He snapped the Moonbird around it, calling orders to Connolly. Tarenorerer sat in the bow throughout, watching, lost in thought. She had shown no sign of further aggression since the brief pursuit, only a kind of sad contemplation that was impossible to understand.

The water on the western side of the island was deeper. I knew this not from Connolly taking soundings, but from the way it moved under us: slow and pulling in strong currents, slipping our stern now and then. No swell here, no breaking waves; just a silent rocky shore that ran south for a mile, boulders standing vertically on the island’s edge like gravestones.

It was as we came down this coast that I first heard the music.

I fancied I had imagined it at first. Voices raised in song—something that might happen at sea. Something old, unpolished but tuneful. Mere drifts of sound, the wind took them away then offered them again and I strained to find the melody. Then of all the sounds that rose from this bouldered world, of water and air in motion, of birds and whispering grasses, the one I least expected to hear: a piano.

Tarenorerer had heard it too. She stood; inclined her head to one side.

The rocky coast had ended and given way to a placid beach. No surf here, just the deep sandy sea floor rising to the shallows. The sound of the piano had stopped and so had the singing, replaced by loud, raucous voices. Conversation, argument, laughter. In the hollows behind the beach I could see lights now. There was an orange glow that I took to be a bonfire, and specks of yellow that must have been lanterns.

The others gathered on the deck and we studied the shore in silence. A signal fire appeared: men illuminated, standing around it. We went through our ritual of anchoring, ensuring we left the Moonbird beyond wading distance from the shore, lest these people prove hostile. I packed my shoreside bag once more: warm clothes, a tinderbox and the leather satchel containing the Howrah papers, which now included those from the Adige chest Louisa had handed me as we left Preservation. The doctor made a pile of his provisions: as well as clothes he had brought a net, instruments and jars, and the ever-present preserving fluid, a small cask of it.

Tarenorerer brought the fowling piece, along with ammunition and powder. No one was going to argue with her about the tact or otherwise of carrying it into someone else’s settlement.