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looks at the scattering of freckles on the side of her cheek, the hopeful sky blue of her eyes. He takes in her scent and sees the earth from which Rosalind sprung, the rolling green hills and pastures of his native Devonshire, the dark puffs of trees and forests—a place of incomparable lushness and beauty.
    Then he opens his eyes and suddenly everything is all right again. His disgrace was a nightmare. Rosalind is not lost. These happy thoughts edge out the fearful shadows of his dream. He sees the sunlight playing upon the ripples of the fine linen and tries to remember where he is. No disgrace, he tells himself again.
    Yet all is not quite well. His waking has not brought the relief that for an instant it seemed to promise.
    George looks at the disk of sunlight shining down from the porthole and gradually takes in the finery surrounding him—the wooden moldings of the bedposts, the panels, the embroidered hangings. The cabin sways and he remembers everything at last. His gaze is drawn to the door under which a piece of parchment with a scrawled message has been passed.
    “I am so glad you could join us, Captain,” Easton says as George enters. Easton and Whitbourne are already seated at either end of a small oval dining table near the fireplace. George approaches and sits in the seat to which Easton, with a gesture of the hand, seems to usher him. George nods to both men. It is strange to encounter Easton again in the cold light of day. George’s senses were so heightened the previous evening, so poised for battle that he took little in with any real precision, either about Easton himself or about his incongruously lavish surroundings. He thought the silk and embroidered hangings gaudy and vulgar in candlelight. And in his imagination they were smeared with the blood of the innocent. He thought the vine leaves and grapes around the wooden posts distasteful, as though revelling in the memory of barbarous Rome. But now, in the morning, they seem merely the trappings of any gentleman who could afford such things. The colours, he notes, actually veer away from bloody reds, and the classical touch now seems appropriate for any sea captain with a thirst for learning.
    In Easton’s person, too, he sees a change from the dream-distorted image he was expecting to encounter. The grin has softened to a courteous smile, and the glint of candlelight which had lent every expression a mocking strain was now quite absent.
    “How did you sleep, Captain?” he asks.
    “Fitfully at first, sir,” George replies, feeling his mouth tighten. “I eventually slumbered,” he adds for the sake of courtesy.
    He hears the hatch open and looks around. The slave enters, not looking at all like Rosalind, yet possessing a slow-moving grace of her own. George blushes slightly. The slave approaches, walks around the table and tips a jug toward the goblet in front of him. The liquid steams and gurgles, rather like an echo of his dream. He sees it is warm milk. He looks up and catches Easton’s expectant smile.
    “We have three cows below who produce milk daily. Each of my other ships has two. Please.”
    George obeys the gesture and drinks. It has been six months since he has tasted milk—his own harbour has yet to acquire its first cow—and the quality is striking, the creamy texture enveloping his tongue. “It’s excellent,” he says, feeling honesty is the only option. Since he boarded the ship every pleasure long buried is being awakened. It is as though sensation itself were a dark mansion with many rooms and his host was lighting a candle in each, one by one.
    “Please try our bread.” George does so, tearing off part of the loaf, and the smell of fresh yeast fills the air as soon as the crust is broken. The tender, spongy heart of the bread tastes quite different from the hard and lifeless bread baked at the fort.
    “I don’t understand. How do you do it?”
    “We are, in every sense, a floating colony, Captain Dawson, an island