She takes a photograph from her handbag and smiles as she pushes it across the table. The young man staring back has tidy features and strikingly pale eyes. Harry thinks that, if he were taking the photograph, he would focus in on the young man’s eyes. Whatever Rachel’s certainty as to the man in the photograph being full of life, there is something already ghostlike about those eyes.

“A handsome chap.”

“Yes.” Rachel takes the photograph back. She runs her hands over it as if she is reading it with her fingertips. “I’ve seen every spiritualist in Sunderland. He’s not on the other side.”

Harry wonders how many seers have run their fingers over David West’s image and what they have felt. He has read about psychics and spiritualist meetings, about widows and mothers communing with the souls of their lost men, connecting again and saying the things that they never had a chance to speak to their faces. But he can feel no sense of Francis as he holds his hand over his photographs. There is nothing there. No presence itching at his palm, no signs, no sense of a soul; only an absence, only a space, a gap, and memories that need to be kept covered up. Francis isn’t there to converse through a medium. If he is, Harry can’t think what Francis would say. And he’s not sure that he would want to hear it.

Chapter Five: Edie

Chapter Five

Edie

Arras, August 1921

THERE IS A YOUNG COUPLE IN THE CORNER OF THE CAFÉ, NOT MUCH more than teenagers, their fingers linked under the table, their heads touching, mouthing words only meant for each other. Edie catches the girl’s eye and quickly looks away, a brief, awkward moment of uninvited connection, but then his voice is there.

“‘Fasten your hair with a golden pin,’” Francis’s voice whispers. She can almost feel his breath in her ear again and hear the grin shaping his recited words. “‘And bind up every wandering tress.’”

It is eight years ago and she is a girl in the lending library, looking for a story to briefly take her away from her mother’s illness—and suddenly he is there, on the other side of the bookshelf, the blond boy with his flamboyant manners, and his rhymes, and that smile. She can see the gloss of his hair again. His smell of soap and cigarettes. His words that tasted of pear drops. Edie thinks of that boy’s confidence, and the irresistible vitality that shone so brightly out of him that day, and she can’t help but smile at the memory.

“‘You need but lift a pearl-pale hand,’” he says, his soft voice lingering through the words, like the sound of them is delicious to him. “‘And bind up your long hair and sigh; and all men’s hearts must burn and beat.’”