A Desperate Fortune

by Susanna Kearsley

  I liked courtyards—the sense of seclusion, of echoing quiet and peace—and this one, when I managed to make my way out to it, wrapped me in all the sensations I loved. The château itself wasn’t square; it was more an elongated pentagon, meaning the courtyard had five high enclosing sides shutting it off from the commonplace world. Four of these had beautiful cloister-like repeating arches with more arches above them, four stories of glittering windows surrounded by pale stone and edged in red brick, with round towers to mark the interior stairwells set into each corner. The fifth side of the courtyard, most lovely of all, was the wall of a chapel, with windows more beautiful than all the others, tall windows of restful green glass that soared heavenward inside their frames of stone tracery.

  I had the whole courtyard alone to myself, and I could have explored any part of it, but I was drawn to that chapel, which inside was even more impressive—long and filled with quiet light from those tall narrow windows, and designed so that the vaulted ceiling’s weight was borne entirely by the walls so there were no supporting columns needed here to spoil the perfect open beauty of the nave. A huge rose window filled the western wall, but at some point it had been covered over from the outside and its glass had been removed to show the stone of what I guessed to be the wall of some addition to the castle, though the sunburst wheel of intricate stone tracery remained. And best of all, at least for me, where once the altar would have been there stood a glassed-in case that housed a model of the château, built in miniature.

  I had a thing for models. Not only was it easier for me to understand things when they were presented to me in their concrete form and not the abstract, but the mathematical precision and exactness used to build to scale were pleasant to my eye. This model was a fascinating thing. Raised up to table height, it was so detailed and extensive that I had to walk the whole way round to view the full expanse of the château as it would have appeared at the end of the seventeenth century, not long before Mary Dundas was born.

  I hadn’t realized it was so large. I’d thought this massive pentagon of rooms that I’d just toured through would have been the greatest part of it, but in the model I could see the pentagon—the “old château”—was nothing but a small bit at the western end, eclipsed by what the label on the model’s case described as the Château-Neuf or the “new château” that spread right to the Seine. The model showed its grand palatial walls, with tower-like pavilions marking out the corners, and the perfect mirrored symmetry of all the steps and terraces that led down to the river. Clearly there was more for me to see outside.

  I took a careful set of photos of the model, checked the time, and seeing I had twenty-seven minutes left before I had to meet Denise, I left the quiet refuge of the chapel and the courtyard and went out again, across the little bridge that spanned the moat, and round the corner through the tall black iron gates into the grounds.

  I should have been more fond of French formal gardens. They were, after all, about order and symmetry—man taming nature by shaping it to his unyielding design—but I didn’t like wide-open spaces with nothing around me to serve as a shield, so to stand in a garden like this made me feel unprotected and far too exposed. I preferred English gardens—the overgrown corners with tree branches hanging however they pleased, and the tucked-away benches with hedges and warm brick walls guarding my back.

  There was nowhere to hide here. What hedges there were barely came to my knees and the broad expanse of gravel I was standing on was too broad and too open for my comfort. Even the facade of the old château, stately and large as it was, stood too many steps distant to offer me shelter.

  This side of it was longer, more imposing than the side that faced the street, as though the castle was more conscious of its need to make a statement here. It stood above the geometric landscape with a silent sort of majesty that almost made me feel a little sorry for it, wasting all that effort to look regal when the only person noticing was me.

  In fact, if I were pressed to put a name to how the château looked to me from here, I would have settled on the word forlorn.

  The wind, as if to underline the thought, blew in a colder gust that chilled my ears and made me hunch deeper in my scarf. I walked the long way down to where the wide path met an iron railing at the top of the steep bank that dropped to meet the river. And all that way, from where the old château’s walls ended to the point where both the railing and the path were tied together by a building of red brick and old white stone that looked like one of the pavilions, there was nothing else remaining of the grandly sprawling “new château” depicted in the model in the chapel. It was as if a child’s hand had swept a castle built of blocks aside without a care, replacing everything with houses and apartments set in rows behind a high obscuring hedge.

  The pavilion itself had been repurposed into a hotel and restaurant, too upscale for me to feel comfortable venturing in off the path for a look, in my old coat and scarf and laced boots, so I stayed by the railing and stood for a moment to focus my thoughts on the river. At least that, I thought, couldn’t be taken away. The view might have changed, with its bridges and cars and the skyscraper sprawl of the Parisian business hub of La Défense looming out of the mist just ahead, but still the olive-colored Seine wound through it all as it had done in Mary’s day.

  Perhaps she’d stood just here and watched boats sliding by on their slow way upstream to Paris, like the long barge I was watching now. Perhaps she’d felt the same wind blowing strongly from the west, and heard the black crows calling roughly to each other from the slope below, above the sweeter trilling of the unseen birds that hid amid the tangle of the ivy-covered trees.

