Desperate Fortune

by Susanna Kearsley

  Thomson said, “Nor will you, from the look of it.” He smiled as he watched Effie settle herself in a chair with her charges, cradling the baby in the crook of one elbow while the toddling girl climbed to her lap to be held with the other arm. “You do that very gracefully, madam.”

  “I’ve had much practice.”

  The mother asked her, “Have you many children of your own?”

  “I only had the one, God rest her soul, but I have been a nurse to many.”

  “Then,” the mother said to Mary, “you must start a family soon, so she’ll have children she can care for.”

  Mary faintly smiled and looked away. Her wandering gaze fell on MacPherson, sitting looking at the mantel of the kitchen hearth, and in English she remarked, “You’re very quiet, Mr. Jarvis.”

  His glance slid briefly sideways, as though waiting for there to be a point to that comment, and when none was provided he looked back to the mantel. “She should wind her clock.”

  Mary hadn’t noticed the clock, to be honest. It wasn’t a large one—a wooden-cased table clock with a small handle on top and a face edged with brass. When she translated MacPherson’s comment for their hostess, the young woman said, “Oh, I know. It was my mother’s, but it’s broken, it no longer works. It used to have a lovely chime.”

  Distilling this to English for MacPherson, Mary only said, “It’s broken.”

  And he nodded, losing interest.

  Mary nearly asked if he could fix it, as he’d fixed the watch at Mâcon, but his face didn’t invite questions. Instead, she turned her focus to her own concerns.

  There was her gown to sponge and clean; her stockings to be mended where they’d torn when she fell running to the ground. And after that, she took her journal out and brought it up to date as best she could from the last time she’d written, through their day of walking in the rain and their most welcome sojourn in the hillside town—whose name, she had since learned, had been Joyeuse, a name of happiness—and all of their encounter with the wolf, that led to where they were today.

  We are to spend another night here. Mr. M— claims it is to confound any who have sought to follow us, but I believe it is because I slightly hurt my ankle in my fall and he would let me rest a little longer before I must face a full day’s walk on it.

  She had no rational foundation for that curious belief, nor could she think of any reason why MacPherson might have gone against his nature so completely as to change his plans so she could be more comfortable, but more and more she felt it must be so.

  He’d gone out late that morning with his gun in hand, returning with a brace of rabbits and an observation. “They have a mule in the barn,” he’d told Thomson. “Ask if they would sell it.”

  And with the deal done and the money exchanged, Thomson had said with pleasure, “At last we’ll have something to carry our baggage.”

  “It’s carrying her.” With a curt nod at Mary, the Scotsman had set Thomson straight.

  Mary, thinking it imprudent to say anything, had bent her head a little closer to her journal and continued writing her new fairy tale about a huntsman and a wolf, in which the wolf was magic, and the huntsman not at all what he appeared to be.

  But she’d asked Effie afterwards, while they had worked together to tuck in the blankets of their bed, “Are all men of the Highlands so unfathomable?”

  “Some.” Effie smiled slightly, then grew serious. “And some like him, who’ve seen the wars, have depths we’ll never reach or know.”

  “How do you know he’s been to war?”

  “It’s in the eyes,” said Effie, very quietly. “It changes them. They go to war as boys and are made men too soon, too violently, and all of them return with something lost, with something missing. You can see it in their eyes.”

  Mary had thought about this later, when MacPherson’s eyes had briefly met her own while they’d been sitting with the others after supper by the kitchen fire, the children all in bed except the baby who, resisting sleep, was cradled still in Effie’s arms.

  The mother said, by way of an apology, “He does not like to sleep, this one. He is afraid he’ll miss something.”

  “I nursed a child like that, once,” Effie said. “Always watching, always thinking, with a mind that would not rest.”

  “It must be difficult,” the mother said, “to leave the children you have cared for.”

  Effie, looking down upon the baby, started rocking gently in her chair. “They have their own lives, in the end. They grow, and they forget.”

  Mr. MacPherson, Mary thought, had not forgotten. She was watching him when Effie began singing softly to the baby in their Highland language, and she saw his eyelids close for just a second as though he’d had something pain him from within, and Mary wondered whether his own mother had perhaps once sung him that same lullaby.

  But when the song had finished and she said—in English, so he’d be included in the conversation—“That was very pretty,” he surprised her more than he had ever done.

  He smiled.

  As smiles went, it was but slight and did not show his teeth, but it did carve a line much like a dimple down his cheek and made his face look younger. “That,” he told her, “was the ‘Griogal Cridhe,’ a widow’s lament about seeing her husband beheaded.”

  Mary was still too surprised by that smile to respond, but it didn’t keep Thomson from commenting, also in English, “And this is the sort of thing mothers will sing to their children, then, up in the Highlands? To teach them that life’s full of treachery?”

  Shrugging, MacPherson said, “Or where to seek their revenge.”

  Effie, still rocking the baby, directed her words to the Scotsman. “Shall I sing a song better matched to your mood, then?”

  The shadow of the smile still lingered on his lips as he returned the older woman’s gaze, his own more of a dare, thought Mary, than an invitation.

