sorrows.
'I am sorry to be the bringer of bad news,' he said softly. 'You must know that, a month past, Queen Marie-Antoinette mounted the scaffold already stained with her royal husband's blood, and this despite the efforts of some of her faithful servants led by the baron de Batz, to snatch her from the jaws of death. They failed – and two days later some of them paid with their lives for their loyalty to the Queen's cause. The Marquis d'Asselnat was among them—'
'My sister?'
'She would not be parted from her husband in his death and they were arrested together. Life without Pierre meant nothing to her. You know the deep and passionate love which united them. They went to the guillotine as they had gone to the altar in the chapel at Versailles, hand in hand and smiling.'
He was cut short by a sob. Great tears which she made no attempt to hide were rolling down Ellis's face. The tears came so naturally, as though, without realizing it, she had been preparing for a long time to shed them. Preparing, in fact, ever since the day when her young and lovely sister Anne had fallen in love with a French diplomat and had renounced her own land, her religion, and everything that had been dear to her to follow Pierre d'Asselnat. Anne might have been a duchess in England, she had chosen to be a marquise in France, and in so doing had broken the heart of the sister, fifteen years older than herself, who had watched over her ever since the death of their mother. Even then, Ellis had felt that her little Anne was going to meet a tragic fate, although she could not have said what gave her the idea. Yet what the abbe de Chazay had told her was, after all, no more than the fulfilment of her nightmares.
Moved by her silent grief, the little man in the rusty black stood before her his arms mechanically cradling the sleeping child. But suddenly, Ellis straightened herself. She held out eager, trembling arms to the baby and taking her gently, laid her against her own flat chest, peering with a kind of terror into the tiny face crowned with a mist of brown curls. She touched the tight little fists with a timid, exploring finger. The tears dried and a look of gentleness came over her face.
The abbe's legs, trembling under the accumulated weariness of weeks, seemed to give way suddenly and he subsided into a chair and watched the last of the Seltons discovering the maternal instinct. There, in the firelight, the long face in its frame of red hair presented an indefinable picture of mingled love and pain.
'Who is she like?' Ellis asked softly. 'Anne was so fair and this child's hair is almost black.'
'She is like her father, but she will have her mother's eyes. You will see when she wakes—'
As if she had only been waiting for the words, Marianne opened a pair of eyes as green as young grass and looked at her aunt. But instantly, the tiny nose was screwed up, the tiny mouth was turned down woefully and the baby began to howl. Ellis started with surprise and almost dropped her. Her eyes flew to the abbe with an expression of near panic.
'Good God! What is it? Is she ill? Have I hurt her?'
Gauthier de Chazay smiled broadly, showing firm white teeth.
'I think she is merely hungry. She has had nothing but a little spring water since this morning.'
'And nor, I daresay, have you! What am I thinking of, sitting her with my grief while you and this little angel perish of hunger and fatigue—'
Within seconds, the silence in the house was a thing of the past. Servants came running. One was ordered to fetch a person named Mrs Jenkins, the others to produce upon the instant a hot supper, tea and brandy. Finally, Parry was commanded to make ready a room for the guest from France. Everything happened at astonishing speed. Parry disappeared, the servants brought a lavish repast and Mrs Jenkins made the solemn entry suited to her position as housekeeper, her ample person and considerable years. But this majesty melted like butter in the sun when Lady Selton placed the baby in her arms.
'Take her, my good Jenkins – she is all that remains to us of Lady Anne. Those bloodthirsty scoundrels have killed her for trying to save the unhappy queen. We must take care of her for we are all she has – and I have no one but her.'
When they were all gone she turned to the abbe de Chazay and he saw that tears were still running down her cheeks but she made an effort to smile and indicated the laden table.
'Sit down – eat, then you shall tell me all.'
The abbe talked for a long time, describing his flight from Paris with the baby after he had found her, alone and abandoned, in the d'Asselnat's town house after it had been looted by the mob.
Meanwhile, upstairs, Marianne, well washed and full of warm milk, was sleeping peacefully in a big room with hangings of blue velvet, watched over by the elderly Mrs Jenkins. The worthy housekeeper had dressed the fragile little body tenderly in lace and cambric that had once been her mother's and now, she was rocking her gently and lovingly and singing an old song conjured up from the recesses of her memory:
'Oh mistress mine! where are you roaming?
Oh mistress mine! where are you roaming?
O! stay and hear; your true love's coming,
That can sing both high and low…'
Whether Shakespeare's old song was addressed to the fleeting shade of Anne Selton or to the child come to find a refuge in the heart of the English countryside, there were tears in Mrs Jenkin's eyes as she smiled at the baby.
And so, Marianne d'Asselnat came to spend her childhood in the old home of her ancestors and grow up in old England…
Part I
1809, THE BRIDE OF SELTON HALL
CHAPTER ONE
The Wedding Night
The priest's hand was raised in blessing and as he uttered the ritual words, all heads were bowed. Marianne realized that she was married. A wave of joy swept over her, almost savage in its intensity, and at the same time she had a sense of absolute irrevocability. From this moment she ceased to belong to herself and became, body and soul, one with the man who had been chosen for her. Yet, though the choice might not have been her own, not for anything in the world would she have wished him other than he was. From the first moment when he had bowed to her, Marianne had known that she loved him. And from then on she gave herself to him with a passionate devotion which she brought to everything she did, with all the ardour of first love.
Her hand, with the brand new ring, trembled a little in Francis's. She gazed up at him wonderingly.
'For ever,' she said softly. 'Until death do us part—'
He smiled, the kindly, rather condescending smile of an adult for an over-enthusiastic child, and pressed the slender fingers lightly before releasing them to hand Marianne to her seat. The mass was about to begin.
The new bride listened meekly to the first words but very soon her mind slipped away from the familiar ritual and returned, irresistibly, to Francis. Her eyes slid out from under the enveloping cloud of lace and fastened with satisfaction on her husband's clean-cut profile. Francis Cranmere, at thirty, was a magnificent human specimen. He was very tall and carried himself with a languid, aristocratic grace which, but for his muscular athletic frame, might have been thought feminine. Similarly, the stubborn brow and the powerful chin resting on the high muslin cravat, counteracted the rather too perfect beauty of features that, for all their nobility, seemed fixed in an expression of perpetual boredom. The white of the hands emerging from lace cuffs, would have done credit to a cardinal but the chest and shoulders moulded by the dark blue coat were those of a boxer.
Lord Cranmere was a man of contradictions, an angel's head on the body of an adventurer. But the whole had an undoubted charm to which few women were impervious. Certainly, for Marianne at seventeen he was pure
