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on the border with Mexico, they had found a small boy huddled beneath a bush, his arms clasped tight round his rickety legs, his dark eyes round and blank. Every one of his ten brothers and sisters had been rounded up by a party of farmers and shot, one by one, in the head.
    Edward had been enraged. Like the Scots at Bannockburn, he saw the Indians as patriots, justified in taking up arms against the trespassers who would subjugate them and steal what was theirs. When he received news that the ranch he had purchased near San Antonio had been burned down by an Indian raiding party and the livestock all driven off, he only shrugged. Morality, he said simply, did not yield to self-interest. It was hard to imagine a man less suited to a life in politics than Edward.
    In the hall the grandfather clock struck midnight. Maribel knew that she should go to bed, that Edward would be cross if he found her still up when he got home, but she did not move. She would go to bed when the fire went out, she told herself, and, as she burrowed more deeply into her nest of cushions, a slow tingling moved down her arms and into her fingers. Not memory, precisely, but what the Portuguese called
saudade
, a yearning for something long unseen. There was no word for it in English. Perhaps most English people did not feel it.
    She closed her eyes, the smell of sun-baked dust suddenly sharp in her nostrils. A wagon train was not every woman’s idea of a honeymoon. In Texas Edward had bought a consignment of cotton which he was sure he could sell in Mexico for a substantial profit. They had been warned that the trek would be long and likely dangerous but the two of them had embarked upon the adventure eagerly, as hungry for movement as for money. They had travelled for nearly sixty days across wild and desolate country and, at night, fearful of Indian attack, they had formed the wagons into a circle and lit a great fire at its centre. Danger had suited her, and discomfort. Though time passed slowly, she had not fretted in its traces. She had eaten simply and slept well, her bed a straw-filled box slung beneath the largest of the wagons. Sometimes, when the night was hot and the scream of the cicadas beyond endurance, she had lain with Edward on his palliasse on the ground, gazing up at the vast sky salted with stars.
    ‘For you,’ he had whispered the first time, reaching up to cup the moon between his hands, and she reached up too, fitting the shape of her hands inside his.
    ‘For us both,’ she had answered and for the first time in her life she did not want to be anywhere else.
    The fire stirred, the apple logs sighing into ash as the
saudade
curled in her like the smoke from an incense burner, solemn and sweet. When it had passed she lit a cigarette, drawing the smoke of the tobacco into the same parts of her. The previous winter she had suffered from an infection on the chest and the doctor had asked that she confine herself to twenty cigarettes a day. Maribel had refused to agree to any such thing. Oscar had once claimed that the joy of cigarettes lay in their being both exquisitely pleasurable and profoundly unsatisfying. Maribel had rolled her eyes and told him to inhale. When she drew the smoke into her lungs, the burning tobacco scattered sparks of light that danced in her blood. It was when she smoked that she knew that she could write.
    Edward found her there an hour later, her dark head bent over a notebook, her brow creased, her tongue pressed in concentration between her teeth. The fire was almost out. She held a pencil in one hand and a half-smoked cigarette in the other. Torn-up pages, crumpled and abandoned, littered the carpet around her and, on a tray beside her, a soup bowl and an ashtray brimmed with smouldering cigarette ends. He bent over her, kissing her lightly on the lips.
    ‘Whisky,’ she said and she wrinkled her nose.
    ‘All those years in Scotland and still you cannot adopt the ways of my mother country?’
    ‘I