She saw the crutches splayed out on the dirty straw, his right leg below the knee encased in a metal leg-iron, and her cheeks flushed a dull crimson. She darted towards her brother and dropped on one knee in front of him, so he wouldn’t have to look up at her. Something about her position of supplication jarred with Léon and he wanted to raise her to her feet. She used to hang around as a child on the edge of André’s gang of unruly boys and even then Léon had been the one to swing her up on to the first branch of any tree they were climbing, while her brother sat at the top urging her on to greater effort. But by fifteen she could outride and outshoot the lot of them. Everything they did, she strove to do better, but it was never good enough. Not for André.

‘Why didn’t you tell me you were at the farm?’ she demanded. ‘I thought you were dead. Why didn’t you tell me?’ Her hand reached out to his knee but stopped just short of touching it. ‘How are you now?’ she asked. Her voice was shaking.

‘How do you think?’ He rested his hand on the stock of the rifle. ‘They would not have dared touch Goliath if I had not been a cripple.’

It was worse than a slap. Léon watched the dark blood drain from her cheek. André was blaming her for the prize bull’s death. Léon feared tears from her, but he was wrong. Underneath the Parisian gloss of silky black hair and the stylish dress with an animal’s blood on its skirt, the old Eloïse still stalked. He saw it in the speed with which she shot to her feet, in the straightness of her spine as she stared down at her brother.

‘What happened here? Why would anyone want to slaughter Goliath? What have you done?’

‘It’s not what I’ve done. It’s what our father has done.’

She turned to Léon. ‘Is it true?’

‘It’s true, Eloïse.’

‘What has Papa done? Tell me.’

Léon was aware of the dense humming of the flies in the sudden silence. ‘He is selling part of his land to the United States Air Force to expand their nuclear air base here at Dumoulin.’

‘No,’ she insisted. ‘Papa would rather chop off his right hand than sell Caussade land.’

André gave her a hard tight smile. ‘It might yet come to that.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

I stood in the bull-yard and watched a monstrous silver bomber dip one long wing as it banked towards the east with a roar, its wing-lights flashing against the sky darkening behind it. It seemed to flatten the trees and punch a hole in the evening. So this was it. This was what my father wanted to inflict on Mas Caussade.

Why? It didn’t make sense.