“This one.” Estelle stepped closer to the booth and lifted a small rectangular canvas that had been mounted in a simple wood frame. It was an image of Millbrook, the sky a bright blue over the distinctive house. The shrubs and greenery that had been dabbed around the base of the manor gave way to rolling lawns painted in sweeping brushstrokes.

She glanced back at William Seymour. He’d lifted his head and was staring out at something that only he could see.

“Why are you doing this?” Imogen asked as Estelle handed over her money. “This is too much.”

“I am making an investment,” Estelle replied. “One day, when he is a famous artist, this painting will be worth a hundred times what I paid today. You can tell him that I will accept nothing less.”

She left the housekeeper staring after her and retraced her steps along the old mill road, back to the center of town. She stopped at the edge of the sea, where she had stood when she first disembarked. The horizon was still where it had been, the sky and the sea meeting in a breathtaking blue vista. She set her bag down on the ground and opened it, sliding the little painting inside, next to the sheet of paper that Miss Atkins had given her the day before Estelle had left for Norfolk.

Because Estelle had never returned to France. Instead, she had remained in England, working for the Inter-Services Research Bureau, teaching other agents, agents like Sophie, how to act, how to speak, how to eat, how to smoke, what to order in a café. Tiny details that might one day save their lives. She had been invaluable, Miss Atkins had told her on the day when people had finally danced in London’s streets.

Estelle hadn’t danced. Instead she had asked the woman for a favour.

That favour now rested beside the hopeful painting of Millbrook, and Estelle withdrew the long sheet, looking at it again, though she knew it by heart by now. There were three columns of names, prisoners who had been incarcerated by the Nazis at Amiens Prison before it had been bombed. The first column was a list of all prisoners. The second column was a list of those who had escaped when the walls of the prison crumbled beneath the explosives dropped from the sky in 1944. The third was a list of prisoners who had been recaptured.

Jerome de Colbert’s name existed only in the first two columns.

It was time to return to France.

She would not return to the Paris apartment where her failures would forever haunt her. But the painting, along with the prison list, were reminders that second chances could exist.

That something lost could be found again.

Chapter ​24

Chapter
​24

Gabriel

London, England
20 October 2017

10 July 1943

Dearest Will,