A Desperate Fortune (38 page)

“Very kind of him, I’m sure.” His gaze moved on politely. “And this would be…?”

Hugh said, “Mistress Mary Dundas. She’s the sister of Nicolas Dundas.”

“Ah, Dundas, yes. So that’s why you asked me about the wig maker. I was able to—” But he was brought up short by footsteps in the gallery. He turned, and Mary turned as well.

The king had come.

Seeing him actually there in the room with them struck her at first as a thing overwhelming. It took her a moment to drop into her finest curtsy the way she had practiced, and keep her head bowed in respect until he gave them all leave to rise.

He was tall, with a wig of pale gray and a suit of gray silk a shade darker, trimmed richly with gold braid and lace, his chest crossed with the ribbands and medallions of his varied royal orders, though she knew not what they were. She looked to match the features to the portrait she had studied at Sir Redmond Everard’s—the portrait of the king when he had been a boy, his hand upon his hip with confidence, his gaze fixed with keen interest on some distant sight. This older King James had the same stubborn chin but his dark eyes had grown more resigned. And when he smiled, it was the faintly weary smile of a man who had seen much and could not be easily drawn to react to what others might view as intriguing.

Still, when he saw Hugh standing proudly in Highland dress, King James appeared to be moved.

He said, “I know your face, do I not?”

Captain Hay introduced Hugh more formally, and the king nodded. “Of course, I remember now. Mr. MacPherson. You came here to Rome years ago with the Earl Marischal and his brother on their way to Spain.”

“I am honored, Your Majesty, that ye’d remember.”

“I trust I shall always remember my brave and faithful Highlanders, and particularly those of a name so sincerely attached to me. Believe me, Mr. MacPherson, I know how loyally you and your clansmen are inclined, and I’m glad of the help of so many brave men, at a time when honest hearts and hands were never so much wanted.”

Thomson, when the king’s gaze moved to him, remarked, “Your Majesty, I can assure you there are honest hearts and hands in all three of your kingdoms.”

“Mr. Thomson. Our worthy friends in Paris have mentioned you more than once to me.”

“Then you’ll know there is nothing I would not willingly undergo for your service. I have never failed to assist my fellow Jacobites in England financially whenever I could, and in Paris Mr. Robinson and I were pleased to be able to give some of your principal men great sums out of our joint stock. I also gave, out of my own pocket, upwards of eight hundred pounds, and there is more that can be got to help prepare for your return to England to take back your rightful throne from the usurper.”

“A rebellion?” The king’s wise, indulgent expression put Mary in mind of her uncle’s face whenever one of her cousins said something that showed want of thought or experience. “I have myself been expecting such things all my life,” he said, “and they have never happened with success.”

Thomson assured him this time would be different. “I promise you, Your Majesty, you have many friends right now in London. Why, some of the aldermen serve as cashiers for the money collected to support your cause, and the city is ripe for revolution.”

“I cannot raise a revolution on the money taken from the hands of those my birth and duty binds me to protect.” The king, though only in his middle forties, looked a good deal older as he paused for thought, and finally said, “I once believed as you do, that rebellion was the only way; that violent diseases must have violent remedies. But those remedies, Mr. Thomson, cause very real suffering, most usually to others than ourselves.”

Mary stole a glance at Hugh, whose face betrayed no measure of his thoughts, and she remembered how his eyes had looked the night Effie had sung the haunting sad lament about the warrior who wandered all alone with all his loved ones in the ground, and something told her Hugh knew well the truth of the king’s statement.

“I am glad indeed,” the king went on, “to find you were endeavoring to aid my cause, and I suppose you took the best measures you could for that effect, but the truth is I did write some months ago to General Dillon and the rest, that I could not condescend to such proposals, that such a means of raising money was not all in keeping with my conscience, and that I had rather leave matters as they are without compromising myself, and wait till it shall please Providence to restore what does belong to me. And to my sons.”

