50 pages • 1 hour read
Katherine ArdenThe Warm Hands of Ghosts
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 28-36Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 28 Summary: “And Lo a Black Horse”
As April approaches, Lieutenant Young arrives at Couthove to visit Pim and to warn everyone that a German spy with an amputated arm named Winter has escaped custody. Young asks Pim out to dinner. Pim accepts, planning to ask him to help her find Faland’s hotel afterward. Now used to the motorcycle, Laura plans to visit Kate the same day as Pim’s dinner with Young. She asks Jones to watch out for Pim while she is gone. Jones teases her for being overprotective but promises to do what he can. Surprisingly, Laura trusts him.
Chapter 29 Summary: “A Slow and Silent Stream”
Freddie finds Faland staring into the mirror one day and surmises that Faland hates the war as much as he does. Faland says he hates and loves it at the same time and cannot leave because people choose him: “They say Better you than that. Over and over they choose me. […] They hand their souls to me. As you did. That’s why I’m here. Because I cannot bring myself to go” (194).
Faland asks for another story, and Freddie tells him about his time in the trenches and charging up Passchendaele Ridge. However, when Faland asks to hear about his German friend, Freddie refuses. He does not want to lose his memories of Winter.
Chapter 30 Summary: “And to the Woman Were Given Two Wings”
Laura visits Kate, who tells her a story about a young soldier who brought in a German prisoner named Winter just days after Laura was injured at Brandhoek. Winter had Freddie’s jacket and ID tags but was too feverish to speak coherently, and his arm had to be amputated. He claimed that Freddie had died and that he himself had taken Freddie’s jacket as a souvenir before being captured. However, one night while addled with morphine, Winter said Freddie was not dead and that he’d promised to save Freddie. Laura is skeptical, but Kate says she has seen things she cannot explain. She recalls one soldier who saw his brother’s ghost in the trenches and said that “ghosts have warm hands” (204). In other words, Kate believed Winter.
Before heading back to Couthove, Laura drives to the town of Poperinghe to speak with Freddie’s former commander.
Chapter 31 Summary: “The Lost Archangel”
One day, Faland offers to show Freddie what he does with the stories he takes. They leave the hotel and walk through a dark haze that brings them to General Headquarters, much farther away than they should be able to reach. Faland leaves Freddie to stand by a window and listen while he enters a building where officers are having a party.
Freddie hears Faland playing his violin and understands the music: It is “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” (211). In the music, Freddie feels his anger come violently alive.
Later, Faland explains that his music forces the officers to remember the pain of the war. He asks for the story of Freddie’s German friend again, claiming he could turn it into powerful music. Again, Freddie refuses. He feels he will lose touch with reality if he loses the memory of Winter, which has become “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” (213-14). Freddie asks again who Faland is. Faland says that he was a soldier who rebelled once. And then he “fell [and] woke up in darkness” (214).
Chapter 32 Summary: “And I Saw the Holy City”
In Poperinghe, Laura sees her mother’s ghost again. Laura runs, but the ghost appears again, pointing at something behind Laura. Then Young appears and invites her to dinner at Gage’s house with Pim and others.
At dinner, news spreads that the queen of Belgium wishes to tour the area. Pim suggests she visit Couthove, and Gage agrees. Suddenly, violin music plays, and a riot breaks out on the street. Pim runs out, hoping to find Faland. Laura follows and is trampled by the rioting crowd. She sees Winter in the crowd and tries to ask him about Freddie, but he runs.
Chapter 33 Summary: “Dream Not of Other Worlds”
The riot ends, and Laura and Pim return to Couthove. Jones is waiting for them and sees that Laura is injured. He takes her to his room to clean her up, but Laura is overcome by his gentleness. She has defenses against men who lash out in panic or pain but cannot withstand Jones’s care and concern. She flees from the room.
Chapter 34 Summary: “To Lose Thee Were to Lose Myself”
Freddie continues telling stories to Faland. Still, he does not tell Faland the story of Winter. Then, one night, he sees three women enter the hotel, his sister among them. He is shocked to realize she is alive. He watches her and the two other women as Faland speaks with them. Laura’s companion, a beautiful blonde woman, stares into the mirror, and then Laura joins her. Freddie drifts through the crowd toward her. She sees him in the mirror and turns, but he cannot push through the crowd to reach her and passes out. When he wakes, he is alone in his room again, unsure if he was dreaming or not.
Chapter 35 Summary: “What Hath Night to Do with Sleep?”
