He would call them the next morning and tell them he was ready to sign. He would agree to their terms and open the company to new investors – but they would have to sign as quickly as possible. It would be best for them to meet him here, so they could put their names to the new agreements and stop talking about it. He knew they would show up. It would be quite a journey: six hours by train, and then he could pick them up at the station in Gourdon or Souillac. At a pinch, they could spend the night in Orcières and leave the next day, amendments signed, and it would all be over. Franck just needed to add the clauses he’d been thinking about for a while. He would draw up the changes tomorrow morning at Sören’s, the illustrator who lived on the old farm, print six copies and then wait for them to sign.

Alpha’s head was still on Franck’s knee. The dog looked him straight in the eye, as if giving his approval. Franck gazed at the landscape, at the centre of which he and the dog stood, trying to picture the lions that had once lived there, reigning over everything. In a way he felt ready to follow their lead and summon a bit of that violence he needed to defend himself – and, more importantly, to attack. The dog was encouraging him to do it, better than any person could.

May 1915

May 1915

For five years, Joséphine had lived in her husband’s wake. Their lives were regulated by consultations and home visits and their conversations were about his patients. Without the doctor, she was not sure if her life had any meaning. To be a widow at thirty in a village in the middle of nowhere was to be condemned to solitude, especially in a time of war, and when they had had no children. She felt the need to help in the fields so as not to be alone all the time. But every evening, she was alone, and despair set in, a despair that worsened as the war spread throughout Europe and to Africa, in the air as well as on the ground. It was said that now bombs were falling on towns and cities as well as over the trenches, that lethal weapons dropped from zeppelins and from aeroplanes, and it was possible that one day the world would disappear in one gigantic explosion. At the rate men were dying there would soon be none left. In a small community, all the husbands and sons were losing their lives to fulfil history’s destiny, which meant that a woman of thirty who found herself widowed would not remarry and without children she would not even receive a pension.