  But when Effie started singing this time, nothing of the smile survived. MacPherson sat in silence with his gaze cast downward, fixed upon the hard edge of the table, and when Effie’s voice had sung the final note he looked at her, and Mary thought she saw within his eyes the lost and missing things that Effie had been speaking of. Or rather, she could see the hollow places they had left behind.

  He stood, and without speaking, went outside.

  Soon after that they heard the steady striking of an ax blade chopping wood, and Thomson, attempting to lighten the mood, said to Effie, “Another beheading song, was it?”

  The baby had fallen asleep now, and Effie replied in soft tones, “The lament of a warrior for his dead comrades and those whom he loved who lie cold in the ground and unable to comfort his wounds while he wanders alone and unloved. Fada atà mise an déidh chàich, it begins, and in English the verse would be: ‘I have lived too long after the others, and the world yet troubles me, and there are none left to talk to,’” she said, “‘of the lives we once had, in the time before.’”

  The past, Mary thought, was itself a great predator, chasing you always behind in a tireless pursuit so you ran from it, or lying ever in wait for you, ready to sink its sharp teeth in the spots where it knew you were weakest.

  She tried to stay sociable out of regard for their host and his wife, who were both lovely people with kind and good hearts and seemed honestly glad to have been thus imposed upon, having four new mouths to feed and their household disrupted, because it had brought them new company.

  Indeed they were so generous and so keen to please that Thomson had to do no more than mention his enjoyment of warmed wine for them to hang a pot upon the hearth and start to heat some. But when all the cups were handed round and their host ladled out one more and said, “I will just take this to your man, for it is cold outside and he is doing all my work,” then Mary without thinking set her own cup down and rose and said, “I’ll take it to him.”
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  It was cold outside, and clear, the waxing moon just past its quarter in the starry bowl of black night sky. She’d heard the ax fall when she stepped outside, but now she only heard the murmur of the dark wind through the trees that rose around the edges of this little patch of field and farmland. She could see the stump, and all the chips of wood around it, but she could not see MacPherson.

  When the furtive sound came close behind her, Mary reacted as anyone might who had just been attacked by a wolf, and wheeled suddenly round.

  “Do not strike me.” MacPherson gave the warning in a calm tone not unlike the one he’d used to tell her those same words the morning he’d first said them to her, when he had surprised her in the kitchen of the house in Paris. Now, as then, she let her raised hand fall, dismayed to find that in her sudden movement she had spilled a good part of the wine upon the ground.

  Carrying on past her, he set the short section of log he was carrying on its cut end on the stump, and adjusting his grip on the ax handle swung the ax round in a sure, measured blow. He had taken off his coat and was in shirt and waistcoat, and his white sleeves had a ghostly appearance. He glanced at the cup in her hand and asked, “Was that for me?”

  “It was.” Mary looked down. “I can fill it again.”

  But he held out his hand for it as it was, acknowledging her action with the curt nod that was also, so she’d learned, how he expressed his thanks. Which nudged her to remember her own manners.

  “I’ve not thanked you yet for what you did. For saving me and Frisque,” she told him. “Thank you.”

  He drained the cup. Handed it back to her. “Do it again and I’m shooting the dog,” he advised her. “I telt ye that he would be trouble.”

  “You did.” Crossing her arms to keep off the chill wind she confided, “I’m thinking of leaving him here.”

  She knew that MacPherson, who did not speak French, would have not heard Frisque’s story on either occasion she told it, and so she repeated it now for him, adding, “He loves being here with the children. He thinks he’s come home.”

  He said nothing. Another log splintered and split on the stump underneath the strong force of his ax.

  “Anyway,” Mary said, “he’s an old dog, I’ve no right to drag him around for my own sake. He will be much safer and happier here. And these people are good. They will care for him.”

  “And if he pines for ye?”

  “No fear of that. I am easy to leave.” Mary looked skyward, at all the innumerable stars in the blackness. “And easier still to forget.” She wasn’t sure why she had said that. It sounded so small and so sad, and she hastened to hide what it might have revealed by diverting his focus. “Which way is your home from here?”

  “What?”

  She said, “Scotland. Where is it?”

  He stopped work a moment and holding the ax at his side turned his own head up, searching the stars with the eyes of a man long accustomed to finding his way by them. “There.” With his free arm he pointed and Mary looked too, to the land that her father had left long ago, long before he’d left her for the same cause—to follow his king.

  “Do you miss it?” she asked.

  It was so long before he replied that she thought he was simply ignoring the question, as he often did, but at last in a level voice he said, “There’s nothing to miss.” Then he turned. “You are cold. Go inside.”

  Mary knew he was cold as well, cold to the core, and whatever he’d seen in his youth was the cause of it, and in that moment she wanted to tell him how sorry she was for whatever he’d lost. That she knew what it was to be lonely. But nothing in his face or stance was inviting compassion, and Mary well knew there were some things so broken they could not be mended with words.

  So she nodded and turned and went in.

