She had opened the letter with the Amiens postmark first and heard Harry’s voice making apologies and appeals. It had made her cry to see the photograph of Will and Francis laughing, and once again to have the Saint Christopher in her hand. Harry’s second letter was from farther south and was full of azure skies, red rooftops, and regret. He seems to be a long way away now and getting farther. She wasn’t certain whether she felt relief or regret that there wasn’t a letter from Francis behind the door.

Edie makes tea and sits back at the table. The kitchen is different without the crows. It has lightened. She no longer feels watched. And, yet, there is less of them—of Will and Francis and Harry—in here now, and she is sorry for that. She props the photograph of Will and Francis against the milk bottle. He was dying in my arms, Harry had written, but she couldn’t quite believe his words any longer. The version of Francis in Harry’s diary was so far away from the golden-haired young man she had loved, and she now isn’t sure that she really knew the story’s narrator any longer either. We were ordered forward, Harry wrote next. I couldn’t stay with him. It wasn’t a choice. Leaving Francis there was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. But, believe me, Edie, he wasn’t going to get up again. It was over. I know you hope that it might not be so, that you want to believe there’s a chance that he might still be out there, but it just can’t be right. For your own sake, Edie, you need to believe me.

She looks again at the letter to Harry that she had begun. So who was my husband really? she wrote. And where is he now? Edie does not mean to send the letter, it will never be posted, but she somehow can’t not reply to Harry’s pen. She needs to have her right to reply, and so she tells him about burying the crows, how much more difficult it was than she had expected, how different the room is now, about her plans for the garden, and about what it feels like to hold the Saint Christopher in her hand again. Though he is the one taking trains, Edie has the sensation that she is still traveling, and to grip the medal in her hand gives her some sense of steadiness. But then, didn’t the Saint Christopher trigger all of this? Her pen confesses that she wishes Harry was here, not getting farther away, but that she can’t be the woman Francis assumed she was, that she feels shame, that she feels guilty—and that she can’t believe Harry when he says that Francis is so definitely dead.

Chapter Fifty-Eight: Harry

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Harry

Quercy, October 1921