‘Why am I so horrible?’ she shouted at the sky. ‘Why have I got pimples and a fat body and a wicked deceitful heart? Why me? Why?’

She listened for an answer, but nothing came. Only the burble of the turning tide flooding into the pools and stealing over the sandbanks and mud flats, glittering as it came. And in the distance the roar of the Severn Bore, foaming, gathering height as it funnelled into the estuary.

Ethie sat up. She tasted salt on the wind. She looked back at the beach and the line of putts, and saw speeding water where sand had been. She looked at her hand clutching the handle of the fishing net.

‘What am I DOING?’

She scrambled to her feet in a panic, and saw that she now stood on a narrow island of sand. It was shifting and crumbling under her feet as the brown water came churning in ahead of the spring tide.

‘Get back – get back.’ Ethie heard her own voice rasping like a storm twisting a stalk of barley. Clutching the net, she waded into the current, feeling the water sucking sand away from her heels. She was a strong swimmer, thank goodness, she thought. She kept wading desperately, waist deep, the water bitter and fierce around her body, dragging her heavy clothes, lifting her now, her chin suddenly in the water, her mouth spluttering, gasping with the cold. Fighting the weight of her sodden clothes, she swam vigorously towards the line of putchers. If she could only reach them, she could scramble to safety.

In the hours she’d spent by the river Ethie had come to recognise the burbling roar of the Severn Bore. It excited her to watch the edge of creamy foam rumpling up the river hauling the tide like a great silver breath discharged from the lungs of the ocean. Hearing it now, Ethie knew she was going to die, and she shouted to the sky.

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Mum and Dad and Kate. I did love you. I did.’ And then she fought to stay afloat, the cold reaching deep into her bones, her breath lurching in her chest. She fought, and she cursed, and at last Ethie let go as the brown waters carried her swiftly upstream under the silent, watching, waiting skies.

She uttered a final curse at the sky.

‘I’ll be back,’ she shouted, ‘I’ll be back.’

Kate and Sally stood one each side of Ethie’s empty bed, looking at each other.

‘Come on Mummy. We’ve got to do this,’ said Kate.

‘I know. It just seems so final.’ Sally looked down at the neatly made bed with its white pillows and the green and black tartan rug that Ethie had always wanted. She was glad of Kate’s bright strength there in the room with her. ‘You’re too young to have this happen to you, Kate,’ she said, ‘especially just now, after losing our home and with you worrying about Freddie.’

‘I’m all right, don’t you worry,’ said Kate. Her toe touched Ethie’s slippers which were under the bed. She picked them up tenderly and put them in the wooden tea chest with the rest of Ethie’s things. ‘Now let’s start by folding the blanket.’

Once the blanket had gone, Ethie’s bed looked ordinary, and the two women silently folded the heavy blankets and the starched sheets. Kate took off the pillowcases and added them to the laundry basket. Now they were looking down at the bare blue and white striped mattress and it seemed natural to sit on it and talk about Ethie.

‘If there’s anything of hers you want, you must have it, Kate,’ said Sally. ‘Her clothes perhaps.’

‘I don’t want her clothes.’ Kate shook her head adamantly. To her, Ethie’s clothes were gloomy, and touching them somehow connected her to all the unhappiness and the resentment her sister had emanated. ‘But I’d like this.’ She rummaged in the tea chest and took out a heavy navy blue book, its cover embossed with gold.

‘Oh yes,’ said Sally. ‘The Water Babies. It was her favourite book. She was always reading it, even when she was grown up. Ironic, isn’t it? There must have been something in it, some truth that she needed.’

Kate put the book on the windowsill. Outside, in the home field, baby lambs were scampering and blackbirds were warbling. Through the trees glinted a silver strip of river, and she looked away, suppressing the twinge of longing for Hilbegut.

‘We’d better turn the mattress, hadn’t we?’ Sally said, getting hold of the two fabric handles. ‘Lift it up, then we’ll put it on the floor and turn it.’

They heaved the mattress and slid it onto the floor. Then both women gasped. Lying on the brown Hessian that covered the bed base was a pile of little blue envelopes.

Kate went pale. She picked one up.

‘Letters. My letters. From Freddie.’

Sally stood watching her, transfixed. Ethie had hurt Kate, even from the grave, and Sally felt devastated and ashamed. For the first time since Ethie’s death, Kate was openly weeping, her face red with fury as she gathered the precious letters, each one beautifully addressed to Oriole Kate Loxley in Freddie’s copperplate script.

‘How could she DO this? My own SISTER.’ She wept and wept, clutching the letters close against her heart. ‘How could she take Freddie’s letters? And why? WHY?’

Sally put her arms round Kate and let her cry, but Kate whirled around out of the room and ran downstairs to her father who was sitting on a bench outside in the sun. By the time Kate reached him, she couldn’t speak for the sobs racking her body.

‘Kate!’ he said in surprise and held out his arms. She slumped onto his shoulder, the letters still tight in her hand.

‘What is it? My lovely Kate. Come on, don’t cry. I’m here,’ Bertie soothed, alarmed to feel Kate shaking all over. He hugged her close and leaned his pale cheek on her hair. ‘We’re all grieving for Ethie,’ he said, thinking he was sure to be right. But Kate sat up and looked at him, her cheeks flushed, her mouth twitching, and a look of burning fury in her eyes that Bertie had never seen before.

‘Kate?’

But Kate couldn’t speak. She held it in, knowing that if she did speak it would be a scream that would never stop. Fearing she might crush them, she put Freddie’s letters down on the bench. Bertie glanced at them, his brow furrowed, then up at Sally who appeared in the door. He raised his eyebrows, questioning.

‘Freddie’s letters. Hidden under Ethie’s mattress,’ she mouthed.

‘Come here.’

Bertie moved sideways to let Sally sit on the other side of him, and put his arms around both of them like the wings of an angel.

‘Shh,’ he said. ‘No – don’t try to talk. Let’s just be quiet. Be quiet and listen. Shh.’

At first Kate could only hear the awful sound of her own sobbing, and with each sob, a pain that felt like broken glass. Then she heard her heartbeat loud and fast, and her father’s slow, peaceful one, and Sally’s rhythmic breathing. She heard the chickens having a dust bath, their wings flapping madly, the baby lambs bleating out in the fields, the distant throb of Uncle Don’s tractor. She heard the blackbird singing and her father’s watch ticking deep in his waistcoat pocket. And then she heard the bees. She was back in the woods at Hilbegut, looking so deep into the blue of Freddie’s eyes as he told her the poem, and she felt love come flooding back into her being.

She dried her eyes on Bertie’s hanky, and looked at her parents’ concerned faces.

‘What am I crying about?’ she said brightly. ‘I’ve got all these letters to read!’

‘That’s my girl,’ said Bertie. ‘My golden bird.’

‘Letter for you.’ Annie tutted, as she put the plump envelope on Freddie’s plate. ‘It’s got a Gloucestershire postmark. That Loxley girl, is it? Took her long enough to answer your letters! Looks like she’s got a lot to say. It’s a wonder that envelope hasn’t exploded.’

Freddie picked up the bulging envelope and turned it over and over in his hands. He’d left the pain of losing Kate far behind, back in that autumn time of cold rain and Ian Tillerman’s eyes, and his motorbike going in the canal. He didn’t want to go back there.