The Winter Ghosts

  ‘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.

  TOULOUSE

  April 1933

  Return to La Rue des Pénitents Gris

  ‘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.

  The shadows had lengthened while they had talked. The late-afternoon sun, shining through the metal grille across the window of the bookshop, cast diamond-shaped patterns on the floor inside the bookshop.

  Saurat cleared this throat. ‘And for the past five years?’

  ‘I returned to England. Not straight away, but when it was clear there was nothing . . .’ Freddie broke off. ‘Then, of course, the Slump, and all that followed. My few stocks and shares became worthless overnight. I had no option but to find a way of earning a living. I rented rooms in a house and got myself a job with the Imperial War Graves Commission in London. Modest enough, but sufficient for my needs.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘We unveiled the memorial at Thiepval, to those who died at the Battle of the Somme, on the first of July nineteen thirty-two. My brother’s regiment, the three Southdowner Battalions, went over the top on the eve of the Somme. They took the German front line and held it for a while, but then fell back. In less than five hours, seventeen officers and nearly three hundred and fifty men of Sussex were lost. The following day, the main engagement began.’

  ‘And since then?’

  ‘Travelling, around France and Belgium for the most part. I’m one of the team of men responsible for the upkeep of the headstones and the crosses of sacrifice and the cemeteries.’

  ‘So no one is forgotten.’

  ‘We remember so that such slaughter is never allowed to happen again. George, Madame Galy’s son, the men of the Ariège, the Southdowners, we must remember them. All the lost boys.’ Freddie stopped. This was not the time or the place.

  He took a sip of his drink, then carefully replaced the heavy tumbler on the table and pushed the parchment across the green felt.

  Saurat held Freddie’s gaze for a moment. In his eyes, he saw neither expectation nor anxiety, but instead resolve. He realised that, whatever lay within the letter, it would come as no surprise to the Englishman.

  ‘You are ready?’

  Freddie closed his eyes. ‘I am.’

  Saurat adjusted his spectacles on the bridge of his nose, then began to read.

  ‘Bones and shadows and dust. I am the last. The others have slipped away into darkness. Around me now, at the end of my days, only an echo in the still air of the memory of those who once I loved.

  Solitude, silence. Peyre sant.

  The end is coming and I welcome it as one might a familiar friend, long absent. This has been a slow death, trapped here. One by one, every heart stopped beating. My brother first, then my mother and my father. Now the only sound is my shallow breathing. That, and the gentle dripping of water down the mossy walls of the cave. As if the mountain itself is weeping. As if it, too, is mourning the dead.

  We heard them, their footsteps, and thought ourselves safe. We heard the rocks, one by one, being piled up, the hammering of the wood, but still we did not understand that they were sealing the entrance to the cave for good. And this underground city, lit only by candles and torches, once our refuge, became our tomb.

  These are the last words I will write. It will not be long. My body does not obey me now. My last candle is burning out. This is my testament, the record of how once men and women and children lived and died in this forgotten corner of the world. I write it down so that those who come after us will know the truth.

  I do not fear death. But I fear the forgetting. I fear that there will be no one to mark the moment of our passing. One day, someone will find us. Find us and bring us home. For when all else is done, only words remain. Words endure.

  And I shall set this last truth down. We are who we are because of those we choose to love and because of those who love us. Peyre sant, God of good spirits, have mercy on my soul.

  Prima

  In the year of our Lord, thirteen twenty-nine’

  ‘Someone will find us,’ repeated Freddie.

  Saurat peered at him over the top of his half-moon spectacles. He waited a while as the words echoed into the silence of the books on the shelves of the narrow little shop.

  ‘Spring thirteen twenty-nine,’ he said in the end.

  Freddie opened his eyes. ‘Yes.’

  ‘More than six hundred years ago.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The two men looked at one another. Only the ticking of the clock and the motes of dust dancing in the slatted afternoon light marked that time moved at all.

  ‘Have you been back to Nulle?’ Saurat asked.

  ‘I have. On several occasions.’

  ‘And?’

