Michel and Angele [A Ladder of Swords] — Complete — John Shaqi
Michel and Angele [A Ladder of Swords] — CompleteParker, Gilbert
History
Michel and Angele [A Ladder of Swords] — Complete
Parker, Gilbert
Great Britain -- History -- Elizabeth, 1558-1603 -- Fiction; Huguenots -- Fiction; Jersey (Channel Islands) -- Fiction
Meanwhile Angele had gone through many phases of alternate hope and
despair. She knew that Montgomery the Camisard was dead, and a rumour,
carried by refugees, reached her that De la Foret had been with him to
the end. To this was presently added the word that De la Foret had been
beheaded. But one day she learned that the Comtesse de Montgomery
was sheltered by the Governor, Sir Hugh Pawlett, her kinsman, at Mont
Orgueil Castle. Thither she went in fear from her refuge at Rozel, and
was admitted to the Comtesse. There she learned the joyful truth that De
la Foret had not been slain, and was in hiding on the coast of Normandy.
The long waiting was a sore trial, yet laughter was often upon her
lips henceforth. The peasants, the farmers and fishermen of Jersey,
at first--as they have ever been--little inclined towards strangers,
learned at last to look for her in the fields and upon the shore, and
laughed in response, they knew not why, to the quick smiling of
her eyes. She even learned to speak their unmusical but friendly
Norman-Jersey French. There were at least a half-dozen fishermen who,
for her, would have gone at night straight to the Witches’ Rock in St.
Clement’s Bay--and this was bravery unmatched.
It came to be known along the coast that “Ma’m’selle” was waiting for a
lover fleeing from the French coast. This gave her fresh interest in the
eyes of the serfs and sailors and their women folk, who at first were
not inclined towards the Huguenot maiden, partly because she was French,
and partly because she was not a Catholic. But even these, when they saw
that she never talked religiously, that she was fast learning to speak
their own homely patois, and that in the sickness of their children she
was untiring in her kindness, forgave the austerity of the gloomy-browed
old man her father, who spoke to them distantly, or never spoke at all;
and her position was secure. Then, upon the other hand, the gentry of
the manors, seeing the friendship grow between her and the Comtesse de
Montgomery at Mont Orgueil Castle, made courteous advances towards her
father, and towards herself through him.
She could scarce have counted the number of times she climbed the great
hill like a fortress at the lift of the little bay of Rozel, and from
the Nez du Guet scanned the sea for a sail and the sky for fair weather.
When her eyes were not thus busy, they were searching the lee of the
hillside round for yellow lilies, and the valley below for the campion,
the daffodil, and the thousand pretty ferns growing in profusion there.
Every night she looked out to see that her signal fire was lit upon the
Nez du Guet, and she never went to bed without taking one last look over
the sea, in the restless inveterate hope which at once sustained her and
devoured her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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