He pointed his loaded fork at me, choking laughter while he swallowed. Reluctantly, I smiled in return.

‘Aah! There…a smile! You are exactly right about the meat. That’s precisely what it is.’ He chewed some more. ‘Now, what is the science? What if this meat confers the benefits of both poultry and—oh, say, herring? Those oils in the fish that are so beneficial to the health? And what if they could be farmed and fed to convict workers?’

I looked at him deadpan. ‘They fly.’

He burst out laughing, ejecting a string of meat from his mouth. ‘Of course they do, you have me there. But there are ways. Aviaries…clipped wings, I don’t know…’

‘They also burrow.’

He could barely contain his mirth now. ‘Oh, this is all too hard. I give up. We’ll send the lags out at night with nets.’

We ate in silence for a while. I knew him well enough now to sense that a change of topic was coming.

‘Where do you suppose you will find this man?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Who?’ Wherever I had thought the conversation might turn, it was not here.

‘The man you say is responsible for the loss of the vessel. I mean, he could be anywhere. These islands are a maze—that’s why all the absconders are here, all the foreigners who don’t want to be found.’

I knew it to be a question I should be capable of answering, and was not. ‘You would have to ask my father.’

‘But how does he know? Does he expect that some ringleader will leap out and reveal himself?’

I thought about that. The fish-bird was becoming less palatable as it cooled. ‘Anyone who is capable of orchestrating a shipwreck is going to be someone prominent. It’s not a thing you could do by stealth, is it? You’d need to recruit others, organise them. Such a person will nominate himself, I would think. He would stand out.’

‘You imagine him as a kind of self-appointed deity. What about the rest of the sealers? Are they mere mendicants? They might not subscribe to the rules of society, but it doesn’t mean they’re savages before an idol. Surely they’d reject such a man.’

My father staggered down the stairs into the cabin, still singing to himself. He knew the rail well now. It was drunkenness, not his lack of sight, that had him stumbling. The doctor watched him go. He seemed terse after his comment: I hadn’t expected him to defend the sealers quite so sharply, and while I had to admire his intellect, I was unconvinced by the argument. I saw every possibility that the sealers had thrown up the kind of charismatic leader who might devise such an incident, and such a leader would fit well with the character of the man who had attacked my father all those years ago.