"Not anything I'd ever heard before," he said with a casual shrug. He didn't believe that the local population in that area had much contact with colonizers, so he wasn't even sure there would be a name for their language. It wasn't as though he'd grown up actively thinking about English, after all; it was just the language the world existed in. Why have a name for something when there was no alternative?

Her question of going back was a more complicated one than she probably realized. Neither Pablo or he had ever divulged that they'd left behind one final, third survivor of the Sycorax expedition in the village when they'd gone off to return to the civilized world. The younger man felt he had nothing waiting for him back in England, and a good life with the tribe. At the time of departure, Alfred had thought he had a lot to look forward to in going home — seeing his family again, being reunited with his then-fiancee, and being welcomed back into society. He'd discovered on return that his two closest family members had died while he was away, he had no longer had much in common with the girl he'd planned to marry, and he just didn't fit in the English world anymore. He'd thought quite frequently in the first few months of being back in England that leaving in the first place had been a mistake, and he might have been happier had he just stayed and lived out the rest of his days as a member of the Central American tribe.

Things had gotten better since then, though, and although he still didn't feel like he was particularly at home in England, he no longer felt the pressing urge to leave — or, at least, he hadn't until November, when he'd put his whole heart into a letter and then not gotten a response. But that was something else entirely.

"Someday, I think I would," he said a little wistfully. "We'll have to see what fate brings."