The small painted
putti
, like children themselves, gazed down from the gold scrolls of the flower-wrapped trellis adorning the lovely curved ceiling, the “sky” rendered with such a skilled imitation of light that it seemed there must truly be sunshine behind the pale clouds.

The king said, “Prince Charles will, I hope, be one day both a great and a good man, and I would advise him and his brother as my father once advised me—nay, required me—to treat all our subjects with fairness, and never to molest them in the enjoyment of their religion, rights, liberty, and property, for a king can never be happy, lest his subjects be easy.” He leveled a decided gaze on Thomson. “And it seems I must now be unhappy, for you will not be so easy for this next while in the place where I must send you.”

Thomson asked, “And where is that, Your Majesty?”

“You understand that I cannot appear to be condoning this affair. And I suspect my subjects who have lost all through this misadventure would much blame me if I showed myself indifferent to their suffering. As a simple formality, it will of course be the pope who arrests you, but it will be known to be done by my orders.”

Thomson raised his eyebrows. “You are having me arrested?”

“Not for long. And should you want for anything while you’re confined, you may apply to Captain Hay or to my secretary, Lord Dunbar.” Turning to Hugh he said, “I shall direct you where he should be taken, and then I am sure the Lord Marischal will have new work for you.”

Then his gaze settled on Mary. “I thank you,” he told her, “for coming to Rome. I have little these days I can offer my subjects, when even my ailments increase with my age, but I still thank God my heart is good, and that will never fail you.”

He was turning away, but she summoned her courage and managed to speak up. “If it please Your Majesty,” she began.

The king paused to look back at her.

“My father, William Dundas, served Your Majesty at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and came with you to Rome, and still resides here. I’ve not seen him for some years, and I am hoping very much to see him now, if he desires it.”

King James looked to Captain Hay, repeating, “Dundas…William Dundas… Ah, the wig maker. Of course. But he did leave us, surely?”

Captain Hay confirmed this for Mary. “He parted from hence with your brother Charles, only last Michaelmas. I have been making inquiries but have not yet learned where they might have been bound.”

Mary schooled her face carefully, not wanting anyone to see the great chasm that had just opened within her, exposing the sharp jagged edges of her disappointment. So then their whole journey had been done for nothing, and she had again been cast off, left behind. Mary felt all off balance and strangely deflated, as though she had opened a gift to discover it empty inside.

The king watched her, and in his eyes Mary saw the deep kindness Effie had spoken of. “It grieves me that my friends in Paris did impose upon you, madam, so unnecessarily, and brought you here by ways exposed to accident and danger, and that the circumstances of my court force so many brave subjects and old servants, like your father and your brother, to seek elsewhere for their bread. I hope in God that better days will come when friends and honest people will not be forced at so great a distance from one another.” His small smile was also kind. “Till then, I will neglect nothing that lies in my power,” he told her, “to see you are sent safely home.”

Mary curtsied again as he left them, but when he had gone she looked up at the high rounded ceiling with new eyes from which the romance had been stripped, so she saw the gold trellis not as a beautiful frame but a cage, that some cruel hand had opened to trick the small painted birds into imagining they could find freedom against the wide blue of that sky. But it wasn’t a sky, after all. It was nothing but plaster, and those little birds would be beating their wings on it endlessly all of their lives without anything changing, the more fools for trying to fly in the first place.

My father said, we do not always get the things we want.

I had transcribed that line an hour ago, and now it resonated in my memory as I stood in Claudine’s studio upstairs and looked with interest at the photographs of Alistair. Claudine, at the table behind me, was sorting the black-and-white prints of a wedding she’d photographed into an album for one of her clients. She asked me, “And why would he be disappointed?”

“I don’t think he’ll like the way it ends.” Assuming, I thought, he had even learned how it had started. I wasn’t convinced that my cousin had actually told him Mary hadn’t gone to Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Jacqui never lied to me but neither did she always tell me everything, especially when she thought it was better for me not to know, and having thought back over our discussion on the phone when she had promised she would tell him and I’d said I’d wait for her to ring me back and she’d replied by text to tell me to keep going, I had realized there’d been wiggle room in that exchange for her to
not
tell Alistair and still not tell a lie. And when she’d been here last, her talk had been all about her own excitement and plans for the book, with no mention of his. “There are things unexplained and unfinished.”

