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my coat, Grace. I won’t be a minute.”
        When Peter came back, he found that Grace Marsh was no longer alone. Greta had put a coat over her nightdress and was sitting beside Grace on the old black bench in the hall, the one with the four evangelists on the front. As she turned toward him with a look of concern, Peter felt himself plunged back into his dream and it was only with a supreme effort of will that he fought down a sudden, almost overwhelming urge to take her in his arms.
        “What? You’re up as well.” Peter blurted out the first words that came into his head.
        “Yes, I want to come too. Please let me.” Greta’s green eyes glittered.
        “All right. But mind yourself on the steps. That wind’ll blow you into the road if you let it. Grace, you hold on to me. I’ll have you down at the harbor in less than ten minutes.”
        
        Peter held the steering wheel of the Range Rover almost in his lap as he craned forward onto the dashboard in order to pick out the turns in the narrow road that wound down to the harbor alongside the seawall. He was conscious of Grace Marsh straining forward just like him, as if willing herself closer to the harbor and news of her husband.
        Going out on the sea now would be like signing one’s own death warrant, thought Peter to himself as he glanced out to the foaming mass of furious high waves beating against the shore.
        “I’m sure everything’s going to be all right,” he said, summoning as much conviction into his voice as he could. “Everyone on the lifeboat is very experienced.” The harbor came into view through a sloping wall of rain.
        “I know. Thank you, Sir Peter. It’s just there’s not been a storm like this one since 1989. And that was when…”
        Grace’s voice trailed away. Peter knew why. The storm of ’89 had not only uprooted the great chestnut tree in the Flyte churchyard planted in honor of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. It had also ended the lives of two Flyte fathers swept from the deck of the lifeboat as it went to rescue a sinking fishing boat out in the bay.
        In the back of the Range Rover Greta gazed out at the sea. She felt electrified by the storm. Never had she seen such violence. She heard nothing of the anxious conversation being carried on in the front.
        Peter parked beside the Harbour Inn and walked down the unmade road to the harbormaster’s hut in search of news.
        “They had them on the radio about half an hour ago,” he told the others when he returned to the car. “They’re expected back at the harbor mouth in the next ten minutes.”
        “But what about my Christopher?” asked Grace Marsh. “Did they say anything about him?”
        Peter sensed the rising hysteria in her quavering voice and tried to inject a note of reassurance into his answer.
        “Nothing one way or the other, Grace. But that’s good, I think. They’d have said something on the radio if anything was wrong.”
        Peter did not mention the atmosphere of gloom and foreboding that he’d found in the hut. More than a dozen men in there, and no one saying anything except in brief answer to his inquiry. The radio communication that he had told Grace about had been cut off halfway through.
        The minutes passed without any sign of the lifeboat, and the storm began to die away. On the opposite bank of the Flyte River the landscape took shape. Tethered boats rode high on the churning water, and beyond the harbor, fields of waving reeds and grasses rose toward Coyne Church. Several trees stood twisted at crazy angles.
        Like men broken on the rack, thought Greta, standing now beside Peter and Grace Marsh at the back of a small group at the water’s edge. Everyone had their eyes fastened on the mouth of the harbor where the Flyte River begins and the North Sea ends.
        It was just after the bells of the two churches, Flyte