But it wasn’t eating improperly that kept Rutledge thin and drawn. It was so many hauntings . . . Hamish. The War. The impossibility of forgetting, when England was full of wounded men, struggling to go about lives that years in the trenches had altered irretrievably. People looked away from such men now, embarrassed by them, unable to think what to say to them. The War was finished. Over and done with. Except for the crosses in Flanders’s Fields. And the living reminders no one quite knew what to do with. He saw himself a dozen times an hour on the streets—among the amputees, the blind, the ugly coughing of the gassed—even though he’d come home from France whole in body. His wounds were invisible, yet he shared the misery of such men. Even now he could see clearly the poor devil he’d watched from his window that very morning, clumsily managing his crutches and attempting to steer a reasonably straight course among the passersby. Or the hideously burned face passing under the street lamp three nights ago, long after dark. The man had tried to hide the worst of his scars with a scarf. But with one ear missing, his hat had settled awkwardly . . . A pilot, shot down in flames and unlucky enough to have lived through it.

As he had lived through Scotland . . . somehow.

Hamish said, “Ye ken, I wasna’ ready for ye to die!”

To silence his thoughts, Rutledge agreed to dinner with Frances. The prospect of working a full day again was daunting; he knew quite well he hadn’t regained his full strength. All the same, it would do no harm to try, and possibly offer him some little respite from Hamish’s morbid concentration on Scotland.

Rutledge didn’t want to think about Scotland.

Scotland had haunted him while he was recovering from surgery. It had filled his drugged dreams. It had brought him upright, drenched with sweat and pain, in the darkest part of the night when defenses were at their lowest ebb. Words, faces, the sound of pipes, that last day of rain when nothing stayed dry . . . It was all there in his mind when he was most vulnerable—on the edges of sleep, waking in the predawn hours—fighting the overwhelming pain for fear the doctor might give him more drugs if anyone guessed how much he suffered.