“The family asked me to take general photographs of the ridge,” he explains. “That was the brief. Only it seems excessively brief. General just seems a bit too general, don’t you think? I don’t know where to start.”

When they turn and look back, the road is long and straight, tapering out in the haze on the skyline. There are other groups advancing up the hill, tourists in sneakers and pilgrims in black. The slope is pitted with shell holes and crumbling earthworks. The village below looks like a feature that someone has tried to scratch off a canvas.

“I can see for miles,” says Rachel. “You can see why they had to take it.”

The plain below is flat. There is the smudge of an industrial town in the distance and a stretching scar (not a neat cut—but like something troublesomely healed) that might perhaps once have been the front line. He takes the view looking back down toward the village.

“It’s the man’s sister who has asked for the photographs?”

“Yes. I haven’t met or corresponded with her. My employer just passed this request on. All I know is that her brother was reported missing here in April 1917.”

He wishes that Mr. Lee’s instructions weren’t so scant and unspecific. The landscape framed in his viewfinder might have no relation to the whereabouts of Captain Albert Stewart. He has no idea where precisely the line was on the tenth of April 1917. He doesn’t want to palm Miss Esme Stewart off with a meaningless image. It is too important for that.

“Perhaps she just wants a sense of the place?” Rachel suggests.

“I suppose. But what direction am I meant to point the camera in? I might be completely off the mark. Would you want a photograph of it if you couldn’t get here?”

“Yes. I might,” she replies. “Just to know the lay of the land, so that I could imagine it correctly.”

He wonders what Miss Esme Stewart imagines. He looks down at the scabbed slope and considers whether he ought to show it to her at its worst, or whether to try to select kinder angles. Would it be kindness to show Rachel the image on his camera? Could he not be completely off the mark there too?

“You’ve been working farther east?” she asks.

“Northeast of here. I was in Epéhy yesterday. Four years ago I thought that I might never leave there. I was injured there,” he clarifies as he looks up at Rachel. “It was quite sobering to go back.”

“And who would be visiting your grave?”

“I don’t know.” He considers: Would Edie make that journey? Would she have come to look for him? Would it have mattered to her to know the lay of that land? “But instead I ended up on an ambulance train back to England.”