Desperate Fortune

by Susanna Kearsley

  Hector had brought me his toy, and I dealt with it absently, sorting the chain of events in my mind. “But I thought that you couldn’t become king, if you were a Catholic.”

  “That law wasn’t written yet. Nor would it be, for another few years. But you’re right, it presented a problem. The last time a Catholic had ruled them, a century earlier, things hadn’t gone all that well for the Protestants, and there were many in England and Scotland who felt fair uneasy with James on the throne. The only thing that calmed them was the knowledge that the crown would pass to one of James’s grown daughters, both good Protestants. But then his second wife, who like her husband was a Catholic, had a son, who having had the fortune and the sense to be born male, would take the place of his half sisters and become the heir. A Catholic heir. Those who had bided their time knew they’d have to take action. The elder of James’s two daughters was married to William of Orange, a man of ambition,” he said, “and a Protestant.”

  “Wait.” I was vaguely remembering things from a long-ago history class. “Is this the Glorious Revolution?”

  Alistair Scott answered, drily, “For some, aye, it might have been glorious. But not for James. A committee of nobles sent word into Holland, to William of Orange, inviting him to come and rule them as king, with his wife Mary as queen. William came, there was fighting, and James—no doubt mindful of what had become of his father—made certain his wife and their wee son were safely sent out of the country, to France, where his cousin the king would protect them. And then he did what he had done as a lad; what his brother had done when the times were against them: he followed his family to exile.”

  My cousin thought James should have stayed to fight. “Think of how different things might have been if he had stayed.”

  “Aye, he might have ended up a little shorter, like his father.”

  “No, really,” said Jacqui. “It wasn’t the best thing to do. If he’d stayed, then his enemies couldn’t have claimed he’d abandoned his kingdom, and William and Mary could never have ruled in his place, and—”

  I said, “You don’t know that. It might have changed nothing.”

  Jacqui wasn’t swayed. “A king should never run away.”

  I didn’t continue to argue, because I saw Jacqui was doing that thing with her mouth again, being defensive. But Alistair Scott either hadn’t yet learned when my cousin was digging her heels in, or else it didn’t bother him.

  “The problem is,” he said, “we want our kings to act like kings, and not like men. King James the Seventh was a man. He had a wife and newborn baby to protect, and he was being asked to fight his own grown daughters, who had taken sides against him. He had seen, firsthand and vividly, the damage that a civil war could do, not only to himself and those he cared for, but to the whole country and its common people. Better he should spare them that and bide a while in France, until the storm had all blown over. It had worked before. I’ve no doubt James expected the same thing would happen this time.”

  “But it didn’t,” I remarked.

  “It didn’t, no.” I wasn’t good at judging tones of voice. I only knew that his had changed. He threw the soft red cylinder a little farther this time, and the dog raced gamely after it. “But he wasn’t on his own in France. The people who stayed loyal to him—Jacobites, they called themselves, from Jacobus, the Latin word for James—they fought with him and bled with him and when he fled, they followed him. The bulk of them, at first, were Irish Catholics, but the Scots were there as well, and even English. It came down,” he said, “to what a man believed. What made a king? The will of God, or Acts of Parliament? For Jacobites, the answer was a simple one. A king was born a king, and nothing men could write on paper could undo that. So when James the Seventh died, his son, to them, became the rightful king: King James the Eighth of Scotland, and the Third of England also. And with each new attempt they made to set him on his throne again, their ranks in exile swelled, as men were outlawed for their loyalty to James and came across to join his shadow court at Saint-Germain-en-Laye.”

  He used the proper French pronunciation, San Zher-MAN en Lay, but I really only registered that briefly.

  My imagination had been fully captured by the image of a shadow court—a castle with its king and all his courtiers who were real, yet without substance, moving always as a mirror to their counterparts across the sea.

  “That’s near Chatou,” he said, “the place where you’ll be going. Where the diary of Mary Dundas is.”

  “So then,” I said, getting my dates straight, “it would have been James the Eighth ruling the Jacobites when she was writing that diary? The baby whose birth was the cause of the war?”

  “Aye.”

  I looked to the long winter shadows that stretched past our feet from the trees at our backs, and I tried to imagine a girl at that long-ago shadow court. “You still haven’t told me,” I said, “why the diary’s so valuable.” And for a writer who claimed that he wrote about ordinary people, his lecture so far had been mostly about kings and queens. When I pointed this out to him, Alistair Scott turned to look at me, smiling as though I had somehow amused him.

  “It has, aye,” he said. “And you’ve answered your own question there, in a fashion.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Well now, history is not just the tale of the victors,” he said. “It’s the tale of the privileged. The men in the mud of the battlefield didn’t leave much of a story behind, and the stories they did tell were mostly ignored or forgotten. The papers and documents that have survived are the ones that were deemed worth preserving, not always the ones that would be of most interest to someone like me. But this diary of Mary Dundas is a treasure because she was no one important. Her father was one of the wig makers at Saint-Germain, and her mother was French—we know that much, at least, from the baptism registers. And it appears that, at some point, young Mary was sent to her mother’s relations, because when her diary begins—and it starts in plain writing, not cipher—she’s on her way back with her brother, to Saint-Germain, coming to live with the Jacobites there. So not only will she be recording the day-to-day life of the common folk at Saint-Germain, she’ll be doing it with the keen eye of an outsider. That’s why her journal’s so valuable to me.”

