Now—no words, everything businesslike, orderly, frantic—he put on top of Calley all that was piled at the side of the trench, shoved it in with his hands hoping to fill the trench completely, but some of the peat must have been taken away, perhaps to be examined by Cornelius’s trowel, and he fetched more from beside the other new trench and made the ground level by stamping on it. Then he stood, staring at the earth between his boots, panting and wiping the dirt from his hands. He wept. It came on him like a shift in the weather, a vertigo, moved through his chest, his throat, convulsed his face. Who was it for? He hoped it was for the girl on the chair in Morales but feared it was only for himself. As for the man he had just buried, who would shed tears for Corporal Calley? Would anyone miss him? Did he have family? A sweetheart? A friend? Had he not, at the end, boasted of a friend?

For a dozen terrible seconds Lacroix thought he was crossing into madness. He could not understand how he had done so much with so little intention. As if his life were not his own, as if he lacked the will, the discipline to make it so. Where to begin? Where to begin now? Voices mocked him, his own among them. He wondered suddenly if his father had been mad, if that was what the doctor’s calls had been about. Were the music books, the dried flowers, simples against madness? He gripped the sides of his head, squeezed it in a way he knew must have looked comical to anyone who had been there to see it. And it was then—lost to a degree he had not imagined possible—that he looked up and saw, right at the edge of what sight could bite down and faint as brushstrokes, the mast-tips and royals of a ship, something big, broaching the northern horizon. He was stunned. It was as if the world had agreed to look back at him, had met his gaze. He waited, breath stilled, life stilled, until he was sure he was not seeing clouds or sea-smoke, that it was not a vision, something he himself had placed there. He watched it rise, waited until the hull rode over the horizon, until sunlight touched some bright thing on it and made it signal, faintly, its existence. Then he broke away, seemed to fall into the air behind him, called to old Tom (what had they not been through together, these last twenty hours?) and led him, as swiftly as the horse’s bulk would allow, back to the house on the shore.