I had been married for a year to a very rich man, the Comte Hervé de Ker—— a Breton aristocrat with whom I was of course not in love. True love in my view can only flourish in conditions where there is a mixture of freedom and constraint. An imposed love, sanctioned by law and blessed by a priest does not really seem the same thing at all. One stolen kiss is worth a thousand of the other kind, don’t you think?

My husband was tall, elegant, every inch a gentleman but a bit short on intelligence. He used to bark out the most ill-considered opinions and it was clear that his mind was full of received ideas handed down to him from his mother and father, who in turn had inherited them from theirs. He never mulled a thing over but came up with an immediate and naturally inadequate response. He was not in the least aware of this limitation or that there might be more than one way of looking at things. His was a closed mind in which nothing much was really going on. There was no ventilation of ideas, no renewal of the spirit. It was like a house all the doors and windows of which are firmly shut.

The manor house in which we ourselves lived was in the back of beyond. It was a great gloomy place surrounded by enormous trees whose trunks were covered with moss and looked like bearded old men. The parkland in which it was set was heavily wooded and itself surrounded by a deep trench or ha-ha.

At the furthest boundary of the property, giving on to moorland, were two small lakes full of reeds and water plants. Between them, at the edge of a small stream, my husband had had constructed a small shelter or blind for duck-shooting.

In addition to the usual servants, we had a watchman, a brute of a fellow totally devoted to my husband for whom he would have happily laid down his life; and, for myself, a personal maid who by this time had become almost a friend and who was equally attached to me. She was a foundling I had brought back from Spain five years previously. With her deep olive skin and her dark eyes she could easily have been taken for a gipsy. She had thick, black hair always a little dishevelled around the forehead, and looked about twenty years of age though in fact she was only sixteen.

It was the beginning of autumn and a great deal of hunting was under way either on our property or that of our neighbours in the area. A young man, the Baron de C—— began calling at the manor rather more often than was normal until his visits quite abruptly stopped. I thought no more about it but noticed that my husband’s attitude towards me was much changed.