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pushed back, watching the clouds gather. She was expecting rain. She was making her plans in accordance with the rain. Beside her, my father stood still, holding a sack in each hand. When I was small, I'd seen my father with two sacks like that, but they had been full of blind moles, their whiskers still rough with dirt. They were dead. We trapped them because they ruined the fields but I didn't know that then, I only knew that my father had killed them. It was my mother who pulled me away rigid with cold from my night vigil. In the morning the sacks were gone. I've killed them myself since, but only by looking the other way.
    Mother. Father. I love you.
    We stayed up late so many nights drinking Claude's rough cognac and sitting till the fire was the colour of fading roses. My mother talked about her past with gaiety, she seemed to believe that with a ruler on the throne much would be restored. She even talked about writing to her parents. She knew they'd be celebrating the return of a monarch. I was surprised, I thought she'd always supported the Bourbons. Becoming an Emperor didn't make this man she'd hated into a man she could love surely?
    'He's doing right, Henri. A country needs a King and a Queen, otherwise who are we to look up to?'
    'You can look up to Bonaparte. King or not.'
    But she couldn't. He knew she couldn't. It was not simple vanity that was putting this man on the throne.
    When my mother talked about her parents, she harboured the same hopes as the traveller who returns home. She thought of them unchanged, described the furniture as though nothing would have been moved or broken in more than twenty years. Her father's beard was still the same colour. I understood her hopes. We all had something to pin on Bonaparte.
    Time is a great deadener. People forget, grow old, get bored. The mother and father she'd risked her life to escape from she now spoke of with affection. Had she forgotten? Had time worn away her anger?
    She looked at me. 'I'm not so greedy as I get older, Henri. I take what there is and I've stopped asking questions about where it comes from. It gives me pleasure to think of them. It gives me pleasure to love them. That's all.'
    My face burned. What right had I to challenge her? To take the light out of her eyes and make her think of herself as foolish and sentimental? I knelt in front of her, my back to the fire, my chest resting against her knees. She kept hold of her darning. 'You're like I was,' she said. 'No patience with a weak heart.'
    It rained for days. Thin rain that soaked you in half an hour without the thrill of a real torrent. I went from home to home gossiping and seeing friends, helping with whatever had to be mended or gathered. My friend die priest was on a pilgrimage, so I left him long letters of the kind I would most like to receive.
    I like the early dark. It's not night. It's still companionable. No one feels afraid to walk by themselves without a lantern. The girls sing on their way back from the last milking and if I jump out on them they'll shout and chase me but there'll be no pounding hearts. I don't know why it is that one kind of dark can be so different from another. Real dark is thicker and quieter, it fills up the space between your jacket and your heart. It gets in your eyes. When I have to be out late at night, it's not knives and kicks I'm afraid of, though there are plenty of those behind walls and hedges. I'm afraid of the Dark. You, who walk so cheerfully, whistling your way, stand still for five minutes. Stand still in the Dark in a field or down a track. It's then you know you're there on sufferance. The Dark only lets you take one step at a time. Step and the Dark closes round your back. In front, there is no space for you until you take it. Darkness is absolute. Walking in the Dark is like swimming underwater except you can't come up for air.
    Lie still at night and Dark is soft to the touch, it's made of moleskin and is such a sweet smotherer. In the