She had drawn the curtains in her father’s room but there were four lighted candles at the four corners of the bed.

He looked like the stone sculpture on a tomb. His hands were crossed over his chest and on the sheets that covered him there was a bunch of lilies of the valley that Hamid had bought in the Bazaar.

The fragrance of them made Yamina remember the times they had walked together in the gardens he had created, where the scent of flowers had filled the air.

Now, though dead and far from home, he still had a magnificence about him.

He had accepted the change in their circumstances, as all through his life he had accepted with a philosophical calm whatever fate might bring.

He had never complained, he had never railed against the injustice of being involved in a war that did not concern him personally.

He had tried in his own way to transmit to Yamina some of his faith in all that was highest and best.

“It is our intellect that serves us in times of adversity,” he had said to her once. “It is our brain that gives us courage and the strength to overcome fear. That is of more significance than anything else.”

Her father had never been afraid, Yamina thought and, as she knelt down beside his bed, she wondered if at this moment he was fearful for her, while he would never have shrunk from anything he had to suffer personally.

‘Help me, Papa, to be like you!’ she prayed. ‘Give me courage if I must die, to face it without screaming and without losing my self-control.’

It was a prayer that came from her heart, a prayer that she knew was fundamentally what her father would have expected of her in all circumstances however horrifying.

Then, even as she prayed, she saw again the bloodstained face of the Russian spy being dragged through the Bazaar, and wondered if he had screamed and struggled when they had first pulled him from his hiding place.

Perhaps he had been the stuff of which martyrs were made, who went to their death with a smile on their faces, defying those who executed them.

‘Could I be like that?’ Yamina asked herself and her thoughts shied away from the answer.

‘Help me, Papa! Help me!’ she prayed.

Once again she said the prayers for the dead that had been said over her mother’s coffin.

But here there could be no Service and no Priest.

Her father had not been able to receive the Last Rites of the Church and yet she felt that it would not matter in the ‘Great to Be’ where she was sure he was at this moment, safe and free from pain.

She said the last words of the Burial Service.

“Requiescat in pace. Amen.”