A Desperate Fortune

by Susanna Kearsley

  Hugh said only, “Then ye’ll not be. I will see to it.”

  She thanked him, and although she’d learned in childhood that no good would come of prodding at a wound, she could not keep herself from saying, “It is too bad the Earl Marischal is not inclined to travel north to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, instead of south to Spain.”

  Mary thought she saw a small change to the angle of his head as though he counted it of interest that the earl would so divulge their plans. He took a step towards her, thoughtfully. “The earl,” he said, “prefers a warmer climate, and he has few friends at Saint-Germain.”

  She sympathized. “In that respect, the earl and I are equal.”

  He’d come to a spot an arm’s length from her, and now he stood there and studied her face. “You were born there.”

  “But I have not lived there since I was a child.” She had not intended the words to sound wistful, but Hugh seemed more focused on what she had said than the way she had said it.

  He frowned. “When I took ye from Paris, ye told me in plain terms ye were to go back to your family. The whole way to Lyon ye seemed fair determined,” he said, “to go home.”

  Mary gave a little shrug and looked deliberately away. “Home, as you once told me, is not always where you left it.”

  She did not wish to speak to Hugh about her family. He already knew—had known from the beginning—who her elder brother was, and doubtless he would then know something of her family’s past. And having made inquiries here in Rome about her father and her other brothers, he would also know how little she had figured in their lives. He did not need her to remind him of how easily they’d left her, for he was about to do the same himself.

  Hugh had said nothing in reply, and Mary—knowing he had no great love of conversation—took that as a sign he wished to bring an end to this one and deliver her to her hotel in safety, for the sun had crept yet lower and the turquoise color in the sky was bleeding through the softer pink and washing it away, and soon the twilight would descend.

  “Shall we start back?” she asked him with a brightness that she did not feel. “I’m sure that Frisque will be beside himself with joy to see you, he has been so bored these past weeks.” As have I, she nearly added, but she held her tongue.

  “I have a gift for ye.”

  It was, as speeches from the Scotsman went, so strange and unexpected that she was not sure she’d heard him right. “A what?”

  He did not bother to repeat the comment, for he had already pushed his sword hilt to the side to gain him access to the pocket of his dark red coat, from which he drew his hand out in a half-closed fist. He held that fist towards her, and his fingers opened to reveal a thing so purely beautiful that Mary could do naught but stare.

  It was an equipage—a silver clip of four open-work hearts so set together that they seemed to form a butterfly, and hanging from them by three dainty silver chains she saw a tiny watch key, and the little watch that went with it, and something small and round suspended in a cage of silver wire.

  She looked at it and could not speak.

  She thought of what the earl had asked him earlier, about whether the man Hugh had met had completed the work he’d been paid for, and vaguely her mind resurrected the earl’s idle mention of shops and a silversmith, but it seemed incredible that Hugh would go to so much trouble and expense on her account. And then she looked at the watch and another thought, still more incredible, struck her. She asked him, “You made this?”

  He nodded. “I had a man here do the chains and the clip for me, for I had not the right tools.”

  Any words she might have said at that moment all seemed to be caught in a lump at the base of her throat, so she did not say anything, letting Hugh show her the watch—how the glass front would open, as would the bright silver-cased back, and the way it was meant to be wound with the key.

  With his head bent, intent on instructing her, he said, “It must be wound once a day, though it will run for six hours beyond that if ye do forget it.”

  She managed to say in a small voice, “I will not forget.”

  She did not mean the watch, but she stared at it anyway, noting the miniature scrollwork that weighted the delicate hands on its white porcelain face with the numerals marked simply in black.

  “The face is a plain one,” said Hugh, “but the workings inside will not fail ye.”

  Her gaze lifted slightly and focused on Hugh—on the serious line of his brow and the slash of a shadow his eyelashes made on his strong angled cheekbones, and Mary could not then imagine how she could have ever thought Hugh unattractive. “It is a handsome face,” she told him, and again she was not speaking of the watch.

  He took no notice, gathering the bits of silver and the chains that ran like liquid over his hard palm, and passing all into her smaller hand.

  The turquoise sky was flaming now to duller gray, and Mary had to lift her hand to see the details of the silver chains and what they held. She gently rolled the little silver cage to better see the flattened ball within. “Is this a bullet?”

  “It is.”

  She glanced up, mutely questioning, and Hugh explained, “I killed the wolf with that shot. It protected ye once, and it may yet have power to keep ye from harm.”

  Her eyes started to fill and she quickly looked down. She’d been cared for and loved by her uncle and aunt, but she’d never had anyone show such concern for her welfare as this hardened man of the Highlands, who’d taken the trouble to fashion a charm with the sole aim of keeping her safe in the time when he would not be able to do it himself. When he would not be there at her side.

  Blinking hard at the butterfly hearts, she began to believe she had seen a design like that somewhere before…and then suddenly she knew exactly where she’d seen those hearts, and her gaze slipped in mixed disbelief and dismay to the basket-like hilt of Hugh’s sword, and the open space where now one piece of the wrought silver basket was missing, then back again to the increasingly valuable gift in her hand.

