Desperate Fortune

by Susanna Kearsley

  Denise told Luc, “With you, it’s never something that I take for granted.”

  Luc grinned and took a tea towel in his hands to dry them as he looked to me for help. “Was I not being nice?”

  “You were. He was,” I told Denise.

  I couldn’t catch the nuance of the look he sent her then, but I assumed it held a hint of vindication or was smug, because she knocked him down a peg with, “Well, just see that it continues while she’s here.”

  Again he looked to me. “You’re here how long?”

  I didn’t know for certain. “It depends. A few weeks, probably. Perhaps a month.”

  Luc told Denise, “I’m sure I can behave well that long. Noah, I’m not sure of. He’ll be after her to help him practice English all the time.”

  “He’d do better,” said Denise, “to have her help him practice his own grammar. Sara speaks French really well.”

  Luc’s smile was brief to match his nod. “Yes, I did notice.”

  It surprised me just a little when he said that, because from the moment I’d addressed the cat in French I’d ceased to notice we were speaking in that language—I’d been more wrapped up in following the conversation. The cat himself had obviously tired of the attention I was showing him, and with a stretch he slipped down from the chair, rubbed past my legs to mark me as his new possession, then stalked off with purpose into the salon.

  Denise said, “Now he’s had his breakfast, he’ll be off to have his morning nap. He likes the softer chairs.”

  “And warm croissants,” Luc added, coming back again into the dining room with plate and cup in hand to set a place for himself at the table.

  It was eight o’clock now, properly. The light was changing, brightening, the soft blue world beyond the leaded windows turning violet and then lavender with pink around its edges, very beautiful. It turned the little beveled shapes between the squares of window glass to diamond drops that glittered round the room like tiny jewels. It showed me, too, more details of the view of the back garden: bare-branched trees and what appeared to be a high hedge all around it, with the silhouettes of a small scattering of rooftops showing over that and close behind.

  “Which house is yours?” I asked Luc without thinking what reason I might have for wanting to know.

  “That one there, at the end of the lane.”

  I could see little more than the peak of a roof and the bump of a chimney. It didn’t look large.

  “I am two steps away,” he said. “And just behind, that’s the house where Diablo lives.”

  “How does his owner mistreat him?”

  He looked at me and raised one eyebrow slightly in a move that, while it spoiled his facial symmetry, was nonetheless attractive. “Pardon?”

  “You said the treatment he got here was better.”

  “Ah. Yes, well, he isn’t mistreated so much as neglected.”

  “Neglect is a form of abuse, surely.”

  Claudine Pelletier spoke up from the salon behind me as she made her way through from the entry hall. “I agree, but tell me, whom are you discussing?” She was simply dressed this morning in a finely knitted roll-neck sweater and a pair of jeans, but though her clothes were not much different from my own she looked more elegant. I put it down to how she moved, with easy unselfconscious grace.

  Denise replied, “Diablo. He’s been making a nuisance of himself this morning, as usual, and Luc has been defending him, as usual.”

  Luc told her, “I wasn’t defending him.” Then turned to me once again to confirm the facts. “Was I defending him?”

  “No, you were saying he couldn’t be trusted.”

  Luc nodded as though vindicated. “There you see? She speaks the perfect truth.”

  His statement sobered me for reasons he would not have understood. I looked away, and met Claudine’s small smile.

  “Denise informed me you spoke French,” she said, “but I didn’t expect that you’d speak it so well. I’m surprised your cousin didn’t mention it.”

  “It wasn’t a requirement of the job. At least, it was my understanding that the diary—or the part that’s not in cipher—is in English. Is that right?”

  “Yes. There is a single entry that begins the diary, all in English, so one would expect the cipher will be based in English also.”

  Denise, setting down a bowl of fresh fruit salad on the table, asked me, “Could you solve it if it were in French?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “What’s this?” Luc looked from one face to another, his one eyebrow raised a fraction in the same way it had been before. “What am I missing? What’s all this about a diary?”

  Claudine told him, in the briefest terms. His eyebrow lifted higher and he looked at me.

  “So this is quite a skill you have. A gift.”

  “I’m not a professional.”

  Claudine said, “Even so, you must have done very well to win Alistair’s confidence. He can be hard to impress. He is…” Pausing for thought, she half turned as my cousin came into the dining room, looking her usual smartly dressed self in the wake of her shower. Switching smoothly to English, Claudine told her, “I was just speaking of Alistair and of his drive for perfection. How would you describe him?”

  “A thorn in my side,” Jacqui said with a smile, as she greeted Claudine with the double kiss. “Sorry I’m late.” When she reached to shake Luc’s hand across the wide table and wish him good morning as well, it reminded me I hadn’t yet washed my hands after petting the cat. I excused myself, using the moment to step out of everyone’s way and enjoy the warm peace of the kitchen.

  It was the best kind of a kitchen—high ceilinged, with dark wood beams holding the plaster above, and a scrubbed stone floor under my feet, and tall multipaned windows to let in the light. On one wall an old fireplace, painted the same rich cream color as most of the walls and the cupboards, spoke of the age of the house and the time when that hearth would have been used instead of the enameled cooker—venerable itself, and likely wood-burning, but clearly still in use from the two pots that steamed and bubbled on its cast iron surface.

