A Ladder of Swords: Tale love, laughter and tears

Extract: I IF you go to Southampton and search the register of the Walloon church there, you will find that in the summer of 157- "Madame Vefue de Montgomery with all her family and servants were admitted to the Communion"-"Tous ceux ci furent Reçus là à Cêne du 157-, comme passans, sans avoir Rendu Raison de la foi, mes sur la tesmognage de Mons. Forest, Ministre de Madame, qui certifia qui ne cognoisoit Rien en tout ceux la pó quoy Il ne leur deust administré la Cêne s'il estoit en lieu pó la ferre." There is another striking record, which says that in August of the same year Demoiselle Angèle Claude Aubert, daughter of Monsieur de la Haie Aubert, Councillor of the Parliament of Rouen, was married to Michel de la Forêt, of the most noble Flemish family of that name. When I first saw these records, now grown dim with time, I fell to wondering what was the real life-history of these two people. Forthwith, in imagination, I began to make their story piece by piece; and I had reached a romantic dénoûment satisfactory to myself and in sympathy with fact, when the Angel of Accident stepped forward with some "human documents." Then I found that my tale, woven back from the two obscure records I have given, was the true story of two most unhappy yet most happy people. From the note struck in my mind, when my finger touched that sorrowful page in the register of the Church of the Refugees at Southampton, had spread out the whole melody and the very book of the song. One of the later-discovered records was a letter, tear-stained, faded, beautifully written in old French, from Demoiselle Angèle Claude Aubert to Michel de la Forêt at Anvers in March of the year 157-. The letter lies beside me as I write, and I can scarcely believe that three and a quarter centuries have passed since it was written, and that she who wrote it was but eighteen years old at the time. I translate it into English, though it is impossible adequately to carry over either the flavor or the idiom of the language: "Written on this May Day of the year 157-, at the place hight Rozel in the Minor called of the same of Jersey Isle, to Michel de la Forêt, at Anvers in Flanders.