The first volume of James Buchan’s The Family of William Neilson sequence (of which six volumes are proposed), A Street Shaken by Light, took us from William’s arrival in France from Scotland in 1720 to the Battle of Culloden in 1746 via the Ile de France (off the eastern coast of Africa) and India among other places on his remarkably global, but often unlucky, adventures. Readers may be please to learn that the second volume, A Chalice Argent, sets a slower pace. The novel is prefaced by the quotation, “Happiness demands more of the character than does misfortune,” and if A Street Shaken by Light consists largely of Neilson’s misfortunes, here he finds happiness.
The novel opens with the arrival of Neilson (in such bad shape he is first described as “a dead gentleman”) at La Sologne in France (its setting is perhaps a nod to Le Grand Meaulnes, another tale of a man searching for the woman he loved at first sight). Neilson has arrived at the home of Mme de Maurepas, the woman he first fell in love with on his arrival in France when she was a young girl of twelve or thirteen (he is sixteen at the time). He later encounters her, married, on the Ile de France, but is forced to leave the island for India and events eventually return him to Scotland only for defeat at Culloden to necessitate flight to France. Mme de Maurepas, now a widow, is reluctant to see Neilson as she is suffering from smallpox:
“She lifted up her bare face in the firelight. Nothing in my life had prepared me for such a sight.”
Neilson, however, is able to treat her blisters, and also inoculate those who work for her. They soon grow closer and admit their love for each other, and finally become lovers:
“My world was transfigured. All those weary years in India and Persia when to myself I was alone, Jeanne de Joyeuse stood at my shoulder, like the goddess that protects the warrior on the plain of Troy.”
Given what the reader knows of Neilson’s problems and privations in the previous volume, it is impossible not to feel his happiness is deserved. Mme de Maurepas’ life also changes as she enjoys the physical pleasure of love-making for the first time:
“It was you who taught me to love. Now I cannot stop.”
The novel, however, is not without incident. When he first arrives, Neilson befriends a young girl cleaning his boots, “the lowest servant in the house”, a foundling, Marie-Ange, who soon becomes a favourite of Mme de Maurepas. When her life is threatened, in a plot to inherit her mistress’ wealth, Neilson must hunt and catch those involved. He also must eventually continue in his mission to get a diamond he received from an Irish priest to the king in exile, James II.
For this reason, he leaves La Sologne for Venice where he soon finds himself in danger as Buchan returns us to the death-defying hero of volume one. He intends to play his respect to John Law, the banker who first brought him to France, only to discover he is recently dead. He is also warned of potential danger:
“There is word that a Scottish officer is travelling to Rome with something of great price for the Pretender… Tyrell here, Smith at Turin, Cockerill at Genoa to do the man an ill turn on the road, and at all costs stop him reaching the Papal Territories…”
Neilson does not however, get out of Venice in time, and finds himself imprisoned, with little chance of escape – though, as he admits, “my principal concern was not to get out, but to ensure nobody got in” as he fears assassination. His adventures do not end there, of course, and by the novel’s end Buchan has tied up many of the plotlines begun in A Street Shaken by Light. The novel is told in the same language as the earlier volume, with its sprinkling of archaic and Scottish expressions among the plainer English, adding to its (old fashioned) charm. It ends ‘to be continued’ though reaches a more obvious end point. One wonders whether Buchan’s intention is to move on to the next generation of Neilsons, and sincerely hopes it is.