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By Root 1324 0

now, having to spend days on end tied to her chair, with nothing else to think about but how to cope with her husband’s murderous schemes, she found all manner of vague, half-formed notions floating around inside her head. It was strange: here was she, living in a wilderness, miles from anywhere, with no one to talk to, when day and night an endless stream of men and women came rushing past her front door in trains that came and went like thunder, nearly shaking the house down, and vanishing as quickly as they had come. It wasn’t just French people either; there were people from everywhere, foreigners, people from the other side of the world. No one was content to stay at home these days; all the peoples of the world, so it was said, would soon be one big family. Such was progress! All men would be brothers, moving as one towards the Promised Land! She tried to put a figure on them, working out a rough estimate of passengers per carriage, but there were so many that she lost count. There were one or two faces she thought she recognized — a gentleman with a white beard, an Englishman perhaps, who made the same journey to Paris every week, and a little lady with brown hair who travelled regularly on Wednesdays and Saturdays. But they came and went in a flash; she could never be sure she had actually seen them. The faces were an indistinct blur, all merging into each other and all ending up looking alike. The stream flowed on, leaving nothing behind. What saddened her most was the thought that all these people, rushing constantly past her window, flaunting their wealth and finery and always in a hurry to be somewhere else, were totally unaware that she was there and that her life was at risk. Even if one night her husband finished her off, the trains would still pass by each other a few feet from her corpse without anyone even suspecting that a murder had been committed in this isolated house.

Phasie sat gazing at the window. It was impossible to explain to Jacques precisely what she was thinking. She hardly understood it herself. Then, as if her thoughts had suddenly crystallized, she said, ‘It’s a fine invention; there’s no denying it. It gets people about quickly, it broadens the mind ... But a beast will always be a beast. You can go on inventing better machines till the cows come home. It won’t change a thing. In the end we’re at the mercy of beasts.’

Jacques nodded his agreement. For the last minute or two he had been watching Flore, who was opening the crossing-gate for a wagon from the quarry carrying two huge blocks of stone. The road was only ever used by wagons from the quarries at Brécourt, so at night the gate was kept locked, and it was very seldom that Flore was disturbed. Jacques watched her as she chatted with the short, dark-skinned man who drove the wagon.

‘Is Cabuche ill?’ he asked Phasie. ‘That’s his cousin Louis driving the horses, isn’t it? Poor old Cabuche! Do you see much of him these days?’

She raised her hands without answering and let out a long sigh. The previous autumn something terrible had happened, and it had done nothing to improve her health. Her younger daughter, Louisette, who was working as a maid for Madame Bonnehon at Doinville, had run away in the middle of the night. She had been badly knocked about and was scared out of her wits. She ran for help to her sweetheart Cabuche, in his shack in the forest, but when she got there she died. There were rumours that she had been maltreated by Grandmorin, but nobody dared say anything publicly. Aunt Phasie knew what had happened, but she couldn’t bring herself to repeat it.8 All she eventually said was: ‘No, Cabuche doesn’t come here any more. He keeps himself to himself. Poor Louisette! She was so pretty, so innocent. She was a dear! She really loved me! She would have looked after me! Flore does her best, of course; I can’t complain. But there’s something crazy about her; she’s got a will of her own. She disappears for hours on end. Sometimes I hardly dare speak to her. And she has such tantrums! It’s sad. Very sad.’

Jacques was watching