The reservoir is a mirror full of blue sky, but the railings are cold to her hands. She looks down on the water and just for a second, in the movement of the surface, Francis is there by her side. Fleetingly. Certainly. Possibly. Her pulse races. She is dizzy and nauseous. But she grips onto the railings, makes herself look again, and there is nothing in the water but her own reflected face. Is it elation or fear that she feels? Grief or relief? Wishfulness or madness? She concentrates on her breathing, counts her breaths, shakes away the notion, and tells herself that it is just the tricks of memory, of conscience, of light on the water. Isn’t it?

The wind blows across the water and she pulls her coat around her shoulders. Harry had been in this water too, she remembers. She is not sure why she recalls it just now, but she can hear both their voices telling the story, their voices weaving, Francis’s lips whispering it into her ear again, and Harry’s there too. In the winter of 1907 they had walked out onto the ice together. Three brothers, still boys then. They had dared each other. Pushed each other on. Harry had told her how he had heard the creak of the ice beneath his boots, seen the shift of the bubbles just below the surface and then the sudden cracks. Francis had told her how suddenly Harry had no longer been there, how Harry had screamed Francis’s name and then Francis’s arm had kept searching in the water until he had finally found Harry’s hand. She imagines the panic and racing fear and the moment when their hands connected. Harry gripping on to life and his brother. The gasping as he surfaced. The emotions exchanged between their eyes in that instant. And what if Francis hadn’t run to him? What if Francis hadn’t got him out? She pictures Harry kicking slowly against the curling weed, the light pulling away from his clamoring hands. She sees him fixed in the glacier cold, like a fly in amber, or a photograph smile. Surely Harry remembers that too? Surely Harry wouldn’t have just let Francis go?

“Mrs. Blythe?” The ferryman is there again.

“There is something else, isn’t there? You said the casualty list. Not the list of the missing.”

“I don’t know what I can tell you,” he says and looks down at his hands. “There isn’t much that I can give you, but perhaps you have a right to know the bit that I have.”

“Yes?” She watches him shift his feet and feels both an urgent need and a sense of shame for putting him in this situation.