Tears welled up in Clotilde’s eyes. The letters, the words, the lines were intact. The pages were sometimes warped at the edge, yellow in the corners, making her private diary look more like a witch’s old book of spells. For a moment Clotilde felt as if she were meeting herself, herself seventeen years ago, like two heroines in a book with two parallel stories who finally come across one another in the final chapter.

Valou looked at her proudly.

‘I saved it, Maman. I saved it!’

They were crying, all three of them.

One arm gripped her waist, another rested just above her chest.

Franck.

She turned around, brushed against her husband’s body and rested her head against him; Franck might have taken it as a gesture of tenderness, but she was merely looking over his shoulder.

Aurélia was huddled against Natale in his windcheater, sheltered.

Clotilde slowly pressed the notebook against her heart.

67

27 August 2016, midday

Lisabetta, amused, studied the crowd in the yard of Arcanu Farm. The sun at its zenith beat down on the gathering dressed in their Sunday best, each one seeking a corner of shade to protect themselves, and not finding it. They were all trapped. Cassanu would have loved it.

He had always hated the kind of gloomy scene some Corsicans still went wild for, the black-clad women singing lamenti and voceri, all those ritual gestures to evoke death, closing the curtains of the house of the deceased, putting sheets over the mirrors. Cassanu wanted none of that on the day of his funeral, and Lisabetta had promised him.

She had kept her word.

Still, they hadn’t been able to prevent the crowd from coming.

Numerous, curious, silent. Lisabetta watched them perspiring litres of sweat, puddles forming under their feet, she imagined, rivulets that would flow all the way to the Mediterranean.

There wasn’t an inch of shade in the courtyard of Arcanu Farm.

And so the crowd waited, crushed by the leaden weight of the sun.

All prisoners in this courtyard, more like an oven. As if Corsica were taking its revenge.

Slowly, very slowly, the crowd came forward.