A Desperate Fortune (42 page)

The gift of his approval was as precious to her as the silver equipage she fastened with great care upon her gown before she turned to lean again upon the parapet, uncaring that the twilight was now properly upon them and there was no view to see beyond the ghostly outline of the broken bridge against the darkness of the shore and hills beyond. And looking at that battered bridge and at the dark gray water surging at it from beneath the place she stood, she felt a sudden desperate need to bravely stand against the current that was so uncaringly attempting to tear one more piece away from her. “What tale,” she asked him, “would you have me tell you?”

He considered this. “The one ye told at Mâcon.”

She had only told one tale she could remember at Mâcon, and it embarrassed her to think of it: the tale she’d told the younger of the frilly sisters while they’d walked and talked in French, when she had thought MacPherson could not understand that language, and she had made sport of him by fashioning a fine dramatic tale of tragic love, with him its hero. The stone beneath her hands was cool and weathered, pitted like old bone, and Mary pressed her fingers to it. “I have long since owed you an apology for what I said at Mâcon.”

Hugh stood watching her a moment longer, then came slowly forward on the bridge and bent to lean beside her on the ancient parapet. “And why is that?”

“You know why. I should not have told that story.”

With another shrug he said, “I liked it well enough. All but the ending.”

Mary turned her head so she could see his profile in the dimness. “It was not my ending. Nor even my story, for all that. You read the original version in Lyon, in Madame d’Aulnoy’s book, you must have noticed. The tale of the Russian prince.”

“Aye. Yours was better,” he said. “Tell it over.”

She sighed. “Hugh.”

“It starts with him lost.”

She could not refuse him, not when he had given her such an incredible gift of his own, so relenting she started the story and tried to repeat it the way she had crafted it when he’d been walking behind her at Mâcon, a shadow she’d longed to be free of. And yet, as she told the tale over again to him, Mary could not keep from noticing all the small points of connection to how things had happened with them in real life—from the earliest part where the hero had gazed upon his lady and had followed her without her ever noticing him in return, to their first meeting when the hero’s lady had dropped her scarf and he’d returned it, to the time when he had kissed her and her world had been forever changed, until Fate cast a pall upon their happiness and forced him to decide between remaining with his lady or returning to the battlefield.

She stopped the story there, because she found it struck too close to home. The twilight now had settled all around them and the lamplight gleamed within the windows of the tile-roofed buildings clustered on the little ship-like island that would never leave its moorings, never know another shore.

Hugh said, “Go on.”

“You do not like the ending,” she reminded him. “You told me so yourself.”

He turned his head towards her then, his face so far in shadow now she scarce could see his eyes. “Then write a different one.”

Mary was not sure at first that she understood what he was asking.

Until quietly he told her, “Write a better one.”

She realized he was speaking in the same tone he had used at Maisonneuve to tell her she should call to Frisque. And hope—a tiny twisted knot of it—began to loosen and expand within her. She remembered what she’d written in her journal so despondently this morning:
If
it
were
my
choice
to
make
I
would
lay
all
my
heart
before
him
and
refuse
to
leave
his
side
. And he was making it her choice.

Beyond his shoulder she could see the paler marble outline of the Janus pillar with its faces turned in all directions and so worn by time and weather they were featureless, that no one now could know or guess at who they might have been. So it would also be with them, she knew—when time had turned and people of an age to come would stand upon this ancient bridge and she and Hugh would be but faceless shadows then themselves, and none would know they’d ever been there.

None would know that on a mid-May evening, with the stars beginning to appear and glimmer in the darkening deep blueness of the arching sky, a young and lonely woman had put all her heart within her hands and laid it full before the silent man who leaned beside her.

“Then he told her,” Mary said, “that he must leave, for he could not neglect his duty nor his honor. And his lady sighed with sadness, but she understood, and said to him, ‘Your honor and your duty are so very much a part of you I could not ever ask you to abandon them, but neither do I think I can endure it, sir, if you abandon me. So what to do?’” She could not hold Hugh’s gaze although she could not truly see it, so she looked away again, repeating, “What to do?”

A night bird in the trees along the river’s edge began to trill, and Mary drew her strength from it.

“And so it happened,” she went on, “a fairy of the nearby forest heard the lady’s mournful speech, and being deeply moved by it, the fairy turned the lady to a falcon that could ride into the battle on her true love’s hand, and so they rode away together and had many fine adventures, and he carried her forever with him and she spent her life content, for she had wings to spread and fly with and the man she loved to hold and keep her safe.”

