“And your father? Victorine didn’t marry him or she just didn’t take his name?”

D’Arcy hesitated, sipping the cognac. She hardly knew this man sitting beside her and he was asking her things she rarely talked about. Yes, she would have been happy to have sex with him but, somehow, that seemed far less intimate than this discussion. She kept it brief. “Neither. I don’t know too much about him. Like I said, I assumed my mother had her heart broken by him. She told me that she hadn’t been able to tell my father about me because by the time she knew she was having a baby, he was no longer in France. Maybe he was a tourist passing through, and it was the seventies, so texts and emails didn’t exist. I never knew him so I never missed him. My mother is redoubtable; she’s more than enough of a parent to be both mother and father,” she finished firmly.

Josh shifted a little closer to her, putting down his glass, casting his eyes over the figure of the girl in the photograph who bore the same name as D’Arcy’s mother. “You don’t seem like someone who’s afraid to ask questions, nor like someone who has no natural curiosity. It all sounds like a made-up story. Did you never ask any more?”

“I didn’t,” D’Arcy said quietly. And then the truth came out, a truth that was a thousand times more intimate than kissing. “I adore my mother. But she looked so sad every time I asked her about it. More than sad; she looked as if I were tearing out her heart, piece by agonizing piece. I didn’t want to be the one to make her look like that. So I stopped asking.”

Then D’Arcy stood in one quick motion. She’d told him more about her mother, and also herself, than she’d ever said to anyone. It was making her eyes a little too damp. “Sorry. You’re not interested in my personal wallowing. You should go to bed. I’ll be back to sawing in the morning.” Her voice sounded convincing, as if she really would just pick up her saw and get on with the job like none of this had happened.

He put out a hand to halt her. “I’ll talk to the photographer. Ask if she’ll see you. Maybe she has some answers for you.”

“Thank you,” she said, before she hurried back to her room and sat on her balcony, staring unseeing at the resplendent gardens spotlit by the full moon, and the dark coil of canal that lay just beyond.

* * *

When she awoke the next morning, D’Arcy had to check the carriage clock on the bedside table several times before she would believe what it said. Nine o’clock! She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept until nine o’clock. She’d fallen into bed at dawn after sitting awake for hours, thinking about her mother, debating whether she should just call her. Victorine’s always practical tone would offer up a simple explanation: Victorine wasn’t the girl in the photograph. It was just a very big and very startling coincidence of names.