The mainland ferry set sail for Liverpool, and I sighed with relief as I unwrapped the sandwiches I’d bought at a kiosk on the pier in Douglas. (Roast beef! I hadn’t tasted beef that wasn’t out of a tin since the war started.) Taxi, rail station, taxi, ferry, loading and unloading everything at each stop, helping Frau von Arnim in and out of vehicles and up and down from platforms—hauling all the travelling cases along with us again, hers full of record albums and mine full of books. There was the gramophone, too. We had to wear the furs; I felt like a trapper. Had Nancy Campbell suspected the fuss? She must have.

But at last I had a chance to breathe, with a long night at sea ahead. We weren’t in a cabin, but the ferry lounge was more comfortable than the train, and Frau von Arnim’s furs were incredibly warm and surprisingly light. I had never worn anything so soft. Johanna von Arnim sat straight and elegant in her own beaver coat and fox stole, with her back to the Isle of Man as we steamed away from it. Her thin powder-white hair peeped out beneath her fur hat, and her watery blue eyes gleamed as if they were wet.

“Good riddance to that godforsaken place,” she said abruptly. “Tell me, my dear, how does a Jamaican schoolgirl end up traipsing across Britain with a released German detainee?”

I swallowed. I hadn’t yet had to tell anyone about Mummy and Daddy being killed—my landladies were there when it happened, and it was nobody else’s business. Mrs. Campbell hadn’t even asked.

“I needed work,” I said evasively.

“No people of your own to go to?”

“Not here,” I said.

I bent over my cup of tea.

“You’re dreadfully young not to have any people,” said Johanna von Arnim.

I didn’t want to talk about it.

But I’d just make it worse for later if I was mysterious. It wouldn’t be the last time I’d have to tell someone, even if it was the first.

“My parents were killed by bombs last month,” I said. “In the same week. Not in the same place. My mother, she was called Carrie, Caroline Adair—she—she was riding in the front of a bus that fell into a crater when Balham tube station was bombed. You might have seen the pictures in the papers.”

“No, we aren’t allowed newspapers,” the old woman said gently. She cocked her head to favor her left ear, listening carefully over the ferry’s engines. “How terrible, and how unhappy you must be! Were you in the accident?”