They had been shelled as they moved forward to relieve the frontline trenches. They had crouched and ducked and shouted in their confusion. He had seen Francis up in front moving stiffly, unfalteringly onward. He didn’t flinch as earth was flung up, metal shrieked, and the air rushed with shock. It had been at that point that it struck Harry that his brother no longer cared. With that realization he was overwhelmed with the need to protect Francis.

He stands now outside the hotel and looks up at Edie’s window. There is no light within but he thinks that he sees a face step back from the glass. In this instant he feels an overwhelming need to protect her.

“We could just go home and try to forget,” he had repeated her own words back to her that morning.

He had never told her about the marks on Francis’s wrists and didn’t suppose that anyone had ever seen fit to inform her. Should he really try to forget that? Could they really forget and move forward, as Rose had suggested?

He stands outside her door. No light leaks from around the edges of it, but he can hear her footsteps on the other side. The door moves ajar when he knocks and so he pushes it open to find her silhouette against the window.

“Edie?”

She doesn’t answer him, just stands there, mysterious in the dim light. He can’t determine the expression on her face in the darkness. His finger moves to the light switch.

The room flicks into light and he sees it. It comes at him brightly. There are papers everywhere, over the floorboards and the dressing table and the bed. For a moment he is back in the looted house stepping through torn-out accounts of Arctic expeditions and maps of Abyssinia. But that’s not what these pages contain and Francis isn’t next door in a room full of feathers. These pages are crammed with writing, recorded images of long-ago instants and pencil portraits. The picture of the girl with the red hair is everywhere. Francis is everywhere. It’s a long time since he has seen these images, but Harry knows the work of his own hand.

“How?” he says simply.

“It’s not his, it’s yours,” she replies.

Chapter Forty-Nine: Harry

Chapter Forty-Nine

Harry

Ypres, September 1921

BUT HOW?” HARRY SAYS IT AGAIN.

“How indeed!” Edie laughs, but there is no humor in her face. There are red lines down her cheeks as if she has clawed at her own face. He wants to take a gentle hand to the red marks. He wants to pull her own hands away, but her laughter pushes him back.

“Dillon had it?”