She was running back through the paddock, diffracting the jewelled fowl like sunlight through a prism. Gasping for breath, Suzie followed her into the house by the tower door. They raced through an enfilade of rooms. She caught glimpses of gilt frames and misted mirrors, chairs arranged in ghostly groups, their former occupants now ranged on the walls in portraits.

Sabine’s footsteps rapped on the roads of parquet, the sound muffled out when she crossed the glowing lakes of oriental rugs. She halted at a hidden, silk-covered door, cut into the wall without a frame, and whisked it open.

‘This is my secret place. No one comes here, no one.’ They were in a stairwell of bare stone. Another door opened and this time Suzie closed her eyes against the sudden brilliance that confounded them. The late afternoon sun was flowing in a stream of dancing atoms through a window above their heads and striking the white-washed walls with dazzling effect. The room was a hall, double height, although it was lower at the far end where the wall was rounded, like the inside of a beehive. A few rush-seated chairs, oddly low, with high backs, were arranged in a row towards the front of the hall. In front of them was a table covered with a white cloth, with two candlesticks on it, as if it were Shabbat and someone was about to say the Friday night prayer. Sabine seated herself on one of the chairs, with her back to the light.

‘Come and sit, sit here.’ She pulled another chair in front of her. Suzie squatted on the low seat, the sunlight falling full in her face.

‘You’ve come here to live?’ Sabine asked. ‘For ever?’

Suzie screwed up her eyes. She could only see her interrogator as a silhouette with a dark nimbus of fine curls.

‘Well, until my mother’s better.’

‘Why did she bring you here?’

‘My mother’s sick. She can’t look after me.’

‘Do you like her?’

‘Who? Your mother?’

‘She’s not my mother. She’s not my mother.’

‘I thought you were Sabine de Cazalle.’

‘Yes, we have the same name, but she’s my stepmother.’ Sabine was leaning forward in the intensity of her feeling. ‘I hate her. I hate her.’

‘But why?’

‘My father’s dead. My mother’s dead. She took me away from the sisters and brought me here. I’m in her power. It’s the same for you. She’s taken you from your parents and brought you here. You’re in her power too.’

Suzie was overmastered by Sabine. Both parents dead; she could not imagine anything worse. At least she had the hope of seeing Maman and Papa again one day, when the war was over.

‘So you’ll be on my side?’ Sabine asked.

How could one not be on the same side as someone who had lost her parents definitively? Suzie’s own tribulations seemed minor. ‘Of course.’

‘Swear.’

‘Yes.’

‘No, swear by all the saints.’

‘I swear by all the saints.’

Sabine rose briskly, taking Suzie’s hand to drag her up too.