A Desperate Fortune (11 page)

Looking round sharply, I saw Luc Sabran strolling in through the gate with a casual ease that, because it was so unexpected, completely unsettled me. I had to take a moment to absorb the new turn of events and adjust, as though trimming the sails of a ship in response to a change in the wind.

He was several steps closer now. “So you decided to see the château after all.” With a smile and a glance at the clouds passing swiftly above, low and dark, he said, “Not the best day for it. What did you think?”

I could see his eyes now, and they helped me recover my balance. I wanted to bluntly ask what he was doing here, but I thought that might be rude, so I simply replied, “I’m not too keen on what they’ve done inside. The courtyard was beautiful, though. And the chapel.”

“You’ve been to see the terrace?” he asked. “There by the river? It runs nearly two thousand meters along, with the forest behind it. A nice place to walk when the weather is better.”

“I saw it. I didn’t try walking it. I only went there,” I told him, and pointed back down to the far distant railing. “I wanted to find all the parts of the château I’d seen in the model.”

“The model?” He tucked his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket.

“In the chapel.”

“Ah.” He gave a nod of understanding. “Right, I had forgotten. But those buildings are all gone. This old part is all that’s left now, and the pavilion of Henry IV at the end of the path where you were, and perhaps a few cellars. The rest was all lost in the time of the Revolution. All royal lands then were taken as national properties.”

“Yes, well, the nation,” I said, “should have taken a bit better care of them.”

Something in that evidently amused him, because he smiled. “You wouldn’t have made a good revolutionary.”

“Probably not. I don’t like to see things destroyed. It would have made me sad to see the château being taken down.”

“But this is how life is, yes? It moves forward, and the sadness of those times, it is now gone.”

But not entirely, I thought, as I looked up at those dark windows, gazing out across the gravel at the barren, leafless trees. The old château hadn’t lost all of its sadness. I felt it and shivered a little and turned from the fountain, now drained for the winter and empty.

I looked at my watch. It was 2:58. Only two minutes left till I’d promised to meet Denise where she had dropped me off. “I have to leave.”

“OK.” Still with his hands in his pockets, Luc fell into step just in front of me and to the side. That was actually where I liked people to walk—I felt shielded from all the uncomfortable empty space but not too crowded. Relaxing a little, I asked, “Do you work here?”

He shook his head. “No, my proper office is in La Défense, not far from here.”

I was very familiar with La Défense, having done business there once, for a former job.

“But Wednesdays,” Luc went on, “I work from home. That’s why—”

“I have to wait right here,” I interrupted.

“OK.” Luc stopped with me on the pavement. Looked around. “Why?”

“I’m supposed to meet Denise.”

We were exactly at the place where I’d been told to be, in front of the château and right across the street from the old church with its grand steps and portico, now sheltering a scruffy group of youths who didn’t look at all religious. The traffic had grown busier.

Luc said, “I don’t think you are.”

“I am. She told me to be here at three o’clock.”

His answer was to hold his right hand up the way a person did when swearing on the Bible, so that I could see the ring of car keys dangling from his fingers. “That’s what she told me, as well.” He smiled and flipped the keys into his fist again and moved a step in front of me to take the lead. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll drive you home.”

I didn’t understand.

I said so. “I don’t understand. Why did Denise send you?”

I saw the lifting of his shoulders in the faint shrug that was such a quintessential French expression. “She couldn’t come herself. She’s gone to Chinon.”

“Where is that?”

“The Val de Loire. Her family’s there, and she and our son Noah always have their Christmas Eve in Chinon. Normally they come back the day after, but this year I was away as well, and so Denise left Noah with his grandparents to have a short vacation. She’s just gone to fetch him home.”

He’d had the luck to find a parking space a few steps round the corner in a street that ran beside the old château. He stopped beside a dark red Peugeot hatchback and unlocked the doors as I tried working through the logic of what he’d just told me.

It was possible, I knew, that I’d been told all this before—Denise could easily have talked about her plans to go to Chinon and, depending how absorbed I’d been in working on the cipher, I might not have paid attention. All she’d said this afternoon when she had come into my workroom was, “I’m leaving in a minute,” which could certainly imply that I was meant to know where she was going, and presumably the phone call she had made before we’d left had been to Luc, to make sure there’d be someone here to meet me.

