A swish of skirts and briskly clicking heels announced the entrance of his mother, Mary’s aunt, who asked them, “Which of you can possibly be bored on such a morning?” But she knew. Her smiling eyes went straight to Mary’s. “You have been too long indoors, I think. Come, bring Frisque. He’s half asleep, as well. We’ll take a walk together.”
“Now? Outside?”
“Where else?” Aunt Magdalene, once having set her mind to something, could be like a plow horse walking in a furrow—difficult to turn. And to be truthful, Mary had no great objection to a walk. If not adventurous, at least it was a welcome change of scene.
She fetched her cloak and muff and changed her slippers for the heavy shoes that better warmed her feet while she was walking, and with Frisque at her heels she trailed after her aunt down the corridor and out the back door.
Outside, the snow lay soft and thick beneath the sleeping vines that climbed the hill behind the line of houses. Come the spring, the sun would bring those vines to life. The vines, in turn, would bring forth vibrant clusters of the little grapes that through the summer and the autumn would enliven the whole village, giving industry and purpose to the villagers who worked towards the harvest and production of the wine that had, for centuries, provided them a living. But for now, the vines lay dormant. And they waited.
Mary, watching Frisque circle and sniff round those leafless vines, felt once again the stir of restlessness and discontent within her breast, and fought to push it down again before her aunt could notice any change in her expression. There was little, she had learned, that could escape the keenly empathetic eye of her Aunt Magdalene.
They walked a little distance without speaking. Mary liked the silence, and the frosted air that smelled of wood smoke, and the view that spread and grew as they climbed higher. She could see, now, clear across the tiled rooftops of their neighbors’ houses, clear past the tall spire of the pale stone church of Saint-Roch with its two great bells, across the trees that hid the roofs of the next village, Andrésy, and over the thin curving ribbon of the River Seine, to the dark forest on the shore beyond: the woods of Saint-Germain.
“Marie, my dear,” her aunt said—using, as she always did, the French form of her niece’s name, “how much do you remember of your life before you came to us?”
The question caught her unprepared. Surprised, she tried to gather up her thoughts and focused harder on the dark mass of the forest, at the farthest edge of which she knew, although she could not see it, stood the great Château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye—the royal castle in whose shadow she herself had been baptized.
She said, in honesty, “I have few memories.”
Those she had retained were like a web of lace, connected in a loose way but with gaps and holes and spaces, and so frail and insubstantial she was never sure how safe they were to trust.
Her mother’s face had long since faded from her mind and been supplanted by the image in the portrait hanging here in the salon that showed her mother and Aunt Magdalene as they had looked before they’d both been married. Mary liked that portrait well, but there was little in the pale determined face and calm brown eyes of the young woman who had grown to be her mother that stirred any sense of recognition. It was not her mother’s face that she remembered, but the feel of her—the soft warmth of her arms, the firmer softness of her silken bodice over stays, the ever-present tickle of the ruffled lace that edged her white chemise and brushed on Mary’s cheek and upturned nose when she was snuggling on her mother’s lap.
And there were scents, as well—a whiff of roses, or of lavender. And later still, the scents of sickness, not so pleasant to recall. And that was all the memory of her mother that was left to her. No voice, though she’d been told her mother sang, and she imagined that her mother’s voice had been much like Aunt Magdalene’s, with warm and pleasant tones that seemed to always be prepared to open easily to laughter.
Of her brothers and her father she remembered something more, but even then, their forms and features had long blurred to indistinction, and their words and voices were reduced to whispers in a language she now rarely used herself, despite her uncle’s stoic efforts to make sure she did not lose her English. “Any foreign language,” so Uncle Jacques had told her, “is an asset in this world. It will expand your opportunities.”
He’d bought her English books, and when the local blacksmith had gone off to Amsterdam and come home with an Irish wife, then Uncle Jacques had happily employed her as a tutor, not to Mary on her own but all the children. Only Mary, though, who’d spoken English for her first six years of life, had truly profited from this arrangement. Colette, Mary’s cousin, had no ear for learning languages, and both Gaspard and young Jacques had been too distracted by the fresh blond beauty of the blacksmith’s Irish wife to pay attention to their lessons.
Still, the end result had been that Mary, though she spoke in French, could switch to English when she needed to with hardly any accent. And she could at least put meaning to the words that she recalled her father saying, when he’d brought her here to leave her for the final time.
“Now, Mary,” he had told her, “be a good lass for your uncle and your aunt, and mind the manners you’ve been taught, and use the sense that you’ve been given, and I promise you, you’ll have a better life here than I ever could have given you.”
At least, that’s what she thought he’d said. The years, perhaps, had rearranged his words and phrased them into a more sentimental speech within her memory, the same memory that insisted she’d replied to him, “I want to stay with you.” And that his thumb had brushed a tear from her hot cheek, and he had said, “We do not always get the things we want.”