There was no sound or movement for long moments but the rushing of the river and the night bird calling.

And then Hugh asked, “What adventures did they have?”

She found it difficult, with all of the emotions of her speech, to make a calm reply. “I do not know.”

He thought this over. “Then ye’d better come to Spain,” he said, “and live them for yourself.”

She turned to look at him, and saw that he was straightening to stand at his full height before her in the semidarkness, and the faint light from the windows of the little island at her back showed her his steady gaze was serious.

Her heart became a trembling thing within her as she straightened too and faced him, and the night air grew alive between them, though she could no more have guessed his thoughts than she had done when they’d first faced each other in the Paris street. Except his eyes now were not cold, she thought. Not cold at all, and no longer impenetrable.

“Marry me,” he said.

She had to smile at his tone, for it could not be helped. “That’s not a question.”

“No,” he said, and bent his head towards her. “It is not.”

And then her smile was covered by his kiss and Mary, wrapped within the warmth of it, could care for nothing else.

Let currents flow and kingdoms fall and time move onward, Mary thought—this moment was for them. Those people of an age to come who stood upon this bridge would never know how long she’d stood tonight in Hugh’s strong arms, or what he’d said to her, the quiet simple words that had been spoken from his heart and were for her alone; nor would they know what she had answered back, and how he’d smiled and gently tipped her chin up with his hand to kiss her longer and more deeply; nor how he had finally held his hand to her outstretched and she had taken it with happiness and followed him.

It mattered not that no one else would bear that moment witness nor remember it, for if the future could not know them, neither could the past confine them, and the choice was always theirs to make, the tale their own to finish, as her aunt had once assured her. And her aunt had been right also when she’d laid her hand on Mary’s heart and said, “I think that always here you’ve had a little voice that calls to you.” For Mary knew the voice that she’d heard calling to her for so long had been Hugh’s own, and now had come the time, at last, to let it lead her home.

THE END

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Once upon a time, a baby girl was born at Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

Her father, William Dundas, was a wig maker who’d been born at Pencaitland in the Scottish Lowlands, and who’d come across as a young man to serve King James VII at his exiled court in France. It was there William married his French-born wife, Marguerite Paindeble. Their son Nicolas was born within the year, and in due course was followed by other sons—Charles and Jean [John]—and at last, at the end of July in the summer of 1710, came their daughter.

They named her Marie Anne Thérèse.

Her baptism, on the twenty-fifth of July of that year, was recorded in the register of the parish church, where I came across it while doing my research, and being in need of a heroine for my new book, I decided she’d fill that role wonderfully well.

I tried to leave her family as it stood—her mother’s sister, Magdalene, was also in the parish records with her husband, Jacques Laurent—but as I could find little record of the family after Mary’s birth, I took some liberties.

I don’t know when her mother died. I don’t know for a fact that her father and brothers followed King James VIII into Italy, but many of the male courtiers from Saint-Germain-en-Laye did so, both after the failed 1715 rebellion and in the years following the death of James’s mother, Queen Mary, when the already diminished former court at Saint-Germain was reduced even further by financial hardship and lack of support from the French.

Following an exiled monarch into an uncertain future wasn’t without risks, and it was common for the men to go alone. It would have been a kindness, in a caring father’s eyes, to leave his tiny daughter safe behind with family; so in setting William Dundas on the path so many other men were forced to take in those times, I allowed him to leave little Mary with her aunt and uncle, where he could be certain she’d be cared for.

I don’t know where the Laurents lived, but there were only two locations close by Saint-Germain-en-Laye where I could find both surnames—Paindeble and Laurent—intermingled in the records of that period, so I chose the village whose name I liked best: Chanteloup-les-Vignes, giving Mary the view across the forest towards Paris that would leave her primed to step into my story.

That story, to be honest, started taking shape much earlier, while I was doing research for another book,
The
Firebird
, and stumbled on a stray mention in Paris correspondence of a Mr. O’Connor—“a reputed Sharper” suspected of being a Jacobite spy. Thinking it might be the Edmund O’Connor I was writing about in
The
Firebird
, I dug deeper, only to find it was not him, but Martin O’Connor, a man with connections that led me to one of those somehow forgotten true stories from history I love to discover.

Martin O’Connor was an Irishman, and by his own admission when he first came over to the Continent he went into Flanders and mixed with the Jacobite soldiers there, many of whom were his relations. Whether one of these relations was in fact Edmund O’Connor I don’t know yet, but Martin himself certainly became a great champion of the Jacobite cause.

