Beth and Robert Eland were safe, yet Beth, they told Esther, had retreated into a world of her own, neither speaking nor eating. She sat in Ma Harris’s kitchen just staring out of the window at the river, at the place where her home had been. At the place where Matthew had died.

Esther was tormented by feelings of guilt. I should have stopped him, she told herself over and over, and even voiced her feelings to Will. ‘I should have gone up after him . . .’

‘Aye, then there’d have been two deaths, lass. Where would me pretty little Katie have been then, without father or mother?’

‘But . . .’

‘But nothing, lass. I’ve heard it all from Ben Harris. He says you’d have gone up if he hadn’t held on to ya.’

‘I should have stopped him here, before he went out. He – he wouldn’t listen, Will. I tried to tell him they’d have come off the boat, but – but he didn’t even seem to hear me, let alone believe me. He was gone so quick, before I really realized what he meant – what he was going to do.’

Will, not often given to displays of open affection, put his arms about her, and likewise Esther, not used to giving way to emotion, laid her head against his chest and her voice was muffled as she said, ‘Oh, Will, I feel so – so guilty.’

Will stroked her hair and she heard his words deep from within his chest as he said, ‘Dun’t blame yourself, lass. We all feel guilt when someone dies. It’s not his death you feel the guilt about, it’s the life, all that went before. All the things you’ve done or haven’t done. Now you’re denied the time to put it right.’

Esther listened to his wise words of comfort. ‘You shouldn’t need to feel the guilt, lass, because since you brought him home from the war, no one on this earth could have been a more devoted wife than you.’

His voice dropped to a whisper as he added, ‘An’ I know, more than anyone else, just how much it’s cost you to do it, lass.’

She heard the catch in his voice and she lifted her head a little and, her own eyes brimming with tears, she looked up into his face.

‘Thank you . . .’ the name she longed to call him hovered on her lips but she ended, ‘Will.’

They all came to his funeral. Everyone from the Point, and from the surrounding farms: the Harrises, the Willoughbys, the Souters and the Squire.

And Beth came.

Supported by her husband, she stood at the end of one of the pews half way down the aisle, her eyes fixed upon the coffin. By her side stood Danny, solemn and white-faced.

The young boy had lost his friend, a man he had helped towards recovery. The man he knew as Kate’s father.