They played music like craftsmen, and made objects like artists. One went to Cremona; learnt; and became known as an amateur lute-builder. Some contributed works of ornithology, some botanized. In their time several had experimented with alchemy, and my father’s grandfather had been fascinated by steam. Physics held no terrors then and the laws of the universe were something a man might deal with pleasantly in a workshop set up behind the stables.
For an undilutedly Catholic family, few had entered the church, and of these most had remained country abbes. The French Revolution was still alive with them as a calamity, and of the Industrial one they were not aware.
I learnt the names of dogs and ducks and horses, and the smells of seasons – of the scent that drifted across the snow from where the sides of boar were smoked, of sweet clouded wine drunk foaming off the press and stands at sunrise immobile by a pond, of the tree that bore tree-hundred weight in plums and the swinging fall of rye before the scythe. I learnt terms of bee-keeping and terms of stag-driving; I learnt of clean straw, oats and clover, of winter honey, walnuts and March wool, of the pig killed at Michaelmas and Easter, and the names baked whole inside a loaf of bread; I learnt of demonstrations held by travelling Mesmerists in the library, of quirks of squires, discomfiture of tutors, and of the ruses employed by peacocks
We were on much less solid ground when it came to the plot, and especially that portion of the plot that had to do with how her parents came to be together. I get it, who wants to think about that, let alone write it up? It’s gross. In any case, a good novel and I’m glad I gambled on it