“My brother’s friend. He’s still up there, working on the cemeteries. He knows every cellar and every spilled stone of that town.”

“As I recall, there’s a lot of spilled stone to know.”

“Could I perhaps borrow one of these photographs? I’d like to find out for you.”

“Of course. I’d appreciate any help. Thank you.”

When Edie had shown him that new photograph of Francis, the one that had come through the post, he’d considered whether it could have been taken at this same time. Do other photographs of this missing period exist, then? Are there more images out there that might yet be sent to Edie?

Cassie shuts the album and pushes it back toward Harry. “Did Francis take William’s death badly?”

“He felt responsible, though he wasn’t at all. There was absolutely nothing that he could have done. If anything, I was the one who ought to feel responsible; I was the one who was with Will.”

“Did it make things difficult between you?”

“Yes. At times.”

“Mercy!” says Ralph. “Cass, how you pry! Don’t you think that the poor chap might have had enough grilling for one night?”

“Harry might like to talk,” she says and looks inquiringly toward him. “I wasn’t grilling you, was I?”

He would like to talk to Cassie. He would like to tell it all to her. He is used to carrying it around, but it is a weighty burden. It has become like a sin that he can’t confess. He can’t even say it to a stranger. “Not in the slightest,” Harry replies.

Chapter Twenty-One: Edie

Chapter Twenty-One

Edie

Albert, Somme, August 1921

WHEN SHE LEANS OUT OF THE WINDOW SHE SEES WOODEN HUTS with corrugated-iron roofs, lines of washing and lettuces, wire fences and chicken runs, and then all the fallen stone beyond. She had walked past the ruins of the basilica as she had looked for somewhere to stay for the night; with its nibbled stone and empty arches, it looks like a forgotten Greek temple, awesome with age, epic with antiquity, and it might well have stood like that for millennia. It is only the lines of spent shell cases by the roadside, the duckboards, and the brick dust that give the game away. Albert is a sad-looking place, Edie thinks, somehow much bleaker than Arras with its determined resurgence. She turns and shuts the window.

They had spent three days camped in those woods, she knows, waiting for their turn, before they had been marched south and then east, toward those place-names that were being mapped out in the newspapers. She had feared for them as she read all those reports, and guessed how their coordinates were matching up with the newspaper arrows. But she hadn’t been ready for the news that Will had gone.