the carcass up here. We can’t simply leave it.’ That obvious point had passed them by in the excitement. A huge dog dead in the courtyard would inevitably point suspicion at us. The animal had to vanish. That way, the servants would decide it was witchcraft and the headmaster would waste his time telling them not to be so stupid. Forming a line, my classmates began to pull on the rope while I kept the pendulum dog away from the wall. Our victim was almost at the parapet when I looked up and froze.
‘What?’ Emile demanded.
I grabbed the noose and wrestled the dead dog onto the parapet. ‘Nothing,’ I said hastily. ‘Simply shadows.’ A girl stared at me from a window opposite. White as a ghost against the darkness of an unlit room. Her hair was down and she wore a thin shift. I swear, even from across the courtyard, I could tell she was grinning.
‘Sleep well,’ I told Emile.
‘You’re going to . . . ?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m going to dispose of the body.’
I shook away offers of help from those who wanted a further part in the adventure. How well Emile would sleep in the week to come was down to him – and how brutally the lacerations on his lower back and buttocks hurt. But he would be allowed to try, and that was down to me. He could take to his bed tomorrow night and close his eyes without risk of a further beating from classmates who’d felt themselves shamed only hours earlier.
And me? I tunnelled happily though the darkness of midnight woods towards a shimmering ribbon of shallow river that edged the school grounds. One more dead dog for its cargo? Barely worth anyone’s notice and miles downstream by morning. Extracting my lock knife, I flicked out the blade and cut a strip from the beast’s back, washed the meat in the river and wrapped it in dock leaves. I would grill it over an open fire, away from everyone’s gaze come morning. In my head, as dry leaves crunched underfoot and an owl’s sudden hoot lifted my soul into my mouth, I was already asking Dr Faure’s wicked-eyed daughter if she wanted to share.
What the Chinese eat
Emile declared himself in love with the goose girl. A ragged child of twelve, if that, who dreamed and dawdled her way along the lanes with her stick and her brood, only hurrying them when she crossed school land. We caught her once where the road passed under the shadow of the oak trees, and demanded a kiss as the price for passing. But she gripped her staff like a Gaulish queen and her geese clustered around her, honking in agitation, and we let her pass unkissed for her bravery. Emile claimed he kissed her later. No one believed him, not even me and I was his best friend.
She was a princess in hiding, he said. Lots of goose girls were princesses in hiding or the bastard daughters of wicked dukes. Emile’s flights of fancy were few and quickly over, but he turned this one into a long and twisting fairy tale that he told himself in corners, his head nodding in agreement to something he’d just said. The others allowed him his strangeness. He’d judged Dr Faure’s dog and found it wanting. Emile was small and strange and common and far too brash in how he displayed his intelligence, but he was ours. We were the best, the bravest, the fiercest, the most proudly foolish year the school had seen.
And we were bound by a lie, all of us. The morning after Dr Faure’s dog was tried, convicted and executed for the sins of its owner, the headmaster appeared in our classroom and asked if anyone had heard anything strange the night before. His gaze swept across our attentive faces so blandly I wondered if he suspected us but kept his suspicions to himself. Dr Faure stood behind him, face pale and mouth tight. He’d been having trouble meeting our eyes since classes began that morning.
We shook our heads, glanced enquiringly at each other, put on a very pantomime of innocence and ignorance. ‘What might we have heard, sir?’ Marcus took the lead and that was as it should be. After all, he was class captain.
‘That,’ the headmaster said, ‘is a very good question. Dr Faure’s dog has disappeared.’ Maybe I imagined the headmaster’s eyes settled on me. Although why would they not settle on Emile, since he was the last boy Dr Faure had beaten . . . ? ‘It disappeared from a locked courtyard to which only I and your master have the key.’
‘Witchcraft,’ a boy muttered.
The headmaster scowled and thrust his hands in his coat pockets, leaning slightly forward as he told the boy not to be so ridiculous. It was bad enough the scullery maids thought such things in this day and age. Witchcraft was rare, and serious, a sin against God and punishable by death, but nothing like as common as servants seemed to think. He expected better from us. The boy he berated apologised, and I caught the boy’s smile as the headmaster looked away.
‘Did anyone hear anything?’ I risked.
He stared at me long and hard. ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘Dr Faure’s daughter sleeps in a room overlooking the courtyard and she heard nothing. In fact, she slept the sleep of the angels . . .’ His mouth twitched at the words, which had to be hers. Theologians doubted that angels slept at all.
‘Could it have escaped?’ Marcus asked innocently.
The headmaster turned to Dr Faure as if inviting him to answer. When Dr Faure stayed silent the headmaster shook his head. ‘Unlikely,’ he said. ‘The walls are three storeys high and the roof is steep. Unless, of course, it sprouted wings.’
‘Like an angel,’ Marcus said. ‘Indeed. Should you discover anything I’m relying on you . . .’
‘Of course, sir.’ Marcus said. ‘We’ll organise a hunt this afternoon. I’ll divide the class into teams. You can rely on us to search everywhere.’
‘I’m sure I can.’
‘It could have been worse,’ Emile muttered. The entire class stilled and the headmaster turned to look at him. Dr Faure stared hardest, his face a stern mask as if his suspicions were confirmed. ‘Obviously, a missing dog is sad. Its vanishing from a locked courtyard serious. But it could have been much worse. It could have been a member of Dr Faure’s family. Say, his daughter.’
‘Indeed,’ the headmaster said slowly. And he said it in a very different way from the way he’d used the word earlier. The joke had gone out of the room and our classmates were shifting uneasily on their benches. The headmaster let himself out of the room and Dr Faure set us a page of Latin to translate and retired to his thoughts. A brooding presence hunched in a high-backed wooden chair at the front of the room. The meat was in my pocket, still wrapped in leaves, and I wondered whether to toss it into the privy and remove the night from my memory. But I had not tasted dog, and for all the beast had not deserved to die, that scowling brute in the chair at the front had deserved punishing more than we ever had. Emile translated the Latin quickly and cleanly, and since we shared a book, I simply copied his. I could have done it myself but it would have taken me twice as long, and my thoughts were on Dr Faure’s daughter, my namesake, Jeanne-Marie.
Her grandfather is a cloth-cutter, her grandmother a Basque, those people who straddle the border between France and Spain and keep their own customs and speak their own language. ‘My uncles and cousins make cheese. Well, their wives probably,’ Jeanne-Marie mutters crossly. ‘They do all the work.’ We’re jammed in a doorway, arms around each other and noses touching. ‘You can kiss me,’ she says. A minute later she sighs at my efforts and pushes me away. Perhaps she’s already been kissed by someone better. Perhaps she’s simply disappointed by the thing itself. She sucks her teeth.
‘Now you can kiss me,’ I say.
She
