‘Oh. Of course. Go on, darling.’ The woman glanced at something on the sheet of paper and frowned. Zoë suddenly felt smaller than the ants she had used to watch, just a few days before, crawling around under the hollyhocks in the garden at home.

‘I think they fell in the sea,’ she whispered, and started to cry. She stuck her knuckles in her eyes to hide them from the woman, though what she wanted to do was bury her head in her skirts that would smell, she knew, of lavender. Of Mama. But Miss Butland always taught her not to cry in front of strangers.

‘I … oh, dear.’ Kindness fought with impatience in the woman’s voice and won. ‘Can you tell me a little more, honey?’

‘Do I have to?’

‘I know it’s hard …’

‘I don’t know!’ Zoë had been twisting the hem of her tunic so tightly in her hands that her fingers hurt. ‘I don’t!’

Just then, another man appeared out of the crowd, a nice-looking older man with a funny little beard. He looked a little bit like Mr Venizelos, the prime minister, whose pictures were on every lamp post and wall in Smyrna. He talked to the woman behind his hand, but too loudly, and Zoë heard everything.

‘I know about this one, Miss Denham,’ he said – another American, not Mr Venizelos after all. ‘She was pulled out of the sea near Kea by one of the transports. The captain reported drifting wreckage – this little thing was clinging on to the mast. Likely they were run down by another ship. Three navies operating in those waters that night, and it was dark …’ He shrugged. ‘No other survivors, I’m afraid – the transport reported two bodies in the water.’ He tapped his finger on the woman’s writing pad. ‘Orphan,’ he said briskly. ‘When you’re finished here, we need you over by the medical tent.’

The American woman – Miss Denham, Zoë remembered, because a polite young person always remembers people’s names – turned back to her, mouth set in a pout of sympathy, rather like the one that Miss Butland would give her when she wasn’t really sorry for telling her off. Lucky Miss Butland, who had gone off on an English battleship after giving her a kiss and whispering, See you soon, petal, into her ear. But Zoë had decided that Miss Denham really was sorry for her, a little bit.

‘It was dark,’ she told her, the words spilling out, English words, because suddenly it struck her that she might never speak English again. ‘It was morning, and we were sailing along.’ She licked her dry lips, remembering. ‘I was looking right at Mama and Papa and then they weren’t there. Then it was dark. I was so cold. In the water.’