By the solitary light of the single bow lamp, Amanda types furiously.

The white silk of her evening gown billows in the night air. Absently, she unclasps her great-aunt’s crystal tear-drop earrings, and slips them into her purse.

Between pages, she leans back to light another cigarette. Far beneath her she can hear, faintly, the sound of the ship’s orchestra.

If this were a story, Amanda thinks, wealth and beauty would count for nothing. Only love would count. My love.

But this is no story. It is real life, flawed and uncooperative.

How could she ever have been so stupid! To have imagined, even for a minute, that Luke Tarrant might care for her! Luke Tarrant is rich; unimaginably rich. He moves in a world of stocks and shares, deals and mergers, of abrupt and lingering transactions that echo down corridors carpeted in beige, or hang in the air of boardrooms like the aroma of expensive cigars. His suits are of the highest quality and possess an international style. He wears authority like a wristwatch, discreet but expensive, a glint of gold beneath the cuffs of his perfectly ironed shirts.

And the other woman?

She is the taffeta that rustles through his dreams. The cloud of black tulle that floats softly at the corners of his gaze. The sparkling black eyes that are always raised to his in laughing mockery. She is the laughter that is like champagne.

She is Lucinda. Her mother is heiress to a typewriter fortune. Her father lives in the country and breeds horses.

Amanda stares out to the dark line of the horizon. A melancholy page 23 figurehead, she gazes past the ocean’s shifting, deceptive surfaces, and into its mournful depths. Surely the water is as cold and melancholy as a grave, a grave for lost love?

The ship is passing a male symbol. It looms up out of the darkness, massive and somehow threatening.

Briefly, Amanda finds herself hoping that the navigator knows what he is doing. She has never been able to rid herself, entirely, of the fear of shipwreck.