“As with real life,” Claudine pointed out.

Thinking of Alistair’s unfinished trilogy, that for the moment would have to remain so, I looked from the mutely accusing eyes of his framed portraits to those hung beside it, my gaze unexpectedly finding another familiar face.

“Wait,” I said. “Is this…?”

“Madeleine Hedrick,” she named the famous actress. “Yes, she was one of my first assignments when I went to London. Such a wonderful woman.”

“You worked in London?” Which explained, I thought, how she had learned to speak such perfect English.

Claudine said, “When I was starting out, yes. By the end I worked all over—New York, London, Rome—although I think I spent more time in airports in those days than anywhere.”

Surprised by all of this, I turned and asked, “What did you photograph?”

Claudine, fitting another of the wedding prints into the album, shrugged. “My specialty was high-end advertising and fashion, but for a few magazines I also did some celebrity portraits. That one of Alistair, second one down on the right, I took that for a magazine.”

I looked. It wasn’t the portrait of him I liked best—the quiet one where he was sitting by the window, reading. Here he was more energetic, standing midway up a hill in what appeared to be a Scottish glen, the sky behind him streaked with clouds that cast long shadows on the curving land below. “And was that how you met?”

“No. Alistair wasn’t a celebrity, when we first met. We had mutual friends,” Claudine told me, “in London, and sometimes when I’d go to parties he’d be there, and one day he said he was writing a book about the Scottish exiles in the Netherlands, and asked me would I like to take the pictures for him? All our friends were teasing him because they knew my fees were too expensive for him, and he looked so embarrassed that I told him yes. I had the time. I took the photographs. I didn’t charge him much. And when he came to write the second book, the one at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, I took the photographs for that as well.
That
,” Claudine told me, “was an even better job, because my aunt was living here, you see. This was her house. I played here as a child, I always loved it. So we stayed here, Alistair and I, and did the research for his book. It was…”

She paused, and I turned round again and saw she’d stopped her work and wore a faint frown like the one my cousin sometimes wore when trying to decide what words to use, describing something.

Claudine said, “For years I’d been so busy. Always traveling. But here… It was like coming from a crowded place to somewhere I could breathe. Does that make sense?”

I nodded. I felt that way here, myself.

She said, “I found I liked to breathe. I liked the person I became when I was here. I think we all wear masks we show the world, and here I didn’t have to wear it. It was very…”

“Liberating,” I supplied, when once again she seemed in search of the right word. I wasn’t thinking of Claudine, though, when I said it. I was thinking back to yesterday, and how I’d woken in Luc’s sitting room in early evening to find Noah sitting at the far end of the sofa, being careful not to lean against my feet which were still covered in the blanket.

He’d been playing Robo Patrol, without the sound on. When I’d stirred, he’d turned and told me, “Papa says I need to let you sleep.”

I’d blinked, and focused. “That’s all right. I’ve slept enough.”

“He says you had a meltdown.”

Children were direct. I liked that. I had given Noah a plain answer. “Yes.”

He’d set his game down, seeming to find me of greater interest. “Did he give you ice cream? Uncle Fabien feels better if you give him ice cream.”

“No,” I’d said. “He didn’t.”

“Uncle Fabien punched a hole right in the wall once, when he had a meltdown. Do you punch through walls?”

I’d thought he’d looked a little hopeful I would say I did, as though I had a kind of superpower.

“No. I just cry, mostly. And I’m very loud.”

“Oh. Well, next time you have one, be sure that you have it when I’m here,” had been his advice, “because
I’ll
give you ice cream.” And having said all he had wanted to say about that, he had held out the Robo Patrol game. “Want to try the next level?”

I’d felt something new in my chest, like a fullness around my heart. “Yes,” I had said, “I would like that.”

