She sits down in a chair and closes her eyes. For a moment it all spins around her and they are dancing again on the lawn. She sees Harry’s up-close, long-ago face. She also sees the photograph that he sent the previous day. It had shocked her when an image of Tyne Cot fell out of the envelope, but he reminded her that he had promised to do it for her. His writing supposes that she hasn’t yet stood in that place. He says this is the best that he can give her.

Being there, seeing this, brought it all back to me, he wrote. I relived those last moments. I saw his flickering eyelids again, heard his stilling breath, felt the weight of him in my arms. Seeing the scene now through his words, being brought up close to Francis’s dying face, she wants to believe that Harry isn’t lying. But she has stood in that cemetery, among the eight thousand nameless men, and she knows that Francis isn’t one of them. She also knows that this wasn’t Francis’s last moment. Where in this scene is the journey back in Rose’s arms and the dressing station? Why is that not in any of Harry’s letters? She wishes that he wasn’t lying, but she knows now that he is.

“I shall be sad when it’s gone,” says Bowen, turning toward her as he locks the door of Denham Hall. “I should be sorry if so much history went under the wrecking ball.”

They stand side by side and watch the reflection of the house shiver in the lake. She turns the Saint Christopher in her pocket. If she hadn’t given it to Harry that day, if she had given it to Francis instead, would it all now be different? Did it really cause so much trouble?

“It can’t do any harm, can it?” She hears her own recalled voice and feels like she has caused so much harm.

There is no drama in its arc, not even a bubble breaks the surface. She has no obvious sense of exorcising a ghost or righting a wrong.

“There’s probably a tidy sum in coins at the bottom of that lake. Did you make a wish?” Bowen’s grin is no more real than Francis’s celluloid smile, but how very far away and long ago that suddenly seems. How fleeting and fragile it all is.

“I’m not sure what to wish for,” Edie replies.

Chapter Sixty-Six: Harry

Chapter Sixty-Six

Harry

Saint-Christophe du Quercy, October 1921

GABRIEL DRIVES HIM AS FAR AS THE VILLAGE WALLS THIS TIME.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?”

“No. As I said, if you’d meet me here again in a couple of hours . . .”