In the middle of the night, ambulances arrive with more wounded soldiers. Laura and the others work tirelessly to care for them. At dawn, Pim sees a wounded man hiding outside, and Laura recognizes Winter. He has been shot. Winter tells Laura that she must save Freddie from Faland, and Laura begs Jones to sneak Winter into the hospital to treat him while hiding him from the authorities. Jones realizes Winter is the escaped German prisoner but agrees to help, even giving Winter his own blood in a transfusion.
Laura does not understand why Jones is helping her, and Jones says, “Because you asked me to” (241). Stunned, Laura does not respond, thinking, “No, it’s not real, whatever this is. Good things don’t grow in this rotten earth” (241). They place Winter in the ward with other patients, hoping no one will notice the extra patient.
Chapter 36 Summary: “Pandemonium”
It is now March of 1918. Freddie wants to see if Laura is safe, so Faland offers to help in exchange for a story about something Freddie fears. Freddie tells him about Winters saving him from drowning in mud and simultaneously forgets the color of Winter’s eyes. Faland takes Freddie to Couthove, where he plays his violin outside the hospital, the music filled with Freddie’s terror. Freddie screams for Faland to stop, but no one can hear him over the screaming soldiers in the hospital. In the chaos, Freddie sees Laura through a window tending to a patient. The blonde woman Freddie saw with Laura runs out to them. She speaks briefly with Faland and then returns to the hospital.
More time passes, and Faland takes Freddie to Poperinghe, where Faland plays music filled with mindless rage. A riot breaks out, and Freddie sees Laura in the crowd. Then he sees Winter and suddenly remembers his eyes are blue. Winter tries to push through the crowd toward him, but soldiers appear and shoot him.
Freddie begs Faland to help Winter. Faland offers a deal: They will take Winter to Couthove, but then Freddie must tell the story of the pillbox, “about the darkness, and how [he] came to love that man” (258).
Chapters 28-36 Analysis
Three different plot threads now come into focus in the novel: Freddie losing his identity to Faland, Laura trying to find out what happened to her brother, and Pim’s compulsion to find Faland, with hints that she is planning something. The author uses misdirection to keep the reader guessing, particularly as Laura continually underestimates Pim’s deviousness. However, when Pim appears even in Freddie’s point-of-view chapters, it signals that Pim has been lying to Laura the whole time. This contributes to the sense of impending doom as the three separate threads begin to converge.
This slow process of convergence begins in Chapter 34, when Freddie sees Laura in Faland’s hotel. Laura and the reader have already experienced this moment from Laura’s perspective back in Chapter 19, when Laura saw Freddie in the hotel crowd but assumed she was hallucinating. Several other incidents from Freddie’s perspective similarly provide new context for Laura’s previous experiences, such as the night the hospital patients went into screaming panic in Chapter 26, which corresponds to Faland taking Freddie to Couthove to see his sister in Chapter 36. As the out-of-sync timelines converge, the novel thus relies less on mystery or ambiguity to generate suspense; instead, it is the question of the characters’ ultimate fate that invites readers to keep reading.
These chapters also contribute to the thematic complexity of the novel in several ways. First, Faland’s power emerges through the motif of music. Music is often said to capture and elicit emotion, but Faland’s music takes this idea to its extreme by inciting terror, rage, and even violence in those who hear it. This first occurs in Chapter 31, which also makes Faland’s connection to the devil more explicit. Faland says he was once a soldier who “rebelled” and “fell”—characteristics of Lucifer, who rebelled against God and fell from heaven to become the leader of hell. To reinforce this allusion, the chapter title, “The Lost Archangel,” borrows from John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, which chronicles Lucifer’s fall and the creation of hell. Many chapter titles from here to the end similarly derive from Paradise Lost, inextricably linking the war to apocalyptic images of hell and thus developing the theme of War and the End of the World.
A second notable episode develops themes of both The Impact of Grief and Trauma and The Resilience of the Human Spirit. Kate’s story about a soldier in Chapter 30 lends the novel its title and provides the thematic quote, “ghosts have warm hands” (204). The image of ghosts with warm hands highlights their symbolism: They represent not only grief but its long shadow over the present, which resembles the lingering touch of a loved one. At the same time, the image of ghosts as warm and protective suggests that such memories can be healing.
Further developing the importance of human connection, Chapter 36 explicitly states something that has remained simmering beneath the surface throughout the narrative, which is that Freddie is in love with Winter. Though Freddie’s feelings have long been implied in his refusal to lose his memories of Winter—something he believes would mark the loss of his soul—the exact nature of those feelings was somewhat ambiguous. Now, however, neither Freddie nor the reader can ignore the romantic nature of his feelings for Winter. This adds new complexity to Freddie’s motives and lays the groundwork for further exploration of resilience, which will arise out of his love for Winter.
Related Titles
By Katherine Arden
