Sabine reached the ground, euphoric at their adventure. ‘We must do it again,’ she said. ‘It was brilliant. We can use it as our hiding place from her, instead of the chapel.’

In the light that flooded in through the open doors Suzie examined what they had discovered. The space was empty. Around the walls were wide wooden racks and the rock floor was carved with an enormous circle.

‘What is this place?’ she asked.

‘It’s the winepress,’ Sabine explained. ‘That’s where the vat used to be. They put the grapes in it in the olden days and then everyone trod on them to mash them and get the juice out.’

‘They didn’t,’ Suzie said sceptically.

‘They did once. But they took the press away when they abandoned the vineyards here.’

Lying in the hay, Suzie asked herself why she had done it. Why? If she had found the courage to make that descent, why could she not refuse to do what Sabine demanded? She had often asked herself this during the first terrible six months at Bonnemort. It seemed as if she was more afraid of Sabine’s taunts than of the physical tests she was put to. And perhaps it was true: isolation was worse than danger; friendship at any price. Sabine had a command which sabotaged her will, converting it to her, Sabine’s, ends, not her own. But, however much she puzzled over this power, she knew that she had surrendered her freedom herself, in an act of folly and betrayal. She had yielded to Sabine from the start, not knowing how to resist her, but she did not blame herself for that, for what else could she have done? What she regretted was the madness of voluntarily giving up the information that had made Sabine’s control complete.

Madame Ariane had made her promise never to tell anyone she was Jewish. Maman had commanded it, too. She could not understand why this element in her identity should be shameful, criminal, yet she could see that it was. And the shame was infectious; other people fled from them. Madame Ariane had welcomed her, but on the condition that her Jewishness was hidden. She understood that she had a duty not to allow the harm she carried to affect others. Was this why she had told Sabine, as a revenge for the suffering she had inflicted, to pass the danger on to her? Or had she hoped that this willing surrender of her greatest secret would somehow show Sabine that her demands had reached the end? There was nothing more she could give.

As soon as the confession was made, one afternoon when they were sitting in the chapel, she had regretted it. She regretted her broken promise to Madame Ariane, for now she was irrevocably committed to Sabine, who recognised her new power at once. ‘I’ll tell who you are,’ or ‘I’ll tell her what you told me,’ were weapons which destroyed all resistance. She could never appeal to Madame Ariane for help, for she would have to admit that she had broken her promise. She was in Sabine’s hands until the war ended and her parents came back to claim her.