“Sarah!” he shouted again. He raced to the companionway and seized a lantern, leaned out over the water. He could see nothing but a waste of water and the mudbanks and reed banks and sandbanks, a canal, a brackish pool, and then more water.

“Dio onnipotente,” he groaned. “Sarah!”

He turned and dashed to the stern of the ship. “Captain Shore?” he called up the companionway.

“Not now,” the Captain said grimly, and when Felipe put one foot on the stairs, he glared at him from under his impressive eyebrows and said: “Nobody comes on my quarterdeck without invitation.”

“I beg of you! It’s Sarah! She’s gone!” Felipe burst out. “Into the water.”

“You let her?”

“How was I to know?”

“You saw her?”

“That way!” Felipe gestured towards the lazaretto where the windows showed a few gleams of light from the different cells.

“Can she swim?”

“How should I know? Yes! She was swimming away from the ship.”

The Captain scowled. “Madness! Madness! And she said to me… what the hell is she doing?”

“I suppose she has gone to Roberto?”

“Christ’s wounds!”

“You must stop the ship and send out a boat!”

“I can’t! I can’t take her back on board!”

“You can’t leave her to drown!”

“God Almighty!”

“Exactly.”

The two men stared at each other. “Ah! She told me to wait for her,” Captain Shore finally said. “That’s what she was saying. Wait, for her mother’s sake.”

Felipe saw the pedotti turn his head from his careful scrutiny of the channel, and glance at them.

“Man overboard!” Felipe yelled. He sprang up onto the quarterdeck. “Man overboard! Two men! Stop the ship! Uomo in mare! Due uomini!”

“Avast! Heave to!” Captain Shore shouted.

At once, the sailors dropped the sails.

“Let go anchor!”

The Captain turned to the pedotti for a quick bilingual argument. Felipe stood alongside Captain Shore and explained to the irritated pilot that two crew members had fallen overboard, simultaneously, and the Captain would launch a dinghy to find them.

“I’m damned if I’ll have it row to the quarantine island,” the Captain swore in an undertone to Felipe.

“You don’t have to,” Felipe said. “But you do have to launch it, now you’re heaved to. Please God she comes back to us quickly.”

“What is she doing? Little lass like her into the water on an ebb tide?”

Felipe was ragged with fear for her. “How would I know? How the hell would I know what she is doing? Get the dinghy out, I’ll row out for her.”

“I’ll wait for no more than a minute,” the Captain ruled. “And if she doesn’t come, we’ll sail without her.”

“We can’t leave her!”

“She left us,” the Captain snarled.

“Captain, I beg you to lower a boat for her. I’ll go alone, we can’t just let her go!”

“We don’t know where she is,” the Captain pointed out furiously. “What are you going to do? Row round the reed banks? She could be drowned already.”

“She can’t be drowned!” Felipe exclaimed in horror. “It’s not possible that she could have drowned!”

“Just what she said about her uncle!” the Captain crowed. “When your mistress had told everyone he had been caught by the dark tides. Not so funny when it’s someone you love, is it? Not such a clever story when you’re at sea yourself.”

* * *

Sarah, swimming north against a strong ebbing current, knew that she was in trouble. The bulk of the ship was behind her, she even heard the loud rattle of the anchor chain, but she was being pushed back to it and away from the island by the tide. Though she swam as strongly as she could, the lights of the Lazzaretto Nuovo were steadily receding. The stone and brick walls, clear in the moonlight, came no closer. Sarah glanced behind her and saw there were sandbanks all around her, some topped with saltwort and sea lavender, so she let the current sweep her towards them, and felt silt and shells under her feet and clambered out of the water. She was on the shoals and sandbars that made up the island of Sant’ Erasmo, she could even see the lights of the Lazzaretto Nuovo, but between her sandbank and the island was a broad stretch of water, more than half a mile wide, with the moonlight dancing on the ripples of the fast-moving tide. She thought that perhaps she might be able to swim across, when the tide turned and it was slack water—but the tide would not turn for hours—and the pedotti on Captain Shore’s ship would never let him wait that long. She started to walk along the shore, trying to get as close to the quarantine island as possible, stepping carefully from one patch of vegetation to another, shying back when her foot sank. Sarah had a terror of quicksands, from childhood stories about the shifting paths of Foulmire. She gritted her teeth, which were chattering for fear and for cold, and went one step at a time, hoping that this sandbank would connect with another and that she might paddle her way towards the Lazzaretto Nuovo and find a shallow crossing of the deadly fast water.

In her note to Rob she had told him to go “widdershins,” trusting that he would guess that she meant him to come out of the front door of the Lazaretto and turn left, “widdershins” in the old country word, counterclockwise, the witch way. She had told him to go on the ebb tide, by the light of the full moon, the Yule moon which shone above her now. She had told him the name of her ship, the ship that had brought him to Italy ten years ago. She had to hope that the purse of tokens had convinced him to read the hidden meaning to the letter, and that he had been able to get out of the fort. But it was, she knew, a desperate chance, a forlorn hope.

Carefully she slid her foot forward and saw ahead of her something that looked like a path on the next sandbank. She paddled into the icy water that flowed between the two, and found it came no higher than her knees, and as the silt shifted warningly under her feet she dropped to hands and knees and crawled across. The neighboring sandbank had a well-trodden path. It was narrow—so narrow that she went one foot before another, but it went on firm ground and it led to another reed bank. Sarah, shivering with cold, went a little more quickly on the narrow track, wrapping her arms around herself to try to keep warm, her cold feet bruised and cut by sharp shells and thorns, and then she froze as she heard a whistle, just like that of a reed warbler—but warblers roost at night.

She squinted into the darkness towards the Lazzaretto Nuovo and saw, in the shadow of the wall, at the southeast corner—just where Rob should have been waiting for her—a single pinprick of a light, come and gone in a moment, like a spark from a tinder box.

“Rob!” she whispered, her voice echoing across the water.

In the darkness she could just make out a small craft, a punt for hunting wildfowl, slide into the deep channel and come towards her, a figure pushing it along the shallow channel. The prow grounded on her patch of dry land.

“Rob Reekie?” she asked.

“Are you Sarah?”