She remembers the meeting of women in Guillaume’s cottage, her mother’s eyes shut tight as she muttered a prayer. She recalls the hunched bodies, like doves gathering against the winter cold. No one spoke if they could whisper. An old woman, the dead boy’s grandmother, stirred a pot with a bony hand, and this was the loudest noise in the room. She remembers, too, the meeting of men in her father’s house: the restlessness and pacing, the twitching of muscles beneath shirts, the fists that opened, then closed around throats of air. The men wanted vengeance. The women wanted deliverance. If I had to choose, she thinks, I would choose action over prayer. I would avenge, but I would also save. Is such a thing possible? If she could relive the past, she knows she would do nothing different. She would still step into the clearing and fill her father’s eyes with the torch’s fire to defend the man from Maxey, just as he had rescued her from thieves in Vaucouleurs.

She takes the present. She does not need to ask her uncle what she can use it for. In her pocket, she has two bent nails. Now she has a knife.

In the morning, she comes across Guillaume’s cat in the road. The dead boy’s family hasn’t treated the animal well. The grandmother is always shooing it away with a broom, but the cat is sunning itself, its expression unconcerned, in a patch of wilted dandelions. She picks it up. She rubs her face, as its former master did, along its soft, curving spine, until her eyes itch with tears and cat fur. Around its neck, she ties a pouch, and in the pouch, she puts the remaining coins from her dress. She sets the cat at the door of the dead boy’s cottage, and the next time she sees the animal, it is being stroked in the arms of Guillaume’s sister and the pouch is no longer hanging around its neck. In the story making its way around the village, the cat went out one day and returned with treasure. The family thinks the cat is lucky and has given it a name: Matagot, after a spirit from Gascony. A matagot may be evil or it may be good, but it is known to take the form of a cat. Treat a matagot well, feed it, and it may bring you a gold coin. Soon the cat is plump as a fine lady’s cushion and too contented, she hears, to be bothered to catch mice. When she passes Matagot, its gray-green eyes blink at her, watching.