Now I understand, thinks Jacob, why I have the Watchtower to myself.

The Shenandoah fires her cannons to salute the guard-posts.

What prisoner wants to behold his prison door slammed shut?

Petals of smoke are plucked by the wind from the Shenandoah’s gun-ports…

… and the shot reverberates, like the lid of a harpsichord, dropped shut.

The far-sighted clerk removes his spectacles in order to see better.

The burgundy blotch on the quarterdeck is certainly Captain Lacy…

… so the olive one must be the Incorruptible Unico Vorstenbosch. Jacob imagines his erstwhile patron using Investigation into Misgovernance to blackmail Company officials. ‘The Company’s Mint,’ Vorstenbosch could now argue most persuasively, ‘requires a director with my experience and discretion.’

Landwards, citizens of Nagasaki are sitting on their roofs to watch the Dutch ship embark, and dream of its destinations. Jacob thinks of the peers and fellow-voyagers in Batavia; of colleagues in various offices during his days as a shipping clerk; of classmates in Middelburg and childhood friends in Domburg. Whilst they are out in the wide world, finding their paths and good-hearted wives, I shall be spending my twenty-sixth, twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth and thirtieth year – my last best years – trapped in a dying factory with whatever flotsam and jetsam happen to wash up.

Below, out of sight, a reluctant window of the Deputy’s House is opened.

‘Be careful with that upholstery,’ commands Fischer, ‘you mule…’

Jacob looks in his tobacco pouch for a shred of leaf, but there is none.

‘… or I shall use your shit-brown skin to repair it: you savvy?’

Jacob imagines returning to Domburg to find strangers in the parsonage.

In Flag Square, priests conduct purification rites on the execution ground.

‘If you not pay priest,’ Kobayashi warned van Cleef yesterday, when Jacob’s future was silver if not golden, ‘ghosts of thiefses not find rest and become demon so no Japanese enter Dejima again.’

Hook-beaked gulls duel above a fishing skiff hauling up its nets.

Time passes, and when Jacob looks down the bay, he is just in time to see the Shenandoah’s bowsprit vanish behind Tempelhoek…

Then her fo’c’sle is eaten by the rocky headland, then her three masts…

… until the bottle’s mouth is blue and vacant as the Third Day of Creation.

A woman’s strong voice rouses Jacob from his half-doze. She is nearby, and sounds angry or frightened or both. Curious, he looks around for the source of the commotion. In Flag Square, the priests are still chanting prayers for the executed men.

The Land-Gate is open to let the water-vendor’s ox off Dejima.

Standing outside the gate, Aibagawa Orito is arguing with the guards.

The Watchtower lurches: Jacob finds he has lain flat on the platform, out of her line of vision.

She is brandishing her wooden pass and pointing up Short Street.

The guard examines her pass with suspicion; she looks over her shoulder.

The ox, an empty urn hanging from each shoulder, is led over Holland Bridge.

She was a fever, Jacob hides behind his eyelids. The fever is lifted.

He looks again. The Captain of the guard is inspecting the pass.

Can she be here, he wonders, to seek sanctuary from Enomoto?

His proposal of marriage now returns like a risen golem.

I did want her, yes, he fears, when I knew I could never have her.

The water-vendor flicks his switch on his ox’s lumbering shanks.

She may just be here, Jacob tries to calm himself, to visit the Hospital.

He notices her disarray: a sandal is missing; her neat hair is awry.

But where are the other students? Why won’t the guards admit her?

The Captain is questioning Orito in sharp tones.

Orito’s clarity is fraying; her despair is growing; this is no ordinary visit.

Act! Jacob commands himself. Show the guards she is expected; fetch Dr Marinus; fetch an interpreter: this is a balance that you may still tip.

The three priests walk in a slow circle around the bloodstained dirt.

It’s not you she wants, whispers Pride. It’s incarceration she wants to avoid.

Thirty feet away, the Captain turns Orito’s pass over, unimpressed.

Suppose she were Geertje, asks Compassion, seeking sanctuary in Zeeland?

In the Captain’s resonant string of words Jacob hears the name ‘Enomoto’.

Across Edo Square, a shaven-headed figure appears in a sky-blue robe.

He catches sight of Orito and calls over his shoulder, motioning, Hurry!

A sea-grey palanquin appears: it has eight bearers, denoting an owner of the highest rank.

Jacob has a sense of entering a theatre well into the play’s final act.

I love her, comes the thought, as true as sunlight.

Jacob is flying down the stairs, barking his shin on a corner-post.

He leaps the last six or eight steps and runs across Flag Square.

Everything is happening too slow and too fast and all at once.

Jacob clips an astonished priest and reaches the Land-Gate as it closes.

The Captain is brandishing his pike, warning him not to take another step.

Jacob’s rectangle of vision is narrowing as the gates close.

He sees Orito’s back as she is led away over Holland Bridge.

Jacob opens his mouth to call out her name…

… but the Land-Gate slams shut.

The well-oiled bolt slides home.

Late on the Twenty-second Day of the Tenth Month

Twilight is cold with the threat of snow. The forest’s edges dissolve and blur. A black dog waits on an outcrop. He scents a fox’s hot stink.

His silver-haired mistress struggles up the twisted path.

A dead branch cracks under a deer’s hoof across the loud stream.

An owl cries, in this cedar or that fir… once, twice, near, gone.

Otane carries a twentieth of a koku of rice, enough for a month.

Her youngest niece tried hard to persuade her to winter in the village.

The poor girl needs allies, thinks Otane, against her mother-in-law.

‘She’s pregnant again, too, did you notice?’ she asks her dog.

The niece had charged her aunt with the crime of making the entire family worry about her safety. ‘But I am safe,’ the old woman repeats her answer for the root-truckled steps. ‘I’m too poor for cut-throats and too withered for bandits.’

Her niece then argued that patients could consult her more readily down in the village. ‘Who wants to trek halfway up Mount Shiranui in midwinter?’

‘My cottage is not “halfway up” anything! It’s less than a mile.’

A song thrush in a mountain ash speaks of endings.

A childless crone, Otane concedes, is lucky to have relatives to house her…

But she also knows that leaving her hut would be easier than returning.

‘Come spring,’ she mutters, ‘it’ll be, “Aunt Otane can’t go back to that ruin!” ’

Higher up, a pair of raccoons snarl murderous threats.

The herbalist of Kurozane climbs on, her sack growing heavier with each step.

Otane reaches the gardened shelf where her cottage stands. Onions are strung below the deep eaves. Firewood is stacked below. She puts her rice down on the raised porch. Her body aches. She checks the goats in their stall, and tips in a half-bale of hay. Last, she peers into the chicken coop. ‘Who laid an egg for Auntie today, I wonder?’