“Tidying your room, ma’am,” Jennings answered.

“I can see that. But why?”

The men looked sheepishly at one another and then Sparrow, face tinged red, replied. “We’re all done, Captain May. I hope it’s satisfactory.”

“It’s like heaven,” she said. “But why?”

None of them answered. Instead they filed out, heads down, gazes fixed to the floor.

Jess’s bag dropped to the ground and she placed her camera on the bed, wincing when she saw the dirty mark her hand left on the clean sheets. And that smear, for some reason, undid her. The tears she hadn’t allowed herself to shed while she listened to Marie-Laure’s terrible tale filled her eyes now and she stood still for a long moment, swallowing hard, the ache in her throat almost insupportable.

She knew why the men were in her room. And she knew there was at least one man in the chateau who saw past the smile and the face and the body to the things that really were inside her, who didn’t think she was nothing. When the tightness in her throat eased, she walked down the stairs and knocked at Dan’s door.

“Come in,” she heard him call, faintly, as if he wasn’t quite in the room.

She pushed open the door but couldn’t see him. A gentle swish of white drapes caught her attention. The door to the balcony stood open and she could see the back of his head, leaning against a sofa that had been dragged out there, taking up almost all the room.

“Dan?” she called from the door.

“You can come in, Jess.”

She left the door open for propriety, a gesture that almost made her laugh, and stepped outside, drawing in her breath as she did so. The room was at the back of the chateau, looking north toward Belgium and over the tents and the remaining snares of garden, which fell away to the canal, a black ribbon in the distance. The night sky draped softly around them like velvet, stars dotted over its surface. There were no clouds to obscure the points of light, just the delicate waft and plume of white phosphorus. At regular intervals a shell or a tracer arc lit up the sky beyond like an unearthly rainbow or a falling star. A comet, even. “It’s beautiful,” she breathed.

“I know,” Dan said.

She dropped onto the sofa beside him.

“You’re just in time.” Dan held up a glass of cognac and passed it to her.

She sipped gratefully. “Thanks.”

“You look like you’ve had a day and a half,” he said, studying her face.

“Topped off by my arrival in my room to find six men cleaning it. My uniforms are washed. My bed has clean sheets.”

“I asked for all the members of the J Club to assemble this afternoon,” he said cheerfully. “I expect what they got wasn’t quite what they anticipated. I told them I’d heard of the J Club and understood that the J stood for Janitor. Their janitorial services were required in your room, for as long as it took, until everything was spotless.”