The Winter Ghosts (21 page)

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 delighted to see him. He approached the bed cautiously, clutching his cap in his broad red hands, giving the impression he was regretting his decision to visit. He had something to say to me, he said, something that had been bothering him. It wouldn’t take long.

‘Take a seat.’

I tried to sit up, too fast it seemed, for the motion made my head spin and I slumped back on the pillows.

‘Should I fetch someone?’

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘Got to take it slower, that’s all.’

He perched awkwardly on the edge of the chair.

‘You had something to tell me?’ I prompted.

He nodded, but he could not meet my eye and didn’t seem to know how to start. In the end, I decided to help him out.

‘How long were you gone?’

Having a straightforward question to answer helped Guillaume get into his stride. It had taken three hours, he said. When they returned to the car with the truck from Tarascon, they found me gone. His father and Pierre were all for thinking I’d returned to Nulle, and concentrated on the car. But he, remembering the questions I had asked, wasn’t so sure. He couldn’t dismiss from his mind how I’d kept looking across the valley and asked questions about escarpment and caves. The longer he thought about it, the more sure he became that I had gone to investigate.

Against the wishes of his father, Guillaume persuaded the mechanic to drive on to Miglos rather than return to Tarascon. He climbed down from the road to the plateau and saw footprints on the mountain path. Given the lateness of the hour and the temperature, which was now little above freezing, he was certain they were mine.

‘But once I was down there, monsieur, it wasn’t clear where you had gone after that. The ground was too hard, ice not earth, so no tracks. And there were many routes you might have taken.

‘I could hear my brother calling me from the road. They were all impatient, certain it was a wild goose chase. I admit I was starting to doubt, too. The light was fading. I knew it was unwise to carry on searching. But I also knew that, if you had not returned to Nulle, you would not survive the night out there alone. Then I saw . . .’

Guillaume stopped, his cheeks red.

‘What, Guillaume?’ I said urgently. ‘What did you see?’

‘I don’t rightly know, monsieur. Someone. I swear to you, on my life, I saw someone waving to attract my attention.’

My heart skipped a beat. ‘A woman?’

He shook his head. ‘I wasn’t sure. I was too far away. All I saw was a flash of blue, a long blue coat. I thought it could be you, monsieur, if you had changed your clothes at your motorcar before setting out.’

‘It wasn’t me.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

Guillaume held my gaze for a moment, his honest eyes flickering with doubt, then he looked away.

‘I climbed up to the place you . . . the figure . . . had been, but there was no one there. I didn’t know what to make of it. Then I saw, not footprints exactly, but marks on the ground, leading towards the cliff face. When I took a closer look, I saw the opening into the cave hidden beneath the escarpment. ’

‘It’s lucky for me that you did, Guillaume,’ I said quietly.

‘I called up to my father and Pierre, who—’

‘They could see you?’

‘No, they were too far away. And by now it was nearly dark. But they could hear me. It was very cold, very still. The noise carries in winter when only the evergreens are in leaf.’

‘Yes, I see.’

‘I found the rubble in the passageway where you had broken down the wall, then followed you down into the cave, then the cavern beyond.’ He stopped. ‘My father always said, but . . .’ He licked his dry lips. ‘I had to think about you, monsieur, how to get you out and to a doctor. You were unconscious, barely breathing. I couldn’t think of the others. Not then.’ He met my gaze. ‘And you are sure it could not have been you that I saw?’

‘Quite sure.’

‘It’s just that . . . you were lying there covered in a blue cloak. It was odd, the exact match to the dress of the . . . the body of a woman. Dressed in a long blue robe, the same colour as . . . You were lying beside her.’ He hesitated. ‘The same blue I . . . the person waving to me.’

I realised that was the crux of it. Guillaume did not want to believe his father’s superstitious tales were true and I did not blame him for that.

‘Probably just a trick of the light,’ I said.

Guillaume nodded. I had not reassured him, but he was grateful the matter was settled and would not be talked of again. He fished in his pocket.

‘And there was this, monsieur,’ he said.

He held out to me the sheet of parchment I’d picked up in the cave, then forgotten about in the horror of discovering the mass grave.

‘You were holding on to it so tightly, I thought it must be important.’

He leaned forward and put it on the bed beside me. The coarse weave was yellow against the white, white sheets.

Gratitude flooded through me. ‘Thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.’ I picked it up. ‘Did you read it?’

He shook his head. ‘It’s in the old language.’

‘Occitan, but surely . . .’ I stopped, realising he might not be able to read. I had no wish to embarrass him. ‘If you hadn’t stuck with it, Guillaume, well . . . I owe you my life.’

And you, Fabrissa, I added under my breath. And you . . .

‘Anyone would have done the same,’ he said gruffly, standing up. The feet of the chair scraped on the linoleum. He was not a man to make anything of his own heroism, and now he had discharged his duty he was eager to leave.

I knew he was wrong. Although George told me of the towering acts of courage he had witnessed, not every man had it in him to put his life on the line for another.

‘Better get off,’ he said.

‘It was good of you to come. If there’s anything you need, any way I can thank you for—’

‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘My father said to pass on our thanks to you. He said he thought you would know what he meant.’

I hesitated, then nodded. ‘I think I do,’ I said. ‘Give my regards to him. And to Madame Galy.’

‘I will.’

He put his cap back on his head and turned to go.

‘Merry Christmas to you, Guillaume.’

‘And to you, monsieur.’

He lingered for a moment, his broad frame filling the doorway and blotting out the light from the corridor beyond. Then he was gone.

I held the parchment close to my face, too nervous to open it even though I knew I would not be able to read it. But I knew it was meant for me. A letter from Fabrissa to me. No, not me. Whoever it was that heard the voices in the mountain and came to bring them home.

I opened it flat. The handwriting was scratched and uneven, lines overlapping one another as if the author had run out of ink or light or strength. I still couldn’t distinguish one word from the next, but this time my tired eyes found a date at the bottom of the page and three initials: FDN.

Was ‘F’ for Fabrissa? I wanted to believe so, certainly. But as to the rest? It would have to wait. I would have to wait.

I lay back on the pillows.

There was no rational way to explain any of it. Only that it had happened. For a moment, I had slipped between the cracks in time and Fabrissa had come to me. A ghost, a spirit? Or a real woman displaced from her own time to that cold December? It was beyond my comprehension, but now I understood it did not matter. Only the consequences mattered. She had sought my help and I had given it.

‘My own love,’ I said.

Because of her, I had faced my own demons. She had freed me to look to the future. Not endlessly trapped in that one moment when the clocks stopped on 15 September 1916. Not stuck on 11 November 1921 at the memorial to the Royal Sussex Regiment in Chichester Cathedral, unable to bear, for one second longer, not knowing where George had fallen. Not condemned to watch champagne spill and drip, drip from the table of an expensive restaurant in Piccadilly.

I closed my eyes. Around me, the noise of the hospital. The squeak of wheels in a distant corridor. And somewhere, out of sight, the sound of voices singing carols for Christmas.

‘And so,’ Freddie said, ‘here I am. I had not been able to come before.’

He sat back in his chair, his hand cupped around the tumbler of brandy. Saurat looked at him.