A Desperate Fortune

by Susanna Kearsley

  I’m not sure how John Thomson traveled from Marseilles to Rome, but I do know King James sent him back again by sea, and since many of the travelers whose accounts I was reading used ships or feluccas for this final leg of their voyage, I sent Thomson that way as well, taking the opportunity to introduce my own fictional addition to the pirate hunters who at that time kept a watchful eye out for the Barbary corsairs.

  In Rome, I put my travelers in the Albergo del Sole al Pantheon, which has been a hotel since the fifteenth century, with its windows that look on the fountain and Pantheon now, as they would have done then.

  The modest Palazzo Balestra that once housed King James and his court lies a short walk away.

  I have been to the palace. I’ve gone up the once-secret staircase, but the king’s rooms are now a private apartment, so I was shown through the rooms just above it. Fortunately, Professor Edward Corp of the University of Toulouse had been able to visit the king’s rooms previously and shared his impressions with me, as well as some beautiful photographs he had taken of the painted ceiling as it yet remains, with Mary’s birds still beating hopefully towards the false sky.

  At the time of Thomson’s visit, those rooms and the ones around them would have echoed with the footsteps of the two young princes, Charles and Henry, and the trusted courtiers who included Captain William Hay—again no stranger to the readers of my book The Firebird—and the Earl Marischal.

  Writing to their mutual friend, Admiral Thomas Gordon, from Rome in February 1732, Captain Hay claims the Earl Marischal “may be justly stiled [sic] the hero of our cause.”

  Having read the earl’s own letters to Admiral Gordon, together with those to his brother, his niece and her family in Britain, and those preserved within the Stuart Papers, I agree with William Hay.

  The earl’s fondness for Prince Henry and the journal Henry kept for him were things I found endearing, and I’ve relied on his own account of where he’d been and what he had been doing at that time in Rome to guide Hugh’s movements also.

  I don’t know if the earl met Thomson, but I do know Thomson met the king. Their conversation was repeated by John Thomson to his “friend” at Marseilles, Mr. Cole, who promptly relayed it to Waldegrave, as I’ve relayed it to you, in the same words. In fact, nearly all of King James’s words used in that scene are his own, taken mostly from letters he wrote to his family and friends.

  Thomson was imprisoned. I haven’t been able to find where he was actually held in the Castel Sant’Angelo, only that he claimed to have been moved from a poor cell into a comfortable apartment there, so I gave him the same apartment used half a century later for another man embroiled in a scandal: the self-styled “Count of Cagliostro.”

  The letter to his father from there on the fifteenth of May was a real one, and I’ve quoted it verbatim. He also used his time in prison to write a full confession of his part in the scandal, addressed to the British Parliament, and in typical fashion the two letters tell different stories.

  Released from prison that summer, he made his way back through Marseilles to Paris and eventually home to London, where in April of 1733 he testified to the Committee in charge of the Charitable Corporation affair in return for a percentage of whatever money they were able to recover by his evidence. It must not have been much. According to the London Gazette, a statute of bankruptcy was awarded against Thomson on September 2 of that year, and afterward he largely disappears from history.

  Interestingly, though, he turns up in St. Petersburg a few years later, happily engaged in business with his brother there and continuing to annoy the British by setting up a manufacturing house for wallpaper in Russia, thus undercutting the British exports to that country. He appears to have still been there in the 1770s, and I continue to keep my eyes open for new references to him, though he remains as enigmatic to me now as he was when I first began to read his letters.

  As for the money? At the time, it was estimated that the swindle involving the Charitable Corporation resulted in profits to the conspirators amounting to half a million pounds, yet only a tiny portion of that was ever recovered.

  I have an idea—completely unproven—where some of the rest might have gone.

  In the summer of 1732, shortly after Thomson’s release from his prison in Rome, Martin O’Connor—who had led me into this tale to begin with, and appears to have been involved in the stock scandal from its beginning—began to develop new mines in Provence with his partners—mines that were presumably intended as a source of income for King James—with O’Connor personally investing 20,000 livres of capital.

  And in 1733, Thomson’s fellow fugitive, George Robinson, joined a number of fellow Jacobites, at least two of whom had also been involved in the scandal, to form a company aimed at developing mines in the province of Burgundy. Their starting capital was 360,000 pounds.

  I could go on to say that neither venture ended in the way the Jacobites had wished, but it lies within the power of each storyteller to decide where best to end the story—a truism that would have been well-known and understood by Madame d’Aulnoy.

  Her own story is a fascinating one, too long to recount here, but well worth searching out and remembering. For my part, I’m happy to see the woman who was not only arguably the writer of the first modern fairy tale, but also one of the most popular and successful novelists of her age, slowly being discovered again and restored in some part to the place she deserves in the canon.

  I found it rather poignant that, in her novel Hypolitus, earl of Douglas, with its fairy tale about the Russian prince, Madame d’Aulnoy has the prince exclaim, when he first learns three hundred years have passed since he last saw his homeland: “When I come there again, who will know me? Or how shall I know any Body; My Dominions are, doubtless, fallen into the Hands of some strange Family? I can’t suppose there will be any left for me; so that I am likely to be a Prince without a Principality; every Body will shun me as if I were a Spectre…”

  She might have been writing of King James VIII.

  I could tell you the end to his story, but I have a sense I’m not done with him, or with his followers, yet.

