Hanzaburo nods nervously, as if he must placate a madman.

Jacob clatters down the stairs, unbolts the door and finds Long Street looking as if an army of British looters just passed through. Shutters lie in pieces, tiles lie in shards, the entire garden wall has collapsed. Dust thickens the air, corroding the sun. On the city’s high eastern flank, black smoke billows, and somewhere a woman is wailing out her lungs. The clerk makes his way to the Chief’s Residence, but collides with Wybo Gerritszoon at the Crossroads. The hand sways and slurs, ‘Bastard French bastards’ve landed an’ the bastards’re everywhere!’

‘Mr Gerritszoon: see to the Doorn and the Eik. I’ll check the other warehouses.’

‘You,’ the tattooed strongman spits, ‘parleyin’ wi’ me, Monsewer Jacques?’

Jacob steps around him and tests the Doorn’s door: it is secure.

Gerritszoon grabs the clerk’s throat and roars, ‘Get yer filthy French hands off my house an’ take yer filthy French fingers off my sister!’ He relinquishes his grip in order to hurl a hay-maker: had its aim been true it could have killed Jacob, but instead its force flings Gerritszoon on to the ground. ‘French bastards winged me! Winged me!’

In Flag Square, the muster bell begins to ring.

‘Ignore that bell!’ Vorstenbosch, flanked by Cupido and Philander, paces up Long Street. ‘The jackals would line us up like children even as they reef us!’ He notices Gerritszoon. ‘Is he injured?’

Jacob rubs his aching throat. ‘By grog, I fear, sir.’

‘Leave him be. We must guard ourselves against our protectors.’

The damage caused by the earthquake is bad but not disastrous. Of the four Dutch-owned warehouses, the Lelie is still under reconstruction following ‘Snitker’s Fire’ and its frame held firm; the doors stayed up on the Doorn; and van Cleef and Jacob were able to guard the damaged Eik against looters until Con Twomey and the Shenandoah’s carpenter, a wraith-like Québecois, had rehung the thrown-down doors. Captain Lacy reported that whilst they didn’t feel the earthquake on board the ship, the noise was as loud as war between God and the Devil. Some tens of crates, moreover, toppled on to the floor in various warehouses: all must be inspected for breakages and spillages. Dozens of roof-tiles must be replaced, new earthenware urns must be procured; the flattened bath-house must be repaired at the Company’s expense and the toppled dovecote mended; and the plaster shaken loose from the north wall of Garden House will have to be applied again from scratch. Interpreter Kobayashi reported that the boathouses where the Company sampans are stored collapsed, and quoted what he called ‘a superlative price’ for repairs. Vorstenbosch shot back, ‘Superlative for whom?’ and swore not to part with a penning until he and Twomey had inspected the damage themselves. The interpreter left in a state of stony anger. From the Watchtower, Jacob could see that not every ward in Nagasaki escaped as lightly as Dejima: he counted twenty substantial buildings collapsed, and four serious fires pouring smoke into the late August sky.

In Warehouse Eik Jacob and Weh sort through crates of toppled Venetian mirrors: every last glass is to be unwrapped from its straw and recorded as undamaged, cracked or smashed. Hanzaburo curls up on a pile of sacking, and soon he is asleep. For most of the morning, the only sounds are mirrors being lain aside, Weh chewing betel nut, the scratch of Jacob’s nib and, over at the Sea-Gate, porters bringing ashore tin and lead. The carpenters who would ordinarily be at work on Warehouse Lelie, across the Weighing Yard, are engaged, Jacob guesses, on more pressing jobs in Nagasaki.

‘Well, it ain’t seven years o’ bad luck here, Mr de Z., but seven ’undred, eh?’

Jacob hadn’t noticed Arie Grote enter.

‘Quite pard’nable ’twould be, eh, were a cove to lose count an’ enter a few whole mirrors as “smashed”, wholly in error…’

‘Is this a thinly veiled invitation,’ Jacob yawns, ‘to commit fraud?’

