A Desperate Fortune

by Susanna Kearsley

  “You’re teaching my son cryptanalysis?”

  “Yes, and he’s teaching me how to play Robo Patrol, so it’s a fair exchange.”

  “Hardly.” He studied the page for a moment. “You made up these samples yourself?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “So you don’t just break ciphers, you write them as well?”

  “Only simple ones, like what I’m working with here. Why?”

  “Have you ever done any proper encryption,” he asked, “with computers?”

  “A very long time ago, just as a hobby. Why?”

  Luc shrugged. “No reason.” And then he said, “Well, that’s not true. There’s a reason. You remember I mentioned my brother?”

  “Fabien, who lives in California and works for the same company you do only his job is more senior.”

  “So you remember.” He sounded amused. “Well, his job is more senior than mine because he’s actually in charge of the development of all of Morland’s tactical and sonar systems—a lot of high-level defense contracts—and he just called me this morning to say he was coming to Paris next week to hold interviews for his department here. I don’t know all the positions he’s filling, but some have to do with creating encryption solutions and cyber security for different clients, and I thought…”

  “That’s very specialized work. I don’t have the experience.”

  “Fabien trains people all the time. Well, not in person, but he makes arrangements to have them trained. I think he cares more about someone’s aptitude, how their mind works, than their years of experience. And your mind works well at this.” He set the paper down again. “You said you wanted to find a job that let you work on your own, and I know for a fact some of his people do that. From home, even. I can’t guarantee that he’d hire you, but I’m pretty sure I could get you an interview.”

  I angled my head in the warm cradle of his strong shoulder to gain a clear view of his face. He looked innocent. I wasn’t fooled. I said, “You’re taking care of me.”

  “Actually, I’m being selfish. Finding a job for you here means you’ll stay close to me. But it’s your choice. If you’d rather I not interfere, that’s fine too.”

  As I studied his face I remembered the words that MacPherson had spoken to Mary, affecting her strongly enough she had written them down: Not so easy to leave after all. And they struck a strong chord with me, too. Luc Sabran wasn’t easy to leave.

  So a job in France, close to him, working alone on encryption and cyber security, sounded fantastic.

  Except, “I’m not all that impressive in interviews.”

  “Fabien never does anything formal, it isn’t his style. We could go into Paris and meet him for lunch if you like, if you’d find it more comfortable.”

  “At Les Éditeurs?”

  “Sure.”

  “Could we take the Ducati?”

  He smiled. “Of course.”

  “Then I’d like that,” I said. “But I’m paying. I still owe you lunch.”

  I expected an “OK.” Instead, he leaned lower and kissed me. I didn’t complain.

  It seemed almost too quiet a few minutes later when he left me sitting alone at my desk with the diary. It was new for me, but I’d discovered I didn’t mind having Diablo and Noah and Luc hanging round while I worked.

  And I no longer minded transcribing the fairy tales Mary kept writing. In fact, I’d begun to enjoy them.

  I worked all the rest of that day on the one she’d told Thomson and Mr. MacPherson and Madame Roy several days after the wolf had been shot, and this time I could see, as Denise had explained, how the fairy tale fit with the rest of her narrative:

  There once was a good and wise king who ruled over a prosperous land, with a son—the crown prince—and two daughters. The crown prince and his younger sister had good hearts and wise heads as well, but the elder daughter was envious and cruel, and thought it most unfair her brother’s birth had robbed her of her chance to rule the kingdom. Calling on a fairy who was practiced in the darker ways of magic, she went about clearing her path to the throne. First she had her brother kidnapped in the night and taken far away into a distant land, from which there would be no returning. Then she had her sister, who was gifted with a rare and lovely voice, changed to a little bird and locked within a golden cage that hung beside the window. And with none to bar her way, the elder sister had her father turned into a small defenseless hare and set him to be chased at that day’s hunt. But her father was clever and swift. He outwitted the hounds and the hunters and ran at great speed to a far distant forest of thorns, where he knew he’d be safe. Incensed by this, the elder sister—who had now been crowned the queen—instructed her dark fairy to pursue the hare, her father, to the forest and ensure that he was killed.

  This vengeful order was by good luck overheard by the young princess, trapped now as a bird within a hanging cage, and using all her own brave ingenuity she freed herself and flew off through the open window in the same direction the dark fairy had just taken, hoping she might find her father first and somehow warn him. She found the forest made of thorns, and found her father also, in great peril—unaware that to his one side he was being stalked and threatened by a wolf, and to the other stood a huntsman with his long gun to his shoulder.

  The princess sang a warning to him, but he could do no more than lie still, for time in this strange forest passed more quickly and the hare-king had already grown too old to run with all the speed he’d once possessed. The princess, to protect him, swooped down hastily and perched atop his back, and from this vantage point she saw now that the huntsman was none other than her brother the crown prince, changed as well from all his wanderings so far from friends and home, his heart grown hard and cold and merciless.

  The wolf—who was of course the evil fairy in disguise—had failed to recognize the crown prince, but was quick to spot a way to deal with both the king and younger princess. Stopping her advance, the fairy cast a spell upon the “huntsman” that would make him in a single shot kill bird and hare together.