  The crows I could see. There was one large crow perched very near to me, on the high hedge at the corner of the old pavilion, but the birds that attracted me most were the magpies. My mother had no love of magpies and chased them relentlessly out of our garden, but I’d always liked their bold plumage—the white and blue-black in predictable patterns that set them apart from their cousins the crows.

  The ones here were scattered along the path, flying and flapping and hopping and searching the gravel for scraps as I made my way back up the broad promenade, a group of them gathering as I repeated the childish rhyme in my head, counting each bird I saw: One for sorrow. That suited the château, I thought, with the mist and the bare lonely trees and the hard gravel shifting beneath my feet as a reminder that nothing was permanent.

  I went on counting:

  Two for joy. Three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold…

  Another magpie settled on the ground amid its fellows, casting a dark eye in my direction.

  Seven for a secret never to be told.

  “You might be right,” I told it. If I couldn’t break the cipher, then whatever Mary Dundas had experienced here would be lost to history altogether and remain a secret. Mary, who had lived and breathed and walked within this shadow court of Jacobites, whose voice I had the power to restore, would stay instead forever silent. The worry and weight of frustration began to close in again. So much for “changing my thoughts,” I conceded. I may have spent two hours out of my workroom, but I’d achieved little to show for it.

  Eight for a wish, was the next magpie. Nine for a kiss. Hardly likely. The tenth took a hop from the ground to the edge of a large round low fountain not far from the gate where I’d entered the grounds. Ten a surprise…

  “There you are.” A man’s voice, speaking French. A familiar voice.

  Looking round sharply, I saw Luc Sabran strolling in through the gate with a casual ease that, because it was so unexpected, completely unsettled me. I had to take a moment to absorb the new turn of events and adjust, as though trimming the sails of a ship in response to a change in the wind.

  He was several steps closer now. “So you decided to see the château after all.” With a smile and a glance at the clouds passing swiftly above, low and dark, he sai
d, “Not the best day for it. What did you think?”

  I could see his eyes now, and they helped me recover my balance. I wanted to bluntly ask what he was doing here, but I thought that might be rude, so I simply replied, “I’m not too keen on what they’ve done inside. The courtyard was beautiful, though. And the chapel.”

  “You’ve been to see the terrace?” he asked. “There by the river? It runs nearly two thousand meters along, with the forest behind it. A nice place to walk when the weather is better.”

  “I saw it. I didn’t try walking it. I only went there,” I told him, and pointed back down to the far distant railing. “I wanted to find all the parts of the château I’d seen in the model.”

  “The model?” He tucked his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket.

  “In the chapel.”

  “Ah.” He gave a nod of understanding. “Right, I had forgotten. But those buildings are all gone. This old part is all that’s left now, and the pavilion of Henry IV at the end of the path where you were, and perhaps a few cellars. The rest was all lost in the time of the Revolution. All royal lands then were taken as national properties.”

  “Yes, well, the nation,” I said, “should have taken a bit better care of them.”

  Something in that evidently amused him, because he smiled. “You wouldn’t have made a good revolutionary.”

  “Probably not. I don’t like to see things destroyed. It would have made me sad to see the château being taken down.”

  “But this is how life is, yes? It moves forward, and the sadness of those times, it is now gone.”

  But not entirely, I thought, as I looked up at those dark windows, gazing out across the gravel at the barren, leafless trees. The old château hadn’t lost all of its sadness. I felt it and shivered a little and turned from the fountain, now drained for the winter and empty.

  I looked at my watch. It was 2:58. Only two minutes left till I’d promised to meet Denise where she had dropped me off. “I have to leave.”

  “OK.” Still with his hands in his pockets, Luc fell into step just in front of me and to the side. That was actually where I liked people to walk—I felt shielded from all the uncomfortable empty space but not too crowded. Relaxing a little, I asked, “Do you work here?”

  He shook his head. “No, my proper office is in La Défense, not far from here.”

  I was very familiar with La Défense, having done business there once, for a former job.

  “But Wednesdays,” Luc went on, “I work from home. That’s why—”

  “I have to wait right here,” I interrupted.

  “OK.” Luc stopped with me on the pavement. Looked around. “Why?”

  “I’m supposed to meet Denise.”

  We were exactly at the place where I’d been told to be, in front of the château and right across the street from the old church with its grand steps and portico, now sheltering a scruffy group of youths who didn’t look at all religious. The traffic had grown busier.

  Luc said, “I don’t think you are.”

  “I am. She told me to be here at three o’clock.”

  His answer was to hold his right hand up the way a person did when swearing on the Bible, so that I could see the ring of car keys dangling from his fingers. “That’s what she told me, as well.” He smiled and flipped the keys into his fist again and moved a step in front of me to take the lead. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll drive you home.”

  I didn’t understand.

  I said so. “I don’t understand. Why did Denise send you?”

  I saw the lifting of his shoulders in the faint shrug that was such a quintessential French expression. “She couldn’t come herself. She’s gone to Chinon.”

  “Where is that?”

