Warlight

Rachel is placed in a boarding school near Wales, and Nathaniel is sent to the US before re-settling in the north of England at a university. Rose returns from her mission, and Nathaniel spends his summers with her in her Suffolk childhood house, White Paint, in an area called the Saints. Reports of Rose’s activities are in the news, but her identity remains hidden; only her codename, Viola, is mentioned. Nathaniel distrusts her for abandoning him and Rachel, and Rose does not explain where she has been. The only clues Nathaniel sees are the new scars on her arm.

The narrative shifts to 1959, when Nathaniel is 28 years old. A decade after Rose’s death, Nathaniel is recruited by British Intelligence to censor war records at the Foreign Office archives in a project called “The Silent Correction.” After the war, nations sought to conceal or destroy compromising evidence in their records to build sanitized histories. Nathaniel does not mention to the recruiters that he hopes to find answers about his mother’s absence in the archives. The records show that war and violence continued after the armistice.

After accepting the archives job, Nathaniel purchases Mrs. Linette Malakite’s house, a property in his mother’s hometown, the Saints.