North and South: The North and South Trilogy Read Online Free

to this land of coastal swamps and back country sand hills because of its physical or commercial attractions. He and Jeanne had fled here from the valley of the Loire, where Charles had been born the fourteenth duke of his line.
    In his twentieth year he had married and begun to assume the management of his family’s vineyards. For a few years the life of the young couple had been idyllic, except perhaps for the troubling fact that Jeanne produced no children. But then the religious faith traditional in their families for several generations had brought their ruin.
    When Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the uneasy truce between French Catholics and Protestants ended. Like all the other fiercely proud Huguenots—for proud, some Frenchmen substituted the word treasonous —Charles de Main and his wife were threatened by the purges that soon ravaged their homeland. Once the terror began, it became a serious offense to attempt to leave the country. Just like hundreds of other Huguenots, however, the de Mains made plans to do exactly that.
    In the village near the great round-towered Château de Main there was a certain lawyer named Emilion who practiced bigotry and thievery behind a pious expression. He knew the profits to be made in England from the sale of the château’s rich reds and tart whites. He coveted the de Main vineyards, and to get them he paid a groom to inform upon his master and mistress.
    Emilion felt the de Mains might try to flee, and before long the groom saw signs of preparations. One word from him to the proper official was all it took. The night the de Mains left, their coach was no more than half a kilometer from the château when the authorities came galloping up behind it.
    Charles put his arm around his frightened wife and whispered words of affection to distract her from thinking of what they would face following their arrest—the inquisition by means of which heretical Protestants were forced to recant. Another Huguenot in the neighborhood, caught while dashing to the coast, had died when the inquisitor’s blade slipped and cut off his testicles.
    The young nobleman and his wife were kept in prison seventeen days. They were questioned with the aid of knives and hot irons. Neither broke; not outwardly, at least, although toward the end Jeanne alternately screamed and wept without stopping.
    They would have died in the dungeon at Chalonnes had it not been for Charles’s uncle in Paris. He was a clever politician who could change his style of worship as effortlessly as he changed satin robes. He knew a few important men whose Catholic principles did not extend to their purses. Bribes were paid; a certain postern was left unlocked. Charles and Jeanne de Main escaped from Nantes in the bilge of a rickety fishing boat that almost capsized in the furious waters of the Channel.
    In London other Huguenot refugees pointed them toward Carolina. The colony’s professed religious tolerance made it a likely haven for those of their faith. Months later, depressed by the heat and the arrogance he found after he crossed the ocean, the young nobleman wondered whether the journey—or life itself—was worth the effort. Charles Town was not necessarily lucky for those named Charles. Or so he thought then.
    He had simplified his last name to Main to demonstrate that he was making a new start in a new land. Soon his pessimism vanished. In Carolina he was free of many of the rules that had constrained him when he bore a title. He took advantage of that.
    He had survived torture—his scarred legs and chest testified to it—and he would survive poverty, too. The greedy little lawyer had stolen his lands and his château, but he would own other land and build another great house. Or his descendants would. Provided Jeanne’s body ever yielded him an heir.
    Poor Jeanne. Today her gray eyes were as clear and lovely as ever. But a narrow white streak running all the way through her yellow hair betrayed her