  “The Val de Loire. Her family’s there, and she and our son Noah always have their Christmas Eve in Chinon. Normally they come back the day after, but this year I was away as well, and so Denise left Noah with his grandparents to have a short vacation. She’s just gone to fetch him home.”

  He’d had the luck to find a parking space a few steps round the corner in a street that ran beside the old château. He stopped beside a dark red Peugeot hatchback and unlocked the doors as I tried working through the logic of what he’d just told me.

  It was possible, I knew, that I’d been told all this before—Denise could easily have talked about her plans to go to Chinon and, depending how absorbed I’d been in working on the cipher, I might not have paid attention. All she’d said this afternoon when she had come into my workroom was, “I’m leaving in a minute,” which could certainly imply that I was meant to know where she was going, and presumably the phone call she had made before we’d left had been to Luc, to make sure there’d be someone here to meet me.

  “But,” I asked him, “why did she send you?”

  He paused with a hand on the passenger door handle, turning to look at me. “Sorry, I’m not thinking. If it makes you too uncomfortable to drive with someone you don’t know—”

  “It isn’t that.” I shook my head, deciding that it really wasn’t something I could easily explain to him. My cousin often said that men were clueless, and in this instance that seemed to be the case. If Luc thought it was normal for his ex-wife to arrange for him to meet me, clearly he had not shared my experience with couples who’d divorced. Even Jacqui, who’d be happy not to be in the same time zone as her exes, kept a faintly jealous eye on all their new associations, and she never would have volunteered them to chauffeur another woman.

  Luc was waiting.

  “Never mind,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Usually, if I were honest, I did feel uncomfortable in cars I wasn’t used to, though this morning in Denise’s car I had been too distracted by her driving speed to notice. And as I settled now into the passenger seat of Luc’s car while he swung my door closed and walked round to his own, I felt a sense of the familiar that distracted me as well, until I put my finger on its cause.

  “Is this a Peugeot 207?” I asked him as he slid behind the steering wheel.

  “It is. An old one, though: 2009.”

  That would explain things. I nodded and said, “Jacqui’s second ex-husband had one of these, only his was a coupe cabriolet, not a hatchback.”

  “I wanted that one, too.” Luc smiled as he released the handbrake. “But Noah was still small and there was no place for his car seat.”

  As we moved off from the curb I cast a glance into the back and saw a child’s booster seat. “How old is Noah now?”

  “He’s nine years old. Nine and two-thirds, if you ask him.” He had seen what I was looking at. “When he turns ten he plans to set that booster seat on fire, I think. He knows it is the law for him to use it, but he hates it.”

  So then Noah was a law-abiding rebel. Like his father, I decided, for although Luc drove with care he had a sure touch with the gear lever that made me think he would have much preferred an open road where he could shift into top gear straightaway instead of being trapped within these winding streets that slowed his speed.

  He was wearing jeans again today. I liked his legs in jeans, though in the confines of the car their muscled length was stretched so close to mine I had to force my gaze elsewhere to keep from staring.

  We were crossing the bridge now, and leaving the château behind.

  “Does she have very many ex-husbands, your cousin?” he asked.

  “Only two. They were both very difficult men.”

  “This is why she is able to take on such difficult authors,” he guessed, “like this Alistair Scott. Denise tells me that he and Claudine have a history.”

  Not knowing the details, I didn’t have any real comment on that. But, “I wouldn’t say Alistair’s difficult, really. He’s just very focused. That’s not a bad thing, for a researcher.”

  “No.” I felt Luc�
�s sideways glance. “No, it isn’t.”

  We drove for a moment in silence, until something struck me.

  “Why Wednesdays?” I asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “Why do you work from home Wednesdays?”

  He paused as though having to search back in our conversation to find the stray comment he’d made that had led to my question. “Oh. Noah still has Wednesday afternoons off, so it’s necessary.”

  I had a vague and distant memory of my childhood friend and neighbor, Ricky, when he’d moved across from France, complaining that in Britain he was made to go to school on Wednesdays, so I gathered it was normal here for schoolchildren to have a midweek holiday. But Luc was talking as though Noah lived with him all week, not just at every other weekend, and that seemed to me less normal. It was probably rude just to ask, I knew, but curiosity outweighed my manners. “So, where does your son live? With you, or Denise?”

  “We share custody. Alternate weeks. We switch over on Mondays. It’s becoming more common in France, this arrangement,” he said. “It’s better for Noah, I think. And for us. You don’t have children?”

  “No.” I’d have found it much easier winning my battle to not watch his legs if they hadn’t been constantly working the clutch and the gas pedals as he changed gears, but I managed to pull my gaze up in time to catch his small shrug.

  “They take work, they keep you busy.” Once again he briefly looked in my direction, this time with a smile, and added, “Noah more than most. You’ll likely have him underfoot when he discovers what you’re doing. He’ll think code breaking is cool—he’ll want to help you.”