Chapter 31: The Lost Archangel

FALAND’S HOTEL, PARTS UNKNOWN, FLANDERS, BELGIUM

Winter of 1917–1918

When Freddie came downstairs again, dull from nightmares, there were no people in the hotel. The foyer was empty but for Faland, who sat on an overturned ammunition crate, violin laid across his knee. He was dragging bow across strings, frowning, and the half-formed melody that filled the room was jagged in a way that made Freddie flinch. “Will you tell me what you hate, Iven?” asked Faland, not looking up, although the melody had trailed away to nothing. He stared thoughtfully down at the instrument in his hands. His voice was gentle.

“Not yet,” said Freddie. He was groping for a bottle. “I can’t tell a story yet.”

“Just answer the question.”

“Why?”

Faland raised his eyes from the violin. “Call it curiosity.”

Freddie cursed himself that he could not keep silent when Faland looked at him like that. “Everyone. Everyone who put me and Winter on the Ridge, who put Laura at Brandhoek. All the men with clean hands, hanging back in headquarters, making plans with our lives.”

“What would you tell them, if you could?”

He felt like a mouse with an owl stooping. “I said not yet!”

“No? But aren’t you curious why I want these stories of yours?”

Wild answers ran through Freddie’s head, fit for the poet he’d been: You eat them. You hoard them like jewels. You want them because you’ve no soul of your own…

“Why?” he said.

“Would you like me to show you?”

When had he come near? Freddie could smell wine and rosin and flowers past their best. He didn’t look up, half-afraid he was looking for any reason to trust Faland again, that he would be glad when Faland found another chink in his brittle armor. “All right.”

Faland took up his violin case and went quite prosaically to a door. This door looked no different from the others, but when Faland pulled it open a gust of frigid air blew in and Freddie saw darkness and stars, and the world outside. It was night. He hadn’t known that. He hadn’t realized how musty the hotel was, how close, until he smelled the night air, and felt a stray snowflake on his cheek. He stood arrested, wanting to gulp the air down, and also to beg Faland to shut the door, and lock it against everything.

“Come,” said Faland, and added, when he saw Freddie hesitate, “Afraid I’ll abandon you to the wilderness? Not tonight. Come.”

---

· · ·Freddie remembered nothing of the walk but the uneven beat of Faland’s step, although he dreamed afterward, sometimes, that he walked past a lake of red embers. But when Faland stopped walking, Freddie found they were standing in the shadow of a building that hummed like Halifax Harbour in July. Electric lights dazzled him after so long with only firelight. Faland said, his lip curling, “Recognize it?”

Freddie had never been there. But it was unmistakable. “General Headquarters,” he said. “But it’s—that’s miles to the south.”

Faland didn’t answer. Freddie fell silent, staring. GHQ wasn’t just a château, it was a whole village of trim buildings, standing clean against the stars. There was no smell of death. Just petrol, and earth, and food cooking. Freddie had forgotten that buildings could be grand, or bright, or well kept. Even Faland’s hotel, for all its magnificence, had an air of relentless decay. He thought he saw silver gleaming behind a bright window, a table laid.

Faland said, “Go stand under that window. You’ll understand.”

“I’ll be seen.”

“So? It’s Christmas.” Faland bared his teeth a little. “When poor ghosts walk the earth. What do you think you are?” A light snow was falling by then, muffling the world in white.

“I’m alive,” said Freddie. Sometimes he wasn’t sure. “What are you going to do?”

Faland didn’t answer. But then, Freddie suspected that Faland liked drama the way he liked wine. Faland just strode across the ground, knocked on the front door, and was admitted.

Freddie thought about walking away. He knew where he was. He could find civilian clothes, maybe, and then—what? He imagined having to face himself, in a world that felt real, and could not. He took one step, another, found that he had turned, not through the gate, but toward the window, keeping to the shadows. He peered inside.

They were preparing to serve dinner. There was cutlery. White cloth. Jellies in crystal. When had he last been hungry? This elegant table could not be further from the last Christmas he’d had, with the rain thundering down and a stale cake, shared out, that someone had got from home.

Officers, already flushed with drink, began to stream in. He recognized a few. Others, in American uniforms, he did not. The regular serving officers, their clothes less than pristine, could be picked out by their faces, something rigid and remote in their expressions, the claw mark of the trenches. They spoke little and applied themselves at once to their food.

But the general staff, the men who did not go up the line, started up an instant tumult of conversation. Jokes, snatches of news, a toast to victory. Freddie realized he was biting his lip bloody. There was no malice in them but a fatal, all-encompassing ignorance. They’re fighting their war in the last world, but we’re dying in this one.

Faland appeared in the doorway.

Heads turned. In his anger, Freddie waited eagerly to see what Faland would do. No blithe ignorance, Freddie was sure, could survive under Faland’s gaze, and Faland could be cruel. Didn’t Freddie have cause to know it? Faland bowed to the room, said something, smiling. The officers looked at one another.

Hurt them,Freddie found himself thinking.

Faland put his violin to his shoulder, and began to play.

The music curled out, into the room, into the night. Talk died away as the sound built slowly. Almost sweetly. Freddie was disgusted. No, he thought. Not here. Not tonight. How dare you play them something beautiful…

And then, as though Faland had heard him, the music turned savage. Sweetness became fury, became shattering loss. Freddie had never heard the tune in his life, but somehow he knew every note.

