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“And Stephen?” Ruth asked, casually. “Is he coming?”

“Are you blushing?” said Reine-Marie.

“She can’t,” said Gabri. “To blush you need blood in your veins.” He nodded toward the scotch. “If ever embarrassed, she’ll turn golden.”

“I think that’s called jaundice,” said Clara.

“Did I hear my name?” Stephen walked slowly across the crowded room, using his cane to clear the way. Just as Ruth had shown him.

“Hello, Jaundice,” said Ruth.

“Hello, Liver Failure,” said Stephen, kissing her on both cheeks. “And fuck, fuck, fuck to you,” he said to Rosa, who looked at him with something close to adoration. Which ducks very rarely did.

As people chatted around him, Armand glanced outside again at the glowing faces and bright eyes staring into the bonfire. It felt like it could be the dawn of time.

Primal and ancient. A new year, a new day dawning.

Armand often went to the little chapel on the hill. More for the silence than the sermons. And he almost always found Ruth already there. Sitting alone and scribbling in her customary seat, and sometimes on it. She sat under the stained-glass window of three of the village boys who’d gone to the Great War and never returned.

On the wall was the polished plaque with the unforgivably long list with names like Tommy and Bobby and Jacques. And below the names was engraved: They Were Our Children.

Then shall forgiven and forgiving meet again. Armand thought of Ruth’s seminal poem as he watched the children around the fire.

Our children, he knew, had much to forgive.

Or will it be, as always was, too late?

“What’re you thinking?” Reine-Marie asked, seeing the faraway look in his eyes.

“Actually, I was thinking about your poem about forgiveness,” he said to Ruth. “Have you ever met Abigail Robinson?”

“The madwoman?” asked Ruth. She turned to Stephen. “If she has her way, we’d both be put down.”

“Maybe not so crazy,” Gabri said to Olivier.

“My God,” said someone in the crowd. “I don’t believe it.”

Armand turned to see what they didn’t believe.

The whole room had grown quiet. Even the kids stopped running and shouting and slowed to a halt, gingerbread men halfway to their mouths. They too were staring toward the wide stairway that swept up from the foyer.

Haniya stopped, halfway down the stairs. And stood there. Perfectly still. Until every eye in the room was on her.

“Is that?”

“Can’t be.”

“But what’s she doing here?”

“My God, she’s magnificent,” Reine-Marie whispered.

And she was. Haniya Daoud, the Hero of the Sudan, was standing on the sweeping stairway, head high, chin up, body enfolded in a rich rose-and-gold abaya and hijab.

She was luminous.

It was Reine-Marie’s first glimpse of Haniya Daoud. After her conversation with Armand and her friends, and their less-than-flattering descriptions of the woman, Reine-Marie had expected someone gloomier. Certainly dimmer.

What she saw was a woman who seemed ageless, timeless. A powerful woman who commanded the room before she’d even entered it.