“All I know is that your husband was taken away to the dressing station. Rose took him there himself. He carried him, they said. That’s the only thing that I can tell you. I don’t know anything more. That’s the only thing that I heard.”

“Rose?”

“Captain Rose. Michael Rose. They’d been friends, you see, him and Francis, back before it all began.”

“But Captain Rose wrote to me. He sent me a letter at the end and he told me that Francis was missing. How could he be missing if Rose had taken him to get help? He didn’t mention a dressing station at all. Why wouldn’t he put that in his letter?”

“I don’t know.” The ferryman looks away. He now looks like he wished he hadn’t followed her. “I’ve no idea. Only don’t misunderstand me—the dressing station was just a group of pillboxes, and it was conspicuous, so they shelled it. They kept on shelling it. The fact that Rose got him back there doesn’t mean that he wasn’t missing in the end. It’s not easy to explain to you what it was like.”

“Captain Rose died, didn’t he?”

He shakes his head. “I’d heard that he was living in Cheshire after the war. If you get in touch with the regiment, they’ll be able to tell you.”

“Yes, of course. Thank you for helping me.”

“I’m not sure that I’ve helped at all.”

She completes the circuit and is back at the spillway. A rainbow glistens in the spray of the water, but the rushing sound of it down the steps makes her shiver. Five months earlier Harry had taken her photograph, standing on exactly this spot. He had nodded when she had talked about Francis’s grave, but then there would be three months with not a word from him. What did that silence mean? Is there really something that he couldn’t bring himself to tell her? So many words pour out of Harry’s letters now, but she knows that he hasn’t told her everything. It was there in Ypres, that hesitation. When she had asked him to find Francis she believed that it would silence the doubts and the questions, but how loud they are now.

Chapter Sixty: Harry

Chapter Sixty

Harry

Quercy, October 1921

HARRY TAKES A SMOKE IN THE COOL EVENING AIR. THE RED CLIFF beyond the goose field glows, and Gabriel, in the foreground, is a silhouette in the twilight. He stares across the green. Harry takes a place at his side, leaning on the gate, and offers him a smoke.

“It is the house of Madeleine. And of Marcellin, of my brother.” Gabriel gestures to the house opposite. A lamp defines a yellow square of window. “It is the lanterne des morts.”

“Lantern of the dead? To guide Marcellin home or to show her loss?”