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to Tomaso. We yelled on the beach, we called to the little boy and brave old Tommy — ‘Come on, come on! The lady will try for it, too!’
    “And then we all — us on the beach and she on the ship — we saw them go under. Between the wreck and the beach, tossed and smashed, Tommy and the little boy. It wasn’t till morning, when the rips had calmed, that the bodies came close enough for us to drag them in, dead. She saw everything, her boy drowned in the sailor’s arms. She never moved after that.
    “We watched her, her legs tucked up under her petticoats, gazing at the place where her son had gone under, she sat still as stone, until the waves took her too and knocked her sideways and she went over and under.”
    A few other sailors and salvage workers brought their lunches up to the hill and sat with them at the graves. Someone gave Henry a piece of bread, some cheese, and a sourplum. They chewed and they drank cider from a common jug, and then they and Bolton resumed their talk, which seemed to be, over and over to one another: “Terrible storm, worst ever, terrible voyage, bad seas, fool captain, bad luck, marble too heavy, slid right through the hold, never go on a merchant again carrying stone if I can help it.”
    Henry thought he could hardly bear to hear it again but each of the sailors seemed to need to say it, more than once, and so it became a kind of muttered chorus: “Terrible storm, bodies lost forever, the child tossed and tossed, brave lady, the child, terrible terrible sea.”
    Ellery Channing and Arthur Fuller arrived just before sunset. The scale of the mess at the beach nearly overwhelmed them; but in an unmethodical manner, they more or less retraced Henry’s search all that evening, with identical results. There was brief excitement when Ellery found some scraps of paper in a note-book — upon drying them, however, they could see enough of the lettering to make out that these were only pieces of the ship’s log. Camping out near the workers, without a tent, they had tried to cheer one another but a light rain kept their gloom constant through the night. In the morning Arthur oversaw the digging up of his nephew’s coffin and hired a cart for the first leg of its trip back to Cambridge for family burial. Since it seemed that all hope of recovering the other bodies was gone, they spoke about the missing manuscript instead. It was Margaret’s book, her “History of the Italian Revolution.” Her lastletters home had announced its completion. There was little chance, they knew, of finding it — but Henry made a promise as Arthur and Ellery left with their burden, that he would continue to try.
    Richard Fuller, Margaret’s youngest brother and Henry’s good friend, had stayed behind in Boston with a fever. More than for anyone else, Henry wanted to recover something for Richard. All he had were two jet buttons from a coat, perhaps Ossoli’s, that he had found on a scrap of wool cloth in the foam.
    Henry resumed his beach walking. He was looking now for nothing in particular, and was able to enjoy noting the dozens of sea-birds, their fishing habits and cries; kelp and sea-lettuce and small moon-jellies pulsing on the sand; the razor clam-shells and jingle-shells and acres of boat-shells, lumpy underfoot.
    A few miles down from the salvage encampment, as he was stepping idly along the wave line, he put a foot directly onto a mass of kelp and bones. They were big bones, and not of fish — he looked closely and saw that they were not quite clean-picked by the gulls and crabs, and definitely human — a shoulder, and an arm, two fingers still attached with shreds of cartilage. He could not touch these bones. No doubt they were from the wreck. They could be from any one of the bodies. He believed nonetheless that they were Margaret’s. That looked like her hand, it did, feminine, with her long fingers.
    He thought perhaps of taking a finger bone for Richard. It was like something out of a