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Harry pushed open the door. Charlotte had run down the steps; he saw Bradfield at the door, smiling.
    Charlotte threw herself into her brother’s arms. “Harry!”
    He started laughing. “Hello, scrap,” he said.
    She pushed herself away from him. “Scrap?”
    “I do beg your pardon,” he replied. He kissed her extended hand. “Quite the grown-up lady, I see.”
    His mother waited as he climbed the steps. She held out her arms to hug him. “Darling,” she murmured. “Darling boy.” He could feel her trembling. She stepped back from him, and, frowning, touched the scar on his cheek. “What’s this?” she asked, horrified.
    “Little present from Fritz. Flew a bit low one day.”
    “A
bullet
?”
    “There are one or two about, you know.”
    “Oh, Harry.” She looked at his hand. “And this??
    He shrugged. “Well now, that’s why they gave me a couple of days. Went to see the doc in London, though. He gave me the all clear.” And he wagged his fingers above the bandage. “Can’t blame Fritz for it, though,” he said. “Some fellow put a chair on it. Blow me if it didn’t numb the hand right up. Couldn’t grip anything for a while.”
    “A chair? But how could he do that?”
    Harry smiled at her. “I’m afraid I was lying on the floor.
De trop vino
. Embarrassing.”
    Out of the corner of his eye, Harry saw his father frown.
    Then behind them, in the shadows of the doorway, a voice called out. “You’re awfully late,” Louisa admonished him. “Someone’s been kept up past her bedtime.”
    Harry had been quite all right until that moment; disengaging himself from Octavia, he was in the act of shaking his father’s hand. And then, in a flurry of movement, Louisa was at his side, and Sessy was thrust into his arms, and a small starfish hand reached up and grabbed hold of the collar of his uniform jacket, and he looked down into a serious little face, very fair, framed by almost starched-looking curls. And saw Emily Maitland’s eyes gazing back at him.
    And suddenly it was all one: the children running screaming along roads from Mons; the tilting terrors of reconnaissance; the snuffing out of human candles in churned seas of mud, or up on thermal currents pricked by brown pockets of antiaircraft fire.
    He buried his face in Sessy’s small round shoulder, and felt those same inquisitive little hands touching the crown of his head like a blessing.

T wice a month, Edwin Bradfield walked from Rutherford into the village. He was always alone; he did not mix with the staff beneath him, nor the family above him. Others might have considered this fact both a blessing and a burden; but he was not a man to dwell on his personal requirements. In fact, after so many years of serving the Cavendish family as their butler, he did not know what personal requirements he might have. The pursuit of happiness was, in any case, an empty thing, he had found. It rarely brought satisfaction.
    He walked steadily, as he did so much else: calmly, at a measured pace. For a young man—and he had indeed once been a young man on this walk—it might have taken an hour or so to cover the four miles. Now, in his sixtieth year, it took him considerably longer than that.
    He stood on the bridge and watched the water go by, and then took himself to the bench seat built into the churchyard wall. The little village—much like the great house hidden now beyond the trees and slight hill—was a picture of perfect peace. Mellow stone cottages were grouped around the green, and the Norman church was framed by a large and picturesque lych-gate; the churchyard itself was surrounded by horse chestnut trees. Bradfield looked out along the lines of graves to the modest new stone in the grass on the west-side corner:
Emily Maitland,
read the inscription.
1895–1913
. He frowned, and folded his hands in his lap.
    Emily Maitland. He could see her now, a frail little thing swamped by her uniform: thin and pretty. She had been hardworking, he