“Well. It’s valuable. And it will be yours one day.”

All her geese are swans, thought Jean.

“Don’t take it off now—it’ll only get lost. I might not be seeing him again for some time, if ever.” But as she said this she felt sure that she would, and soon.

“Shall we wind this wool, then?” she said, drawing up her chair so that they sat opposite each other, knees nearly touching.

From her knitting bag her mother produced the front panel of Dorrie’s jumper and unhitched it from its holding pin. It took no more than a gentle tweak to begin the process of unraveling months of painstaking work. Jean held out her arms and watched with secret satisfaction the scribbled wool turning and turning around her tiny, delicate hands.

To keep your fingers white and soft, dig your nails into the pith of an old lemon skin after completing any dirty jobs at the kitchen sink.

5

The former matron of St. Cecilia’s clinic in Broadstairs was called Alice Halfyard, for which curious and memorable name Jean was very grateful, as it made the job of tracing her considerably easier. Jean had made inquiries ahead of her visit and discovered that St. Cecilia’s itself was no longer a convalescent home of any kind but a boy’s prep school on the south side of the town, on Ramsgate Road.

Less than a year after Gretchen Edel’s residency, the boys’ school around the corner had looked to expand into new premises and made an offer for the large Edwardian villa. The patients were sent home or dispatched to other sanatoriums along the coast, and what were once wards and treatment rooms for the sick now held desks and chairs, blackboards and coat hooks.

The headmaster of this establishment, now Anselm House, had a wooden leg and walked with an ebony cane. He offered to take Jean on a tour of the building before showing her the St. Cecilia’s archive. It was lesson time and the school was quiet; the classroom doors were open because of the heat and as they passed along the corridor the murmured voices within fell silent at the tap and shuffle of his approaching footsteps.

He halted at the last class. The boys rose, as one, with a solemn scraping of chairs. The teacher, evidently accustomed to this kind of unheralded interruption, paused at the blackboard, on which he was drawing what looked to Jean like some terrible monster but was in fact just a flea, greatly magnified.

“This is Miss Swinney, an important newspaper reporter from London,” he said in a rather free interpretation of the facts. Perhaps to the people of Broadstairs, London was a concept that stretched as far as the Medway River. “So we must hope she takes away a good impression of the place.”

Jean gave the room her warmest, most reassuring smile. She would have liked to see how the lesson proceeded.

“That looked rather interesting,” she said, in a half whisper, when they had walked on. “I wondered if it was an introduction to the poetry of John Donne.”