Silas weighed the hammer in his fist. Bodies were still being found in the nooks and crannies of ruins like these. His eye caught a glint on the ground a few feet away, a wink of light, there and gone again. He walked over and scuffed the dirt away with his boot then stooped and brought out a plain gold band. It barely fit on the tip of his little finger. A slender woman’s wedding ring.

‘Keen eyes, that’s down to tha youth.’ The foreman took the ring from Silas and tucked it into the top pocket of his waistcoat. ‘Old Pearce has given over his warehouse for a lost and found. I’ll give it him.’

A wedding band. He wondered whether it had belonged to the wife of Joe Dyson or had been long buried and now excavated by the wave.

He thought of his brother. Peter would be a married man by now, and soon he would be a father and Silas an uncle. Silas would return to visit his niece or nephew. He would be a man of the town now, safe from Peter’s fists, with a beautiful wife on his arm. Harriet’s face swam before him, that anxiously guarded face that was transformed when she smiled and made him feel glad in his heart. He wanted to make her smile always.

Imagine if he turned up at the farm in a carriage with Harriet sitting beside him. His mother would immediately fall in love with her, his father would be speechless in the face of Silas’s good fortune. Peter would try and fail to hide his envy.

Silas kicked a fragment of brick. He had little to offer Harriet, but she did not send the warm glances Silas received in the direction of that pinch-faced Boothby fella. The man was staking his claim though, whether Harriet knew it or not.

Walking home that evening, he came to a clearance site with men still swarming over it, making the most of the dying light. Smoke was pouring from the stacks of a nearby steel works, only slightly further up the incline of the road but enough to have escaped the flood. He recalled the ferocity of Reverend James talking about the Steel Age and all its wondrous new inventions. ‘I’ve seen a Bessemer convertor stoked up,’ he’d told Silas. ‘A furnace quicker than a crucible and hotter than the sun.’

‘It sounds dangerous,’ his mother had said, mildly.

‘No, madam. We’re in the modern age where we can easily transform the raw power of iron into steel. God, Empire, Industry, Prosperity! And God bless Queen Victoria.’

But the vicar had not seen Fred Sharrow lifted and carried, stuck against one of these furnaces like a swatted fly. If he had, he might have understood Silas’s reluctance to re-enter a forge. His nightmares were still filled with the roar of the wave, the ease with which it had destroyed those machines of which he’d stood in awe. He couldn’t see himself back inside a forge, trapped like an animal if disaster befell him again. Better to be labouring in the open air, using his muscles, building his strength. He’d escaped a gruesome death by the skin of his teeth. Only luck had saved him. Luck – and Harriet.