There are twelve thousand men buried in Tyne Cot, eight thousand of them without a name. Edie had read that fact, had known that number for a long time. And, whatever the odds, she had told herself that if Francis was there, she would know it. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to walk directly to his cross, but she would feel that he was nearby. Standing among so very many crosses, though, she had only felt a sense of shock, of horror, of confusion. With the size of the cemetery, the scale of the thing, it was almost too much to comprehend. They could all be Francis, or he might be none of them. She didn’t feel a prickle of connection to any particular cross. Just a terrible sadness and anger for all of them.

The train pulls into a station and Edie sees the sign for Amiens. She watches the exchange of passengers, the sightseers, pilgrims, and widows alighting, guidebooks and suitcases in hand, and the onward travelers joining the train. Beyond the gantries the stonework of the station has been cleaved and shored up. Nothing is quite intact, is quite as it was. Nowhere has entirely escaped.

The movement of the crowd returns her thoughts to the stillness of a field of crosses and his photograph face. Harry had said that that last photograph of Francis must have been taken in October 1917. He had sworn it couldn’t be later. But how could he be telling the truth? Francis had slept in her bed in September. How could four weeks do that to a man’s face? But then what had Francis learned in those four weeks? And what had he done to himself as a consequence of that learning? She thinks about Francis when he had come home on leave, how he had curled himself away from her and just sat for hours staring at the fire. She had watched him and wondered what terrible thoughts were passing behind his eyes. Now she realizes that, at least in part, it was jealousy and suspicion that were twisting Francis up. At what point had he first suspected? How long had he been storing all of that up? Was it seeing the Saint Christopher that had triggered it? Was it because she wrote letters to Harry too? But had he not read her letters and seen that they were innocent?