  There were modern appliances, too, and a TV tucked off to one side on the worktop, but I liked the fireplace and old-fashioned cooker the best. I could happily have eaten breakfast here, amid the clutter of utensils at the sturdy-looking table in the center of the room, but from the scrape of chair legs and the clink of tableware I knew that everyone was taking up their places in the dining room and I would have to join them.

  The table in the dining room was long and could have seated ten if called upon to do it, but there were only five places set. Ordinarily I would have picked the chair that had me facing Jacqui, for I found it easier to have her face to focus on if I felt overwhelmed in conversations, but this morning I sat down beside her, focusing instead on Luc.

  His eyes were very blue.

  The conversation had moved on while I’d been in the kitchen. The talk was all in English now, so Jacqui was included, though Denise appeared to find it fairly challenging to follow what was being said.

  Claudine, in her educated English, was attempting to explain to Luc the background of the Jacobite community in France and how they’d come to live in exile here, with agents from the government in England sent to spy on them.

  I would have found it incredibly difficult, living like that—never knowing if one of your friends had been threatened or bought off and turned to the enemy’s side, or if even your family could truly be trusted. The spies, from all that Alistair had told me, had been everywhere. Somebody’s servant or cousin or priest and confessor could be in the pay of the English King George and his government, opening letters and selling off secrets.

  And if one was caught, the results, on both sides, could be deadly.

  The levels of spying and counterintelligence had caught my interest s
o deeply I’d spent the past week or so reading about them, until I knew most of the spies’ and the spymasters’ names—could have probably spotted them, from their descriptions, had I been alive back then. This was just part of the way my brain processed things: nothing by half measures. Every new interest became an obsession.

  But at least it meant I could contribute to this conversation over breakfast, filling in a detail that Claudine could not remember, and then going on to properly set out the full chronology of what had happened after King James moved his shadow court to Rome, and those who had been left behind had struggled in the wake of the Queen Mother’s death to keep up their community at Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

  The first time Jacqui kicked my ankle I assumed she’d done it by mistake, but when she did it for a second time I realized what I was doing. I reined in my thoughts, put a check on my monologue, and was self-consciously searching for some way to back out with some shred of dignity when Jacqui smiled reassurance.

  “You’re going to have me looking over my shoulder,” she told me, “with all of this talk about traitors and spies.”

  “I’m sorry. I do tend to ramble on a bit.”

  Across the table, Luc Sabran looked from my cousin’s face to mine. “You don’t need to apologize. Go on, I find it interesting. I didn’t know this history.”

  All throughout my monologue Denise had kept herself in nearly constant motion, back and forth between the kitchen and her own seat next to Luc. She said to Jacqui now, in careful English, “While Sara is here with us she must go visit the château.”

  My cousin, smiling still, said, “Sara will most likely be too busy with her work to do much touring.”

  Luc shrugged and raised his coffee cup to drink. “Perhaps that is a thing for Sara to decide.”

  It seemed to me he held her gaze a moment longer than he needed to. For a moment, even though I knew it was ridiculous, I almost thought I felt a trace of tension in the air between them.

  Claudine smoothly cut across it with a comment aimed at me. “But yes, of course, today is Sunday and you’ve only just arrived. Perhaps you’d like to visit Saint-Germain-en-Laye?”

  “Or we could maybe take a walk around Chatou?” suggested Jacqui.

  All the faces turned towards me made me feel uncomfortably the center of attention, and I couldn’t give an answer because honestly I didn’t know what choice to make or whom to please or what they all expected me to say.

  Luc asked, “What would you like to do?”

  Direct and simple, in a tone that brought my gaze round to the perfect angles of his features, and to those blue eyes that in that moment seemed to anchor me.

  I found my voice with ease then. And I looked from Luc to Claudine and I said in total honesty, “I’d like to get to work.”

  Chapter 7

  Then shall the traveler come…

  —Macpherson, “Temora,” Book Two

  Chatou

  January 23, 1732

  The house where they had passed the night was large and grand with many rooms, yet Mary had awakened feeling restless. She had taken Frisque outdoors but it had been too cold to stay there, and since Nicolas seemed to be in no hurry to depart she had been left with little option but to find some way to pass the time within this house of strangers.

  They were pleasant strangers, certainly. The master of the house, Sir Redmond Everard, had welcomed both her brother and herself on their arrival with as much warmth as if they had been his family, and had fed and entertained them all the evening with so little inconvenience that one would have thought they were expected guests. Sir Redmond was an Irishman of middle age whose educated voice held little trace of the same accent as the blacksmith’s Irish wife’s in Chanteloup-les-Vignes. It was not clear to Mary how he’d come to know her brother, but she’d gathered from their conversation they had many friends in common at the former court of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, among the exiles, though Sir Redmond had come over much more recently than most. She’d gathered, too, he had left an estate of worth behind him in Ireland, for his manners were the manners of a gentleman by birth, and all the things within his house were very fine.

