He thinks about Francis’s face in the mirror of the ransacked house, their eyes meeting in the mirror and then the trinkets and violets raining down on his head. The memory makes him want to put his hands over his head. “Don’t look like that,” he hears Francis’s voice again. “It’s for Edie.”

“I had a dream,” Harry says. “A nightmare. I must have sleepwalked.”

“Have you cut your feet?” She pulls her shawl around her shoulders. It is embroidered with Indian flowers, he sees. The fringe of the shawl brushes softly against his hand. Harry imagines that he can smell the musky silk roses.

“I don’t think so.”

He sits on the edge of the bed while she washes his feet. His eyes keep closing. He’s not sure that he isn’t still asleep. She sweeps the glass shards together and folds them into a newspaper. His hand aches where she pulled the glass from it. Her hands lift up his feet and pull over the sheets. She puts a finger to her lips and then there is nothing but the black.

“It will be all right,” says Edie’s voice.

He shuts his eyes and briefly believes her.

Chapter Forty-Four: Harry

Chapter Forty-Four

Harry

Proven military camp, west of Ypres, October 1917

YOU’VE HEARD NOTHING FROM HIM?” ASKED CAPTAIN ROSE.

“Not a word. I last saw him on the station in Poperinghe—that was on his way out.”

Rose was writing in a book. Harry could see that he’d drawn a pair of eyes and a dog in the margins. The dog had forlorn hound eyes and its tail between its legs. “That would be the twenty-fourth of September, then?”

“Yes, sir. I suppose so. Nearly three weeks ago now.”

“So tell me: How come Corporal Butterworth reported seeing him in the vicinity of the camp ten days ago?” Rose checked the notes in his book. “Butterworth swears that he saw him here on the fourth of October—the day that he was due back from home leave. He says that your brother came back into the camp, but then left again.”

It was the first that Harry had heard of this. “I don’t know anything about that, sir. Could Butterworth have been mistaken?”

“He’s made a sworn statement. He says that he saw Francis going out through the gates.”

Harry shook his head.

“Why would he come back into camp, but then leave again?” Rose asked.

“I can’t imagine why he’d do that. It doesn’t sound right. Like I say, I’ve heard nothing from him.”

Rose looked up. “All right, Harry. I believe you. But this isn’t good for him, you know. We can’t have men just wandering off. It isn’t tolerated.”

“I understand that,” said Harry, wondering quite what that nontoleration meant.