Turn 3 of 7

Ask what year she thinks it is

The question comes out before you have decided how to ask it, blunt and graceless, and it hangs in the air between you like something dropped.

"What year do you think it is?" The woman on the bridge looks at you as though you have asked her the colour of the sky. Her brow furrows, not in confusion but in the mild irritation of someone who has been asked something foolish by someone who ought to know better.

"Eighteen and twelve," she says. "October. The ninth, if you want the day, though I'll grant you I've lost track of the hours sitting out here." She holds up her wrist, and there is a watch on a leather fob, the face fogged with water, the hands stopped at a quarter past four. She looks at it and shakes it, once, the way you shake a watch that has stopped, and then tucks it back under her wet sleeve without comment.

You do the arithmetic in your head and it comes out wrong, all of it wrong, by more than two hundred years. The valley was not flooded yet in 1812. The reservoir was not built. The village was still a village, and the mill was a ruin, three years burned, and this woman was alive and standing on this bridge waiting for a brother who told her to be here. Whatever happened next, whatever sent her into the water, it had not happened yet — not for her. The cut on her knuckle is still beading, slow and red and ordinary.

"You look as though you've seen a ghost," she says, and there is something almost like humour in it, dry and tired. She wraps her shawl tighter.

"I'm the one stood out in the wet. Are you quite well?"

Behind her the church tower stands half-exposed against the darkening sky, its empty window a black mouth, and the reservoir stretches out flat and gleaming where the rest of the village should be. The silence between you fills with the small sounds of water — dripping from the bridge stones, lapping softly at the mud, running in thin threads down the exposed road. She is waiting for you to say something that makes sense, and you are aware that nothing you could say will.