Henri watched the water a little longer, then returned to the hotel by a different route, paid for all three rooms, spoke briefly with Madame Royère and left on her cousin’s motorbike for Paris, where he lived.

Lotti and Ben watched Clara walk listlessly back toward the Sparrowhawk.

“Oh dear,” said Lotti. “Ben …”

“I know,” he said. “We can’t leave her.”

“We can’t, can we? Poor old thing, she looks so miserable. Someone has to look after her. Do you think she’ll mind sharing Nathan’s workshop with the puppies?”

Chapter Twenty-Six

At last, they were going to find Sam!

The Sparrowhawk left La Belle Ecluse at first light on Sunday morning. The canal was wide, flanked by crops of ripening corn and barley, and there were foxgloves and meadowsweet on the banks. The weather was kind, sunny but not hot. In the workshop, in a blanket-lined fruit crate, Elsie nursed the puppies, and at his favorite post on the bow, Federico clocked ducks, songbirds and kingfishers. The scene was peaceful, almost idyllic, but among the crew the mood was tense. Ben at the helm was in a trance, focused entirely on driving, the only way he could control his nerves. Seated on either side of him on the storage boxes, Lotti and Clara, understanding his need for silence, were lost in their own thoughts—Clara of what she had left behind, Lotti of what lay ahead, at Buisseau, where they would look for Sam, and beyond that for herself …

About an hour out of Calais, something deep inside the Sparrowhawk’s hull began to rattle.

“Shouldn’t we check what that is?” Clara asked.

“It’s nothing,” said Ben.

“It doesn’t sound like nothing …”

“We’re not stopping until we find Sam.”

Shortly after lunch, they turned inland and came to a small town, where any sense of idyll was lost completely.

This, then, was what a country looked like after a war.

The town had been destroyed. The church was missing a roof. Most houses were missing walls. Over a shop, a once jaunty pâtisserie sign hung jagged above a hole where the door had been. And the trees …

“They’ve all been cut down,” said Lotti. “Why?”

“They got in the way of fighting,” said Clara.

Max had written to her of this once.

“The poor trees …” Lotti thought of the beech alley at Barton, the woods where the nightingale sang. The fate of the trees upset her more than anything. “They were just there. They didn’t choose to go to war.”

“Nobody chooses to go to war,” said Clara.

“Somebody must,” said Ben. “Or it wouldn’t happen.”

They sailed on, quiet but for the rattle of the Sparrowhawk.