Lucie rubbed her face with her handkerchief. ‘But what am I going to do? No one can know.’
Marianne and Suzanne exchanged glances. Suzanne shrugged. ‘It’s up to you,’ she said.
Marianne thought for a moment, then she sighed.
‘Lucie, listen. I’ve heard nothing from Sandrine, and that’s unlike her. And she needs to know that someone’s looking for her. I sent a telegram, but we were thinking of going to see if things are all right.’
For a moment, hurt shone in Lucie’s eyes. ‘You were going to go without telling me?’
‘Do you blame us?’ Suzanne said sharply.
‘But I . . .’ she began, then shook her head. ‘No, I suppose I don’t.’ She paused. ‘When were you going to go?’
‘As soon as we can,’ Marianne replied. ‘You’d better come with us. You’ll be safer there with Liesl and Marieta until . . .’
For a moment Lucie looked relieved, then her expression changed. ‘But if I leave Carcassonne,’ she said, anxiety mounting in her voice, ‘how will Captain Authié contact me when he gets permission for me to visit Max? I can’t leave.’
‘Lucie, stop,’ Marianne said sharply. ‘You’ve got to get it into your head that you can’t trust Authié. He only made the promise to get you to talk about Sandrine. He’s not on your side. Certainly not on Max’s side.’
‘But I’m not interested in politics,’ Lucie protested. ‘I’m not trying to cause trouble. I just want to get on with my life with Max, that’s all.’
‘Those days are gone. The occupation affects everything we do, whether you choose to accept it or not.’
Finally, tears began to roll down Lucie’s cheeks. ‘There must be something.’
‘You need to think of yourself now,’ Marianne said firmly. ‘Of the baby. That’s what Max would want you to do.’
‘How far gone are you?’ said Suzanne in her abrupt way.
‘Three months.’
She did the arithmetic. ‘Due in January.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Haven’t you seen a doctor?’
‘How can I?’ she wailed. ‘I’m not married. They’d want to know who the father is. I can’t.’
‘You don’t show,’ Suzanne said.
‘I haven’t been able to keep anything down for weeks.’
‘All the more reason to get you to the country,’ Marianne said. ‘A few weeks of Marieta’s cooking and you’ll be your old self. We’ll carry on trying to find out what’s happened to Max, without Authié’s help. You mustn’t worry any more.’
Lucie was picking at a thread of cotton on her sleeve, thinking about what to do. Marianne smiled. Lucie had always been the same. Holding any set of views passionately, but just as likely to turn round and do the precise opposite.
‘What do you say?’ she asked.
When Lucie raised her head, Marianne saw her eyes were now dry. ‘Would it help if I could get hold of a car?’ she asked.
Marianne looked at her, then at Suzanne, then burst out laughing.
COUSTAUSSA
S
andrine and Raoul were in the woods beyond the Andrieu farm, with six empty glass jars, Raoul’s service revolver and some ammunition. Sandrine had tied her hair back off her face and was wearing an old shirt and a pair of slacks of her father’s, held up with a leather belt. Raoul’s hair was short – cut by Sandrine in the bathroom – and he’d shaved off his beard. He looked more like his old self, the face on the poster, but nothing like the man the Couiza police were looking for.
‘Bend your knees and set your feet further apart,’ he said. ‘No wider than your shoulders. The first rule of marksmanship is that the position and hold must be firm enough to support the weapon.’ He paused. ‘So, are you comfortable?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Raise your right arm, straight in front of you,’ he said. ‘The gun’s got to point naturally at the target. Otherwise the recoil will knock you off balance.’
‘It feels all right.’
‘Good. Now, close your left eye, focus with your right. Look down the barrel, through the sight. Make yourself breathe, slowly, in and out, get used to the position.’
‘Can I shoot?’
‘Be patient!’ he laughed. ‘This isn’t about firing a shotgun at a rabbit, whatever lessons those country boys might have taught you. It’s about precision, putting the bullet where you want it to go. About being patient.’
‘I am being patient,’ Sandrine protested.
He laughed again. ‘Now slowly, very slowly, squeeze your finger towards you; you’re gently pulling the trigger, not jerking at it. Squeeze it. Keep your eye all the time on the target, don’t look at anything else, just keep the target in your sight. Then, and only then, when you’re ready, shoot.’
