“What year was that?” Caroline asked.

“Nineteen thirty-seven. I was twenty-one and horribly naive. India was an awful shock, I can tell you. The heat and the dust and the flies and the beggars. I would have fled straight home to my mother if I could have.” She gave an embarrassed chuckle. “But I stuck it out. Jim was wonderfully patient. A good man. I’m sorry you never met him.”

Caroline nodded, returning her smile, then turned back to the book. “Oh, look. She’s sketched a handsome Venetian—I wonder if he was a gondolier? Oh, and she went on to Florence. See? That’s the Ponte Vecchio.” She closed the first book and took up the second one. “This one is also Venice,” she said. “And it’s dated 1938. So she did go back.”

“That’s right, I believe she did,” Granny said. “I remember my mother writing in one of her letters that Lettie had been asked to take a party of schoolgirls on a trip abroad in the summer holidays.”

Caroline was turning pages. These sketches in the second book were also of Venice, but done by a more skilled hand. The perspectives were just right. The faces of people in the market were so alive. There was a garden with trees and a fountain. More gondolas. An outdoor restaurant with lanterns . . .

“She clearly loved it,” Caroline said. “Did she go often?”

“She never went back after the war,” Granny said. “I think she’d seen enough of Europe by then. She was trapped there, you know.”

“Trapped?”

“Yes. She got some kind of bursary to study in Europe in 1939. A stupid time to go, really, if you think about it. But it was a chance she couldn’t turn down, I suppose. And then war broke out, and she couldn’t get home. She managed to make her way to Switzerland and sat out the conflict. I believe she worked with refugee children.”

“Oh, I see.” Caroline frowned. “It’s strange that she didn’t go back to teaching when she came home. She obviously liked working with children.”

“I don’t know,” Granny said. “I expect she saw some sad things during the war. I know she stayed on for a while after the German surrender, working with her refugees. She came back to England just before I did.”

“How did I never know any of this?” Caroline asked.

“You never asked. The young are not interested in the lives of the old. And I expect some memories were painful for both your great-aunt and me. I know she had to work with some concentration camp survivors. That would have been very unsettling for anyone.”

Caroline closed the second of the sketchbooks. “What I don’t understand is that you say she has left me everything in her will. So why single out this particular box? Why was it important to her?”

“I have no idea.” Granny shook her head. “She never mentioned anything except that she wanted you to have the box.”