She pulled over and, as she cut the engine, the song of a nightingale could plainly be heard, its trill echoing on without the force of a shell or an ack-ack bomber, simple and rhapsodic. It made them all stop, the sound of a bird now something remarkable and worth their tribute.

“You were right,” Dan said to Jess. “Coming here is just what we all needed.” He put his arm around her and kissed the top of her head, and if Victorine thought there was anything strange about these signs of affection, she didn’t say so.

They climbed out of the jeep. Without the expanse of olive drab tents and vehicles and soldiers to mask it, the chateau rose into view from behind a screen of plane trees as if they were meant to come upon it suddenly and be astonished. All three of them said a wondrous “Oh,” at the same time.

Victorine ran forward to the fairytale castle before them. Medieval in style, it had a keep, a drawbridge and round towers at each corner with slit windows from which archers must once have shot their arrows. Red and green ivy crawled unchecked over the stone walls. It looked so different to the place they had stayed with an entire division in the month before Christmas 1944, although the fields to one side were still marked with the ashy remains of wood fires and the rutted tracks of jeeps and heavy vehicles.

“Look, there’s a butterfly!” Jess said to Victorine, who dashed off after it.

That afternoon, they lazed on a blanket, watching magnificent Queen of Spain butterflies, the nacre on the underside of their wings flash lunar in the sun, the rows of black spots on the other side of the wings as smooth and soft as velvet. The day was pleasantly noisy, filled with the chirrups of field crickets, the hum of damselflies, and the cries of the plovers and kingfishers, punctuated occasionally by the hoots of mallard ducks on the canal beyond. They lay almost hidden by the swathe of orchids grown up all around—spider orchids, monkey orchids, lady orchids—which gave way to a mass of ferns closer to the canal. Black beetles scurried busily around, rosemary perfumed the air and Jess found some early wild strawberries and wild currants for Victorine to eat.

In between, they laughed at Victorine’s stories and Jess took photographs: of Victorine’s face haloed by flowers; of Dan lying on his back, awake but unmoving because Victorine was sleeping on his chest; of the Wood White butterfly, like an angel or a ghost, come to rest for the briefest moment on Victorine’s shoulder and Victorine calling out, “Look Papa!”; of the crown of yellow water primrose that Victorine made for Dan, transforming the flower that most thought was invasive and alien into something fleetingly beautiful.

Victorine took some photographs too, of the plump strawberries, of the castle towers, of the serenading nightingale that flew out to bid them good day before taking its song elsewhere. She was especially fascinated by the dwarf beech trees and she named them all: the teacher was the one that looked, according to Victorine, wise, its head bent over its raised boughs; the little girl was the one that looked as if it might pick up its skirt of leaves and dance down to the water; the mother was the one whose crossed branches formed a cradle in which sat a richness of greenery.