‘Speaking personally, I only have time to study law books and legal journals,’ said Judge Thistledon, lifting his distinguished head and addressing them with a faint note of censure in his voice. ‘Though I do not deny I read some Dickens as a younger man.’

He managed to make this sound like a vice of which he was now cured, and Eleanor gave a little laugh as if the judge had made a joke, though she knew he had not. Thistledon was a neighbour of Booker-Reid’s, a bachelor forty years on the judiciary, a man who rarely smiled and looked out on the world through eyes that did not blink. A heavy brow and a neatly trimmed white beard went some way to compensating for the absence of hair on his domed and shiny head and somehow added to her impression, long held, that the judge lived outside of the normal plane of human endeavour.

‘When I was a young fellow I had my Bible in my saddlebag and that was all I required,’ said Sir Bertram, stretching out in his chair and unconcerned that he no longer held the attention of the room. ‘It served me well enough—though I recall as a child being utterly absorbed by the journals of Mr Watkin Tench.’

‘Alasdair is named for Mr Tench, Sir Bertram,’ said Eleanor. ‘It is one of your baptismal names, is it not, Alasdair?’

But her husband had shrunk a little since he had made his initial appeal to literary endeavour and at each response the skin had tightened on his face and the clothes stiffened on his body so that they resembled items made of wood or stone within which he was trapped, or so it seemed to his wife. He gave Sir Bertram a tight smile, though it was Eleanor who had made the observation.

‘That is so, sir. A whimsy of my father’s,’ he said, and these words appeared to cost him a great deal.

‘Which did not inspire you to take up exploring, Dunlevy?’

‘No, Sir Bertram. I have always known my destiny was to serve the people of this colony as their representative.’

And Eleanor thought: he has forgotten who he once was.