When I woke again, it was black still. Night had fallen, and I was so cold. The roan was gone. As it turned out, it would be him that saved me from dying out there. The horse had bolted straight for home, and the stable boy had found him trotting about the yard and had realised I must have fallen. When I hadn’t come home by the afternoon, a search party was sent out. In the darkness I saw their lanterns and I called out. I was shocked at how reedy and thin my voice was, as if the strength had ebbed from me. In its place, there was blind terror. Because, I couldn’t go to them. They would have to come to my voice, they would have to find me. And that was what terrified me. The fact that I couldn’t move.

When they found me, I told them my legs wouldn’t behave and insisted that I was certain they were still sticking up in the air. I don’t remember this at all. I just remember them picking me up, and at that moment realising that it was not just the cold that had made me numb. I literally could not feel anything at all from the waist down.

They threw me over the back of one of the huntsmen’s horses to get me home. What else could they do? I couldn’t sit up. I couldn’t ride. I lay there, spread across with my limbs dangling, just as the dead stag had done a few days before. I came into the yard like this and my papa tore those grooms to shreds for treating me as if I were a sack of potatoes to be flung about. Gently, he lifted me down and carried me to the grand upstairs room with the windows that looked out over the courtyard. Then he ordered a bed warmer to be prepared even though it was summer and there were no hot coals in the fireplace to use for such things. He barked at the grooms to ride out and fetch the doctor to come and examine me, threatening Madame Gris with the guillotine if she didn’t hurry herself to bring me soup and warm bread to fill my stomach.

The doctor arrived in the depth of the night. He examined me. Asked me if I could feel my arms and hands – I could. And my legs? I could not.

He pressed my toes, massaged my calves, and then, using a needle that he produced from his black bag, he pricked the tip into my toes one by one.