It was perhaps in examining herself for damage after these operations, soothing her own pain, that she discovered the comfort of the lonely in physical pleasure and her night-time tortures were relieved in orgasmic fantasies of revenge. When her enemies had been torn apart in some episode of biblical violence, she would at last fall shudderingly asleep.

She found protection at last in a new sister, recently arrived from the order’s work in Algeria. Sister Barbe was young, with a low, intense voice and so powerful a personality that her classes, French language and orthography, were among the most dreaded. Whether for faults of behaviour, restlessness or whispering, or of performance, a blot on the page, an ill-spelled word, punishment, in the form of sarcasm and beating, was swift. Sabine, however, felt safer in this regime of terror, which lay on all of them impartially. To Sister Barbe she made her only attempt to tell an adult of her suffering. The response was curious.

‘Denunciation,’ she told Sabine, ‘is despicable. Each person must assess her own sins, confess them, make retribution for them. We are not placed on this earth to take the speck from our brother’s eye, but to remove the mote from our own. You will make your confession on Saturday as usual. In the meantime, I must punish you myself.’

The beating was brief but severe. The surgical experiments ceased. Sabine never discovered how Sister Barbe curbed Antoinette’s medical obsessions, for she saw no sign of sanctions placed on her or on the others. It was enough that she was saved and she was deeply grateful for the protection she had won from the nightly torture. It was worth the price. Sister Barbe’s beatings, although harsh, were infrequent. She willingly bartered the gift of her pain for a sort of safety. She knew Sister Barbe watched over her, was interested in her studies and her devotions. For the first time since her mother’s death she was special to someone, even in a perverse fashion.

When her stepmother removed her from the convent, without warning, in September 1940 and brought her to Bonnemort, she missed the protection and the pain. She had hated Ariane for it. It was a long time until she found a substitute for what she had lost.

Chapter Six

The farmyard was shimmering with frost when Theo left the tower next morning. He could see by the dark footprints in the rime that Micheline and Florence were already at work. In her kitchen Micheline made him a bowl of ersatz coffee with milk and cut him a slice of bread. He took his breakfast to a chair by the fire, its whitened ashes rekindled and burning with fresh wood. He dunked the bread into the coffee, to soften one and disguise the taste of the other.

‘I should go to see Dr Maniotte this morning,’ he remarked. ‘I’ll take one of the horses. They could do with exercising, I imagine.’

‘No need. He’s dead, too.’ Micheline was stirring the pigswill in a battered cauldron. When Theo said nothing, she went on, ‘His wife is still at La Grande Penetie with the younger children.’