"It was cold and then it was hot. I suppose they might be seasons. But then they got a new forger sent to them. He was a Sussex man named Page. You mentioned hanging, sir, not on your life. They made him an architect, although that was never his trade. I was sent to work with him. We taught each other, so to speak."

"And you don't know how old you were?"

"Perhaps I was thirteen."

"An architect at thirteen." I laughed. I thought it preposterous. "And by fourteen you were an artist, capable of producing this?"

"Perhaps eighteen, sir. There were many journeys. We were sent to find a way through the Blue Mountains, and that was where those drawings are from."

"You were an explorer too?"

"We failed at that, sir."

"Eighteen?"

"Most likely. Perhaps twenty."

"Perhaps twenty."

I turned to the title page where I saw the authorship attributed to none other than the Marquis de Tilbot, whom I had always known as the author of those very botanical engravings which had cast their gloomy shadow on my childhood.

"You, sir"-I now spoke to Larrit, and I was very angry-"you, sir, are a scoundrel and a liar."

"I am not," he said, stepping back to lift his glass from the baize table and, standing with one insolent hand upon his hip, he drank it in a single gulp.

"You are a vassal to the Marquis de Tilbot."

"It would seem so, wouldn't it?"

"Then is he not the author of this work?"

"I believe the words are his, sir, but I could not say for sure. It is only the engravings I can speak for."

"Then you speak falsely, for they are his."

"A one-armed engraver?"

"Please be careful, Mr. Larrit, lest you forget your perilous situation."

"They are mine, sir. They were to be a gift to the Empress Josephine, or so I was told by him."

"The Marquis de Tilbot told you? Perhaps you shared a cell with him?"

"As I said, I was never imprisoned."

"But you were confined in a penal colony."

The rascal poured himself a spanking big glass of Chateau de la Fite, and when he turned his eyes had changed, and they were narrow and nasty above his hatchet bones.

"Please listen to me, your lordship," said he. "If there is a scoundrel in this story it is that fellow named Monsieur, although in fact he saved my neck, and ruined my life, and rescued me again and I am, as a result of all these horrors which you could never understand, indebted to him. I had hoped to hide his name from you, but more shame to me, I failed. It was the Marquis de Tilbot who passed forged money. It was he who abandoned me, abandoned me to a penal colony where I survived, sir, and saw human meat whipped off a living back. Do you know what the currency was in Australia?"

"The pound? The Spanish dollar?"

"Rum, sir. That was what it was. That was the place I was left in, and the place I tried to make myself an artist, and the place where the so-called marquis returned to find me when I was a man. Hello, said he. I don't know how he knew me. I promised I would fetch you, he said.

"Clearly this was a lie, except he recognized somehow the boy inside the man. I might not have known the old man neither, but for his awful arm and the fact he produced a keepsake I had given him, his likeness incised into a stone. This touched my heart in the most disquieting way, for I had given it to him for just this reason, that one day he would return and say, There you are.

"It was beyond the bounds of expectation that he would sail to Sydney to find me after all this time. But he was a spy, I must believe, and as a spy he had a dozen plans, not one of which was told to me. He and I had labored through the bush like drunk schoolgirls collecting wildflowers, for he would take the seeds to Josephine at Malmaison, for what reason I cannot say. She was not empress by then. I don't know where the plates have ended up, although I know he sold the proofs without me ever benefiting. If there was to be a folio, he never told me, and if you saw me looking queer when I found the book, it was the shock of finding myself robbed. This book contains what I saw and tried to render. Perhaps he wrote the words. I doubt it. The only part he played was to instruct me on a way to draw a map of Australia. Here, sir. He can take credit for that, although, you see, it does not suit him to do so, for he has turned me into Captain Larrit.

Carte de l'Australie entiere, Capt. John Larrit, 1804

"I was not a captain, ever in my life, and I drew this fancy to his instructions. The Delta of Australia was his invention, I know because he changed the name so many times and caused me endless trouble. If there is a sea where he says there is, no one has found it yet."

"Why would he do such a thing?"

"Oh, sir, surely you know him."

"Indeed I do, and have done all my life."

"And what is his business do you think?"

"He is a noble gentleman."

"He is a spy. But the map was not real spying. It was a counterfeit. It would please Napoleon, don't you think, to imagine all those fertile lands unoccupied? Why, we might have transported a million French felons to colonize the land."

"Yet he rescued you, you said."

"In his opinion."

"And you left Botany Bay with him. Did he rescue you or not?"

"Like the Americans rescue their slaves from floods, so they will not run away. He bought me somehow. I was employed to record what took his fancy. We sailed to New Guinea and New Caledonia, and when the last ship came for us he said I could come home."

"He rescued you."

"He deceived me, as good as kidnapping. I had a wife by then, a house, a baby. In Botany Bay."

"And where are they now?"

"How would I know?" he cried, his face now contorted, the tears flowing in great quantity. He retreated into the shadows and I stood with Duponceau, mortified on his account.

"How long ago was this, dear chap?" said Duponceau.

"He said I would remain a piss-poor engraver if I stayed in Sydney. I was a guttersnipe. I had seen nothing of what could be done. He said I should take a year in Paris and I would see things that would make an artist of me."

"And you went."

"You know I did."

"So you were made an artist."

He laughed scornfully. I saw his hands hanging from his arms, alarming balls of fist. "I was made useful," he said, more quietly.

"What do you want now?" our host inquired.

I saw how my servant gazed at Duponceau while he considered the question, and you could imagine that all his life and travels were being weighed and evaluated and considered.

"To be still," he said, and smiled.

Duponceau nodded, and ran his hand through his long unruly hair. "Stasis," said he.

John Larrit did not seem to understand the word. "Not the road," he said. "Not the sea," and I thought, He could be fifty, and I understood he told the truth and would have wept except I had no right.