Before Savery died, he’d once said that even a person like him who’d been in the war, part of the war, would after a few years no longer be sure which events he actually remembered and which he’d been told about by someone else—Izzy, for example—who’d also been there. They saw the same thing, but not the same thing. They felt the same things, but not the same things—and in talking to each other, both right after the various battles and movements and then as they retold those events, sometimes in the company of others and always with liquor involved, all the stories tangled together. Which strand came from him, which from someone else? Even he had not been able to remember sometimes—and if that was true for Savery, then she could do no worse and might even do better. Exactly because she hadn’t been there, she thought, she had the chance to separate out from the strands of evidence what was legend and what was not. Maybe she could see, as those who’d been present sometimes couldn’t, how one place had been conflated with another, two wings of a battle fused into one, how time had been compressed or expanded.

She’d started a number of sketches, including one she wouldn’t show this pair: a little scrap about Bernard’s uncle, which had arisen from that glimpse of her brother writing out the wounded Izzy’s words, sending his own greeting to Izzy’s brother and the girl who sometimes held that brother’s pen. A little sketch, nothing yet. In time it would fall into place. A soldier from Troy, a fellow amateur historian who’d received one of Savery’s early circulars, had sent in February a history of his own regiment that referred to a few men from Savery’s regiment. With that, added to all she already had, she hoped to weave the story of the battle in which Izzy had been injured.

Bernard, clutching the scrapbook as well as the folder of transcribed letters, said, “I think I should take these. If you’ll forgive me—”