When the chaplain finished, somebody sat down at the organ and began to play. A nurse stood up from a small group and began to sing “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth” from Handel’s Messiah and the beauty of that lone voice, the sonorous organ ringing out over a desecrated Italian valley, was too much for Jess. She squeezed her hands together and gritted her teeth but her throat burned and the tears were too many for her eyes to hold and they spilled over, running like the Italian winter rain down her cheeks. She closed her eyes and swallowed, trying not to sob aloud, trying to hold herself together, to stop her body from shaking.

Something brushed her hand and took gentle hold of it. Jess opened her eyes to find that Dan had taken it, that his jaw was clenched tight too, that just one drop glistened on his cheek. They sat like that for the entire song, hands pressed painfully together, but it was the only way to listen to the hymn and not fall to pieces like the shell that had burnt out to nothing far below them.

Keep fighting them, Dan had said. And she would, she vowed, as the hymn crescendoed. Warren might well string her up when she got back to London or confine her to the Savoy. But, damn the consequences; she’d press the rules to the limits to find a way to get out of the Savoy and back to Europe, to photograph the moments like this, a lacuna of pathos amidst the firestorm of invasion.

The silence after the song had finished vibrated with the sound of the soprano voice, the final words—For now is Christ risen from the dead, the first fruits of them that sleep—bittersweet. Jess knew that none who fell here at Monte Cassino or during the imminent invasion would rise; that all the men around her, including Dan, might tomorrow be the ones to sleep forever.

PART TWO

D’Arcy

Seven

FRANCE, JUNE 2004

As the train sped out of Charles de Gaulle Airport, D’Arcy’s eyes banqueted on the view; she could almost smell the chestnut-and-lily–scented French summer air seeping into the train. It had been too long and she’d missed the church spires in every village, the railway bridges arching like ornate rainbows over river and road, the dusky Van Gogh yellow of the cornfields.

In an hour, she reached Reims, ready to pick up her car, hoping the gallery had remembered to book a small vehicle for her, one designed for navigating French towns, not a typically muscular SUV like everyone in Sydney preferred to drive. She was relieved to find a minuscule blue Renault awaiting her and she promptly opened all the windows, not caring that her long blonde hair would fly about madly as she drove past engorged grapes, so full of champagne juice that it was a wonder the slipstream of her car didn’t burst their skins. Oaks—how she wanted one day when she was finally a grown-up to have a grand driveway lined with oak trees—peered majestically down at her, some bowing their heads, others raising their arms to the sky as if they too were celebrating the fact that D’Arcy Hallworth was finally back in France.