For the ancient spirit of the Midi, buried in the deep memory of the mountains and hills, in the lakes and the sky, had long ago begun to stir. To speak. The white bones of those sleeping in the cimetière Saint-Michel, in the cimetière Saint-Vincent and in the country graveyards of the Haute Vallée, were beginning to awake. A shifting, a murmuring through the cities of the dead, words carried on the wind.
War was coming to the South.
A
narrow corridor with high ceilings led directly from the foot of the stairs to the front door. Sandrine sat on the bottom step to lace up her shoes, then went to the hallstand. Two umbrellas were wedged into the base. Six brass hooks, three on each side of the mirror, held a selection of hats. Sandrine chose a plain maroon beret. Looking in the glass, she held her hair off her forehead and put the hat on, teasing out a few curls. Then she heard the rattle clatter of a pan and the bang of the screen door, and realised Marieta was already up and about. Little chance of getting out unobserved now.
Sandrine walked down the corridor to the back of the house. As little girls, she and Marianne had spent a good deal of time in the kitchen. Her sister loved to cook and was keen to learn. Sandrine was too impatient, did everything in a hurry. Perched up on the draining board beside the porcelain sink in Coustaussa to help strain the cherries for jam in summer when she was three or four. When she was six, being given the mixing bowl and wooden spoon to lick when Marieta baked cakes for the
bataille des gabels
to celebrate the fête de Saint-Nazaire in Carcassonne. At eight, sprinkling flour over the old wooden table while Marieta taught Marianne how to knead the dough for her
pan de blat
, the rustic wheat bread not available in the boulangeries in Couiza.
She paused on the threshold. Marieta grumbled that the kitchen was too small, but it was cool and well stocked and efficient. Metal pots and pans hung from hooks above the fireplace, where a modern gas cooker had been installed. A deep enamel sink with a large draining board, and a tall dresser so that the plates and cups were easily within reach. High windows filled the entire back wall. Even though it was early, all four were tilted wide open. Bundles of wild rosemary, dried tarragon and sprigs of thyme gathered at Cavayère hung from the wooden rack suspended from the ceiling.
‘Marieta,’ she said. ‘
Coucou, c’est moi
.’
Marieta was sitting at the table with her back to the door, breathing heavily. Beneath a wrapover housecoat, today’s a pattern of yellow and pink field flowers, she wore her customary black, cotton rather than wool her only concession to the season. Buttoned up to the neck and at the cuffs, with dark stockings and sabots, the heavy wooden clogs she always wore. Wisps of grey hair were escaping from the bun at the nape of her neck and her chest wheezed, her breath full of dust.
‘
Coucou
,’ Sandrine said again, putting her hand on the old woman’s shoulder.
Marieta jumped. ‘Madomaisèla!’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.’
‘What are you doing up at this time?’
‘Couldn’t sleep.’
Marieta looked her up and down, taking in the beret and outdoor shoes.
‘You know your sister doesn’t like you to go out on your own.’
‘I did tell her.’
Marieta raised her eyebrows. ‘But did she hear you?’
Sandrine flushed. ‘I didn’t want to wake her up.’
The housekeeper leaned forward and picked a stray piece of crimson wool from Sandrine’s skirt.
‘And if Madomaisèla Marianne asks where you are?’
‘She won’t, she was awfully late home last night.’ Sandrine paused. ‘Do you know where she went?’
Their eyes met. On the wall above the door, the hands of the clock moved round. One tick, two ticks, three.
Marieta was the thread that held the woven life of the household together. Originally from Rennes-les-Bains, she had spent her life in the service of others. Devout and loyal, she had been widowed young, in the Grande Guerre. She had come to help after Madame Vidal had died, unexpectedly, eighteen years before.
She claimed to be content to live in Carcassonne, though Sandrine knew she missed the ancient green forests of her childhood, the quiet village streets of Coustaussa and Rennes-les-Bains. When war had broken out in 1939, Marieta took it in her stride, saying she had survived one war and would survive another. After the telegram informing them of Monsieur Vidal’s death, there had been no more talk about her going home.
‘Do you?’ Sandrine said again.
Marieta pretended she hadn’t heard. ‘Well, if you are determined to go out, you’d better have something inside you.’
Sandrine sighed. She knew if Marieta didn’t want to talk about something, she wouldn’t.
