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it first then pass it on to Herbert. One day, before passing on the bucket, the older boy urinated in it. Herbert refused to take it. In an instant his arms were pinned behind his back and his head forced deep into the filthy water. He writhed and panicked, but the more he struggled, the more tightly his head was held down. His chest tried to draw in air, but he fought it, keeping his mouth firmly shut. And then, just as he had in his father’s workroom, he willed himself to be still. He waited, with his head in the bucket, perfectly still, until at last he was pulled free.
    When Stone told these things to the third officer, standing with him at the rail as their ship searched for the dead, Groves said, ‘But you know, none of the people from the Titanic will have drowned.’
    Stone turned to him. ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘On P&O ships there were always enough lifejackets for everyone, and if there was any sort of emergency, the first thing they said was “Put on your lifejackets!” And you can’t drown with a lifejacket on so they will have died of the cold.’ Stone wished Groves would stop talking, but the young man went on. ‘Hypothermia,’ he said, ‘is what they call it. I learned all about it. Did you know, water sucks heat from your body thirty times faster than air? But they say it’s not such a bad way to die. After a while you just feel a bit tired, then you stop shivering, and by the end you feel quite warm. Then you fall asleep.’
    Stone stared at him. The third officer, he realised, was trying to comfort him, to offer some small twig of consolation. Don’t worry about the fifteen hundred who died, he was saying, because they did not gasp desperately for air, but quietly fell asleep. Stone wondered whether the third officer knew just how tiny and withered that twig was.
    But either way, frozen or drowned, where were the bodies?
    In the water around him, Stone could see none. He could see the pretty Carpathia , less than a mile away, her white accommodation glittering and flashing in the sun, and her passengers lining the rails and waving at him as if they were daytrippers on a picnic steamer. He could see, in the vibrantly blue water between the rescue ship and his own, some debris: a piece of rope, an oar, a lifejacket, a woman’s shawl spreading silently on the water. Closer inboard was a small lifeboat whose canvas sides had collapsed so that the frigid water lapped freely over a sodden suitcase jammed between the thwarts. So little wreckage, he thought, for such a large ship.
    ‘Probably,’ said Cyril Evans, who had appeared briefly by his side and seemed to be reading his thoughts, ‘everything was taken down by the suction.’
    When the Carpathia steamed off to the west and the semaphore flags had been put away, Captain Lord ordered full ahead on the engine. Stone heard the chief officer talking to the bosun about grappling hooks and derrick booms. The second officer was not asked to do anything. Nobody came near him; he stood alone at the aft end of the bridge, out of the way, while the captain stood on the starboard bridge wing and stared straight ahead into the hardening morning light. Captain Lord’s bridge coat looked oddly square and stiff. He seemed almost to be part of the ship’s structure. Stone wanted to speak to him – about the rockets, about what to say and do about them – but now was not the time.
    He held tight to the rail and observed the water below, which had begun to hiss and spit as the ship picked up speed. The wind rose, rattling the bridge awnings, and the sea became choppy, with streaks of white froth scudding along low-lying crests. When the captain stepped inboard to speak to the chief officer, Stone heard only scraps of what was said – that the bodies might have been carried south by the Labrador Current, or west by the wind, that it was impossible to know where they were.
    There was a cry from the third officer, who stood on the port bridge wing looking