“I’m strangely accustomed to their company. I have been known to talk to them on occasion.”

“God, we’ve trapped you in a Victorian ghost story! Burn them, or bury them, if you feel inclined. It feels like we’ve imprisoned you in a mausoleum. I’m developing sensations of guilt.”

His eyes connected with hers as he smiled, and it felt like the first time he had really looked at her since he walked back through the door. She remembered how Harry would smile at her when he was a young man. He was so often the dreamer, his eyes in the skies, as Francis put it, but when Harry smiled it was like the sun coming into the room. Only those smiles seemed to be so fleeting and so much more complicated now.

“Are you back in the shop again?” he asked.

“I’ve been back for over a year now. Of course it’s all black now. It’s all the color of these crows. I did six months at the station as well. I worked in the soup kitchen there and watched through the hatch as they all filed back.” Such a long line of faces. Only none of them had been his. “I looked out for you, but you were never there.”

“I’m sorry.”

She watched his fingers tapping cigarette ash among the bread crusts, his downcast eyelashes, his mouth looking like it was going to say something, but holding its silence. She didn’t want Harry to be sorry, and yet there had been so many times when she had needed him to be here.

“She dyed her clothes black, your mother. Everything. Here in this room. Right down to her underclothes and her nightdress. There was a vat of black dye in here. I can still see her underskirt rising up steaming from that vat. I can’t be in this kitchen without seeing that again, without remembering the smell of that black dye. I thought about looking for you, only I didn’t know where to start.”

“I can’t stay, you know. I don’t feel like I could live in this house again.”

“With all my heart I wish it wasn’t like that, but I do understand,” she said.

Chapter Ten: Harry

Chapter Ten

Harry

Richebourg, Pas-de-Calais, February 1916

THEY WERE TOLD THAT THEY WOULD PROCEED TO THE TRENCHES, and so they advanced toward names they knew from 1915’s newsprint.