The Winter Ghosts - By Kate Mosse Page 0,55

the prison wall with my bare hands. I remembered chancing upon the letter, then making my way through the narrow gap that led to the inner cave. Then finding the skeletons of those with whom I had spent an evening. The winter ghosts, as Breillac called them, long dead. I remembered Fabrissa. And my eyes filled with tears.

Later, when I was a little stronger, I learned the doctors had been mystified by how ill I was. The fever had been aggressive and my body temperature in the cave had dropped to perilously low levels, but at the same time there was no severe injury that accounted for my disorientation. The abrasions on my hands and face were minor, and though I appeared to have knocked my head, it was nothing serious. Only one nurse understood, a pretty dark girl from Nulle originally, with round kitten eyes. She knew I had ventured too close to the grave and had been tainted by it. Death had slipped into my bones.

Medical men came and went. Doctors, psychiatrists, the ward sister and her flock of starched nurses in squeaking, rubber-soled shoes. On the surface, it seemed that history was repeating itself. A sanatorium in Sussex, a hospital in Foix, a patient unable to cope. But I was not the same man. For though they poked and prodded at me, I felt clear in my mind. I was no longer doped up, just tired.

And the knowledge that I had done what had been asked of me sustained me. I had found Fabrissa.

With each passing hour, more memories returned. Fragments of the days leading up to this point, filling in the gaps like missing pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. My room in the boarding house, the crunch of sparkling ice underfoot in the place de l’Église when I set out for the Ostal. Watching the pale sun light the valley at dawn.

Fabrissa at my side.

On 22 December, my friends came from Ax-les-Thermes. Having received my letter, they had waited for me to get in touch. When after four days there was still no word, they made enquiries with Madame Galy and found out I was laid up in hospital.

They stayed for a couple of hours. From them, I learned my discovery in the cave was something of a coup. La Dépêche, the local newspaper, had devoted a whole page to the story. Of course it was early days and on account of the season, there was difficulty getting hold of the top men from Toulouse - archaeologists, pathologists, battalions of experts - but the consensus was that the skeletons were some six hundred years old. The cache of grave goods, pots and domestic artefacts, all confirmed that.

I understood a little more. Not a tragedy in living memory, but a story far older.

According to the experts quoted in the newspaper, the bodies were most likely to be traced back to the wars of religion in the early fourteenth century. Local historians had recorded similar incidents when members of the last remaining Cathar communities in the region had been trapped inside the caves in which they had taken shelter. In Lombrives, for example. No one had known there might be another similar site so close.

‘Breillac knew,’ I murmured to myself.

The whole village knew. My pretty nurse, Madame and Monsieur Galy, all of them had grown up in the shadow of the deep sadness that enveloped the village. Not only from the last war, but all the wars going back through the centuries. The inhabitants of Nulle, present and past, knew how such profound grief erodes the spirit.

But as I listened to my friends talk, and heard the excitement in their voice at being caught up, at one remove, in such an historic mystery, relief seeped through me. For although it was not I who physically carried her body home, my exploration of the cave had set in motion the reclaiming of those lost so many years ago. Now the real work of identification and burial could begin.

My thoughts drifted back to Fabrissa. She had led me there, hadn’t she? A flash of blue against the white of the mountains? And I had, for a perfect, impossible moment, surely held her in my arms.

I had no other visitors until Christmas Eve.

As the evening shadows were falling across the neat rows of beds and the nurses were lighting the lamps in the ward, a figure appeared in the doorway. Broad shoulders, awkward in the sterile atmosphere.

‘Guillaume, come in.’

I was genuinely