“I am planning a pilgrimage of my own.” He smiles at Harry. “I plan to take Mado to Marcellin, to visit the cemetery together, and through his death to find a future. I will talk to her. I will make her see. Marcellin is lost to both of us. He divides and bonds us. It is not wrong. We have to find a future.”

As Harry sweeps the flagstone floor of his new lodgings he thinks about how he would compose a portrait of Gabriel and Madeleine. He has already started putting their gestures, their movements, the way their eyes connect down on paper. He is drawing Gabriel and Madeleine because he has stopped drawing Edie’s face. He has made a pact with himself because it has to be this way. Because he has to stop. He has to make himself forget. Sometimes now, when he has the dream about Edie, he can’t quite make out the details of her features. Edie is starting to blur. She is slipping out of focus. It is an agony to him, her imprecise face, but how can he have it otherwise?

Chapter Sixty-One: Edie

Chapter Sixty-One

Edie

Lancashire, October 1921

THOSE DETAILS JUST AREN’T THERE IN ROSE’S LETTER. EDIE READS through it again, although she hardly needs to; she already knows those brief lines by heart, could pick out Rose’s handwriting, could recognize his on-paper voice. Among all his pleasantries and kindnesses, there is no mention of any dressing station or a journey back. Surely if Rose had done that, if he had carried Francis back as the ferryman had described, he would have mentioned it? But there is no hint of that journey in this letter. There is only that scant phrase Missing, believed killed embroidered around with apologies and well-meaning obituary. It doesn’t add up. Why would he not have told her the rest? What motive could he have had for that omission? Could the ferryman’s memory be wrong? Might he have mistaken Francis for someone else?

She turns the photograph of Francis between her fingers again. She has spent so long focusing in on that terrible image for the past five months, and had altogether forgotten that this one existed. Francis is carrying a camera in this photograph. A tree is casting shadows across his face, but Edie recognizes the expression. She looks close, at the hands that were once as familiar as her own, at the glint that the image captures in his eye. This is so much more like the man she knows. It is almost like there are two versions of Francis, she thinks. Could this version not have survived?