“So, you, Jimmy,” he turns to me. “You’re a career soldier. A bona fide lifelong military man. An inter-generational warrior.” Unlike Sophie, Harold appears to have no trouble at all with my having been born in 1727. He does not disagree that I might have been adjutant at Dettingen and aide-de-camp for Hangman Hawley at Culloden in 1745, whereas Sophie snorts at the very mention.

If a person knits as you speak of the past, you can become mesmerized. As the yarn unwinds from its skein your memories naturally unfold to their full length. I tell him about my fierce adoration of George Warde, and about the strange love between my mother, Henrietta, and myself. Harold listens without judgment, his soothing line of wool unspooling and purling round his needles. I tell him how Hangman Hawley made me hammer up gallows at his tent-flaps to hang the lad Jonas who romanced the laundress Hawley fancied, then he hung a fourteen-year-old who forked the glob of suet Hawley had his own eye on.

I start to say something about loving and losing Eliza—I’ve been talking for over an hour—and Harold says, very politely, “You mentioned her, I remember…but…tell me again about losing your brother.” He says this with a frown as if he hasn’t quite understood. I recall telling him last Tuesday in Chinatown, at Magic Idea, about losing Ned after Dettingen, about having to write home and tell my mother how I’d distributed his effects….A letter it cost me tears to write.

“Tell me again about the box of your brother’s things,” Harold says. “The one you sent home to your mother.”

The bravest moment in a big brother’s life is not the instant before his own death in battle. He foresees that the moment he enlists. The brave part is when he sees limbs blasted off a boy down the line and doesn’t know if they belong to Ned, or Elwyn, or whoever his beloved might be.

“I saw the blood of the loveliest boy soak in the stones,” I tell Harold. “I ran to see, but the head was torn off—the head was a bag of blood, a burst football rolling till it smacked into a rock. His blood congealed in a tide-mark on that rock. And the rock belonged to land I knew would never be home to any of my people now or down through history yet to come.”

“But this was your brother? It was Ned?”

“Nobody could tell me who it was.”

“But your brother died, and you told me you sent his things back home….”

“Yes. Ned died.”