“But,” I asked him, “why did she send
you
?”

He paused with a hand on the passenger door handle, turning to look at me. “Sorry, I’m not thinking. If it makes you too uncomfortable to drive with someone you don’t know—”

“It isn’t that.” I shook my head, deciding that it really wasn’t something I could easily explain to him. My cousin often said that men were clueless, and in this instance that seemed to be the case. If Luc thought it was normal for his ex-wife to arrange for him to meet me, clearly he had not shared my experience with couples who’d divorced. Even Jacqui, who’d be happy not to be in the same time zone as her exes, kept a faintly jealous eye on all their new associations, and she never would have volunteered them to chauffeur another woman.

Luc was waiting.

“Never mind,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”

Usually, if I were honest, I
did
feel uncomfortable in cars I wasn’t used to, though this morning in Denise’s car I had been too distracted by her driving speed to notice. And as I settled now into the passenger seat of Luc’s car while he swung my door closed and walked round to his own, I felt a sense of the familiar that distracted me as well, until I put my finger on its cause.

“Is this a Peugeot 207?” I asked him as he slid behind the steering wheel.

“It is. An old one, though: 2009.”

That would explain things. I nodded and said, “Jacqui’s second ex-husband had one of these, only his was a coupe cabriolet, not a hatchback.”

“I wanted that one, too.” Luc smiled as he released the handbrake. “But Noah was still small and there was no place for his car seat.”

As we moved off from the curb I cast a glance into the back and saw a child’s booster seat. “How old is Noah now?”

“He’s nine years old. Nine and two-thirds, if you ask him.” He had seen what I was looking at. “When he turns ten he plans to set that booster seat on fire, I think. He knows it is the law for him to use it, but he hates it.”

So then Noah was a law-abiding rebel. Like his father, I decided, for although Luc drove with care he had a sure touch with the gear lever that made me think he would have much preferred an open road where he could shift into top gear straightaway instead of being trapped within these winding streets that slowed his speed.

He was wearing jeans again today. I liked his legs in jeans, though in the confines of the car their muscled length was stretched so close to mine I had to force my gaze elsewhere to keep from staring.

We were crossing the bridge now, and leaving the château behind.

“Does she have very many ex-husbands, your cousin?” he asked.

“Only two. They were both very difficult men.”

“This is why she is able to take on such difficult authors,” he guessed, “like this Alistair Scott. Denise tells me that he and Claudine have a history.”

Not knowing the details, I didn’t have any real comment on that. But, “I wouldn’t say Alistair’s difficult, really. He’s just very focused. That’s not a bad thing, for a researcher.”

“No.” I felt Luc’s sideways glance. “No, it isn’t.”

We drove for a moment in silence, until something struck me.

“Why Wednesdays?” I asked.

“Pardon?”

“Why do you work from home Wednesdays?”

He paused as though having to search back in our conversation to find the stray comment he’d made that had led to my question. “Oh. Noah still has Wednesday afternoons off, so it’s necessary.”

I had a vague and distant memory of my childhood friend and neighbor, Ricky, when he’d moved across from France, complaining that in Britain he was made to go to school on Wednesdays, so I gathered it was normal here for schoolchildren to have a midweek holiday. But Luc was talking as though Noah lived with him all week, not just at every other weekend, and that seemed to me less normal. It was probably rude just to ask, I knew, but curiosity outweighed my manners. “So, where does your son live? With you, or Denise?”

“We share custody. Alternate weeks. We switch over on Mondays. It’s becoming more common in France, this arrangement,” he said. “It’s better for Noah, I think. And for us. You don’t have children?”

“No.” I’d have found it much easier winning my battle to
not
watch his legs if they hadn’t been constantly working the clutch and the gas pedals as he changed gears, but I managed to pull my gaze up in time to catch his small shrug.

“They take work, they keep you busy.” Once again he briefly looked in my direction, this time with a smile, and added, “Noah more than most. You’ll likely have him underfoot when he discovers what you’re doing. He’ll think code breaking is cool—he’ll want to help you.”

I returned the smile to be polite, and looked away. I didn’t dislike children, but I wasn’t all that keen on being “helped” by one. And when it came to something like the breaking of a cipher, there was no real help a nine-year-old could give me.

