Paris: The Novel

itself was not arduous, and though it was mostly men taking part, a few of the women rode. One day Roland suggested that Marie might like to ride with him at the next meet, and with some uncertainty she agreed. But when the head groom asked anxiously if she was still intending to hunt, she went to Roland and asked him if he thought the groom was trying to suggest that she should not. To her delight, Roland only chuckled.
    “It’s the other way around,” he said. “He’s so proud of you that he’s been boasting about it to all his friends. He’s only terrified you won’t show up.”
    “How do you know?” she asked.
    “Because he told me.”
    Having organized the decorating of the house, Marie had turned her attention to the library. It contained some fine old volumes from the eighteenth century, but almost nothing since. So she set to work. “You’re indefatigable,” he laughed, as she imported the classics from the nineteenth century and some of the more interesting productions of modern literature—none of which he had any intention of reading. But he didn’t stop her.
    Of more interest to Roland was another, longer-term project Marie undertook.
    The de Cygne family archives were not in good order. “My father meant to sort them out,” Roland told her, “but he died before he got very far.”
    There were boxes of letters tied with ribbon in cabinet drawers. There were trunks of unsorted documents in the attic, and lead-lined strongboxes of parchment, going back to the sixteenth century.
    “It’s probably a treasure trove,” Marie informed him, “if we can ever sort it out.”
    “It will keep you occupied for years,” he replied with a grin. “And future generations will bless your name.”
    These researches were not only significant because anything relatingto one’s ancestors was important to an aristocrat. One day Marie even discovered that the family owned some quite valuable fields a few miles away that, during the confusion at the time of the Revolution, they had forgotten that they possessed. Roland was both proud of the fact that his noble family could forget such a detail, but equally delighted when Marie managed to recover the fields for him.
    And then there had been the evening when she had come into the old hall carrying a small box of letters and asked him: “Did you know that your family went to Canada?”
    “No.” He frowned. “In fact, I’m sure they did not.”
    “Well, there are a whole collection of letters here, written with great affection, from the brother of a former owner of this house. They date from the early seventeenth century. He’d gone out to Canada and settled there. It’s clear that the two brothers were in quite regular correspondence. I wonder if there were descendants.”
    Roland was silent. For some reason she didn’t understand, he looked awkward.
    “I seem to remember hearing from a Canadian once,” he said. “But I don’t know that he had anything to do with this seventeenth-century fellow.” He shrugged. “I may have written him a rather unfriendly letter.”
    “You could always write again.”
    “It’s all a long time ago,” he muttered. And since the business seemed to embarrass him, she didn’t bring it up again.
    Meanwhile, she continued to archive the material, and see if she could find any more hidden treasure for her husband.
    She was enjoying being chatelaine of the estate, and she believed that she might be getting quite good at it.
    In fact, she only had one regret. She wished, now, that she had married Roland a few years earlier. Not because of Roland himself, but because of his son. She would have liked to be more of a mother to Charlie.

    Everyone called him Charlie. The serious boy she’d first met at the Gobelins factory had still been at school when she’d married his father. He was already a tall, good-looking young fellow by then, though still a little gangly. He looked quite like his father, except that his hair was dark where his father’s had been fair, and Marie suspected that before he was thirty, his hairline would be receding. Like many boys, he’d been a littleunsure of himself, and occasionally withdrawn, but she had been very straightforward and friendly with him, and he seemed to like that. She’d never pressed him to confide in her, but she’d ask him what he thought about all sorts of things, and freely shared her own thoughts about everything from politics to marriage. She hoped she’d made