  But before the spell had fully taken hold, the princess sang.

  She sang a tune the prince and she had sung when they were children, and the warbling notes began to thaw his frozen heart until they became words within his mind that told him: “Save your shot, dear brother. Do not let your heart grow cold enough to kill without a cause.”

  And so he’d changed his aim and killed the wolf instead, and with the evil fairy dead the whole enchantment ended and the king and princess were restored to their true selves, and with the prince they left the forest and set off along the path they knew would lead them home.

  * * *

  “That’s not a proper ending,” was Jacqui’s opinion, when I read the tale to her over the phone.

  “Why not?”

  “She never does say if they made it home safely. Most readers,” she said, “like a little more closure.”

  “Why?”

  “They just do. It’s human nature, I suppose. We want things to end tidily—especially with fairy tales. We want our happily ever afters.”

  “Not every story has one.”

  “Yes, I know.” My cousin’s voice reminded me that she, with her two less-than-wonderful marriages, knew from experience frogs sometimes stayed frogs no matter how often you kissed them. “But that’s the beauty of my business, darling. We can manufacture them.”

  In honesty I didn’t mind an open ending, one that left some room for my imagination to continue with the story line and end it where I chose, or let the characters keep living on within my mind like distant friends I could look in upon from time to time. But I deferred to Jacqui when it came to knowing readers’ preferences. I did, though, feel the need to point out, “Mary’s fairy tales aren’t really meant to stand alone, though. Denise says back in those days women’s fairy tales were woven into
novels, so you’re not supposed to read them on their own—you have to read them in the context of the narrative around them. That’s why this one makes more sense when you know what’s going on in Mary’s diary, with MacPherson and the wolf attack, and when you can see how she’s pulling in the other themes dealing with King James and the Jacobites.”

  My cousin tried rewinding me a notch. “Denise says this?”

  “She studied it at uni.”

  “Ah. And how are you two getting on?”

  “Denise and I? We’re getting on just fine. I really like her. Why?”

  “She doesn’t mind that you and her ex-husband are…” Jacqui paused, as though in search of the right phrase.

  I waited, curious to see what she’d select.

  “…together?” was her final choice.

  “She doesn’t mind at all. She’s said so.” Several times, I could have added. Clearly. Unequivocally. You’re good for him, she’d said to me this morning, when we’d stood together at the kitchen window watching Luc come up the path from the back garden. He’s so happy. Look at him. He made me happy too, and she had commented on that as well.

  My cousin said, “I see,” though I suspected that she didn’t. “And just how ‘together’ are you?”

  “Sorry?”

  Bluntly, because she had learned the blunt approach was best with me, she asked me, “Are you sleeping with him?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” There was no way on the phone that I could try to sort the blend of vocal tones in that one word. I couldn’t tell if she was pleased or disapproving or surprised. “Why not?”

  She wasn’t being rude. She knew my pattern; knew that normally I’d meet a man and have him in my bed and out the door again within a week. I shrugged and said, “I don’t feel any rush, with Luc. I feel like we have time.”

  She didn’t answer straightaway. And then she only said, “That’s good. I hope it lasts.”

  I knew that tone. “But you don’t think it will.”

  “I didn’t say that. Does he know that you have Asperger’s?”

  “No. Not unless you told him.”

  Jacqui reassured me with, “You know I’d never do that.”

  “Good. So, getting back to Mary and the diary…”

  “Yes. Where are they now?”

  “Just outside Nîmes.” I named the city in Provence, just south of Avignon, where Mary and the others had been forced to break their journey. “They’ve been stuck there for a while now. Mr. Thomson’s ill in bed. He has a fever.”

  “All that walking in the rain, no doubt. Or else his dunking in the river.”

  “Mary walked in rain too, and she isn’t ill.” I knew it wasn’t logical for me to feel such pride in the resilience of a woman I would never meet, but I was growing close to Mary through her words and so I felt it anyway. I liked her sense of humor and her strength and her tenacity, and her determination to let nothing keep her down. She’d had no liking for the rooms they’d lodged in outside Nîmes, and Mr. Thomson with his fever had apparently not been an easy patient, yet she’d made the best of things and done her part to entertain him and Madame Roy and MacPherson in the evenings with her stories, having noted in her diary her amusement that MacPherson, when she’d told them all the story of the huntsman and the wolf, had replied with his opinion the crown prince would have done well to shoot the lot of them and gain himself a kingdom he could rule alone in peace.

  For as it stands, so Mr. M— remarked, the prince is left to guide the king and princess through the forest when he might have spared himself the effort, which he said in such a tone I knew he was not serious, for though we all must be indeed a weight upon him, he appears to carry it with ease, as he does everything.

