Edmund Ashworth stood at the window of Balmoral House, his reflection ghostly against the grey glass. Below, the Scottish Highlands stretched into a sea of mist and heather, beautiful and indifferent to the suffering of men. He pressed his palm flat against the cold pane and felt nothing. That was the worst of it—not the pain, but the absence of it.

Captain William MacAllister had been dead for six years, and Edmund still kept his poetry notebook on the bedside table. Billy had written terrible verse—sentimental, overwrought, the sort of thing that made educated women blush—but he had written it with such earnest conviction. Edmund remembered the last letter, smuggled out of the Zulu camp before the blades found him. The handwriting was shaky, the ink blotted with something that might have been rain or might have been blood.

'I would rather face a thousand Zulu warriors than the silence that follows your letters, Edmund. Tell me you are well. Tell me the Highland air heals what the African sun broke.'

Edmund had never answered. What could he say? That the African sun had not broken him so much as it had burned away everything he had mistaken for conviction? That he had come to South Africa believing in the civilizing mission, in the noble cause of bringing order to chaos, and had instead watched British regulars set fire to villages and slit the throats of children who could not yet hold a rifle?

The door opened softly. Lady Eleanor stood in the threshold, her widow's black silk rustling like dry leaves. She was a tall woman, severe in her composure, but her eyes—those were the Ashworth eyes, grey as the sky over the moors, and they saw everything.

'The doctor says you must eat something, Edmund.'

'I am not hungry, Aunt Eleanor.'

'You have not been hungry since you returned. That is not hunger. That is a choice.'

She set a tray on the side table—broth, toast, a small pot of tea—and left without another word. Edmund watched her go. He wanted to call her back, to tell her that she was wrong, that this was not a choice but a sentence. But he said nothing. Words had lost their meaning somewhere between Rorke's Drift and Kandahar.

Three friends. That was all he had left of the army, and even they were gone now. Thomas Hartley, frozen to death in the Hindu Kush while trying to lead a column of wounded through a blizzard he had no business attempting. He had always been the brave one, the one who charged first and thought later. Robert Sinclair, who had sat beside Edmund in the siege of Khartoum as the city burned and the Nile ran red, and who had taken his own life when the evidence of London's betrayal became too heavy to carry.

Sinclair's file had been destroyed. Edmund had watched the flames consume the pages in the hearth of the War Office, standing at attention while a man in a tailcoat explained that some truths were too dangerous for the public to know. The man had been polite, almost kind. That was what made it worse.

Edmund picked up Billy's poetry notebook from the table. He had taken it from the boy's body in the Zulu camp, from among the things the warriors had left behind. The leather cover was stained with mud and something darker. He opened it to the last page, to a poem Billy had written the week before he died.

'The grass grows green on fields of red, The wind blows cold where soldiers bled. But I shall sleep beneath the heather, And dream of home and mother's weather.'

Edmund closed the book and placed it back on the table. He turned to the window again. The rain continued to fall on the Highlands, indifferent and eternal. In the distance, a lone stag moved through the mist, its antlers catching the weak light like a crown.

He thought sometimes of sending the evidence to Parliament. He had copies—Sinclair's notes, copied by hand in the weeks before his death. But to whom? The men who had authorized the violence were dead or retired or honored. The ones who remained had forgotten, or chosen to forget. And Edmund—what was he? A mad colonel, soft in the head from too much sun and too much wine, muttering about conspiracies in the drawing rooms of London?

He picked up his pen and began to write. Not a letter to Parliament. Not a memoir. Just words, the way Billy had written them, terrible and earnest and true.

'They sent us to civilize the world, But found it already civil enough— Civil enough to kill us quietly, Civil enough to call it duty.'

The ink bled on the damp paper. Edmund did not notice. He wrote until his hand cramped, until the candle burned low, until the rain sounded less like weeping and more like breathing. When he finally set down the pen, he looked at the page and saw that he had written something that might have been a poem, or might have been a confession, or might have been both.

Outside, the stag disappeared into the mist. The house was silent. Edmund Ashworth sat alone in the library of Balmoral House, surrounded by the ghosts of men who had trusted him, and wondered if memory was a gift or a curse.

He did not know the answer. He suspected he never would.