Or at least, that’s what I thought on Wednesday afternoon. By Thursday night, on New Year’s Eve, I’d learned that I was wrong.

The day began with rain, which by the early afternoon had lost its steady patter and become a dismal mist that clouded everything outdoors in gray and now and then was spattered on the windows by the fitful wind.

Inside, the house was quiet.

With Denise not back from Chinon yet, my breakfast with Claudine had been as simple as our meal the night before, with us both managing to serve ourselves from what she’d left behind for us to eat and clearing up the table when we’d finished. Claudine had gone out somewhere just after that and I had taken full advantage of the solitude to start my work, refusing to be beaten by the challenge of that single line:

…when I replied I had no head for ciphers she assured me any person could devise one using anything to hand, whereon she crafted one upon the spot…

Because if Mistress Harrison—or whatever her name had been—could craft a cipher on the spot, then I could do the same thing in reverse. Or so I’d told myself. My confidence had waned and I was feeling now the rumbling of faint hunger in my stomach that reminded me I hadn’t stopped for lunchtime, but I stoically ignored it and bent closer to the fresh page in my notebook where I copied out more numbers from the cipher in the diary into tidy penciled rows and searched for patterns.

I’d completely bored Diablo, who had draped himself across his box of files by the window, turned his head away and closed his eyes disdainfully, the twitching of his tail the only sign he wasn’t actually asleep. That, and the swivel of an ear, as though he’d heard something beyond the range of my own senses.

I was in the middle of re-ordering a row of numbers when I heard it, too: a faint repeating simple tune, like something from a synthesizer. Gradually it gained in volume, growing nearer. On his box, Diablo shifted, opening his eyes to watchful slits. The music stopped abruptly on a click, as though whatever had been playing it had been snapped shut, and from the entry hall outside my workroom I could hear the lightly purposeful approach of footsteps on the tiles.

The door, which I had left ajar so that the cat could come and go, swung inward as a boy came in, his whole attention on the cat. “Diablo!” he said, stretching out his arms, and to my great surprise the tomcat rose and arched and leaped straight into them, allowing himself to be made a fuss of in a way that I’d have thought he’d find undignified. I must have made a sound, because the boy turned then and noticed me. An adult faced with that sort of surprise might well have dropped the cat; the boy held on more tightly to it as he said, “
Bonjour, madam
,” recovering his manners. Speaking carefully in English he continued, “I am sorry to derange you. I look for… I
was
looking for Diablo.” Shifting the cat to one side, he came forward and held out his hand. “I am pleasured to meet you,” he said. “I am Noah.”

Of course he was. Noah Sabran had his mother’s black hair and his father’s blue eyes. He seemed small for a nine-year-old, but he looked healthy and filled with the energy most boys contained at that age. He came right to the side of my desk for the handshake.

Returning it, I told him, “It’s ‘disturb.’ To be ‘deranged’ in English doesn’t mean the same thing that it does in French. In modern English, anyway. So you’d say: ‘I am sorry to disturb you.’”

“I am sorry to disturb you,” he repeated, with a nod at the correction, as he gathered up the cat against his chest. I heard the rumbling as the cat began to purr. “Thank you, madam. Good-bye, madam.” He made a swift retreat into the entry hall and left me on my own again.

I felt both relieved and a little surprised that he hadn’t displayed any interest in what I was doing. The diary spread on its cushion, its pages held open with small leather weights, dominated my desk but was vulnerable to any person who thought it looked curious, and children in my experience liked to explore things by touch. Then again, it admittedly wasn’t that easy to touch things while holding a cat.

I carried on working. It took several minutes before my brain—no doubt egged on by my stomach—connected enough dots to realize that Noah Sabran being here in the house meant Denise must be home, and Denise being home meant a better than average chance I would be greeted with food if I found my way into the kitchen, and food would restore both my spirits and my concentration. I set down my pencil.

The kitchen was warm from the wood-burning cooker and lit with a brightness that banished the wet gray world outside the multipaned windows, creating a cozy and comfortable haven of cream-colored walls and red brick and dark beams, with the old vintage cupboards and old flagstone floor and, in front of the fireplace, a plain sturdy table where Noah sat petting Diablo and playing a video game.

