Thank you, as always, for the reviews, they're never far from my mind when I'm writing out this story. It is lovely to hear what worked and what you liked,museum to know what you did not. Here's a chapter I've had mentally composed for a long time now. I'd love to know what you think of it.

1917 is a bad year for news in Canada. In January the Austro-Hungarian troops conquer Forlani in Italy. They have begun to recover when the news of what the Globe calls 'the trouble in Russia' in a moment of spectacular understatement, is brought home to the inhabitants of Sussex Avenue. At the time Nina is visiting them, sitting with Persis on the floor of the front room.

'Let me see,' she says, holding her hands out for the paper tucked under Owen Ford's arm.

'What in God's name are they doing to my country?' She is speaking somewhere in the region of Mozart's immortal Queen of the Night, her words as fast as any coloratura's speech patterns have a right to be.

'I thought you were Canadian really?' says Owen with attempted lightness, but he hands her the paper all the same. It was what Nina had said to Ken for years, and her classmates at first in school and then at the conservatory. Leslie gives her husband a look but seemingly it is the right thing to say after all because suddenly Nina is herself again, her voice back in the modal register, what a non-musician would call speaking pitch, and she is laughing.

'I am, really. It was mother's country properly –but it didn't mean I didn't fall in love more than a little, with its music, an the language –I meant it that evening I said I could never lose my Russian from having heard and spoken it so much at home –and the stories… Russia was always a kind of mythic place for me and for my sisters. Nothing could happen to it. Not like this –and now of course, it has. I suppose it shall go more wrong still and we shall live through that too. If nothing else we will someday be able to boast that we got to be very good at living through terrible things.'

That was February. There would be a divisive election and the introduction of the War Measures Act, to say nothing of conscription before the year went out with the explosion of the Halifax Harbour.

Amidst all of this there comes in April one of those rare moments that can be looked back on with relief and even a certain amount of pleasure. It is Easter week and the weather mild. Persis and Nina are sitting in the little attic room that is Nina's in the house on the corner of Sussex and Huron.

'Did I ever tell you,' says Persis as she and Nina sit sewing, 'what Ken's pet wish used to be when we were little?'

'No,' says Nina good-naturedly around a mouthful of pins. 'At least, I don't think so.'

'He was always trying to tell me I ought to marry Walter – 'I'd trust him with you, Butterfly,' he would say.'

Nina pauses in her sewing partway through a rocking stitch to study Persis. Her needle presses uncomfortably against the finger that stays it but that does not matter; this particular remember-when of Persis's has risen up from seemingly nowhere and Nina is unsure if she ought to smile or not. But Persis is laughing over the memory and it is safe to join in.

'You never took him seriously about it then?'

'Nina, would you trust an idea of Ken's if it were about anything half so serious?'

'Do I have to answer that?' Nina ducks her head and goes back to the hospital gown she is sewing.

'If the stitches don't all come out of this it will be a new kind of miracle,' she says.

'You want smaller stitches,' offers Persis.

'No,' says Nina, 'I want a thimble for ever finger and the chance to sing this gown into being. I can't do a thing usefully with my hands –I was brought into the world to furnish it with good music, nothing more.'

'Well I won't disagree with you about that. Have you had news lately?'

'News?' says Nina, her attention seemingly given over to her sewing.

'Letters,' clarifies Persis.

'Have you?'

'Turn about is always fair.'

'Yes but where am I supposed to be getting them and from whom?' Nina demands, not without a certain amount of curiosity.

'Nina, if I knew, I wouldn't need to ask.'

Nina shakes her head.

'The only person I write to, and that with irregularity is your Ken and you are hardly going to accuse me of falling in love with him. We should kill each other in a matter of minutes if anything like that were to happen.' Her needle finds it's way into the soft place between nail bed and finger and Nina brings it up sharply, struck by a thought as she does so.

'Have you heard anything from Ken lately?' she asks of Persis.

