It was only as she scrolled down further, to oblique references and articles that had no bearing on the Jessica May she was interested in, that she found one that caught her attention. It was a piece about women in journalism, and it put forward a theory that a writer reporting on the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, and who had been tipped to win a Pulitzer, was actually Jessica May using a male pseudonym. It was also the year, the article said, that Dan Hallworth won a Pulitzer. The author suggested that May had lost because somebody had found out she was a woman. In its final paragraph, she saw the words: The night of his Pulitzer win, Dan Hallworth established the Jessica May Foundation, designed to encourage women artists to pursue their calling despite the myriad obstacles.

Dan Hallworth had established the Jessica May Foundation? D’Arcy heard her surprised “Oh” echo through the room. She navigated to the Foundation’s website and read through the history of the fellowships. Yes, Dan Hallworth had indeed set up the Foundation in 1946 in honor of a woman I met in Europe who was lion-hearted. That short extract from the speech he gave on the night the Foundation was established made her shiver.

It forged yet another link between Dan Hallworth and Jessica May. But the missing link was still Victorine, D’Arcy’s mother.

She decided to tackle Dan Hallworth’s name alone next, something she’d been delaying out of fear, she knew, of what she might find. His bio details confirmed his war service, which made it seem even more likely that her mother’s boss and the man she was embracing in the famous photograph were one and the same.

The rest of the information was less relevant to her search, being only a long list of his newspaper holdings, estimates of his wealth, a précis of his family background, which included marriage to an Englishwoman named Amelia in 1945, a son from that marriage, and a subsequent divorce. She was about to give up when she found a very old and out-of-print biography of America’s newspapermen reproduced in full, with an entry on Dan Hallworth. She sat up straight and almost knocked over her coffee cup when she read the information it contained about his family background. It was different to everything else that had been published later. Two children, this one said: a daughter Victorine Hallworth, born 1940—her mother’s birth year—and a son, James Hallworth, born 1946. D’Arcy snapped her laptop shut.

Was it possible that D’Arcy had a grandfather she’d never known?

* * *

D’Arcy’s preparations for visiting Victorine’s boarding school were aided somewhat by the cognac she’d drunk in order to forget what she’d read on the internet. Her eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep and her skin was much too pale for an Australian who spent so much time outside. It gave her the appearance of someone who was suffering, which was the effect she’d thought she’d wanted, but now that the suffering was real, she wished she could think of another plan. She stepped gingerly, as if her pain were physical, into the most demure things she owned, a black velvet YSL blazer she’d picked up for a steal at a charity shop in Sydney, and a pair of slim black capri trousers. She assembled her face to look distraught, which wasn’t all that hard, and then she walked through the doors of the Parisian boarding school her mother had once attended.