The Winter Ghosts - By Kate Mosse Page 0,4

am sitting a little apart from the tableau, an awkward adolescent of thirteen. My hair is lying not quite flat. At the moment the shutter clicked, something made me turn away from the camera and towards George. Over the years I have examined and re-examined the photograph, trying to read the expression in my eyes. Is it his reassurance I am seeking, his admiration? Or is it rather a child’s impotent anger at being made to collude in such a charade? I don’t know. However many times I stare at that dusty, captured moment and try to remember what was going through my mind, I can’t.

Two days later, George was sent to join the 13th Battalion in France. I do recall how proud Father was, how boastful Mother, and how full of dread was I. Crippling, overpowering dread. Even then, I knew that road would not lead to glory.

How long did I sit there on that cold winter seat in Tarascon, the chill seeping through the heavy fabric of my coat and tweeds? Time stretches and shrinks, does not stay fixed when we most need it to. I thought of my parents, distant and uninterested. Of George, of all those who had died, becoming less defined as the years went by. The simple truth was that I was burdened by my life and the fact of George’s death.

With hindsight, I see that all these emotions assaulted me simultaneously. Delusion and hope and longing, all tumbling one after the other like a falling line of dominoes. It was, after all, a path well-worn. A decade of mourning leaves its footprints on the heart.

Finally, I pulled myself together and moved on, grateful for the darkness. I stopped a while at the church and attempted to decipher the handwritten notice set outside on the wall, forcing myself to concentrate on the words. It appeared that the name - La Daurade - was derived from ‘daurado’ in the local language, which meant ‘golden one’ or ‘gilded one’, and referred to a statue of the Virgin that had once been housed within the church. I tried to ignite a spark of interest, if nothing else out of respect for my previous, short-lived employment in a firm of ecclesiastical architects. But in truth, I felt nothing. And my thoughts insisted on spiralling back to the dead sleeping in the cold earth. Shattered bones and mud and blood. The headstones and the graves, the wild and untended places between.

I shook my head. I didn’t want to be haunted by images of George’s final hours, of barbed wire, limbs tangled and trapped and torn. I did not want to hear the crump of the guns or the screams of men and horses brought down in a hail of bullets or a cloud of gas or the sudden wrenching away of the ground beneath their feet.

The trouble was that I knew both too much and too little. After ten years of trying to find out what had happened to George in 1916, I had armed myself only with possibilities of what might have been. Rather than helping me to accept and to move on, that ugly, violent knowledge had been the undoing of me.

Again, I tried to think about other things. I looked up at the beauty of the church, the pleasing symmetry and gentle detail of stone, and I wished, as I had so often before, that these fragments of history had the power to move me as once they had. My fingers, stiff in my leather gloves, slipped to the Penguin score of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in the pocket of my coat. An investment of two shillings and sixpence, this, too, an attempt to remind me of what I had once valued so highly. But music, like everything else, had lost its charm. I was no longer moved by Vaughan Williams’s soaring cadenzas or Elgar’s falling sevenths, any more than I was by the sight of white apple blossom in March, or the vivid yellow of broom in the hedgerows in April, or a haze of bluebells in a wood in May. Nothing touched me. Everything had ceased to matter on the day the telegram arrived: MISSING IN ACTION. PRESUMED DEAD.

I continued my solitary circuit, walking through the place des Consuls, careless of the cold that made my ears ache. There was the occasional rattle of a plate or a cup from behind shuttered windows, the intermittent burst of conversation or the crackle of a