They had been much lighter than she expected, much less solid than their presence suggested, and terribly, horribly brittle. That brittleness set her teeth on edge somehow; it had both an awful fragility and a sense of pent-up potential. Despite their very obvious desiccating deadness, she almost expected the wings to flinch under her hand.

Edie had felt a great sense of Will’s presence as she took the crows down from the dresser. They were so obviously the work of his hand. In removing them, in erasing their presence, did she push him out too? She had found herself talking aloud to Will’s memory, carrying on a conversation with a recalled image of a cross in France. She also found herself asking him about Francis. Was there something more that Will knew? Is Francis with him on the other side?

Condemned to a cardboard box, the crows had less menace. There, at unnatural angles, they looked less like they might beat into life. And yet there was still something threatening about them. Still some suspicion that they weren’t yet finished and entirely devoid of the potential to flap their protest. Edie told herself that it was just her imagination. Is imagination getting the better of her with regard to Francis too?

It wouldn’t have been right just to put them out for the rag-and-bone, and to burn them would have been too close to sorcery, so she had taken a spade down the garden and dug a grave. Standing here now, she is struck with her own folly, her own ridiculousness. “If you could see me!” she says to a memory of Harry’s face, and then tells herself that it is for the best that he can’t.

On a whim, taken with a fancy, she cuts a bunch of sweet Williams and places them in the crows’ grave with an apology to her brother-in-law. A blackbird is fluting its liquid notes from the lilac. It is a more elegant elegy than Edie can summon. She takes up the spade again and lets the first clods of earth cover them over gently. She works with reverence, carefully at first, but then it becomes an effort to just hide the last of the feathers. The tip of a wing protrudes through the soil. She cannot bear to put a boot to it.

Her hands sting when it is done, and there is dirt in the creases of her palms. She thinks of a graveside gesture of Francis’s caught in Harry’s diary. She thinks of them covering Will over. She thinks of the cut on Harry’s palm. She remembers a black feather on Will’s grave that Harry had not put there. Her fingers find the ribbon in her pocket.