She did remember, clearly, that she’d cried for him and called him back, and that he had not turned; he’d walked away from her with quick, determined strides, head bent, until her aunt’s broad skirts had rustled round to block her vision as the carriage wheels had rattled down the road.

She looked towards that same road now and squared her shoulders as her father had, and asked her aunt, “Why do you wish to know what I remember?”

She had never known Aunt Magdalene to search for words, and yet it seemed to Mary that her aunt was doing just that, in the moment’s pause. And then her aunt remarked, “We’ve had a letter from your brother.”

Even less expected. The surprise, this time, stopped Mary in midstep, and made her heedless of the fact that she was standing ankle-deep in snow. She had three brothers. “Which of them?”

Aunt Magdalene said, “Nicolas. Do you remember him at all?”

Her eldest brother. Nicolas. Broad shoulders and a pair of boots. Two hands that tossed her in the air and caught her when she came down laughing. In a voice that hurt her throat a little, Mary answered, “Yes.”

“He has returned to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and now he wishes you should join him.”

Mary tried to take this in. Her mind, resisting the attempt, focused instead on little Frisque, who seemed convinced that there was something of great interest hidden underneath the snow that mounded round the rooted base of one staked vine, and had begun to dig in earnest to discover it. A mouse perhaps, thought Mary, sleeping in its winter burrow with its family.

“When,” she asked, “did he return?” She’d thought he was in Italy.

Aunt Magdalene paused longer this time. Then she said, “Two years ago.”

Mary looked from Frisque to her aunt, well aware her feelings would be plainly written on her face. “Two years? He has been here two years? So close, and yet he has not ever…” She could not continue. She looked sharply down, then up again, and out across the river to the darkly distant forest.

“He has family of his own now,” said her aunt. “A wife and children. And a life at Saint-Germain has never been a certain one financially. Perhaps he wanted to be sure that he was well and settled, before sending for you.”

Mary nodded, saying nothing, thinking hard and blinking harder, while her aunt, who knew her well, allowed her space to turn things over in her mind. They turned so very quickly that she could not get them sorted, or begin to make much sense of them beyond the simple fact that just beyond those trees, the brother whom she had not seen for fifteen years was even now attending to the business of his day. Perhaps, like her, he was outdoors. Perhaps his gaze was even turned in this direction…

“I did not expect,” she said, in that tight voice that hurt her still, “that anyone would ever send for me.” And then, because that made her sound too needy, and she was not altogether sure exactly what she needed, she let her forehead crease into a thoughtful frown. “Am I to have a choice?”

“My dear, you always have a choice.” Her aunt spoke calmly, in a voice that carried strength and reassurance. “Uncle Jacques and I would never send you where you did not wish to go. But Nicolas does seem to want you with him very much. And Saint-Germain,” she said, her own chin lifting in a nod towards the unseen castle past the forest on the far side of the river, “is a world apart from this one. You were too young, I think. You have forgotten how it is to live within a royal court.”

A dim remembrance flickered in the corner of her memory: someone’s hands—her brother’s, maybe—hoisting her up high to see above the heads of others, while a murmur of excitement chased around them like the wind across a summer field. Look, Mary. Look! The king!

The flicker died, and left a darkness in its place.

And Mary said, “There is no court at Saint-Germain. Not anymore.” The king, if he had ever truly been a king, was gone. The queen, his mother, had been dead for years.

“But there are courtiers still,” her aunt remarked. “They will have daughters of your age for you to meet and talk with. And young men with whom to dance.” The smile was coloring Aunt Magdalene’s warm voice now as she took the few steps needed to draw level with the place where Mary stood, an undemanding presence at her side, but giving comfort nonetheless. “Unless,” she said, “you’d rather linger here and battle with Colette to catch the eye of the Chevalier de Vilbray?”

The thought drew Mary from her deeper ones and made her smile, as well. “The chevalier pads his stockings. And his breath is none too pleasant.”

Frisque’s quarry had eluded him. Abandoning his digging, the undaunted spaniel trundled through the snow towards another vine, his plumed tail wagging. He’d never seemed to mind that his entire world was bounded by this property, thought Mary, and for that she’d always envied him. For fifteen years now, she’d been looking daily to that forest and the wider world beyond it, to the smudge of smoke and rooflines that lay further still than Saint-Germain-en-Laye, past the next bend in the bright river: Paris.

Daily she had looked in that direction and had wished and hoped and dreamed, and all the while she had stayed rooted in this village as securely as these rows of tied and fruitless vines that slumbered here and waited for the sun.

We do not always get the things we want, her father’s voice reminded her.

Aunt Magdalene was watching her. “Marie, my darling, you are twenty-one. Your mother, at that age, had met your father, and she would have never done that if she had stayed here.”