He felt very far from his own world of small luxuries taken for granted: hot water in a china jug in the bedroom, clean clothes laid out for the day, servants to do everything; but he must enter this world of work if he were to make right the wrong he had done, bring a good woman to happiness, heal the wounds of his own failure. Like the king, he had come to make a restoration.

He hitched his horse to a ring on a post, stepped to the edge of the wharf, and looked down into the flat-bottomed barge which was grounded heavily on the ramp beside the quay. “Where’ve you come from?” he called down to the man he took to be the master of the ship who was watching the unloading, ticking off the sacks in a ledger.

“Sealsea Island, Sussex,” the man replied in the old, familiar drawling accent. “Best wheat in England, Sussex wheat.” He squinted upwards. “You’ve come to buy? Or Sussex-brewed ale? And salted fish? We’ve got that too.”

“I’m not here to buy,” the stranger replied, his heart thudding in his chest at the name of the island.

“Nay, you’ll be here for a dance in the ladies’ great hall?” the shipmaster joked and one of the lumpers gave a crack of a laugh as the gentleman turned away from their impertinence, to look up at the warehouse again.

It was on the corner of a run of shabby three-story warehouses built of planks and old ships’ timbers, the most prosperous of a poor row. Farther along the quay, where the River Neckinger joined the Thames in a swirl of filthy water, there was a gibbet with a long-ago hanged man, few tatters of cloth holding the bleached remaining bones. A pirate, whose punishment had been to hang, and be left to hang as a warning to others. The gentleman shuddered. He could not imagine how the woman he had known could bear to live within earshot of the creak of the chain.

He knew that she had no choice, and she had done the best she could with the wharf. Clearly, the warehouse had been improved, rebuilt. Someone had gone to the expense and trouble to build a little turret at the downriver corner of the house, looking out over the Thames and the River Neckinger. She could step out of the glazed door and stand on a little balcony to look east: downriver towards the sea, or west: upriver to the City of London, or inland along St. Saviour’s Dock. She could open the window to listen to the cry of gulls and watch the tide rise and fall below her window and the goods come into the wharf below. Perhaps it reminded her of home, perhaps some nights she sat there, as the mist came up the river turning the sky as gray as water, and she thought of other nights and the thunder of the tide mill wheel turning. Perhaps she looked across the turbulent river to the north, beyond the narrow street of chandlers and victuallers, past the marshes where the seabirds wheeled and cried; perhaps she imagined the hills of the north and the wide skies of the home of a man she had once loved.