‘Was he talking about my grandfather? Was he saying he was here as an actual spy? I mean … a real one?’ Will asked incredulously.
Lucy smiled broadly. ‘I think so, yes,’ she said and then laughed in shock. She couldn’t help it.
‘A failed spy, the vicar said,’ Will pointed out when he’d come to his senses.
‘A failed mission,’ Lucy suggested. ‘There’s a difference.’
‘And the woman he left the island with. I already knew they’d left together. But … my grandmother, Lise, was Jewish. I had no idea.’
‘Didn’t you?’ Lucy asked.
‘She never said,’ was Will’s simple reply.
Lucy sat down on the grass and Will joined her. It was warm and hardened through the summer sun. ‘Perhaps she thought that her religion could have cost her life here and so …’
‘Keeping quiet seemed safer,’ Will said quietly. ‘What an awful time.’
She reached out and put her hand on his knee as they sat cross-legged. What could she say? It was horrifying. Totally, unbelievably horrifying. ‘Poor Persephone. Poor Stefan. They did something good. And died as a result.’
‘But they saved two lives,’ Will said.
Lucy nodded. ‘Without them, Jack and your grandmother wouldn’t have got off the island.’
‘And they’d not have fallen in love, got married and had my dad.’
‘And then you wouldn’t be here,’ Lucy said.
‘Yeah …’ Will said thoughtfully. He looked at her with a new intensity. Was he looking through her or at her as he processed it all?
Lucy flushed and slowly removed her hand from his knee, aware too late as to what she’d been doing. ‘It’s got really hot all of a sudden,’ she said. ‘Is it just me?’
‘It’s just you,’ he said.
Lucy looked at the graves in front of them. ‘So there’s not a body, I mean … for Persephone and I suppose the same goes for poor Stefan.’
‘And so no grave,’ Will said. ‘Hence the memorial window, I guess.’
But there was something else bothering Lucy. It would come to her in a second; she knew it. The clang of the church door sounded across the churchyard and the vicar issued them both a wave that they returned. They watched him go to his car, start the engine, drive away.
Will had become quiet, had found her hand in the grass and taken it in his own. ‘Oh,’ Lucy said without meaning to as she looked down. But her mind was processing a random assortment of facts and she couldn’t think about what it meant to have Will’s warm hand holding hers, as much as she knew she liked it.
Lucy had never really known Dido, had never even known Persephone had existed, let alone that she’d died in such tragic but heroic circumstances.
Persephone had died getting Will’s grandfather and grandmother off the island and to safety. And in doing so, whether intentionally or not, had sacrificed herself as part of it.
But there was something else nagging at her. Something the vicar had said … Dido had paid for the window to be installed to memorialise her sister and the man she’d loved. She had done it after the war. She had done it when she’d returned.
‘When she’d returned …’ Lucy muttered.
‘Pardon?’ Will asked, his gaze lifting from their hands, one on top of the other, to her.
‘The vicar said Dido organised to have the window installed when she returned. When she returned from where?’
Chapter 38
1943
The knock at the door was louder than usual, more forceful. Dido braced herself. So it was going to be tonight. That hateful old woman had sent the letter and the Germans were here for Lise and Persey. Well, Dido rallied, they wouldn’t find either of them here. Not tonight.
