She had stood among the unidentified dead and told them that, whatever Francis might have supposed about Harry and her, it wasn’t true—that nothing had happened—that whatever conclusion he might have drawn, it was the wrong one. She wouldn’t have betrayed him, she tells herself. Not then. Whatever feelings she might have had for Harry, she wouldn’t have acted upon them, and however difficult a future might have been with Francis, she would have made it work. She would have done the right thing, however wrong it might have felt. She would have tried. Edie tells herself that. She had also told it to the field of crosses.

“‘I have spread my dreams under your feet,’” his long-ago voice whispers. “‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.’”

Was it natural that she had felt some sense of anger toward the graves that might be Francis as well? Was that a proper reaction? Was it so wrong to feel that she had been treated unfairly? That she’d been judged and damned and had not had the right to defend herself? She had unbuttoned the swallow brooch from her coat, remembering his words. “It’s only paste,” he had said. “Only a cheap thing, but it’ll look pretty on her, won’t it?” She had seen the scene through Harry’s eyes a few hours earlier, visited that looted house through his diary. She knew about the trinket box, the violets, and his sudden violence, and she had remembered the moment when Francis had placed the brooch in her palm and tightened his fingers around her hand. She had thought, after that happened, that perhaps her response had spoiled things. But maybe the Saint Christopher was more to blame? Or perhaps it is just her that is to blame? Edie had looked at the closest cross, at the words KNOWN UNTO GOD, and pushed the brooch into the soil.

With the guard’s whistle, and the call for Calais Maritime, she looks out on slate rooftops slipping by, red chimney pots, and the distant towers of Amiens Cathedral. She is leaving it all behind, all the skeleton churches and leveled cathedrals, all the ruins and the boneyards. She imagines Harry waking in Ypres this morning and wishes, for his sake, that he too could leave it behind. All this cemetery searching can’t be healthy. It’s all too like endlessly digging over the same ground.