The parts of him continued to confound a rational whole: the fine, slender feet that showed no signs of hardship and had carried him so nimbly up there on the rounded timbers. The long whip of his body, barely touched by his advancing years, from the slender legs to the squared shoulders, the visible sinews of his chest. The thick hair that, but for the silvering at his temples, was a young man’s; the damage to his face that was the only indication of hardship. No man I had observed could ape refinement if their body betrayed physical work: and no dandy could move with agility in high places. This man eased between both worlds and escaped definition.

I narrowed my eyes at him. ‘And what are we waiting for, doctor?’

He lay back with his hands cupped under his head. ‘Birds.’

The afternoon wore on. Time slowed and weighed drowsy on me. Nobody seemed to feel any urgency about their tasks: the brothers were fishing at the stern, and I could hear the master preparing food beneath us in the galley. The Moonbird sat serene at anchor, knowing unspoken things.

‘Your father’s bottle-ache will return,’ the doctor said out of nowhere. ‘That was not the ordinary sickness one experiences the morning after a bout of drinking. It was more serious, and there will be other bouts before his body purges itself of the liquor it has stored. It lives in the organs, takes time to leach out. And you have the paroxysms we observed today, the body resisting expurgation. Difficult for you.’

I didn’t want to think about my father at that moment. I wanted to cling to what I felt: an antidote to the labour of being a daughter. I could be someone else if I wished it hard enough.

‘The visions are interesting to me,’ he continued. ‘Formications, echoes from the deepest parts of the human soul, buried under the sediments of our behaviours, even our unspoken desires. Way down in the dark. The images are more commonly batrachians, but it varies. I thought he was referring to snakes. Was that your understanding?’

He looked at me, brows raised in inquiry.

‘I don’t know, I—’

‘He must recover fully. If we reach the southern islands and he finds this man, these men, he seeks, he will need his strength.’

The sun was setting, out over the sea, casting brilliance towards us and lighting the rigging and the misty net in gold. Already, birds were careening into the net and sticking there, struggling and issuing sounds of distress. Most of them were small and swift-built, but there were larger ones too, some that I thought would be land birds and others that wore the colours of the sea. The whole net was trembling now, collecting the energy of their individual agonies.