A Versailles Christmas-Tide

Christmas 1901. A family in France awaits the return of their son from Versailles, their home bright with holiday preparations. Then comes the news: scarlet fever. What follows is a tender, sometimes funny, often heart-in-throat race to reach him - a mother's frantic journey through winter roads, a comic encounter with a bumbling young woman named Placidia, and ultimately a Christmas spent in a hospital room, where the holiday spirit must be coaxed back into something that can survive the shadow of sickness. Boyd captures the particular agony of waiting for news from a sick child, the way time moves differently when fear is involved, and the stubborn insistence on joy even when everything has gone wrong. The book is a period piece in the best sense - not nostalgic, but precise about how people in 1901 moved through the world, what they worried about, how they loved. For readers who want to step into another time and feel the weight of ordinary anxieties made fresh by historical distance.