Citadel Read Free Page B

see the hands on the clock on the chest of drawers, but there was something in the quality of the light coming through the gaps in the shutters, the song of the blackbirds in the street outside, that told her it was nearly morning. She didn’t have to get up, but she knew she wouldn’t go back to sleep now.
    Sandrine slipped out of bed and tiptoed across the room in her bare feet, trying to avoid the worst of the creaking floorboards. Her clothes were piled, raggle-taggle, over the arm of the cane-backed chair at the foot of her bed. She wriggled out of her nightdress and dropped it to the floor. Though she was eighteen, Sandrine still looked like the tomboy she had been, a garçon manqué . She was all arms and legs, there was nothing soft about her. Her black hair refused to be tamed and she had the deep complexion of a country girl, tanned from days spent out of doors. Powder made no difference. As she threaded her slim arms into the sleeves of her cotton blouse, she noticed a smudge on the inside of the wide round collar where she’d experimented yesterday with her sister’s face powder. She rubbed at it with her thumb, but it was stubborn and wouldn’t shift.
    The skirt was too big, a hand-me-down. Their housekeeper, Marieta, had moved the hook and eye, taking in a good two inches at the waist, so even though it didn’t hang quite right, it was wearable. Sandrine liked the feel of the sateen lining against her legs, the way the chequered pattern shifted through squares of red and black and gold when she walked. In any case, everyone wore hand-me-downs these days. The sleeveless pullover was her own, a blowsy burgundy, knitted by Marieta last winter, that half argued with, half suited, her colouring.
    Perching on the edge of the chair, Sandrine pulled on her écossaises , the precious tartan socks her father had brought back as a gift from Scotland. His last trip, as it turned out. François Vidal had been one of the many Carcassonnais who had gone to fight and never come home. After the months of waiting, seeing no action – the drôle de guerre , the phoney war as it had become known – he was killed on 18 May 1940 in the Ardennes, along with most of his unit. A muddle of orders, an ambush, ten men dead.
    It had been two years. Although she still missed her father – and her nights were often broken by bad dreams – she and Marianne had learnt to carry on without him. The truth was, much as Sandrine hated to admit it, the outline of his face and his gentle smile were less clear in her mind with each passing month.
    In the east, the sun was rising. Light filtered through the patterned glass of the arched window on the stairwell, casting a kaleidoscope of blue and pink and green diamonds on to the rust-red tiles. Sandrine hesitated a moment outside her sister’s bedroom. Even though it was her intention to sneak out, she had a sudden urge to check that Marianne was there, safe in her bed.
    Sandrine put her hand on the ornate metal door handle and crept in. She tiptoed over to the bed. In the grey half-light, she could just make out her sister’s head on the pillow, her brown hair wrapped in complicated knots of paper and rollers. Marianne’s face was as beautiful as ever, but there was a spider’s web of worry lines around her eyes. Sandrine could just make out her shoes beside the bed. She frowned, wondering where she had been for them to be caked in mud.
    ‘Marianne?’ she whispered.
    Her sister was five years older. She taught history at the École des Filles on Square Gambetta, but spent much of her free time at the centre run by the Red Cross in the rue de Verdun. Quiet and principled, Marianne had offered her services as a volunteer with the Croix-Rouge after France’s surrender in June 1940, when tens of thousands of dispossessed people from the Occupied Zone had fled south to the Languedoc. Then, her work had been to provide food, shelter, blankets for refugees fleeing the advancing Nazi forces.