A Desperate Fortune (7 page)

Denise replied, “Diablo. He’s been making a nuisance of himself this morning, as usual, and Luc has been defending him, as usual.”

Luc told her, “I wasn’t defending him.” Then turned to me once again to confirm the facts. “Was I defending him?”

“No, you were saying he couldn’t be trusted.”

Luc nodded as though vindicated. “There you see? She speaks the perfect truth.”

His statement sobered me for reasons he would not have understood. I looked away, and met Claudine’s small smile.

“Denise informed me you spoke French,” she said, “but I didn’t expect that you’d speak it so well. I’m surprised your cousin didn’t mention it.”

“It wasn’t a requirement of the job. At least, it was my understanding that the diary—or the part that’s not in cipher—is in English. Is that right?”

“Yes. There is a single entry that begins the diary, all in English, so one would expect the cipher will be based in English also.”

Denise, setting down a bowl of fresh fruit salad on the table, asked me, “Could you solve it if it were in French?”

“I think so, yes.”

“What’s this?” Luc looked from one face to another, his one eyebrow raised a fraction in the same way it had been before. “What am I missing? What’s all this about a diary?”

Claudine told him, in the briefest terms. His eyebrow lifted higher and he looked at me.

“So this is quite a skill you have. A gift.”

“I’m not a professional.”

Claudine said, “Even so, you must have done very well to win Alistair’s confidence. He can be hard to impress. He is…” Pausing for thought, she half turned as my cousin came into the dining room, looking her usual smartly dressed self in the wake of her shower. Switching smoothly to English, Claudine told her, “I was just speaking of Alistair and of his drive for perfection. How would you describe him?”

“A thorn in my side,” Jacqui said with a smile, as she greeted Claudine with the double kiss. “Sorry I’m late.” When she reached to shake Luc’s hand across the wide table and wish him good morning as well, it reminded me I hadn’t yet washed my hands after petting the cat. I excused myself, using the moment to step out of everyone’s way and enjoy the warm peace of the kitchen.

It was the best kind of a kitchen—high ceilinged, with dark wood beams holding the plaster above, and a scrubbed stone floor under my feet, and tall multipaned windows to let in the light. On one wall an old fireplace, painted the same rich cream color as most of the walls and the cupboards, spoke of the age of the house and the time when that hearth would have been used instead of the enameled cooker—venerable itself, and likely wood-burning, but clearly still in use from the two pots that steamed and bubbled on its cast iron surface.

There were modern appliances, too, and a TV tucked off to one side on the worktop, but I liked the fireplace and old-fashioned cooker the best. I could happily have eaten breakfast here, amid the clutter of utensils at the sturdy-looking table in the center of the room, but from the scrape of chair legs and the clink of tableware I knew that everyone was taking up their places in the dining room and I would have to join them.

The table in the dining room was long and could have seated ten if called upon to do it, but there were only five places set. Ordinarily I would have picked the chair that had me facing Jacqui, for I found it easier to have her face to focus on if I felt overwhelmed in conversations, but this morning I sat down beside her, focusing instead on Luc.

His eyes were very blue.

The conversation had moved on while I’d been in the kitchen. The talk was all in English now, so Jacqui was included, though Denise appeared to find it fairly challenging to follow what was being said.

Claudine, in her educated English, was attempting to explain to Luc the background of the Jacobite community in France and how they’d come to live in exile here, with agents from the government in England sent to spy on them.

I would have found it incredibly difficult, living like that—never knowing if one of your friends had been threatened or bought off and turned to the enemy’s side, or if even your family could truly be trusted. The spies, from all that Alistair had told me, had been everywhere. Somebody’s servant or cousin or priest and confessor could be in the pay of the English King George and his government, opening letters and selling off secrets.

And if one was caught, the results, on both sides, could be deadly.

The levels of spying and counterintelligence had caught my interest so deeply I’d spent the past week or so reading about them, until I knew most of the spies’ and the spymasters’ names—could have probably spotted them, from their descriptions, had I been alive back then. This was just part of the way my brain processed things: nothing by half measures. Every new interest became an obsession.

But at least it meant I could contribute to this conversation over breakfast, filling in a detail that Claudine could not remember, and then going on to properly set out the full chronology of what had happened after King James moved his shadow court to Rome, and those who had been left behind had struggled in the wake of the Queen Mother’s death to keep up their community at Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

The first time Jacqui kicked my ankle I assumed she’d done it by mistake, but when she did it for a second time I realized what I was doing. I reined in my thoughts, put a check on my monologue, and was self-consciously searching for some way to back out with some shred of dignity when Jacqui smiled reassurance.

