Read Chapter 4: Toast to Old Friends

The knock came as Élodie was banking the kitchen fire for the night, her fingers smudged with ash. She wiped them on her apron and opened the door to find Julian Ashworth standing in the corridor, a bottle of Bordeaux cradled in one hand and two glasses dangling from the other.

“I find myself unable to sleep,” he said, with a rueful half-smile that she remembered from years ago—younger, softer, before the sun and the sand had carved lines into his face. “And it occurred to me that I have been a poor guest. You have fed me, housed me, asked nothing of me. I thought perhaps we might share a glass, and you might tell me about Mathieu.”

Her throat tightened. *Tell him about Mathieu.* The man who had watched her husband die, asking her to relive the grief she had buried beneath the floorboards of her own heart.

“I have wine in the cellar,” she said. “You needn’t have brought your own.”

“Consider it a gift. From one old friend of Mathieu’s to another.”

*Friend.* The word sat strangely in the air between them. She had called him that in her mind for eleven years—the unknown Englishman who had carried her husband’s last letter across a desert and a sea to reach her. But now he was here, in the flesh, drinking her wine and asking questions, and she could not forget the folded paper hidden beneath the floorboards of his room, or the words *the tower will burn*.

She hesitated a moment too long. His expression softened.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I should not have presumed. It is late, and you have already done enough for me tonight.”

“No.” She heard herself speak before she had decided to. “No, I… I would like that. Truly.”

She led him to the small parlor off the dining room, a cramped corner she rarely opened to guests, where a threadbare settee sagged beside the cold hearth. He settled into it with the easy grace of a man accustomed to being welcomed anywhere, and she lit a single candle against the dark.

“You did not light the fire,” he observed.

“Wood is dear this autumn.”

He nodded, as if that explained everything, and worked the cork from the bottle with a practiced twist. The wine glugged into the glasses, dark as blood in the candlelight.

“To Mathieu,” he said, raising his glass.

“To Mathieu.” She touched her glass to his. The wine was warm on her tongue, smoother than anything she would have served her guests, and she wondered where he had acquired it. “You remember him well?”

“I remember him laughing.” Ashworth leaned back, cradling his glass. “That is what struck me most. We were dying around him—of fever, of thirst, of despair—and he laughed. He said the desert could not kill a man who had already survived a Breton winter and a Parisian landlord.” His mouth curved. “I believed him.”

Élodie’s chest ached. She had not heard anyone speak of Mathieu like this in years—as a living man, not a memory to be mourned. The last time had been her own fault; she had stopped asking, because the answers only carved the wound deeper.

“He was always like that,” she said quietly. “He could find sunlight in a cellar.”

“He found it in you.” Ashworth’s gaze met hers over the rim of his glass. “He spoke of you often. Of coming home to you. Of the inn he would build with his own hands, and the children you would raise above it.”

Élodie looked away. The candle flame wavered, and for a moment she was twenty years old again, standing in the ruins of a half-built house, holding a letter that began *My dearest Élodie, if you are reading this, I have not survived the campaign*.

“We had plans,” she said. “But plans are cheap. The dead cannot keep them.”

Ashworth was silent a moment. Then he set down his glass and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his voice dropping low.

“There is something I have been meaning to ask you, Élodie. About Cairo. About a debt.”

She felt the air leave the room. *A debt.* Her fingers tightened around the stem of her glass.

“Mathieu owed me money,” he said carefully. “A sum I lent him before the campaign. He swore he would repay me when we returned to France, but we both know he never did.” He paused. “I have wondered, these many years, whether you knew of it. Whether you might have found something among his effects—a note, a ledger, any record of the sum he owed.”

The lie rose to her lips before she could think, smooth as silk and twice as strong. She had practiced it for years, in this very room, with police captains and nosy neighbors and the tax collector who came sniffing after her husband’s estate.

“Mathieu kept his affairs close,” she said. “I was his wife, but he treated money as a man’s business. I never saw any record of a debt.”

Ashworth’s eyes searched her face. She held his gaze, unwilling to blink first.