  So let me finish where I started:

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

  Her name was Marie Anne Thérèse Dundas.

  Her baptism, on July 25, 1710, was written down into the parish register…as was, in the very next entry, the note of her death, on the fourth of September that year. She had lived only six short weeks.

  She wasn’t given a chance at a life. So I gave her one.

  Writers can’t truly change history, but we can decide, as I said, where a story should end.

  Not being fond of the ending of Mary’s tale, I wrote a different one.

  I wrote a better one.

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  Reading Group Guide

  1. “Mistress Jamieson” tells Mary when they meet: “My mother likes to say some people choose the path of danger on their own, for it is how the Lord did make them, and they never will be changed.” Do you agree? Was it more true in the past than today? Did Mary purposely choose a path of danger? Who else?

  2. The author has people in her own life with Asperger’s syndrome who helped her with Sara’s character. What was it like to be in the point of view of a person with Asperger’s syndrome? Did you have any preconceived ideas about Asperger’s? Did they change?

  3. Journeys (physical and otherwise) are a prevalent theme in many of Susanna Kearsley’s bo
oks. What journeys can you identify in this book, past and present? How do they differ for female and male characters?

  4. Mary takes “Mistress Jamieson” as a role model. “She closed her eyes a moment…and allowed the poise and grace of Mistress Jamieson to settle round her shoulders like a robe before she turned.” Is there anyone you use as a role model in this way? Why do you think it’s helpful?

  5. Why does Mistress Jamieson teach Mary the cipher?

  6. Susanna Kearsley has said, “Never underestimate the power of an animal to reveal character within the story.” How does the dog Frisque further the plot? What does Frisque tell us about Mary? About Hugh? In the present, how does the cat Diablo serve these purposes?

  7. I fear the man across the street… What did you think of MacPherson when he is first introduced? Did you have him pegged as a hero? If not, when did you begin to change your mind? When did Mary stop fearing Hugh? When did you? Can you identify what makes you feel safe or not safe around someone?

  8. Hugh was a man of his time. If he lived in the present, what sort of job would he have? What role in society would he fill?

  9. Compare the meeting of Mary and Hugh with the meeting of Sara and Luc.

  10. It is Luc who points out to Sara that Hugh has fallen for Mary, long before she realizes it: “A woman can start with a man she might find unattractive and slowly begin to see good in him, grow into love with him, but this is not how it happens with men. We’re much simpler.” Do you agree?

  11. In fiction, as in life, what people appear to be may differ from what they are. While Hugh first appears as a sinister character, “Jacques” appears to be a charming gentleman, but is he? Do you think Thompson is a good man or a bad man?

  12. By “seeing” the story as it unfolds in the past, the reader is not only a step ahead, but also often has more knowledge than Sara as she deciphers the journal. How did this affect your reading of the story in the present?

  13. If you’re familiar with Susanna Kearsley’s writing, you may recognize a number of references to characters, both in the past and the present, whom the author has introduced in other novels. Did you recognize anyone? (Hint: Characters also seen in The Winter Sea, Mariana, The Splendour Falls, Season of Storms, and The Firebird.)

  A Note of Thanks

  No book of mine is ever written without the help of a number of people. It might take a book of its own to thank all of them, but here are some who deserve special mention:

  I’m grateful to Catherine Heymann and Jacques Chiaffrino, my hosts for my time in Chatou, who graciously allowed me to use their Maison de Chatou as the model for my Maison des Marroniers; and to their neighbors, Colette and Marcel Saby, for allowing their house to be Luc’s for this novel.

  I owe a great debt to the film director and writer Franco Amurri and his wife, Heidi, who generously helped arrange for my personal tour of the Palazzo Balestra—the former palace of King James VIII in Rome—and to Veronica Schiavulli and Oscar Garibaldi of Volpes Case, for being my guides through that building and showing me all of the corridors, stairways, and rooms they were able to.

  I’m also indebted beyond measure to Edward Corp, professor of British history at the University of Toulouse. Not only for his books A Court in Exile: The Stuarts in France, 1689–1718 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), The Jacobites at Urbino: An Exiled Court in Transition (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), and The Stuarts in Italy, 1719–1766: A Royal Court in Permanent Exile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), all of which have proven invaluable to me in my research, but also for his great kindness in sending me his personal photographs of King James’s rooms, which Professor Corp took on his own private tour of the Palazzo Balestra in 2011, and which included brilliant color images of the painted ceilings in the king’s gallery and cabinet.

  And finally, as ever, my thanks to my mother, who, born with a natural editor’s eye, always makes my books better.

  About the Author

  New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Susanna Kearsley is known for her meticulous research and exotic settings from Russia to France to Cornwall, which not only entertain her readers, but also give her a great reason to travel. Her lush writing has been compared to Mary Stewart, Daphne du Maurier, and Diana Gabaldon. She hit the bestseller lists in the United States with The Winter Sea and The Rose Garden, both RITA finalists and winners of RT Reviewers’ Choice Awards, and won the RITA in 2014 for her novel The Firebird. Other honors include National Readers’ Choice Awards, the prestigious Catherine Cookson Fiction Prize, and finaling for the UK’s Romantic Novel of the Year Award. Her popular and critically acclaimed books are available in translation in more than twenty countries and as audiobooks. She lives in Canada, near the shores of Lake Ontario.