What no one cared about was the nature of her relationship with the baby’s father. It was true love and he had promised to marry her, but that carried no weight in Ste-Estelle-sur-Seine. The change had come about six months ago, three weeks before Nathalie’s birth, when the Allies came and the Germans lost ground. Lilly was heartbroken. Not because of the arrival of the British, but because Julius was gone – and he hadn’t even seen her child. How he would have loved his beautiful daughter.

The mayor indicated a wooden chair in the centre of the courtyard. She hadn’t noticed it. ‘Sit down, Lilly Marais.’

She made no move. Her eyes were pleading. ‘I beg you, where is my baby? Where is Nathalie?’

‘You will sit.’

‘My baby! My baby! Please, where is she?’ Please God, why had Papa been looking at the well?

‘That’s enough. The bastard child is where it should be.’ It was her father speaking now. He strode forward. He was not a tall man, but he was immensely strong. He picked her up as if she was an infant and thrust her down on the wooden chair.

Two women were coming forward: the stout figures of Françoise Dupont and Nicole Étienne. Her father was behind the chair now, holding her arms back so that she couldn’t rise and couldn’t resist.

‘No, no.’ She was crying. She knew what they were going to do but she didn’t care about her hair. All she cared about was Nathalie.

The women were powerful and rough, their skin calloused by physical work. They had the strength of peasants who had laboured hard all their lives. Their hands could twist a chicken’s neck or wield a knife to a pig’s throat without apparent effort.

Françoise Dupont grasped her hair at the back and hacked at it with shears. She was the baker’s wife and Lilly had always thought of her as kind-hearted. Nicole Étienne was the mayor’s wife. Lilly had never liked her. She had a cut-throat razor in her hand and as Lilly’s golden tresses fell, Nicole shaved her head close, with no soap or oil to smooth the blade’s savage passage across her scalp. The blade cut into her skin, taking flesh with the hair. Lilly cried out but no one moved to help her.

And yet they had all collaborated in one way or another. All had accepted German rule. No one had joined the Resistance – at least not until a few weeks before the Allies came ashore. All had smiled at the German soldiers when they encountered them in the street. All she had done was fall in love. And the romances she read told her that true love knew no national frontiers.

More women were approaching, crowding around, mobbing her, calling her foul names, spitting at her or at the ground by her bare feet. One of them had a pair of scissors and began cutting her dressing gown and nightdress away, exposing her breasts. Others grasped the material in their bony fingers and ripped at it, shredding it, pulling it away from her slim body until she was completely naked.