The Forgotten Country

by Meriol Trevor

Genres: Historical Romance; Regency Romance

Synopsis

Among Napoleon's lesser known activities was matchmaking. Alix, widow of the Prince of Montpierre and known for her elegance and intelligence, seemed to the Emperor a good match for one of his most successful generals, Laroche. But Alix is loath to marry anyone, her first marriage not having been happy. An unexpected proposal by the Comte de Berthol - a mere acquaintance, but like herself a Luxembourger - seems suddenly more attractive than submission to the Emperor's palns. On reaching the Comte's castle at Falkenberg she finds a more interesting yet more mystifying personality than she had anticipated. The attempted murder of General Laroche begins a chain of events which leads her to discover a depth of emotion she had not known she could possess.

Release date: August 15, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 192

Sample

It was midsummer, not the best time of year for a long carriage journey, and Alix de Montpierre, though she had been born in the country which had once been the duchy of Luxembourg but was now just part of France, was not at all sure she wanted to go there. But at the moment anything was preferable to staying in Paris.

“At any rate, Madame, M. le Comte has sent his own chaise for you,” said her maid, Marguerite, who had been with her so long she was almost more like a relation than a servant.

“It was the least M. de Berthol could do,” said Alix, “after changing all our plans so completely.”

“But it is his mother who has changed them, Madame, by her illness,” said Marguerite. “Otherwise, I am certain he would have married you in Paris, as he intended.”

“But if his mother is well enough for us to be married at his home, why is she not well enough to be left?” objected Alix. “It was no part of our understanding that we should go to Falkenberg, which I remember as quite the most uncomfortable castle in the country. M. de Berthol, after all, is now in the Austrian diplomatic service and told me that we should be living in Vienna or some civilised German city. Why, he said that he could not live in his old home, since he has never accepted the annexation of Luxembourg by France. It is only because we have peace since our Emperor married their Emperor’s daughter that M. de Berthol has been able to visit Paris again. It is not only vexing; it is puzzling.”

Marguerite agreed that it was, and remarked that there was something a little puzzling about M. de Berthol himself. “But perhaps it is only because he is a diplomat,” she said. “They have to hide their thoughts — that is their profession.” And then she patted her mistress’s hand fondly. “Dear Madame, you will look so lovely as an ambassadress! M. le Comte will take you to Vienna, not a doubt of it. He knows he is a fortunate man to have won you, Princess.”

“Oh, I am aware that he thinks I shall be an ornament to his profession,” said Alix, with a smile.

She did not smile often, especially in the last year, since her friend Madame Dulac had died and things had become so difficult, but when she did it softened the contours of her proudly beautiful face.

Alix de Montpierre would be twenty-eight later in this year of 1810 but she looked more beautiful now than she had eleven years ago when she had been married to the Prince de Montpierre, then an émigré in England. She was tall and slender; her beauty was of a form and bone which looked finer now than in adolescence. She had a clear pale skin, black hair which she wore high in a classic knot, and her eyes were startlingly green. With her friend, Corinne Dulac, she had for some years been the centre of a circle of savants and artists, and she was reputed in Paris to be both clever and cold; she had been credited with several lovers but was so discreet and independent that no man ruled her.

The Prince, many years her senior, had allowed her to cross to France in 1802, during the Peace of Amiens, to see her brother Dominique d’Erlen, who had then recently gone over to Napoleon Bonaparte. The next year, when war broke out with England once more, the Princesse de Montpierre had stayed in Paris. Her brother Dominique fought for France in the continental campaigns of the following years and became a general; her other brother, Gabriel, remained with the Austrian army, and she had not seen him since she was a young girl, taken to England as the armies of the Revolution swept through Luxembourg.

When, unexpectedly, they had started on this journey towards the country that had once been Luxembourg, Marguerite had said, “Well, Madame, at least your brother Comte Dominique will be down there to support you, at his château of Rehoncourt.”

“I do not need his support,” Alix had said, with typical cool detachment. “And I do not know if I should have it, for he used to quarrel with the Berthols when they were boys — though I think more with the elder, who was killed during the invasion, than with Conrad.” And she added, “What is more, they have taken opposite sides in these wars, and I do not know that the peace between the Emperors can make peace between them.”

