- In Macao, a wealthy merchant named Charles Clay hires two people to recreate a story of a sailor who is paid to impregnate a man's wife.
- The Portuguese colony of Macao in the 19th century. Mr. Clay is a very rich merchant and the subject of town gossip. He has spent many years in China and is now quite old. He likes his clerk Levinsky to read the company's accounts to him at night for relaxation. Tonight Mr. Clay recounts a true story he heard years before about a rich man who paid a poor sailor 5 guineas to father a child with his beautiful young wife. Levinsky says that's a popular old sailor's legend and not true. Mr. Clay has no heir for his fortune and no wife either. He resolves to make the story true... Levinsky approaches Virginie, another clerk's mistress, and strikes a bargain for 300 guineas. Now to find the sailor...—David Woodfield
- Late nineteenth century Macao. Mr. Clay is an aged wealthy merchant, who is unaware that he is disliked because of his ruthless business dealings and thus largely alone in the world, about which he probably would not care regardless. His only companion is his clerk of seven years, Elishama. Clay believes in history, not in prophesy. During one of Clay and Elishama's evening social sessions together where Elishama generally reads from his accounting records, they discuss a story concerning a wealthy aged businessman, his young wife and a sailor that both have heard, that has largely circulated through the seafaring community, and that they now believe to be an old sailors' tale. As such, Clay wants the story to become a prophesy come true by his doing. He entrusts Elishima with finding a young woman to play his wife, while he himself will find the appropriate sailor within the streets of Macao. His goal is to have the sailor be able to tell the story as it happened to him and thus become a widespread story on reality. Who Elishima finds to play the wife is Virginie, who used to live in the house Clay currently owns and in which she has not been since she was a child. Virginie has her own motives for agreeing despite despising Clay. Similarly, Paul, the young Danish sailor Clay finds, has his own reasons for following Clay. The question becomes if Clay, Virginie, Paul or even Elishima for that matter will come out of the scenario what they wanted going into it.—Huggo
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