It was slightly startling to be given personal credit for the project, and I felt an obligation to set her—and Tommy—straight. “Actually, the canal was here long before England was even a country. Ramses the Second was the first Egyptian to begin it, although it wasn’t completed until the days of Darius, about twenty-four hundred years ago. Not that it’s been open all that time. The silt blocks it, and a couple of times it was deliberately filled in for defence purposes, but we can hardly be given credit for thinking of the thing. Anyone who looked at a rudimentary map would be tempted to get out the shovels.”

“Well!” she exclaimed. “I never. And Tommy said . . . But aren’t you clever, to know these things? I should have gone to school, university I mean, but somehow it just never seemed to come up.”

“It’s not too late.”

“I suppose,” she said dubiously, but we both knew she never would. She spent perhaps thirty seconds mourning her lack of education, then held out one arm alongside mine, which was growing darker by the day. (For, whatever our disguises might be in the weeks ahead, I doubted that pale-skinned English lady would be one of them.)

“When Mama notices how brown you’re going, don’t be surprised if she has ten fits. Whenever she finds me sitting in the sun, she gives me a lecture about wrinkles until I put on my topee.”

“Topees make me feel as if I’m speaking inside a bucket,” I said.

She giggled. “Does your mother nag you, too, or does that stop as soon as you’re married?”

“My mother’s dead,” I told her.

Her expressive face crumpled. “Oh, I am so sorry. How stupid of me, I didn’t—”

I interrupted before she burst into tears. “Don’t worry, it’s been a very long time. So tell me, have you decided to be a Kewpie doll or a harem dancer?”

The fancy-dress ball was to be the following night, and the ship quivered with the thrill of anticipation, the ship’s tailors working round the clock, sworn to secrecy. Holmes and I planned on taking advantage of the evening’s empty cabins to begin juggling clubs. Wooden belaying pins when dropped make quite a noise.

My distraction worked. Sunny clapped her hands and leant towards me as if there might be spies lurking on the other side of the crate to ask, “Have you ever been to the cabarets in Berlin?”

I reared back to stare at the child, speechless. A Berlin night-club was not a thing I’d have thought Sunny’s mother would have allowed her daughter within a mile of.

“Er, yes.”