The Launching of Roger Brook (43 page)

At the moment he was still a free man, and so not compelled to return to the château. Twilight was now falling, and he had a good horse upon which he could put many miles between himself and Bécherel during the night. But he had only a little silver on him and if Athénaïs requested
the authorities to arrest him there was little chance of his being able to get clean away.

He felt, too, that it would be the act of a coward to attempt to run away. By returning to face whatever fate she might decree for him, he could at least show her that he was not lacking in courage; and there was always the possibility that, furious as she might be, she would shrink from humiliating herself further by telling anyone what had occurred, and, rather than that, let the matter drop.

When the hour was up he rode slowly back through the deepening shadows, handed his mount over to a stable boy and went up by the back stairs to his room. On looking in the mirror he saw that his face was a network of angry red weals and he wondered how to account for its condition to the servants. The easiest way seemed to give out that his horse had bolted with him and carried him full tilt into a grove of alders, the springy shoots of which had whipped fiercely at his face as he was swept wildly through them. As the weals were straight, short lines and not the least like scratches the story was somewhat thin, but he was too tired and depressed to worry further over it and decided that it must serve.

However, instead of going downstairs for his supper he went straight to bed, with the idea that the bedclothes would serve to partially conceal his injuries, and that he would remain there till they were better.

In due course, Henri came to inquire why he had not come down for his evening meal, and Roger gave his explanation, adding that he had also hurt his leg, so would probably stay in bed for a day or two. The man brought his supper on a tray and, after eating it, while still wondering what the outcome of the afternoon’s events would be, he dropped asleep.

After his
petit déjeuner
he spent the morning hours in considerable anxiety, listening for any heavy footfalls in his lonely corridor which might herald the approach of a group of servants sent by Athénaïs to apprehend him. At last, just before midday, the footfalls came.

There was a knock on his door, then, to his amazement, Athénaïs’s clear voice called: ‘Monsieur Breuc, may we come in?’

‘Come … come in,’ he stammered, wondering what on earth was about to happen.

Followed by Madame Marie-Angé, she walked in and said calmly: ‘I am told that you met with an accident when out riding yesterday. I trust that it is nothing serious, and we have come to attend to your hurts as well as we can.’

There was not a trace of expression in her eyes or voice and with a muttered, ‘No, no, Mademoiselle, it is nothing serious, I assure you,’ he went on to tell them his version of how he had come by his now empurpled face.

‘My, my! How those alder shoots must have stung you!’ exclaimed Athénaïs, after one close look at his injuries. ‘But this will soothe the angry places they have made,’ and taking a pot from Madame Marie-Angé she began to apply some of the ointment it contained.

The sympathy of her words was swiftly belied by her actions; as, with her back turned to Madame Marie-Angé, she proceeded to rub the ointment into his cuts as though she was scrubbing a floor.

When she had done, both of them talked to him for a little, then, bidding him stay where he was until he was fully recovered, they left him to his thoughts.

One cardinal fact emerged from this visit. Athénaïs had evidently decided that it would be best to let sleeping dogs lie; so he was not yet destined to have his hand cut off, be branded on the shoulder with a red-hot iron, or cast into a dungeon. Yet he felt that he could hardly regard her ministrations as the offering of an olive branch. They had been much too painful for that. On thinking it over he came to the conclusion that she was very far from being a little fool and having decided to keep her humiliation to herself, had realised that she must continue to behave towards him in a normal manner; and, in consequence, had treated him just as she would any other member of the château staff who had been reported to her as in bed as the result of an accident.

Nevertheless, he now began to feel a slight twinge of guilt at his own behaviour, and, as the day wore on, it grew. He did not believe that most girls of sixteen would have been so shattered by a kiss, even if it was their first. He knew that, as she saw things, she had a perfect right to strike him, and he realised now that he had given her real cause for anger by dogging her footsteps, as he had. It had never occurred to him at the time that his actions would be noticed and commented on by the servants, but, of course,
they must have seen him lurking in the corridor outside her boudoir and riding out after her in the afternoons. Naturally they would have talked among themselves, and she had good cause to resent that. In view of the traditional chastity in which young French girls of noble birth were brought up she no doubt regarded his kiss almost in the nature of a rape, and that was far beyond anything that he had intended.

