Mary asked, “Have you ever ridden a motorcycle?”
Laura blinked. “No.”
Mary said, “It’s better than hitchhiking round the forbidden zone.”
Laura said, “Mendinghem isn’t so far. Neither is Pop, for that matter.”
Mary said, “Maybe not for a troop of Girl Guides on a fine day. But I don’t think either your legs or your lungs would agree. Look, here’s what I’ll do. Once you’re well, I’ll start you off riding my motorcycle. Then you’ll need a week practicing before I can trust you not to kill yourself. After that I’ll give you two days for your searching, but if Fritz attacks while you’re out, you come straight back. And if the battle’s joined before you go in the first place, well, you stay until things settle back down. Fair?”
Laura thought about it. The motorcycle tempted her. The freedom it implied. The power. To go where the evidence took her, explanations owed to no one. And Mary was right. Once she might have walked, but her leg would hardly take it now. “We’ll start tomorrow,” Laura said. “I’m in a hurry.”
Mary sighed. “All right. If you eat quite a lot and sleep tonight, Iven.”
FALAND’S HOTEL, PARTS UNKNOWN, FLANDERS, BELGIUM
Winter of 1917–1918
Freddie never learned to distinguishnight from day in Faland’s hotel, although he had a vague sense of sleeping in daylight and rousing at dusk, when the music wound its way up the stairs and summoned him. But he was never certain. Day and night had no meaning in a place where all the light came from fires and the outside world was so effectively shut out.
Freddie didn’t miss the sun. He kept to the shadows and drank and watched Faland’s mirror, lost in longing. It was an endless, daydreamer’s longing, satisfying in itself, with no need for fulfillment. The people in the mirror could not disappoint in any way, and he would never fail them, or lose them, or mourn them. It was easier so. He had only to watch and yearn. And tell Faland a story.
Freddie had no idea why Faland wanted to hear them. “Inspiration,” he would say, and nothing more. Perhaps it didn’t matter what Faland wanted. Stories were a small price to pay for the surcease of night terrors, for the wine, for the silence in Freddie’s head that might almost have been taken for peace, so Freddie told him of the time he and Laura were picking beetles off the cabbages in theirmother’s garden, and decided to play avenging angels, with the beetles as their victims, until Freddie burst into tears and said he hardly thought the beetles deserved eternal damnation for eating cabbage.
He told Faland of the time Silas French got taken with Laura and kept following her home from school trying to carry her books, until she finally got tired of it, opened one of her books, and started reading, in a syrupy voice, about bowel resections, until Silas turned green and went away.
He spoke of the ships they watched from Laura’s upper window, how they’d imagine whole stories for them: manifests, and destinations, and secrets, and murders.
It wasn’t easy. Often, he hated it. Each memory felt like pins and needles, a deadened limb stirring sluggishly to life. Thoughts he did not want would run through his head:What would my family think of me?And, worse, his sweet fairy-tale longing for the dream in Faland’s mirror would become a sick sorrow, when he remembered afresh that he had nothingbutmirror and memory, that his sister was lying in a pine box, under the same earth that he, sometimes, wished he’d never escaped. That Winter had gone to an unknown fate. He’d tell Faland a story—even a lighthearted one—and then press the heels of his hands to his eyes to stop himself feeling, reaching desperately again for forgetfulness.
Faland would pour Freddie a cup in silence, the glittering eye and the lightless one both fixed on his face.
One night, Faland tuned his fiddle as he listened, the instrument laid tenderly across his knee, the murmur of it a background to Freddie’s voice when he spoke of the battle royale that took place in their house when Laura got into nursing school, how their father had flatly refused to pay, and how Laura had told him that he didn’t have to, that she was going to do scut work in the hospital and pay her own way. And she had. By God, she had.
When he fell silent, the wandering sound of the fiddle seemed, briefly, to take the story up, chords of determination and stubborn pride, more like Laura than the smiling girl in the mirror was.
Freddie turned away from the sound, shaking with regret andlove and sorrow, poured himself a cup, tossed it back quickly, and while he waited for it to work, he blurted, “Why are you here?”
Faland scraped his bow over all the strings at once, and the tune vanished. Freddie was glad it was gone, and wished he’d play it again. “Here?” inquired Faland.
Freddie hardly knew what he was asking. But the thoughts still were trying to crowd his mind, so he opened his mouth instead. “Here. In the war zone. You could keep a hotel anywhere. London. New York. You could play your violin at Carnegie Hall.”
Faland’s bow drew another shimmering run of notes from the fiddle, something nostalgic that evoked a bright city, far away. “Perhaps. But in New York, they’d pay me in money. Or perhaps in love, or secrets, as men sometimes do. But here—” The violin changed key, seemed to whisper slyly to itself. The firelight sharpened the edges of Faland’s face. “Well, here, people will give me anything at all.”
“But you don’t ask for anything. Just stories.”
The violin murmured again, something vaguely familiar this time. Where had he heard that tune? “Yes,” Faland said, meditatively. “Just stories.”
· · ·
The next night, when Freddie was half-asleep in the shadows near the bar, his eye settled dreamily on the people in Faland’s mirror, a question occurred to him. He tried to dismiss it. But he could not, so when Faland came to him and waited, Freddie blurted, “What did I tell you last night?”
Faland just looked at him.
“My story,” said Freddie. “Last night. I don’t remember what I told you.”
Faland had poured himself a glass of wine. He sipped it. The subtle lines of laughter deepened round his eyes. “No?”
Freddie cursed his sodden brain. He tried to think back—one night—then the next. And he said, slowly, “And—and the story before that—do you remember what I told you?”
