A Desperate Fortune (10 page)

“I’ll get my coat,” I said.

Denise drove fast, and played the radio—both things I found distracting, but today I was distracted even more by my imaginings.

The road to Saint-Germain-en-Laye looked much like any other road, but I was busy seeing it the way it would have been when Mary Dundas and her brother had presumably set out that afternoon from the house of Sir Redmond Everard. In Mary’s time—I’d worked it out—a horse and chaise could travel at an average speed of 1.65 leagues an hour, to use the standard reckoning for leagues in Paris, every district having its own measurements. And Chatou, from its center, lay approximately 1.7 leagues from Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which meant it would have taken Mary and her brother, in the winter, just above an hour to reach their final destination.

In the car, it took us fifteen minutes. Slightly less, the way Denise was driving.

We crossed the river by a long bridge, turned and wound our way around and up a road still edged with the remainder of the old town walls, then back along an avenue with trees cut in a box-like hedge and round again to where the old château sat facing down the huddled buildings at the center of the town. There was a church directly opposite with regal steps and pillars that looked every bit as old as the château, and both those buildings had retained their grandeur—but the modern world had crept right to their doorsteps.

Denise had pulled in to what looked like a long bay for buses to pick up and drop off their passengers. Pointing ahead she said, “There is the entrance. Or if you don’t want to go inside just yet, go through there, through that big gate, and down and around through the park and along the terrace—the long path overlooking the river. It’s really a beautiful walk, and the fresh air will help you change your thoughts,” she said, using the French phrase for clearing one’s mind. With a glance at her wristwatch she asked, “Will two hours from now be enough time?”

I wasn’t about to impose my own schedule on hers. “Tell me what time I need to be back here, and I’ll be here.”

“Three o’clock,” she said. “Be back at three.”

I said, “Thanks,” as I climbed from the car and she gave me a wave and was off again. The broad stretch of pavement in front of the château was practically empty, which suited me fine. I had never done well in the jostling confusion of crowds.

The château rose squarely in front of me, solid and soaring, designed to impress, yet it looked slightly lost. Like the house at Chatou it seemed fully aware that it should have had grander surroundings; as though it had slumbered and woken to find itself here at the edge of a street crowded round with tall mansard-roofed buildings, an outdoor café and the broad entrance into the underground RER station bookending the church on the opposite side, and it wasn’t quite sure how to manage the fact that the world had moved on.

It was built of that same pale stone that looked ivory in some lights and golden in others and gave French châteaux their own beauty. Today there was no sun to make that stone glow, only clouds in a flat winter sky, and the walls of the château thus robbed of their light had a dull ochre cast to them, only relieved by the contrasting red brick that trimmed the round walls of the turrets and towers and framed the tall arched rows of windows that lined the two uppermost stories, reflecting no image but that of the overcast sky.

Hardly welcoming, but then the point of my trip here today wasn’t to be made welcome. It was to learn the layout of the château and the grounds, to walk where Mary Dundas had once walked, so if I ever broke her cipher and began to read her diary entries I could understand them better.

Alistair considered it unlikely Mary’s brother and his wife and children would have lived within the château proper, because most of the apartments there were taken up by influential Jacobites and those who’d served the young King James’s mother while she’d lived. It was more probable, thought Alistair, that Nicolas Dundas on his return to Saint-Germain-en-Laye would have found lodgings for his family in the town that had grown up around the château walls to house the varied tradespeople and servants and supporters of the exiled royal court. But even so, the château and the people who had lived there would have been a daily feature of the life of Mary Dundas, and whatever events she described in her diary would need to be placed against that backdrop to be viewed in proper context.

I used my mobile now to take a few snaps of the château. When I got back to Chatou, I could create a file of photographs to reference when I was transcribing the diary.
There
, I thought.
Pure
optimism
. Jacqui would be proud of me. She always told me I was far too quick to give up hope.

Moving in closer, I photographed some of the details: the balconies edged with stone railings that ran in a long line across the facade, and the carved stonework over the massive main entry doors set at the end of a narrow stone bridge leading over the dry grassy moat. Then I crossed that same bridge myself and went in.

I’d been warned by Denise that the château was now a museum, but in my mind I’d pictured something much like Hampton Court—rooms made to look as they’d looked in the past, with paneled beds and tapestries and those great portraits in which all the faces looked so much the same that to tell them apart was a challenge. But this wasn’t anything like that. The château had been entirely repurposed as a museum of archaeology, the old rooms all refitted with exhibits showing finds from Paleolithic times through the Bronze and Iron Ages, and the Romans to the early Modern era. They were probably important finds, but honestly I paid them no attention. I was more absorbed in searching out the little plaques explaining what the rooms had been originally, and in finding features that appeared to have survived unchanged, most notably the stairwells with their stone steps and their intricately vaulted stone-and-redbrick walls and ceilings, and the leaded windows looking out towards the central courtyard.

I liked courtyards—the sense of seclusion, of echoing quiet and peace—and this one, when I managed to make my way out to it, wrapped me in all the sensations I loved. The château itself wasn’t square; it was more an elongated pentagon, meaning the courtyard had five high enclosing sides shutting it off from the commonplace world. Four of these had beautiful cloister-like repeating arches with more arches above them, four stories of glittering windows surrounded by pale stone and edged in red brick, with round towers to mark the interior stairwells set into each corner. The fifth side of the courtyard, most lovely of all, was the wall of a chapel, with windows more beautiful than all the others, tall windows of restful green glass that soared heavenward inside their frames of stone tracery.