Napoleon Bonaparte, having conquered the Austrians a second time last year, had finally established himself among the crowned heads of Europe by marrying Marie Louise, daughter of the Austrian Emperor Francis II. Alix despised Bonaparte for divorcing his wife Josephine to do this; she had once admired him greatly but by this time her admiration was tempered by the suspicion that power had gone to his head.

“Since his own marriage, our Emperor has got noble marriages on the brain,” said Marguerite. “Why must he interfere with the lives of everyone else? It is quite indelicate!”

“It is certainly inconvenient,” said Alix.

Napoleon wanted to mix his newly ennobled generals with the old nobility and got his ubiquitous police to send him lists of suitable young ladies; he then ordered what he considered the appropriate marriages. Agitated fathers had been known to marry off their girls to any young man in the house, rather than risk such plebeian contamination.

Alix de Montpierre had never expected to qualify for the imperial matchmaking, but last year the Prince de Montpierre had suddenly died in London leaving her a widow — though as she had not seen him for over seven years she did not draw attention to the fact by going into mourning. The Emperor usually took a great deal of notice of dowries and Alix had little money of her own. In fact, after the death of her friend Corinne, when M. Dulac had simply turned her out of the house and married again, she had been reduced to somewhat straitened circumstances. She could have gone to live with her brother down at Rehoncourt, near the old border of Luxembourg, but she did not choose to do so.

“I am bored in the country,” she told her friends in Paris. “And my sister-in-law is a good little woman, completely absorbed in her family.”

But the Emperor, though interested in dowries, also had an eye for a beautiful woman and decided to reward one of his newly made generals with the Princesse de Montpierre.

It was lucky, Alix thought, that by then she was able to announce to the imperial emissary that she was already betrothed — to Conrad de Berthol, Comte de Falkenberg, who had been born in the same country as herself.

The Emperor did not like his plans to be thwarted and when M. de Berthol was suddenly called to his mother’s deathbed, Alix became alarmed that she would be forced to marry the upstart general after all. Hence it was that when the old Comtesse de Falkenberg failed to die, and her son sent his carriage with a letter asking his betrothed to come and marry him at his home, she did not hesitate long. Just long enough, in fact, for Marguerite to pack her clothes.

Now, sitting in the chaise on this warm June day, she said with sudden impatience, “I wish I need not marry at all! I am perfectly content to live single, if only I should be allowed. What it is to be born a woman and never have a life of one’s own!”

Marguerite, however, did not entirely agree with this.

“M. de Berthol is not quite worthy of you, Madame — who would be? But he has a good position, he is rich, and he is not ill-looking … I think you were right to accept him.”

“He got most of his riches from his wife, I believe,” said Alix.

Conrad de Berthol was a widower; his wife had died in the winter of 1808 and she had died in Paris, for she was French. Alix had known her slightly — a fair, plaintive woman, whose behaviour, in staying in France while her husband was in Austria, Alix had some sympathy with, though she shared no other interests with her. She came of a bourgeois family and enjoyed the kind of gossiping social life Alix had no time for.

“Well, if he married first for money, now he is able to choose beauty,” said Marguerite, with a broad smile.

She was ten years older than her mistress and owing to some youthful troubles during the revolutionary years had, in general, a poor opinion of the motives which swayed men, whether in love or war.

Alix, however, did not smile. “It is hard to know what to do, under the circumstances,” she said seriously. “I wish that M. de Montpierre had lived to an even older age and saved me the trouble of a decision.”

Marguerite had not been with her mistress in England and had never met the Prince de Montpierre, but she knew that Alix d’Erlen had been married to him at the age of sixteen, when he had been nearly fifty, and she had heard gossip from returned émigrés. She had a shrewd suspicion that it had not been a normal marriage, but Alix never spoke of her intimate experiences, as some women did to their maids; if she had confided in her friend Corinne Dulac, Corinne had not communicated her secrets to anyone else.

Madame Dulac’s maid had once wondered at Marguerite’s staying with the Princesse de Montpierre — “such a cold, clever lady as she is, and so proud”.

But Marguerite rather admired Alix’s pride and self-control and she did not find her a difficult mistress. Alix expected good service but she rewarded it well, and she was not inconsiderate. For instance, she frequently told Marguerite to go to bed, if she was going to be late herself, and did not keep her up yawning till all hours to assist in disrobing her, as some did.

