She goes ahead and opens shutters. As light comes into the room Harry sees china dogs that he might recognize and porcelain shepherdesses that he might not. There are several clocks in this room, all stopped at different times, so that their lies vary in scale. He also sees a lot of photographic equipment; there are rolls of film and parts of cameras, stacked glass plates and boxes of chemicals. Photographs are everywhere. Lines of wire have been stretched between the beams, and clothespins remain where drying prints have been suspended. There is only one image now on the wires: the view of the valley, the tapering lines of trees, and the ash tree at the center. With the smell of developing fluid, Harry is back in the cellar in Arras.

“Voyez! Looking after this monsieur has not been easy,” says Marie-Thérèse. She laughs, throws her hands up, and then frowns. “Pas facile,” she repeats with emphasis.

“No,” says Harry, looking around. “I see.”

The walls are a patchwork of photographic prints, rippling now in the breeze from the window. Many of the images Harry recognizes as being from the immediate vicinity—the arcades of the village square, the wooden timbers of the market hall, the alleys, and the crumbling bastide walls. The valley below the house is a repeated subject. The ash tree is there in mist, in rain, and in snow.

Marie-Thérèse points and pulls back her lips to show a crooked-toothed smile. Her own image is among a collection of portraits. She sits straight-backed, proper, and proud, those hands, linked again, now in her lap. There are faces of farmers and shepherds and circus performers, ancient faces, children’s faces, and young women in mourning clothes. There is something quietly dignified about these portraits. Each of the sitters looks like they have some source of pride. He has given a nobility to them all.

“Ma fille,” says Marie-Thérèse and indicates a girl with braided hair. “My daughter.”

Harry nods. They are accomplished portraits. Sharp. Direct. Their eyes arresting. They speak loudly, these quiet sitters. He would be proud had he taken these photographs himself. He thinks of all the faces that he drew. All those glinting eyes and grins that he had tried to catch on paper left something of themselves behind and come back to him in dreams. He sometimes imagines all of those paper faces flickering behind him like an echo. He sometimes wonders what happened to the sent-home soldiers’ smiles. Are they still there on bedroom walls and kitchen dressers, substituted for their owners or looking like something long ago and unlikely? He thinks of all the times that he has drawn Francis’s face and how far away but oddly close that memory feels at this moment.

Harry looks at the far wall, and Marie-Thérèse shakes a hand in front of her face and turns her back. “I don’t look,” she says.