Prologue
Christmas Day, 1933. Château Gauthier, Alsace
Marie-Claire knew the precise moment she fell in love with Jacques Dolch. They were both fourteen, she slightly older. It had been snowing all night, and a soft thick blanket of white covered the undulating hills around the chateau. She had risen early: the sun had just made its full and glorious appearance above the horizon, flinging a cloak of golden light over the land, and everything was sparkling and pure, as if the world was alive with a silent joyous song, so that she, too, felt sparkling and pure and full of joy. Village rooftops, just visible in a cleft between the hills below, and the meadows and rows of vines that combed the hills, all glistened as if with a million tiny diamonds; and the branches of the bare trees, silhouetted against the brilliant blue sky, were all etched in white; and life was whole and full of splendour. She opened the front door to all this, laughed out loud with glee and stepped forward, into the untouched snow.
She loved the sound of thick, pristine snow crunching beneath her boots. She loved being the first to leave footprints in the virgin whiteness, breaking the deep silence of a winter morning. She welcomed the new day with a little dance of joy, and then she hurried back inside, summoned back by the book the Christkindl had brought her last night. She had spent most of the night reading, and it was pulling her back with the strength of a mighty magnet. It was a delicious love story, just the kind of book to wrap itself around her and sweep her away to a faraway world, a world of ballrooms and beautiful dresses – and, of course, of heroines swept off their feet by charming and handsome swains.
Maman had already lit the poêle en faŃ—ence, or Kachelowa, as they called it here in Alsace, the wood-burning stove that provided heat for the entire ground floor, and the salon was filled with a delicious warmth, the kind of saturating warmth that sank into your being when you came in from a crisply cold day, the kind of cosy warmth that made you want to do nothing more than curl up with a good book. Marie-Claire was the reader in the family, and Maman had delivered gold with this particular book. She couldn’t wait to get back to it.
And so, curled up in the massive armchair just next to the Kachelowa, was where Jacques found her hours later. She had even skipped breakfast, so absorbed had she been in the story.
‘Marie-Claire! You’re wasting the morning away! Come on out – we’re going to have a snow-fight, and we need one more person to even up the teams. It’s boys against girls!’
He made to grab her book, but she pulled it away just in time.
‘Oh, Jacques, no! Go away! You really are a nuisance!’
Jacques was not a reader, so he could never understand. Nobody understood. In her family, they were all energetic, outdoorsy people, and nobody knew the magic of a good book. The nearest anyone came to understanding was Juliette, Jacques’ sister, who also read, but a different kind of book: factual books, books about things, not people. And there was still hope for Victoire, her little sister and the youngest in the family, who was slowly learning; Marie-Claire had given her a novel suitable for seven-year-olds last night, and she had seemed genuinely pleased.
Jacques and Juliette Dolch were not only their best friends and nearest neighbours: their mother had died at Juliette’s birth, and their own maman had played the mother role all their lives. Thus, they were like siblings to the four Gauthier children, and, as always, had celebrated Christmas with them last night. Their father, Maxence Dolch, was a good friend of their mother, as well as her winemaker, and the six children were in and out of each other’s homes. She had never thought of Jacques as anything but a brother, along with her own two brothers, Leon and Lucien. A quite annoying brother at that. Like now. He would not take no for an answer.
‘Come on, don’t be a boring spoilsport!’ He grabbed at the book again, and this time he was able to pull it from her hands and slam it shut, and hold it above his head, high up, so that she, considerably shorter than him, could not reach it, no matter how she jumped and tried to grab it back.
‘Now you’ve gone and lost my page! Jacques Dolch, I hate you!’
‘No you don’t. You know it’ll be fun once you get out. The book won’t run away, Marie-Claire. Come on! It’s beautiful outside. Look, here’s your book. Sorry I lost your page.’
He handed it back to her. She took it, and leafed through it looking for the place she’d left off and, finding it, settled back into her comfy chair.
‘You’re really going to spend all morning there?’
‘Yes, of course, and what’s it to you?’
Jacques shrugged. ‘I just thought you might enjoy being with us, that’s all. But if you’re quite sure…’
‘Yes, I am, thank you very much.’
She drew up her legs and, curled into a ball, began to read again, ignoring Jacques, who shrugged, turned and walked towards the door.
Marie-Claire read a few more paragraphs but discovered that she couldn’t get back into the flow of events. Jacques had made her lose not only her place in the book but her place in the story. She was out of it, and couldn’t get back in.
In the end she gave up. She placed the piece of red silk ribbon that served as a bookmark between the pages, closed the book, stood up and stretched. She might as well go outside now.
The snow-fight on the meadow in front of the chateau was in full swing, all the children laughing as they zigzagged around the field, pitching hastily formed lumps of packed snow at each other. Marie-Claire bent down, picked up a lump of snow in her mittened hands, packed it into a ball and charged at Jacques, who had to be punished for the unforgivable crime of pulling her out of her book. Her missile hit him smack in the face; he laughed out loud and soon it was a one-on-one battle between the two of them.
And then it was just as Jacques had said, girls against boys, for Leon and Lucien came to Jacques’ rescue, and Juliette and Victoire rushed in to defend Marie-Claire, and the clamour of laughter and screams was enough to bring the grown-ups – Maman, and Tante Sophie, outside, to stand before the chateau’s door and laugh with the children, egging on the girls, who seemed so frightfully disadvantaged by the sheer size and strength of the boys.
And then, disaster. Marie-Claire, twisting around to avoid a particularly large snowball fired by Jacques, fell and, when she struggled to get back on her feet, cried out in pain. Maman, though wearing only slippers on her feet, rushed forward to help.
‘I can’t, Maman, I can’t walk!’ whimpered Marie-Claire as Maman tried to help her to her feet. ‘I think it’s broken!’
‘Nonsense! It’s probably just a sprain. Nothing a bit of rest and an ice pack won’t heal. Come on, arm around my shoulder. You can limp back.’
Standing now on one leg, Marie-Claire gave a little hop, one arm around Maman’s neck, but lost her balance and fell again.
‘Let’s make this easy,’ said Jacques.
He bent over and scooped Marie-Claire into his arms as if she were a child of three rather than a quite solid fourteen-year-old. Holding her aloft, he marched across the field to the front door. ‘I’m not too heavy?’ Marie-Claire asked.
‘You’re light as a feather!’ Jacques replied, and grinned down at her.
He had lost his cap during the fight and a lock of dark hair hung forward over his eyes, and his grin was cheeky and his eyes sparkled in a way she had never noticed before; and being carried like this, by a boy as handsome and, yes, as charming, as Jacques – well, it was something very special indeed, a pivotal moment in her life. Only this morning, in the very book she was reading, something like this had happened to the heroine, a girl not much older than she herself, and even with a name, Marianne, similar to her own. And the girl had fallen head over heels in love, and it was the most delightful and moving scene in the book up to now.