  I nodded. “I see.” And I did see. The girl in that shadow court had her own shape, now. Her own voice, which I could restore to her.

  I let my gaze travel over the green of the Common to where a quaint pub stood at one of the far corners, with a tall Christmas tree set up in front of it, cheerful in tinsel and lights, a reminder that Christmas itself was a week and a half away. Christmas, that time of new hope born of winter, when someone like Alistair Scott might imagine it possible to share that rebirth himself.

  Second chances, I thought, as my gaze shifted slightly to Hector, the dog who’d been branded as useless but rescued because one man firmly believed that a life shouldn’t be cast aside. And although I had never seen Calum MacCrae, much less met him, I suddenly very much wanted to see his works knocked off the bestseller lists by this new book of Alistair Scott’s.

  I asked, “When would you need me to go to Chatou?”

  “Well, as soon as you feel you could—”

  “Boxing Day. Would that be soon enough?”

  With that decided, my cousin said, “Brilliant.” She looked at the pub, too. “I’m actually starting to feel a bit cold…”

  “Aye, this standing around isn’t good for a body.” And whistling to Hector, the Scotsman said cheerfully, “Let’s have a walk in the woods.”

  Chapter 3

  Another sport is drawing near: it is like the dark rolling of that wave on the coast.

  —Macpherson, “Fingal,” Book One

  Chanteloup-les-Vignes

  January 14, 1732

  It seemed on that morning to Mary Dundas that the new year intended to go on e
xactly the same as the last, bringing all the excitement, surprise, and adventure she’d come to expect in her twenty-one years: namely, none.

  She had risen at five, as she always did, for her uncle held to the advice of the physicians quoted in the work of Rabelais: “To rise at five, to dine at nine, to sup at five, to sleep at nine,” and so he’d run his household for as long as she’d been part of it.

  With the help of the maid she had dressed with her cousin Colette, as she always did, and they had talked, not of what they would actually do on that day, but of what might occur should the wind ever suddenly change its direction and blow in their favor. Perhaps then the handsome Chevalier de Vilbray who’d taken the nearby château for the hunting last autumn and stayed over Christmas would, feeling a need for companionship, come by to visit. Or maybe their other near neighbors were even now planning that musical evening they’d promised to host.

  But at breakfast, while Mary had eaten her butter and bread and fresh milk, as she always did, no invitations had come to enliven the day and no handsome young nobles had called at the door, and here she was, sitting as usual in the salon in her chair by the window with Frisque, her dog, curled on her lap, and her other two cousins, Gaspard and Jacques, idly debating some trivial point about bridges and which was the longest, and Mary felt certain that anything, anything, would be a blessed relief.

  “Does it honestly matter?” she asked Gaspard. “Surely each bridge is as long as it needs to be, and serves its purpose as well as the others.”

  Gaspard, who was four years her junior, his dark hair just recently clipped to allow for the white-powdered wig with its short sides and black-ribboned queue that he thought made him look much more serious, turned now and spoiled the effect with a grin. “That is so like you English, to judge such an intricate thing as a bridge by its function, and no other measure.”

  “How else would one measure a bridge, but by whether it does what you built it to do?” Mary countered. “And I am not English.”

  “Half English, then.”

  Colette, between them, looked up from her sewing and shook her head, setting her bright curls to dancing. “No, no, she is right. Uncle Guillaume is Scottish, not English.”

  Gaspard blew a sharp puff of air to declare the distinction irrelevant. “What does it matter which nation she claims?”

  He looked so very much the part of the young gallant then that Mary had to take great pains to hide her smile, for she was far too fond of him to wish to wound his pride. Instead, she settled one hand on the silken hair of Frisque’s warm back and felt the lazy thump-thump of the little dog’s tail on her lap. “I claim neither,” she said. “I am happily nationless.”

  Jacques, who would not be fourteen till next month but who was, without question, more thoughtful than all of them, stirred in his own chair. “You can’t be.”

  “Why not?”

  “No person can truly be nationless.”

  Mary knew otherwise. She had been born without a nation—daughter of an exile at the French court of a foreign king who had himself no country and no crown. The fact her mother had been French gave her but partial claim to call herself the same, and she had never tried to do so. Having lived these fifteen years, since she was six, within her aunt and uncle’s house, she had adopted French as her first language and adapted to the customs and the fashions of the nation, but while everybody else called her “Marie,” in her own mind she was still “Mary,” neither Scots nor French, but falling in between.

  She plainly said so to her cousins now, and Colette answered, “Silly, if you will not stand in Scotland and you will not stand in France, you will have no place left to stand but in the water that divides them.”

