There was no prevarication in her voice, none of the thickets of words with which the Parkeys hedged their bets in séances.
“Second: He will not come back to you. You must go to him. Third: To save him, you must let him go.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will,” said Lucretia.
“And I will give you some advice,” said Agatha. “Wars are stark things, are they not? Black and white. Allies and enemies. Not this time. You will not know who your enemies are, nor will they reveal themselves as you expect. You will not know whom to trust, but you must trust regardless. Do you understand?”
“No,” said Laura.
“You will.” Agatha’s three-toothed smile was a little frightening in the firelight.
Laura said what she could never say aloud in daylight. “He’s dead. They’re all dead. There’s nothing to save. I failed. The comet came. The fire. My mother was right. It’s the end of everything.”
“Perhaps. But there is something to save,” said Agatha.
The kitchen was fracturing now into amber light and scarred wood. Three old ladies, straight-backed. Their caps had become hoods, their dressing gowns were sweeping robes, and all three of them looked at her with eyes that had seen sorrows like hers a hundred times: a quiet, remote empathy.
Agatha said, “I suppose that is another piece of advice for you, Laura. Do not despair. Endings—they are beginnings too.”
Her voice echoed in Laura’s head. The fire and the shadows were dissolving into nothing, and then Laura came quietly awake in her own rumpled bed. Clear morning light fell on her face.
She lay there a moment. Shook her head at herself. Dreams within dreams.
· · ·
But this dream would not let her go. It lived behind her eyelids: green gas and fear, mud, the comet, her mother’s voice. Agatha in her kitchen sayingYour brother is alive.When that evening came at last, Laura stirred up her fire against the frigid dusk, closed her door, sat down at the desk, and set all Freddie’s things in front of her. The jacket, laundered now. The Bible, with the place marked. The postcard from Bayern.I will bring him back if I can…She looked at the two tags, the cord twined round her stiff fingers. All her correspondence stacked neatly off to the side.
What did she know?
The Red Cross said he was missing. But he wasn’t. She had his things.
Someone knew what had happened to him. Someone in Flanders. The person who’d packed that box. Who’d taken the jacket.Knows but isn’t telling me. She understood. God knew she’d lied to enough families, to spare them.
Who is it? Who knows?She reached for her letters. One by one she paged through them all.We don’t know where he died. We don’t know.
She laid the creased papers aside and sat for a long time, thinking.
Someone knows.
Before she could think too much about what she was doing, she got up from her desk and left her room. In the foyer, she put on her cap and coat and scarf, slipped out into the frigid evening, closed the Parkeys’ front door soundlessly behind her. She was going to call on Penelope Shaw. Or, more specifically, Pim’s friend Mary Borden.
The sky was getting dark,and a cataract of frigid air poured off the restless sea. As she walked, Laura found herself reaching in her memory for a warmer day, back and back, to the bright summer of ’14, hot and dry and vivid, its long days freighted, somehow, with hope.
Laura had just received her nursing certificate, with a commendation. Enough success to silence even her skeptical father. She’d put herself through nursing school. Got up every day at four in the morning, scrubbing the hospital floors and emptying bedpans. She had been so proud of herself. Her mother had been proud too, quietly. She’d made one of her old Montreal dresses over for Laura for the graduation.
But 1914 was also the year her mother had fixed as the world’s last, and she would not leave the subject alone. “I read it inZion’s Watch Tower,” she told her children. “We must be wary, we must be prepared.” She filled the house with tinned food, and read the papers with dogged intensity.
“Just don’t argue,” Freddie had advised Laura. He was always sensible, her brother. “Let the year pass. They’ll come round.” He and Laura were walking together in the public gardens, side by side in their scuffed shoes. It had been a Sunday in July, the sun hot on the back of Laura’s neck. The roses had just opened, sheremembered. The air hummed with bees. Laura ran a finger along the edge of a petal. She was twenty. He was eighteen. The world seemed to be opening before them. Like the roses.
“Try to understand them,” Freddie had added. He was kinder than her too. “Look at the world now. It’s terrifying, isn’t it? We have flying machines. Phonographs. Moving pictures, even. Everything is changing so fast. Mother’s frightened. In a way, it’s easier to imagine the world’s going to end. At least there’s a certainty to it. End—bam—done. But change—where does change stop?”
Laura remembered her answer, her eyes still on the flowers. “When did you get so wise?”
Freddie snorted. “If only I could put it in meter.”
Freddie had just got a job as a harbor clerk. Laura said, “I’m making money now.” Although, admittedly, not much. “If you’re working nights, we could do it. You could go to school to study—anything really. Art.”
