* * *

Over the next week, Jess settled into life as a photojournalist. She propped her typewriter on a small table she’d found that would also double nicely as a shelter to roll under should the Germans start bombing the hospital again and she sat there every day, wearing everything she owned, layered in double socks, trousers, shirt, jacket, overcoat, scarf. It still wasn’t enough to keep out the cold, nor was the oil stove enough to warm the tent; it was only when she stepped outside that she realized it was actually a couple of degrees warmer inside—freezing, instead of several degrees below. The stories she collected were about Victorine, who was a small sun bringing light and warmth to a place otherwise bereft of those things.

Each day, she and Victorine visited the convalescent tent to sit with the men and, each day as they entered, like today, someone would call out for her. “Vicki?”

Victorine spun around crossly and stalked, as much as a four-year-old could stalk, into the ward. “You are one of Dan’s men,” she pronounced to the man who’d called her name. “My name is Victorine.”

“Sorry, Miss,” the soldier apologized, and Jess realized it was Private Jennings, the man who’d wanted his face in Vogue.

“Captain May,” he nodded at Jess.

“You have a dirty arm,” Victorine scolded him.

“What happened?” Jess asked, remembering that he was a new replacement and here he was, already in the hospital, his face pale against his shock of red hair, his leanness all the more childlike against the hospital blankets.

Jennings flushed. “Hurt my head,” he mumbled and Jess could see that he had a row of stitches holding together a split eyebrow.

“Somehow he managed to trip over and crack his head on a long Tom,” a nurse said sardonically and when Jennings’ cheeks colored so red he looked as if he might explode, Jess again had the impression of enduring innocence, a wholesomeness worth preserving.

“Look!” Victorine cried, pointing to the patch of clay on Jennings’ arm. “The mud is shaped like a…”

Puppy. Bird. Fairy. Rabbit, Jess waited for Victorine to say, imagining it was like the game she’d played as a child when she’d lain on her back on a sandy beach before a Tahitian storm watching clouds coalesce into giants’ faces and unicorns.

“One of the silver pineapples nobody lets me touch,” Victorine grumbled, as if it were wrong that nobody would let her touch a grenade. “See,” Victorine continued, “it has lines across it. And the funny bit on top.”

Jess met Jennings’ eye and saw in them a shock she imagined was mirrored in her own. Then she took the photograph of the little girl tracing the mud on a man’s arm that she’d compared to a deadly weapon, such were the limitations of what she’d been exposed to in her short life.

“Doesn’t matter how you got to hospital,” Jess said to Jennings, hoping to make him feel better, and herself too. “Now you’ll be in the pages of Vogue.”