Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution Read Online Free

the meadow. They took off after it. Papa and Jean, his groom, plunged into the thicket after the others, and La Rouge continued her pace, unslackened, so I pulled hard at her reins to turn her left, to slow her down just at the thicket’s edge. I was still not far behind Papa when I heard him curse as a low branch swiped his cheek. But following Papa’s groan was another squealing sound in the brush.
    The commotion of the hounds and horses had flushed a boar, who now charged through the thicket with Papa after him. La Rouge heard the sound too, and its shifting unfamiliarity, as if the brush itself were squealing, frightened her. She bolted back toward the meadow, and I reined her in there and had just calmed her down when I heard a shot from the direction in which Papa and Jean had gone. La Rouge whinnied but got no response from the other horses. We rushed through the thicket in their wake; both Rouge and I could sense where the others were. She dashed headlong down a gulley; I was obliged to stand upright in the stirrup, her rump above me, it was so steep. Ahead of us lay a dry streambed, strewn with leaves under a sheer rock face.
    Le Bleu, riderless, stood under the lee of the rock.
    On the ground, amid copper leaves and stones, lay Papa. Le Bleu must have bolted and thrown his master when the boar, cornered in a rocky gulley, turned on its pursuers. Jean had shot his musket, wounding the boar and increasing its desperation, and was now reloading.
    The hounds leaped and barked at the boar; it grunted, lunged at them, hating them, its tusks thrusting in the air and the hounds leaping back.
    Then the boar went after the source of what had caused him pain and, before Jean could fire again, charged through the dogs and gored him in the ankle. Jean dropped the musket on the rocks.
    Jean’s scream, the boar’s fierce grunts, the hound’s howling, and the horse’s whinnies filled the gulley; then the boar paused, the dogs keeping back, and it turned toward my father, a welcome quarry down on its level among the stones. In the seconds that the boar paused to consider its second prey, I pulled as hard as I could at Rouge’s bit, and we reached the bottom of the gorge. As the boar charged my father, I jumped down from my saddle, snatched up the musket, and shot into the nape of its tough neck. The boar lay still among the leaf-littered stones, a few inches from my father’s chest. The hounds were on it in an instant.
    That night at the count’s table we enjoyed boar’s head along with haunch of venison in chestnuts, though I myself did not partake of the boar. Above us hung a tapestry of the hunt: a man in a red-and-blue cloak on a white steed leaping over a log, in the grasses a white hart not far before him, about to disappear into a forest of a hundred shades of green. I always preferred to think he got away, across the meadow strewn with the mille-fleurs , the thousand flowers, into the woods out of which rabbits peek: the hunter still has his crossbow slung across his back. The joy is obviously in the chase. The enormous hearth flames licked massive logs; light and shadows flickered across the oak paneling.
    My father had attended Jean’s wound and said Jean might always walk with a slight limp. Papa himself had a twisted ankle from his fall, and he had his foot up on an embroidered cushion and was in jovial spirits.
    He insisted that I sit at table with the men. The count’s son had retired early; Paul had gone home to spend the evening with my older sister Marguerite and their little daughter, Marie, and the men of the château de Beauregard were toasting me now.
    “To Annette, a huntress the likes of whom haven’t been seen since the days of Diane de Poitiers,” the baron said, which made Papa beam. Diane was his heroine from the days when the kings and queens hunted through these forests.
    “To the huntress!” they cried.
    Everyone laughed and drained their glasses, and with my father glancing proudly over