Meg brings a map with her, this time, this most recent of many.

The ship's going to be another two months, at least she tells Tom, as they sit beside the river. It's been four weeks – it must have been absolutely wrecked. She laughs as she says it, as though destruction is a spectacle for amusement, then spreads out the map for him to view.

She's shaded in in red all the places where she's been.

You've gone to China?

Yes. Oh, I wish I could take you there. The smells! They sold paper fans in the market. Dad brought me one, but I broke it when I had one of my moments. And the women had tiny feet – they break them, when they're babies, so they grow deformed.

That's disgusting.

So are stays and laces and lead face powder which turns your fingernails blue. Look here – I want to go here.

Russia?

I've never been.

Why would you want to go there? It's all ice and snow and-

I was born there.

Thomas looks at her in confusion, his head tilted on one side.

I thought your father was English.

My mother wasn't. Thomas looks at the map, then at the smiling girl. She's not like the girls of the town – she climbs trees and plays her violin in their branches, walks with bare feet in the mud, hitches up her skirt to above her thighs, so he looks away, his father's morals woven into his eyes, which cannot stand the sight of such impropriety. She will not wear stays, eats in great mouthfuls – he's even see her get drunk. Her face is strong, and her eyes a brown so deep he finds it hard to look anywhere but them.

Tell me.

She raises her eye-brows.

There is something unhinged within her, too. She sometimes talks too fast or looks too long. It frightens him.

She clears her throat, and begins:

My father, once upon a time, suffered that ironic malady of a broken heart. The non physical wound which strips you of everything you are. Perhaps possessed by a kind of madness, he joined the war for Dutch independence against the Spanish, then moved from war to war. I'll never know what made him do so – he served as an officer, a pirate, a spectator, watched so many wars he must have felt sick with it. As though he was about to burst from it. He said, he used to taste blood when he went to sleep, used to dream of it, see their faces, see the shadows and the dark.

He still has nightmares, sometimes.

But he didn't stop. Then he went to fight the Turks, and killed their generals, cut their heads off in the battlefield, slaughtered the foot soldiers – fought like a man broken, a man lost, possessed (at least, this is what his brothers in arms have told me, when I've met them).

And then he stopped. Right in the battle field, he stopped – and he said its because for a moment he felt the wind on his face. Just the wind. It seemed to strip away all that frightful wash of red, the grate of steel, the throat croaked screams, the whimpers of the boys who were too young to fight. The wind came and brought with it a memory.

He knelt in the blood, and put down his sword, and closed the eyes of the man he had just slaughtered, and realized just how savage they all were.

So the Turks captured him, and they were all sold as slaves 'like beasts in a market.'

And this is where my mother comes in.

Dad saw her in the crowd. He says it was hot – too hot, so hot he could barely breathe. He says she had black hair, very straight, and he could not see her face, because she wore a kind of veil. For a moment, he thought she was someone else, and he shouted a name.

Well, she wasn't the woman he thought she was, but she turned around even so, and saw him, and brought him too.

This was in Constantinople, where she was visiting with her husband, a Marquis who was settling a rather large gambling debt. My mother, her name was Maria, like the Virgin Mary, and she took him with her back to Russia, the land where she lived, the land where she was born, leaving behind her husband in Constantinople.

I don't quite know if they fell in love. Perhaps, in the end, she was just very lonely, and so was he, and so it was more the clutching of two drowning people than any sort of heart wrenched passion.

So they fell in love, and her husband returned – a Marquis, or the Russian equivalent, not quite a prince but powerful, even so. When my mother grew pregnant he thought it was his. Paid no attention to my father, once slave now servant, overseer of peasants.

Until I was born. He suspected nothing until I grew a pale fuzz of blond hair, and he saw my father pick me up and hold me, and he realized what had happened.

He killed my mother, and would have killed me, as well, if my father had not fled (secreting enough sparkles of diamonds to buy a new ship and crew, and a wet nurse for yours truly).

And we've ben all over the world! I've seen things you can only dream about. I can speak four languages.

And – and we are still…

She breaks off, suddenly, looks away. They've both been caught up in the story, and now that there is silence he can hear the choir of birds above them, the rustle of the leaves around them.

Still what? He asks. He catches her hand – it is rough, the nails are bitten away, it is so dry it bleeds.

Running she whispers.

For a moment she trembles, is delicate, and he wants to take her in his arms and hold her.

But then she's wrenched her hand away, bundled up the paper map, and taken off between the trees, disappearing loudly, swallowed up by the forest.

Thomas stares at her for a moment.

Then he hears a calling.

And he goes to find his Mother, who tells him his father is home, wants him to come back, think she is irresponsible. Her eyes are very red, she has been weeping, and she rubs her hands together.

She shakes.