The Mistletoe Bride and Other Haunting Tales by Kate Mosse Read Free Book Online

edge of her dress skimmed the frosted ground. Claire sensed, rather than saw, she was smiling.
    ‘At last,’ the woman murmured as she stretched out a thin, white hand. ‘ A la perfin .’
    Claire took it. Together, they stepped out into the sky.
    As they fell, the woman’s hood fell back from her face. Claire smiled at the sight of familiar features looking back at her. Was it her ancestor, long dead or, rather, her old self, eyes bright and singing with hope, the person she had been before grief took the life from her?
    Claire was home. No more past or future now, only an everlasting present.
    The hire car was found a few days later, half buried in the snow. No one understood how she’d managed to reach the village in the first place. The blizzard had been one of the most sudden and the worst in living memory, shutting all roads in and out of the village from late on the evening of 15th March until early on the 19th.
    Claire’s body was never found, though they searched for weeks. After all, she had no further need of it.
    Her diary, however, was discovered beneath a table in a local restaurant, lying open on the page for Friday 16th March. Since the owner and his wife had been away all winter, no one could explain how it came to be there. Not a suicide note, but the signs were all there. The unexplained death of her baby son in his cot: the not-knowing-why and the loss. The guilt. It was a grief that would never leave her, a loneliness that would never let go.
    There were only two words written on the page – M ONS S ALVATIONIS – but the date was ringed in red.

Author’s Note

    In 1989, we bought a tiny house in the shadow of the medieval city walls of Carcassonne in the south-west of France, a region known as the Languedoc. The area is the inspiration for my trilogy of novels – Labyrinth , Sepulchre and Citadel – as well as various stories and essays.
    This is one of the earliest stories I published. Written during 2003, the inspiration was my first visit to Montségur in the Pyrenees in the 1990s. My husband, two-year-old daughter and I left Carcassonne in a blaze of spring sunshine, yet found ourselves in the mountains in the grip of a blizzard.
    We found a seemingly deserted restaurant, though there was a burning fire and food laid out on tables. In real life, of course, the owner had popped out and came back soon enough, but for some time we were the only people there.
    In a story, things are different . . .
    The title comes from the practice of illuminating manucripts where significant or important days are picked out in red, known as rubrics. The first Council of Nicaea in 325 CE decreed which were to be Saints’ Days, Feasts and other Holy Days, which came to be printed on medieval church calendars in red. The term – a ‘red letter day’ – came into wider usage with the publication of the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549, in which the calendar showed special holy days illustrated in red ink.
    The story was first published in an anthology called Little Black Dress edited by Susie Maguire.

THE DROWNED VILLAGE

    The Quibéron Peninsula, Brittany
November 1912

The Drowned Village

The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices
    from ‘The Dry Salvages’, Four Quartets
T. S. ELIOT
    It was mid-November. Autumn was already stripping the trees, though winter had not taken a grip on the land. Farms and market gardens were still laden with fruit and vegetables. The seas were calm enough for even the most careful fisherman to put out on the tide.
    In school it was the week allotted for the award of scholarships. Only once or twice in living memory had a child from the Three Villages gained a bursary to go and study at the secondary school in the city nearly twenty miles away.
    Gaston made his way to the front of the hall. The teachers lined each wall, all eyes upon him, as he climbed the three steps onto the stage. Choked by nerves, he could barely raise his head.
    The headteacher spoke.