Under a Stern Reign Read Free Page B

tiny town without our wild afternoon adventures.
    I thought I might also be missing Samantha, or that I was trapped in an immature reluctance to deal with a dull life. Embarrassingly I started flirting more frequently, with Jeanette, with female students, and with a waitress.
    Marianne warned me to take it easy, and then one night as we watched another arty film I drank too much and ended up making love to her.
    It wasn’t so bad. Without her glasses and with a little care she wasn’t unattractive, and a relationship developed between us for the next year. She was a calming and caring influence. I had been neglecting things around the home, and despite her strong feminist leaning, she felt sorry for me and started helping out. I even gave her the keys Samantha had left behind.
    Life went on, and then Marianne began to change. She used contact lenses instead of glasses and wore make-up. She let her hair grow long and had it styled. She’d been going to the gym and there was a distinct femininity about her clothes. It was a complete transformation, and she looked good.
    So it hurt when she announced her plans. She’d decided to resign and take up a post teaching English in Barcelona. I was dumped again, it seemed.
    And then I got a call from Switzerland, from Madame de Agora’s son, Eduardo. It took me a while to remember who he was, and then he asked if I still had the copy of the journals. He had retired and regretted his belligerent dismissal of my approach about writing the book. Since retirement he had become an avid reader, and his literary views had changed. He apologised for having been so judgemental, and asked if I’d still be interested in carrying out the proposal I’d made, to which, somewhat surprised, I agreed.
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    I completed the book not long ago, and noted that something must have been happening to me while I worked. I no longer feel like the same person as when I started. It’s as if I haven’t been sure of whether the stupor in which the characters held me has somehow taken me over, or if I belong more in it than out of it...
    I’ve called Samantha, and I’ve accepted her invitation to stay with her in Amsterdam for a while. I’ve also called Marianne and she’s invited me over to Spain.
    Lastly I got in touch with Natalie, for the first time in eight months. She says she would be delighted if I went over there too. She’s told her artist friend about me, and two weeks ago she sent me another photo. She looks as stunning as ever, and wondered if I remembered the day she came in to use my photocopier.
Chapter One
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    Count Guillaume de Tranville chewed on his lip and tapped his foot. His anticipation was making him restless as he leaned over the wall of one of the two turrets at the front of his home, Chateau Tranville, a small castle and former mediaeval fortress in the Loire Valley that the de Tranvilles had possessed since the inhabitants of the nearest town, Rency, could remember.
    Guillaume de Tranville was waiting to see a familiar coach winding along the country road and heading for the narrow stone bridge at the castle’s entrance. The count was a widower in his early fifties and had dressed more attentively than usual that day. He was a ruddily handsome man of medium height, with cropped iron-grey hair beneath his wig. He also had cloudy, grey-blue eyes that managed to hide not only the traces of grief that were still buried in him since the death of his wife some six years past, but also the knots of anxiety caused by the turn of events that had befallen France.
    The radical upheavals in Paris after the storming of the Bastille in July 1789 had been too distant to disturb de Tranville in his quiet, provincial abode, and he had not felt it necessary to leave the country along with many of his friends that year.
    But the bloody purges that swept through the land from the summer of 1793 now wracked him with worry. He would often