She found she was holding her head now. The memory would spring on her without warning as she sat at her desk. Or it would wake her in the night, making her retch, as she had then, tears of rage and shame starting from her eyes.

Chapter Thirty-one

Suzie opened the door of Sabine’s room and entered quietly. The bedroom she had shared for two years seemed puzzlingly strange. Then she realised that although nothing in the room itself had changed, the smell, the familiar animal scent of her own lair, was different. A sharp medicinal odour mingled oddly with that of woodsmoke, the background scent of Bonnemort in winter. Sabine’s head was all but hidden in her pillows and, as she made no movement, Suzie assumed she was asleep. She sat down on the chair by the bed.

She noticed that her side of the dressing table still carried her collection of objects: an ammonite, a thrush’s nest with, inside it, a wren’s egg that she had found in a deserted nest, a cluster of acorn cups, an ox’s slipper and a tiny blue glass bottle. Their existence as a collection, each one still correctly positioned, surprised her. She had had no intention of coming back to Bonnemort when she left, because she was going to live with Papa and Maman when they came home; she had not cared what happened to her objets trouves. Yet she was touched that Sabine had not swept the whole lot into the bin, as if she thought Suzie might come back to claim them.

She looked at the segment of Sabine’s head that was visible, a slice of bruised cheek, a tuft of hair, and felt the power of the conscious in the presence of the sleeping. She had been liberated from her; she was no longer afraid. In Paris she had not allowed herself to think of Bonnemort at all. Sometimes the soft snorting of Lou Moussou, or the velvety warmth of Florence’s goodnight embrace recurred involuntarily, not as memory but as sensation, and she had rejected them immediately. Now she saw that she was free. Sabine’s occupation was over; she could not threaten her or tyrannise her, even if the two of them were living together once more. She let out a shuddering breath and glanced at Sabine, to find that her eyes were open and she was watching her.

‘How are you?’

Sabine’s expression was full of anger and resentment. ‘Alive.’

She could tell at once that Suzie had changed in the months she had been away. The placatory undertone that had always coloured her voice had gone. Sabine had felt Suzie’s absence bitterly when she had first been taken away by Madame Ariane: another debit to her stepmother’s account. She had been furious, jealous, that Suzie had gone and she was left, so she had heaped on the absent one’s head all the terrible things that had happened at Bonnemort since she had last been there, and since she had gone. Suzie was to blame; she had made her, Sabine, do things she would never have done if she hadn’t had Suzie to do them with, or to. Her father had been angry with her when she had said it was because Suzie was Jewish. But if she hadn’t been Jewish, she wouldn’t have had to hide at Bonnemort in the first place.