“It’s not funny, Tony,” Rose said suddenly. She had been so quiet I’d almost forgotten she was there. “You and Jonquil loved to tease him.”

“It didn’t put him off, though, did it? He kept on showing up.”

“He wanted to be included, like I did,” she said. “How can you talk about him like that, as if nothing had happened?”

Tony turned back to her. “All right. Don’t upset yourself. We all felt bad but it was an accident, wasn’t it? How were we to know?”

“To know what?” I asked.

“That he couldn’t swim,” Tony replied.

I looked to Belinda for an explanation. “Jonquil dared us to see if we could cross the river on foot. She said she had done it on her horse and if we timed the tide just right she thought we could do it. So we started off. It was hard going over some of the sandbanks. Soft sand, you know. We kept getting stuck and in the end we decided we should turn back.” She took a deep breath. “But the tide was already coming in. We started running. We didn’t notice that Colin was having trouble keeping up. He got cut off. When we heard him calling and looked back, he was already up to his knees in water. And we shouted, ‘You’ll have to swim for it,’ and he shouted back, ‘I can’t swim.’

“Jago and Tony started back toward him, but a wave knocked him off his feet and he thrashed for a bit and then . . .” She paused and took another deep breath. “And then we didn’t see him anymore. He was gone. We looked and looked but they didn’t find his body until the next day on the other shore.”

“When you think about it, it was rather idiotic of him to embark on something like that, knowing he couldn’t swim,” Tony said. “After all, it was crossing a river, for God’s sake.”

“He so desperately wanted to be included, and he trusted us, Tony,” Rose said. “You and Jonquil always seemed so confident. If you remember I didn’t even come with you, because I thought you were taking too big a risk.”

“You were always scared to do anything dangerous, Rose,” he said. “But I would have stopped him if I’d known he couldn’t swim. I mean, who comes down to Cornwall for the summer and doesn’t learn to swim? It’s all about beaches, isn’t it?” He paused, gave an uneasy laugh, then added, “Actually Jonquil confessed afterward that she knew he couldn’t swim.”

There was an awkward silence, then Tony added, “That was Jonquil all over, wasn’t it? It added to the risk. She loved playing with fire.”