Searching For The Secret River. Kate Grenville

out: tell the story. It didn’t change anything, but it felt like an act of respect.

      All the way back to the hotel on the Tube it was as if William Boon was beside me, a living, speaking man. My search for facts about Wiseman had been fruitless. They were there, somewhere, and if I knew more about how to look, I might even have found them. But my meeting with William Boon was telling me I didn’t have to approach the past in a forensic frame of mind. I could experience the past—as if it were happening here and now.

      Staring out from the train at the Thames, gleaming darkly under a lowering yellow sunset, I decided to suspend the paper search for Wiseman. Instead I’d look for him in the places where the past had happened: the lanes and streets, the churches, and above all the river.