A Desperate Fortune

by Susanna Kearsley

  Madame Roy looked at Mary’s face and smiled slightly. “This is the Hotel de Sens,” she said, speaking in French as they took up their places where they had been told to stand, beside the open doorway. “It was built for archbishops and once housed a queen and her lovers, and though that was a long, long time ago, this still has the look of a castle, do you not think?”

  Mary was not in a state to admire the building as she might have otherwise done. It had clearly been repurposed as the office for the public coaches traveling to all the parts of France, for even at this hour of the night—or early morning, rather, since it was approaching four o’clock—the streets and courtyard bustled with activity, with torchlight and the call of voices, mostly male; the fall of booted footsteps on the cobblestones, the grind and roll of wheels, and restless stamping of the horses.

  She had never seen a diligence. Her uncle, who had journeyed in one, had described it as appearing very like a coach, but being longer and in all dimensions larger, and the vehicle before them now was definitely that. It looked, by torchlight in the darkness of the early morning, very large. The huge heavy wheels at the rear were her own height, and even the smaller and more nimble front wheels were sturdily built. Besides the central closed compartment, which looked fully long enough to carry several passengers, there was another partly open box set at the front, protected by a leather curtain, and on top was seating for a handful more, though given the extremes of weather those who traveled outside would have had to be of hardy constitution. At the back end of the diligence a great curved covered basket held the luggage of the passengers, and at the front stood seven horses waiting with impatience in their harness, the postilion’s large black jackboots strapped in place upon the nearside mare who flicked her tail and twitched an ear to Mary as though waiting for the order to be off.

  Thomson, beside her, adjusted his hold on the deal-box he’d carried the whole way across from the rooms they had waited the day in. Much like the portmanteaus, it had appeared from the back room with no explanation, though Thomson had instantly taken control of it and ever since had been loath to let go of its handles. It wasn’t a large box—her uncle had used one quite like it to hold all his papers—but Thomson had guarded it closely enough Mary guessed it contained something he deemed of value.

  She watched as the Scotsman returned with his sure, easy stride in the company of a much shorter and older man who helped consign both the portmanteaus into the basket. She noticed, though, Mr. MacPherson chose not to relinquish control of the third leather cylinder strapped to his back, nor his swords, but conveyed them himself to the netting assigned for that purpose. Then turning, he motioned the others to come.

  Mary looked at the diligence, and at the horses, and felt a small stab of misgiving. MacPherson’s three-cornered hat blocked out the glare of the torchlight and cast a black shadow that hid his eyes, but she was no less aware of his steady regard as she turned to face Thomson and covered her worries with petulance.

  “Is it permitted,” she said in a tight voice, “to ask where you’re taking me?”

  “Certainly,” he said, remembering this time to answer her as she had spoken, in French. “We are bound for Lyon.”

  Lyon. Mary’s heart dipped. It was such a long way to travel, so far from the dream of her bright life in Paris, the dream that beckoned to her all these years from the hazy horizon.

  And yet…it was thinking about that horizon that helped her to muster some courage. The mare stamped hard upon the cobbles, breathing steam into the frosty early morning air, and Mary lifted a hand to the hood of her fur-lined cloak, gathering it closely round her face to hide her features.

  Mistress Jamieson, she told herself, would not have felt afraid. She would have welcomed the adventure, turned her face towards the wider sky and never looked behind.

  So Mary tried to do the same. She took the gallant hand that Thomson offered her and stepped as lightly as she could into the waiting diligence and took her seat with perfect nonchalance. She tried to keep her gaze fixed forward, only forward, taking on the poise of Mistress Jamieson as though it were another cloak that made her fears invisible.

  But as the massive public coach began to lurch and roll along the cobbles, Mary couldn’t help herself. She turned her head, against all her intentions, and looked back. The lights of Paris seemed already to have dimmed and lost their promise. And the wider sky ahead of them looked very dark indeed.

  Chapter 18

  The incandescent blue of twilight had already started its descent, and all along the row of little Christmas Village chalets on the Champs-Élysées strings of beautiful white lights were coming on, as though they wanted to illuminate our way. The slight curve of my visor turned those little lights to stars, and their reflections swiftly chased across the sleek black surface of Luc’s helmet as he briefly glanced to see the way was clear before he changed lanes. Holding tight to him, I tried to look where he was looking, at the Arc de Triomphe rising brightly in its floodlights just ahead of us, but my eyes kept returning to those fairy lights that draped the white chalets. I couldn’t help it.