An ardent Freemason—as were many of the leading Jacobites—he was also the Secretary of the Mine Adventurers Company, and whether on his own initiative or at the company’s behest he appears to have been working to establish mines as part of a larger and organized Jacobite effort to find a steady source of income for King James VIII.

James, as a king in exile, was in the difficult position of having all the expenses of maintaining a court and government without any of the usual resources for raising the money to do so. He couldn’t collect taxes, and most of the people who followed him were in no position to contribute to his cause. In fact, many of them—particularly in the wake of the disastrous 1715 rebellion—had lost their own estates and crossed over the Channel as refugees, looking to King James for pensions and financial aid. James repeatedly wrote in his letters of his desire to help them and his frustration at not being able to fulfill what he felt to be an obligation to assist those who had suffered because of their loyalty to him, but “the truth is,” he wrote to the Duke of Ormonde in 1719, “we are in a terrible way as to money matters.”

Well aware of this, his supporters continued to search for new avenues of income, and while permanent and sustainable ones—such as mines—were highly desirable, no stone was left unturned, and various schemes were proposed.

The idea of using the stock market was a recurring one. As early as October 20, 1717, Father Graeme (whom any readers of my book
The
Firebird
may recognize as being the son of Colonel Patrick Graeme, who featured in both that book and in
The
Winter
Sea
) was writing from Calais to King James’s chief adviser, “Will you only allow a well-wisher to the good cause to put a trick on the stockjobbers by sending over a counterfeit
Paris
Gazette
with news in it to make their stocks either rise or fall, as shall be found most convenient, and you may have a million sterling in a week or two without running any risk?”

I came across several other examples of similar offers in the correspondence I was reading, but the king invariably turned them down. Nonetheless, his followers continued to intrigue, at times without his knowledge, let alone his blessing.

By the summer of 1731, it had become apparent to one of the British informers placed in the household of a prominent Jacobite in France that some new plot was in the wind. Several people, including Martin O’Connor, had been traveling with regularity between London and Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where they were meeting with General Dillon, who, although he was no longer part of King James’s inner circle, was still a loyal Jacobite and viewed by both the king and those around him as an honest man.

Whatever General Dillon and O’Connor and his friends were up to, it pushed the bounds of honesty enough that the informer’s Jacobite employer was concerned, and King James—when he learned of it that summer—reportedly wrote to the general himself and instructed him not to proceed with the plan.

That this plan involved the stock swindle that would give rise to the Charitable Corporation scandal is certainly suggested by the fact that the informer repeated this detail in almost the same words the following April, while writing to his British spymasters about the affair of the Charitable Corporation. “O’Connor and others,” he told them, “have assured me that the Pretender had writ some months ago to the principal people concerned, in a very great Secret, that he could not condescend to such proposals…”

At any rate, the king’s instructions came too late. The wheels of the scheme were already in motion.

There were so many people involved in the scandal, and their interconnections and dealings were so intricate and well-concealed, that I could probably spend decades trying to work my way through that labyrinth without ever finding my way to its center. Even now, when I have reached a basic working understanding of the things they did and how they did them, I can’t claim to fully understand their motivation.

Of the two men who shouldered the bulk of the blame for it—the banker, George Robinson, and the warehouse keeper, John Thomson—I chose to write about Thomson, not only because he left behind a greater wealth of correspondence, but also because the more I read of it, the greater an enigma he became.

Each time he recounted his role in the Charitable Corporation affair—in his personal correspondence, or in conversation with people he trusted, or in his official testimony to the Parliament committee investigating the scandal—he told a different version of the tale, and I found it increasingly impossible to tell which one, if any, was the truth. With three centuries between us, and without a better knowledge of his character, I could not say with certainty if Thomson was a victim, zealous Jacobite, or fraudster. I chose instead to have him, in this novel, give the varied explanations that he gave in life, pulling his dialogue in those scenes directly from his letters and conversations and leaving it up to the readers to judge, from his own words, which story they ought to believe.

While I may not know Thomson’s true reasons for getting involved in the stock fraud, I do know for a fact that in October of 1731, reportedly accompanied by Martin O’Connor, he fled London, crossing to France.

There was, in France, a long established Jacobite network extending from the old court of Saint-Germain-en-Laye to most of the primary cities and towns—Boulogne, Bordeaux, Marseilles, Lyon—and of course Paris, where the body of King James VII lay in state at the Church of the English Benedictines in the rue Saint-Jacques, still unburied years after his death, awaiting the restoration of his son to the British throne so the dead king’s body could be given a proper state funeral at Westminster Abbey, within his own kingdom.