  I wasn’t the best at detecting emotional interplay, and I’d admittedly missed all the signs that Luc said showed MacPherson had fallen for Mary, but even I was aware of the quietly growing rapport between Mary and the Highlander. In the fortnight they’d spent stuck there waiting for Thomson to make his recovery, she’d written five times in her diary, and one of those entries was given entirely over to the day MacPherson had taken her into the city itself—to assist with translation while he bought supplies, or that at least had been Mary’s belief, though I knew as well as she did Madame Roy could have done that for him as well, and with less trouble on his part, for Mary still needed to ride the mule. But she’d had a splendid time from the sound of it, looking through the shops and stalls and admiring the ancient sights.

  There is a most impressive tower and a temple and, against the southern city walls, an ancient amphitheater where the Romans set their warriors to fight with beasts and with each other, now so picturesquely run to ruins that I might have wandered all the day within it had not Mr. M— refused to let me wander. He is watchful of my ankle even though Madame Roy worked a Scottish charm upon it yestereve, tying three knots in a white linen thread that she held in her mouth while repeating a verse in her language, then winding the thread round my ankle where I am to leave it until it unravels itself. She says such a charm in the Highland tongue is called an oleless, or so it does sound to my ears, and will work without fail, and in truth I confess that already I feel an improvement, and will I feel sure be quite ready to walk on my own when we leave here a few days hence.

  Summarizing all of this for Jacqui now, I said, “I haven’t gone beyond that, but I’m guessing that they’ll still be heading south.”

  My cousin told me, “Yes, they’re going to Marseilles. I’ve done a bit of sleuthing myself this week.” It turned out she’d actually sent her assistant, the handsome and capable Humphrey, to Kew, to the National Archives, to search through their records for anything useful on Thomson. “Humphrey found a lot of letters flying back and forth between the government in London and the English ambassador in Paris, who had spies all over. Not the nicest people,” she pronounced them. “Keep your eyes open for any mention Mary might make in her diary of two Jacobites named Mr. Cole and Mr. Warren, in Marseilles.”

  I jotted the names down. “Why?”

  “Humphrey’s been reading their letters all week, and he thinks they’re both bastards. They shook Thomson’s hand and pretended to be his friend,” Jacqui said, “while they betrayed him.”

  Chapter 33

  Now, like a dreadful wave afar, appeared the ship…

  —Macpherson, “Fingal,” Book Three

  Marseilles

  March 31, 1732

  “Mr. Warren.” Thomson shook the Irish banker’s hand with pleasure. “Kind of you to see us.”

  “Mr.…Symonds, is it?”

  Mary had expected him to be an older man, but he was somewhere between her own age and MacPherson’s, well dressed in the tidy immaculate way of most men who had dealings with money. She was glad she had taken the trouble to comb out her hair and repin it beneath the lace headdress she’d traded her spare pair of gloves for at Nîmes.

  His office was in the Cours, the broad main street of Marseilles, which ran perfectly straight and was lined with twin rows of tall trees that lent shade to the benches and fountains beneath them. Mary had a clear view of the street and those trees from the chair that the banker held graciously out for her, close to the window.

  He turned to his clerk. “Would you be so kind as to go call on Mr. Thomas Cole and ask him if he’s able to attend us? Thank you.”

  When the clerk had gone, the banker closed the door and turned to them and smiled. “Now then, Mr. Thomson, let us have a proper introduction, sir. I’m glad to meet you.” As they shook hands for a second time he added, “I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you arrived in town. I had expected, you see, that you’d come down through Avignon, and having business myself there just lately I tarried awhile there in anticipation of your coming. But you did not come through Avignon?”

  MacPherson, standing quietly behind them,
gave the answer. “No.”

  “I see.” The young man looked up at the Scotsman with a quick assessing eye and wisely chose not to pursue the matter. “Are there only three of you?”

  “Four, actually,” said Thomson. “We’ve a maid, who’s stayed to watch our things this morning. And our dog.”

  “You have a dog as well?” The Irishman raised both his eyebrows slightly as though not sure how to manage such a curious assemblage. “Never mind, I’m sure we’ll find you something suitable. You wish to go by sea, I take it?”

  “If we can. It will be quicker,” Thomson said.

  “Indeed. And very much safer,” the banker replied. “You’ll avoid going through any other Dominions on your way to Rome, for ’tis sure the English ministers in Genoa and Leghorn have been told to keep a watch for you.”

  MacPherson said, “We did not mention Rome.”

  “Well no, you didn’t, fair enough. But that is where the king lives, is it not?” asked Warren. “Also, I’ve a letter from your banker, Mr. Wogan, writ from Paris with advice that if a package comes for you after you’ve left here, I’m to send it on to Rome. So I assumed.” His smile, self-deprecating, sought to charm, and seeing it had no effect upon the Scotsman he said in a mock aside to Thomson, “Has he always been this trusting?”

  Thomson laughed. “Come now,” he told MacPherson, “surely we can let our guards down among friends. We’re all of the same party, and truly I’m weary of watching my back.”

  Mary privately thought he could hardly have cause to complain or be weary, when Mr. MacPherson had been the one doing the watching for all of them. But she said nothing. Her mind had been all but consumed by that single word: Rome.

  They were going to Rome.

  Where the king was. And where her brothers and father had gone. Where her father was, still.