I gasped but couldn’t speak. I could not look away, could not wrench myself from the eyes of the man on the sea floor. Through the emerald tint I believe those eyes still appeared blue, though another part of me thinks that could not be. He was unmistakably dead. There was no urgency in anybody on board: the staring eyes were lifeless.

Declan was hauling at the line, sobbing, but the combined weight of the anchor and its chain and his brother was more than he could lift. Argyle moved in beside him and put a hand on his shoulder.

‘The windlass, boy,’ he said quietly. The doctor moved towards it and made a motion to begin winding, but Connolly hurled himself at him.

‘Was your watch, ye fucker!’ The doctor reared back. ‘What the fuck were ye doin? Sleepin, were ye?’ He swung a despairing punch that flew wide. Gideon leaned back to allow the fist to pass: composed, even now.

‘He’s tangled himself, lad. Not a thing could be done.’

‘It’s never been his job! Not a once! It’s me does the pick every single time…can ye not tell us apart, ye stupid prick?’

‘Be calm, boy.’ It was the master, at home in the sorrow, drawing a dark shawl around himself. ‘Haul him in and we shall attend to him.’

When Declan Connolly began to wind the device, pouring his fury and pain into the work, the chain pulled taut around his brother’s ankles so as to invert him and bring him feet-first towards the boat. At that very instant, when his head came around and began to trail, I will swear a glittering stream of tiny fish left his mouth like unspoken words.

~

The boy was buried on Hummock Island, on the side of a hill. Feet down and, according to the master, facing Scapa Flow.

Declan had cried all the way up the rise, cried in abandonment, in fragments of lament, among the hard breathing of the uphill walk carrying his dead brother’s weight. He was talking to him, not to himself and certainly not to us. He chided his brother for the excesses, the carelessness that had led to this. ‘Why’m I here, boy, puttin ye to bed with a shovel?’