  Her fingers closed around it and she had to fight and concentrate to keep the tears from spilling over from her blurring eyes, and it was all for naught because a single tear squeezed through her lashes anyway and slowly tracked a path down her averted cheek. She blinked again to force the others back and breathed a steady breath and willed herself to show him nothing but the strength he’d told her he admired.

  Hugh was watching her. He asked, “Is something wrong?”

  Everything’s wrong, Mary wanted to say. You are going away. But she shook her head. Found her voice. “No.” Not exactly her voice, so she cleared her throat lightly and tried again. “No, it is only that this is a beautiful gift, and I’ve nothing to give you at all in return.”

  There was silence a moment, as though he were thinking. “A story will do.”

  Mary brought her head up at that, grateful he’d given her something to smile at. “My stories,” she said, “are in no measure equal to this, and you know it.”

  He looked at the silver that gleamed in the hand she’d held up as her evidence, and with a stubborn shrug told her, “I’d count them above it.”

  The gift of his approval was as precious to her as the silver equipage she fastened with great care upon her gown before she turned to lean again upon the parapet, uncaring that the twilight was now properly upon them and there was no view to see beyond the ghostly outline of the broken bridge against the darkness of the shore and hills beyond. And looking at that battered bridge and at the dark gray water surging at it from beneath the place she stood, she felt a sudden desperate need to bravely stand against the current that was so uncaringly attempting to tear one more piece away from her. “What tale,” she asked him, “would you have me tell you?”

  He considered this. “The one ye told at Mâcon.”

  She had only told one tale she could remember at Mâcon, and it embarrass
ed her to think of it: the tale she’d told the younger of the frilly sisters while they’d walked and talked in French, when she had thought MacPherson could not understand that language, and she had made sport of him by fashioning a fine dramatic tale of tragic love, with him its hero. The stone beneath her hands was cool and weathered, pitted like old bone, and Mary pressed her fingers to it. “I have long since owed you an apology for what I said at Mâcon.”

  Hugh stood watching her a moment longer, then came slowly forward on the bridge and bent to lean beside her on the ancient parapet. “And why is that?”

  “You know why. I should not have told that story.”

  With another shrug he said, “I liked it well enough. All but the ending.”

  Mary turned her head so she could see his profile in the dimness. “It was not my ending. Nor even my story, for all that. You read the original version in Lyon, in Madame d’Aulnoy’s book, you must have noticed. The tale of the Russian prince.”

  “Aye. Yours was better,” he said. “Tell it over.”

  She sighed. “Hugh.”

  “It starts with him lost.”

  She could not refuse him, not when he had given her such an incredible gift of his own, so relenting she started the story and tried to repeat it the way she had crafted it when he’d been walking behind her at Mâcon, a shadow she’d longed to be free of. And yet, as she told the tale over again to him, Mary could not keep from noticing all the small points of connection to how things had happened with them in real life—from the earliest part where the hero had gazed upon his lady and had followed her without her ever noticing him in return, to their first meeting when the hero’s lady had dropped her scarf and he’d returned it, to the time when he had kissed her and her world had been forever changed, until Fate cast a pall upon their happiness and forced him to decide between remaining with his lady or returning to the battlefield.

  She stopped the story there, because she found it struck too close to home. The twilight now had settled all around them and the lamplight gleamed within the windows of the tile-roofed buildings clustered on the little ship-like island that would never leave its moorings, never know another shore.

  Hugh said, “Go on.”

  “You do not like the ending,” she reminded him. “You told me so yourself.”

  He turned his head towards her then, his face so far in shadow now she scarce could see his eyes. “Then write a different one.”

  Mary was not sure at first that she understood what he was asking.

  Until quietly he told her, “Write a better one.”

  She realized he was speaking in the same tone he had used at Maisonneuve to tell her she should call to Frisque. And hope—a tiny twisted knot of it—began to loosen and expand within her. She remembered what she’d written in her journal so despondently this morning: If it were my choice to make I would lay all my heart before him and refuse to leave his side. And he was making it her choice.

  Beyond his shoulder she could see the paler marble outline of the Janus pillar with its faces turned in all directions and so worn by time and weather they were featureless, that no one now could know or guess at who they might have been. So it would also be with them, she knew—when time had turned and people of an age to come would stand upon this ancient bridge and she and Hugh would be but faceless shadows then themselves, and none would know they’d ever been there.

  None would know that on a mid-May evening, with the stars beginning to appear and glimmer in the darkening deep blueness of the arching sky, a young and lonely woman had put all her heart within her hands and laid it full before the silent man who leaned beside her.

  “Then he told her,” Mary said, “that he must leave, for he could not neglect his duty nor his honor. And his lady sighed with sadness, but she understood, and said to him, ‘Your honor and your duty are so very much a part of you I could not ever ask you to abandon them, but neither do I think I can endure it, sir, if you abandon me. So what to do?’” She could not hold Hugh’s gaze although she could not truly see it, so she looked away again, repeating, “What to do?”

