Free Miramont's Ghost by Elizabeth Hall

years old, and he and his father were hunting with Seigneur Teyssier, on the Teyssier estate several miles down the road. A storm had come up, just like the one before him now, and each of the hunters had taken shelter wherever they could. The comte had found a rock overhang, along the side of the hill, and had stood underneath, watching as the water poured down around him.
    Marguerite was with her governess. The two of them had been caught in the rainstorm, out riding horses, and had also taken shelter. As soon as the rain had started to let up, they had galloped past him. Both were sodden. But even soaking wet, even in that gray day, he had seen the reddish glints in her hair. She was wearing a cloak of cobalt blue, and the color had popped out against the gray of the day and the copper of her hair. She turned to look at him, as if she knew he would be standing there under the rock, sheltering from the rain. The look that passed between them went straight to his heart. It was as if she already knew him, had expected him to be waiting there.
    He mentioned her to his father a few days later—the girl with the reddish hair. His father seemed unaware of the girl’s existence, but as he thought back, he realized that there had been a young daughter mentioned years ago, at the Teyssier household. She had never been allowed out in public, had never even, as far as he knew, been allowed to sit at dinners held for guests at their estate. It was as if she had disappeared from consciousness within a few years of her birth.
    Seigneur Teyssier had seemed stunned when Matthieu and his father approached him about a possible union. Matthieu never thought to question it, never thought to wonder why the girl had been hidden away for most of her life. He ignored the warnings from his own father, who insisted there must be something terribly wrong or they would not have kept the girl from society. He had begged his son to reconsider, but Matthieu had thrown caution to the winds. There was something about that young woman in the blue cloak, something about the way her eyes met his, something about that look of knowing, that had arrested Matthieu, had turned him into a captive even before they had actually met. When they met a few weeks later, at a dinner arranged by Matthieu’s family, he was even more entranced. She was quiet, reticent to speak, especially in front of her family, but when she did, she displayed a keen intellect. Matthieu could see that nothing escaped her notice.
    Later, when Matthieu and Marguerite had been married a few months, Matthieu had learned why she had been hidden away, why Seigneur Teyssier had done his best to keep her out of the public eye. Her visions, her stories, just like Adrienne’s, had been cause for alarm, and her father had made sure that none of that talk would leak out to the surrounding countryside. As Marguerite learned to trust her husband, she began to talk about the things she saw. She told him that their first child would be a dark-haired daughter. She warned him to stay away from Paris one fall, and they learned weeks later that there had been a riot with several people killed. They agreed to keep her visions to themselves, and they had done their best to guard her secret.
    For the most part, they succeeded. There were occasions, relatively few, when the comtesse would drift off, and come back with some startling new story that somehow managed to leak out. She told him about the family in Clermont who was forced to leave the country, forced to leave their possessions, because the father had argued with the village priest. She asked him to send their cook, Edith, home to Nice, knowing that the woman’s mother was on her deathbed and would not live another month. There were times when servants overheard, even the rare occasion when a servant would come to her, asking for help. Edith was one of those. She had been dreaming about her mother, had come to Marguerite and asked if Marguerite could