“Don’t worry,” she says. “Johann will find her. Just think, she’s in Switzerland. Wherever she is, it’s not far.”

“She can’t be here. She’s in Nassau.”

“Well, it seems she’s not. She came after you.”

“It’s impossible,” he says.

“She’s an intrepid woman, I suppose.”

“She was supposed to stay in Nassau!”

Elfriede folds the telegram and slips it in her cardigan pocket with the envelope, all the while cursing herself for not reading the thing first. When would she learn? Telegrams always contained something shocking. Benedict’s bracing himself on the arm of the bench, trying to rise, and the image of Wilfred, sitting on this very bench, and her young self poised on the wall behind him, almost staggers her. But not quite. She keeps enough wit to reach out and take his arm.

“Benedict, no. Where are you going?”

“To find her.”

“Don’t be silly. You can hardly walk yet.”

“I thought she was safe,” he says. “I thought she was in Nassau.”

“Well, it seems she came after you, like a good wife should. Now sit down.”

“Why didn’t someone tell her I was alive?”

“Because by the time your brother was able to get word to his old army friend and arrange that little ruse in Colditz for us, she was already gone. Sit, please. You’re alive, she’s alive. Johann will find her somehow. Sit, Benedict.”

But Benedict will not sit. Just like his father, she thinks, as she follows him down the paved path, piles of slush to the left and the right of him, the mild smell of springtime leaking from the stones, and back inside the walls of the monastery. You can’t just keep a man like that away from this woman he loves. They will have to dig up one of the old straitjackets from the cellar or something.

But isn’t this no more than she deserves? Maybe she had no choice in the beginning, when Mrs. Thorpe had her moved from the hospital in Inverness to a— Well, let’s call it what it was, a loony bin. Naturally, Mrs. Thorpe, being the sort of woman who never spent a sunless day in her life, who saw the bright side even of her own son’s death—He died a hero, just as his father would have wanted, remember that, Elfriede, don’t dishonor his memory with these stupid moods of yours—thought it best for the children to remove this sodden, dangerous influence from their lives. A woman who tried to drown herself, what next? Drown the children?