California had been the plan, but the worm-ridden old hulk of a ship, known rather fancifully as the, SS Gallant, sank off Ceylon, stranding Swann and three other passengers in a small rowing boat for the best part of a week before they were picked up by a Royal Navy frigate that put the unfortunates ashore on the north-eastern coast of India.

One of the unfortunates (as the captain had named them) was a young American widow by the name of Mary Hartwell who had been making her way back to San Francisco to bury her poor husband in the small churchyard that overlooked the Golden Gate Harbour. The poor man was, in his lead-lined coffin, now very firmly wedged at the bottom of the Indian Ocean with his distraught widow, who had only been married to the Rev Hartwell for six months, now suffering a tragic double loss she had tried to alleviate by trying to jump overboard from the rowing boat on at least three occasions during that long week adrift.

Only Swann’s constant vigilance had stopped Mary from quite literally drowning her sorrows, with the other survivors so totally lost within their own helplessness and fears as to be utterly useless.

Once back on shore Mary Hartwell clung to Herbert Swann like the very life preserver he had been at sea. And, if Herbert Swann was completely honest with himself, he rather enjoyed the young woman’s dependence on him and her need not to have him out of her sight. She even insisting he sleep at the foot of her bed in the cheap lodging house in Anakapalle, so as to be there if she awoke screaming for the lost soul of her dear lost husband.

A local doctor, who had trained in London and spoke a beautifully lilting English, insisted that Mary must have complete rest and that a sea voyage, so soon after the shipwreck, was completely out of the question.

” My dear young man,” the doctor explained to Swann after examining Mary, “I fear that if the young woman were to venture upon the ocean she may very well go mad. I have seen such things many times here in the Bay of Bengal. Look after her, my dear sir, and perhaps by next spring she may be fit enough to travel.”

And Swann did look after Mary with a tenderness he never knew he possessed, but which filled him with a warmth he had also never felt before and he knew, by looking into Mary’s dark green eyes, that she too felt something, something deeper than the sea that had swallowed the man to whom she had declared her most profound love.