Hester Shaw was starting to get used to being happy. After all her muddy, starveling years in the ditches and scavenger-villes of the Great Hunting Ground she had finally found herself a place in the world. She had her own airship, the Jenny Haniver (if she craned her neck she could just see the upper curve of her red envelope, behind that Zanzibar spice-freighter at strut seventeen) and she had Tom; gentle, handsome, clever Tom, whom she loved with her whole heart and who, in spite of everything, seemed to love her too.

For a long time she had felt sure it wouldn’t last. They were so different, and Hester was hardly anyone’s idea of beautiful; a tall, graceless scarecrow of a girl, her coppery hair done up in too-tight plaits, her face split in half by an old sword-blow that had robbed her of one eye and most of her nose and twisted her mouth into a snag-toothed sneer. It won’t last, she had kept telling herself, all the time they were waiting on the Black Island for the shipwrights to repair the poor battered Jenny Haniver. He only stays with me out of pity, she had decided, as they flew down to Africa, then crossed to South America. What can he see in me? she wondered, while they grew rich ferrying supplies to the great oil-drilling cities of Antarctica and then suddenly poor again, jettisoning a cargo to outrun air-pirates over Tierra del Fuego. Flying back across the blue Atlantic with a merchant convoy she whispered to herself, It cannot possibly last.