‘I am hungry,’ she admitted.
Marieta lifted the linen cloth on the table, releasing a sweet smell of flour, rosemary and salt, to reveal a freshly baked loaf cooling on a wire tray.
‘White bread!’
Marieta cut a slice, then gestured to the blue china dish in the centre of the table.
‘And butter,’ she said. ‘Delivered this morning.’
Without thinking how it might embarrass the older woman, Sandrine threw her arms around her. The familiar scent of lavender water and sulphur lozenges was reassuring, taking her back to a place before the war, before her father’s death. To a simpler and easier time.
Marieta stiffened. ‘What’s the matter? Did you have another bad night?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘At least, I did, but it’s not that. It’s . . .’
‘Well then, sit. Eat,’ Marieta said, then spoke in a softer voice. ‘It will be all right, you hear? These times will pass. France will be France again. There are enough good men – men of principle, men of the Midi – they won’t sell us out. Not like those criminals in Vichy.’
Sandrine looked down at the piece of bread, her appetite suddenly gone.
‘But what if it stays like this for ever? Nothing getting better? Always the fear of things getting worse?’
‘We will bide our time,’ she said. ‘Keep our heads down. The Germans will stay north of the line, we stay south. It won’t last for ever. Now, finish your breakfast.’
Marieta watched until she’d finished every scrap. Then, before Sandrine could clear up after herself, she was on her feet and carrying the plate over to the sink. Sandrine brushed the crumbs from her skirt and stood up too. She wasn’t sure why she felt so out of sorts.
‘Is there anything you need in town, Marieta?’
‘Not that I can think of.’
‘Surely, there’s something? I want to
do
something.’
‘Well,’ said Marieta eventually, ‘I suppose if you are going that way, I promised this dress pattern to Monsieur Quintilla’s wife.’ She took an envelope from the drawer. ‘I meant to deliver it myself, but it is such a long walk down to the café at Païchérou and . . .’
‘It’s no trouble.’
‘Only if you’re going that way.’
‘I can.’
‘But don’t go over the bridge,’ Marieta warned. ‘Madomaisèla Marianne would say the same. Stay on this side of the river.’
S
andrine ran down the steep steps to the small courtyard garden at the back of the house. She got her bicycle and pushed it out into the street. The gate rattled shut on its latch behind her.
She felt her mood lift as the air rushed into her lungs. Tilting her face to the morning, she dropped her shoulders and felt the cobwebs blow away. She picked up speed as she crossed the rue du Strasbourg, weaving in and out of the elegant
platanes
that lined the square behind the Palais de Justice, then left into the rue Mazagran.
The ebb and flow of life as it used to be was most evident in the elegant nineteenth-century beauty of this quartier, all grey stone and wrought-iron balustrades, the chalky pinks and blues of the decorative tiles and plaster on the front of the
maisons de maître
. On mornings such as this, when the lilac sky told of another hot day to come and the green underside of the leaves shimmered silver in the light breeze, it was impossible to believe that much of France was under German occupation.
The Bastide had come into being in the mid thirteenth century, some fifty years after the medieval crusade that had given Carcassonne its bloody notoriety. The vicious wars of religion had turned the inhabitants of the medieval Cité into refugees. Evicted in 1209, with only the clothes they stood up in, after the treacherous murder of their leader and ruler, Viscount Trencavel, it was only in 1276, some years after the last Cathar stronghold had fallen, that the French king gave permission for a new settlement to be established on the left bank of the Aude.
Despite the fact that Sandrine had lived her whole life in the Bastide, she loved the Cité more. And although she felt guilty even for thinking it, a part of her was grateful that, thanks to Maréchal Pétain’s collaboration with Berlin, she did not have to witness German soldiers walking through the cobbled streets of old Carcassonne.
The bells of Saint-Michel were ringing the half-hour as she crossed Square Gambetta, then cycled down the rue du Pont Vieux. Then, suddenly there it was – la Cité – on the hill on the far side of the river. The sight of it never failed to take her breath away.
For a moment, Sandrine was tempted to cross the bridge, but mindful of the promise she’d made to Marieta, she instead turned right. This first stretch of the bank, between the Pont Vieux and the weir above Païchérou, was the prettiest. Silver olive trees, fig trees in the gardens of the large houses. Ivy trailed down painted walls and ironwork trellises with vines. Elegant canopies and awnings and white terraces. Bougainvillea, carnations in pots, red and pink and white.
