perfection.
She closed her eyes for a second in order to savour her happiness, then opened them on the altar, decorated with autumn leaves and one or two late blooms amongst which a few candles burned. It had been erected in the great hall of Selton Hall because there was no catholic church for several miles around and even fewer priests. The England of King George III was going through one of its periodical violent bursts of anti-papist feeling and nothing less than the protection of the Prince of Wales had been required to enable this marriage between a catholic and a protestant to take place according to the rites of both churches. An hour before, the priest of the Church of England had blessed the couple and now the abbe Gauthier de Chazay was officiating by special favour. No power on earth could have kept him from blessing his goddaughter's marriage.
It was, moreover, a strange marriage, with no other pomp but these few flowers and candles, the one concession to the solemnity of the day. Around this makeshift altar, the familiar surroundings remained, as ever: the high white and gold ceiling with its hexagonal mouldings, the purple and white Genoa velvet hangings, the heavily gilded furniture and, last of all, the great canvases depicting the imposing figures of past Seltons. All this gave to the ceremony an impression of unreality and timelessness that was strengthened by the gown worn by the bride.
Marianne's mother had worn these things at Versailles, in the presence of King Louis XVI and Marie- Antoinette on the day of her marriage to Pierre-Louis d'Asselnat, Marquis de Villefranche. There was a full gown of white satin oversewn with lace and rosebuds, worn over the wide cloth of silver underskirt swollen with panniers and a host of petticoats. The tight, constricting bodice with its square neck line was cut low, revealing a girlish bosom below the necklace made of many rows of pearls, while from the high powdered wig, frosted with diamonds, a great lace veil cascaded like the tail of a comet. This dress, with all its outmoded magnificence, Anne Selton had sent home as a keepsake to her sister Ellis who had treasured it ever since.
Many times, when Marianne was little, Aunt Ellis had shown her that dress. Each time, she had to hold back her tears as she drew it from its cedar wood chest but she loved to see the wonder on the child's face.
'One day,' she would tell her, 'you too will wear this dress. And that will be a happy day for you. Yes, by God, you shall be happy!' As she spoke she would thump her stick on the ground as though challenging fate to contradict her. And it was true, Marianne was happy.
But now, the thumping with which Ellis Selton had been in the habit of punctuating her commands echoed no longer, except in her niece's memory. For a week now, the generous, domineering old spinster had rested in the Palladian mausoleum across the park among her ancestors. This marriage had been her doing. It was her last wish and as such not to be denied.
Ever since that autumn evening when a weary man had deposited in her arms a baby only a few months old, crying with hunger, Ellis Selton had discovered a new meaning in her lonely life. Without effort, the ageing, arrogant spinster had transformed herself into a perfect mother for the orphan. Sometimes she would be overwhelmed by fierce waves of tenderness that woke her in the middle of the night, panting and sweating at the mere thought of the dangers through which the little girl had passed.
When this happened, she would get up, driven by an uncontrollable impulse, and fumbling for her cane, make her way barefoot, her red plaits dangling down her back, into the big room near her own where Marianne lay sleeping. She would stand for a long while by the cot, looking down at the baby girl who had become her one reason for living. Then, as the nightmare fears abated and her heart beat normally again, Ellis Selton would go back to her bed, not to sleep but instead to offer up endless prayers of thankfulness to God for granting an old maid this miracle, a child of her own to care for.
Marianne knew the story of her escape by heart, she had heard it so many times from her aunt. Ellis Selton, although fiercely protestant and anchored firmly in her religious beliefs, could value courage when she saw it. The abbe de Chazay's exploit had earned him the Englishwoman's sincere esteem.
'He's a man, that little papist priest!' was her invariable conclusion to the story. 'I couldn't have done better myself.'
She herself was, in fact, a woman of consuming activity and tireless energy. She was passionately fond of horses and, before her accident had spent the best part of her time in the saddle, riding the length and breadth of her vast estates, inspecting everything with her keen blue eyes which very little was allowed to escape.
