She knows that Francis would have come here, if he could. He would visit Will. She is certain of that. She remembers Francis’s arm around his younger brother’s shoulders, Francis’s fingers ruffling Will’s hair, their gripped fingers as they arm-wrestled across the kitchen table. Francis letting Will win and feigning pain. Will always following Francis. He had followed him to this place. Surely Francis wouldn’t just leave him here? She pictures Francis’s photograph features in this place. The color of the columbines looks like overcompensation against Francis’s black-and-white afterward face.

“Did Harry leave him the feather?”

The gardener is spaying the roses at the end of the row. He smiles at her as he looks up. “The feather?”

She twirls it between her fingers. It is a feather from a crow’s wing, she thinks. It is glossy and bounces back the blue of the sky. “It was there.” She points. “Pushed into the soil at the base of William’s grave. He must have left it.”

“What a thing,” says the gardener and shakes his head at the feather. “It wasn’t there this morning, miss, I swear it. I weeded along that row and I’d have noticed it.”

“No?” She wonders.

“Perhaps it blew there?” he suggests.

“Yes, perhaps.”

She places it back at the base of the grave and stares at it there. It was so deliberately planted in the soil. She can’t imagine how the wind might have done that.

“Is he still here?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Harry.”

“No. Ralph took him to the station. The day before yesterday, if I recall rightly. He was going south, I think, and then on to Ypres.”

“Ypres?”

“It was something to do with his brother there. His other brother. Something about a photograph of him turning up.”

Chapter Twenty-Six: Harry

Chapter Twenty-Six

Harry

Rosières, Somme, August 1921

‘APRES LA GUERRE FINI, SOLDATS ANGLAIS PARTI,’” SINGS ÉLODIE AS SHE moves between the tables with soup tureens. Everyone in the café knows her name and the words to the song. The room hums along.

From his table Harry can see the spire. It seems so improbable, this soaring height of brickwork. He had not expected it still to be intact. Much of the tile has slid from the roof of the church, and the building to the near side reminds him of a house of cards that has slumped, but the spire is much the same as it had been in a drawing he made four years earlier. They had sought its shape on the skyline as they had marched back to brigade reserve. He had remarked that it was like a lighthouse then, steering them into safe harbor. Today it looks like a miracle.