“I’m sorry, lass, for being so maudlin on such a beautiful day.” The housekeeper shook her head as if she might shed her sadness the way a dog shook to shed water. “I thought, in truth, that maybe bringing William out here in the sunshine, where he could see the market and see his paintings, would make him remember the better times.” She glanced at the hunched figure under the tree. “Would you speak to him? Will?”

Estelle shrank away. “I don’t know him.”

“But you knew his Sophie. Maybe you could share something with him about her? A happy memory, perhaps?”

“I don’t want to upset him.”

“I don’t think that there is anything that you could say that would make his suffering worse.”

Estelle bit her lip so hard that she tasted blood. Imogen was wrong. There was a great deal that she could say to the desolate man in the wheeled chair that would make this all worse. Estelle could tell him that she had not been able to save his Sophie. That his beloved sister and best friend had very likely died a slow, horrible death at the hands of the same monsters that had kept William Seymour captive for years. That Sophie had witnessed more hate and more evil than even an RAF pilot shot down in the opening salvos of the war.

“Please,” Imogen said. “Please just talk to him. The doctor gives him medicine but I don’t know that it helps any. It only seems to make him confused and nauseated. He’s but a shadow of himself, and I am powerless to do anything except watch him fade away. You can’t imagine what that’s like.”

“I can,” Estelle whispered. She knew this woman’s fear intimately and the feeling of helplessness that came along with it.

“Then you’ll speak with him?”

Estelle could almost feel the hope in that question right down through her bones.

“Of course.” She couldn’t answer otherwise.

“Bless you, lass.” Imogen was sniffling again.

Slowly, Estelle left the booth and walked toward the man in the chair. The ground was dappled here, the sun finding holes through the tree’s canopy to splash a pattern of yellow-gold and grey-blue across the overgrown grass. Here, only the cowslips on the ground and the sparrows in the branches above would overhear their words.

She stopped in front of William but the man seemed oblivious to her presence.

“Mr. Seymour?” Estelle tried.

No response.