as an Athenian demagogue, about whom Dr Faure had that morning been characteristically rude, since they were foreign, given to unnatural vices and favoured democracy. Being mostly thirteen, it was the unnatural vices that interested us.
The first plate we turned to in the first book showed a baby being extracted from between a woman’s legs with a hook. We assumed the baby was dead. The second showed an arm being sawn off. Emile shut the book with a snap and slid it into its gap on the right-hand side of the top shelf. It had a fraying leather spine like every other book in the cabinet. We both memorised its position and knew we’d be back for another look later.
‘How are you?’ he asked.
‘Well enough.’
Jeanne-Marie and I had been friends for more than a year. It was not just the kissing and my hands under her blouse I missed. I’d grown used to talking to her. She was the person I could say things to I couldn’t say to anyone else. Emile still saw his goose girl. It was rumoured they’d been seen together in the woods flattening bluebells as she laughed and fought off his closer attentions. He never mentioned her to me. It was a kindness.
Most of my spare time I spent in the kitchens, the vicomte having suggested to the headmaster that I be given the run of them. After the head cook had recovered from his fury that anyone outside the kitchens should dare tell him what to do, he granted me one half of an insufferably hot and extremely small room next to the great oven. I still brought the man rabbits, although fewer than the previous year, and anything else I caught that he might use. He no longer paid me in greasy sou, having decided access to his kingdom was payment enough.
My recipe book grew week by week as that spring turned to summer and the harvest was brought in. Rats from the rubbish dump tasted sour. Rats fed on grain from the new harvest had a cleanness that required only frying in butter and a few leaves of shredded mint to make palatable. I gave some to Emile and told him it was chicken. He didn’t doubt it, although to me it tasted more like owl. I killed a sleeping grass snake and stewed it with cat as the colonel said the Chinese did. The effects on my subtlety and vitality, if any, were minimal. The hiding place for my journal was obvious. It lived beside the first book we’d taken from the locked cabinet, its spine worn and shabby enough for the book to fit happily among its brothers.
It was while writing notes on a disappointing dormouse recipe that my life changed. The sauce had curdled, the clove spicing was entirely wrong, the taste was as sour as if I’d been chewing crab apples. I was wrestling with my foul humour when I looked out of the library window and saw a cart trundling down the drive towards the gates. The carter sat on a plank at the front, and behind him, on trunks, were Madame Faure and Jeanne-Marie, who looked a little more like her mother than when she’d left six months earlier. No one knew why they’d gone. A sick grandmother was the sensible suggestion. The most popular was that, having been bedded by the colonel, Madame Faure threw a hairbrush at her husband and left, taking her daughter with her. And here they were, almost inside the gates and headed for the arch into the main courtyard. I was hurtling down the back stairs, the grand stairs being forbidden to pupils, when I realised I could hardly burst into the courtyard and simply embrace Jeanne-Marie.
Dr Faure looked round as I stumbled to a halt in front of the cart.
‘The cases,’ I said. ‘I thought you might need help carrying the cases.’
‘Why not?’ Dr Faure said. He signalled to a couple of other boys and between us we wrestled the luggage from the cart and onto the cobbles, having first stepped back to let Madame Faure and her daughter down. Jeanne-Marie passed me by without a glance. She was nowhere to be seen when we finally laboured the first of the cases into the smaller courtyard and up the outside stairs that led to her raised door. The school was old, and this bit the oldest; built in the days of rebellions and civil wars, when it was dangerous to have a door at ground level. We lugged another two cases up those stairs, listing in whispers what could be in them to make them so heavy, our hissed inventions growing wilder with each step. The lead-encased corpse of Madame Faure’s lover was our last suggestion before we staggered through the door and found Jeanne-Marie waiting.
‘I want to talk to you,’ she said.
The others took one look at her scowling face and left with their half-completed goodbyes trailing after them. ‘Jeanne-Marie . . .’
She stepped back as I stepped forward. ‘You owe me a cat,’ she said fiercely. ‘I’ve thought about it and I don’t mind the dog. But you owe me a cat.’
‘You said it farted and its fur stank.’
‘Don’t be rude . . .’ She sounded almost grown up when she said that. Her face was rounder, her hips a little wider, her blouse had filled to reveal a definite curve. Impatiently, she pulled the coat she was wearing over it tighter. ‘You understand? You owe me a cat.’ She turned to go and my stomach tightened.
‘Wait,’ I begged.
She kept walking.
‘What kind of cat?’ I asked desperately.
Jeanne-Marie turned back and I could see that question hadn’t occurred to her. Thought pulled at one side of her lip and she looked for a second as I remembered her. Searching inward, asking herself questions. When her eyes refocused she looked a little kinder, as if the answer itself made her smile. ‘A kitten,’ she said. ‘I want a kitten.’
‘I know exactly where to find one.’
She looked at me, considering. Was this a trick? How desperate was I to keep her talking? Later, I wondered if her harshness to me was a game. Or simply a way of saying don’t think we can go back to where we were. Or maybe she really did miss having a cat and believed I should provide one having been responsible for the death of the other.
‘Where?’
‘Beyond the ruined village.’
‘You know that’s out of bounds.’
I nodded, and interest entered her eyes. She smiled for the first time since I saw her on the cart and let go the coat she’d gripped tightly around her. ‘You go then,’ she said. ‘Bring me a kitten and we can be friends again.’
I shook my head. ‘You must come too.’
‘Why?’ Jeanne-Marie asked.
‘So you can make your choice.’
It was an answer she liked. ‘When?’ she demanded.
‘Tonight . . .’
She shook her head. ‘My mother’s tired and my father will want to talk about my grandmother.’ She saw my question and said, ‘She died.’
‘Your mother’s mother?’
‘My father’s. He had his work so we went.’
‘Was it hard?’
Her glare said it was.
‘My parents died,’ I told her. Hoping for forgiveness.
‘I remember. You said they starved.’ Jeanne-Marie considered that and decided it counted. ‘Tomorrow night. Where do we meet?’
‘By the bridge.’
The bridge is what the goose girl used
