“But how?” Jess asked. “If they won’t let a woman go anywhere near a combat zone, I can’t imagine they’d allow a child.”

“He didn’t have a choice,” Dan said simply. “Nobody has a choice. We all do what we hope is for the best. How all this is for the best is anyone’s guess,” he added, hand gesturing to the ambulance driving in, the injured man lifted out. “He thought the hospital would be safe. That the nurses would help him look after her. Nobody, nobody,” he repeated, “understood what a field hospital on the Italian front would be like.”

Jess risked a glance at him, remembering the horror of last month. The thickness of the blood beneath her shoes, the latrines walled with a teetering pile of sodden blankets, the proximity of the shells. It was incomprehensible. “So your brother was the man she calls Papa? She doesn’t know about her real parents?”

“She doesn’t.”

With the cover of rain, almost impossible to see through, Jess couldn’t be sure how Dan felt at that moment but his stance suggested a remoteness that made her heart crack a little. How old was he? Twenty-five at most. In charge of how many men? Knowing that whatever he ordered them to do could kill them. And a child to protect too. She understood now why he could shoot a man and not look as if he felt anything; he had so many people to care about and to keep alive that he couldn’t afford to expend any visible emotion on an enemy. Which didn’t mean he didn’t feel it though.

She waited for what he would say next, sensing by the tension dripping off him more thickly than the rain that it wouldn’t be good.

“A shell landed on the operating tent in September. Laurie was killed.”

Jess instinctively reached out a hand to touch his arm. “So now she’s yours?”

“Yes,” he said simply.

“Victorine means victory,” she said when she thought she could speak.

Dan nodded. “And nobody will dare to send her away. She’s our lucky charm. Almost a deity.” He drew in a breath. “The boys bring her chocolate. They believe that if she kisses them on the cheek before they go out to fight, they’ll survive. The boys who don’t believe it are always the ones who get shot. I can’t explain it. But it’s what happens. No one in the upper reaches of the army wants to send away something the men believe in. So they turn a blind eye. The nurses look after her for me. I owe them a whole goddamn lot.”

Jess couldn’t believe she’d assumed he’d wanted to drive her to the hospital so he could charm one of the nurses. He clearly had no time and no energy to be charming anyone. “I’ll go and show Victorine my camera,” Jess said. “And you’d better watch out,” she added mischievously, wanting him to leave to face the enemy with lightness rather than sadness, “you might find that I’m her best friend by the time you return.”