Alix stared out of the window of the chaise at the summer landscape, falling into a reverie about this man she had promised to marry, hardly knowing him.

For she could not remember meeting Conrad de Berthol as a child. He was some seven years older than herself and had followed his elder brother into the Austrian army when he was scarcely more than a boy. He had been through the siege of Luxembourg and was only twenty at the end of it, in 1795 — and by that time Alix had been two years in England, living with her brother Gabriel’s first wife, Anne Louise de Gaudray and her stiff old father, the Comte de Rehoncourt, a Frenchman of the ancien régime who had died without making any compromise with modern developments.

Alix had first met Conrad de Berthol a couple of years ago, during the period of peace between Napoleon’s two campaigns against Austria, when he had come back to Paris to see his wife and children. Curiously enough, it was Marcellin Pellotier who had brought him to one of Corinne’s soirees.

Corinne called Pellotier “Alix’s philosopher”. He was one of her oldest friends in Paris and commonly named among her lovers, though the idea made Alix smile. She liked Marcellin, but he was an excitable, temperamental little man, with a nutcracker face, whom she could not imagine anyone loving, though he had a plain bourgeoise of a wife who seemed devoted to him, admired his cleverness and treated him as the eldest of her children. When Marcellin exclaimed to Alix at his wife’s stupidity, she always retorted that he should not grumble, for had she been intelligent, she would never have married a penniless philosopher and made him so comfortable with good soup and flannel waistcoats.

Whereupon Marcellin would throw a theatrical scene, declaring that his life was a tragedy, Alix despised him while he adored her, and so on, till she asked him something about his latest theory and he forgot his imaginary woes of feeling in the joys of his very real gifts of intellect.

Looking back, Alix’s first memory of Conrad de Berthol was of him standing in a window of Corinne’s salon, listening to one of Marcellin Pellotier’s theories and then to her argument with the philosopher — for he had provoked her to argument that day. What about? Oh, music, of course.

“Your mathematics may explain the technique of music, M. Pellotier,” she had said, “but something is left out — what moves us when we listen. Why should sounds affect our emotions? Your theory does not explain that at all.”

Pellotier, who was not really fond of listening to music, could not understand her and argued on, obstinately maintaining his theory.

Alix had become aware of the listener in the window, silent and tall.

“What do you think, M. de Berthol?” she demanded at last.

“I agree with you, Madame,” he replied, with a slight bow.

“Oh, that is very diplomatic, to be sure!” cried Marcellin Pellotier, bouncing in his chair with irritation. “What do you know, Monsieur, of mathematics or music? Politics is your trade.”

“Very true, M. Pellotier,” said Conrad de Berthol, unperturbed. “Music is an art in which I am merely an amateur.”

He came often to Corinne’s evenings while he was in Paris, but hardly ever said anything himself. Then he had suddenly left, the war had begun again, and Alix had forgotten about him, all her attention taken up by her friend’s illness and death, and her own subsequent troubles and removals.

Now there was peace again — except with England — and he had come back a few weeks ago, had found out her apartment and called. Alix, who was living very quietly, had been surprised at his coming, even more surprised to find that he appeared to know everything about her affairs, and surprised above all by his proposal of marriage, which he made at his third call.

She had been speaking of the difficulties of living her accustomed life now that both her friend and her absent husband were dead. “Of course, M. de Montpierre was not a part of my life,” she said, “but his existence gave me a kind of protection and standing. It is extremely annoying that a woman in my position, alone, cannot enjoy society — unless she is very rich.”

“Madame, have you considered the possibility of a second marriage?” asked Conrad de Berthol.

“There is no one I wish to marry,” said Alix.

“I do not believe, however, that there is no one who wishes to marry you,” he said.

Alix had laughed. “No — there are several, but the only one I fear is the unknown the Emperor may choose for me.”

She had already heard a rumour that she was on the Emperor’s list.

“I can understand that,” said Conrad de Berthol.

They were sitting in the tiny salon of her hired apartment, dim even on a summer morning. He got up, walked across to the window, stared down into the street abstractedly and then came slowly back to stand opposite her.

“Madame, I ask you to consider if it might not suit your interests now to marry me.”

