“Maybe one day you can teach me.” Lotti sighed, then reluctantly stood up. “I really do have to go, but may I come back?”

Ben didn’t miss the falter in her voice. She sounded vulnerable suddenly, and much less confident.

“Of course you can,” he said. “Just make sure Malachy Campbell doesn’t see you.”

“I’ll try to come back tomorrow, then,” said Lotti happily. “And you can show me all over your boat.”

She held out her hand. Ben, having shaken it, found that he didn’t want to let go.

He stood and watched as Lotti and Federico ran down the towpath, away from town. As they turned onto Barton Lane, he thought how strange it was, that even though she had barely stopped talking throughout her visit, the silence when Lotti had gone was even louder.

Earlier that afternoon, just a hundred yards away from the Sparrowhawk, at about the time when Lotti was telling Ben about being expelled from school, Malachy Campbell knocked on the door of the lonely cottage Ben had run past earlier. A thin, untidy young woman rushed to answer the door, her wire-rimmed spectacles slipping down her nose.

“You seen my Chihuahua?” asked Malachy Campbell.

The young woman, whose name was Clara Primrose, pushed her spectacles back into place and regarded him with an air of intense disappointment.

“Showed it to you last week, remember?” said Malachy, conscious that the air of disappointment had changed to one of blazing fury. “He’s been nicked.”

“Well, he’s not here,” Clara said, and slammed the door.

In the summer of 1914, Clara Primrose had been eighteen, at university and in love with a fellow student called Max. Max wrote poetry and hated fighting and was the last person you could imagine as a soldier, but he had gone into the army as soon as war was declared.

“When it’s all over, I’ll come for you,” he wrote to her, over and again in smuggled letters through those four bleak years. “Promise you’ll wait for me!”