All the while she was growing up, each morning before daybreak, Marianne would awake to fetch eggs from the henhouse. She moved swiftly as she bent to reach under the hens, all of which complained when they were disturbed. The eggs were brown and blue and spotted, warm to the touch. She then helped with the bees, dressing in white with a net over her head. Sometimes she dreamed of the hum of their buzzing when they surrounded her on summer days, their feet dusted with pollen so that they left traces of yellow and green on her shoulders and arms.

Her mother had died when she was very young, and Marianne’s father depended on her. By the time she was seventeen, most other local girls had married, and the boys who once teased her fell away; soon they had families, and merely nodded when they saw her, as if they had never begged for a kiss. Every day was like the one before, not bad, merely the same. When she sat outside in the evenings to gaze at the stars pricking the darkness, she was filled with longing. Fate was waiting for her, she just didn’t know where.

Their village was secluded and blizzards of snow fell. Sleds or snowshoes were needed to get anywhere, and for months the snow was too deep for cars; even horses and carts were useless. They were cut off from the rest of the world. It was possible to hear wolves from across the mountains in Italy. In the highlands there were wild mountain goats, called chamois, and little nocturnal animals called genets, which kept their distance from human beings. Occasionally, if one was very lucky, perhaps once in a lifetime, it was possible to spy a lynx. In summer, the forests were so thick a person could disappear into the mossy glens and never be found.

The villages and the farms for miles around were populated by Huguenots, hardworking men and women who were used to the deep silence of the mountains. In their world, churches were plain but forests were holy. Louis XIV had been brutal in forcing the Huguenots to convert or flee, and they were without the rights of citizens until 1789, after the Edict of Toleration was signed. Only a tiny fraction of Huguenots had remained in France and most of those were in the villages nearby. They were French, but they held themselves apart from all others, for they had been treated as outsiders, disrespected and imprisoned and murdered. One didn’t forget such mistreatment; it was in the blood, as much as these mountains were, for these mountains, impassable in winter, had saved their lives.