She turned half a dozen pages until she came to a photograph of the city burning. It had been taken from a hill above the downtown, long shadows indicating that it was early morning. The buildings were crisp and clear, those closer to the camera revealing their missing cornices, shattered windows, and huge cracks running up the brick. The streets were adrift with brick and rubble, the mounds studded incongruously with chairs and wardrobes that had been carried so far, then abandoned. Men and women stood about, staring up at the cloud of angry smoke billowing grey against the lighter sky. To one side, a dead horse lay in the traces of its wagon, half buried by the collapsed wall of a building.

After a minute, she turned the page.

The next photograph was at once shocking and oddly reassuring. Again from a hilltop, again the fires raging in the background, but along the front of the picture, picnics were taking place. A group of young men, some of them hatless but all in ties and tidy suits, sat and lay back on their elbows on the grass around a cloth arranged with sandwich rolls and bottles of lemonade. In the centre of the photograph, with the smoke cloud huge and furious above them and the dapper young men glancing at them from the sides, stood a pair of young women—girls, really—dressed in their spring finery. Hats elaborate with feathers, new spring frocks, their postures shouting their awareness that the youths at their feet were of greater interest and importance than the city burning at their backs. It might have been an illustration of the careless self-obsession of the young, yet somehow it was not. For some reason, the posture of the young ladies and the ease of their admirers conveyed a sense of defiance in the face of catastrophe: One knew somehow that these young people were quite aware of the horrors creeping up on them, yet one suspected that they were merely biding their time until they might do something about it.

Reassuring, the assertion of young strength in the time of the city's need.

Holmes found himself smiling, and she turned the next page, her fingers swiping back the tissue protector to reveal a refugee camp.

The profile of the hill on which the camp was laid was the familiar park a few streets away—Lafayette Park, little more than a grassy knoll with the incongruous house parked among the trees at the top, the whole of it two streets wide and two deep. In the first photo, the grass was a jumble of possessions—bedrolls and steamer trunks, strapped orange-crates and disassembled bed-steads. All the women wore the elaborate hats of the period, and most of the men were missing.