Mathilde hurled her dress to the floor at the foot of the bed.
‘What’s all this now, young miss?’ bleated Adeline, rushing to pick up the discarded garment.
‘Out, you fool! Out of my room at once! That oafish girl will be the death of me!’
Adeline did not wait to be asked twice, fleeing the chamber of her young mistress whose tantrums she knew from experience to be fearful. Mathilde had already slapped her on several occasions, and without the slightest compunction had one day thrown a hairbrush in her face.
Mathilde was seething. She felt she could burst into tears at any moment. Rags were what she was forced to wear. What good was it everybody thinking her pretty if she was made ugly by shapeless tatters? She couldn’t even bring herself to wear the beautiful hair comb her dear Uncle Eudes had given her, it would have clashed so horribly with the few unfashionable shoddy garments she possessed. Her sweet uncle … at least he treated her like a young lady.
All that filth, the insufferable smells, the dirty uncouth farm hands she was forced to mix with … Life at the manor was an ordeal. Only that beggar, the conceited Clément, could endure it. What a half-breed he was. And he had the impudence to stick his nose in the air when she gave him orders, as if he only received them from the Dame de Souarcy, her mother.
Madame – her mother. How did Agnès de Souarcy put up with this life? What a disgrace to have to watch her go and collect honey dressed as a man, worse still, as a serf. How degrading to be reduced to counting newborn piglets like a common peasant. True ladies did not deign to perform such tasks. Her mother’s hands would soon be as rough as those of a farm hand!
Why had her mother not accepted Baron de Larnay’s generous offer of going to live at his chateau? The two of them would have enjoyed a life befitting their position. Her Uncle Eudes gave myriad parties where beautiful ladies and gallant knights mingled. He even hired troubadours to delight his guests during meals made up of delicacies and exotic dishes. There was dancing and merriment to the music of chifonies,29 chevrettes30 and citoles,31 and the subject of love was discussed openly, though chivalrously.
No, Agnès de Souarcy had flatly refused, thus depriving her daughter of the happiness that was her birthright.
The young girl was filled with bitterness. Thanks to her mother, she would never wear magnificent furs and sumptuous robes. Thanks to her obstinacy, that life of sophistication would forever remain a mystery. Thanks again to her stupid resolve, her daughter Mathilde would no doubt also be deprived of the kind of marriage to which she aspired.
Her eyes became moist with tears and she trembled at the thought of the future that awaited her in that miserable pigsty, Souarcy. A peasant’s life spent rummaging in the soil with her bare hands for food, and dressing like a beggar to go and collect honey! What misery! She did not deserve such a fate. She hurled herself onto the bed in despair. The life she had been forced to put up with for years was a dishonour. Just because the mother was prepared to wither and die because of some inexplicable pride, it did not mean the daughter had to share the same fate.
Her sorrow gave way to rage.
Mathilde was born within the sanctity of marriage, and of noble blood – the Larnays’ on her grandfather Robert’s side and the Souarcys’ on her father’s.
She did not intend to fade away within Souarcy’s damp, grey walls. She refused to count pigeons’ eggs as if her life depended upon it. She would not stoop to bartering cords of wood for a few yards of linen. Never. Not like her mother.
As for Clément, Mathilde couldn’t care less what became of him. He could die with his good lady if he wished. She had had enough of his superiority all these years!