  There was something in their beauty and the rhythm of their passing that was making me feel warm inside, and happy—though the happiness, I knew, had been a steady growing thing inside me all the afternoon. I knew the source of it. I’d felt this way before, although I hadn’t felt it with such strength in years, this feeling of attraction and anticipation; liking someone. There had been a time, before I’d learned how to contain it and control it, when this feeling would have frightened me because I would have feared that it would end, and I’d be hurt. But now, the certain knowledge all relationships would end, and I could choose the time to end them, left me free to just enjoy the rich sensations that I felt when one began.

  At the moment, here with Luc, with the Ducati roaring underneath us and the cold air rushing past and all the little lights like stars around us, it felt very much like flying.

  It was really, I assured myself, the perfect situation. I would only be in Chatou for another month at most, and then my work with Mary’s diary would be done and I’d be gone, which made a neat and perfect end date for a romance, if I did choose to indulge in one. Apart from which, Luc seemed to understand the time I needed for my work, and with his son and his ex-wife already here to keep him company, he didn’t seem to be the kind of man who’d place demands on me, or try to hold me back when it was time for me to leave. He’d likely only shrug and smile and say “OK,” the way he did to everything.

  My cousin’s voice spoke from a distant corner of my mind, made fainter from the effort of attempting to push past my pleasant thoughts with her more rational advice: That’s not a rabbit hole you want to tumble down.

  But I was already some distance down that hole and falling ever faster. By the time we reached the first of the long tunnels and the motorcycle dived into the close embrace of the low-ceilinged arched walls with the long and steady line of lights that flashed past with the rhythm of a heartbeat, I was too far down the rabbit hole for saving. I leaned forward, wrapped my arms more tightly round Luc’s waist and, with my head turned sideways, let my helmet rest against the safety of his back. And went on falling.

  * * *

  Noah didn’t want to go to bed. Each night, except for New Year’s Eve, he’d gone upstairs at 9:15 without complaint, but now it was 9:43 and he was still downstairs wandering round from one room to the other; only this time he didn’t have his video game with him, so there wasn’t the synthesized music to serve as a warning, and when he came into my workroom it startled me.

  Noah apologized, not bothering to try to speak in English. “I am looking for Diablo,” he explained. “I cannot find him.” He looked sad.

  I’d always been puzzled when books about people with Asperger’s claimed that we didn’t have empathy. True, I might have trouble sometimes guessing how another person felt, but sadness was an obviou
s emotion and an easy one to spot most of the time. My problem wasn’t that I didn’t understand their feelings, only that I didn’t have a clue how to respond to them. I never knew the proper thing to do or say. I wasn’t good at comforting.

  He said, “I thought he might be here, with you. He likes this room.”

  “I haven’t seen him.” Which, considering Diablo was a cat, meant very little. Cats were good at hiding.

  “Oh.”

  I hesitated as I looked at Noah. He looked so sad. And he hadn’t interrupted me, not really. I’d just finished work on one of Mary’s entries in the diary and had set my pencil down to rest my hand a moment. She had not had much to say. The diary entry had been short and dull, a recap of her second trip to Mass, and I’d learned nothing from it other than that she had liked her new green gown. Mary hadn’t named the church they’d gone to this time, either, which at least had made me feel less guilty for not taking on the crowd of tourists at the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés this afternoon, because she might have never gone there. I was happy with the way I’d spent my time in Paris, anyway. So happy, to be honest, that my concentration wasn’t what it should be, and I found it easy now to set my work aside completely to help Noah take a look around the room. The cat, as I’d suspected, was not there.

  I said, “He must be somewhere. Where else have you looked?”

  His shrug was very French, a smaller mirror version of his father’s. “Everywhere. In all his favorite places. There is only the one room he likes upstairs, but I can’t go in there alone, not without a grown-up, and Maman is busy doing laundry and Madame Pelletier is in the bath.” His eyes were like his father’s, too, and fully as persuasive.

  “I’ll come up,” I offered, which if not exactly comforting must still have been the right response, because he brightened.

  “Truly?”

  “Yes, of course.” I rose, and let him lead me out and up the winding stairway. As we climbed, I asked him, “Are you sure he’s even in the house? Perhaps he’s gone home to his owner.”

