As she stands and looks around the square his whispering voice is there in her head again, telling her to tread softly. She sees a smile curling at the corners of his mouth, and the glimmer of his long-ago eyes through the bookshelves. She turns around and the arcades and crowds spin. Could Francis be watching her even now? Are his eyes there, just out of sight? But she knows that he’s not here. She would feel it. And yet, if he’s not here, where is he? Edie turns in the middle of the square, with the crowd surging around, and feels that she doesn’t know which way to go or what she is meant to do next.

She stands with her suitcase and looks up at the station frontage. Many of the panes of glass are yet to be replaced, so that when it catches the light it seems to twinkle malevolently. The railway station looks rather Gothic in its glittering raggedness, she thinks, like some sort of monstrous fairy palace.

A man in uniform is chalking up departure times on a board and every destination is a question and a possibility. She tries to pull her mind back through Francis’s letters, to remember the significant place-names, all the places that mattered to him and where he might now be. A year ago she had been so certain that he was quietly in his grave, but every town on the map now looks like a maybe.

All the destinations on the departures board are names that she knows from newspaper headlines. They are all memories of battles and fronts and big pushes. Did he want her to follow him to these places? Did he need to show her these things? Did he mean to make her understand? She hears her own intake of breath as she steps up to the ticket desk.

She is certain of one place where he will have been.

Chapter Twelve: Harry

Chapter Twelve

Harry

Arras, August 1921

I’M GOING TO TAKE A TRAIN SOUTH,” HARRY TELLS HER.

Rachel butters her toast and nods. She has come down to breakfast late. He wasn’t sure that he would see her again at all.

“Your graves?”

“Yes.”

“Good. It’s a good thing that you’re doing. A kind thing. You ought to have more confidence in that.”

She pours tea and raises an eyebrow at him.

“Yes, please.”

“It’s horribly weak,” she says and dabbles in the pot with a spoon. “The French really don’t know what they’re doing with tea. I wish I’d packed tea leaves.”

“Will you be all right on your own?”