There was no sign of Gideon, no sign of the men hunting him, no sign even of the island’s children. The newcomers knew nothing of it: that a man I’d briefly thought I could love now ran like game ahead of a maddened pack.

Parish and his crew had retreated further down the path and now stood at the top of the beach, samphire and tussocks around their shins, staring out at their anchored vessel. The sun bleached the whole scene, effacing its meaning.

I rested my hand just lightly on my father’s arm, hoping the sun would warm him as it did me. Something to cling to, something to distract from the dreadful tension that gripped the settlement. I led him to the large boulder that framed the entryway to the house. It was flat on top, rising in a gentle slope so that it was possible to walk up it. I took my father up there now, wanting to look over the bay, perhaps to see some sign of the progress of the hunting parties. I helped him to sit at the top of the boulder and he did so in silence. After a few minutes I saw he had reclined, made drowsy by the warmth. I lay beside him, a child again in the sun’s caress. I sank towards sleep as I lay there, each fingertip—the heels of my hands, the back of my head, my feet—feeling the heat in the rock.

Voices came to me as I lay there, disguised at first as a dream, but making an acute sort of sense that dreams do not provide. Parish’s voice was clear, infused with the same cadence as Gideon’s, which I now understood to bespeak an overwhelming smugness about the world and other people.

Lying flat on the boulder, we were concealed from them. They spoke frankly.

‘…timber on the western side. Perhaps only firewood. Any building materials you’d have to ship in. But there’s water…’

‘Two springs—I saw those.’

‘So he would, would he not? I think he would be rather pleased.’

‘And anchorages.’

‘Anchorages.’

‘Mutton fish, mutton birds. You’d not go hungry. Even with a couple of hundred to feed.’

‘We can clear this lot off easy enough’—the voice I recognised to be Parish’s—‘but the matter that interests me is the sea all around. Currents. It is utterly escape-proof, gentlemen.’

~

I waited, the sun clouded over and the day lost its air of kindness. When I was sure the speakers had moved away, I woke my father and led him down from the rock. The missionary and his senior men had sat themselves at the benches under the thatch roof. Seeing us wander past, Parish stood and approached. He stared emptily at me. Neither of us made any attempt at an introduction.