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oppression and its greed. And at the same time, more than anything on earth, she needed its promises of a God who loved, who would have allowed her baby to have been baptised and taken to Himself, not buried in the cold ground where she could not even mourn him properly. She kept her face turned away.
    Georges pushed his hands through his hair, scraping it back off his brow. ‘It’s a hell of a thing!’ he answered. ‘At least it stood for some kind of order ... some recognition of ...’
    ‘Corruption,’ she finished for him bitterly. ‘Do you know how much land the Church owned, before we took it back?’ She remembered her mother working it out precisely.
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And how much twisted morality, and how much unearned privilege and unnecessary guilt. But it still represented some kind of belief in a power greater than ourselves. It offered hope to those who had no other, and faith in a justice beyond anything there is here ... which is too often a farce, or worse. If we are all there is,’ he shrugged, ‘we haven’t got much, have we?’
    She was crushed by the emptiness of it. ‘If the best of us is the best there is, it’s not enough ...’ Unintentionally she turned towards him.
    He grinned suddenly, a flash of teeth in the flickering light. ‘But if the worst of us is the worst there is, it’ll do nicely, eh? Hell doesn’t need to be more than last September.’
    ‘And since we’ve done away with God, miracles aren’t very likely,’ she said drily. Then before he could add anything else, she slipped out of the door and down the narrow stairs into the darkness. She did not look back at his silhouette against the light of the fading candle.

Chapter Two
    C ÉLIE WOKE WITH A start, her head throbbing, her body hunched under the blankets. It was still dark outside, but that only meant that it was not yet seven. Amandine was leaning over her, a candle in her hand, her face pale with anxiety and lack of sleep, her soft hair a dark cloud around her head.
    ‘Célie, wake up! You’ve got to come and help me!’ Her voice was shaking with anger. ‘Bernave had St Felix out again all night! He’s just come in and he’s been beaten again, worse this time! Drunkards—Marat’s men—Marseillais, I don’t know. Get up and help me—please! He’s bleeding and he looks terrible. Sometimes I could kill Bernave!’
    ‘They’re going to execute the King,’ Célie mumbled, fighting off the remnants of sleep. She was so tired she felt drugged. Her throat was dry and the edges of her vision blurred.
    Amandine’s voice dropped. ‘Yes, I know. St Felix told me. In three days.’
    Célie sat up slowly. It was bitterly cold. There was no heating whatever in the room, and the air was like ice on her skin. At this hour probably no stoves had been lit anywhere in the house, except the kitchen. Amandine would have the stove going down there. Bernave’s household was one of the few that could afford to be warm, at least some of the time.
    She pushed her hair out of her eyes, and reached for her clothes. She put them on with clumsy fingers fumbling over buttons.
    Amandine looked dreadful. She was smaller and more rounded than Célie, her face more delicately boned. There were dark smudges under her eyes. She stood with her arms folded tight and her shoulders hunched.
    Célie tied a brown woollen shawl over her blouse and rough, full skirt. It was a sort of peasant garb, and she hated it, but that was what everyone wore in these days of ostentatious equality. The shawl was for warmth, not decoration. She would have liked a pink one, or bright yellow, something daring and individual, not a revolutionary colour. But that would be foolhardy, even if she could have found one.
    Amandine moved from one foot to the other impatiently. ‘Hurry, please! His clothes are torn and filthy, and there’s blood on them, and he can hardly speak. You know more about medicine than I do!’
    That was true. When Célie’s