Afterward they went up to the gallery. There were boxes she’d left in one of the bedrooms, and she fetched those while he went into the study, opened the cases, and brought out the finely wrought ship’s models. They were of such perfection that he could see the tiniest detail clearly, and he marveled at the patience and workmanship that had gone into them. But then the rector had spoken of Nicholas’ patience.

He gave her the first one, the Queen of the Sea, at the door of the room, and she took it the way a priest takes the host, with trembling fingers. He made a point not to look at her face, her eyes. She knelt and began to wrap it carefully in cotton batting, then just as carefully lowered it into a box filled with torn strips of newspaper. He went back for the next, and brought that to her as well. The Olympic. He remembered when she was launched, 1910. The sister ship of the ill-fortuned Titanic. There was also the German Deutschland and her sister, the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. And the earliest of the great liners, the Sirius, handsomely afloat on a beautifully carved sea with dolphins at her bows. And the Acquitaine, launched in time to become a hospital ship in the Dardanelles. He wondered how many ghosts had followed her home to England. The Mauritania had served off Gallipoli, the sister ship of the Lusitania sunk by a German U-boat in 1915.

“Was it the ships or the sea that intrigued Nicholas Cheney?” he asked as the last of the liners went into her paper and batting slip. He hadn’t told Rachel how empty the cabinet looked without them, as if something that was alive in the room had been taken away.

“Both, I think. He told me once—when we were children—that he’d grow up to be a great sea captain. One of his ancestors was an admiral, on his mother’s side, and had fought at Trafalgar. I suppose that was what put the idea into his head. There was a small boat down on the strand that he used from time to time. Sometimes Olivia went out with him. Sometimes I did. He was a different man on the water. I—I don’t exactly how, but it was there.”

She closed the last box, and with his help taped the tops of the others as well, then together they carried them down to the hall. But at the stairs she stopped and looked back over her shoulder with such haunted eyes that he turned away and made a show of shifting the boxes in his arms. Hamish, in the back of his mind, stirred restlessly and ominously. He was sensitive to lost love—he’d died before returning to his own.