Cover

Dedication

To my grandparents:

Peter and Dorothy Gerosa
John and Barbara Bishop
With all my love

1. The Beginning

Max Morel had never left France in her life. Now, on the first day of the Christmas holidays, she was sitting on the 3.55 train from Paris to Munich, a city in Germany.

It felt like a dream. An odd sort of dream. Max was sitting with her nose pressed to the window, wrapped in a warm navy coat and three scarves, accompanied by a nun who was humming to herself and fixing a shoe.

Why three scarves? Because December was bitter that year, and Max’s mother had a great fear of the cold, and an even greater fear of far-away foreign cold.

Why the humming nun? That is a difficult question. Sister Marguerite is not really the sort of person to whom “Why?” applies. You will just have to put up with her.

And why was Max on the train at all? That is a much easier question. She was going to visit her great-aunt Elodie in Istanbul. Or at least – that was the plan. But perhaps to really explain things, we need to begin with the day that Great-Aunt Elodie called.

2. The Very Beginning

All Max knew about her great-aunt Elodie was that she had moved to Turkey years and years ago, and that she was very rich, and lived all by herself in Istanbul. Every Christmas she sent the Morels some well-meaning but ugly knitwear, and every year they sent her a card with a family photo printed on the front. Apart from that, they never heard from her. She hadn’t been to visit since Max was a baby.

Then one day, when December had arrived and iced Paris all over with a slippery frosting, Max skidded-slid-stumbled home from school to find her mother on the phone. She was saying “Mm-hmm, of course” with her voice, and YOU ARE AN UNBEARABLE STRAIN ON MY SAINTLY PATIENCE with her eyes. The voice tinkling on the other end was not familiar. Max made herself some hot chocolate on the stove as usual, but extra slowly and quietly, so that she could listen for clues about the mystery caller. She was curious – this was out of the ordinary, and things at her house were hardly ever out of the ordinary.

After a very long time of “mm-hmm” and “of course”, her mother finally said au revoir, and hung up the phone. She tutted, sucked in her cheeks and rolled her eyes all at once, which made her look like an overexcited prune.

Max tipped the steaming milk out into a bowl, and cupped the bowl tightly to get some warmth back into her fingers. “Who was that, Maman?”