Yet in some ways the confinement of this healing had once again left him vulnerable to all the horrors he’d fought these past five months to overcome. Now they were creeping out again in spite of him, reaching out to pull him back into the morass of despair and hopelessness he’d struggled so fiercely to leave behind. In the distraction of work, the subsequent exhaustion that brought him dreamless sleep, the concentration that kept Hamish at bay, he had scraped together a measure of peace.

“Until Scotland.” It was a refrain that Hamish had dinned in his head day and night for the past three weeks. Until Scotland…

Rutledge told his sister lightly, forcing the shadows out of his conscious mind, “There’s sanity in work. I’ve a desk full of papers to get through-hardly a test of endurance. And I am on sick leave, not permanent disability. This will heal, in good time.” Unlike the spirit

… “It’s little more than a week early.”

Frances was that rare woman who knew when to stop persuading and start encouraging. “All right, then, let’s try a compromise. You can manage your own breakfast, and find yourself a midday meal, but come to me for your dinner. At least I can be sure you’re eating properly. You don’t, you know. You are far too thin, still-”

But it wasn’t eating improperly that kept Rutledge thin and drawn. It was so many hauntings… Hamish. The War. The impossibility of forgetting, when England was full of wounded men, struggling to go about lives that years in the trenches had altered irretrievably. People looked away from such men now, embarrassed by them, unable to think what to say to them. The War was finished. Over and done with. Except for the crosses in Flanders’s Fields. And the living reminders no one quite knew what to do with. He saw himself a dozen times an hour on the streets-among the amputees, the blind, the ugly coughing of the gassed-even though he’d come home from France whole in body.