“Yes, ma’am,” she says, but there’s a note to her voice that sets something stirring in me. You know how it is when you’ve been reporting on people’s tittle-tattle for the past two years. You recognize the sound of someone wanting to unburden herself. I turn my head. She’s wearing a worn raincoat, worn rubber boots that must be several sizes too big for her, a strange floppy oilskin hat like something a fisherman would wear in a gale. Her hands fret about inside her pockets.

“Something the matter, Annie?” I ask.

“Poor Master Benedict. Poor lad. Just like his father. And you! Expecting a wee babe, just like his mother.”

“I’m not anything like his mother.”

“Oh, but you are. There’s only a few who love like that. Only a few that can bear it.”

“But she didn’t bear it, did she? When he died, she couldn’t bear it.” I gesture to the thicket. “She made you bury his things.”

“That was just the darkness in her, ma’am. I knew she didn’t mean it. She had a darkness in her, like my mum had. Came on when she had her babes. Poor wee thing. I knew she didn’t mean it.”

She’s looking off into the thicket now, as if she sees something inside it. I turn to face her, and still she doesn’t regard me, so I reach out to take her elbow. I left my gloves behind, and my hands are wet and raw, and her raincoat is about the same.

“What does that mean, Annie? What are you trying to say?”

“I did keep it safe, ma’am. All these years. The poor dear major. It wasn’t right to bury his things in the dirt.”

Lulu

July 1943

(The Bahamas)

I woke to the sound of a ringing telephone, sometime past eight o’clock in the morning. At first I thought it must be Thorpe, but then I remembered how, a few hours earlier, I had settled in the dark sand and watched the sun crawl over the edge of the world, until the drone of the Liberators merged into the noise of the ocean and Thorpe was gone, my husband was gone, and I had staggered back to bed.