“You’re going to have
me
looking over my shoulder,” she told me, “with all of this talk about traitors and spies.”

“I’m sorry. I do tend to ramble on a bit.”

Across the table, Luc Sabran looked from my cousin’s face to mine. “You don’t need to apologize. Go on, I find it interesting. I didn’t know this history.”

All throughout my monologue Denise had kept herself in nearly constant motion, back and forth between the kitchen and her own seat next to Luc. She said to Jacqui now, in careful English, “While Sara is here with us she must go visit the château.”

My cousin, smiling still, said, “Sara will most likely be too busy with her work to do much touring.”

Luc shrugged and raised his coffee cup to drink. “Perhaps that is a thing for Sara to decide.”

It seemed to me he held her gaze a moment longer than he needed to. For a moment, even though I knew it was ridiculous, I almost thought I felt a trace of tension in the air between them.

Claudine smoothly cut across it with a comment aimed at me. “But yes, of course, today is Sunday and you’ve only just arrived. Perhaps you’d like to visit Saint-Germain-en-Laye?”

“Or we could maybe take a walk around Chatou?” suggested Jacqui.

All the faces turned towards me made me feel uncomfortably the center of attention, and I couldn’t give an answer because honestly I didn’t know what choice to make or whom to please or what they all expected me to say.

Luc asked, “What would
you
like to do?”

Direct and simple, in a tone that brought my gaze round to the perfect angles of his features, and to those blue eyes that in that moment seemed to anchor me.

I found my voice with ease then. And I looked from Luc to Claudine and I said in total honesty, “I’d like to get to work.”

Then shall the traveler come…

—Macpherson, “Temora,” Book Two

Chatou

January 23, 1732

The house where they had passed the night was large and grand with many rooms, yet Mary had awakened feeling restless. She had taken Frisque outdoors but it had been too cold to stay there, and since Nicolas seemed to be in no hurry to depart she had been left with little option but to find some way to pass the time within this house of strangers.

They were pleasant strangers, certainly. The master of the house, Sir Redmond Everard, had welcomed both her brother and herself on their arrival with as much warmth as if they had been his family, and had fed and entertained them all the evening with so little inconvenience that one would have thought they were expected guests. Sir Redmond was an Irishman of middle age whose educated voice held little trace of the same accent as the blacksmith’s Irish wife’s in Chanteloup-les-Vignes. It was not clear to Mary how he’d come to know her brother, but she’d gathered from their conversation they had many friends in common at the former court of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, among the exiles, though Sir Redmond had come over much more recently than most. She’d gathered, too, he had left an estate of worth behind him in Ireland, for his manners were the manners of a gentleman by birth, and all the things within his house were very fine.

She liked his drawing room the best. Not for the carpets and tapestry hangings and wainscoting, nor for the richness of furnishings—walnut-tree tables, and chairs with stuffed cushions and footstools, and even a cage with a red-breasted linnet whose twittering song had enlivened the evening while Mary and Nicolas had sat with Sir Redmond and his wife playing at cards. No, she liked the room best for its books: seven shelves of them, carefully dusted and ordered by binding and looking, to her, like a wonderland.

There had been few books in her uncle’s house: a Bible, and a book of plays by Molière that she and all her cousins had delighted in performing of an evening, with appropriate theatrics; three English sermons purchased by her uncle to help Mary practice reading in her native language, and two books by the Countess d’Aulnoy—one her famous novel of the Count of Douglas, and the other a collection of enchanting fairy tales that had delighted Mary until her Aunt Magdalene had one day found her reading them and promptly had reclaimed the book from Mary’s hands with the remark, “These are
not
meant for children.”

She’d obeyed her aunt, of course, until she’d reached her sixteenth birthday, when she’d judged herself to be grown-up enough to read the fairy tales. She’d learned them all by heart, and in the nighttime with her cousin Colette close beside her in the bed they shared, she would recite them and embellish them, and when she had told all the Countess d’Aulnoy’s tales she started to invent her own, of princes and forbidden love, enchanted lands and twists of fate and such romantic tragedy that often at the end of them Colette would be in tears.

One night last November, when Mary had finished a story, Colette had remarked, “You must marry a man who will take you to Paris, for you could charm the writers of the great salons with your own tales, and I could charm the men who came to listen, and so find a wealthy husband of my own.”

That had long been Mary’s dream as well, but she was practical. “It will be the other way about, for you will marry before I do.”

“Why?” Colette had asked. “You are the elder.”

