“Ugh! Who would want that staring back at them?” Françoise said when the bidding went wild for a painting where a man had been given the head of a pig in place of his own face. Beside her, the art patrons turned to glare at the young girl with such loud opinions, but Françoise didn’t care. She was fearless in the auction room and thought the whole affair was hilarious. A couple of times, she even raised her hand and placed a bid! At one point she ‘borrowed’ a paddle from a lady and nearly bought a painting by mistake – which I found terrifying and she found funny. Françoise, of course, had been attending these Lucie auctions since she was a baby in her mother’s arms. To her they were entertainment to be enjoyed. But to me, it was so stressful! Lot after lot, I felt my pulse rising as I waited for them to reach my painting, and all I could think about was Claude.

What would selling his painting achieve now? The public outcry had been huge on his behalf, but the Célestins had been unwavering. It was not their policy to care for a permanently injured horse. Even with the groundswell of public opinion against them, they had held firm to their position that the humane thing to do would be to end Claude’s life. It appeared that Nicole’s plan to get the public behind us and demand that the Célestins change their mind would fail anyway. And now, here I was, spending Claude’s final hours in a stupid room filled with rich, snobby women and their well-leashed husbands about to pay too much for paintings of squiggles and blobs and …

“Lot number sixty-seven!” Monsieur Falaise’s cry silenced the room around me. “This substantial work, in oil on canvas, is entitled, Claude.”

I could feel my heart hammering like mad in my chest. This was it! The moment had come at last.

“Who will open the bidding at five thousand euros?”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! Five thousand euros? All the other works so far had fetched no more than two or three thousand. To open the bidding at this sum was –

“I have five thousand bid! Alors! We are underway who will give me six thousand?”

I was craning my neck, trying to peer round the backs of the people standing front of me to see now who was doing the bidding, but all I could catch was a glimpse here and there of a paddle being raised, and then the auctioneer pointing his long bony finger across the room to identify a new bid.

“With you, madame, at twenty-five, and with you now, sir, at twenty-six. Madame? You want to go higher? Thank you we have twenty-eight. Now twenty-nine …”