His face she washed last of all. The lugs of his ears, the tender skin around the closed eyes, his brow, his lips. The whiskers and moustaches he wore when he left (Lord, the trimming, the rubbing-in of ointments!) had, at some point, been removed, but he had a week’s growth of beard on him, the hair on his chin looking younger than the hair on his head, no threads of grey in it. She leaned back from him hoping to see the boy’s face in the man’s, the face she had seen when she first came into service with the family, but she could not, and knew that whatever had happened to him between the June day last summer when he left and this February night, it had taken with it the last of his youth.

She fetched a second blanket to lay over him. The warmth of the fire was creeping closer to the bed but had not yet reached it. The dog was sprawled on the rug, belly to the flames. She held her hand by his mouth, felt the come and go of his breath. Was he easier, quieter? It seemed to her his breath came more slowly and she could not decide if this was good or not. As soon as Tom came up with the milk she would send him for the doctor. She could not have the responsibility just on herself. And doctors were not entirely useless, not all of them, always. They had their tricks.

She fussed, adjusted his blankets, his pillows, then told herself to cease, to have done. How could he sleep unless she let him be? She stepped away and crossed to the old linen press opposite the end of the bed. She had set down the knapsack there and now, for the first time, she thought to examine it. Like the clothes he had arrived in, the pack was not his own. Officers did not have packs like this. This was to be worn on a private soldier’s back. She had seen such packs often enough when the recruiting parties came through, though this one had the look of something raked out of a fire. Scorched, filthy. Black with tar or grease, the world’s filth. And this was what he had come back with? This and nothing besides?