I felt that same fullness now, holding it close as Claudine gave a nod at the word I’d suggested.

“Yes,” she told me, “liberating. Alistair had moments of that here as well, I know, but his career was on the rise. His second book did very well. It made him famous, and he had to travel. For a while I tried to do it with him, but I couldn’t be that person anymore. Sometimes you try a coat on that you used to wear, and it just doesn’t feel the same. The style, the cut—it’s not that you’ve outgrown it, but it doesn’t really fit. So you stop wearing it.” She bent her head again above her work. “He didn’t understand that. I’m not sure he ever will.”

She fell silent again for a moment. I didn’t say anything either. I’d been curious about Claudine’s relationship with Alistair, and apparently today she felt inclined to talk about it, but I’d learned through observation it was sometimes best to not leap in with questions. Questions sometimes went unanswered. But faced with a stretching silence, people often sought to fill it.

Claudine finally said, “Success, for him, is something that you win, that other people have to give you. But if other people give you something they can take it back. For me, the work itself, just being able to create—that’s what I want. I don’t need all the high acclaim and recognition. Capturing a wedding, this is not less than a fashion shoot. In many ways, it’s more important. More worthwhile.” She slid the final print in place and closed the album, keeping one hand on its leather cover. “You’ve met him, have you? Then you’ll have seen how he’s restless; how quickly he walks.”

I thought of my cousin’s complaints as we’d kept pace with Alistair all through the woods of Ham Common.

Claudine went on, “Always he’s looking for something, he’s chasing it. Always the neighbor’s grass is greener, somewhere else, over the next hill.” Her smile was slight. “My grass is green enough.”

I looked around the room, at all the many pictures in their frames, with new appreciation for the scope of what she had accomplished, what she had abandoned.

When my gaze returned to rest upon the single photograph of Alistair, relaxing with a wineglass in his hand, head bent above his book, my first thought was:
He
isn’t walking.
And my second was:
He
looks
content, and happy.
And then I noticed something that I hadn’t before.

I had already guessed Claudine had been the person sitting in the empty chair, who’d left her wineglass on the table while she’d snapped the photograph, but now I looked beyond the curtain at the casement window by his shoulder, lifting in the faint suggestion of a summer breeze, and saw the outline of a peaked roof framed by trees. Luc’s roof. The chestnut trees in the back garden. The same view I saw myself each day when I looked out the window of my bedroom.

“This was taken here,” I said. I wasn’t sure why that surprised me.

Claudine said, “It was.” And then she said, “I had hoped…”

But she didn’t finish, didn’t tell me what she’d hoped. She only stood and smiled and said, “Come, let’s go down and have some coffee with Denise. We ought to celebrate your finishing the diary.”

* * *

“Darling,” said Jacqui, “you’re not making sense. What do you mean, he’ll have to come to France?”

“Not only France. He’ll have to come
here
, to Chatou. It’s what she wanted him to do from the beginning.”

“Now you’ve lost me. Who wanted, and why? And what does any of this have to do with some drawing from America?” The force of her sigh made me hold the telephone briefly away from my ear.

I tried again, purposely slowing my speech as I took things a step at a time.

“The drawing,” I said, “is of one of Luc’s ancestors. It was drawn, so the story goes, by a young woman who loved him.”

“The ancestor.”

“Yes. And when Claudine first saw it, she said that the girl who had drawn it had shown us her heart in the drawing, had shown us she loved him.”

“The ancestor.”

“Yes.”

“I’m just trying to follow along,” she explained, in response to my tight reply.

“There is a photograph in Claudine’s studio,” I said, “of Alistair.”

“Ah.”

“Have you seen it? The one where he’s reading?”

“I think so.”

“Well,
I
think Claudine, in that photograph, showed us her heart,” I said. “She was in love with him then. She still is.” I tried backing my opinion with a summary of everything Claudine had said, and finished with: “That’s why she bought the diary in the first place, don’t you see? Not because she values it for what it is—she doesn’t—but because she hoped that it would bring him back here. Back to her.”

