I was pressed against his body, held there by the strength of his hands. My cheek was somewhere on his sternum but I could not hear his heartbeat in there and I looked out from his embrace and saw the globe of the air pump, our reflection on the curving glass. We were distorted, long and strange, his flesh all golden in the lamplight and my face a hollow of confusion. And in that moment I did not recognise myself at all: we were smears of light, phantasms in the dream of some girl who was yet to be born.

I pushed him and ran him back towards the bed where he fell easy on his back, and I climbed him and tried imposing my will by enfolding my legs over his, gripping hard to make a vice that would hold him. I hauled my skirts and saw my thighs, and for an instant I thought them powerful.

But the shadows and the uncertain light crossed one another and made confusing shapes that cast a mad glare on his face and found ugly sinew in his body. And this was not the romance I had wished it to be but a wrongly drawn map that led down an unknown road.

GUN CARRIAGE

GUN CARRIAGE

We came in the night.

Gun Carriage Island was a wide pyramid stacked against the starry sky, a sloping plain at its base. We had approached from the south-east, from the top corner of Cape Barren, along a small channel that led out to a sand spit and then on to the separate mass of the island.

It was shallow in the channel, Argyle said. He was dressed in dark hues that night: a bodiced jacket with velvet buttons and three-quarter sleeves. The skirts below it, also dark, hung halfway down his shins and he was barefoot, as usual.

I stood at the helm with him, my father at his other shoulder, us and the night. The wariness about pursuit had dissipated and the sea was gentle. But there was an unspoken foreboding between us.

Unspoken until my father gave voice to it.

‘This will be the end of the road,’ he said. I saw nothing out there that indicated it, yet I could not bring myself to disagree. Everything had become terminal: his obsession, my entanglement with the doctor, our search for the missing ship.

Argyle stayed wide at the island’s first landfall, keeping us a hundred yards or more off the coast. There was surf breaking in there, surging chaotically at a coast that lied about its own contours. A long beach made a convex arc away from us, tailing off to the north-west. The mountain slowly rotated in response to our progress, showing new facets to the moon. The island ended at a wide triangular point that faced exactly north, and Argyle hewed close to this as shoals appeared on our outside.