I have no direct evidence Sir Redmond Everard played any part in the move to assist and conceal Thomson that winter, but he was closely connected to some of the people who did, and I found the coincidence of his house being at Chatou—the same town where I’d placed my modern-day characters—too great to let it pass by without using it, just as my discovery of the real-life arrest, imprisonment, and examination of Mrs. Elizabeth Farrand, the Jacobite courier carrying messages between Paris and London, seemed to me the perfect opportunity to give a walk-on part to Anna Jamieson, a favorite fictional character of mine from my novel
The
Firebird
, whose nature made it likely she’d have stepped in to take up the dropped baton of Mrs. Farrand. It was also in keeping with Anna’s nature that, once on the page, she decided to turn that walk-on part into a proper cameo appearance and leave a more meaningful stamp on the story line.

By the time of Mrs. Farrand’s arrest by the British, John Thomson had been hiding in France for three months, and the British ambassador in Paris, James Waldegrave, had been doing what he could to have him found and brought to justice.

Waldegrave was, interestingly enough, a grandson of King James VII by one of his mistresses, which made Waldegrave’s mother King James VIII’s half sister—but while he was not above using his family connections to gain information, paying visits to his uncle the Duke of Berwick at Saint-Germain-en-Laye from time to time, there is no indication he felt sympathetic at all to the Jacobite cause. On the contrary, he had a far-reaching web of informers and spies used to counter their efforts. He put them to use in hunting for Thomson.

There were, in that winter, no certain reports of where Thomson was actually staying. Waldegrave’s spies reported having seen him in a hired coach in November and speculated that he was staying with the Jacobite Abbé Dunn at Boynes, south of Paris—which he probably was, since some of his papers were later discovered there and in January one of his associates claimed to have visited him in a little village outside Paris.

But by the thirtieth of January, Thomson was writing to a colleague in London: “Write but seldom for three months, and expect to hear but seldom from me in that time…” And a letter he wrote to his cousin in Edinburgh, dated that same day, was written from Paris.

So I put him in Paris.

One of the difficulties of doing research in this period, incidentally, is that at the time, England was still using the Old Style calendar while France and Italy used the New Style, so when the newspapers in England announce on the ninth of the month that someone is setting out for France, that person is actually setting out on the twentieth in the New Style, which adds eleven days. For the sake of simplicity I kept all the dates in this novel in New Style, as my characters would have used them on the Continent.

In Paris, I chose to put Thomson on the rue du Coeur Volant for three reasons. First, that particular street had changed little since 1732, allowing me to visit it, stand where my characters would have been standing, and gain what impressions I could, which is always an integral part of my research. Second, because the real-life timing of that part of the story meant events would be happening at the same time as the annual Fair—the old
Foire
Saint-Germain
—I deliberately chose a street close to the Fair site, so it could be used in the story. And finally, the rue du Coeur Volant was very close to where George Robinson—John Thomson’s fellow fugitive—had stayed while he was hiding out in Paris (at the Petit Hôtel de Normandy in the rue Taranne).

For descriptions of the city at the time, I turned primarily to memoirs of the travelers who stayed in Paris in the early eighteenth century and who thoughtfully recorded all the fascinating details they observed, from public executions to the lamps that hung above the streets. As is my custom, I tried when I could to move my characters within existing dates and real events—the pantomime they go to watch (the evening Mary’s gloves are stolen, when she first encounters Hugh) was actually performed on that one evening: Wednesday, February 13, and its plot is detailed in a French newspaper of that month. While such minor things might be of little importance to most of my readers, they help me to anchor my characters, real and imagined, within their historical landscape.

Because Thomson, whenever he’d been spotted somewhere in France by the British ambassador’s spies, had been always in company with noted Jacobites, never alone, I considered it very unlikely he would have been left on his own while in Paris.

I gave him Mary, with her imagined former nurse, Effie, to help with his camouflage and, for added protection, created a bodyguard for him in the person of the fictional Hugh MacPherson.

Just as Mary Dundas stands, in part, as an example of the displaced second generation of Jacobites, born in exile and without a land to truly call their own, so Hugh MacPherson represents the many Highlanders who left their homes to fight for James, and paid a higher price than most.

Hugh’s story, as told by the Earl Marischal, is entirely true, in its various parts. It was drawn, down to the burning of the cottage and the loom, from the memoirs and letters and firsthand accounts I read in my research, and while I cannot say with certainty that all those things happened to one man, I can say in honesty all of them happened.