“I see,” he said at last. He did not sound convinced.

“You must understand,” she added, softening her voice, “he left me with little. The inn was only half-built. What he owned, he had spent on it—or lost in Egypt.” She spread her hands. “If he owed you money, I am sorry. But I have nothing left to give you.”

“I did not come to collect.” Ashworth’s voice was gentle now, and that gentleness cut deeper than any accusation. “I came to remember him. To settle the past in my own mind.” He lifted his glass again, but this time he did not drink. He only looked at her, and something in his expression shifted—a shadow passing behind his eyes. “You said you never saw his affairs. But you wear his watch.”

Élodie’s hand flew automatically to the blue enamel watch pinned at her bodice. *Stupid.* She should not have worn it. She had told herself it was a memorial, but it was a brand, marking her as the widow of a man who had died in a battle she had never seen.

“He gave it to me before he left,” she said. “A token of his love.”

“I told you,” Ashworth said slowly, “that I saw it on a dying soldier at Marengo.”

“You told me that. But you were mistaken.”

“Was I?” He set down his glass. “I have carried the image of that watch in my mind for two years, Élodie. I have wondered who the soldier was, and why he wore a woman’s trinket into battle. When I saw it on you tonight, I thought… I thought perhaps Mathieu had survived Egypt after all. That he had made his way to Italy, and died there, and that the watch had found its way back to you.”

The silence stretched between them, taut as a rope.

Élodie forced her hands to still. “If Mathieu died in Italy instead of Egypt, then you are not the man who carried his letter to me.”

Ashworth blinked. “No. No, you are right.” He shook his head slowly. “I was mistaken. The light was poor, and I have not thought of that day clearly in some time.” He reached for his glass again, and this time he drank deeply. “Forgive me. I have kept you far too long with the ramblings of a tired old soldier.”

He rose, and she rose with him, her heart hammering against her ribs.

“I will leave you to your rest,” she said.

“And you to yours.” He paused at the door, hand on the frame. “Élodie.”

“Yes?”

“You are a terrible liar.”

Her blood turned to ice. But he smiled—not unkindly—and the moment passed.

“You wear your grief too plainly for a woman who claims to know nothing,” he said. “Mathieu was fortunate to have you. Whatever else passed between us, I hope you know that.”

He left her standing in the parlor, the candle guttering in the draft of his passage.

Élodie did not sleep. She sat at her kitchen table, the bottle of Bordeaux half-finished on the counter, and waited until she heard his footsteps cross the floor above her—three paces to the window, pause, three paces back. At last the floorboards fell silent.

She rose and went to her room, to the locked chest at the foot of her bed. The key hung on a chain around her neck, and she fumbled it into the lock with trembling fingers. Inside, beneath layers of winter blankets and a moth-eaten shawl, lay a bundle of letters tied with a faded blue ribbon.

Mathieu’s letters. She had not read them in years.

She untied the ribbon and spread them across the bed, her hands moving by memory. The letter she sought was the last one, the one that had arrived after the news of his death, when Ashworth’s messenger had come to her door with tears in his eyes and a folded paper in his hand.

*My dearest Élodie*, it said. *If you are reading this, I have not survived the campaign. Do not mourn me overlong. I have made a life debt to an English officer—* and there the sentence stopped, the name gouged out of the paper with something sharp, leaving a ragged hole the size of her thumb.

She had never understood why. She had assumed the letter was damaged in transit, that the courier had been careless, or that Mathieu himself had crossed it out in a moment of anger.

But now, as she held the paper to the candlelight, she saw the truth. The mark had been made carefully, deliberately. Whoever had removed the name had done so with intent.

And she remembered Ashworth’s voice, low and careful, asking about a debt her husband owed him in Cairo.

She stared at the hole in the paper for a long time. The candle burned down to a stub. Her candle, but she could not buy another.

Somewhere above her, Julian Ashworth dreamed of the desert.

And Élodie Marchand lay awake, holding the ghost of her husband’s secret in her hands.