“Who is he, and how did he get that scar?”

“Nobody knows, because he does not speak. He appeared earlier in the spring, and the Reverend Mother took pity on him and gave him work. He lives in a cabin in the woods. We call him Moses, because he loves to watch the river.”

“Poor man,” said Clara, but she shivered as she followed Sister Monique through the orchard, feeling the gardener’s eyes still on her, and remembering her feeling last night on the Sparrowhawk, that she was being watched then too.

Chapter Thirty-One

“We’ll go to every house between the hospital site and Buisseau,” said Ben at breakfast on Wednesday. “We’ll show them Sam’s picture and ask if they saw him.”

“Every house?” Lotti paled.

“Every single one,” said Ben. “Also in Buisseau itself. People don’t just disappear. Someone must have seen him.’

Since the hospital, Lotti had known that it was hopeless and that they would never find Sam this way. It had been a brave, defiant plan, but all the adults had been right, it was impossible. Ben refused to see it. Well, Lotti could understand that, and she still felt the responsibility of having suggested the plan in the first place, so she would continue to support him, but she felt profoundly weary. After what they had seen yesterday at the hospital, Lotti almost hoped Sam hadn’t survived. To be alive, and look like that …

She tried to shake the image out of her head. It was no good thinking like this, no good at all.

Leaving Federico once again with Sister Monique, Lotti and Ben cycled all day through the countryside between Buisseau and the river, on tiny roads to knock on the doors of remote cottages and farmhouses, on tracks down to where laborers worked in the fields, down paths to visit gamekeepers and woodcutters …

“I’m sorry to disturb you, mademoiselle, have you seen this man?”

“Monsieur, I am looking for an English soldier …”

People cried, people sighed. People closed doors in their faces, people invited them into their homes. Over cake and grenadine, they showed Lotti and Ben their own photographs and told their own stories, but no one remembered Sam.

They returned to Buisseau in the late afternoon. Ben wanted to continue the search in town, but Lotti couldn’t go on.

“I’m so tired,” she said.

Ben was angry with her, and Lotti truly was sorry, but all through the day, as the terrible sad stories of the war piled up, her mind had kept returning to the café in the southwest corner of the main square, which she had glimpsed on Monday when they came off the train.

She wanted, very much, to sit there quietly and remember, and discover if she had the courage to do what she had come to France to do.