I didn’t mind the job too much in those early years, if I’m to be truthful, especially when I didn’t have to do the “Haunted Ambergris” tour, and before I had to stand outside Mary’s home like a fool. At least part of the time a horse and buggy would be employed so I didn’t have to drag my leg around. And business gradually became more robust: the cessation of hostilities soon brought a new wave of the curious—not curious enough to venture over for the Festival, but curious enough to explore during the daylight of other seasons.

Besides, I often contrived to arrive at the Blythe Academy right before lunch, so I could allow those bright-eyed travelers from Morrow or Stockton or Nicea to wander as they would, within reason, while I sat down for a sandwich with Bonmot. At a stone bench. Under the fabled but now considerably more wizened willow trees.

“Tough crowd today?” Bonmot would almost always say, making me smile.

“I’m not a comedian or a juggler, Bonmot. I don’t have to entertain. I just have to lead them around to interesting places.”

“You are such a kind tour guide,” Bonmot would say, trying not to laugh. “To teach them the responsibility of finding their own entertainment.”

“Why not? That’s what I have to do.”

I wish I could say my lunches with Bonmot felt the same as before, but they did not. Yes, a similar sense of contentment, of ease, lingered over those conversations, but it became a more fleeting thing; it did not last as long or affect me as powerfully. Our discussions had limits; we had acquired scars. Bonmot never discussed Duncan, and I, not wishing to give up even the faded pleasure of those lunches, never pressed the point.

If the situation had changed, so had Bonmot. The war had changed him.

“You’re hesitant sometimes now,” I said to him once, during an uncomfortable silence. “You halt on the verge of saying things.”

Bonmot nodded. “You’re right. I halt because I am not certain anymore. The things I thought I knew do not always seem right when I say them, so I say them first in my head, and then speak. Otherwise, it’s as if I were mouthing sawdust. And I miss people who have died, and sometimes when I speak, I see them, because this priest or that priest who has passed on had taught me the truism I was about to say.”

He stared at me with a knowing sadness. “I liked it better when I knew everything.”

A barking laugh. And an echo from Sybel, standing in the willow tree, whispering to me: “I liked it better when I knew nothing.”

For my part, I found it odd to sit there watching the current crop of fresh-faced students make their way across the courtyard—lithe, flushed with success, seemingly innocent—and know that it was just a few years ago that Mary and Duncan and Bonmot had played out their appointed roles of lust, love, secrecy, and discovery. The war lay like an insurmountable black wall between then and now.