Neither Agathe nor Annette had ever been on a train before. Annette spent the journey with her nose pressed against the window, watching sunlit countryside such as she had never seen nor been able to imagine, slip past her as the train chugged its way south from the city. Agathe was watching as well, but she was looking anxiously for the names of the stations they passed, afraid that they might miss theirs. Other passengers in the compartment came and went, and once Agathe plucked up the courage to ask one elderly woman how much further to St Etienne.

‘I leave the train at the station before,’ the woman replied, and with a sigh of relief Agathe knew she could relax until then.

When the train finally steamed into St Etienne she quickly got to her feet, saying to Annette, ‘Come along, hurry and pick up your bag, this is where we get off.’

They clambered down onto the platform, each of them carrying a small case containing her worldly goods. When they had passed through the ticket barrier, they stepped outside into the summer sunshine and looked about them.

‘Madame St Clair said someone would meet us,’ Agathe said anxiously.

Annette, looking about her, saw a man of about thirty standing beside a pony and trap, his eyes searching the few passengers who had alighted. ‘Perhaps that’s him,’ she said.

The man spotted them at the same moment and came across. ‘Madame Sauze? I am Pierre, sent by Madame St Clair to fetch you.’ He added anxiously, ‘You are Madame Sauze?’

‘Yes, monsieur, thank you, and this is my niece, Madame Dubois.’

The man looked surprised. He had been assuming that the niece he’d been told to meet was a Mademoiselle Dubois, but in that instant he saw that she was expecting a child and quickly averted his eyes, saying, ‘I have the trap over here. Come this way, please.’

As they drove away from the station, Annette stared wide-eyed at the scattered houses of St Etienne. Some lined the main street, hidden by high protecting walls; other, smaller houses opened directly onto the roadway; and yet more scrambled, higgledy-piggledy, up narrow lanes that branched off on either side to the rising ground beyond. The thoroughfare bisecting the village opened out into a stone-paved square, the Place, and clearly this was the heart of St Etienne. It was bounded by shops on two sides, and a busy coaching inn, a silver cockerel above its door proclaiming it Le Coq d’Argent, lay across a third. The fourth side was dominated by the Mairie, the town hall, by far the most important building in the square. In the centre of the Place, market stalls, some shaded by colourful awnings, offered fruit, vegetables and other produce from the surrounding countryside. It was a gathering place where people met to do business, to catch up on news, to share a glass of wine. Several elderly men were sitting out in the sunshine, glasses in hand, smoking pipes and chatting as they watched the progress of a game of boules; women, carrying baskets, paused to share gossip before returning home with their purchases. There was a lazy bustle about the place as it lay in the warm summer sunshine.