Under a Stern Reign Read Free

friend. She set her sights on acting, and appeared on calendars and in a few girlie magazines. She danced at a club and on pop videos, but couldn’t get into mainstream acting at all, which was sad because she was beautiful and talented.
    Her friend, meanwhile, added holistic massage to her skills, and they both now live in a rustic hillside chalet near Lausanne, Switzerland. Natalie still writes and sends the odd photo of herself, and has invited me to visit her.
    Her departure from my life blew a hole through me at the time. I decided I still needed to go away, so I picked a destination out of a hat. It happened to be Lisbon, Portugal.
    The city was remarkably beautiful, but the sight of so many tourists, and so many happy couples, only brought home my sense of loneliness. I decided to hire a car and go exploring.
    The guidebook led me to the town of Sintra, up in the hills beside Lisbon. It was a breathtaking area, steeped in history and natural beauty. I headed off on winding roads through rich, verdant forests and rolling hills.
    At one point I was running out of petrol. The area was dotted with quintas, stately homes and farmhouses that had formerly belonged to nobility. Apparently many of them had been converted into hotels and bed and breakfasts run by aristocratic descendants. I drove past a few, the advertising outside and the standardised menus off-putting. Eventually, though, I spotted one rather isolated looking quinta with no big signs by the entrance, so I gave it a try.
    It turned out to be a home and not a hotel. An elderly woman lived there alone. I apologised, my Portuguese lapsing into French. She laughed, chatted with me in an odd French accent and invited me in.
    She turned out to be a very sweet woman, and luckily did not automatically assume that the man at her door was a psychopath or an escaped lunatic. Instead she asked me about myself. She was cooking, and offered me dinner.
    It was a rustic place with a kind of impoverished grandeur. Goats were loosely tethered in the backyard, cats spread themselves on sofas, and a dog lazily licked its private parts on the porch in the evening breeze. She offered me a drink and took a polite interest in my French teaching.
    Paintings lined the hallway, and she took evident pleasure in showing them to me. The first two made me fall silent.
    They were of two very pretty blondes, who looked a little like Natalie. The first had the name Genevieve de Montfort inscribed below; the other was simply called Emelie.
    Next to them was a handsome man of dark appearance with piercing blue eyes. His portrait had a distinctly Byronic quality. He was called Rodolfo de Agora, and he wore some sort of uniform with decorations.
    Beside him was a dark-haired female with captivating eyes and a sensual mouth. She was called Elise de Tranville.
    The old lady informed me that some of them were ancestors of hers, but unfortunately records did not reveal from which of them she was descended. Archives suggested that in their lifetime a number of scandalous rumours were floating around about them.
    While her husband had died and her family moved away, her origins could be traced back to both French and Portuguese nobility, she said proudly. The portraits were painted at around the time of the French Revolution, and the dark-haired gentleman had left them their family name - de Agora.
    This historical theme really got the ball rolling, as I had often planned to write a novel set during the French Revolution. She wanted to help and became excited.
    Two of those painted - Elise and Genevieve - kept journals during that period, she told me. They had not been published, and were still with her family.
    I became curious, partly given the academic value of such journals and partly with a sense of the financial value they might represent. So I asked to see them. But they were no longer with her; her son had taken them to Geneva, where he worked as a financial consultant. He considered them too