“Nicole!” the sight of her makes me well up with tears. “Alexandre was just here. He says the Master of Horses, the head of the Republican Guard, is going to kill Claude!”

“What?” Nicole is horrified. “They can’t!”

“Alexandre says they have no choice!” I say. “He had the vet with him with the black bag and everything. The Master, the head of the Guard, says they have to. They won’t pay for him to have surgery and Claude is very sick and the leg is probably broken and he’s being difficult to treat and they are horrible! Horrible!”

“Calm down, Maisie, calm down. It will be all right,” Nicole says, but she looks like she might cry too.

“They want to have the horse put down?” The man in the black spectacles speaks with a London accent like mine!

“I put them off,” I say, “but only until tomorrow.”

The man looks over the stable door at Claude.

“But this is the horse that stopped the van,” he says. “Do they realise they’re about to kill a national hero?

“They don’t consider him a hero,” I say. “To them, he’s just a horse.”

“Well,” the man says with great assurance, “I think we can change that.”

I am baffled. And then Nicole speaks up. “I’m sorry Maisie, I haven’t introduced you. This is David Fisher. He is a reporter for the International Tribune newspaper. He phoned to interview me about Françoise and what happened at the Louvre and then we got talking about Claude and the painting that you are doing of him. I brought David down here because I think perhaps he can help us.”

I don’t see how this man can help. We have twenty-four hours. Claude has been given a death sentence. But I know better by now than to underestimate Nicole Bonifait. She has come here with a plan.

“You are going to tell David your story, about what happened that day at the Louvre,” Nicole says. “And then he’ll take a picture, of you and of Claude and of the painting.”

And then she explains her scheme to me, and I have to admit, it is brilliant. But we are running out of time. Tomorrow is the day that they will take Claude from me forever. We have to put our plan in motion and I can only hope it works.

***

That night, alone again, I pack my paints and I lie down in the straw beside Claude. I can hear his breathing, rasping and low, as I stroke his mane and I whisper goodnight to him. I’m going to leave his stall this time and go home and eat dinner, have a shower, resort to reading Rose’s diary at 3 a.m. when I cannot sleep …