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Chapter 1
Chapter One: Ash and Silence
The lane into Ashvale was narrower than Thomas remembered, hedges having grown thick and untidy in his years away. The brambles had crept out like careful fingers, tracing the ruts left by cart wheels. He trudged along the mud-tacked verge, kitbag slung across his shoulder, the heel of his boot catching now and then on roots he could not see. Above the hedges, the thatch roofs crouched like slumbering beasts, their chimneys stubbly and cold.
He stopped at the village cross and listened.
Silence was not uncommon in the trenches. In the seconds before the barrage, before the whistle, silence could press the soul flat. But this was not that silence. This was not the tense breath held between thunderclaps. It was emptier, like a well with no water.
The green lay bare. A child’s hoop leaned against the stocks as if a ghost had put it there to be found. The inn’s sign—The Plough and Whistle—hung lop-sided, its painted ploughman washed into pale smears by weather. The door was open. No smoke rolled from its chimney. The air smelt of damp and old ash.
Thomas pivoted slowly. Cottages stood with their doors ajar, curtains lifting in the draft. Traces of lives waited stubbornly. A tea towel flapped from a sill. A shoe lay in the road, a child’s size, the leather scuffed. In the distance a rook cawed, but it sounded far away, as if muffled under a blanket.
He ran a thumb along the edge of his collar and forced himself towards the cottage he had grown up in at the lane’s end. He had imagined this moment every night at the front. He had built pictures in his head of his mother at the hearth and his father’s boots by the door and the laughter that might greet him, changed and older, but home. The gate was unlatched. It clicked softly when he pushed it, and the sound was indecently loud.
Inside, the table was set for three.
Three plates, knives and forks neatly arranged, a loaf on a board with the end cut away, butter softening in a ramekin. His mother’s shawl—a brown wool with a darn at the shoulder—was draped over the back of the nearest chair. A kettle sat on the hob, cold iron, blackened. A pot of carrots and potatoes had crusted into a skin he did not touch. The clock above the mantel had stopped at twenty past two. The hands looked oddly embarrassed about it.
“Mam?” he called, and his voice stuttered in the empty rooms.
He checked the bedroom. Blankets thrown back, his mother’s hairbrush on the chest, strands caught in its bristles like threads of spun autumn. His father’s Sunday coat hung on the peg. Everything was in place, and no one was.
He crossed the threshold into the little back garden, where rows of winter brassicas held their ground beneath a net of hoarfrost. Beyond the garden, the churchyard climbed a gentle rise, and he could see the tilt of the grey stones and the yew tree leaning like a tired man.
He went towards it.
In the churchyard, recent graves widened the patchwork of old ones. A week or month old, by the look of the earth. A few were marked with names he knew, and a few were marked only with signs—three lines crossing at angles to make a knot, a fish with a split tail, a simple circle within a circle. He knelt and touched the soil of one such grave, and something in him recoiled and had no name for it.
He got to his feet and studied the church. The door was closed. Thomas tried it and found the latch stiff. Inside, the air was bitter and still. Someone had left candles burned down to puddles on the altar rail. A sermon card lay on the lectern. Reverend Gray’s square hand had written: We must put aside that which is unclean and cast out that which binds us to sorrow. Underneath, a blot of ink spread like a bruise.
Thomas folded the card and put it in his pocket without thinking why. He stood in the nave, his breath smoky in the cold, and listened hard again.
From outside, a wind moved through the yew. It carried a sound that lifted the hairs along his neck. The sound was not song nor speech but seemed to be made of syllables. Men’s voices. Half-heard names shed their winter coats and stepped into the chill of his memory: Daniels. Burr. Pool. Names from the line, the roll-call of the vanished.
He stood very still and told himself it was the wind.