'It was what made me think of that old memory of Walter. It's mum and Aunt Anne, not me, who are haunted by those as a rule. I'd almost forgotten about this one until Ken wrote –here.'

Persis sets her own sewing by –a 'hopeless case gown' – and extracts a letter from the pocket of her dress.

March -1917

Your letter of this October just gone has finally caught up with me, Butterfly, as come to that, have all the letters I should have had months ago. I don't know where They thought I was to have made such a hash of delivering them but I don't suppose it matters now. Your letter particularly came through just at the same time as orders for –but that's one of those things I can't tell you, isn't it? Butterfly, when this war is over and we've won, do you suppose we'll ever go back to telling each other anything in plain English the way we used to do? Anyway, the point is that for a long minute –it wasn't a clock minute but one of those protracted time-has-stopped-minutes, does that make sense? –I just couldn't issue those orders. I had your letter about Walter and I kept seeing him in place of the other fellows in my division –I felt sending them out over the top would be somehow killing him all over again. Now that doesn't make sense, I know, but that was what I thought. Of course the moment passed and I went back to telling time by a clock, but not until after I'd had time to think how glad I was nothing had ever come of my childish matchmaking –do you remember? I suppose you must, you never had much patience for it. You'd throw a book at me as soon as let me get to then end of an idea once I'd got started. Just as well too, because if you had gone along with me, think what harm I'd have done you.

But tell me seriously, and in plain Before-the-War-English, Butterfly, how much in earnest am I to take your writing to Carl Meredith? I don't mean that to sound as Victorian as it does, and I swear I won't interfere –I'm only asking so that I have it all clear in my own mind. After months of being starved for your letters, and mother's and Aunt Anne's, I've suddenly got a passel of them am having to play catch-up on news, and I don't like it at all.

That's reminded me, I will have to write Aunt Anne and apologise being so long saying anything about Walter when we were always so close. I have a horror of what she must think, with never a line from me. If I weren't convinced it would look all wrong, I would ask you to write ahead and explain what a muddle They (that awful unnamed They again) had got into over sorting out our post. But I think that had better come from me. And with that letter still to write, and lights-out looming, it had better be goodnight, Butterfly. Tell Stuart well done over that concert of his, won't you, even if it was months ago now, and wish Nina luck with the Rusalka.

Yours ever,

Ken

'To think,' says Nina, handing the letter back, 'I should ever agree with Ken Ford about anything. But in this I do.'

'I can't think why –you know I tell you everything important,' Persis says.

'The trouble is, I don't know that you do, not just at the moment,' says Nina not unkindly.

'It's just –I only ever seem to have half the pieces at a given moment where letters from Carl are concerned, and I'm not asking for the other half but I haven't quite forgotten either what that kind of letter-grounded connectivity between people can be like.'

'No –I know,' says Persis. 'Now it really is your turn. I know you've had at least one letter –you looked as if you'd been handed the moon.'

'Oh that,' says Nina and laughs, 'now that really is nothing.'

'It can't have been,' Persis unbelievingly says.

'Well for the time being it is. And that, as you might say, is that. Come on, that's the college bells going for evening and we agreed we'd go up to Knox for the prayer meeting. We'll be late.'

They are not late, and afterwards they are slow to leave the church with its cool interior and high-vaulted arches. They come out into the gathering dusk of an April evening, inches away from twilight. The world is humming with sounds of spring; chirruping birds, throbbing crickets and over these the voice, unlooked for, of a young man singing with exquisite technique,

Ah! Mes Amis quell jour de fête

Je vous marcher sous vos drapeaux

L'amour qui m'a tourné la tête

Désormais, désormais, me rend un héros.*

At first it is only the music that strikes the two girls, standing on the lawn outside Knox church overlooking Spadina Avenue and squinting into the dying light. Then it comes home first to Persis and then Nina that the singer, whoever he is, is on a bicycle. He comes nearer, still singing and Nina begins to count the High Cs on her fingers; one, two, three…Fair-haired and exultant with cheeks the red of yew berries the cyclist comes suddenly into focus, haloed by the last of the light and with a jolt Persis realises this young man, who she has not recognized, is 'little' Stuart Ross of South Drive and he is riding his older brother's bicycle. Nina is still counting, seven, eight, nine, and so Persis's exclamation –'he's grown into Robert's bicycle!' –is initially lost on her.

