Free We All Ran into the Sunlight by Natalie Young

slacks and a black round-neck jumper, small round-toed shoes; she was pluckier than he thought.
    ‘I’d like to show you something,’ said the Mayor, and he led them across the courtyard to the gates.
    ‘You won’t have seen this; it’s overgrown.’
    The sun sank. Across the courtyard the heads of the thistles were painted orange.
    ‘There is a plaque here, behind the post. It tells you when the house was built. There. Read!’
    He stepped back and pushed her forward to the wall. Lucie opened her mouth obediently. The Mayor stood behind her; she felt the men’s eyes on the curls at her neck.
    ‘What does it say?’
    ‘It says it was built in 1533, on the site of a former edifice.’
    ‘A what?’
    ‘On the site of a former edifice.’
    ‘Who built it?’
    ‘Two brothers. From Barcelona. They were extradited by the King and came here, and built this, and died here.’
    ‘What did they do?’
    ‘Who knows?’ said the Mayor and then he made his excuses and put his bandaged hand back in his pocket. He walked away quickly, coughing. It was as if someone had called to him to come in and eat suddenly. He pushed his way through the gate and left them alone.

     
    Arnaud was delighted with the wine on the table and he poured some for both of them, using the brandy glasses from the night before. He seemed relaxed now in the room, and warm. Lucie had kept a fire going for most of the afternoon and now she opened the lid of the pot hanging from a hook over the fire and stirred the stew thick with onions, tomatoes, peppers and potatoes. He watched her go about her womanly business and smiled comfortably. There was bread and a large slice of soft cheese, which Arnaud cut quickly and ate with his glass of wine.
    He stood up to help her lift the pot from the fire. Lucie sat at the table with her hands demure in her lap. Arnaud leant forward, dragging his boots; already, she thought, his eyes had something of the countryside in them, something bright and hard like berries.
    He ate hungrily, watching her. When he had finished his food, he pushed his bowl to one side and reached across the table for her hand.
    ‘They are all so strange here, Arnaud.’
    ‘You think?’
    ‘The Mayor, with his cough and his bandaged hand, leaving like that, having pushed us over to see the plaque, which means what exactly? Built on the site of a former edifice?’
    ‘It means built on something that was here before.’
    ‘Before what? Before the fifteenth century?’
    ‘Exactly.’
    ‘But the villagers who say nothing, and do nothing? I feel as if something has happened here.’
    He drained his glass. Then he pulled his chair away from the table and took it over towards the fireplace. He stood on the chair and reached his hand back through the bars and into the teeth of the wooden cage that was above the fireplace and was where he had put his gun.
    ‘They would have kept the dogs up here, Lucie. Dogs to turn the spit.’
    ‘Yes, Arnaud. Yes. I know.’
    He slid the gun out of its cloth and turned it in his fingers . In the morning he would go out in the fields to check it was still in working order.
    ‘This house was once magnificent,’ he said to her, looking her straight in the eye. ‘I think that if we work at it with all our hearts and minds we can make it so again.’

2
     
     
    Through the winter, the crows kept watch; their watery eyes turned to her labours in the courtyard as she cleared the weeds and made space for herbs, for olive trees, a bed of lavender to plant in the spring.
    When she had finished clearing the courtyard, it looked vast and ghostly; the ground was dirty white in places, rings of cracked earth around the giant fig tree in the centre.
    Arnaud decided to remove the vines from the top vineyard entirely and leave the field fallow for a year. It took him days to haggle for the machines, and the men who came were not from the village but from another, up in the hills.
    In the early-morning dark, he peeled back