Sabine de Kercoz

Sabine de Kercoz is Christabel LaMotte’s cousin and the author of a private journal that becomes a crucial source for reconstructing LaMotte’s lost year in Brittany. Through Sabine’s changing account of family affection, jealousy, fear, and uncertainty, the novel gives an intimate but limited record of LaMotte’s pregnancy and disappearance, while showing how a private diary can preserve evidence without resolving every secret it contains.

Identity and Family Background

Sabine belongs to the Breton family connected to Kernemet, the family manor maintained by her father, Raoul de Kercoz. Her father’s family history joins republican and anticlerical commitments with an interest in folklore: Raoul was the brother of Isidore LaMotte’s mother, while Isidore himself was a historian and mythographer shaped by German folklore research and a mystical Breton Christianity. Sabine is thus Christabel’s cousin within a family whose religious and intellectual differences form part of the setting for LaMotte’s refuge.

Sabine’s journal is not an impersonal chronicle. It records her own position in the household and makes clear that her feelings affect what she sees. She first describes Christabel as a cousin and companion, someone near her own age and a confidante; living alongside her, Sabine comes to recognize that Christabel is considerably older. The diary’s record of that shifting perception signals both intimacy and the limits of Sabine’s understanding of the people around her.

Journal and Changing Relationship with Christabel

A scene around the fire makes the family’s emotional change visible to Sabine. As Gode tells a story, Christabel knits increasingly quickly, then puts aside her work and touches her breast and head. Sabine sees her father take Christabel’s hand and hold it; after the story, he kisses her hair, and Christabel clings to him. Sabine registers the scene as a moment in which the three of them appear like a family. Her account captures closeness before she can fully make sense of its implications.

That closeness becomes the source of jealousy. Sabine describes a hatred that feels foreign to her usual self and imagines it as taking possession of her. She resents Christabel’s presence and her father’s tenderness toward her, including his giving Christabel copying work that Sabine had found burdensome. When he explains that he is glad to have another pair of skilled hands and eyes, Sabine experiences his practical reassurance as an additional injury. She recognizes the disproportion of her response, yet that self-awareness does not stop the resentment. The diary therefore preserves not only what Sabine witnesses but how rivalry and insecurity color her account.

Christabel’s Disappearance and Return

As Christabel’s pregnancy advances, she increasingly walks to the church. Villagers have seen her tracing the figures around the base of the Calvary and spending hours there in prayer or quiet; Sabine notes that the family knew of these visits. One day Christabel enters the church and is not seen coming out. The search begins only at dinner-time, when Gode urges Raoul to take out the horse and trap because the young woman is overdue. Sabine’s account follows the family as they search roads, hollows, and isolated huts, their uncertainty turning every dark shape into a possible sign of Christabel’s whereabouts.

The family’s fear is heightened by Christabel’s advanced pregnancy and by the absence of an explanation. Raoul seeks help from a nun, attempting to describe Christabel’s refusal to speak, but the nun is brusque and turns him away. The diary records the effect of this failed appeal on Sabine’s father, who returns depressed. Sabine’s narrative stays close to the family’s uncertainty rather than supplying knowledge she does not have.

On May 8, Christabel returns to the house. Sabine describes her as thin and frail, with her clothes drawn in by a heavy leather belt and her hair cut short. When Raoul moves to embrace her, Christabel raises a hand to stop him and insists that she can stand on her own feet. The return ends the immediate search but not the mystery: Christabel comes back physically changed and unwilling to accept her father’s attempted comfort.

Evidence, Limits, and Significance

Sabine’s journal later becomes essential to the investigation by Maud Bailey and Roland Michell. A copy supplied through Dr Le Minier makes clear that a child was born in Brittany, but the child’s subsequent fate cannot be traced from the journal. The distinction is central: Sabine’s record establishes a birth while leaving its outcome unresolved. In a later letter, Randolph Henry Ash says that Sabine told him what was known at Kernemet, but stresses that this was only the fact of the birth, not certainty about what followed.

The diary’s importance lies partly in this incompleteness. It preserves observations of Christabel’s movements, the family’s search, and the emotional tensions in the household, but it does not give Sabine knowledge of every event or access to Christabel’s private reasons. Its personal perspective both supplies evidence and complicates interpretation: Sabine’s jealousy is explicitly present in her account, while the journal’s record of the disappearance remains marked by uncertainty. Through her, the novel shows how a private document can change the historical picture without making the past entirely recoverable.