‘He was in command of the unit.’ Aunt Marguerite liked clearly defined questions. ‘He was called Major Udo Knecht.’

‘Was it ever established what had happened?’

Their voices fell over one another in their eagerness to talk. ‘We never knew.’

‘We could never find out.’

‘It was such a terrible time. Henri was killed, so the death of the German, well, no one cared about it.’

‘And whom could we ask? Normally Micheline or Florence or Ariane would tell us the news, but they were so distressed by Henri’s death …’

‘It was not something we could ask the children about. It was shocking enough that they saw him.’

‘We all saw him. He lay there, completely naked.’

‘There was a lot of activity in the night. The engines of cars, headlights. We didn’t go out or even open the shutters. We prayed.’

‘The Resistance must have caught him.’

‘How? Where?’

‘We’ll never know.’

‘Whoever killed him left him there as a warning to his comrades.’

‘But fortunately for us, the Germans had left, because if they had still been here, and they had found the body rather than Micheline …’

‘I imagine we would have all been shot.’

‘I can’t think that killing individual Germans was a sensible tactic. It led to such terrible repercussions: three for one, or ten for one.’

‘That was the communists. They didn’t care about reprisals. They thought it would incite the population to revolt.’

‘When he broadcast from London, the general forbade attacks until the liberation.’

‘Yes, but Maurice Schumann said on the wireless that the time for the settlement of accounts would come.’

Aunt Odette struggled out of her chair and found her cane. ‘Theo, you have had a long journey, so we must give you a moment to prepare for dinner. And afterwards we must allow you some time with Sabine.’

Chapter Five

Theo went to his room to unpack. He found his wardrobe full of his old clothes and took out a tweed jacket, thick woollen trousers. As he put them on, he felt he was assuming his old life, before Ariane. Sabine was his first responsibility, he told himself. When he was in exile he had had half-formed ideas about the future, when the war was over, of living in Paris with Ariane and Sabine and other possible children, making a new family with a normal life of school holidays and family festivals. Those visions were dead before birth. So Sabine would have to go back to the convent. He wanted her to be like her mother, gentle, domestic, with no conversation or interests outside the family. He had had enough of modern women; he had no wish for her to be highly educated, as Ariane was. The convent would do very well.

Dinner was served in Micheline’s house, at the table where he and Dorchin had sat that evening at the beginning of September, and they all ate together, the aunts, Sabine, Micheline and Florence. Aunt Odette felt the oddity of dining in the servants’ quarters and said in explanation, as Theo escorted her across the farmyard, ‘Ariane suggested we eat over here, because it made things easier for Micheline.’