When the swimmer had covered about two thirds of the journey from shore, there was a rapid volley of fire. I could not make out who was firing or at what, but a split appeared in the timber of the mainmast only inches from my head and splinters struck my face. My father stood exposed forward of the mast: I leapt at him and dragged him to the deck. A shower of fist-sized rocks began to land around us as I peered over the bulwark, keeping my face between the pulleys.

The rounds were smacking into the surface and raising plumes of water, wide and long but closing in as some marksman found his range. Above me, Argyle was crouched low, trying to swing the rudder. The boom responded, sweeping inches over my head.

The swimmer was close when the ball struck him. It took him flush in the top of the skull and made a sound like he’d been hit with a timber. His eyes had been fixed on us in supplication as he thrashed our way, and by then it was clear he was trying to escape. But when the ball hit him it sheared away the crown of his head and the eyes were upturned by the impact, irises hideously absent. He slumped forward where he was. A brief and subsiding jet of blood; then his lifeless form floating face-down in the reddening water.

There was a great deal more yelling from shore, and a further round or two whirred through our rigging. The Moonbird had borne away by now and the gusts that swirled down the cliff filled our sails and swept us out of range. The dead man rolled over onto one side, sinking from view as the air escaped from the back of his shirt.

The firing ceased. We emerged from our various positions to meet in stunned silence in the centre of the deck, just aft of the foremast. Something had struck my father on the chin: he was bleeding a little. I sat him back against the cabin wall and dabbed at the cut with the end of my sleeve.

‘Who were they?’ he asked me.

I looked around at the rest of them: Argyle only a graven image, the Connollys breathing heavily after the labour of getting the Moonbird out of the lethal gully it was in and the doctor, to my surprise, calmly cleaning the barrel of the carbine.

‘Did he…?’ I found my mouth was dry. ‘Is he…?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ the doctor replied pleasantly. ‘I only wish I’d laid out a couple of those wretches before they hit the poor lad.’

‘Your pocket?’ the master asked him.

The doctor smiled and scooped out a handful of balls. Argyle counted them. ‘You got off three shots in, what, forty seconds? Fine shooting, doctor.’

I hadn’t answered my father. ‘I guess they were lags,’ I said to him. ‘Absconders.’