The doctor wrapped his arms round Aimee and the girl pushed him away after a few seconds. ‘I am your enemy. We should be trying to kill one another.’

The doctor laughed for the first time in weeks. ‘What would be the point? I could shoot you, but you’ve been so kind I couldn’t bring myself to eat you. And I need food more than anything.’

‘What are those German words on your belt buckles?’

‘Gott mit uns,’ the thin man replied. ‘It means God is with us.’

‘Then I hope he’ll look after the good men like you,’ Aimee said. She turned and ran into the barn so she wouldn’t have to watch him go.

Marius had been taken upstairs to the hayloft where he would be well hidden if the British should arrive. Master DuPont had changed him into an old suit of work clothes that belonged to Aimee’s father. ‘Tell the British he is one of your farm hands... and that if they go near him they will catch flu. That should make sure he is safe till he’s better.’

‘And then?’

‘And then he can follow his friends back to Germany,’ the teacher said.

Now the boy lay on the straw, living in some fever-nightmare world of his own. Aimee remembered how it felt. ‘My whole body was weak,’ she’d told Marius, ‘and I’d a headache like drumbeats inside my skull. I was so dizzy I couldn’t stand without falling on my face.’

The Germans seemed to have had it worse than Aimee. She had seen so many sick soldiers and heard for herself the hacking cough and seen the trickles of blood dribbling from the mouth. The worst sign was when the face turned blue. She knew that meant death was just hours away.

Marius’s face was pale and covered in a sweat but the only colour was the burning red spot on each cheek. No blue.

‘Don’t die,’ Aimee said in Latin.

The boy was mumbling in German. She understood some words now. ‘Mutter. Ich möchte meine mutter.’

‘You want your mother, I know. But you’ll have to make do with me.’

She sat by his side for hours. She used a damp cloth to cool his brow and fed him some of his own willow-bark drink to ease the fever.

As the sun set and it grew dark in the hayloft his eyes opened and he smiled up at Aimee. ‘The doctor?’ he asked.

‘Gone back to Germany. You can follow when you’re strong enough.’

Marius nodded and began to say something when Aimee heard footsteps in the barn below. Then a voice said, ‘Set up the radio here.’