She takes the card out of her pocket and looks at it again. She had gone to the regimental headquarters the previous day and the woman on the desk had simply smiled at her inquiry and obligingly copied the address from her records onto the reverse of a business card. Captain Michael Rose is living in Alderley Edge. He didn’t die at Cambrai, as Harry had told her. Since the woman smiled at her, and passed the address across the desk, Edie has been asking herself what reason Harry had to lie. What reason did Rose have not to tell her all of the truth? She can’t help but think there is something that links the lie and the omission, but what does that add up to?

She pushes Harry’s letters away. It is the same voice that writes to her now, only the tone is so different. It is like the orchestra has changed key. It won’t stop, he says today. I can’t move on. I don’t know how to make it stop.

“I don’t know how to make it stop,” she speaks out loud.

Does she not have the right to ask Rose? Should she not be allowed to know how Francis got from the dressing station to being missing and lost? She walks back to the table, picks up the pen, and once again considers where to begin a letter. But it is not enough just to put those questions in an envelope. Her fingers turn the card in her pocket. Does she not have the right to hear it directly from him?

Chapter Sixty-Two: Harry

Chapter Sixty-Two

Harry

Quercy, October 1921

GABRIEL TAKES HIM ON THE HORSE AND TRAP.

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“No. Don’t waste your time. It might be a fool’s errand. I don’t even really know what I’m looking for.”

Saint-Christophe du Quercy already has its war memorial—an obelisk dressed with stone palm leaves and the newly cut names of twenty-eight men. Harry walks around the monument. He reads the names of the twenty-eight men, imagines who these Edouards and Augustes and Jean-Baptistes might have been, what their faces might have looked like. None of these names is familiar. How did an image of his brother’s face end up in this remote, ancient village? How is Francis connected to this foreign place and this list of strangers?

They passed through fortified walls on the way in, but it is a long time since war shook the stones of this place. There are arcades around the square and a wooden market hall that might well be medieval. There are no people, though. He shades his eyes from the sun. There is no other soul in the square—only Harry and the names of twenty-eight men who didn’t come back. Did anyone come back?