The best time to pick the pockets of the dead and dying is on a battlefield, it’s axiomatic, but that’s not why she came with her silver salver of water — from where? Legend does not tell us, nor how she was able to distinguish one side from the other to know who to give comfort to.

One man, more dead than living pulled himself with the last of his strength onto her lap, the richly embroidered apron of her skirts — it was at that exact moment that the little red flowers that the politicians sing of still began to spring up as though by infernal magic and the black birds that the field is now known by began to circle overhead singing of the bounty below. When her hand touched his pale dying cheek she knew that everything she touched thereafter would wither.

This was not the curse, no — it was that centuries later, a painting of this moment (or perhaps one done in cross-stitch by the pious lady of the house) should hang in every émigré household, and that she forever be kept looking down into his face.