GABRIEL SHAKES HIM at dawn. He flops beside him on the straw and sighs at the roof beams. “Madeleine has made a start. They are already in the fields. She says that they do not need us. Women do not need men any longer. It is the same everywhere, she says. We are obsolete, my friend. Extinct. We are as good as dinosaurs.” He lights a cigarette and laughs as if he doesn’t mean it.

Harry considers how Edie must feel the same. Is she waking in his mother’s house today and making plans in which he is not a consideration?

He puts his head under the pump, washing away sleep’s warmth and thoughts of Edie waking. Behind the barn they descend along the white road, through the scrub oaks, to the valley. The plum trees are heavy with overripe fruit. The branches are crusted with lichen, making them falsely look like something long dead. They are organizing collections for the fruit trees destroyed in the war zone, Gabriel informs him conversationally. Harry thinks about George Bartley cradling the branches of apple trees and a circle of apple pips around his grave.

As they walk, Gabriel shares the night’s sketches. He has drawn an image of a soldier slumped against a wall. There is a great weightiness in the dangle of the man’s arms, in the slouch of his shoulders and the droop of his head.

“It is too deathly,” says Harry. “You will have the village in tears every time they walk past. They will start avoiding the square. You will do nothing for the takings of the bar.”

Gabriel’s sketchbook is full of his brother, Marcellin: limp-armed and phantomlike, gesticulating, writhing, Christ-like and dying.

“When must you submit your design?”

“I’m already late. It has to be agreed by the end of the week.”

In the field, Madeleine, her sister Thérèse, and Madame Bousquet advance as a line, swinging scythes and sweeping down the glinting grass. It is a timeless picture—except the workers are all women. Madeleine is dark-skinned and pale-eyed. She leans on the scythe as they approach, looking like she might use it against Gabriel.

Harry watches as Gabriel plays the gallant sergeant in the hayfield, but it is obvious that Madeleine does not want it. He sharpens a scythe for Harry, working it with a whetstone and showing him the action. So much of this is for Madeleine’s benefit, Harry realizes. Gabriel laughs at his inexpert efforts, says he hopes he will make up in sweat what he lacks in skill, but still Madeleine does not smile. Gabriel tries to coax her, gives her the comedy and Harry’s incompetence to share, but her pale eyes are not here. Harry is struck by how much Gabriel needs Madeleine’s gaze to be on him. She shuts her eyes against the brightness and his grin.