I was made to wait near the horse while he said goodbye to the dog. Someone would come by and feed her, he assured me, and she could not otherwise be persuaded to leave the house. She was no longer chained up, and she snuffled at him and licked and pawed while he told her he had work to do, an important journey, and that he would be back, that a good dog would watch the house and keep the badgers at bay. The dog thumped her tail on the boards of the verandah, pleased no doubt to have been assigned a role.

‘And the porcupines,’ he called over his shoulder as he came my way. ‘Don’t you forget the porcupines. Sneaky damn things.’

The dog did not try to follow us. She just watched, in the sad way of a left dog.

It was an effort, as always, to get my father into the saddle, though the mare was patient with him. Seated behind me, his hands were placed in a self-conscious combination of affection and distance: one on the back of my shoulder and one gripping the edge of the saddle. He knew horses well enough to be sure this would suffice.

He inclined his head just once, back to the house and the dog.

As I trotted the mare down through the streets, the knowing eyes watched us as usual. My father spoke to me over my shoulder. He was excited, fixed upon what he saw as his mission, and now I began to feel the resentment once again, listening to him. He had no idea that I would have to look after him out on the ocean, just as I was doing in the bush outside Sydney. Here I was again, married to the care of my father, on a ridiculous errand that promised both hardship and anticlimax. This fearsome adversary who awaited him was probably four feet tall and suffered from hay fever.

They could have one another.

~

Once I’d guided my father across the planks and onto the Moonbird, he edged his way carefully around the deck, running his hands over every fitting, every rope. His vacant eyes were enraptured, his mouth undone, as the workings of the vessel revealed themselves in the knots and shrouds and pulleys under his probing hands. Argyle had gone ahead of him and closed the hatches: the generous bulwarks of the Moonbird would keep him from tumbling overboard in the meantime.

I watched him for a while and decided he was happy. The master called me, said there’d been a delivery. On the table in the galley I found a letter. It bore Srinivas’s name at the bottom, but the hand was female, I was sure, and the spelling was perfect, leading me to think he must have dictated it.

Miss Grayling,