Read Chapter 9: The Locket's Secret

Dawn came grey and hard-edged, the frost biting through Élise’s coat as she stood at the edge of the farmyard, watching the eastern sky bleed pale gold over the ruined fields. Two days of rest. Two days to go south, away from the guns, away from the blood-soaked straw and the constant murmur of dying men.

James found her there, a tin cup of coffee steaming in his hand. He didn’t offer it, just stood beside her, his shoulder nearly touching hers.

“You’re certain about this?” he asked.

“The soldier asked for his Marguerite.” Élise touched the silver locket beneath her collar. It had grown warm against her skin over the past fortnight, an intimate weight she had come to rely on. “I gave him my word.”

“Bezonvaux is a long way from the lines. And the roads are—” He stopped, and she heard the unspoken words: *littered with the dead.*

“I’ll manage.” She finally turned to look at him. The bruise beneath his eye from the shelling had faded to a sickly yellow, and his hands were chapped from the cold water they scrubbed in between surgeries. He looked tired. He always looked tired now. “You’ll hold the unit together while I’m gone?”

A ghost of amusement crossed his face. “I did command a hospital before you arrived, Mademoiselle Moreau.”

The false name still sat awkwardly on her tongue, even after all these weeks. She pressed her lips together and nodded.

“Take one of the orderlies,” James said. “I don’t like the idea of you traveling alone.”

“I’ll take the cart. I’ll travel faster alone.”

He opened his mouth to argue, and then seemed to think better of it. Instead, he reached into his coat and produced a small, battered revolver, holding it out to her.

“You know how to use it?”

Élise stared at the weapon. It gleamed dully in the morning light. “My father taught me to shoot rabbits.”

“This is bigger than rabbits.” But he didn’t lower the gun. “If you encounter soldiers—any soldiers—if they ask where you’re going, you tell them you’re a widow visiting her husband’s grave. They’ll leave you alone. Widows are sacred, even to the men who’ve lost their own souls.”

Something in his voice caught at her chest. She took the revolver, feeling its weight in her palm. “Thank you, Dr. Whitmore.”

“James.” He said it quietly, almost as if the word had escaped without his permission. “In two days, I’d rather you called me James.”

She didn’t answer. But she nodded, and when she climbed onto the cart and flicked the reins, she let his name settle somewhere in her memory, a warm coal against the cold morning.

---

The village of Bezonvaux had been reduced to its bones.

Élise had seen destruction before—had watched shells tear apart the landscape around the field hospital, had walked through towns abandoned in haste, their inhabitants scattered like leaves before a storm. But Bezonvaux was different. The French lines had held here through the autumn, and the village had paid the price. What remained were chimneys standing like accusing fingers, the hollow shells of houses, and the smell of old fire and older death.

She tied the horse to a scorched fence post and walked the main street alone, her boots crunching over shattered glass and spent shell casings. The locket pressed against her chest with each step, growing heavier as doubt crept in.

*What if she’s gone? What if the village is empty? What if this was all for nothing?*

She found life at the far end of the village, where the church had somehow survived the bombardments—its roof patched with corrugated iron, its door hanging crooked on one hinge. An old woman emerged, carrying a basket of turnips that seemed too heavy for her thin frame.

“Madame?” Élise called, hurrying forward. “I’m looking for Marguerite Bisset. Marguerite of the Bisset family?”

The woman stopped and stared at her with clouded eyes. “You’re looking for the dead.”

The words hit Élise like a physical blow. “She—dead?”

“Influenza.” The woman spat the word like it tasted of ash. “Took half the old ones and the young ones whose lungs were weak. Marguerite was never strong, not after her father was taken by the Prussians. She lasted three days.”

Élise’s hand went to the locket. It was cold against her fingers, mocking her.

“Was there—is there a family? Her mother?”

The old woman pointed with her chin toward a second house, one that still had four walls and a partial roof. “Mother Bisset lives. Though I’m not sure you could call it living.”

---

Mother Bisset was a small woman folded in on herself like a paper flower left in the rain. She sat by a cold hearth, draped in a black shawl that had faded to grey, and when Élise was shown in, she looked up without surprise, as if strangers arriving at her door were simply one more cruelty the war had made ordinary.

“Marguerite?” Her voice was cracked paper. “She died in November. The fever took her quickly. We buried her by the church, with her brothers.”

