Children of Light. Lucy English

      

      CHILDREN OF LIGHT

      Lucy English

       Copyright

      Fourth Estate

       An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      Copyright © Lucy English 1999

      First published in Great Britain in 1999 by Fourth Estate Limited

      Extracts from ‘Magali’ are from Memoirs of Mistral by Jean Roussière.

      The right of Lucy English to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

      Source ISBN: 9781841151168

      Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007483235

      Version: 2016-01-07

      FOR MY PARENTS

       BECAUSE THEY

       INTRODUCED ME TO PROVENCE

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

ROCHAS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

       ST CLAIR

       CHAPTER SEVEN

       CHAPTER EIGHT

       CHAPTER NINE

       CHAPTER TEN

       CHAPTER ELEVEN

       CHAPTER TWELVE

       CHAPTER THIRTEEN

       CHAPTER FOURTEEN

       CHAPTER FIFTEEN

       LIEUX

       CHAPTER SIXTEEN

       CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

       CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

       CHAPTER NINETEEN

       CHAPTER TWENTY

       CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

       CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

       LA FERROU

       CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

       CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

       About the Publisher

       INTRODUCTION

      A bus stopped in a village in the south of France and a woman with grey hair descended. She wore walking boots and tough, practical clothes. She hauled a large rucksack on to her shoulders, but she was out of season. The village was shut like a mussel on a rock. She didn’t walk away but watched the nearly empty minibus drive out of the village and back down the hill. The village looked over a valley to another, almost identical village, whose houses clung to the sides, which rose to a church tower. All around were steep wooded hills of dark green pine. A white tumble of clouds fell out of the whiter sky and hung in the valley like a lost baby. A sudden squall of wind and a flash of rain, the mother sky wailed with grief, then it fell too and the whole valley became a swirling mist of wet cloud. It was March.

      Wednesday

      Dear Stephen,

      I’m sorry we parted on such bad terms. I know it seems crazy what I’m doing but I feel so much better now that I’m here. It took me much longer than I expected. The railway no longer runs to Draguignan and I had to bus it. I was afraid I would arrive in the middle of nowhere in the dark, but I managed to reach St Clair by early afternoon. Oh, Stephen, Jeanette still runs the café. I think she recognised me but I was tired and I didn’t want to talk. The village is different, it’s nearly all holiday homes, much smarter, there’s no weeds growing in the walls. I wonder how many real villagers are left. I didn’t see any.

      You were wrong about the hut being derelict. You see, it’s not England here. If you left a place in England for 20 years the brambles and the damp would take over, but here the summers are so dry they scorch plants to the ground. The pine trees are taller. The one near the hut is quite large, but that