By the following day he had reached the conclusion that she had really acted with extraordinary forbearance in not sobbing out the truth on Madame Marie-Angé’s broad bosom, and, without anyone else knowing the cause of the matter, leaving her duenna to order his locking up until the Marquis could be informed of his crime.

Inspite of its harsh application, the ointment Athénaïs had applied to his cuts both soothed and healed them rapidly; so, on the third morning after his whipping, on looking at himself in the mirror, he decided that he might show his face downstairs without arousing undue comment.

Another night of solitude and reflection had reduced him to a definite state of remorse, for what he now thought of as his churlish brutality, so he determined to seek out Athénaïs and, at the first suitable opportunity, humbly beg her pardon.

His surprise and dismay can, therefore, be imagined when he learnt that she and Madame Marie-Angé had taken coach for Paris on the previous day. According to their plans, as he had understood them, they had not been due to leave Bécherel for the capital for another fortnight; so it seemed that Athénaïs, unable to bear the thought of being reminded of the shame he had put upon her, by seeing him about the place, had devised some way of manoeuvring Madame Marie-Ange into advancing the date of their departure.

Only too clearly he recalled the contents of the note that Athénaïs had pressed into his hand the previous April. It had said that she would not be seeing him again, as next winter, instead of returning to Rennes she was to be presented at Court. And, as he now realised, once she was established there, the chances of her returning to Bécherel for the following summer were extremely slender. Not only had he lost her but she had left before he had had a chance to beg her pardon for his outrageous conduct, and must
have carried away with her a bitter, angry memory of him in her heart.

After a few days of acute depression he flung himself into his work again with renewed energy, in an attempt to make up for lost time and keep himself from brooding over her; and soon the mass of old documents were occupying most of his thoughts. As he delved deeper into them the problem of the rightful ownership of the
Domaine de St. Hilaire
began to take on a deep fascination for him. In a few weeks he became a positive mine of information on the genealogical trees of half the great families in western France. Each time he unearthed a new link in the chain he felt a thrill of excitement, and each time he came upon a settlement or will that blocked the claim he was endeavouring to establish he felt as though he had lost a battle.

Now and again the tall, black-bearded Chenou came upstairs to invade his workroom and insist that it was high time he got some exercise. Sometimes they rode together, at others when the weather was inclement, as the ex-Dragoon was a fine swordsman, they practised their skill with rapier and sabre in the tennis court adjacent to the stables. Monsieur St. Paul had taught Roger some useful thrusts in his academy at Rennes, the previous winter, but Chenou taught him more; and now that the strength of a well-set-up young man was added to his agility he was rapidly becoming a really dangerous antagonist.

Occasionally on their rides they halted to take a glass of wine with Monsieur Lautrade, the Marquis’s bailiff who lived in a little house in a clearing of the woods some distance from the château. Lautrade was a fat, elderly, bespectacled man, kind by disposition but firm by habit, as he had to be in order to extract his master’s rents at the dates they were due from the ever-complaining farmers.

On one such visit Roger asked him if the case of the peasants was really so hard as it appeared, and he replied:

‘Monsieur Breuc, it varies greatly in different parts of the kingdom. Here in Brittany, in Languedoc and in the German provinces, things are not too bad, because the nobility have managed to retain something of their independence. That makes for good conditions on some estates and bad ones on others; but at least it is better than the rule that maintains in the greater part of France. There, the Intendants wield almost absolute power, and the thousands of
petty government servants who work under them is each a little tyrant, producing nothing and living like a parasite on the labour of people who are hard put to it to support themselves.

