‘I’m afraid I can’t say.’
Florence felt sorry for Rosalie. She must have been devastated if he had married someone else.
‘Come on,’ Jack said. ‘We’d better be off.’
But then Florence felt a bolt of energy run through her and suddenly she knew. ‘This Riva. What did she look like?’
Linda looked surprised to be asked. ‘Stunning actually. Red hair and French originally, but with perfect English.’
‘Do you know anything else? Her surname maybe.’
‘Ah yes. Janvier, that was it. She enjoyed quite a colourful life. A dancer and then an editor. Did quite a bit for the girls who worked in Strait Street too.’
Florence bit her lip in excitement.
‘Still exists,’ the woman continued. ‘Cabaret, music hall and girls. Not as bad as it used to be though. Her work got the place cleaned up a bit. Now I’m sorry I really must go.’
‘Where did you last see her?’
‘Here. But you might try the land registry. I think Beresford had a place near the RAF Officer’s Mess at the Xara Palace. She used to go there with him. Good luck with your search. I’m sorry, I have a meeting now.’
Florence gripped Jack’s hand and whispered. ‘I’m surethis Riva woman is Rosalie. Remember that my mother always said she was a brilliant dancer and had secretly worked in cabaret in Paris.’
At the land registry they found a helpful studious young man who allowed them to search first for Riva Janvier. ‘She might have carried on living there after Beresford died,’ Florence said.
But they could find nothing about a woman called Riva Janvier.
‘Linda hadn’t seen or heard from her in over three years. Strikes me she must have left the island,’ Jack said. ‘Shall we go?’
‘Hang on a minute.’
She carried on searching and after a few more moments grinned with excitement. ‘Oh my God! I knew it. Look.’ Her heart was racing as she tapped the line she’d spotted. It was an address in Mdina that had belonged to one Rosalie Beresford since 1943.
Jack gazed at it and continued to read. ‘And before that it was owned by someone called Addison Darnell and Sir Robert Beresford, Baronet. Bloody hell!’
‘Rosalie,’ Florence whispered. ‘Oh, Rosalie, are you still there? And if you aren’t, where are you now?’
CHAPTER 51
Florence wanted to go straight to Mdina after they found her aunt’s name in the land registry, but it was getting late, the bikes didn’t have lamps, and Jack persuaded her to wait. By the next morning she hadn’t slept a wink, so eager and excited was she, but also fearful that Rosalie might have gone back to France or even England.
Cam had told her it was Maltese nobility who lived in Mdina, so how Beresford and this Addison man had a place there that Rosalie must have inherited, she had no idea.
But at least Beresford had married her.
They cycled to Mdina slowly, Florence hanging back, hardly able to bear the disappointment if, after all this, Rosalie had gone. ‘Can we stop for a bit?’ she called out to Jack, who had gone on ahead of her.
He waited while she caught up. ‘I thought you’d be itching to get there.’
‘I am. But I think I’ll cry if she isn’t there.’
‘And I think you’ll cry if she is.’
She laughed. ‘You’re right. And yet, I don’t even know her and if I ever met her, I’d only have been a toddler.’
‘What a shame you never knew her.’
‘She just upped and left, at only nineteen, and nobody knew where she’d gone. My grandparents moved away from Paris sometime after that. I never knew why. My mother wouldn’t discuss it.’
