The Red Necklace Read Free

wanted to impress the count. Nothing had been spared to make the celebration a success. Only the finest ingredients were to be used for the banquet. The country might well be starving, but here in his kitchens there was food enough to waste.
    He had even gone to the trouble of having his daughter brought home from her convent to satisfy a whim of the count’s, who had asked to see her. Why, he could not imagine. He thought little of his only child, and might well have forgotten all about her if it hadn’t been for Kalliovski’s request. For the marquis considered Sido to be a mark of imperfection upon his otherwise perfect existence.
    The marquis’s splendid new château stood testament to his secretive nature and his sophisticated taste. Each of its many salons was different. Some were painted with scenes of the Elysian Fields, where nymphs picnicked with the gods. In others, there were gilded rococo mirrors that reflected the many crystal chandeliers. On the first floor all the salons opened up into one another through double doors with marble columns. The effect was a giddy vista of rooms, each one more opulent than the last, and each complemented by sumptuous arrangements of flowers, their colors matching the decoration, all grown in the marquis’s hothouses. It might be winter outside, but here the marquis could create spring with narcissi, mimosa, tulips, and lilacs, lit by a thousand candles.
    But behind the grand façade of smokescreens and mirrors lay what no eye saw, the narrow, dark, poky corridors that formed the unseen and unsightly varicose veins of the house. They were for the servants’ use only. The marquis liked to fancy that an invisible hand served him. And so his army of footmen and maids performed their tasks quietly in felted slippers, like mice behind the skirting boards.
    On the day of the party, the Mother Superior told Sido that she was wanted at her father’s new château near Paris.
    It had been two years since she had last seen him, and for a moment she wondered if he had been taken ill. Her memory of her father was of a cold, unloving man who had little time for his daughter. Sido had grown into a shy, awkward-looking girl who walked with a limp, an unforgivable impediment that reflected badly on the great name of Villeduval. She had lost her mother when she was only three, and for most of her twelve years she had been brought up away from her father at the convent. The marquis had handed her over to the Mother Superior at the tender age of five, with instructions to teach the girl to be less clumsy and to walk without limping, if such a thing were possible.
    Her surprise at finding that she was going to the château just for a supper party filled her with excitement and trepidation. As the coach drove away, and the convent doors closed behind her, she hoped passionately that she would never have to see the place again, that this might be the start of a new life where her father would love her at last.
    Sido’s happiness soon vanished as the coach made its way along the country roads. Peering out of the frosty carriage window, she could hardly recognize the landscape they were driving through. In the thin, blue, watery light, figures seemed to rise out of the snow like ghosts, given shape only by the rags they were wearing. They trudged silently along the side of the road with grim determination. Faces stared at her, registering no hope, all resigned to their fate. Old men, young men, women carrying babies, grandmothers, small weary children, all were ill-equipped for the bitter winter weather as they slowly and painfully made their way toward Paris.
    Sido stared at this terrible vision. She knocked on the roof of the carriage, her words sounding hollow and useless. “We should stop and help,” she called to Bernard, her father’s coachman.
    The coach kept on moving.
    “Please,” Sido called again. “We must help them.”
    “The whole of France needs help,” came the answer. “If