“I am tired.”

He shuts his eyes to the polkas and the politics and the drink, and Gabriel and Madeleine’s across-the-table embraces, and in his mind he watches Edie dancing in the red room. He tries, as they spin, to see the face of the man she is dancing with. He expects it to be, wants it to be, Francis, but in turns he sees the icy paleness of the eyes of the man called East, the disparu, whose image a camera cannot catch. With that, Harry must keep his eyes open. Perhaps Gabriel is right, that this is a night made only for nightmares? He drinks the glass of brandy down, and the words of the songs and the speeches seem to revolve in his head.

He puts his cheek to the cool of the window and watches the ferns of frost curl. His head throbs with the hot and the cold, and the interminably circling beat of the music, and he is Francis in the Blue Angel for a moment, but then, somewhere behind the ice crystals, there is a flash of red.

“You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.” Gabriel’s face blurs in the candlelight and fug of drink. His hand stretches across the table. “Are you unwell, Harry?”

“I don’t know.”

But then Harry knows the color for what it is, and suddenly all the music and the tears and the laughter are silenced, and she is there. Harry stares at her and wonders if he has made her. Has he conjured her up? Is she imagination? He doesn’t trust his mind any longer. Like the eyes of the wreath maker, is she madness or a phantom? Is this delirium or drink? He stares at Edie’s face. Edie’s eyes connecting with his. Edie’s mouth making the shape of his name. There is no fantasy in the fierce grip of her hand.

Epilogue: Harry and Edie

Epilogue

Harry and Edie

Houthulst Forest, north of Ypres, March 1922

LAST NIGHT HARRY DREAMED ABOUT THE RESERVOIR. IT IS AN awfully long time since he last had that dream, since his sleeping imagination last went back to that long-ago place. But yesterday, in their hotel room in Ypres, he had thought about the mirror that he broke here six months ago, the sound of the fracturing glass, and perhaps that was the link that took him back to the noise of the ice.

In his dream he is a boy again, stepping out across the frozen reservoir, in the blue-white, bright crisp cold. Will and Francis are calling from the far side and goading him to step out farther. “Dare you!” their adolescent voices shout. “Coward!” they cry. The breath is icy in Harry’s mouth, and coming faster now, but because they shout, he keeps on going.