‘If your dreams wake you, I shall be there beside you,’ Rupert said softly. ‘And the further you get from Simon Barnier, the less they will haunt you. You will always be quite safe with me, I promise you.’

‘Will I?’ Hélène looked up into his face. ‘Annette said that it would be different with someone you love. When I asked her about wanting to marry Pierre, she said it was quite different to what had happened to her before.’

Rupert did not ask what had happened to Annette before, but he said, ‘She was quite right. It is quite different when you love someone as much as I love you.’

‘But… but supposing it isn’t?’

Rupert got to his feet and said, ‘Do you remember that last day, before I went home to England?’

‘When we had the picnic? Yes, of course.’

‘And when I was leaving, that evening? When I held you in my arms when we said goodbye?’

Hélène nodded. She had held the memory close in the weeks after he’d gone. ‘Yes,’ she whispered, ‘I remember.’

‘You didn’t mind me holding you close then, did you? Will you let me hold you again, now, before I go?’

Hélène looked up at him as he pulled her gently to her feet, and then as he slipped his arms round her, she buried her face in his shoulder, clinging to him as if her life depended on it. He made no move to kiss her, simply held her close until he felt her relax. Then he let her go and she sank back down into her chair, and he sat on the floor beside her.

‘This time,’ he said, ‘I won’t go back to England without you. I can’t risk losing you again.’

They sat together as the shafts of dusty sunlight moved slowly across the floor, talking to each other as they had used to.

Hélène told him how they had managed, with the help of Pierre and the generosity of Madame Sauze, to escape from St Etienne and maintain themselves in the little apartment, taking in sewing and working on the stall in the market.

‘I had to learn so many things,’ she said. ‘Things I had never thought about before.’

Rupert told her of all the sadness that had overtaken his family at Pilgrim’s Oak, not only the deaths of his father and wife, but of his mother’s slide into senility and Fran’s perfidy. He told her everything and she listened to the pain in his voice, holding his hands enfolded in her own.

‘Will you be happy to come back there with me?’ It was a question he had not dared to ask earlier. She’d said she loved him, she’d said she would marry him, but was he asking too much of her? Could she really be happy living in a house she didn’t know, in a country she didn’t know, with a family who so far had clearly not wanted her?

‘As long as I have you,’ she said, ‘I will be happy anywhere.’