  Freddie smiled. ‘It is different. A place restored to itself. Monsieur and Madame Galy are still there and their little boarding house is thriving.’

  ‘No longer living in the shadows.’

  ‘Not at all. Nulle itself has become quite a centre for walking holidays in the mountains south of Tarascon. Guillaume Breillac makes a good living at it. There’s even talk of building a funicular railway to take visitors up to the caves.’

  ‘A tourist destination.’

  ‘In a modest way. It doesn’t yet rival Lombrives or Niaux, but perhaps one day it will.’

  Freddie looked towards the sunlit window and wondered, as he had not been able to stop himself doing many times in the past few years, what Fabrissa would say could she see the village come back to life again.

  ‘Certainly, the facts of the story are accurate,’ Saurat said. ‘In the beginning of the fourteenth century, the remaining Cathar communities were hunted down and eliminated. At Lombrives, more than five hundred were found by the soldiers of the Comte de Foix-Sabarthès, the future Henri IV, two hundred and fifty years after they had been entombed in the caves there.’

  Freddie nodded. ‘I read of it.’

  ‘And those you met in the Ostal - Guillaume Marty, Na Azéma, the Maury sisters, Authier - all typical Cathar names of the period. Fabrissa also.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Saurat hesitated. ‘Still, I am not certain what you think actually happened that night.’

  Freddie held his gaze. ‘We are modern men, Saurat. We live in an age of science and rational thought. And even if it has not done us any good, we are not obliged to live, as our forebears did, under the oppressive and superstitious shadow of religion, of irrationality, of demons and retributive spirits. We know how psychology can account for night terrors, for hallucinations, for voices in the dark. We are aware of the tricks our minds can play on us, on our delicate, vulnerable, suggestible, shabby little minds.’ He shrugged. ‘I lose count of how many times I was told that when I was ill.’

  ‘You are saying the doctors are right?’

  Freddie smiled. ‘They may be right, Saurat, but I know she was there. Fabrissa was there. I saw her. I talked to her, I held her in my arms. While I was in Nulle, tramping the grieving land that surrounded the village, she was as real to me as you are sitting here.’

  ‘And now?’

  At first, Freddie did not answer. ‘There are moments of intense emotion - love, death, grief - where we may slip between the cracks. Then, I believe that time can stretch or contract or collide in ways science cannot account for. Perhaps this is what happened when I smashed the car and knocked myself out, perhaps not.’ He shrugged. ‘That such a person as Fabrissa once lived in the village of Nulle, I do not doubt. That somehow she sought me out, I also do not doubt.’

  ‘Faith, then?’ sai
d Saurat, looking around at the book-lined shelves. ‘A belief in something more than this?’

  ‘Who’s to say? Life is not, as we are taught, a matter of seeking answers, but rather learning which are the questions we should ask.’

  Saurat looked down at the antique letter, at the words he had so painstakingly translated for his English visitor.

  ‘Why did you wait so long?’

  ‘I needed to be ready to hear it.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘And to make an end of things.’

  Saurat put his glasses down on the table and rubbed his eyes.

  ‘Perhaps also, because you knew what it would say? I had the impression nothing in it surprised you.’

  Freddie shrugged again. ‘“We are who we are, because of those we choose to love and because of those who love us.” That’s what Fabrissa wrote.’ He smiled. ‘One does not need a translator to understand the truth of those words.’

  Both men fell silent. Inside the bookshop, the clock continued to mark the passing of the day. In the street outside, the burst of a car horn, a woman calling to a child or a lover in an affectionate voice, the sounds of the modern city on an afternoon in spring.

  ‘What do you intend to do with the letter?’ Saurat asked after a while.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I’d give you a fair price.’

  Freddie laughed. ‘I don’t think it’s possible to put a price on such a thing. Do you?’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ Saurat conceded. ‘But if you should ever change your mind . . . ’

  ‘Of course, I’ll bear you in mind.’

  Freddie stood up. He put on his overcoat, slipped the letter into the pasteboard wallet.

  ‘You’ll allow me to pay you for your time?’

  Saurat held up his hands. ‘The pleasure was mine.’