“I wonder when they last ate,” she said, speaking her thoughts aloud, forgetting for the moment that Philippe was dumb.
It was Léonore who answered her and at the sound of her voice Melita started because she had thought the old woman was in the shadows at the far end of the hut instead of behind her.
“We eat at noon and when work over,” Léonore said.
“Then nobody will be very hungry as yet.”
“Always hungry,” Léonore answered. “Madame give too little food. Enough working men only.”
Melita’s lips tightened.
It seemed incredible that Madame Boisset, with Cécile’s large fortune to draw on, should deliberately cut the food given to the slaves and their families.
‘But it is what I might have expected,’ she reflected.
The small children she had seen on her first visit to the slave quarte