'Tell me again,' Nina says.

'Stuart,' says Persis, 'he's grown into Robert's bicycle.'

Then, running down the walk to Stuart approaching on his –no Robert's –bicycle –'Stuart, however do you come to be up this way?'

'Do you know,' says Nina, coming and hovering behind Persis, 'you landed every one of those Cs?'

'Have you heard?' he asks, ignoring them both, triumph of the High Cs and all, 'have you heard?' His breath comes in short, sharp snatches. He is out of air from the effort of singing and cycling.

'Have you heard?'

'Heard what, Stuart?' Suddenly Persis is to all intents and purposes, again in the back garden of the Sussex Avenue house, sitting under the yew trees. They cannot be in the middle of some new and different war, she reasons –there is nowhere left to go to war with, having brought the whole world into this one –and for a moment her own breath catches painfully in the expectation of victory. After two and some years such a thing has begun to feel impossible.

'Vimy Ridge,' says Stuart, still breathless. He climbs down off of the bicycle and onto the pavement, leaning against the handlebars of the bicycle for support.

'The British couldn't take it and the French couldn't either but the Canadians have done it!' Now his chest is swollen not from breathlessness but the luxury of being able to deliver good news to people who matter to him. It is not a privilege the world has allowed him for what feels months. The sunlight makes a last try at brightness and strikes the whites of his teeth. He looks expectantly at them but there is nothing meaningful to say.

'Have they really?' Nina manages at last, sounding and looking unbelieving.

'How can you be sure?' says Persis.

'I heard it on my way home from the harbour. I was 'cycling out by the water and as I was coming back along Front Street I sort of stopped by where the Globe is –where it gets printed, you know –and heard them talking about it as they…' Stuart reaches about mentally for the word he wants.

'What's it called when they arrange all the letters on the boards so they can print the paper?' he asks at last.

'Typesetting,' says Persis promptly.

'Right, well they were typesetting then, and one of the fellows doing the typesetting said he was awfully glad it was Vimy we'd won because that was easy to spell –not like some of the names we've had in this war.'

'Easier to say too,' says Persis, thinking of her mother's long-ago quandary about the pronunciation of Przemysl. Then remembering, 'but if you were over on Front Street then how on earth did you end up here? We're hardly on your way home.'

'I came up to tell you,' says Stuart simply and unaffectedly.

'I heard them getting the news ready for the evening paper and I thought I'd just come and let you know –only no one seemed to be in at the house and then it struck me that you might have gone to the church because Peggy seems to always be at ours when she's not home, doing things to do with the war; Red Cross and Sewing and Recruitment talks, things like that. Was I right?'

They begin, all three of them to turn back towards Sussex Avenue, Stuart laboriously walking the bicycle alongside the curb. Standing on the pavement he is now higher than it is and has to bend over cripplingly to maneuver it alongside them.

'You were,' says Persis. 'Come back with us won't you, and have supper; you've earned it after all that bicycling about. We can ring South Drive and let them know.'

'Oh, no one there will mind,' says Stuart carelessly. 'They'll think I've got choir or a singing lesson or something on after school. Is that all right? I mean, do you mind?'

Then, his excitement ebbing with the delivery of his news, 'did I really hit all those High Cs, Nina? Did I really?'

*Words from 'Ah Mes Amis!' from Donizetti's La Fille du Régiment. It is infamously difficult for the tenor who sings it because of its nine High Cs.