“Who are the letters to?” I asked.

“They don’t say, as if she was purposefully hiding his identity. But whoever it was we know how it ended.”

“Yes, we do,” I said. Whomever Emma Poole had written these paeans of love to had been the one to impregnate her and desert her, to leave her alone as she nursed her dying mother while her stomach swelled.

“Get rid of them,” she said as she grabbed the letters from my hand and threw them on the floor. The cat leaped away for a moment and then jumped onto the sofa next to Caroline, who barely flinched. “I can’t bear to read them. I feel like a voyeur.”

“These were written more than seventy years ago,” I said. “It’s like looking through a powerful telescope and seeing light that was emitted eons ago by stars that are already dead.”

“It’s not right,” she said. “Whatever she felt for the man who deserted her it has nothing to do with us. The emotions were hers and hers alone. We’re trespassing.”

“There’s another letter,” I said. “It’s not from Emma.” I reached into the pack and pulled out the letter entitled: To My Child on the Attainment of Majority.

She hesitated for a moment and then took the envelope. She unwrapped the string that bound the envelope shut and pulled out a sheaf of pages written in a masculine hand. She quickly looked at the last page to find the signature.

“It’s from my grandfather,” she said. “It’s written to my father. Why was this letter with the others?”

I shrugged my ignorance.

She read the first lines out loud. “April 6, 1923. To my child. By the time you read this I will be dead.”

She looked at me and shook her head but even while she was shaking her head she trained her gaze back onto the letter and started reading again, though this time to herself. When she was finished with the first page she handed it to me and went onto the second. In that way I trailed behind her by a few minutes, as if my telescope was a few hundred light seconds farther away from the source of the dead star’s light than hers, and my emotional response similarly lagged behind.

It is hard to describe the effect of that letter. It solved mysteries that spanned the century, resolved questions that were lingering in our minds, threw into even greater highlight the terrors that stalked the Reddmans and the Pooles. But even with our out-of-synch emotional responses a peculiar reaction took place between the two of us, Caroline and me, in our separate worlds, as we read the letter. Slowly we drifted apart, not just emotionally, but physically too. Where we had been leaning upon one another when we started reading the letter, our sides and legs melded as though we were trying to become one, as the words drifted through us we separated. First there was just a lessening of pressure, then a gap developed that turned into an inch and then into a foot and then into a yard and finally, while Caroline was sobbing quietly, Sam the cat curled in her lap, and I was reading the last lines and the bold signature of Christian Shaw, Caroline was leaning over one arm of the couch and I was leaning over the other, as far apart as two could be on one piece of furniture. Had the sofa’s arms not been there I fear we would have tumbled away from each other until we slammed like rolling balls into opposite walls.

What caused this fierce magnetic repellence was not any great puzzle. What had come between Caroline and me so strongly in that moment was what had never been between us and the letter was the most vivid confirmation of that yet. Christian Shaw’s letter to his child gave us something that was completely unexpected in this tale of deception and betrayal and murder and desertion and revenge, it gave us an unexpected burst of hope. The letter gave us hope because what Caroline Shaw had believed to be a fiction had been shown to be real, alive, transforming, redeeming. The hope was unexpected because who could have thought that in the middle of the cursed entwining of the Reddmans and the Pooles we would find, like a ruby in a mountain of manure, a transcendent and powerful love.

April 6, 1923

To My Child,

By the time you read this I will be dead. My death will have been a good thing for me and richly deserved, but doubtless hard on you. My father too died when I was young. He was a stern man, I’ve been told, a harsh man, prone to fits of violence. But as he died before I could remember anything about him, I imagine him as a fine and gentle man. I imagine him teaching me to ride. We would have hunted together. He would have given me his rifle to shoot. I imagine him finer and more gentle with me than the real man ever could have been. It is from this imagining that I feel the great gap in my life. I would not mourn him so keenly had he just once reached from his grave and slapped me on the face.

I have been the worst of scoundrels, the lowest of cowards. I take no pride in these facts, nor utter shame. It is simple truth and you should know the truth about your father. You may have learned that I was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross for my brief adventure in the army but do not be deceived as to any heroism on my part. The medal resides in the silt at the bottom of the pond beneath the Reddman estate, Veritas, where I threw it. It is home among the frog excrement and the rotting carcasses of fish. I joined the army to escape what I had made of my life. Do not think that war is glamorous or good, child, but I welcomed it as a friend for what it was, another way to die.

In May of 1918 I led a counterattack from a trench near a village called Cantigny. It was raining and fog was rising. The muffled sounds of war were unbearably close even before the Germans attacked. It was our first battle. The Germans advanced in a wave of ferocity and we beat them back with rapid fire. It was a magnificent and ugly thing to see. Young German men fell and cried out from the mud where they fell and we maintained our fire. Then the runner brought orders for the counterattack.

I wasted no time. I was first over the top. How many trailed my wake and died I cannot know. Shells with a soft sickly whistle dropped and fell gently to the ground. The fog rose thick and green. My eyes burned. My lungs boiled. The Germans we had shot writhed red in the sucking mud. They cried out from the vile green fog through which I charged. I charged not for honor or for Pershing or for France. I charged for death. The artillery, louder now, frightful, our own, rained down like a blessing from on high. We succeeded in running the Germans from their lines in Cantigny and I succeeded, too, in my personal mission. Scraps of metal from the great Allied guns, spinning through the air like locusts with shark’s teeth, sliced their welcome way into my body. I tried to lift my arms in gratitude but only one would rise and I fell face first into the mire.

Two stretcher bearers found me. I begged them to let me sleep but they ignored me and lifted me from the mud. The ambulance raced me to a mobile surgery unit where the doctors saved my life and took off what was left of my arm. Within half an hour they were cutting apart the next poor wretch. I was shipped off to Number 24 General Hospital, Étaples. It was in Étaples, on the northern coast of France, that I met Magee.

Number 24 General Hospital swarmed with wounded. Germans filled whole wards, so packed even the floors were crowded with their stretchers. Cries of “Schwester, Schwester,” rushed down the hallways. Other wards were stocked with our troops, the mangled, the maimed, the sufferers of trench fever, relatively cheery despite their feverish chills. Many in my unit hadn’t loused themselves, hoping a bite would send them to just such a ward. Because of the crowding, the sisters had cleared offices to hold patients and I was placed in one of those.