Dedicated to
My Cheef Resurcher
(who knows who he is)
I am no longer an artist interested and anxious. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn in their lousy souls.
—Paul Nash, Artist
1899–1946
Paul Nash served with the Artists’ Rifles and the Royal Hampshire Regiment in the Great War.
JANUARY: You enter the London year—it is cold—it is wet—but there are gulls on the embankment.
—from
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Prologue
The taxi-cab slowed down alongside the gates of Camden Abbey, a red brick former mansion that seemed even more like a refuge as a bitter sleet swept across the gray, forbidding landscape.
“Is this the place, madam?”
“Yes, thank you.”
The driver parked in front of the main entrance and, almost as an afterthought, the woman respectfully covered her head with a silk scarf before leaving the motor car.
“I shan’t be long.”
“Right you are, madam.”
He watched the woman enter by the main door, which slammed shut behind her.
“Rather you than me, love,” he said to himself as he picked up a newspaper to while away the minutes until the woman returned again.
THE SITTING ROOM was warm, with a fire in the grate, red carpet on the stone floor and heavy curtains at the windows to counter draughts that the ancient wooden frame could not keep at bay. The woman, now seated facing a grille, had been in conversation with the abbess for some forty-five minutes.
“Grief is not an event, my dear, but a passage, a pilgrimage along a path that allows us to reflect upon the past from points of remembrance held in the soul. At times the way is filled with stones underfoot and we feel pained by our memories, yet on other days the shadows reflect our longing and those happinesses shared.”
The woman nodded. “I just wish there were not this doubt.”
“Uncertainty is sure to follow in such circumstances.”
“But how do I put my mind at rest, Dame Constance?”
“Ah, you have not changed, have you?” observed the abbess. “Always seeking to
The woman began to press down her cuticles with the thumbnail of the opposite hand.