I had the whole courtyard alone to myself, and I could have explored any part of it, but I was drawn to that chapel, which inside was even more impressive—long and filled with quiet light from those tall narrow windows, and designed so that the vaulted ceiling’s weight was borne entirely by the walls so there were no supporting columns needed here to spoil the perfect open beauty of the nave. A huge rose window filled the western wall, but at some point it had been covered over from the outside and its glass had been removed to show the stone of what I guessed to be the wall of some addition to the castle, though the sunburst wheel of intricate stone tracery remained. And best of all, at least for me, where once the altar would have been there stood a glassed-in case that housed a model of the château, built in miniature.

I had a thing for models. Not only was it easier for me to understand things when they were presented to me in their concrete form and not the abstract, but the mathematical precision and exactness used to build to scale were pleasant to my eye. This model was a fascinating thing. Raised up to table height, it was so detailed and extensive that I had to walk the whole way round to view the full expanse of the château as it would have appeared at the end of the seventeenth century, not long before Mary Dundas was born.

I hadn’t realized it was so large. I’d thought this massive pentagon of rooms that I’d just toured through would have been the greatest part of it, but in the model I could see the pentagon—the “old château”—was nothing but a small bit at the western end, eclipsed by what the label on the model’s case described as the
Château-Neuf
or the “new château” that spread right to the Seine. The model showed its grand palatial walls, with tower-like pavilions marking out the corners, and the perfect mirrored symmetry of all the steps and terraces that led down to the river. Clearly there was more for me to see outside.

I took a careful set of photos of the model, checked the time, and seeing I had twenty-seven minutes left before I had to meet Denise, I left the quiet refuge of the chapel and the courtyard and went out again, across the little bridge that spanned the moat, and round the corner through the tall black iron gates into the grounds.

I should have been more fond of French formal gardens. They were, after all, about order and symmetry—man taming nature by shaping it to his unyielding design—but I didn’t like wide-open spaces with nothing around me to serve as a shield, so to stand in a garden like this made me feel unprotected and far too exposed. I preferred English gardens—the overgrown corners with tree branches hanging however they pleased, and the tucked-away benches with hedges and warm brick walls guarding my back.

There was nowhere to hide here. What hedges there were barely came to my knees and the broad expanse of gravel I was standing on was
too
broad and too open for my comfort. Even the facade of the old château, stately and large as it was, stood too many steps distant to offer me shelter.

This side of it was longer, more imposing than the side that faced the street, as though the castle was more conscious of its need to make a statement here. It stood above the geometric landscape with a silent sort of majesty that almost made me feel a little sorry for it, wasting all that effort to look regal when the only person noticing was me.

In fact, if I were pressed to put a name to how the château looked to me from here, I would have settled on the word
forlorn
.

The wind, as if to underline the thought, blew in a colder gust that chilled my ears and made me hunch deeper in my scarf. I walked the long way down to where the wide path met an iron railing at the top of the steep bank that dropped to meet the river. And all that way, from where the old château’s walls ended to the point where both the railing and the path were tied together by a building of red brick and old white stone that looked like one of the pavilions, there was nothing else remaining of the grandly sprawling “new château” depicted in the model in the chapel. It was as if a child’s hand had swept a castle built of blocks aside without a care, replacing everything with houses and apartments set in rows behind a high obscuring hedge.

The pavilion itself had been repurposed into a hotel and restaurant, too upscale for me to feel comfortable venturing in off the path for a look, in my old coat and scarf and laced boots, so I stayed by the railing and stood for a moment to focus my thoughts on the river. At least
that
, I thought, couldn’t be taken away. The view might have changed, with its bridges and cars and the skyscraper sprawl of the Parisian business hub of La Défense looming out of the mist just ahead, but still the olive-colored Seine wound through it all as it had done in Mary’s day.

Perhaps she’d stood just here and watched boats sliding by on their slow way upstream to Paris, like the long barge I was watching now. Perhaps she’d felt the same wind blowing strongly from the west, and heard the black crows calling roughly to each other from the slope below, above the sweeter trilling of the unseen birds that hid amid the tangle of the ivy-covered trees.

The crows I could see. There was one large crow perched very near to me, on the high hedge at the corner of the old pavilion, but the birds that attracted me most were the magpies. My mother had no love of magpies and chased them relentlessly out of our garden, but I’d always liked their bold plumage—the white and blue-black in predictable patterns that set them apart from their cousins the crows.

The ones here were scattered along the path, flying and flapping and hopping and searching the gravel for scraps as I made my way back up the broad promenade, a group of them gathering as I repeated the childish rhyme in my head, counting each bird I saw:
One
for
sorrow
. That suited the château, I thought, with the mist and the bare lonely trees and the hard gravel shifting beneath my feet as a reminder that nothing was permanent.

I went on counting:

Two
for
joy. Three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold…

Another magpie settled on the ground amid its fellows, casting a dark eye in my direction.

Seven
for
a
secret
never
to
be
told.

“You might be right,” I told it. If I couldn’t break the cipher, then whatever Mary Dundas had experienced here would be lost to history altogether and remain a secret. Mary, who had lived and breathed and walked within this shadow court of Jacobites, whose voice I had the power to restore, would stay instead forever silent. The worry and weight of frustration began to close in again. So much for “changing my thoughts,” I conceded. I may have spent two hours out of my workroom, but I’d achieved little to show for it.

Eight
for
a
wish,
was the next magpie.
Nine
for
a
kiss
. Hardly likely. The tenth took a hop from the ground to the edge of a large round low fountain not far from the gate where I’d entered the grounds.
Ten
a
surprise…

“There you are.” A man’s voice, speaking French. A familiar voice.