“I went over and stayed with him a couple of times, but it wasn’t any sort of a home, and I’m not sure that he really wanted me to be there. It was a village called Saint-Christophe du Quercy.”

“Saint-Christophe du Quercy?” Edie repeats it, and suddenly the letters of a blurred postmark slide into focus, and match a place-name in Harry’s letters.

“You almost look like you know it.”

“I think I might.”

Chapter Sixty-Eight: Harry

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Harry

Calvaire du Quercy, 11th November, 1921

NOVEMBER 1921 IS EXCEPTIONALLY COLD. SHIPS ARE LOST IN THE Channel in snowstorms, telegraph communication between London and Paris goes down, and fountains freeze solid in Trafalgar Square. The grass beneath Harry’s boots is glitteringly brittle. The shapes of oak leaves crunch white. The trees are like negative images of themselves today, and all the contours of the land declare themselves differently. He looks back and sees his own breath hanging in the air. His survival, on this day of remembering death, seems to be making empathetic marks. He is conscious on the frosty lane of his own momentum and bulk and pulse and heat.

Gabriel is waiting for him at the bend, as arranged. The service is scheduled to start at twelve. He stamps his feet and blows on his fingers. Gabriel’s breath mists around him, like a soul in a trick photograph. “It’s ten degrees below,” he says through chapped lips. “This air is like needles in my mouth.”

There are strings of red, white, and blue flags across the square. They tug in the icy wind and seem to accentuate the cold. The people of the village, below the bunting, are in black. Harry moves through the crowd, at Gabriel’s side, toward the memorial. Gabriel shakes hands. A lot of hands stretch out toward him today. He is nervous, though, he has told Harry on the way up the hill. He fears that they each still secretly hope that the statue will wear the face of their son, their husband, their father, their brother.

The figure is still covered over. An apparatus had been constructed that suspends a black cloth over it, worked with ruffles and pleats. Via a system of weights and pulleys it will be unveiled on the stroke of twelve, as the trumpets’ blare closes. This apparatus looks like a gallows, Harry thinks.