As a result, almost as soon as she was able to walk, Marianne was hoisted on to a pony and learned to accustom herself to cold water whether at her washstand or in the river where she learned to swim. Wearing little more in winter than in summer, going out bareheaded in all weathers, hunting her first fox at the age of eight, Marianne's education would have done credit to any boy but, for a girl and more particularly for a girl of her times it was more than a little unorthodox. Old Dobbs, the head groom, had himself taught her to handle weapons and at fifteen Marianne could wield a sword with the very best and shoot the pips out of a playing card at twenty paces.
Yet, with all this her mind had not been neglected. She spoke several languages and had been well taught in history, geography, literature, music and dancing and, above all, in singing, nature having endowed her with a voice whose warmth and clarity was by no means the least of its charms. Far better educated than the majority of her contemporaries, Marianne had become her aunt's pride and joy, and this in spite of a regrettable propensity for devouring every novel that came within her reach.
'She might take her place without shame on any throne!' the old woman was fond of saying, emphasizing her words with vigorous thumps on the ground with her stick.
'Thrones are never very comfortable things,' the abbe de Chazay, to whom these glorious visions of Lady Ellis's were usually confided, would answer, 'but of recent years they have become perfectly untenable.'
His relationship with Ellis had always been violently unpredictable and now that it was all over, Marianne could not help looking back on it with a nostalgia touched with amusement. Lady Selton had been a protestant to her very soul and regarded catholics with invincible mistrust and their priests with a kind of superstitious terror. To her, they still carried with them the slight but unmistakable smell of burning flesh associated with the worst horrors of the Inquisition. Between her and the abbe Gauthier there was an endless and enthusiastic verbal duel in which each did his best to convince the other without the faintest hope of ever succeeding. Ellis flaunted the green banner of Torquemada, while Gauthier fulminated against the cruelties of Henry VIII, the fanatical furies of John Knox and recalling the martyrdom of the catholic Mary Queen of Scotts, launched a virulent attack on the whole Anglican citadel. More often than not, the battle was ended by sheer exhaustion. Lady Ellis would ring for tea which came accompanied, in honour of the visitor, by a decanter of rare brandy. Then, peace restored, the two adversaries would confront one another again in a calmer frame of mind over the card table, each thoroughly pleased with the other and themselves, their mutual esteem intact, if not actually strengthened. And the child would go back to her play with the feeling that all was for the best in the best of all worlds, because the people she loved were at peace with one another.
Despite her aunt's convictions, Marianne had been brought up in her father's faith. If the truth were told, this religious instruction, like those interludes nicknamed by the child 'the wars of religion', did not take place very often. The abbe Gauthier de Chazay's appearances at Selton Hall were brief and infrequent. They did not know how he occupied his time but one thing they did know, that he travelled a great deal in Germany, Poland and even as far as Russia where he stayed for long periods at a time. He was also to be found, from time to time, at the various residences of the Count of Provence who, since 1795 and the death of the Dauphin in the Temple, had become King Louis XVIII. The abbe had lived for a while in Verona, at Mittau and in Sweden. Every now and then, he would make his appearance in England, only to vanish again, always in a hurry, always secretive, without ever saying where he was going. And no one ever asked questions.
With the establishment of the fat king without a kingdom at Hartwell House, the preceding spring, the abbe had seemed to be settled in England for a while. Since then, he made only one short journey abroad. Marianne and her aunt could not help being intrigued by all this coming and going. Lady Selton remarked more than once that it would not surprise her if the little priest turned out to be a secret agent for Rome.
Even so, it had been the abbe she summoned to her bedside as she lay dying rather than the Reverend Mr Harris whom she heartily detested and referred to as a 'damned pompous idiot'. A bad cold, treated by the invalid with her customary supreme contempt, had brought her to death's door within a week. Ellis contemplated the approach of death without flinching, calm and lucid as ever, her only regret that it had come too soon.
'I still had so much to do,' she sighed. 'But whatever happens, I am determined that my little Marianne shall be married a week after I am underground.'
