This, he realised, was what he had carried around in his mind for four years of exile. His pleasure at the memory of his father, at the beauty of the object, was also the moment of recognition of his own folly. He had carried Bonnemort wrapped in his imagination, believing it to be sealed away, like the book in its velvet-lined box.

He turned a page. The anonymous painter was a more ruthless realist than he was. He remembered his father’s finger pointing to the troop of armed men marching out of the castle in the spring. He was indicating the minutely exact weapons: lances, halberds, crossbows. An injured soldier lying on the brilliant grass was trying to contain a writhing snakes’ nest of intestines spilling from his belly. And the chatelaine, if he turned another page, would she be welcoming the enemy into the surrendered castle? It was easy to transpose the excitement of his and Ariane’s time together before the war to his nightmares of her passion for the German officer.

One memory came back so intensely that he groaned as he imagined the scene replayed here at Bonnemort, his own role taken by the invader.

He could no longer recall where the original drama had taken place, because the central incident was so vivid. Whether at her father’s house, at the opera, at a dinner, it was somewhere public, dangerous. He had just returned to Paris from his unit.

In some small antechamber or corridor they had embraced passionately. Through the layers of his evening clothes, he had felt her hands pressing on the small of his back, then, with dexterity, manoeuvring between them, opening his buttons. He gasped as he felt her cool fingers on his flesh, pulling him out. When she dropped to the floor, he reached down to her.

‘Ariane, this is madness, Ariane …’

The thought of what would happen in a Paris salon in the aftermath of being discovered being fellated by a woman whose long silk skirts were spread in a pool around his feet occurred to him only briefly before he reached the point of no return. It must have been at a dinner, rather a grand one. He recalled that later in the evening he had met her eye across the table, an exchange of glances full of complicity and amusement. A feeling he had never before experienced overcame him then, compounded of desire, admiration, attachment; he did not know what to call it. At that moment he thought that her strong face, with its heavily marked eyebrows, was the most beautiful he had ever known.

He folded the Book of Hours back into its velvet-lined box. He might one day take it out to show to Sabine.

Chapter Ten

The next day, his last, began with a visit to the Gendarmerie in Lepech Perdrissou. He was looking for Officer Paul Petignat, who had been sent up to Bonnemort to break the news of Henri’s death. He turned out to be a young man, in his late twenties, with a strong country accent. He must have been recruited before the war, a local boy who achieved the peasant dream of a government job. He was wary, but eager to please when Theo explained who he was. He was obviously glad that the questioning turned not on his own actions during the Occupation, but on the murdered German at Bonnemort. He was still defensive, thinking he had to answer the charge that proper procedures had not been followed.