She pedalled along the water’s edge, twigs and stones spinning under her wheels, and arrived at the café. Before the war, tea dances were held at Païchérou each Sunday afternoon, the waiters in their white jackets, and long refectory tables laid out in rows. For a moment, grief caught in her throat, an old memory taking her by surprise. Her father had promised to take her for her twenty-first birthday, a promise he would no longer be able to keep.
The gates into the grounds were open. Sandrine propped her bike against the wall, then knocked at the door. She waited, but no one came. She knocked again.
‘Madame?’
She went to the window and peered in. It was dark inside. Everything looked closed up. Sandrine was in two minds as to whether to leave the envelope – Marieta was careful about her belongings. In the end, she posted it through the letter box and decided she’d come back later to make sure Madame Quintilla had got it.
Sandrine had intended to go straight home from Païchérou, but she’d heard rumours that refugees had set up a camp on the far side of the river. She was curious to know if it was true.
She cycled towards the weir and the secluded pocket of trees that stood at the bend of the river, just below the cimetière Saint-Michel. A glade of pine and beech, elm and ash. This morning, though, it felt a little too secluded. Sandrine found herself glancing over her shoulder, with a prickling on the back of her neck as if someone was watching her. The flapping of a collared dove, then the slither and splash of a fish in the shallows made her jump.
Sandrine stopped at the water’s edge and looked across to the far side of the Aude. She could see nothing unusual at all, nothing different or threatening or out of place. No tents, no gypsy encampment, no shadow city. She wasn’t sure if she was disappointed or relieved.
The sky was the colour of forget-me-nots. The bells of Saint-Gimer below the Cité began to ring seven o’clock, the sound floating across the mirrored surface of the water. Minutes later, they were answered by the bells of Saint-Michel and other churches of the Bastide. There had been a time, during the early days of the war, when the bells were silenced. Sandrine had missed them then, the familiar steady marking of each day. Now, though they rang again, she couldn’t help hearing a sadness in their voice.
She laid her bike down, then sat on the bank and pulled at the grass with her fingers. Before the war, at about this point in July, they’d be getting ready to leave Carcassonne for their summer house in Coustaussa. Her and Marianne, their father. Marieta fussing and packing three times as much as they needed. Picnics on the banks of the river Salz in the deep shade of the afternoon with her oldest friend, Geneviève. Cycling to Rennes-les-Bains for supper at the Hôtel de la Reine in the evening. Playing ‘Docteur Knock’ in the kitchen for hour upon hour with the battered old playing cards.
Sandrine leant back against the trunk of the tree and looked at the towers and turrets and spires of the medieval Cité, the walls of the Château Comtal and the distinctive thin outline of the Tour Pinte. Like a finger pointing to heaven. And, between the two Carcassonnes, lay the river. Still and flat and silver.
Like a sea of glass.
‡
‡
GAUL
CARCASO
JULY AD 342
T
he shimmering waters of the river Atax glinted bright in the early morning sunlight. The young monk crossed the wooden bridge, then followed the track that led up to the main gates on the eastern side of the fortified town.
Ahead, Arinius could see the walls of Carcaso, not much more than twice his own height perhaps, but wide and solid. They looked strong enough to keep out any invaders. The foundations were large stone blocks, two or three deep, with a layer of mortar on the top. The façade was a mixture of lime and rubble. Spaced at regular intervals were horseshoe-shaped bastions, short squat towers on the northern section of the walls, curved on the outside and flat on the side facing the town.
‘A place of refuge,’ he said, praying that it would be the case. He was weary and intended to rest in Carcaso for a few days, to gather his strength for the final leg of his journey into the mountains. His throat was sore and his ribs ached from coughing.
Pressing his hand against the dry papyrus beneath his grey habit – an action that was now as natural and unconscious as breathing – Arinius joined the early crowd waiting to gain access to the town. Merchants, farmers from the
faratjals
, the pastures on the plains below the hill, weavers and those with pottery or ceramics to sell. Even in these uncertain times, this trade route along the coast of Gaul remained one of the busiest. Traders and wine sellers travelling to and from Hispania. Rumours of marauding
bagaudes
, bands of deserting soldiers or barbarians from the East, could not deter the men and women of commerce.