Page 11 of The Secret Daughter
She didn’t answer, just passed him his borrowed hat, picked up her bundle and jumped down. “Thank you for all your help, Monsieur Reynard. The best of luck with your…enterprises.”
“You can keep the hat. As you see, I have two.”
She shook her head. “Thank you, but no. Goodbye.”
He nodded, but frowning, made no move to continue on. Zoë hitched her bundle over her shoulder and set off up the drive. She wasn’t expecting—or even hoping—to come across any long-lost relatives; it was clear that nobody came here any longer, but she wanted to see it for herself. Had to see it for herself. Where her mother had started life. Where her ancestors had come from.
She knew how Maman’s life had ended, and it was grim: in sickness and poverty in the slums of London. But her childhood, Maman always maintained, had been a happy one. Up to the age of eleven,anyway.
Chapter Three
She trudged along the long, curving, tree-lined driveway, weaving through clumps of weeds and keeping an eye out for things that slithered.
The sun beat down. She stopped once or twice to wipe her brow, and hoped she would come across a stream or some source of water soon.
She turned a corner and stopped dead. There it was. Château de Chantonney, once home to the Comte de Chantonney and his family. And Maman. She put down her bundle and just stared up at the château.
Once a beautiful fairy-tale castle, with a round turret at each corner—she remembered Maman telling her about those turrets—now a ruined, crumbling, abandoned wreck, with a partially collapsed roof, smashed windows, and signs of a long-ago fire.
She looked cautiously around—there was nobody in sight—and approached the château. The remains of the front door, once a grand carved oak entrance, hungcrookedly on warped hinges. They had smashed their way in, whoever they were, all those years ago.
She pushed it open and entered. The formerly elegant entry hall had chipped and smashed tile work on the floor, the walls were covered in delicate murals, now faded and ruined by violent gashes. The remains of what had been a chandelier hung crookedly from the ceiling, the crystals taken.
Carefully she mounted the stairs. Most of the delicate wrought iron banisters had been wrenched off and carried away. A few twisted bits stubbornly remained: a memory of past elegance. She peered in room after room, seeing ragged shreds of wallpaper, ruined statuary, smashed plasterwork and years’ worth of dust and dirt and cobwebs. No paintings, no furniture, except those things too heavy to move, and they were either smashed or partially burned. And in many places there was the smell of damp. And mold. And decay.
It was heartbreaking, seeing so much beauty so wantonly destroyed. The echoes of past violence, the rage of the mob, too long denied the necessities of life, were almost tangible.
She climbed and climbed, recalling Maman’s stories until she came to what she was sure had been the nursery. More delicate frescoes gouged and slashed at. Furniture and toys broken, the remains flung wantonly about.
A scrap of dirty lace caught her eye and she bent to pull it out from beneath a splintered piece of wood. And gasped. It was a doll, her once dainty blue silk dress in shreds, faded and dotted with mold. There was no head. Zoë searched and found it, cleanly severed from the little doll’s body.
As if guillotined.
Maman had told her about this doll, how she’d wanted to take it with her, but she’d been hustled away in the night in a rush, and there had been no time to find it. Marianne,her favorite doll, the best friend of a lonely little girl. Maman had even painted her, years later, from memory.
Feeling ill, Zoë cradled Marianne against her chest, imagining the scene. Acid curdled in her throat. Such anger and hatred. Againsta doll.
A drop of water fell on her hand, startling her. She glanced up at the ceiling, but it wasn’t a leak—she was weeping. She hadn’t realized it. She went to wipe her eyes and found her cheeks were wet with tears. She scrubbed them away.
Thank God for the intervention of Berthe, Maman’s nursemaid, who, catching wind of the revolutionary unrest brewing in the surrounding villages, had bundled Maman into a cart and spirited her away before anyone realized the daughter of the comte was still here. The other servants had taken what they could and fled. Or joined the mob.
Maman’s parents and her brother, Philippe, the heir, were already in Paris, but Maman had come down with measles and had remained behind, too ill to travel.
So she’d been alone, except for servants, many of whom secretly despised the aristocracy. Zoë swallowed, thinking of it. A little girl, helpless, unprotected, waiting to be torn apart by a screaming, raging mob.
Ironically, her illness had turned out to be fortuitous. Had Maman gone with her family to Paris she would have gone to the guillotine with the rest of them. And had it not been for Berthe, she would no doubt have been murdered here, like her doll.
Berthe had stuffed her bodice with what jewels Grand-mère had left behind: a canny decision. She’d taken Maman to the coast and used some of the jewels to bribe a fisherman to smuggle the child out of France and take her to England. As she bade Maman farewell, she’d pressed a gold locket and bracelet into her hand. “You can sell these when you get to Angleterre,” she’d said.
And if she’d kept the rest of the jewels herself, who could argue with that? She’d saved Maman’s life, at considerable risk to her own.
Maman had described that journey to Zoë: eleven years old, sailing with strangers into the dark, all alone, in fear for her life, going to a strange country where she knew no one and didn’t even speak the language.
Zoë had heard the story a hundred times, but now, standing in the ruined château, holding the viciously beheaded doll, she could imagine it as never before.
“Oh, Maman,” she whispered. Tears rolled down her cheeks, unheeded.
By late afternoon, Zoë had had enough of exploring her mother’s former home. Emotionally she was wrung out like a wet rag. She supposed she could spend the night there, gather up some dusty fabrics and make a nest on the floor—very little furniture remained intact—but it was too depressing, too evocative of tragedy and violence.
