The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

skirt.”
    “Shows he’s better,” grunted Boridot. “A little apéro, to take the heat from the day?” He led the way inside, which smelled as gamy as a badger’s den. There was a huge cheese made from ewe’s milk on the table, and an earthenware dish containing a fat pâté beside it. On an old couch, whose broken fourth leg had been replaced by a large stone, lay a middle-aged man with a clean bandage on his thigh and a half-filled glass in his hand.
    “My own pineau, ” gestured Boridot proudly, and took his handkerchief off his head to wipe it around a cloudy glass. He filled it with a reddish-brown liquid from a liter bottle, and handed it to Manners. He poured himself another glass, and Sybille picked up the drink she had been sipping before she came to the door. The ration of four liters a month did not seem to be affecting this farm.
    “How goes it?” Manners asked the recumbent man. He looked half-drunk, and sounded even drunker when he said he felt well enough to fight some Germans again. Manners reached into his blouse to give him a packet of English cigarettes. Alongside the Players, he found the dead German’s pay book. Feldgendarmerie, Military Police—that told him nothing. He opened the leather wallet and found, to his surprise, a traveling chess set, with flat pieces that fit neatly into slits in the leather. No name or identification on it, so it might be useful to help the boys pass the time. He closed it, slipped it into his breast pocket, and then handed the cigarettes to the wounded man.
    “Do you want to get us all killed?” Sybille asked dryly. “The Germans find those, and we’re all dead.”
    “The Germans find a wounded man with a bullet hole in his thigh and we’re all dead anyway,” he replied neutrally. “Besides, old Boridot would blow them away.”
    She looked at him, just a bare hint of a smile on her face. No makeup hiding that fine skin, good eyes, he thought, the catalog forming in his mind by reflex. But somehow she seemed to want to make herself look plain. Tiredness, perhaps, too many years of war and occupation. With enemy soldiers around, he could understand an attractive woman wanting to look drab.
    “I want to thank you for taking care of him,” he told her formally. “I understand the risks you must be taking.”
    “I’m the one taking the risk, with that glamorous horse doctor,” belched the man on the couch. He lit a Players, looked at it suspiciously, and then handed the packet around.
    “It’s the best care you’re going to get, so treat her with respect. Otherwise, she might saw your leg off next time,” Manners said firmly, lighting Sybille’s cigarette. “May I pay your fee, madame? We are well supplied with currency.”
    “This cigarette will more than repay me. Besides, I’ve known this dirty old man since he used to watch us coming out of school to run home to our lunch. There’s not much to buy, anyway. Now if you had some coupons for clothes, or some of that parachute silk…. My husband sometimes smoked these, before the war. We went to London for our honeymoon,” said Sybille, and held up the glowing cigarette to watch the way the smoke curled. “God, I’ve almost forgotten what it tasted like.”
    “Buckingham Palace, Tower of London, Houses of Parliament,” chanted the drunk on the couch. “Not very romantic.”
    “We’ve all forgotten a lot of things from peacetime,” Manners said. He wondered where her husband was now.
    “Is your husband a vet as well, madame?” he asked.
    “He was a vet. He was killed in 1940, somewhere near Calais with an artillery regiment which was wiped out holding the town to let the English escape from Dunkirk. Horse-drawn artillery, against panzers.”
    “The Germans have horse-drawn artillery too,” he said quietly. “And nearly a hundred thousand Frenchman got out with us at Dunkirk.”
    “I’m not blaming the English, monsieur. I blame the Germans, and that rotten government we had, and the whole foul, political mess of the prewar days. Communists, fascists, royalists, socialists, radicals—I spit on all of them.” She smoked her Players. “I think these things are very bad for the health. But not as bad as war.”
    “Well, I blame Hitler,” said Manners.
    “If not him, the Germans would have thrown up some other arsehole. They always do. Hitler, the Kaiser, Bismarck,” said Boridot. “We should have finished the job back in 1918. If we’d marched on to Berlin,