The Lost Seigneur is a sequel to the award-winning Chateau Laux. It is the story of Jean-Pierre du Laux, a nobleman in southern France, who was wrongly imprisoned during a time of religious intolerance and subsequently endeavors to return to his family. Many years have passed since he saw them, and his long incarceration has broken his health. Any reunion would clearly have been impossible, without the unlikely help of a youthful companion that he meets along the way.
The Lost Seigneur is a sequel to the award-winning Chateau Laux. It is the story of Jean-Pierre du Laux, a nobleman in southern France, who was wrongly imprisoned during a time of religious intolerance and subsequently endeavors to return to his family. Many years have passed since he saw them, and his long incarceration has broken his health. Any reunion would clearly have been impossible, without the unlikely help of a youthful companion that he meets along the way.
The afternoon turned the worn hue of an old silver coin as Magdalena began the daily ritual of closing up the lonely château, which sat on a plot of cultivated land in the new-world colony of Penn’s Woods, not far from the western frontier. First, she checked the bolt on the front door as well as the one that led from the mudroom to her husband’s vineyard. Then she pulled the heavy drapes on the long windows, shutting out the meadow views on one side of the house and the distant line of oak forest on the other. The house was now in deep gloom, and she lit the lamps in the great room, where she intended to sit in front of the unlit fireplace and await the further advance of the coming night.
Before settling down with her book, however, she tidied up the kitchen. The iron skillet needed to be scrubbed and her plate and single setting of silverware washed. Her husband, Lawrence, had installed a drain in the sink—it was one of the little improvements he was always coming up with—and she poured the wastewater away while the dishes air-dried on a tea towel. Then, satisfied that all was in order at last, she retired to her waiting chair.
The château had two stories, and the upper level loomed with a presence that was not quite ominous. In the winters, the upstairs became so frigid that water froze in the glass by the bedside. Now, however, the summer heat gathered like a woolen blanket, making her feel hot and itchy. As a distraction from thinking about the upstairs furnace lying in wait, she usually read until fatigue crept over her with enough force that sleep would beckon. Remus had no problem getting comfortable wherever he happened to be, she thought, her gaze stealing to the mastiff at her feet. Magdalena’s father had given her the dog as a puppy on her wedding day, and now, at three years old, it lay with its jowly head on her foot, reassuring her with its company.
A sudden knock on the door startled her. Remus picked up his head and gave a throaty woof. Setting her book aside, Magdalena rose and made her way to the foyer, the dog padding at her side.
“Who is it?” she called out.
“It’s the post, ma’am—from the stage depot,” a youthful voice piped, and Remus issued a low growl. After the death of his first wife, Catharine, who had been Magdalena’s older sister, Lawrence was loath to leave her alone. But he was in the Pennsylvania assembly now, which met in Philadelphia, a two-day ride away. He had wanted Magdalena to accompany him. But while she was glad to be out of her mother’s house, she couldn’t stand the thought of being too far removed, either, which meant that during her husband’s absences, the post was their only means of keeping in touch.
A young man stood on the threshold, his face glowing in the lamplight. Behind him, where his horse patiently waited, the last silvern vestiges of the waning day had given way to the creeping purples of twilight. The cicadas were particularly loud this year, and the coming night seemed to drive them into a frenzy. Their thundering chorus made it hard even to think.
“Thank you,” Magdalena said, accepting the letter the young postman withdrew from the leather pouch that hung around his neck. The lad beamed when she dropped a couple of coins in his palm, and waved cheerfully as he turned away. After climbing up onto his horse, he waved again, and Remus let out another growl.
“Oh, calm down, you,” Magdalena said, glancing affectionately at her companion as she shut the door and rebolted it. The dog looked up at her, his eyes rolling, and she reached down and scratched behind his ear.
Heading into the kitchen, she placed the letter on the oversized wooden table and lit the lamp that sat on the counter. Visitors to the château were not unwelcome, but they created a disturbance like a draft on the neck—or were she more like Remus, hair rubbed the wrong way. It was an agitation that she didn’t want to take into the great room, where her book waited. So, she placed a kettle on the heating plate of the kitchen hearth and added a couple more sticks of kindling underneath. She assumed the letter was from her husband and felt the tingle of suspense.
Once the water in the kettle had warmed, she poured a mug and added an infuser of tea leaves. She opened the letter with a knife from the block on the counter, then sat down rather ceremoniously at the table.
The letter was written in an unfamiliar longhand. It took time to read. Without thinking, she had placed the kettle back on the heating plate and it started to bubble and spit. Her hand began to shake. She read the letter again and yet a third time before lowering it to the table and staring into space.
