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Friday he had found them.
    The sun had returned to the Baltic, just a week before Easter. Now all that was lacking was the warmth, then Gerlof would be able to spend whole days sitting in the garden. Resting, thinking, and building his ships in bottles. Slender blades of green were beginning to appear among the brown leaves around him. The grass wouldn’t need cutting until May.
    The sunshine in the middle of the day was beginning to entice the butterflies out. For Gerlof they were the most important sign of spring. Even as a little boy he had waited to see the first butterflies appear, and to see what colour they were. At the age of eighty-three it was difficult to be filled with the same sense of anticipation as when he was a child, but Gerlof still waited eagerly for the first butterfly of the year.
    He was alone at the cottage now; everyday life had resumed after the move, and he ambled around the small rooms, his stick in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. The wheelchair waited silently in the bedroom, ready for the day when his rheumatic problems, caused by Sjögren’s syndrome, would take a turn for the worse. At the moment he could still get up and down the stone steps without any problem.
    The previous week his furniture had been delivered – the small number of pieces he had wanted to keep from his room at the home – and all the mementoes from his thirty years at sea: the ships in bottles, the maritime charts, the name plates from some of the ships on which he had sailed, and beautiful examples of rope work, dark brown and still smelling of tar.
    Gerlof was surrounded by memories.
    It was when he had opened the cupboard next to the fridge in the kitchen to put away the log books and charts that he had come across the diaries.
    They had been tied up in a bundle on a shelf behind Ella’s little jewellery box and old books by Karl May and L. M. Montgomery. Each one had a number in black ink on the cover, and when he undid the string and opened them, he saw densely written pages in his wife’s ornate handwriting.
    Ella’s diaries – eight altogether.
    Gerlof hesitated briefly. He thought about the promise he had made Ella. Then he picked up the top book and went out to the wooden seat in the garden, with a feeling that he was doing something dishonourable. He had seen her writing in her diary on the odd occasion, but she had never shown him what she had written, and had only mentioned her diaries on that one occasion, when she was dying.
    Burn them, Gerlof .
    He sat down, wrapped a blanket around his legs and placed the book on the table beside him. It was twenty-two years since Ella had died of liver cancer in the autumn of 1976, but here in the garden he often had the feeling that she wasn’t gone at all, that she was in the kitchen making coffee.
    Ella had always set clear boundaries. For example, she had never allowed her husband in the kitchen, and of course Gerlof had never tried to change her mind. When their daughters Lena and Julia became teenagers at the beginning of the sixties they had made determined attempts to get him to help with the housework, but Gerlof had refused.
    ‘It’s too late for me,’ he’d said.
    For the most part he had been afraid and unsure of himself in the kitchen. He had never learned to cook or do the washing, although he could do the dishes. These days Swedish men seemed to do just about everything; times had changed.
    Gerlof turned his head. He saw a small fluttering movement in the long grass beyond the garden. It was the first butterfly of the year. It came flying towards him with the same jerky movements as every other spring butterfly he had seen over the years, flitting here and there with no apparent goal.
    It was a Brimstone Yellow. A perfect sign of spring.
    Gerlof smiled at the bright butterfly as it reached the lawn in front of him – but stopped smiling when he spotted another butterfly over in the long grass. This one was dark, almost black, with