The Winter Ghosts - By Kate Mosse Page 0,8

and malt. I had an appetite and ate with pleasure, not solely for the purpose of keeping body and soul together. I took my time with my pipe, filling the salle à manger with clouds of smoke that danced in the December light, and was tempted to stay another night. In the end, a certain restiveness within me demanded I keep moving.

It was a little after eleven by the time I had settled my bill, retrieved my Austin from the garage and put Tarascon behind me. I headed south towards Vicdessos. I had no particular destination in mind and was content to see where the road took me. My Baedeker recommended sites with splendid caves at Niaux and Lombrives. It was hardly likely they would be open to visitors in December, but I felt a stab of interest nonetheless. Enough, at least, to make me journey that way.

I followed the line of the river through a magnificent, archaic landscape. Mostly, I had the road to myself. I saw a wooden cart drawn by oxen, then an old military truck rumbled past. Its engine wheezed, its green tarpaulin roof was ragged, splattered by mud, and one of its headlamps was missing. An old warhorse, not yet put out to grass.

The mercury was falling but there was no snow, although the higher I drove, the heavier the canopy of frost that covered the plains. But I could imagine that if one came this way in late summer, there would be fields of yellow sunflowers and olive trees with their silver-green leaves and black fruit. On the terraces of the few houses scattered on the sharp hillsides, I could picture earth-coloured pots filled with white and pink geraniums the size of a man’s hand, and vines of red and green grapes ripening in the noonday sun. Twice I pulled over and got out to stretch my legs and smoke a cigarette, before continuing on.

The lush winter beauty of the river valleys of the Ariège, through which I had motored the previous day, here yielded to a more prehistoric landscape of caves and plunging cliffs. The rock and forest came right down to the road, as though seeking to reclaim what had been taken from it by man. The clouds seem to hang suspended between the mountains, like smoke from an autumn bonfire, and so low that I felt as if I could reach out and touch them. On every peak was a limestone outcrop that drew the eye. But rather than the romantic, crumbling chateaux or the remains of a long-deserted military strongholds I had seen in Limoux and Couiza, here were jagged clefts in the mountain face. Not the echoes of habitation, but something more primitive.

My mind was alive with memories of my classroom at prep school. Chalk dust and the yellow light of an October afternoon, listening to the master tell the bloodstained story of these borderlands between France and Spain. Of how, in the thirteenth century, the Catholic Church had waged war against the Albigensians. A civil war, a war of attrition that lasted more than a hundred years. Burnings and torture and systematic persecution, giving birth to the Inquisition. And to us boys of ten and eleven, who had not seen death, did not yet know what war meant, it was the stuff of adventure. The sunlit days of childhood, nothing fractured, nothing spoiled.

Later, a little older, the same master’s voice, telling of the sixteenth-century battles of religion between the Catholics and the Huguenots. A green land, he called the Languedoc. A green land soaked red with the blood of the faithful.

And in our times, too. Even if this corner of France had suffered less than the Pas de Calais, than all the ravaged villages and woods of the north-east, the war memorials at every crossroads, the cemeteries and plaques, told the same story. Everywhere, evidence of men dying before their time.

I pulled over and killed the engine. My fragile good spirits scattered in an instant, replaced by familiar symptoms. Damp palms, dry throat, the familiar spike of pain in my stomach. I took off my cap and leather gloves, ran my fingers through my hair and covered my eyes. Sticky fingers smelling of hair oil and shame, that grief should still come so easily, that after all the talking cures, the treatments and kindness, the kneeling at hard wooden pews at evensong, I still carried within me a cracked heart that refused to heal.

It was then that I