“It was the only way I could think not to go with Mercy!” Ben defended himself. “I had to stay on the Sparrowhawk. What if Sam came back and I wasn’t here? But now the War Office is going to tell Skinner Sam’s not coming back, and then he’s not going to let me carry on living here, is he? And then what’ll happen to the Sparrowhawk? What’ll happen to Elsie?”

His voice broke as he looked at his dog, fast asleep again on the blanket with her head in his lap. Lotti set aside her outrage.

“Tell me everything,” she said. “Tell me exactly. Is Sam coming back or not? I’m confused.”

Ben took a deep breath. Where should he start? “After Nathan was killed,” he said slowly, “the man at the farmhouse where he was staying sent all his things back, with a letter explaining how the field hospital where Sam was being treated was destroyed. He … he said he buried Nathan himself, in the Protestant churchyard in the village. Mercy and I wrote back asking for news of Sam, but he didn’t know—just that there were a lot of dead, and the wounded had been transferred to another hospital. Then later there was a telegram from the War Office …”

“You mean a letter,” said Lotti.

“I keep telling you, there was no letter.” It wasn’t fair to be irritated with Lotti, but Ben couldn’t help it. It wasn’t her—it was the whole situation. “There was a telegram. It said Sam was missing, believed killed. And that’s all.”

“But then …”

“He could be alive,” Ben insisted. “Believed killed doesn’t mean actually killed. And I’d know, wouldn’t I, if he was dead? I mean, I’d feel it. Didn’t you, with your parents?”

Lotti had had not an inkling, not a hint of a tingle of a premonition that her parents had died until one of the servants told her, but she understood how important it was to Ben to believe that what he said was true. And so she didn’t reply to his question but asked instead, “If Sam were alive, Ben, where would he be?”

“I don’t know!” Ben’s tears were back, and in danger of spilling over. “In France? The hospital was near a town called Buisseau, by a river. I remember the river because Nathan wrote that they brought the wounded there by barge. He joked that he should have taken the Sparrowhawk over to bring Sam home. Lotti, are you all right?”

Lotti had gone very still.