Élise pulled the locket from her collar and held it out. The silver was warm from her body, and for a moment she felt as if she were offering a piece of herself. “Her fiancé. A soldier. He asked me to return this to her. He died holding it.”

Mother Bisset’s face crumpled, then hardened with the terrible discipline of grief. She took the locket with trembling fingers, opened it, and stared at the miniature portrait inside—a young woman with dark hair and a smile that had never learned what the world would do to her.

“He loved her,” Élise said softly.

“He promised to come home.” Mother Bisset’s voice cracked. “They all promise. And what does the war care for promises?” She closed the locket and pressed it to her lips, then looked at Élise with new eyes, sharp and assessing. “You came all this way. For a dead girl, for a dead man.”

“I gave my word.”

The old woman’s eyes softened marginally. “Then you’re a rare sort of nurse.” She held out the locket. “Take it.”

Élise blinked. “Madame?”

“My Marguerite lies beneath the frozen ground. She doesn’t need silver to keep her company.” Mother Bisset pressed the locket into Élise’s palm, folding her fingers over it. “But there’s something you should know. Marguerite never spoke of a fiancé. She wrote to me of a boy, yes—an orderly from Verdun, someone who worked in a hospital. He sent her letters, but the last one came before the war began. She thought he had forgotten her.”

The world tilted slightly. Élise stared at the locket. “The soldier—he had her portrait. He said they were to be married.”

“My daughter was engaged to no one.” Mother Bisset’s eyes were ancient and unbearably kind. “But she loved, in her way. The boy from the hospital kept her heart even when he didn’t come home.” She took a ragged breath. “Perhaps he was that boy. Perhaps he was the one who never wrote. Perhaps the war gave him a story to die with, and she was the only name he remembered that was sweet.”

Élise looked down at the locket, at the smiling face of a woman she had heard described by a dying man who called her his fiancée.

*But she was not.*

So who was the soldier? Why claim a woman who had not been his betrothed?

“Keep it,” Mother Bisset said. “You were the last kindness he knew. You should carry his story, not a grave you never dug.”

Élise wanted to protest, to hand it back, to walk away from the weight of the mystery. But the old woman had already turned away, staring at the ashes in her hearth.

---

She rode back through the grey dusk, the locket burning against her chest like a question without an answer. The portrait inside was no longer a promise to be renewed—it was a riddle. A dying man had woven a fiction to comfort himself before death, or the grief-stricken mother had misplaced her daughter’s heart, or—

*Or something else.*

When Élise finally reached the farmhouse that served as their unit’s headquarters, the lamps were lit, casting warm squares of light against the advancing dark. James met her at the door, his brow furrowed with concern.

“You’re back early,” he said. “I would have sent an escort if you’d needed—”

“She’s dead.” Élise climbed down, her legs stiff from the ride. “Influenza. Months ago.”

His face softened. “I’m sorry.”

“He lies in an unmarked grave somewhere near the Somme, and she lies in Bezonvaux, and the locket—” She pulled it out, held it up between them. “Her mother says he was never her fiancé. That Marguerite loved a boy who worked in a hospital. That she never received his letters after the war began.”

James studied the locket, then Élise’s face. “A deathbed confession doesn’t have to be a true story. Men rewrite themselves when they see the end coming. He may have imagined the whole affair.”

“Maybe.” But Élise couldn't let it go. “But if he was the boy she loved—the one who never wrote—then why claim she was his betrothed? Why not say he loved her, but never told her?”

James was quiet for a long moment. The wind stirred the fabric of his coat, and the sounds of the field hospital drifted toward them from the converted barn—the low murmur of men, the clatter of equipment, the occasional cry from patients not yet deep enough in their drugged sleep.

“Perhaps,” he said slowly, “he needed her to be his. He needed one true thing before he went into the dark—not a hope, but a claim.” He looked at Élise with an expression she couldn’t quite read. “Some men find it hard to believe they’re worthy of love unless someone binds them to it formally.”

The words hung in the cold air between them.

Élise looked down at the locket and remembered the soldier’s dying eyes, the desperate pressure of his hand on hers. He’d spoken of Marguerite as if she were his only shore—the one place the tide couldn’t take him. If he’d been lying, he had lied beautifully, right up until the moment his soul slipped free.

Or perhaps some fictions were truer than facts.

She closed her fingers around the locket.

“I’ll keep it,” she said. “Until I understand.”

James nodded, and they stood together in the cold, the weight of the dead between them and around them—and the strange, answering warmth of each other’s presence, unnameable and growing.