Then Freddie understood. The music, its familiarity, the reason it hurt to hear. It was himself. His loves, his flaws, the way his world had ended. His deep, ruinous anger. His memories weren’t gone. They were there, in Faland’s moving hands, at his service. In that moment, Freddie understood Faland’s power at last; he’d shared it once. It was the poet’s alchemy, to seize the intangible or unspeakable and drag it, real, into the living world. But in Faland’s hands the gift was monstrous. The very silver on the tablecloth rattled with the force of Freddie’s anguish. It felt like a threat. It felt like magic, a cry of defiance, the voice of his soul, in a world that did not care if he had one. But the music diminished him too, flattened him to a scream in an endless wilderness. There was no place in Faland’s rendering for Laura’s laughter, or Winter’s eyes. There was only wrath. As he listened, Freddie began to be afraid. Began to wonder if he really was nothing more than the furious cry of Faland’s violin.

Yet alongside his fear, he was savagely joyful. Because the keening note of his agony was piercing the diners’ soul-deep ignorance. Freddie saw restless movement, clenching fists, darting eyes. The war was there, all around them: the rain, the dark, the hunger, the thirst. The dying. Things that didn’t have proper words, but the violin didn’t need words. It howled. Freddie’s soul wasn’t gone, but it had shrunk to raw pain, distilled to power in another person’s grasp. Freddie had forgotten he was anything but the scream of the violin. He felt himself teetering on the edge of madness, but he didn’t mind. He thought the men at the table might be doing the same. Stop, he thought to Faland. Then, Don’t stop.

A sudden crash rattled the window.

The spell of the music shattered, and Freddie leapt instinctively for the cover of the rhododendrons. But it was too late: A man was standing next to the window, eyes perfectly round. It was Bowles, his commanding officer’s servant. He was staring at Freddie.

Freddie forced himself to stillness, did the only thing he could think of. When poor ghosts walk the earth…Like a man gone beyond guilt, Freddie raised a hand in lonely salute, and ducked into the shadows. He was shaking.

No one came after him. But the music did not begin again.

---

· · ·Sometime later, a familiar step scraped the icy gravel and Faland appeared beside him, under the shadows of winter-black trees. Freddie leaned against one of them, still shivering. It hadn’t occurred to him to leave. “That’s why you want me to tell you stories. For your music.”

Faland was silent.

“But why do I have to forget?” said Freddie. Did he even want to remember?

He thought Faland wouldn’t answer, or if he did it would be a joke or a lie. But finally Faland said, “I made music for myself once.” He glanced up briefly, and Freddie saw a single star, there and gone in the grayness. “And put it into the world. But now I cannot create without destroying.”

“Why not?”

“Prying is so impolite.”

“That’s what your mirror does, isn’t it? You see who people are and play it back on the violin.”

With a faint, familiar malice, Faland said, “They have to pay for their wine somehow.”

Chilled, Freddie said, “Does everyone forget themselves?”

Faland shrugged. “People forget anyway. The war shatters them, remakes them. At least I make something of them. Otherwise they merely—fade to gray.”

Freddie said, “Make what? In the dining room, in the music—that wasn’t me. That was—that was just a scream.”

“Oh, child,” said Faland very softly. “It was you.”

Reality tilted again for an instant, as though his soul made Faland’s music but the music in turn remade him, round and round, ouroboros forever, until he was small enough to fit into the strings of the violin. He gritted his teeth, managed to say, “What’s the point of it all?”

Faland turned to look at him.

“What you played, tonight, it was just dinner music. No matter how strange or—or pretty. No matter that you got it from—from me, from all those things I told you. They heard, but it didn’t change anything. It didn’t matter. You don’t matter. But you could. I saw you in Ypres. You were like a king. Nothing touched you. You have that—and you just play games with people’s lives. Making and destroying. For what?”

“Well,” said Faland, a needling edge coming into his voice. “Perhaps I lack the right inspiration. You certainly have not given me the best of yourself, have you?” In his face was a flicker of hunger, almost lust. “Tell me what makes you wake screaming in the dark. The memory at the bottom of your soul. Give it to me.” His voice crawled over Freddie’s skin. “Tell me about the German.”

Freddie, his mouth dry, whispered, “What will you do with it?”

“Rend men’s hearts. Don’t even tell me you don’t want me to.”

Freddie said nothing. He was trembling. He’d go mad if he gave that memory. He knew it suddenly and clearly. It was a cornerstone of the tottering edifice of his soul. All that he’d become was in that memory: fear and courage, darkness and kindness. Lose it and he’d collapse like a house of cards. He couldn’t lose it. He couldn’t bear it.

Faland had stopped walking. He watched Freddie in silence. Waiting. He’d wait forever, Freddie thought in a daze, not sure if he was awed or horrified. He didn’t know what he was going to say before he opened his mouth, but he found himself whispering “You said that you were a bad soldier once. What did you do?” He thought Faland wouldn’t answer.

Faland said, “Why do you ask questions that you already know the answer to?” He relented. “I rebelled.”

He couldn’t think, with how his heart was beating. “How did you hurt your leg?”

“I fell,” said Faland. The dark eye ate up the light, darker than the haze of a tarnished mirror. “And then I woke up in darkness.”

The boy Wilfred would have been sick, and terrified. But Freddie didn’t know what to fear now. Perhaps the poet in him was exalted. Perhaps the poet understood. Perhaps Faland was a poet himself. He couldn’t speak. Faland’s voice was like frayed silk. He added, “And that is all the story you will get from me. I have shown you what I can do. I will show you more, if you will tell me why you wake up screaming, Wilfred Iven.”