“Ah, yes,” said Wavery.

“I believe my daughter-in-law has the honour of working for you.”

“Asunción?”

“Just so.”

“She very kindly met me yesterday off the ferry,” said Wavery.

Genia Ortiz, her head at the angle of an alert bird, said: “May I ask where you learned your Spanish?”

“In Peru,” Wavery told her.

The smile shrank her eyes. How pleased she was that the Court of St James’s had sent this man to Abyla. The presidio must be more important than she had supposed. He reminded her of Tromso, only nicer.

“I could tell by your accent,” she went on. The purest Spanish was spoken in Peru. How lucky he was to know it! She had always wanted to visit Lima. “The City of Kings,” she murmured, remaining by his side as he paid for the milk.

“You must meet the rest of the family. My son, I’m hoping, will be home for Christmas. He’s done very well. He’s in television. He makes that series – Oh, what’s it called? Well, it’s the biggest by far. If we talk about something else for a bit, it’ll come back.”

Wavery, who did not wish to talk about anything else, waited for Don Ramon to return his change.

“And how do you find your house, señor?”

“There’s quite a lot to be done.”

“Do you feel any vibrations?” Her eyes widened and diverged as she mined the last word.

“Not yet,” said Wavery. But Asunción had warned him of the earth tremors. On her brisk tour of the house she informed him of her father’s opinion that the skeleton discovered in the basement belonged to a camel which had perished in the Lisbon earthquake.

Genia Ortiz gave a fluffy laugh and tapped his chest with her baton. “The General’s wife felt them immediately!”

“The General’s wife . . . ?”

Asunción hadn’t told him? The wife of the general who built the house.

“The General?” said Wavery. He had arrived in Abyla only last night. He knew nothing of any General.

At this point, Don Ramon raised his hands, but he could not stop the conductor’s widow. Before he could say: “At least make way for the lady behind,” Genia Ortiz was transported back to her first year in Abyla.

Where did she begin? Did she begin as tradition required her to begin with the General’s triumphant entry into Abyla bearing the body of Lieutenant Zamora, whose actions had saved the enclave from Abdel Akbar?

She did not. “Ah, the General. What can I say?” she said, one eye fixed on Wavery, the other over his shoulder on the monstrous shape of the man whom she had first seen in Moorish trousers and a corset as he chased a boy up the street – not yet called Calle Zamora – slapping him on the seat of his pleasure with the flat of a sabre.

The General was the first man Gena Ortiz had ever seen in a corset. “He was a ferocious homosexual,” she said pronouncing a word that had not existed in the vocabulary she carried with her as an eleven-year-old from Balnasharki. In Señor Wavery’s house he had entertained his Moroccan lover, who had instructions to light a candle every night on the balcony so that from his quarters on Monte Hacho the General could see someone was thinking kindly of him.