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“You took my Alan,” she says.

“In February.”

“You remember.”

“I remember all of them.”

“He was afraid of the water.” Her voice cracks straight down the middle. “All his life. And he went in off the wall in February and I have not slept a whole night since for thinking about him being afraid at the end, and nobody will tell me anything, and the priest says a great deal and none of it is an answer.”

The square has gone quiet at last. Everybody is listening and nobody is looking.

Riwal goes down on one knee in the mud in front of her, which puts his face level with hers, and I watch him do it, and it hurts. I want to put myself between him and every person in this square.

“He was only afraid for about as long as it takes to say his own name,” he says. “Then he was not. I stayed with him for the rest of it, and it was not long, and he was not alone, and where I took him there was no water.”

She makes a terrible sound.

“You’re certain.”

“I am certain. I was holding him.”

She stands there with her basket for a moment. Then she takes his hand, the one on his knee, in both of hers, and holds it, and puts it down, and goes off through the crowd very fast without looking at anyone.

He gets up. There is mud on his knee. Nobody in that square says one word to him.

So I give the bridle to him and I take his arm.

I do it right there, in front of the ash tree and the geese and the eel-trap man, and I do it with my whole hand and my whole weight, and I walk him across the middle of that square at my own pace, which is slow, because I want it to take a while.

I feel the moment the town works out what I am.

It goes through the crowd like a bell in a bad room. She is his. That woman is with it.

The woman with her arm through the Ankou’s arm is the one from the block at Morlac, the one who said the quiet one out loud in front of everybody, and here she is holding on to his sleeve with her chin up in the middle of a market like it is nothing at all.

They look at me exactly as they look at him.

It takes no time at all. A woman pulls a child sideways out of my path. A man who was about to offer me apples turns and puts the apples down. The space that goes round him goes round me now, and I am inside it with him, and it is the loneliest ten yards I have ever walked.

Four hundred years of this.

Every day. Every town. Every single time he is called out to sit with somebody’s son in the water, and then back through a square where nobody will sell him an apple.

“You can let go,” he says, very low, not carrying.

“No.”

“Enora. They will talk about you for a year.”

“Good. Let them get it right.” I hold on tighter and we keep walking. “You knelt down in the mud.”

“She needed to hear it.”

“I know she did.” My voice comes out thick with something between fury and tears. “You did the kindest thing I have ever watched anybody do and then you stood up and this entire square remembered to be somewhere else, and I am not having it, so you will have to put up with me being on your arm until we’re out of it.”

He does not say anything.

At the far side of the square he stops, where a lane goes off behind the chandler’s yard, and looks down at me, and there is mud on his knee, and his mouth is not steady.