1

Even before their last kiss something, not time or place or that vicious circumstance, divided them. Each had firmly in mind an idea of how such farewells as this were to be enacted. Their ideas of the scene were similar; by the late spring of the war’s first year everyone in London knew how young wives saw husbands to the War Train at Victoria, with what stoic cheer, but also what lapses of heavy, pointed silence. Despite its horrors up to then, the war had yet to really show itself, and so it was still a chivalric moment, full of association. The unselfish sacrifice of an entire nation was implicit in the welling eyes of those women, and its disciplined restraint in the fact that tears never overspilled those ruby cheeks in the public setting of a crowded, bustling, noisy train platform. This was courage and resolve; even nobility. These were people for whom such notions still carried resonance. Farewell was the first and sweetest act of war, the only one the women were admitted to until the soldier’s eventual return, when they nursed him or buried him. But even that prospect, now, while terrible, had its loveliness. In prospect, death lacks loveliness utterly except in war.

An observer would have seen the young woman and man as types of a species—British bluebloods, him in his mustache, Sam Browne, jodhpurs, and polished boots,fresh-stitched captains’ diamonds on his sleeves, her in theflat-hipped practical dress, plumpness nowhere, not of Victoria but of Victoria’s granddaughters—but an observer could not possibly have read their silence. For an unbearably short time he had been with her and their two young children at her parents’ house in Chelsea. It was the leave to which he was entitled, having, with his men, just completed training, having been promoted unexpectedly from first lieutenant to captain, and his regiment having been ordered at last to France. And at the end of those precious, fleeting four days, he and this woman, whom he loved more than he loved, even, his children or his father or the memory of his mother or his native land or God, had quarreled bitterly.

She looked up at him. “I’m sorry, Douglas.”

He shook his head. “It was my fault, darling. It was my fault.” And he meant it. True, one would think a man going off to war had the right to know that his wife and children were where they belonged, where he wanted them, where she’d always promised they would be. But he saw grief in her eyes and he knew it had nothing to do with him. Her father was dead exactly a month now, having gone down on theLusitania, sunk May 7. Douglas knew that the bottom of her world had fallen out from under her, and he knew how afraid she was for her mother. But when she told him that she and the children were going to stay permanently in London instead of going home, he reacted with a fierce, disapproving imperiousness that was not uncommon among men like him but which, between them, was unprecedented and therefore frightening to both. His anger had made him crudely insensitive and he had accused her of using her father’s death as a pretext for leaving Cragside. Only after he’d seen the fury of her denial had he known it was true.

He took her into his arms and felt her settle against him. At last the rigid tension that had so threatened their parting melted, drained away. He touched her hair w