Felix Baer couldn’t have slept at all, because he kept changing records and winding the gramophone. Perhaps he was keeping himself awake on purpose, waiting for his contact from Intelligence.

The music was only a lullaby lilt through the closed doors and the passage between us, but it must have been jolly loud in the room where he was playing it. By and by I noticed that most of what he played—most of Jane’s records, actually—were all forbidden in Germany now.

So he was treating himself to a feast of beautiful music from before the war, from before the Nazis, when people could listen to whatever they liked.

I wanted to hate him. But the music made my heart sore, and I remembered the warm touch of his palm against mine, and his bony fingers flying over the piano keys. What was it like to be a musician and not be able to play music you love? I thought of my flute and all it meant to me, lessons with Mummy, duets with Daddy, sitting on the roof of the flat in London trying to imitate the starlings at dusk when I should have been practicing.

I drifted off once more, and this time when I woke I heard nothing but the wind in the Scotch pines on the knoll above the Limehouse, and Jane gently snoring beside me. Felix Baer was finished playing records.

I knew there wasn’t a thing Jane could do if that German decided to shoot us in our sleep. But I didn’t think he would, not after she let him share her music. Lying next to her, I felt like I was in the safest place in the house.

So finally I went to sleep properly.

Hours before it grew light, I opened my eyes and stared into a wholly unknown dark. I had absolutely no idea where I was. On a train? Or a boat? In an air-raid shelter? England, Jamaica, the Isle of Man? I wasn’t scared—I just had no idea where I was. I’d been going so hard for so long that I’d lost my place in the world.

But I knew the sleeping person beside me was not Mummy but Johanna von Arnim, otherwise known as Jane Warner. This reminded me I’d come to Scotland to look after her, and I was in the Limehouse, and down the passage was a music-loving German pilot.

My stomach lurched with fear and fascination. It was hopeless trying to go back to sleep. I lay stiffly.

Before long there came a tapping at the door, soft but insistent. Jane slept on as if she were completely deaf. What if I opened the door and it was Felix Baer, with his pianist’s hands and tired eyes? What would I say? We didn’t share any language but music.

I found myself whistling the opening bars of the Hebrides Overture under my breath.