  She liked his drawing room the best. Not for the carpets and tapestry hangings and wainscoting, nor for the richness of furnishings—walnut-tree tables, and chairs with stuffed cushions and footstools, and even a cage with a red-breasted linnet whose twittering song had enlivened the evening while Mary and Nicolas had sat with Sir Redmond and his wife playing at cards. No, she liked the room best for its books: seven shelves of them, carefully dusted and ordered by binding and looking, to her, like a wonderland.

  There had been few books in her uncle’s house: a Bible, and a book of plays by Molière that she and all her cousins had delighted in performing of an evening, with appropriate theatrics; three English sermons purchased by her uncle to help Mary practice reading in her native language, and two books by the Countess d’Aulnoy—one her famous novel of the Count of Douglas, and the other a collection of enchanting fairy tales that had delighted Mary until her Aunt Magdalene had one day found her reading them and promptly had reclaimed the book from Mary’s hands with the remark, “These are not meant for children.”

  She’d obeyed her aunt, of course, until she’d reached her sixteenth birthday, when she’d judged herself to be grown-up enough to read the fairy tales. She’d learned them all by heart, and in the nighttime with her cousin Colette close beside her in the bed they shared, she would recite them and embellish them, and when she had told all the Countess d’Aulnoy’s tales she started to invent her own, of princes and forbidden love, enchanted lands and twists of fate and such romantic tragedy that often at the end of them Colette would be in tears.

  One night last November, when Mary had finished a story, Colette had remarked, “You must marry a man who will take you to Paris, for you could charm the writers of the great salons with your own tales, and I could charm the men who came to listen, and so find a wealthy husband of my own.”

  That had long been Mary’s dream as well, but she was practical. “It will be the other way about, for you will marry before I do.”

  “Why?” Colette had asked. “You are the elder.”

  Mary had explained with patience, “I am not your sister. And your parents will have need to see you settled with a husband and a dowry before giving thought to me.”

  “Then I must set myself at once to win the heart of the Chevalier de Vilbray,” Colette had said, not all in jest. “I saw him riding to the hunt today. He is in truth as handsome as they say he is. Perhaps one day he’ll meet me in the woods, as the prince met the peasant girl in tonight’s tale, and fall madly in love with me.”

  Mary, who at that time had not yet seen the chevalier, had allowed herself to daydream of chance meetings in the woods with him herself. She’d smiled. “Well, if he sweeps you up onto his horse the way the prince did to the peasant girl, I trust you’ll sweep yourself back down, for such encounters rarely end so well in life as they do in the fairy tales. Real men are not so chivalrous.”

  “I’ll not permit you to be cynical. You cannot tell the tales you tell and not believe in chivalry.”

  “I do. But the Chevalier de Vilbray—”

  “—will make a charming husband,” Colette had completed Mary’s sentence. “And when we are married, he will carry me to Paris and I’ll bring you with me, and you’ll be the new sensation of the literary salons. You will be adored by all and have so many famous lovers and so many grand adventures that your memoirs, as you write them, will run into several volumes, all of which of course you’ll dedicate to me. Now,” she’d said, “tell me the ending again, where the prince reappears when the princess was sure he’d abandoned her, for that is my favorite part, and I’ll try not to weep.”

  It had seemed strange to Mary last night in this house in Chatou to sleep all by herself in a bed, without Colette be
side her. And she knew that it would have been equally strange for Colette.

  When Mary had said her good-byes before driving away in the closed chaise with Nicolas, Colette had hugged her the hardest. And late last night when Mary had retrieved a nightgown from her portmanteau she’d found a parcel wrapped in paper nestled in the neatly folded clothes, addressed in pencil in her cousin’s careful writing: For your memoirs.

  It had been a book with all its pages blank, exactly like the one in which her uncle kept household accounts, with cloth boards and a leather spine, and with it had been a cylindrical traveling pen set, the ink well and talc in small sections that screwed one on top of the other beneath the long section that held three plain quill pens with neatly carved nibs.

  An extravagant gift, and had Colette attempted to give it before she had gone Mary wouldn’t have taken it, knowing how much the small pen set alone must have cost. But last night she had held it and been grateful for the sentiment behind the gesture, and the small connection that it gave her to the place she’d left behind, and she had brought both book and pen set down this morning with her to Sir Redmond’s drawing room, where she sat now, the book laid open to its first page while she wrote the details of her journey here with Nicolas.

  For if she was in truth to have adventures, she decided, that was where they should most properly begin.

  Frisque did not like to be ignored. When Mary had first started writing, he had flopped upon the carpet on his back with all four feet up in his most engaging attitude, attempting to convince her that he needed her attention, and when that had failed he’d alternately pounced upon her shoes and tugged and worried at the hemline of her gown until she’d met his needs halfway by rolling, with her foot, his favorite wooden ball across the floor so he could chase it and retrieve it. She could do this without thinking, because Frisque retrieved things brilliantly. Each time the ball rolled off across the carpet he would hunt for it quite happily, tail wagging, bring it back and lay it down exactly at the right spot near her foot so she could kick it out again.