After we’d eaten the evening meal, he finger-traced his way over the timbers and through the rigging until he reached the bow, then propped himself up among the coiled ropes and began a muddled rendition of ‘Spanish Ladies’. I picked up a lantern and went below.

Through the boards I could hear him on the deck. Eventually he would make his way back down to where I was: I had to hurry, but I had to be sure of what I was doing. Argyle was busy with his chart, the doctor with some other dissection. Angus Connolly was snoring in his bunk; Declan above deck on silent watch. My father, meanwhile, had mislaid his lyrical man-o-war somewhere between Ushant and Scilly. There was time.

I began with the small chest at the foot of his cot. Clothing, disarrayed. A razor and brush, his pipe. A brooch: a shell cameo in a delicate gold frame with a relief design of a woman’s face, her hair garlanded with blossoms. I closed my eyes and felt it with a fingertip. I could not, no matter how hard I concentrated, discern the image without sight. But someone who had once had sight would use the fingertip to remember what they saw. Perhaps. The cameo called to me from a well of memory but that moment, whatever it was, hung like a phantom just beyond reach. I raised it to my nostrils but there was only the smell of old metal from the frame.

Another banging sound from above. I needed to hurry.

I plunged deeper among the garments and flinched in shock. My hand had found a blade: had I struck the edge as I’d struck the flat, I would have cut myself deeply. I traced along it in the half-light of the cabin and found the hilt, lifted it out. A dagger, nine inches long. Plain and ugly, flecked with rust along its spine, the honed edge bright.

I had heard from many people the tale of how the imposter Figge had stabbed my father. It was embellished by the vulgar with the epilogue that the attack had made me an only child: that the injury was of an unmentionable nature such that he could never again get a woman with child. So here was a weapon of lethal intimacy, a means of mortal violence available to a blind man. A blind man could not shoot, he could not hurl a missile or swing a club, but in close, working by feel, he could slip a blade between a man’s ribs. For my father, who had felt the steel, a moment of vengeance in perfect symmetry.

Sounds on the deck, feet moving quickly. I could no longer hear my father.

The Moonbird lurched hard to port, so hard that I tumbled against the bulkhead and the lid of the sea chest slammed shut, narrowly missing my fingertips.