Coming home I’m nearly found out. Luckily the noise is thunderous, and I scamper behind a tree as the carriage clatters past and turns up into our drive.

Uncle Henry, who had been away on business in Scarsdale, must have decided not to stay the night. Now everyone will be waked, and my absence surely will be discovered.

As I approach the house, I see the hired man in his work clothes. I know he’d returned from the tavern only moments before I’d heard his whistle up ahead of me on the road, and I’d walked well behind him, out of sight. I creep up along the edge of the lawn, darting from tree to tree. One of the boys is unstrapping Uncle Henry’s valise from the back, and Mrs. Sullivan is stationed at the door, quiet as a post. Her folded hands waiting to see if Uncle wants her to cook him a late supper before he goes to bed.

Such unrelenting drudgery, the lives of the servants.

Aunt Clara is nowhere in sight. For this, I breathe a calming sigh as I slip around the side of the house in order to enter through the back. If Aunt were awake she’d expect everyone to rouse and tend to her. Which would have made it quite impossible for me to sneak into the house and then pretend I’d been here all night.

Through the pantry, silent at the boot jack, I steal in stockinged feet up the back stairs, where I overhear Uncle Henry in the foyer requesting a sausage pie and brandy in the library. But I am battened down safe in my attic room before he has taken the second flight of stairs.

At last. My heart is knocking in my chest. I build up the fire from its embers and unfold Will’s letter, which I read on my hands and knees by the scant heat.

Even before I begin, I can see that it’s been written under hardship and duress. Will’s letters tremble and slant backward confusedly. What’s more, the paper is water damaged, the last passages a wash of ink.

When I am finished, I close my eyes, which burn with the effort of reading this final, agonized missive from the grave. Wherever Will’s body is buried, too much of my heart is there, too.

“It doesn’t matter, William,” I whisper. “None of it matters anymore. For I will always love you, no matter what this war forced you to become. Always and ever, dear heart.”

For what else could I say? What else could I ever possibly say about a senseless death and a war that I do not understand?


15.