He was trying, Sissy saw, to make the scrapbook less visible behind the folder, which he’d squeezed almost flat. As if she didn’t have other copies; as if others from their regiment hadn’t sent the same clippings with their own marginal annotations. Anyway, the originals (Savery’s comments; Savery’s sprightly dashes) were here if she needed them. That she could not lay her hand on them, just now, meant nothing. Somewhere they existed, and also many others—letters sent to her by men who knew the Deverell brothers, and those who did not, those who had been there at the worst moments of the battle and the rout and those who’d been elsewhere; those who’d seen the carnage and the fire and the balloon that watched them all from above. Some were vivid, some were dull; some were boastful and some were silly and some were straightforward and sounded honest. She would write when she was ready, when all the notes had been collated and all the versions brought together.

“Take those, if you want,” Sissy said kindly. “They’re your family’s, after all.”

“We’d leave them here, if you were going to finish the book,” Miss Atkins said—then stopped, her face filled with questions, her excellent manners seeming to struggle with her curiosity. One hand toyed with the notebook in her pocket.

“If,” she said. “When—” And then, reluctantly, “I could—I do know how hard you must work. My dear friend writes natural history books, and it’s always a struggle for her both to find the time to do the work, and then to actually do it. She’s very meticulous and I can see you are too, you must have had your own difficulties. I’ve written some things myself, so—”

“Books?”

“Articles, mainly,” Miss Atkins said. Not about people, Sissy gathered. Moths, mosses, trees. Not about what people did. Bernard said, “We’ve written some together,” but still Sissy pitied her. Why study a tree when you could study a person?

“My book will get done,” Sissy said calmly. “I don’t need those papers to do it.”

“But,” Bernard said, “if you’re to include my uncles—”