But then she blinked and it was gone.
The stove was still there, half-melted, where the kitchen had been. Here were the remains of the parlor, a fireplace poker thrusting up from the ash. She pulled the poker free, jabbed it here and there. She didn’t know what she ought to be looking for. Her mother’s brooch? Silver spoons? The ash was layered with snow, new and old. Memory, which she’d spent the last six weeks outrunning, circled close; for a moment, her head was full of acrid smoke and falling sparks, herself stumbling through it, blood on her skirt, her hands, pooling on the floor of her parents’ bedroom, her voice rigidly controlled, callingStay with me, come on,glass in her fingers, under her knees, in her mother’s eyes…
Laura shook the image away.
“Laura?” called a voice from the street behind.
She nearly lost her footing in the ashy snow. Her first wild thought was that it was her father at last, staggering bluish out of the harbor. But, she reminded herself, she didn’t believe in ghosts.
“Miss Iven,” corrected the voice. Then, more tentative, “Laura? You there?”
She turned. A man she knew stood in the fire-scarred street. “They said you’d come past,” he said.
“As you see, Wendell,” she called, hearing her own voice thin but perfectly steady. “How are you, sir? Delivering to Veith Street again?”
Wendell looked relieved to see her. “A bit, but I’ve been keeping a lookout for you in particular. A box came for your par—” He hesitated. “For you.”
“That’s very kind. How is Billy?” She crossed the snowy ground, brushing frozen ash and snow from her skirt. Billy was his son. Laura had pulled him through three nights of fever. He’d been walking to school too.
“He’s all right. Fat as a dormouse now. Schoolchildren in Kansas collected pennies, sent up boxes of candy.”
The ash on her fingers had left streaks on her blue dress. She thought, with distant irritation, that she must launder it. “What is it, Wendell?”
A lorry was parked in the street with a wooden crate in the back of it. He indicated the box. “This. Kept it for you. Wanted to do you a good turn.” He hesitated. “It’s from Flanders.”
A chill skated across Laura’s skin. She told herself it was the bitter wind off the water. “Thanks awfully. A bit bulky, isn’t it? Any chance of a lift? I’m staying with the Parkeys, you know. In Fairview.”
The Parkeys had hired Laura as a nurse-companion only a few days before the explosion. She’d been in their house, safely beyond the harbor, when the ship blew up. They’d waited up for her, when she’d come back late that night with glass embedded in her hands, blood drying on her clothes, and nowhere else to go. They’d fussed and bandaged and laundered. Offered her a room to live in.
Wendell said, “Of course I’ll drive you, Miss Iven. You look like you could use a bite and a sleep, if you don’t mind my saying so. The old ladies treating you all right?”
“Famously. They bake me pies, and I amuse them with ditties and bad words I picked up in Europe.”
Wendell grinned. “Those Frenchmen swear a blue streak, I hear.”
“Everyone does when you’re patching them up. Stings, you know.”
Wendell offered her a hand up into the lorry. Laura took it. She didn’t look back at the ash heap. Perhaps thieves would come in the night and sieve the ruins.Let them.But though she stared straight ahead as they drove away, gooseflesh still rose, as though her mother were staring back, blindly accusing, out of the vanished upper window.
Blackthorn House stood square onits plot, with peeling paint and a sagging roof. In summer, its shabbiness was windswept and romantic, but now the flower beds gaped bare and the birch by the door quivered naked in the air off the harbor.
“Servants’ entrance, if you please,” said Laura. She had a latchkey. She let herself into the kitchen, and Wendell followed. He laid the box by the hearth, and hesitated. He wasn’t much older than she was. They’d been in school together, years ago. He’d a daughter, as well as his boy. “Iven—” he said. “Laura.”
“Lord,” she said. “Such a long face. I’ll be along in a day or two, to see to Billy. Don’t let him eat too many candies. Think of his teeth. And thank you. For the lift and for the box.”
“I—” He caught her eye, swallowed, and went. The door closed behind him, and in the silence, Laura, standing still, was suddenly aware of every sound: the way the house groaned and settled in the chill, the whisper of the slow-burning fire. The box was indeed postmarked from Flanders. Addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Charles Iven.
Freddie was twenty-one. He wrote wretched poems and drew quite good pictures. He played football. He spent all his spare dimes on ice cream. She hadn’t heard from him since she’d left Flanders on a hospital train. No letters had followed her to Étaples, or ontothe ship, or across the ocean, but at first she’d been too ill to wonder much. And then she’d crawled off her sickbed in Halifax and the ship blew up.
They sent soldiers’ effects if they died in hospital. But Laura hadn’t had a death notice. This box could be anything. Freddie was somewhere on rest, drinking or playing cards or chasing the lice through the seams of his shirts.
Laura stared at the box and didn’t move.
Then a woman cried out, somewhere in the house. Laura, half-relieved at the interruption, wrenched her gaze round and hurried out into the hall. Found herself in darkness, with amber light and a babble of sound pouring from beneath the parlor door. The heavy Aubusson dragged at her feet. A stentorian voice rose above the clamor. “Mr. Shaw!” it said. “James Shaw, if you are on the other side, if you are there, speak to us!”
Laura stopped. Another séance. The Parkeys amused themselves by giving séances. Séances were a growth industry, in 1918. The war was in its fourth year. People liked to point out that if mankind had learned to fly, and see bullets inside living skin, and sail underwater, then it stood to reason that they could talk to the dead. Séance money paid Laura’s wages. The Parkeys had kept on paying her wages even though most of her time, after the explosion, had been spent in the YMCA hospital. Laura was grateful to the Parkeys.
Now the cries died away. The hall fell silent. Mr. Shaw, Laura thought, did not seem to be present. The commanding voice went up again. It sounded like Agatha, the eldest Miss Parkey. “Spirits! If any one of you knows a Mr. Shaw, knows thefateof Mr. Shaw, Mr.JamesShaw, speak now.”