Sandrine felt a strange calm go through her. The steady beating of her blood in her ears, an awareness of each of the muscles in her neck, her arm, connected all the way down to the tip of her right index finger on the metal trigger. She ceased to be aware of Raoul or that he was watching her. She exhaled, then, slowly, squeezed. At the last moment, the barrel jumped and the bullet went high.
Frustrated, she let her arm drop. ‘What happened?’ she said, cross with herself.
‘It’s what always happens to start with.’
‘It didn’t used to happen.’
‘A shotgun’s a very different weapon.’
‘I meant Yves’ father’s revolver, a souvenir of the war.’ She paused. ‘The last war, I mean.’
‘Who’s Yves?’
‘Just a boy from the village,’ she said quickly. ‘It was a long time ago.’
‘I see.’ Raoul looked at her. ‘The shot must be released and followed through without any change to your firing position. You anticipated the shot, so at the very last second you lost your aim.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘It’s a common mistake. You blink, your arm moves, the bullet misses its target.’
Raoul came round and stood close behind her, touching her shoulder, her elbow, moving her arm a little higher. Sandrine could feel his breath on her cheek, the sweet smell of soap and tobacco. She felt herself blush.
‘Now,’ Raoul said, once he was satisfied with her position. ‘Try again.’
Sandrine took aim. Determined to do it right, she counted down in her head, like swimming in the deeper part of the river at Rennes-les-Bains, slow and steady, breathing in, breathing out. This time, she squeezed the trigger and imagined the bullet shooting down the barrel and out. This time, the glass shattered.
‘There!’ she said with triumph, turning round to face him.
‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘We’ll make a marksman of you yet.’
‘Haven’t we practised enough?’ she said. ‘It makes me nervous being out here.’
He smiled. ‘There’s no one about.’
Raoul leant forward, aligning his arm with the length of hers. Now he was folding his hand over hers, helping her to raise the gun, her exact shadow. Heat flooded through her, making her aware of every inch of her skin, of his skin, of his breath on the back of her neck.
‘Now,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘Try again.’
When the shadows were beginning to lengthen, Raoul and Sandrine returned to the house.
She put her head around the door into the salon. Liesl and Marieta were playing ‘vingt-et-un’. Marieta had more colour in her cheeks. Liesl seemed to have recovered from her attack of nerves. Sandrine went back into the hall.
‘I can’t find Monsieur Baillard,’ Raoul said, appearing at the end of the corridor. ‘I wanted to tell him about my star pupil.’ He took her hand and held it tight.
‘What is it?’ she said, feeling the urgency in his grasp.
‘I was going out of my mind at the thought of not seeing you again.’
Sandrine raised her hand to his cheek, and all the words, spoken and unspoken, shimmered in the air between them. Then, sharp, a glimpse of how life might have been. In different times, not these times, the vision of years of marriage and love and company. The smile slipped from her lips.
‘If something happened to you, I don’t think I could bear it,’ she said.
‘Nothing’s going to happen to me,’ he said.
‘You can’t say that.’
‘I can look after myself.’
Sandrine sat down at the bottom of the stairs. ‘When you were taking refugees across the border, when you were risking your life for people you didn’t even know, probably wouldn’t see again, what were you thinking?’
He sat down beside her. ‘Mostly you’re not thinking at all, only about where to sleep, where the next meal’s coming from, if there are police or patrols about.’
‘Were you scared?’
He laughed. ‘All the time. It’s how you survive. Fear keeps you on your guard, keeps you safe.’ He threaded her fingers through his. ‘You think about one day at a time. Today’s the only day that matters.’
‘And if things never change?’
‘They will,’ he said quickly. ‘They have to. We’ll keep fighting, more people will come over to our way of seeing things, we won’t . . .’ He stopped. ‘Things will get better, you’ll see.’
Sandrine looked at his serious, proud face, his restless eyes bright in his tanned face, then put her arm around his waist. Sensing a change in her, perhaps, Raoul felt suddenly awkward.
‘What?’ he said, nervous now.
Sandrine stood up and took a couple of steps up the stairs. ‘Today is what matters, that’s what you said.’
‘Yes . . .’
‘And you can’t say you’ll be all right, because you don’t know. We don’t know what will happen when the sun rises tomorrow.’
