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voyage home, he was being carried to St. Thomas’s Hospital. He was bundled up in blankets, helpless as an infant, and he was waving at the passing scene with a slow, kingly wave, his mouth formed in a little smile like a digestive grimace. Maybe it was his eyes that made that smile appear so uncanny, forthey seemed to gaze at me from out of that haggard young-man’s face as from ten thousand miles away, but there was something more in them than distance. My mother and I were not at the fair, only on our way to it, and yet the sight of him gave me a confused idea he was somehow of the company of those we would see when we got there. I mean the tumbling posturemaker lad and the midget lady and the Scotsman who broke glasses by shouting at them. It was that same look in the eyes.
    In those days, crowds were not so well-behaved as now, and when an unusual figure passed, they seldom failed to let him know their feelings. If he met their approval they might offer up a hip-hip-hooray. If not, they were as likely to pelt him with offal. Or if there was something about him peculiarly incensing—if, say, he had the look of an Italian—then they might spill him out of his chair and set upon him with kicks and cudgels. But in the case of the seaman it was as if he carried along with him through the streets so commanding a space of silence and unease that the entire scene blanched and faltered before him as he went. Many averted their eyes. Others hesitated, or stepped aside, hardly seeming to know what they did, like automata, or animals suffering a premonition. And it was not just because he had the look of a sick man, or a dying person, though he had both, it was something else.
    The sailor did die, not long after. By that time a story was abroad that he’d survived those first days on the island by eating the flesh of his drowned shipmates. How anyone could learn this without the man himself confessing it, I don’t know. Perhaps it came out in a final delirium. For my own part, I have always doubted whether the cannibalism was the cause of the look or only the story that those who knew nothing had fabulated toexplain it. As I remember it, the look was that of a man in a condition of triumph, who even now was coming heroically through, and yet at some unfathomable cost. It was the look of one who’d always understood that if he ever made it back alive, his exile would be over, yet here it was, only beginning, and all his triumph one long farewell to human regard. This was why it was a look at the same time and in equal measure proud and abashed.
    But there was something else in it—or so I thought at the time. Something especially for me, or that it asked of me. But what?
    Perhaps I’ve made too much of one thing or another I saw in John Haslam on my very first encounter with him. And maybe it’s true I didn’t see much that first time, and memory has enriched itself since, like a crude sketch grown unaccountably to a Dutch portrait. Perhaps it’s this habit of writing things down. When Jamie first disappeared into France, I learned that without him to talk to, if I would keep hold of my life as I actually lived and knew it (as knowing Jamie had taught me I did live and did know it), then I must talk to paper. After the travails and loneliness of the day I must retreat to my corner window at the turn of the stairs and scribble into the night while the nonscribblers of the dark city dream the dreams that nourish them another way. I am not a dreamer but a gatherer-in. My fear is of the daily vanishing of all experience down the drain of Time. In this age of cataclysm, storm, and madness, with monarchy, nobility, and Church seeking to destroy the heroes of equality—the David Williamses and the Tom Paines and my dear husband and the French male population on the march in a dream of freedom—I struggle to hold on to what matters, and at the end of the day and in the small hours, what to me matters has little to do with rank