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and Coyne, had finished tolling the hour of seven that a boat came into view, plowing its way slowly downstream.
        “Black flag!” shouted a man at the front, who had the advantage of a pair of field glasses. “There’s a black flag on the mast.” A shudder ran through the crowd, and Peter caught Grace Marsh as she stumbled forward in a half swoon.
        Soon everyone could see not only the black flag but also the bright yellow caps and raincoats of the crew moving about on deck. They tied up at the end of a long wooden jetty and came ashore almost immediately.
        It was easy to distinguish the shivering rescued strangers plucked from the murderous sea by their rescuers, men of Flyte whom Peter recognized from their other lives as bank tellers or fishmongers or churchwardens. Their faces, however, were haggard, drained by the struggle with a force so much more powerful than themselves.
        Peter kept an arm around Grace Marsh and watched the silent men coming up the jetty in the hope of seeing his neighbor. A minute passed and the last man reached the bank. There seemed to be no one left on either the boat or the jetty.
        “Where’s my husband?” cried Grace in the voice of the about-to-be-bereaved. “Where’s my Christopher?” As if in answer, Christopher Marsh and another yellow-coated man appeared out of the boat’s cabin carrying a third man in their arms. A drowned man. Peter could tell from the way that they carried him, as if it were a duty rather than an act of love. Their shoulders sagged with their load and their failure.
        “He was on the other side of the boat. Drowned before we could get to him, poor bastard,” said Abel Johnson, bank teller turned lifesaver.
        He finished his sentence with a mute cry of protest as Grace Marsh pushed him aside in her rush toward her husband.
        “Christy. I thought you were dead, Christy. Oh God, I don’t know what I would have done.”
        “It’s all right, Grace,” said her husband, who had had no option but to deposit his burden on the ground at the end of the jetty as his distraught wife threw her arms about him. “You mustn’t take on like this. How did you get here?”
        “Sir Peter brought me. In his car.”
        “Well, thank you, sir. It’s a kindness. Grace takes it hard when we go out at night.”
        “Perhaps you shouldn’t do it anymore, Christopher. Find someone to take your place.”
        “Well, I don’t know, sir. It’s like a duty. My father was on the lifeboat and his father before him.”
        As the two men talked, Greta stood looking down into the face of the drowned man. Blue jeans and a thick black sou’wester jersey. A black beard flecked with white, and thick black curly hair. A big, strong, seafaring man, and now just a corpse. A thing to be disposed of in an appropriate way. Morgue meat.
        The man’s blue eyes were like glass. There was nothing behind them, and the last of the rain pattered down on his upturned face, causing him no discomfort. His hands hung limp at his sides. Five hours ago they would have been wiping the water from his eyes. From his blue, far-seeing eyes.
        Life and death. Everything over in a moment as the drowning man’s lungs collapsed and he floated facedown in the sea. His whole huge life was gone, and now he lay discarded on the ground while people talked about the weather and a man embraced his wife.
        It was this that struck Greta most of all: the extraordinary insignificance of the fisherman’s death. A man from the lifeboat was cupping his hands in a practiced gesture to light a cigarette. The landlord of the Harbour Inn was sweeping the water from his doorstep with a broom, and the dead man lay untended on the muddy ground.
        Christopher Marsh gently disentangled himself from his wife’s embrace, and he and the other man from the lifeboat bent to pick up the corpse. Wearily they