She knows this is her mother’s natural tongue: the speech of suffering, the patois of prayer and commiseration, of one human being imparting to another these questionable words of comfort—all affliction comes of God. It is Christ’s grand design, like a scattering of seeds. Every forest, lane, and village, every town and city and unswept alley of the kingdom, her mother has explained to her, is covered in such seeds of misery, so the only thing to do is to learn to accept the pain. Accept and submit to God’s will, whatever you lose.

She, Joan, doesn’t speak this language. What’s more, she does not want to learn. She pushes her bruised face into the fur of Guillaume’s cat, which, she discovered after asking the dead boy’s sister, has no name, has never been given one. So, Joan is turning her mind over, trying to think of a good name.

She tries to copy Guillaume: flip the cat on its back and cradle the animal like a baby, because she does not want to be here among these women, quiet though they are in pain, and who exchange prayers for things impossible to put into words with the ease of swapping recipes. The cat is soft in her arms. It mewls, and the cry is like a human cry. Some sounds one does not hear so much as feel, and she feels this cry in her heart.

The cat gives her a slow feline blink; its gray-green eyes look watery, or maybe that’s just a trick of the light. But she would rather believe that animals, too, are capable of grief, of memory and therefore of remembering better days. I know, she thinks. She wants to whisper this into the cat’s ear. I am not your master, though I would happily be your friend. And you miss the boy you used to see every day. You miss being called by your name, for I am sure he gave you a name, even if no one knows or remembers it now. Well, I shall try to think of one, and I won’t give you a bad word for a name, like I did my poor Salaud.

She sets the cat down. She inches slowly along the wall, though she doesn’t have to. No one pays any attention to her, not even Hauviette or Catherine, who are huddled around Guillaume’s sister.