My guest today on What Cathy Read Next is Leona Francombe whose novel The Heron Legacy will be published on 25th June 2024. Described as ‘a novel of modern suspense through which history roams freely, its breath still warm’, I’m delighted to be able to bring you an extract from the book which is currently available to request from BookSirens.
About the Book
Sometimes you can actually feel history breathing… even after nine centuries.
Charles Fontaine returns to Europe to sell his family’s ancestral domain and finds that a twelfth-century legend still haunts the property.
Clues lead him to a parchment relating the curious tale of a village seeress, whose music enchanted a nobleman with shadowy ties to the present-day Fontaine family.
The deeper Charles delves into the mystery, the closer he comes to his own buried past.
Find The Heron Legacy on Goodreads
Extract from The Heron Legacy by Leona Francombe
The Pond
I
Forest… At night it whispered to him from the frontiers of sleep where even dreams feared to go, and he would follow it there, to the places he’d known. On waking, a spicy note of pine sometimes lingered on his cheek, and as he strode to work on the hard pavement of New York City as he used to stride through the trees, it seemed he could feel soft, damp earth underfoot.
When everyone had left the office for the day and the great city glittered into splendor outside his window, he would take the few mementos of his boyhood from their drawer: a Roman coin and three pottery shards; a small rolled-up banner with the family coat of arms; a quartz crystal. He’d study these treasures as if for the first time, close his eyes and sigh, for at that moment the forest wrapped its silence around him like river mist. In those weightless arms he could drift far from the alien world that had eaten at his soul for so long, and he could whisper truthfully, for indeed it seemed so real: I am home!
Charles Fontaine possessed a host of memory-ways for slipping into his past. His uncle’s domain in the Belgian Ardennes was full of them: the steep forests where oak and yew had witnessed centuries of passages and knew Charles’s especially well; the alley of beeches leading to the pond where the herons fished (he could walk that path in a blindfold).
And Villa Antioch, of course.
His grandfather had constructed the fading, turreted retreat in the early 1900s in a particularly remote part of the forest and it still had no neighbors. From the terrace you could look out across an unkempt meadow to the river, and beyond, to the ruins of Blancheron Castle, perched on their lonely ridge.
And then there was the river itself: that moody, unreliable Semois. The tight serpentine wound through sudden fogs and dizzying escarpments and folded epochs between its coils. History grew deep roots here. Its breath was still warm.
A stone bridge spanned the river near Villa Antioch, built by the Romans during their occupation of Gaul. According to the villa’s current tenant, Charles’s uncle, Theodore, a horseman occasionally rode across the bridge at dusk. “It’s your ancestor, lad, Stephen de la Fontaine!” he liked to tell his wide-eyed nephew of an evening, when vapors blurred the ancient arches.
“Depending on the weather, of course,” he twinkled. “And how much Merlot you’ve had at supper.”
Strangely, memory always seemed to guide Charles to a single boyhood afternoon. How was it, he wondered, that seventeen years had not diminished its brightness?
II
Nothing is as ancient as the forest, Charles. Except stones, of course. Not even time is as old as stones.
It was the last summer he would spend in the Ardennes before moving with his father to America. He’d been Charles de la Fontaine back then, a diffident, searching sixteen-year-old from Brussels, and the words had been those of his beloved uncle, Theodore de la Fontaine, professor of history at the lycée in Bouillon and local eccentric. Theodore had been wandering the Ardennesn and clambering about its medieval vestiges since his own boyhood and knew a thing or two about ancientness.
“Uncle, wait!”
They’d crossed the stone bridge and started up the ridge via a near-vertical path. Autumn had already tainted the summer with morning brume and cold rains. The footing was slick.
“Do you feel it, lad?” Theodore called over his shoulder. “The twelfth century, breathing on your neck?” His voice was uncharacteristically somber. They both knew this would be their last scramble up to the Blancheron ruins for a long time.
“Of course I feel it,” Charles muttered, lagging behind. He always felt the past on his neck in his uncle’s company.
“You’d better remember it, then,” Theodore said. “You won’t find anything like it in America.” The battered leather satchel he carried on forest expeditions swung out from his shoulder and narrowly missed his nephew.
Charles peered up the steep, wooded ridge: a perfect natural defense of rock and trunk. No wonder his ancestor had chosen the spot for his castle. Trees took root in fissures and grew with ghastly deformities, and the rocks themselves, raw sculptures of schist and shale, seemed to have been tossed about by a sullen spirit. Maugis, perhaps: the enchanter of Ardennes lore. The idea filled Charles with foreboding. Maugis was a shape-shifter; a ne’er-do-well. He could wrap himself in water…melt himself into mist. You never knew in what cave or pool he might be lurking.
Charles grasped a birch trunk and leaned out to watch the river glisten far below. Stephen de la Fontaine had probably scrabbled up the very same shale nine centuries ago, he thought. Then, with a frisson: Someone else might have, too.
About the Author
Leona Francombe is the author of The Heron Legacy, The Universe in 3/4 Time: A Novel of Old Europe (shortlisted for the 2023 Eric Hoffer Award), The Sage of Waterloo, Madame Ernestine und die Entdeckung der Liebe and many short stories and essays. Her discovery of an ancient ruin in a remote part of the Ardennes forest inspired The Heron Legacy. Leona is also a pianist and composer. She lives in Belgium.
Connect with Leona
Website | Goodreads
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