Mary had explained with patience, “I am not your sister. And your parents will have need to see you settled with a husband and a dowry before giving thought to me.”

“Then I must set myself at once to win the heart of the Chevalier de Vilbray,” Colette had said, not all in jest. “I saw him riding to the hunt today. He is in truth as handsome as they say he is. Perhaps one day he’ll meet me in the woods, as the prince met the peasant girl in tonight’s tale, and fall madly in love with me.”

Mary, who at that time had not yet seen the chevalier, had allowed herself to daydream of chance meetings in the woods with him herself. She’d smiled. “Well, if he sweeps you up onto his horse the way the prince did to the peasant girl, I trust you’ll sweep yourself back down, for such encounters rarely end so well in life as they do in the fairy tales. Real men are not so chivalrous.”

“I’ll not permit you to be cynical. You cannot tell the tales you tell and not believe in chivalry.”

“I do. But the Chevalier de Vilbray—”

“—will make a charming husband,” Colette had completed Mary’s sentence. “And when we are married, he will carry me to Paris and I’ll bring you with me, and you’ll be the new sensation of the literary salons. You will be adored by all and have so many famous lovers and so many grand adventures that your memoirs, as you write them, will run into several volumes, all of which of course you’ll dedicate to me. Now,” she’d said, “tell me the ending again, where the prince reappears when the princess was sure he’d abandoned her, for that is my favorite part, and I’ll try not to weep.”

It had seemed strange to Mary last night in this house in Chatou to sleep all by herself in a bed, without Colette beside her. And she knew that it would have been equally strange for Colette.

When Mary had said her good-byes before driving away in the closed chaise with Nicolas, Colette had hugged her the hardest. And late last night when Mary had retrieved a nightgown from her portmanteau she’d found a parcel wrapped in paper nestled in the neatly folded clothes, addressed in pencil in her cousin’s careful writing:
For
your
memoirs.

It had been a book with all its pages blank, exactly like the one in which her uncle kept household accounts, with cloth boards and a leather spine, and with it had been a cylindrical traveling pen set, the ink well and talc in small sections that screwed one on top of the other beneath the long section that held three plain quill pens with neatly carved nibs.

An extravagant gift, and had Colette attempted to give it before she had gone Mary wouldn’t have taken it, knowing how much the small pen set alone must have cost. But last night she had held it and been grateful for the sentiment behind the gesture, and the small connection that it gave her to the place she’d left behind, and she had brought both book and pen set down this morning with her to Sir Redmond’s drawing room, where she sat now, the book laid open to its first page while she wrote the details of her journey here with Nicolas.

For if she was in truth to have adventures, she decided, that was where they should most properly begin.

Frisque did not like to be ignored. When Mary had first started writing, he had flopped upon the carpet on his back with all four feet up in his most engaging attitude, attempting to convince her that he needed her attention, and when that had failed he’d alternately pounced upon her shoes and tugged and worried at the hemline of her gown until she’d met his needs halfway by rolling, with her foot, his favorite wooden ball across the floor so he could chase it and retrieve it. She could do this without thinking, because Frisque retrieved things brilliantly. Each time the ball rolled off across the carpet he would hunt for it quite happily, tail wagging, bring it back and lay it down exactly at the right spot near her foot so she could kick it out again.

This went on for some time, and Mary had managed to put down her summary of what had happened the previous day, from the time she had set out with Nicolas right through their evening with Sir Redmond Everard, and she was just starting into the details of what she’d done so far today when she felt Frisque return, so she aimed a kick at where the ball should have been and discovered it wasn’t. Instead she connected with softness and fur and was met with a swift bark of protest.

She left off her writing midword to bend down and apologize, petting Frisque to comfort him. “Where is it, then?” she asked the dog. “What have you done with it?”

Frisque cocked his head in a quizzical way.

Mary told him, “The ball. Where’s the ball?”

It was one of the three words, together with
outside
and
food
that could spur the small dog to immediate action. That he expected her to follow him was evident from how he trotted off a few steps, wheeled and bounced and wheeled again, and with a sigh she stood and went where he was leading her, across the room to where a high-backed settee faced the fireplace. The settee was broad and deep, richly upholstered with silken embroidery over the wool of the cushions and arms and the tall curving back, trimmed with braid and a dainty bell fringe that brushed over Frisque’s ears as the little dog pushed underneath, scrabbling with his small paws in an effort to reach the ball wedged underneath the low rail that connected the settee’s carved legs.