#
The following morning, she was already awake when the sun first peeked over the heavily forested ridge to the east. The night had seemed endless, with the thunder of the cicadas and the creaks and moans of the house. With only a bedsheet for cover, because of the heat, she had lain on one side and then the other, then on her back and on her stomach, before turning once again. There were times she feared she wouldn’t be able to sleep at all, and other times when she would awaken and stare up through the cloaking darkness with her eyes wide open. Finally, as the room began to brighten, she was relieved that she could put the long, miserable night behind her.
She was the kind of person who was rarely hungry in the morning. But the day ahead crowded her mind and she forced herself to eat some toast. Remus whined to be fed, wagging his heavy tail and peering up at her. As a self-professed Cathar, Magdalena did not eat meat, but that restriction did not apply to her husband and certainly not to her dog, and she sautéed a portion of venison shoulder just enough to singe it before spooning it into the bowl.
She had no problem finding the horse in the pasture and slipping a halter over its head to lead it to the barn. The grass was heavy with dew and after a few strides, her dress was soaked to the knees. The horse was compliant, and as they walked, it would lower its head and nibble at her in quest of a snack. This Magdalena blamed on her husband, who carried sugar lumps in his pocket. The sugar was from the Caribbean, which seemed a long way to come to end up in the belly of a horse.
Up at the barn, Magdalena curried the animal’s hide with sweeping circular motions, then she fluffed off the dander with a brush. A horse’s mane was forever getting tangled and she combed this as well before hitching the horse up to the wagon. One of her father’s sayings was that if you wanted a friend, a good horse was hard to beat, and while Magdalena didn’t always share every sentiment that he expressed, she loved his sayings nevertheless, for they were so many pieces of the whole that made up the man. Each of his sayings and kind observations were like a brick in one of the new red homes in nearby Watertown, individually of no consequence, perhaps, but in their accumulation something solid and real.
On the way to the farm where Magdalena had grown up, Remus loped ahead, scaring up robins and meadowlarks from the bordering fence line. The road cut through fields of rye and Indian maize, the wild, dark forest giving up here and receding there until it had grown more and more distant.
When they got to the Laux farm, Remus charged forward to greet his littermate, another equally imposing mastiff, and the two of them romped and rolled in the grass in front of the farmhouse. Magdalena parked the wagon at the wire gate next to the yard. Her mother, Beatrice, was in the kitchen, shaving carrot peels into a ceramic bowl on the counter. Beatrice wore a white apron over a gray linen dress with a pattern like the plumage of guinea fowl. She had on the wooden shoes she liked to wear in the kitchen.
“Hello, Mother,” Magdalena said, which sounded a bit formal even to her. But that was the way she felt about her mother. There was a stiffness between them that did not exclude love, but which tended to put a damper on any unprovoked displays of warmth.
“If you’ve come to lend a hand with the peeling, I’m almost done,” Beatrice blustered, and Magdalena smiled. It was a constant tease between them that she tended to show up at the farm just as a task neared completion.
“I hate to disappoint you . . .” she said.
“Then it must be your husband, kicking you out for good, this time.”
Magdalena laughed.
“Mother, we’ve talked about this many times. Just because Lawrence has to spend at least some of his time in Philadelphia doesn’t mean we’re not happily married. It’s an arrangement that suits us both.”
Beatrice gave her head a shake, as if a husband and wife in a celibate marriage were something she simply could not comprehend. She had never made a secret of how she felt toward the Cathar women who had come to the farm when Magdalena was a child and somehow wormed their way into the little girl’s affection. The women said that Magdalena was the image of her grandmother, who had been a Cathar parfaite, and while Beatrice was careful about what she said regarding her husband’s mother, she had never held back when it came to perfect strangers putting their ideas into little Maggy’s head.
“If it’s your father you want, he’ll be in the barn getting the cider press ready,” she relented, scraping her carrot a little harder. “He wants to start appling next week, if your brother Georgie is done with his fever by then. Lord willing, no one else will get sick! One of Georgie’s little ones already has the sniffles,” she added, with an aggrieved sigh.
Magdalena had three older brothers, and Georgie, who had never once wanted to leave the farm and couldn’t be happier living with his parents, shared his old bedroom with his wife, Rachel. Magdalena’s oldest brother, Jean, was an officer in the Royal Navy. His room had gone to Georgie’s son, Georgie Junior, and Magdalena’s second brother, Andrew, owned a house of his own near one of the sawmills he ran, which left his room to Georgie’s daughter, Sofie.
As if on cue, a boy of seven burst through the kitchen, clutching a corncob doll. A younger girl was in hot pursuit, her face beet red. “It’s mine! Gimme it back!” she howled. The both of them bolted out through the kitchen door and Magdalena heard their voices receding into the yard.
