The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [264]
Only one tangible evidence of that meeting remained. Just before they left, her grandmother had taken the little wooden cross from around her neck and given it to her. ‘This is for you, child,’ she said, ‘to remember your grandmother. My mother gave it to me and it had been in her family for I don’t know how long. Since before the Spanish Armada, they say.’ She had taken her hand. ‘Now if I give you this, will you promise to keep it?’
‘Yes, Grandmother,’ she had said. ‘I promise.’
‘Good. Now give your old grandmother, whom you never saw before, a kiss.’
‘I shall come again, now I know you, and you must come to see us,’ Fanny had said happily.
‘Just you keep that cross,’ the old lady replied.
She had been very surprised by how angry her mother had been when they got out into the street again. ‘Fancy giving a child that dirty old thing,’ she had exclaimed, looking at the little cross with disgust. ‘We’ll throw it away as soon as we get home.’
‘No!’ Fanny had cried, with unexpected passion. ‘It’s mine. My grandmother gave it me. I promised to keep it. I promised.’
She had hidden the cross, so that no one should steal it. A year later her mother had died. As for her grandmother, she supposed she must have died too. There was no more mention of her at Albion House. But she had always kept the cross.
‘And who was your grandmother?’ Gilpin now enquired.
‘My mother was a Miss Totton, as you know,’ Fanny replied. ‘So she must have been old Mrs Totton. I know she was Mr Totton’s second wife. His first, from whom my Totton cousins descend, was a cousin of the Burrards. So I should imagine she was one of those old Lymington families, connected with the sea.’
‘Undoubtedly,’ agreed Gilpin. ‘One of the Buttons, perhaps.’ He nodded. ‘It’s probably in the Lymington parish register, you know, if they married there.’
‘Why yes. I hadn’t thought about it. I suppose it is.’ She smiled. ‘Would you help me look, one day?’
Dusk: the two figures came independently, from opposite directions. No one would have guessed that they would meet at a prearranged place.
Charles Louis Marie, Comte d’Hector, general, aristocrat, as valiant a man as any of the legendary Three Musketeers, took good care to saunter up the High Street as casually as if he were enjoying an evening stroll. His trusted companion came down a back lane in a similar manner.
The Frenchman was an elegant sight. While most men were now wearing their hair naturally, he and his fellow émigrés wore the short powdered wigs of the French royal court. A silk coat and knee-breeches completed his attire, as though to say: ‘We not only deplore the Revolution in our country; we decline even to recognize its existence.’
Whatever one thought of the old royal regime in France, the French Revolution of 1789 had turned into a desperately bloody affair. The initial experiments in republican democracy had given way to the guillotine, for the aristocracy and the royal family, and more recently, in the awful Terror, to the wholesale execution of thousands accused as enemies of the Revolution. Aristocrats and their followers, like the French community at Lymington, had fled if they could. All Europe had watched, horrified. The continental powers had prepared for war. Nobody knew where this turmoil across the sea might lead. Even in quiet Lymington, which seldom took much notice of anything that did not concern it, the French conflict was made real by the presence of the émigrés in their midst.
There were about a dozen gentlemen like the count