  A night bird in the trees along the river’s edge began to trill, and Mary drew her strength from it.

  “And so it happened,” she went on, “a fairy of the nearby forest heard the lady’s mournful speech, and being deeply moved by it, the fairy turned the lady to a falcon that could ride into the battle on her true love’s hand, and so they rode away together and had many fine adventures, and he carried her forever with him and she spent her life content, for she had wings to spread and fly with and the man she loved to hold and keep her safe.”

  There was no sound or movement for long moments but the rushing of the river and the night bird calling.

  And then Hugh asked, “What adventures did they have?”

  She found it difficult, with all of the emotions of her speech, to make a calm reply. “I do not know.”

  He thought this over. “Then ye’d better come to Spain,” he said, “and live them for yourself.”

  She turned to look at him, and saw that he was straightening to stand at his full height before her in the semidarkness, and the faint light from the windows of the little island at her back showed her his steady gaze was serious.

  Her heart became a trembling thing within her as she straightened too and faced him, and the night air grew alive between them, though she could no more have guessed his thoughts than she had done when they’d first faced each other in the Paris street. Except his eyes now were not cold, she thought. Not cold at all, and no longer impenetrable.

  “Marry me,” he said.

  She had to smile at his tone, for it could not be helped. “That’s not a question.”

  “No,” he said, and bent his head towards her. “It is not.”

  And then her smile was covered by his kiss and Mary, wrapped within the warmth of it, could care for nothing else.

  Let currents flow and kingdoms fall and time move onward, Mary thought—this moment was for them. Those people of an age to come who stood upon this bridge would never know how long she’d stood tonight in Hugh’s strong arms, or what he’d said to her, the quiet simple words that had been spoken from his heart and were for her alone; nor would they know what she had answered back, and how he’d smiled and gently tipped her chin up with his hand to kiss her longer and more deeply; nor how he had finally held his hand to her outstretched and she had taken it with happiness and followed him.

  It mattered not that no one else would bear that moment witness nor remember it, for if the future could not know them, neither could the past confine them, and the choice was always theirs to make, the tale their own to finish, as her aunt had once assured her. And her aunt had been right also when she’d laid her hand on Mary’s heart and said, “I think that always here you’ve had a little voice that calls to you.” For Mary knew the voice that she’d heard calling to her for so long had been Hugh’s own, and now had come the time, at last, to let it lead her home.

  THE END

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  About the Characters

  Once upon a time, a baby girl was born at Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

  Her father, William Dundas, was a wig maker who’d been born at Pencaitland in the Scottish Lowlands, and who’d come across as a young man to serve King James VII at his exiled court in France. It was there William married his French-born wife, Marguerite Paindeble. Their son Nicolas was born within the year, and in due course was followed by other sons—Charles and Jean [John]—and at last, at the end of July in the summer of 1710, came their daughter.

  They named her Marie Anne Thérèse.

  Her baptism, on the twenty-fifth of July of that year, was recorded in the register of the parish church, where I came across it while doing my research, and being in need
of a heroine for my new book, I decided she’d fill that role wonderfully well.

  I tried to leave her family as it stood—her mother’s sister, Magdalene, was also in the parish records with her husband, Jacques Laurent—but as I could find little record of the family after Mary’s birth, I took some liberties.

  I don’t know when her mother died. I don’t know for a fact that her father and brothers followed King James VIII into Italy, but many of the male courtiers from Saint-Germain-en-Laye did so, both after the failed 1715 rebellion and in the years following the death of James’s mother, Queen Mary, when the already diminished former court at Saint-Germain was reduced even further by financial hardship and lack of support from the French.

  Following an exiled monarch into an uncertain future wasn’t without risks, and it was common for the men to go alone. It would have been a kindness, in a caring father’s eyes, to leave his tiny daughter safe behind with family; so in setting William Dundas on the path so many other men were forced to take in those times, I allowed him to leave little Mary with her aunt and uncle, where he could be certain she’d be cared for.

  I don’t know where the Laurents lived, but there were only two locations close by Saint-Germain-en-Laye where I could find both surnames—Paindeble and Laurent—intermingled in the records of that period, so I chose the village whose name I liked best: Chanteloup-les-Vignes, giving Mary the view across the forest towards Paris that would leave her primed to step into my story.

  That story, to be honest, started taking shape much earlier, while I was doing research for another book, The Firebird, and stumbled on a stray mention in Paris correspondence of a Mr. O’Connor—“a reputed Sharper” suspected of being a Jacobite spy. Thinking it might be the Edmund O’Connor I was writing about in The Firebird, I dug deeper, only to find it was not him, but Martin O’Connor, a man with connections that led me to one of those somehow forgotten true stories from history I love to discover.

  Martin O’Connor was an Irishman, and by his own admission when he first came over to the Continent he went into Flanders and mixed with the Jacobite soldiers there, many of whom were his relations. Whether one of these relations was in fact Edmund O’Connor I don’t know yet, but Martin himself certainly became a great champion of the Jacobite cause.