“Oh, no, I want to put it behind me as quickly as possible.”

We talked for some time after that, exchanging information to make it appear more likely that she’d known me for some time.

“Wasn’t it difficult,” she asked at one point, “to work with badly wounded men? I know how distressing it was to care for Alan in his last days. Roger was wounded, you know. In the shoulder. He never told us, and it mustn’t have been severe, because he wasn’t sent back to England.” She bit her lip. “It was George who mentioned it. He’s a friend of the family. He’d run into Roger in France. But I hadn’t seen Roger for three years. Not until he came home because of Alan. And he treated me like a stranger. As if he couldn’t remember those months before the war when we were so happy.”

“War does change people,” I pointed out. “And of course there was his brother.”

“Yes, I know,” she said wistfully. “I shouldn’t have pressed. But I wanted so badly to have a child. Someone to love, if-if the worst happens. That’s what we quarreled about, you see.” She touched her face. “The hurt went deeper than the blow. That’s why I couldn’t stay at Vixen Hill.”

This was the truth, finally.

“We are a house of widows,” she went on. “For all intents and purposes these last three years, I have been one as well. Roger’s mother and his grandmother live with us, and I could see that their children have been their salvation. He may never come back from France, once he leaves. This could be our only chance.”

“Was Alan married? Did he have children?”

“He was married, yes. But he and Eleanor had no children. And neither do Margaret and Henry. She’s Roger’s sister, she lives near Canterbury.”

“And Juliana?”

“No. Of course not.”

She was silent for a time. Then she said, “Sometimes I think they’re cursed. Margaret and Alan and Roger. Mama Ellis told me once that Juliana’s death was devastating. It scarred all of them. Roger’s father couldn’t accept it. He tried, but in the end he went out into the heath and shot himself.”