The Winter Ghosts - By Kate Mosse Page 0,33

smoke wreathed up into the dawn air and she reached out, as if to wind it around her fingers like thread.

‘It is beautiful.’

‘Beautiful?’ I laughed, charmed. ‘That’s one way of putting it, I suppose.’ I snapped my case shut, returning it and the matches to my pocket. ‘You’re remarkable. I can honestly say I’ve never met anyone like you before.’

‘I am no different from anyone else,’ she said.

I smiled, thinking both how wrong she was and how delightful she did not realise it.

Fabrissa’s Story

We sat in silence for a while. I smoked. She fixed her eyes on the dark horizon, as though counting the stars. Were there actually stars? I can’t remember.

Then I heard her catch her breath and knew Fabrissa had been arranging her story in her mind, as I had done. I crushed the remains of my cigarette beneath the sole of my boot and turned to listen. I wanted to know everything about her, as much as she would tell me, anything. Tiny details. Irrelevant, beautiful details.

‘I was born on an afternoon in spring,’ she began. ‘The world was coming back to life after a hard winter. The snow had melted and the streams were flowing again. Tiny mountain flowers of blue and pink and yellow filled the fields of the upper valley. My father used to say that on the day I was born, he heard the first cuckoo sing. A good omen, he said.

‘Our neighbours came with a loaf they had baked, white flour, not coarse brown grain. Others also brought gifts: a brown woollen blanket for winter, furs, an earthenware cup, a wooden box containing spices. Most precious, salt wrapped up in a piece of cotton, dyed blue.

‘It was May. Already, the shepherds and their flocks had returned from their winter pastures in Spain and the village was full of life and sound - the women chatting in the square, the wooden treadles of their looms clattering on the cobbled stones.’

She paused. I was happy to wait. I wanted to let her tell her story at her own pace, in her own way, as she had allowed me to do. Besides, the pleasure of listening to her voice was such that she could have recited a laundry list and still it would have rung like music in my ears.

‘My birth was seen as a sign that things might be changing for the better,’ she said. ‘And my mother and father were well liked and respected in the village. They were loyal, honourable people. My father wrote letters on behalf of those who could not read or write. He explained the ways of the courts to those who needed representation or his help. Each fulfilled the role most suited to his character.’

‘I see,’ I said, though I did not.

‘After years of violence and denunciation, it seemed our enemies had set their sights elsewhere and, for a while, we were at peace. There were, of course, the usual struggles, disagreements common to communities living in the shadow of war. But they were isolated incidents, not part of a systematic reprisal. And although we all knew someone who had been taken, most people were released with no more than the punishment of wearing the cross.’

Instinctively, my hand moved to my pocket. I took out the scrap of material and laid it across my knee.

‘This was a way of marking people out?’

I looked down at the tattered piece of cloth, the yellow faded and sour. I had heard of the Germans inflicting penalties on civilians - The Times had written of it - but nothing like this.

‘It was intended to humiliate, certainly,’ she replied. ‘But when so many were branded in the same way, it became a sign of good character.’

‘A badge of honour.’

‘Yes.’

Realising now it might be a symbol of her survival and that, therefore, she might wish to keep it, I held it out.

‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have taken it.’

She shook her head. I hesitated, then returned it to my pocket. It was hardly an orthodox love token, but it was all that I had.

‘The raids became more frequent. Whole villages arrested, or so it was said - men, women, children. In Montaillou, little under a day’s walk, everybody over the age of twelve was taken before the court in Pamiers. The interrogations went on for weeks. People talked of it in hushed whispers, behind hands and closed doors. Even so, we hoped our village was too small to matter to anyone but us.’

For the second