‘Again different systems of tenure have grown up in various areas. In Picardy, Flanders and other provinces of the north, the nobles and clergy are accustomed to let their land in large farms. That is a good thing; such farms are the best cultivated, the farmers become men of substance and their hired labourers are paid a wage which often enables them to save enough to buy a small plot of land of their own. The peasant is always hungry for land, of course. But I am not of the opinion that its possession profits him.’

‘Why do you say that, Monsieur?’ asked Roger. ‘I should have thought it a good thing for a man to have a piece of land of his own.’

‘Experience does not go to show that as far as smallholders are concerned. ’Tis estimated that two-fifths of the kingdom consists of little plots owned by the peasants and ’tis they, not the hired labourer, whose condition is most wretched. Apart from the north all France is honeycombed with these smallholdings which have been acquired piecemeal from the nobles, either on outright payments or on the
métayer
system.’

‘What is that, Monsieur?’

‘A
métayer
is one who acquires the right to cultivate a piece of land in return for a share of its produce. The system is always unsatisfactory, as the cultivator is naturally tempted to conceal the true bulk of his crops and the landlord, rightly or wrongly, always believes that he is being cheated,’

‘Even so,’ remarked Roger, ‘if the peasants have succeeded in buying nearly half the land in France it does not seem that their condition can be so deplorable.’

Monsieur Lautrade nodded. ‘They would be no worse situated than the peasantry of other countries were they left to go about their work as they wished, and allowed to dispose of their produce as they thought fit. ’Tis the
corvée
and the
droits de seigneur
which deprive them of any hope of prosperity and fill them with discontent. By the
corvée
they may at any time, perhaps at such important seasons as the sowing or the harvest, be taken from their land for enforced labour on the roads, bridges and other government
construction. And in many places the
droits de seigneur
are extremely oppressive.’

‘Do they vary then? I thought the
droit de seigneur
was the right of a noble to send for any girl living in one of the villages on his estate, on the night of her marriage, and have her sleep with him whether she was willing or no.’

‘’Tis one of the
droits
,’ agreed the bailiff, with a smile. ‘And ’twas exercised, no doubt, in the middle ages. But can you see a fastidious gentleman like Monseigneur taking one of our uncultured village wenches into his bed?’

‘I know one or two that I would not mind taking into mine,’ Chenou grinned.

‘You do so, anyhow, you handsome rogue,’ laughed Lautrade. ‘’Tis said that not one of them is safe from you, and that they fall willing enough victims to your fine black moustachios.’

‘Aye! I have my share of fun,’ the chief huntsman acknowledged. ‘But you’re right about Monseigneur, and his kind. They have no stomach for such strong, garlic-flavoured dishes and have long since ceased to exercise their privileges.’

‘I was referring to numerous other
droits
,’ Lautrade went on. ‘There are many and they vary with each manor, but some are common to all. There is the
droit de colombier
, by which the
seigneur
may keep as many pigeons as he chooses, which find their food as much in the peasants’ fields as in his own; the
droit de chasse
, which reserves all game exclusively for the
seigneur’s
amusement. Then there are the
banalités
which oblige the peasant to send his corn to the
seigneur’s
mills, his grapes to the
seigneur’s
winepress, and his flour to the
seigneur’s
oven. For each such operation a fee is exacted and on badly run estates the work is often ill-done or subject to irritating delays against which there is no redress. In addition there are the
péages
, or tolls that the peasant is called on to pay whenever he takes a cartload of produce more than a mile or so from his home. To use every road or cross any river he must pay something either to the Crown, the Church, or to some noble. But you must know this yourself, and that one must also pay to cross each line of customs barriers that separate the provinces from one another. ’Tis this infinity of little outgoings that rob the peasant of his substance.’

‘It sounds a most burdensome catalogue,’ Roger agreed.
‘But surely the
noblesse
could well afford to give some relief from this local taxation?’