The main narrative begins in August 1842 with the homecoming of Sir Richard Calmady, third and last of the baronetcy, and his bride. Katherine Ormiston, only daughter of a Yorkshire ironmaster at Ormiston Castle and his deceased wife, had been reared by her great-aunt Mrs. St. Quentin, a Dublin-born beauty and wit who had witnessed the French Revolution and the First Empire. Katherine met Richard at Ormiston Castle in the summer of 1841, was followed by him to Paris, accepted him after the ball at the British Embassy, married him in London some five months later, and traveled up the Rhine and through Italy before returning to Brockhurst. As the last guests depart on a soft August evening, Katherine, alone on the troco-ground, confides to her husband that she is with child.
Into this setting the novel introduces Julius March, Richard’s cousin and a clergyman of delicate constitution. He had been educated at Oxford thirteen years earlier, had thrown himself into the Tractarian Movement, joined the austere community at Littlemore, and wrestled long with the question of submission to Rome. Choosing to remain within the Anglican Church, he accepted a position at Brockhurst as domestic chaplain and librarian, the dry upland air being recommended for his chronic asthma. He kept elaborate private diaries recording his religious struggles and his self-imposed, unwitnessed vow of chastity. The arrival of Mrs. St. Quentin and Mademoiselle de Mirancourt at Brockhurst, the news of Katherine’s pregnancy, and Julius’s overhearing a tender exchange between the two women, together precipitate a deep emotional crisis. Watching Richard and Katherine embrace by moonlight on the terrace, Julius weeps and acknowledges to himself that he loves Katherine—though he never doubts the inviolability of his vow.
While cataloguing the library, Julius discovers four tattered eighteenth-century chap-books tied with a rusty black ribbon. He reads the legend of Sir Thomas Calmady, the forester’s daughter, and her curse, and learns that the saviour foretold in the prophecy is to be a child of the house—fatherless of brothers or sisters, with red-gold hair, blue eyes, and a foot that would never know stocking or shoe, “half angel, half monster.” Appalled, he hides the books away, having already glimpsed the connection to Katherine’s unborn child.
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