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“Because it’s the right thing to do.”
“I knew it,” Rose groaned, as she looked at Weston. “I knew he was going to say that.”
“And that’s why we’re here,” Weston finished. “To find either the diaries I read through before to see if there’s anything that could point to the fate of the children, or to find the folder Rose remembers.”
Juliette was looking at him, but Marek, Rose, and Devon were all watching Franco, who appeared to be having a seizure. Or an orgasm.
Juliette sighed. “Go ahead,” she said, without looking at her husband.
Franco jumped to his feet. “That’s it! That’s it! It all makes sense.”
“Explain,” Devon demanded, but he was smiling.
Franco took a deep breath, then started speaking in rapid-fire Spanish.
“Uh,” Marek said. “Does he know he’s not speaking English?”
“This happens sometimes when he gets excited. Just wait him out,” Devon said.
Rose was frowning as she listened, but bit by bit, she sat up straighter.
“Do you speak Spanish?” he asked Rose.
“A little. He’s talking too fast for me to get all of it, but I think I understand.”
Weston felt a pang that he didn’t know that about her. The history they had might have shaped both their lives, but he didn’t know everything about her.
That’s okay, she’s your wife; you have a lifetime to get to know her.
“Franco, my love, could you please explain again? Slowly. And in English.”
Instead of responding, Franco ran to a bookshelf and pulled on a book. A compartment hidden by several false spines opened.
“Oh good,” Devon growled. “I would hate for us to have even one fucking secret Weston doesn’t know.”
Heh.
Franco pulled something out of the small compartment and brought it over to the table, setting it down gingerly. It was an old-fashioned folio.
“I don’t know about the diaries,” Franco said in a voice that sounded strangled from the effort of speaking slowly. “But this must be what you’re talking about. Devon, get the box of clippings too.”
Devon exited the office, while Franco opened the folio and started pulling things out. He laid pieces of paper on the conference table, and Rose, Weston, and Marek came around so they weren’t looking at them upside down.
“What are we looking at?” Rose asked.
“Fake baptismal certificates, issued during World War II, by the Catholic Church to Jewish children. And these over here are baptismal certificates issued by the Church of England.”
Weston’s heart leapt. “You found them together?”
“Yes.”
Weston was about to explain the significance, but Franco beat him to it. “It didn’t make sense because there weren’t Jewish children fleeing England. I assumed that these were real birth certificates, and they were added into the folder but they didn’t really go together.”
Weston cut in quickly. He’d done all this research, damn it. He wanted to explain some of it. “But they did go together. These Church of England records must be for the children who boarded the Esperanza in Poole.”
“But that means there were other children onboard.” Rose pointed to the fake certificates.
Weston nodded, his excitement over the corroborating evidence muted by the horror this represented. “It makes sense. I knew there was art from both Europe and Britain on board. If the art was meant to be financial security for children, it’s logical to assume that there would have been children for whom that art was intended to provide for security. We have an eyewitness account of children getting on in England, but that was probably the last stop, meaning there were already children on board.”