Alix was so astonished she simply stared at him.

Conrad de Berthol then gave her a list of the advantages to her if she were to become his wife. She would be saved any further embarrassment from the Emperor’s matchmaking, and she would be able to leave Paris till her disobedience was forgotten. Then, since his mother had lived in the castle of Falkenberg all through the times of trouble, it had never been alienated, and would be theirs eventually. But meanwhile, since he was following a diplomatic career, they would be living in the capital cities of Europe. Then, too, they were both Luxembourgers, their families both ancient and noble.

Alix gazed at him thinking, “But could I marry this man?”

It seemed at first an extraordinary idea, to marry someone she hardly knew. That happened to young girls, of course, had happened to herself, for she had hardly spoken to the Prince de Montpierre before their marriage; but it was not so usual for a woman of her age, used to independence.

“But, Monsieur, what is the advantage to you?” she asked at last.

“Advantage to me?” he repeated, and she saw a smile in the corner of his mouth which made her suspicious of his intentions. “How can you ask that?” he said. “I should gain as my wife the most beautiful and intelligent woman I have ever met.”

“A very smooth answer,” she said, dissatisfied. “I don’t believe any man can appreciate intelligence in a woman.”

“I daresay it is your beauty which is responsible for the evidence on which you base that opinion,” said Conrad de Berthol with composure.

Alix thought over this remark. “He is really intelligent himself,” she concluded, rather against her will.

At least he was not professing everlasting love on the basis of a very few meetings.

“I cannot give you my answer at once,” she said.

“Of course you cannot,” he replied. “But may I call each day while you are making up your mind?”

Alix could see no reason to refuse this request and so had begun what she supposed must be regarded as a courtship, though it was an odd one, for on his visits, which were always in the morning, Conrad de Berthol discussed books and writers, borrowed one of Pellotier’s treatises and lent her some poems in German. Every night Alix decided she could not marry him and every morning she wavered, because it was the first time for months that she had had any stimulating conversation.

It was the Emperor who made up her mind for her. His emissary arrived one morning when she was expecting Conrad, and she was so alarmed when she heard the Emperor’s commands that she said at once that she was engaged to marry the Comte de Falkenberg. Five minutes later, while the emissary was still refusing to believe his ears, Conrad arrived.

As soon as he understood what was going on, he confirmed what Alix had said, politely but definitely.

The court official, not looking forward to his next interview with a thwarted Emperor, began to take a somewhat hectoring tone, suggesting that the Comte de Falkenberg had no business to contemplate marriage with a lady destined by the Emperor for another bridegroom.

Conrad de Berthol let him talk for some time and then quietly remarked, “You seem to forget, M. le Baron, that I am not a subject of the Emperor Napoleon.”

The official had indeed forgotten and tried to bluster out of his mistake. “I am sure Madame la Princesse said your castle is in the Department of Forests.”

“My castle may be temporarily in France,” replied Conrad de Berthol coolly, “but I am a Count of the Holy Roman Empire.”

“Which no longer exists!” sneered the Bonapartist Baron.

“But the Emperor still exists,” said Conrad de Berthol. “And I am in his service. I have a house in Vienna.”

The Baron changed his ground, insisting that the Princess would have to get the Emperor’s permission; she at least owed obedience to Napoleon and should not marry an Austrian subject. Alix, knowing the French Emperor’s liking for arranging other people’s lives, began to feel some alarm.

But Conrad de Berthol remained apparently unmoved. He was a tall, rather heavily built man, and his face seemed designed to express mild incredulity. The folds at the outer corners of his eyes gave them a slight downward slant, and when he was frowning, as now, his eyebrows went up to meet at an apex above his nose. It was a long face, not fat but rather heavy, with folds round a mouth which seemed to shut habitually with the lower lip almost over the upper. The total effect was of someone observing with sceptical detachment the behaviour of another species.

“The Emperor Napoleon, who has just made so successful a marriage with our Archduchess Marie Louise,” he said at last, “will surely not grudge another peaceful alliance between less exalted members of society.”

And somehow, soon afterwards, the Baron left.

Alix began to thank Conrad de Berthol for managing the situation so well.

“That sort of person gets excited too easily,” he said, dryly. “Bu. . .