‘May wild dogs chew my head off first! Now, I’ve arranged a meetin’ for us. You,’ Grote glances at Weh, ‘can make yerself scarce: a gent’s comin’ what’d take offence at your shit-brown hide.’

‘Weh is going nowhere,’ counters Jacob. ‘And who is this “gent”?’

Grote hears something and peers out. ‘Oh, bloody oath, they’re early.’ He points to a wall of crates and orders Weh, ‘Hide behind there! Mr de Z., dispense with yer sentiments regardin’ our sable brethren ’cause piles an’ piles an’ piles o’ money is at stake.’

The slave youth looks at Jacob; Jacob, reluctantly, nods; Weh obeys.

‘I am here, eh, to play the go-between twixt you, and…’

Interpreter Yonekizu and Constable Kosugi appear at the door.

Ignoring Jacob altogether, both men usher in a familiar stranger.

Four young, lithe and dangerous-looking personal guards appear first.

Next enters their master: an older man who walks as if treading on water.

He wears a sky-blue cape and his head is shaven, though a sword-hilt shows from his waist sash.

His is the only face in the warehouse not sheathed in sweat.

From what flickering dream, wonders Jacob, do I know your face?

‘Lord Abbot Enomoto of the Domain of Kyôga,’ announces Grote. ‘My associate, Mr de Zoet.’

Jacob bows: the Abbot’s lips curl, tighten into a half-smile of recognition.

He turns to Yonekizu and speaks: his burnished voice is uninterruptible.

‘Abbot,’ translates Yonekizu, ‘says he believed you and he share affinity, on first time he see you at Magistracy. Today he know his belief was correct.’

Abbot Enomoto asks Yonekizu to teach him the Dutch word ‘affinity’.

Jacob now identifies his visitor: he was the man sitting close to Magistrate Shiroyama in the Hall of Sixty Mats.

The Abbot has Yonekizu repeat Jacob’s name three times over.

‘Da-zû-to,’ echoes the Abbot, and checks with Jacob: ‘I say correct?’

‘Your Grace,’ the clerk says, ‘speaks my name very well.’

‘The Abbot,’ Yonekizu adds, ‘translated Antoine Lavoisier into Japanese.’

Jacob is duly impressed. ‘Might Your Grace know Marinus?’

The Abbot has Yonekizu translate his reply: ‘Abbot meet Dr Marinus at Shirandô Academy often. He has much respect for Dutch scholar, he say. But Abbot also have many duties, so cannot devote all life to chemical arts…’

Jacob considers the power his visitor must wield to waltz into Dejima on a day turned upside down by the earthquake, and mingle with foreigners free from the usual phalanx of spies and Shogunal guards. Enomoto runs his thumb along the crates, as if divining their contents. He encounters the sleeping Hanzaburo and makes a motion in the air above the boy, like a genuflection. Hanzaburo mouths groggy syllables, wakes, sees the Abbot, yelps and rolls on to the floor. He flees from the warehouse like a frog from a water-snake.

‘Young mans,’ Enomoto says in Dutch, ‘hurry, hurry, hurry…’

The world outside, framed by the Eik’s double-doors, dims.

The Abbot handles an undamaged mirror. ‘This is quicksilver?’

‘Silver oxide, Your Grace,’ replies Jacob. ‘Of Italian manufacture.’

‘Silver is more truth,’ remarks the Abbot, ‘than copper mirrors of Japan. But truth is easy to break.’ He angles the mirror so as to capture Jacob’s reflection, and puts a question to Yonekizu in Japanese. Yonekizu says, ‘His Grace ask, “At Holland also, do dead people lack reflection?” ’

Jacob recalls his grandmother saying as much. ‘Old women believe so, sir, yes.’

The Abbot understands and is pleased with the answer.

‘There is a tribe at the Cape of Good Hope,’ Jacob ventures, ‘called the Basutos who credit a crocodile may kill a man by snapping his reflection in the water. Another tribe, the Zulus, avoid dark pools lest a ghost seize the reflection and devour the observer’s soul.’