“Idiot,” she told him with affection, “you won’t get it out like that, it’s too far back.” She knelt and nudged him to the side with one hand while she reached beneath the settee with the other, feeling for the ball. Out in the entry hall the bell beside the front door rang and Frisque gave the low rumbling woof he used when threats felt close at hand, his louder barking always kept reserved for challenging those things that were too far away to answer him. She stroked his head and shushed him, warning him to silence, for she did not wish to be a nuisance to their host and hostess. Frisque gave one more grumble but obeyed, and when the door into the drawing room was opened he made no sound, though his ears twitched forward.

“…comfortable in here,” Sir Redmond Everard was saying as he showed an unseen guest into the room. A woman, from the rustle of her gown and petticoat; the click of smaller heels across the floor.

Mary, feeling anything but comfortable, debated what to do. They had not seen her crouched behind the tall settee, and as embarrassing as her position was she knew she should stand and announce her presence before they began to—

“There,” Sir Redmond said, “now we have privacy.”

Behind the shelter of the settee Mary sank back on her heels and felt her cheeks flame as she tried hard
not
to think of why a married man might wish to be in private with a woman not his wife. If she had felt uncomfortable before, it had been nothing to the level of discomfort she felt now, and she could see no easy end to it that let her keep her dignity, although her mind was whirring in its search for one.

Sir Redmond told the woman, “I’d expected Mrs. Farrand.”

“Mrs. Farrand has been taken, sir.” The woman spoke in English with a pleasant lilt. Her voice was clear and confident, and sounded young. “When last she crossed to Dover she was met there by a Messenger who had been sent to stop her and arrest her as a spy, and she’s been taken now to London to await examination.”

“She’s in prison?”

“Aye, sir.”

“That is most unfortunate.”

The woman’s voice acquired what Mary took to be the slightest edge. “You underestimate her, sir, if you imagine Mrs. Farrand will tell anything of value to the government, however ill they treat her.”

“Then you know her?”

“Aye, I do, sir.”

“And have you brought any proof of this?”

“I have. My introductions, which were given me when I passed through Boulogne.”

There was a pause, and the faint crinkle of a paper being smoothed along its folds. Sir Redmond commented, “From Father Graeme
and
from General Gordon. These are both good men. How do you come to know them, Mistress—?”

Clearly he was waiting for her name, but she did not supply it. Her reply was simply, “You’ll forgive me, but as Mrs. Farrand was herself so recently betrayed, I would prefer to keep my own connections private. They are good men, as you say. And I do know them, as their letters prove.”

“Well then, that must suffice.” Sir Redmond’s voice held admiration and amusement. “Come then, give me what you’ve carried all this way. Unless you’ve got them in your stays, as Mrs. Farrand always carried them? Should I turn round?”

“They are not in my stays, and I can do the turning round, if you will give me but a moment.” She had evidently sewn whatever they were both referring to within the lining of her gown or petticoat, for Mary heard the rustling of the fabric as the woman turned, and then the tearing of a seam, and the crinkle of paper again.

Frisque, growing bored, reached with his paw again beneath the settee’s legs in an attempt to gain his ball, and Mary pressed more firmly on his head to quiet him and hold him to his silence while she closed her eyes and sent a wish to any fairy godmother who might be like to listen that Sir Redmond and his guest would soon conclude their business—or that a convenient hole might open in the floor beneath herself and Frisque, and so end her embarrassment.

The woman said, “There are five letters, and the latest cipher, for the one that Mrs. Farrand carried with her is no longer safe to use.”

“Of course. I’ll—”

What he was about to say was interrupted by a fall of footsteps in the corridor, and then the door swung open and Sir Redmond’s wife exclaimed, “Oh, do excuse me, dear, I did not know we had a guest.”

“My wife,” Sir Redmond made the introductions, “this is Mistress—”

“Jamieson,” the woman now replied, in friendly tones, after what Mary thought had been the faintest pause. “It is an honor, Lady Everard.”

The knight said, “Mistress Jamieson is a great friend of Mrs. Farrand.”

“Ah, dear Mrs. Farrand,” said his wife. “I have not seen her for some weeks. Does she not travel with you?”

“She is indisposed, just at the moment,” was the younger woman’s answer, and Sir Redmond’s wife made sounds of sympathy that made it plain she was not privy to her husband’s business and was unaware that Mrs. Farrand—and indeed the woman she was being introduced to—were in fact clandestine couriers.

The younger woman carried on, “But knowing I would be in this vicinity, she asked me if I’d stop and ask your husband for a letter that attests to the good character of her son Thomas, who does seek to marry a young lady at Calais whose father yet requires convincing.”

“Yes, of course. For Mrs. Farrand, anything. You’ll do that for her, won’t you, darling?”