“Give it to me!”
“Make me!”
“I see Georgie Junior takes after his father,” Magdalena observed, wryly, referring to Georgie Senior, who as a child, himself, had always been ready to yank on a hair ribbon or pull a frog from his pocket.
Beatrice made an obvious effort not to retort, and Magdalena followed the children out onto the porch. Slipping past the tussling pair and the dogs that growled and wrestled in the yard, she headed out the wire gate and down the gravel path to the barn. She found her father, Pierre, in the cider room, as Beatrice had said, crouched in front of the apple press. Dipping a rag into a bucket of vinegar water, he carefully wiped at the flat surfaces and dabbed into the places that were hard to reach. Having oiled the press this past winter, he just had to remove the dust and then soak the wood so that it swelled and held the apple juice that spilled from the pulp bucket.
“Papa,” she said, affectionately, inhaling the sweet, lingering odor of apple nectar that still perfumed the air from previous years.
Pierre looked up. He dropped the rag into the bucket of vinegar water.
“Daughter,” he said, with a nod, and Magdalena nearly burst into tears. She loved it when he called her that. It reminded her anew that she had a place in his life and in his heart.
Thrusting the letter out, she waited while her father looked down at it. Pierre was a big man, which made the little things he did seem methodical, even such a thing as reading. His eyes seemed to fasten on one word and then move excruciatingly to the next, and Magdalena felt a bead of perspiration work its way past her ear and crawl down her neck. The stifling heat of the loft made her nose burn and her throat grew parched.
Finally, Pierre raised his head. But he was looking somewhere just past her and seemed to have a hard time focusing.
“What do you think?” she asked, at last, with a trembling voice. The letter was from the governor of Antigua, warning that a ship bound for La Florida had blown off course, with a man aboard who claimed to be Pierre’s father. It said the seigneur had a daughter, whom the governor apparently found to be most disagreeable—too cunning for the fairer sex, as he put it—but that he nevertheless was doing everything in his power to expedite their passage to Philadelphia.
Pierre shook his head. Or maybe it just seemed like he moved it, Magdalena couldn’t be sure.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “My parents are both gone. I laid my mother to rest with my own hands and my father disappeared when I was thirteen.”
His shoulders sagged. For a moment, he stared down at the apple press as if struggling to remember what it was for. His knees buckled and he hobbled from the cider room to sit on the bench outside. With his shoulders hunched and the colonial sun on his face, he gazed at the far horizon as if waiting for something to materialize.
Magdalena sat down beside him.
“Papa?” she said, but he seemed not to hear.
“Papa, talk to me,” she pleaded.
But for the first time in her life, she felt alone, even with the man she adored. As father and daughter, they shared a lot in common. But they were born on different continents and came from different worlds. He was born to privilege and she to stories of the loss of it, and sitting so close she could feel the heat of his body, she realized that there was much about him that she still did not know.
The Lost Seigneur is the story of Magdalena Laux as well as her long-lost grandfather Jean-Pierre. Magdalena is living a life overshadowed by grief and uncertainty, while in the past Jean-Pierre struggled with religious persecution and his own loss and uncertainty.
This book was an interesting dive into how a family can persevere throughout turbulent times and the pressure of external forces. I really enjoyed the vastly different settings that contrasted well: a manoir in the French countryside and a small backwoods settlement in Colonial Pennsylvania. Loux did a good job of making the settings come to life. The major locations were well-described with a lot of small details setting them apart and immersing readers in the time and place.
While there isn't much of an immediate struggle or danger in the present timeline, the chapters on the past were by far the most intriguing and what kept me reading. The narrative in the past sets up the family history. The events of the past created the family members in the present day. In the present they are still dealing with the repercussions of the past.
While there was a lot of research put into this book, there were also some areas that I had a problem with as they were anachronistic. The mention of "moonshine" predates the first instance of the word by several decades. The claim that 17th century noblemen were illiterate was also wildly inaccurate and broke my immersion. Peasants were often illiterate at that time, but even they had around 30% literacy rates. Noblemen had to be literate to run their estates and avoid being looked down on by their highly educated peers. It seems at times Loux believed he knew facts so didn't doublecheck them.
Overall, I would recommend this book to people who are interested in history and who would like something which delves into a less commonly addressed time and place. It's not heavy on action or violence, but if you want to dive into a historical setting I would highly recommend it. It's more of a book that explores themes of loss and renewal and characters who have to find themselves after hardship and tragedy. I also recommend it as a great exploration of family ties and how family members can connect to one another despite their differences, and to support one another.