Denise was busily unpacking bread, fruit, and vegetables from an assortment of bags, but she paused to greet me cheerfully, saying in French, “Did you hear us? We tried to be quiet and sneak in the back so we wouldn’t disturb you. I knew you’d be working.” She said to her son, “Noah, this is Madame Thomas.”

Noah had set down his video game and was standing politely and watching me with those blue eyes that were so like his father’s.

I nearly replied that we’d already met, but I caught myself just in time, realizing from what Denise had just said that her son hadn’t told her he’d been in my workroom ten minutes ago. And from how he was holding his shoulders, so square and so still—like my cousin did when she was bracing for something unpleasant—I guessed he’d be happier if Denise didn’t find out.

“Hello, Noah,” I said, still in French, as I held out my hand. “How are you?”

He blinked and accepted the handshake. “I am very well, madam. Thank you.”

“Sit down,” said Denise. “I was just getting Noah a snack, would you like one?”

Her “snack” was the same as the ones I’d been served in the home of my childhood best friend—bread and butter and chocolate in generous proportions, except with a hot mug of coffee in place of the milk Ricky’s mother had given me then. I could feel my inner self regressing happily to that remembered time, that other kitchen where I’d spent so many afternoons in warmth and comfort, lovingly accepted as a member of the family.

Denise asked me, “How did you enjoy your time at Saint-Germain-en-Laye? Did you find inspiration?”

“No, but it was very interesting.”

“And Luc came to meet you at the proper time? He wasn’t late?”

Across the table from me Noah said, “Papa is never late.”

His mother smiled. “Well, not with you. And not for meals. But when he’s working he forgets to watch the clock sometimes.”

I told them both, “He was on time. A little early, actually.” I didn’t bother saying that I’d been surprised to see him, because if in fact Denise
had
told me yesterday that she’d be heading off to Chinon, I was not about to look a fool for having failed to listen.

Noah, looking vindicated, fed the cat a bit of bread beneath the table. “Did he bring his motorcycle?”

“No. He drove a car.”

“I like the motorcycle best,” his son said. “It goes very fast.”

A rebel then, as I’d suspected. If I’d needed further proof, just watching how he made sure that his mother wasn’t looking before breaking off another bit of bread to give Diablo told me he was fond of testing boundaries. The cat looked furtive, too. He’d sunk so low on Noah’s lap his eyes and ears were all that showed above the table’s edge.

I smiled a little, and when Noah smiled back I reasoned he was probably acknowledging the bond between conspirators.

Denise, who hadn’t noticed, brought the coffee pot across to fill my cup again, and glancing out the windows said, “He won’t be riding it today, not in this weather.”

“He can ride the motorcycle in the rain,” said Noah. “There are tunnels on his way to work.”

I gave in to my growing curiosity. “He works in La Défense, he said. What does he do?”

“He’s a financial accountant for Morland Electronics,” she told me. “It’s an English company, do you know it?”

The bloodred Morland logo was familiar to me. “Yes.”

“Luc’s brother works for Morland, too, in California. They have offices worldwide. In Luc’s division, here in Paris, they do tactical and sonar systems special for the military and defense.”

“But Papa doesn’t build them. He just keeps the books.”

Denise corrected Noah patiently. “It’s rather more than that. Your father has to manage and prepare all the reports. He does the budgeting and forecasting and keeps the ledgers balanced. It’s important.”

“But it’s still too many numbers,” Noah said. “I’d rather do what Uncle Thierry does.”

Denise was smiling as she said to me, “
My
brother, Thierry, chooses not to grow up, ever. He still helps our aunt and uncle with their hotel, as he’s done since we were both at school. He will be Chinon’s oldest bartender, I think.”

“He lets me help him,” Noah said.

“Oh yes, he always likes to have your help. It means less work for him.” She kissed him lightly on the head. “And if you’re such an eager helper, you can help me with the decorations for tonight.”

I couldn’t think why she’d need decorations for tonight until I realized it was New Year’s Eve—the feast of Saint-Sylvestre here in France. At my friend Ricky’s house they’d always had a full-on party, filled the house with neighbors, but Denise assured me things at the Maison des Marronniers weren’t that elaborate.