  She did not know when he came in, for she was in her bed already and asleep, but in the night she woke and turned and felt the blankets cold beside her feet where Frisque was wont to sleep, and realized that the dog was with the children once again, and as she lay there feeling empty at the knowledge she had lost the one companion she had thought would never leave her, and yet trying to be happy for his happiness, she heard the fall of footsteps in the kitchen and the now familiar sound MacPherson’s swords made when he took them from their belts and laid them to the side.

  Next morning when she woke she found MacPherson sleeping upright in a chair, his head leaned back against the kitchen wall, his legs outstretched in front of him. A stump of candle sat within a small dish on the table, and on the kitchen mantel sat the clock, now ticking rhythmically. And on the hour, to the delight of all the children and their mother, it began to chime.

  “We could have had the mule for nothing, after that,” said Thomson, as they gathered their things after breakfast, preparing to leave. But they’d paid fairly for the mule, enough to let the family buy another to replace it in the spring, when they would need it for their plowing. And standing saddled at the door and waiting for them patiently, it was a welcome sight to Mary, for her ankle had begun to ache.

  Her heart ached more. She watched the children gathering round Frisque to say good-bye to him, and saw his joyful, wagging tail, and she was well aware of what she ought to do and say, and of the choice she ought to make, but it was very difficult.

  She felt MacPherson watching her, his hard gaze steady on her face. He slung the gun case on his back and looked from Frisque to Mary, and he told her simply, “Call him.”

  Mary looked at him, not understanding, knowing that her anguish must be showing in her eyes.

  He said again, more slowly, “Call him.”

  Mary could have told him that it was no use, that she had called her father back and it had made no difference, that if something once desired to leave you it was lost already and forever. But she yielded to the pressure of those unrelenting eyes, and cleared her throat, and called out, “Frisque.”

  The dog’s ears perked, and his head turned towards her, and he left the children and came bounding over happily to paw the hemline of her skirt and ask to be picked up. She could not do it, for her eyes had filled quite suddenly and foolishly, and she feared if she moved at all those tears would fall and shame her. Without words, MacPherson scooped the spaniel up and placed him safe in Mary’s arms and lifted both of them to sit upon the mule.

  Then taking the bridle into his strong hand he remarked, “Not so easy to leave after all, it appears.”

  And they started to walk.

  Chapter 32

  Luc bent forward from where he was standing behind my chair, leaning his hands on the armrests and bringing his cheek close to mine as he read the transcribed pages over my shoulder. It usually bothered me when people hovered, invading my personal space, but with Luc it felt…nice.

  It was comforting, actually, having the warmth of him there at my back like a shield, and the press of his arms against mine was surprisingly pleasant. I might balk at the more random contact and touching that most people took in their stride as a matter of course every day, but I liked being held by the people I liked to be held by, and how Luc was touching me now felt a lot like a hug. I relaxed deeper into it, resting my head in the strong hollow curve of his shoulder and liking the freshly ironed scent of his smooth cotton shirt.

  Luc said, “He’s taking care of her.”

  “He is their bodyguard.”

  “Well, technically he’s Mr. Thomson’s bodyguard, but here you see he’s starting to care more about protecting her than Thomson.”

  He pointed a few entries back to the lines that read:

  We are to spend another night here. Mr. M— claims it is to confound any who have sought to follow us, but I believe it is because I slightly hurt my ankle in my fall and he would let me rest a little longer before I must face a full day’s walk on it. In truth he seems to disapprove my smallest movement, and when I stepped out
side on waking to dip water from the barrel there so I could wash, he came behind and took the bucket from my hands and would not let me carry it. And yet for all he shows concern, he has today been more withdrawn than I have seen him, and more sullen. Truly, never have I met a man more difficult to fathom.

  Luc maintained it wasn’t difficult at all. “She’s his Achilles’ heel. He’s fallen for her.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  He smiled at my skeptical face. “It’s OK, you won’t see it because you’re a woman. 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,” he told me. “We see and we want.”

  I was still unconvinced, so my tone sounded dry. “Really?”

  “Really. This bodyguard would have found Mary attractive the first time he saw her in Paris, I promise you, and he’d have wanted her right from that moment, those feelings won’t change. But how much he wants her, the strength of his feelings—he may not have realized this till he was watching her run from that wolf.”

  I sorted this out. “So he’s been in love with her all along, but he didn’t know he was in love with her until the moment he thought he might lose her?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re saying men aren’t complicated?”

  “We see and we want,” he repeated and shrugged. “Very basic.”

  “And what do you do when you get what you want?”

  “We look after it.” He turned his head and I felt the warm brush of his kiss at my temple. “What’s this over here?” he asked, reaching to pick up a page to the side of my stack of transcribed ones. “It looks like Noah’s writing.”

  “It is Noah’s writing.” He’d been in my room earlier, at first just sitting quietly and playing with the cat. So very quietly, in fact, it hadn’t bothered me or hindered me from working. I hadn’t even been aware how closely he’d been watching me until I’d stopped to stretch and he had asked an intelligent series of questions. “I gave him some samples of ciphers to work through.”