Ishraq borrowed a cape from the priest’s housekeeper and then the five of them – Isolde and Ishraq, Luca, Brother Peter and the innkeeper – went back to the inn, looking out to sea as if Freize might be swimming home. ‘I can’t believe it,’ Luca said. ‘I can’t believe he didn’t come with us.’

‘He went out in the harbour to try to get the children to come back to land,’ Ishraq said. ‘It was the bravest thing I’ll ever see in my life. He pushed us towards the inn and then he went out towards the sea.’

‘But he always comes with me. He’s always just behind me.’

‘He made sure we were safe,’ Isolde said. ‘As soon as we were running for the inn he went back for the children in the harbour.’

‘I can’t think how I let him go. I can’t think what I was doing. I really thought that the sea was going out, and I would walk with them, and then everything happened so fast. But why would he not come with me? He always comes with me.’

‘God forgive me that I did not value him,’ Brother Peter said quietly to himself. ‘He did the work of a great man today.’

‘Don’t talk of him as if he’s drowned!’ Isolde said sharply. ‘He could have climbed up high like we did. He could be on his way back to us right now.’

Luca put his hand over his eyes. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘He’s always with me. I can’t get rid of him! – that’s what I always said.’

They stood for a moment on the quayside, looking at the empty sea. ‘You go on,’ Luca said. ‘I’ll come in a moment.’

At the inn they found the innkeeper’s wife in the kitchen, furiously throwing buckets of muddy water from the stone-flagged kitchen into the wet stable yard outside.

‘Where the hell have you been?’ the innkeeper demanded of her, instantly angry.

‘In my laundry room,’ she shouted back. ‘Where else would I be? Where else do I ever go when there is trouble? Why didn’t you look for me? The door was jammed and I was locked in. I’d still be in there if I hadn’t broken it down. And anyway, I come out here and the yard is empty and the kitchen filled with water! Where have you been? Jaunting off when I could have been drowned?’

Her husband shouted with laughter and clasped her round her broad waist. ‘Her laundry room!’ he exclaimed to the girls. ‘I should have looked there first. It’s a room without windows, backs onto the chimney breast – whenever there is trouble or a quarrel she goes there and tidies the sheets. But what woman would go to a laundry room when the greatest wave that has ever been seen in the world is rushing towards her house?’

‘A woman who wants to die with her sheets tidy,’ his wife answered him crossly. ‘If it was the last thing in the world, I’d want to be sure that my sheets were tidy. I heard the most terrible groaning noise and I thought straight away that the best place I could be was in my laundry room. I was tucked in there, heart beating pit-a-pat, when I heard the water banging into the house. I sorted my linen and I felt the cold water seeping under the door like an enemy. But I just kept arranging the linen, and sang a little song. Is it very bad in the village?’