“There was a mass exodus of people out of Paris in June, trying to keep ahead of the Germans. My sister-in-law was one of them,” Dan continued, starting to walk again, slowly. “The roads were so jammed with cars that it took days to travel a few miles, there was no water and no food and the Krauts bombed the lines of refugees. So everyone did what they could to protect their children. They gave them to convoys of French soldiers fleeing south, anyone with a vehicle. They thought they would all get to somewhere south of the Loire and it would be safe and they would be reunited.”

“Oh God,” Jess said quietly, unable to think what it would be like to hand your child over to strangers because it seemed the better choice.

“My brother was with a convoy of medics and a woman handed him two children through the window just after the Stukas had strafed a line of civilians. One was older, a boy; he’d been shot and he died soon after. The other was a tiny baby girl, about a week old.”

“Victorine,” Jess said. “But why isn’t she with your brother’s wife?”

Dan didn’t answer that question. Instead, a long stream of terrible words filled the air like mortar explosions as he told her that his brother had waited in Moulins for a fortnight, trying to find the baby’s mother as she’d said that’s where she was going. But there were too many lost children and no possible way to reunite them all. His brother hadn’t been able to give the baby to another family as nobody had enough milk for their own children. So he’d taken the child to Toulouse where his wife had gone to be with family.

“He thought he and his wife could care for the baby for a couple of weeks, then he’d go back to Moulins and try again once everything had settled down. But at his wife’s family’s home, he found…” Dan paused.

They were back at the jeep, the men he’d promised a ride to huddled into their coats in their seats. “Fucking rain,” he swore as the relentless drizzle turned into a torrent that really couldn’t make them any wetter than they already were. “Sorry.”

“If you think that’s the first time I’ve heard someone say that then you really have forgotten everything I told you in London,” she said gently.

It made the corners of his mouth turn up a little and he leaned his back against the jeep, away from the waiting men and went on, his voice low. “His wife and their baby had died in childbirth. There were no doctors left in Toulouse. His mother-in-law was ill from grief and his father-in-law refused to so much as look at Victorine because he thought she was a changeling who had taken his daughter’s and granddaughter’s place.”

Dan stopped speaking, his jaw tight. Jess leaned back against the jeep too, next to him, but not looking at him so he could speak out into the rain, rather than to her. “The baby wouldn’t settle with anyone but Laurie. And his father-in-law had made everyone suspicious of Victorine; you’ve no idea the kinds of beliefs people in the countryside have. The final straw was when Laurie walked in on his father-in-law shaking her. He knew he had to leave or Victorine would be dead too. He got to London. As soon as the American troops rolled into Italy, he signed on as a medical officer. He brought Victorine with him.”