“Claudine likes to do things simply. There will only be the five of us.” She handed me a small box. “Here, I’ll give you the balloons, if you don’t mind? Noah will waste them all by popping them.”

I disliked the sound of balloons popping, so I was careful to blow them up slowly, to Noah’s frustration. Diablo, unimpressed by my efforts, retreated to a shadowed corner of the salon while we strung the paper banners that said “
Bonne
Année!
” above the lovely windows of the dining room, and fastened clusters of balloons to all the chair backs, and hung stars of silver glitter where Denise directed us to hang them while she set the table with fine china and cut-crystalware and candles with more silver stars and glitter balls strewn round them for good measure.

By the time Claudine arrived home from wherever she had been, we’d nearly finished with the salon, too, and everything looked festive.

“This is perfect,” she announced, and hung her coat up in the entry hall before she spread her arms to give a double kiss to Noah. “You’ve been busy, darling. Aren’t you clever?”

“Madame Thomas helped.”

“Then she is clever, too.” Claudine included me in her warm smile and joined us in the salon, looking up towards the ceiling. “All we need now is the mistletoe.”

We British liked our mistletoe at Christmas, but in France it was a ritual of New Year’s Eve, as I had learned in childhood.

Noah said, “Papa is bringing it.”

As if on cue, the sound of footsteps scuffed against the stone walk in the garden at the back. Before the rear door to the kitchen opened on a gust of wind and slammed again the boy had started running, and Luc barely had the time to shake his coat and clear the rain from it and step into the dining room before he had to kneel to intercept a flying hug.

“Papa!”

With both their heads so close together it was even easier to notice the resemblance. It was more than just their eye color—I saw it in the angle of their jawlines and the quickness of their smiles. Luc hugged his son back tightly with his one free hand—his other hand was taken by a plastic-handled shopping bag that bulged.

“You got my messages?” asked Noah.

“Yes, all five of them.”

Denise, who’d come through from the kitchen also and was standing in the arched door with her apron smudged from cooking, said, “I can’t believe I didn’t think to get it at the market. We were right there.”

“It’s no trouble finding mistletoe,” Luc told her.

Noah asked him, “But the blowpipes! Did you find the blowpipes?”

“Yes, of course.
And
hats. See here.” Luc reached into the shopping bag and pulled a pointed party hat from deep within it. “Look, it has a light that flashes if you push it there. And this,” he said, “is even better. This is mine.” He drew it out and put it on his head—a rather ridiculous novelty hat made of shiny foil card with a small sprig of mistletoe stuck to its brim.

“Very subtle,” said Denise, but as he stood and handed her the bag she kissed him anyway, a friendly kiss that looked no different from the one he coaxed from Claudine when he came through to the salon to give her a proper greeting. Then he was in front of me, and smiling, so I kissed him too, as lightly as the others had. His face was cold and smelled of wood smoke and the damp outdoors. I liked it. I liked him.

“I have a hat for you as well. And you,” he told Claudine. “Yours has a light on it, like Noah’s.”

Claudine thanked him. “Very kind of you.” Her tone was dry. “But if it’s all the same to you, I’ll wait and wear it after dinner.”

“As we all should,” said Denise, removing Noah’s hat and nudging him affectionately forward. “Go and keep Papa from getting into trouble while I finish cooking dinner. You can show him your new card trick.”

“Not another one?” Luc’s groan sounded real, but the way Noah grinned in reply made me realize his father was teasing and everyone knew it.

“It’s a good one,” the boy promised. “One of the waitresses at the hotel showed me.”

Luc grinned in his turn. “Hanging out with the waitresses, were you?”

“He’ll claim it was only professional interest,” Denise said, “but notice he never asks
me
if I know any tricks with the cards I can teach him.”

Her son turned to look at her. “Do you?”

“I might have learned one or two when I was your age.”

“Did they have cards when you were my age?” Noah asked. For all my difficulty reading people’s tones and their expressions, I was fairly sure from looking at him that he hadn’t meant that as an insult. Children his age sometimes had no proper sense of history as a timeline—to them, everything that happened in the years before their birth was “history,” tangled dates that intersected freely without context. I remembered asking my own mother one day after school how many traitors she had gone to see beheaded at the Tower.