THE MORNING LIGHT IS CREEPING ACROSS THE ROOFTOPS. ONCE upon a time this skyline would have been spiked with belfries and church steeples, but today the towers have all come down and the roofline is tattered. The white shape of the cathedral is like a ghost of a building. Smoke starts to rise from the chimney opposite Edie’s window and a flight of starlings streaks along the street below and then wheels above. She envies the birds the lift of their wings as she turns away.

There are prints of Madonnas and saints all around the walls of this rented room and a black wooden crucifix is suspended above the headboard. It is wound around with a string of rosary beads and crumbling sprigs of heather. When she wakes in the night she can see the beads slowly rotating above. It looks like a bed in which an elderly relative has slowly died. She has spent enough nights lying awake in this awful bed trying to match the photograph silhouette of a broken-down town to the streets through which she has spent the day walking.

She splashes her face at the washstand. In the mirror she is surrounded by lithographs of suffering martyrs, but she barely sees the jewels of blood and gilded agonies. Perhaps she has stared at it for too long, but like a double exposure, that photograph face now seems to be imprinted over everything. Francis is here in this room, there behind her own reflection, and he is all over this town. And yet, she is certain now, he isn’t actually in Arras.

She had taken the envelope into the post office the previous day. The staff behind the counter had huddled around it, poring over the blur of ink. They debated, gesticulated, and laughed as if this postmark were a puzzle, a riddle to be solved, a code to be cracked, but then all three had turned to face her and had shaken their heads. It is always the same. With the authorities there have been more headshakes, more rooms full of awful remainders of other men, more ledgers full of names that are not his. She puts the photograph back into its envelope and places it on the top of her suitcase. It is time to move on. He isn’t here.