“I see.”

I wasn’t sure she did. I found it frustrating to talk like this, unable to see Jacqui’s face. I might not be able to read everyone’s expressions but I’d studied Jacqui’s long enough to guess, most times, at what she might be thinking. But her tone of voice was lost on me.

She said, “It seems a complicated way for her to do that, don’t you think?”

I thought most people did things in a way that was ridiculously complicated, coming at them sideways all the time instead of saying what they wanted. “Look, just get him here, all right? And if you haven’t told him yet what’s in the diary, then for heaven’s sake don’t tell him now. Don’t give him any reason to decide he needn’t come.”

“What makes you think I haven’t told him?”

“Have you?”

Jacqui hesitated. “No.”

“There you are, then. Just as well. He can decide if it’s of any use to him when he’s had time to read it. If it isn’t, he won’t have to pay me anything.” I took note of the time on my computer screen and said, “I have to finish up here. Promise me you’ll bring him over. Those exact words.”

Jacqui sighed. “I promise I’ll bring Alistair to Chatou just as soon as it can be arranged. All right?”

“This weekend would be nice.”

“I’ll do my best.” When I’d accepted that, she asked, “So, how does Mary’s diary end?”

“It doesn’t,” I replied. “It doesn’t end.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You can see it for yourself,” I said, “this weekend.”

Ringing off, I gave my concentration back to the computer, typing in the final lines of what I had transcribed this morning:

On
the
15th after breakfast Captain Hay did call upon us with the message Mr. Thomson wanted me to visit him.

Which, it appeared, was the first thing of any real note that had happened since Mary had seen the king. She’d given a full and colorful account of
that
, down to a detailed description of what they’d all worn to the palace, but afterwards her entries had grown sparser, and more dull.

Her days seemed duller still, and while she tried to keep herself amused by telling stories to her fellow guests at the hotel at mealtimes, from what I could tell they were the old tales she had told of the Chevalier de Vilbray, and not her newer, more original creations. She referred to them, but did not write them down.

A week before this final entry, on May 9, she’d written:

So at dinner told the story of the storm, which was well liked by all, and Effie later said to me in private she believes if the chevalier ever comes to Rome he will be most amazed to find himself so celebrated here for his adventures. Her remark did make me smile, which pleased her, for she holds I am become too melancholy. When I answered that it was a melancholy thing to wait so long at someone else’s whim, she gently did remind me that had been her whole life’s lot, and that she meant to wait upon me longer yet, and stay with me as long as she was wanted, which I told her would be always. I am glad to have her with me, but I count it still a hard thing that we are not free in life to choose our road, for Hugh must go wherever the Earl Marischal would have him go, and I must go where I am sent.

And there, I thought, was Mary’s problem written in a sentence: she no longer had MacPherson.

If she’d seen him since she’d seen the king, she’d written nothing of it, but the fact that he had gone from being “Mr. M—” to being “Hugh” since they had shared the cabin on the pirate hunter’s ship gave me good reason to believe his absence was the root cause of her melancholy.

Captain Hay had been the only visitor she’d mentioned, and this visit—after breakfast on the morning of May 15, in Mary’s final entry of the diary—was the first time he’d brought any news that she had deemed worth noting.

He will return this afternoon and take me to the place where Mr. Thomson is confined. I cannot think why Mr. Thomson would desire to see me, nor am I assured what he might say to me should be believed. Each time he has spoken of coming abroad he has altered the facts in small ways yet without seeming less than sincere. In truth he is more a chimera than I am, and I know not whether to count him a friend or a villain. In truth there is but one man in the whole of Rome whose honor I am certain of, whose friendship I have come now to rely upon, and if it were my choice to make I would lay all my heart before him and refuse to leave his side. My father said, we do not always get the things we want, and he was right; for though my aunt once reassured me I would always have a choice, if there is one before me now I do confess I cannot see it, so instead I must—