  To which Gaspard added slyly, “Perhaps then our talk of bridges will not bore you.”

  A swish of skirts and briskly clicking heels announced the entrance of his mother, Mary’s aunt, who asked them, “Which of you can possibly be bored on such a morning?” But she knew. Her smiling eyes went straight to Mary’s. “You have been too long indoors, I think. Come, bring Frisque. He’s half asleep, as well. We’ll take a walk together.”

  “Now? Outside?”

  “Where else?” Aunt Magdalene, once having set her mind to something, could be like a plow horse walking in a furrow—difficult to turn. And to be truthful, Mary had no great objection to a walk. If not adventurous, at least it was a welcome change of scene.

  She fetched her cloak and muff and changed her slippers for the heavy shoes that better warmed her feet while she was walking, and with Frisque at her heels she trailed after her aunt down the corridor and out the back door.

  Outside, the snow lay soft and thick beneath the sleeping vines that climbed the hill behind the line of houses. Come the spring, the sun would bring those vines to life. The vines, in turn, would bring forth vibrant clusters of the little grapes that through the summer and the autumn would enliven the whole village, giving industry and purpose to the villagers who worked towards the harvest and production of the wine that had, for centuries, provided them a living. But for now, the vines lay dormant. And they waited.

  Mary, watching Frisque circle and sniff round those leafless vines, felt once again the stir of restlessness and discontent within her breast, and fought to push it down again before her aunt could notice any change in her expression. There was little, she had learned, that could escape the keenly empathetic eye of her Aunt Magdalene.

  They walked a little distance without speaking. Mary liked the silence, and the frosted air that smelled of wood smoke, and the view that spread and grew as they climbed higher. She could see, now, clear across the tiled rooftops of their neighbors’ houses, clear past the tall spire of the pale stone church of Saint-Roch with its two great bells, across the trees that hid the roofs of the next village, Andrésy, and over the thin curving ribbon of the River Seine, to the dark forest on the shore beyond: the woods of Saint-Germain.

  “Marie, my dear,” her aunt said—using, as she always did, the French form of her niece’s name, “how much do you remember of your life before you came to us?”

  The question caught her unprepared. Surprised, she tried to gather up her thoughts and focused harder on the dark mass of the forest, at the farthest edge of which she knew, although she could not see it, stood the great Château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye—the royal castle in whose shadow she herself had been baptized.

  She said, in honesty, “I have few memories.”

  Those she had retained were like a web of lace, connected in a loose way but with gaps and holes and spaces, and so frail and insubstantial she was never sure how safe they were to trust.

  Her mother’s face had long since faded from her mind and been supplanted by the image in the portrait hanging here in the salon that showed her mother and Aunt Magdalene as they had looked before they’d both been married. Mary liked that portrait well, but there was little in the pale determined face and calm brown eyes of the young woman who had grown to be her mother that stirred any sense of recognition. It was not her mother’s face that she remembered, but the feel of her—the soft warmth of her arms, the firmer softness of her silken bodice over stays, the ever-present tickle of the ruffled lace that edged her white chemise and brushed on Mary’s cheek and upturned nose when she was snuggling on her mother’s lap.

  And there were scents, as well—a whiff of roses, or of lavender. And later still, the scents of sickness, not so pleasant to recall. And that was all the memory of her mother that was left to her. No voice, though she’d been told her mother sang, and she imagined that her mother’s voice had been much like Aunt Magdalene’s, with warm and pleasant tones that seemed to always be prepared to open easily to laughter.

  Of her brothers and her father she remembered something more, but even then, their forms and features had long blurred to indistinction, and their words and voices were reduced to whispers in a language she
now rarely used herself, despite her uncle’s stoic efforts to make sure she did not lose her English. “Any foreign language,” so Uncle Jacques had told her, “is an asset in this world. It will expand your opportunities.”

  He’d bought her English books, and when the local blacksmith had gone off to Amsterdam and come home with an Irish wife, then Uncle Jacques had happily employed her as a tutor, not to Mary on her own but all the children. Only Mary, though, who’d spoken English for her first six years of life, had truly profited from this arrangement. Colette, Mary’s cousin, had no ear for learning languages, and both Gaspard and young Jacques had been too distracted by the fresh blond beauty of the blacksmith’s Irish wife to pay attention to their lessons.

  Still, the end result had been that Mary, though she spoke in French, could switch to English when she needed to with hardly any accent. And she could at least put meaning to the words that she recalled her father saying, when he’d brought her here to leave her for the final time.

  “Now, Mary,” he had told her, “be a good lass for your uncle and your aunt, and mind the manners you’ve been taught, and use the sense that you’ve been given, and I promise you, you’ll have a better life here than I ever could have given you.”

  At least, that’s what she thought he’d said. The years, perhaps, had rearranged his words and phrased them into a more sentimental speech within her memory, the same memory that insisted she’d replied to him, “I want to stay with you.” And that his thumb had brushed a tear from her hot cheek, and he had said, “We do not always get the things we want.”