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AN TURNED THE body over with his pitchfork once, then twice, and said to Nina in his lazy way, “Nina, lead the mare over to that bank so she can eat some clover.”
    “Clover,” Nina said. She was staring at a picture she had seen before but she couldn’t remember where.
    “Grass or clover, all the same to her, she’s hungry. Georgie, Janie, give her a hand.”
    He had the body turned by now, in a tangle of floating seaweed. He was hoping they wouldn’t understand what they had seen.
    “Will she eat shamrock?” Nina asked. She had the loose reins of the mare in her hand and was leading her away from the image she wanted to forget.
    “She’d eat anything,” Dan said.
    “Clover,” said Georgie.
    Nina drew the mare’s head down towards the grass and saw her lips curl back, baring long yellow teeth. She listened to the crunch of seagrass and shivered even though the sun was hot enough to make her cheeks burn. She remembered wishing her governess gone and wished now that she hadn’t wished that. Because if all of her fleeting desires came true, she didn’t want to think of what would happen.
    “That was Miss Shawcross, wasn’t it?” she said quietly to Dan, who jammed his pitchfork in whatever seaweed he had so far collected, and took the reins from her hand.
    “Don’t you bother your head about it.”
    Dan lifted her first, then Janie and last of all George on to the cart.
    “Is she drowned?”
    “Drowneded,” echoed Georgie.
    “We’re taking you home now Nina,” said Dan softly, “and I don’t want you to bother with what you’ve seen. Leave that to the peelers.”
    “She’s still hungry,” said Nina, as Dan jerked the mare’s head upright, and whipped her into a smart trot down the sandy road.
    “She is,” said Dan, “and I know a fine field of clover she can chew to her heart’s content.”
    “Where’s that?” asked Janie
    “Below the RIC barracks.”
    She lulled herself into a dream as the horse trotted back, a dream scented with honeysuckle and clover and the smell of wet seaweed. In her dream the face turned over and over, the hair spreading out in the water like a scallop-shell. In her waking the river threaded its way above the hedges, a hot ribbon of silver.
    The sound of humming bees droned towards her from the hedges and away to the dunes and made common cause with both her dream and her waking. Whatever made this happen wasn’t her, she sensed, but some part of her had seen it before it happened, so some part of her could at the very least have stopped it from happening. To know what was to come would be a burden, a terrible burden, even worse than knowing what was not to come. She would return, she knew, to the house, to father and mother and Mary Dagge, to her doll Hester and to a world without Miss Isobel Shawcross.
    She tried to picture Dan’s arrival at the peelers’ station, sunlit swathes of green below the redbricked barracks, two peelers running towards them from the door, buttoning their tunics, serious, serious, all business. Dark glances towards her, the girl in the back, you, you of all people knew. But to her immense relief it wasn’t like that at all. An officer in shirtsleeves was lazily clipping the lawns, Dan pulled the mare to a halt, handed the reins to Nina, said, “One minute now,” left them on the seaweed-smelling cart while he walked forwards, shook his hand and whispered.
    “She’s dead, isn’t she?” said Janie.
    “You think so?” asked Nina.
    “Well, I don’t think she was swimming.”
    “Maybe she can’t,” said Nina.
    “Can’t what?”
    “Swim.”
    The mare cropped at the grass by the roadside.
    “Clover,” said Georgie.
    “Stop saying clover,” said Nina.
    “Grass,” said Georgie.
    “That’s better. Grass.”
    Louder voices on the lawn then, two peelers walking fast down towards them. Buttoning their tunics, just the way she’d pictured, to her shock and disappointment, but not really her surprise.
    “Make room