“‘Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes. She shall have music wherever she goes.’ Did your husband make them?” He nods at her fingers.

“Yes. David was a silversmith. Always clever with his hands and a pair of pliers in his pocket. He took his pliers away with him, because that’s just part of who he was—who he is. He made me some napkin rings too, from some sort of shell casing, and a box with pansies engraved onto it. Pensées in French, you see. He told me that. It meant that he was thinking of me.”

“An artist and a poet and a linguist?”

“Ten,” she says. She flexes her fingers. “He sent me one each month. Ten months in France. I look at my fingers and I know where he was each month. I know the location that each parcel arrived from. The one that matters, though—the only one that really matters—is the eleventh month, and I know hardly anything about that.”

“And the eleventh month was?”

“November 1916.” Staring at her fingers, Rachel suddenly looks as if she might cry. “I’ve been here before, you know. This is my third trip. How many more do I have to make?” She clatters the teaspoon into her cup and the ringed fingers are then in her hair. “I should be an expert at this by now, but—once again—I don’t know where to start.”

“You’ve written to your husband’s regiment? He could be in England by now. Maybe in one of the hospitals?” There are still twenty thousand men in the special hospitals, Harry has read. Looking for Francis, he has sat in the waiting rooms of many of those hospitals. He has written those letters. Spoken to those doctors and seen them shake their heads. “He could be staring down a ward waiting for you to arrive.”

“I told you on the boat, didn’t I?” She looks suddenly forceful. “I wrote to his officers, to the men who had written to me at the time, to all the men who he had ever named in his letters. They couldn’t tell me anything. So many men are missing. That’s what they all say. It’s like the word missing is a code and I’m meant to get the nod as to what it really means.”

“How about the army enquiry office? Or the British Legion?”

“Yes, haven’t I already told you? They couldn’t help.”

“The Red Cross?”

“I even saw a clairvoyant. She told me that David wasn’t dead. She was quite certain about it. She couldn’t find him on the other side. It was near Arras that he went missing—in that place, and it all tumbled down to ruin. I think that David might be lost, or might have lost his mind.”