Back in the cabin, he took two bowls from a cupboard in the galley, filled one with dog biscuits and the other with water, and put them both on the floor. Elsie fell to eating immediately. Lotti placed the little dog on the ground beside her, and Elsie shuffled aside to make room for him.

“Isn’t that sweet?” sighed Lotti. “Your dog is lovely. What sort is she?”

“Mostly spaniel, I think. We rescued her as a puppy, so we’ve never really known.”

“This one is a Chihuahua. I’ve decided to call him Federico.”

“The theft …?” Ben said.

Lotti wrapped her arms round her knees.

“I suppose,” she mused, “it all started when I stabbed the sewing mistress.”

Ben’s head started to swim. “Stabbed …?”

“Only with a needle,” Lotti explained hurriedly. “To get expelled. I wanted to come home so badly, you see. I’d been away at school for so long, longer even than the war, since my aunt and uncle sent me there after my parents died in an airplane crash when I was eight. And I was sort of used to it—I mean, it was miserable but bearable, in a prisony sort of way—but then this new girl came, Veronica Smedley, and locked me in the coal cellar.”

Ben was confused. “Why?”

“I laughed at her,” admitted Lotti. “She slipped in the mud playing lacrosse. It wasn’t nice of me, I know, but she did look funny covered in mud. Anyway, it made her furious. So first she told all the girls they shouldn’t speak to me, and then she got them to play pranks on me, and one of the pranks was locking me in the coal cellar. Ben, you look lost. Don’t you go to school?”

Ben thought about this. Because they moved around so much, Nathan had always taught his boys at home on the Sparrowhawk. When Ben went to live with Mercy, she had vaguely made him attend the Great Barton school but Ben, used to a lifetime of freedom, hadn’t loved it. Now that he was living alone, he thought he might go back to learning alone.

“No,” he said. “I don’t.”

“Then you don’t understand how properly horrible bullies can be. Veronica made them keep me all night in the coal cellar, and it was one of the loneliest nights of my life, almost as bad as when my parents died. Have you ever been lonely, Ben?”

“I lived in an orphanage until I was four,” Ben replied quietly. “And for the last eight months, I’ve been living alone with a stranger.”