She kicked off her shoes, which fell clattering back down to the floor, then turned and walked up the narrow stairs, feeling his eyes on her. She didn’t know what she intended, not really. Only a voice in her head telling her how little time they might have.
Sandrine stopped, turned then. Looked back at him. Watched as Raoul ran his fingers over his hair, glanced at the shoes lying like an invitation on the floor, not sure what he was supposed to do.
She smiled. In slow motion, it seemed to her, he started to walk up the stairs, then faster, taking them two at a time, until he was standing in front of her.
‘Today is what matters,’ she said again.
T
he sun was sinking down to earth, covering the garrigue in a golden light. Everything was sharp, outlined against the whitening sky.
Audric Baillard stood beside the largest of the
capitelles
, his hand resting on the stone, still warm from the heat of the day. He looked down the low wall that ran alongside the track back towards Coustaussa. Past the old holm oak, past the white walls of the outbuildings of the Andrieu farm, to the cemetery.
To the west, the ruins of the old château-fort. To the east, Arques and Rennes-les-Bains hidden in the green folds of the woods. Ahead, on the far side of the valley, the village of Rennes-le-Château, a semi-circle of green houses and the flat red turrets and towers of the ancient Château des seigneurs de Hautpoul. The Visigoths had made the hilltop the capital of their spreading empire, building on older remains. The square towers and high arched windows of the more recent castle were reminiscent of the oldest sections of the walls of the medieval Cité of Carcassonne.
Baillard took the fragile scrap of woollen cloth from its linen shroud in his pocket and held it before him, still unable to believe the turn of fate that had brought it into his hands. Crude though the picture undoubtedly was, he was certain the tallest of the peaks shown was the Pic de Vicdessos. He followed the line to the hiding place at its centre with his eye. Hard to tell without an indication of scale, but he estimated it might be some three or four kilometres north of there. Even so, it was a large area, filled with caves and labyrinthine fissures in the rocks. Once, most of the lower slopes would have been forest. Today, open spaces punctuated the woods.
‘
A la perfin
,’ he murmured. At last.
Baillard took a deep breath, then began to read out loud the few Latin phrases written on the map. Repeating the words once, then again, hoping to hear the voices calling to him from deep within the earth. He closed his eyes.
‘Come forth . . .’
And this time, although the sound was still indistinct and blurred and distorted, Baillard perceived the shift of bones within the land. For an instant, a cooling of the air and the light metamorphosing from pink to silver to white. He caught his breath. The rattle of metal and leather, of swords and marching feet. Banners and battle colours, one row behind another behind another, shimmering like a reflection in a mirror. The heroines of antiquity, Pyrène and Bramimonde, the Queen of Saragossa, Esclarmonde de Servian and Esclarmonde de Lavaur. The song of the dead awakening.
‘. . . the spirits of the air.’
Harif, Guilhem du Mas and Pascal Barthès, all those who dedicated their lives so that others might live. The Franks and the Saracens, the battles of Christianity against another new faith. Stories of treachery and betrayal in the eighth century as in the fourth, Septimania conquered and subjugated and occupied once more. The force of arms and the clash of belief.
‘A sea of glass . . .’
In his mind’s eye, Baillard could see the walls of Carcassonne. Charlemagne’s army camped on the green plain beside the river Atax. Looking out over the plains of Carsac, the widow of King Balaak, the sole survivor in the besieged Cité. Straw soldiers set along the ramparts to protect Carcas, the Saracen queen, from the power of the Holy Roman Emperor. No man left living to send out to parley. Burning what little remained for warmth.
‘A sea of fire.’
Baillard closed his eyes as the legend took shape in his mind. Every schoolchild knew the story. How Dame Carcas fed the very last grains of food in the starving city to a pig, then tossed the animal over the wall. When its sides split open, and undigested food spilled out, the deception was sufficient to persuade Charlemagne that the Cité had food and water enough to withstand. He lifted the siege and struck camp, until the single note of an elephant’s tusk horn called him back and the Tour Pinte bowed down in homage at Dame Carcas’ behest.
Carcas sonne
, so went the phrase. Carcas is calling.
A story to explain how Carcassonne got its name. A fairy tale about a brave woman and an army of straw men defeating the might of the army of the Holy Roman Emperor. A myth, no more.