  “You can’t own a cat. Cats don’t like to be owned.”

  This was news to me. “No?”

  Noah shook his head, certain. “Papa says that cats choose the people they want to be with; you can’t force them to stay if they don’t want to stay. And they only belong to themselves,” he said. “That’s why Diablo prefers to live here, because we understand that.”

  “I see.” We were at the first floor, now, where my bedroom was, but we simply stepped round to the next flight of stairs and kept climbing. I hadn’t been up this far yet. It was my understanding Denise and her son had the attic suite on the third floor, while Claudine’s rooms were just above mine, but the second-floor room Noah led me to, although directly on top of my own and the same general shape and size, wasn’t a bedroom. When the light was switched on I saw cameras and tripods and lamps and reflectors; a sleek modern desk and a couple of stools and framed photographs everywhere, telling me this must be Claudine’s own workspace—her studio.

  I paused on the threshold. “You’re sure you’re allowed to be in here?”

  “If I’m with a grown-up.” He’d already entered the room and was moving around with the easy assurance of someone who knew it well, peering behind canvas backdrops and under the desk and in what I assumed were the cat’s favorite places. I wasn’t much help to him, mainly because I was busy admiring the photos that hung on the wall.

  I had seen all the photographs Claudine had taken for Alistair’s books, of course, but those were landscapes and streetscapes and buildings, while these for the most part were portraits of people, some done in full color and some black and white. They were people I didn’t know—strangers—except for one man in a black-and-white image, caught halfway in shadow. A big man with dark hair turned gray at his temples.

  There were at least three other portraits of Alistair Scott hung beside and below it, but this one attracted my eye because, while all the others were formal and posed, this one captured a quieter moment, more private. He seemed unaware of the camera. He sat in a chair by a window, its casement propped open to some sort of breeze that had lifted the simple sheer curtain and let in a soft slanting angle of light. He was reading, his head slightly bent to the paperback book that he held in one hand, while his other hand cradled the stem of a wineglass that still had some wine in it. There was a second glass, also half full, on the table set under the window beside him, as well as a second chair pushed back as though someone had only just stood and walked out of camera range. Or as if that person was the one taking the picture.

  It wasn’t the usual sort of a portrait one saw of an author, I thought. It was intimate.

  “He isn’t here,” Noah said.

  Turning, I saw his eyes filling with tears and that made me feel even more useless because I still didn’t know what I could do. So it helped that the next thing he said was, “He’s lost.”

  Then at least I knew I could correct him. “We don’t know that. All we know is we can’t find him,” I said, using simple logic, “but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t know exactly where he is.”

  Noah paused to think this through. I wasn’t sure if it made sense to him, but it did stop the tears.

  Relieved, I carried on, “So, where else—”

  I didn’t get to finish. I was interrupted by a thump, a thud, and a shriek from Denise in the room underneath us. My room.

  Noah, as always, was faster than I was. His feet seemed to barely connect with the stairs, and he made a loud thump of his own at the landing in front of my bedroom door. I came more cautiously, not sure of what I would find.

  Denise smiled as we entered the room. She had bent to recover a basket of clean folded sheets that had dropped to the floor and now lay on its side with its contents disheveled and half on the carpet. “I’m sorry,” she told us, “I’m fine. I just opened the wardrobe to put the new sheets in, and this beast decided to pounce from on top of it.”

  Noah looked where she nodded and let out a squeal of his own, only happy. “Diablo! You found him, Maman!”

  Denise, in the middle of righting the basket, said, “I didn’t realize he was lost.”

  “He wasn’t. Madame Thomas said he wasn’t, and he wasn’t. Were you?” Noah asked the cat, now sitting very innocently near my bed. “You knew exactly where you were.”

  The cat, without denying or confirming this, blinked back at him.

  “Thank you, Maman,” said Noah, and he hugged his mother tightly. Turned to me. “Thank you, madam.” He hugged me too, so quickly there was no time for me to respond. Which was, I reasoned, just as well. I wasn’t good at hugging, either.

  Diablo didn’t seem to have a problem with it. He allowed himself to be scooped up without complaint. As Noah bounced off with Diablo cradled closely in his arms, Denise smiled and remarked, “Noah likes you.”

  I wasn’t sure what to reply but it didn’t much matter, since she didn’t leave any time before adding, “And so does his father. That jacket he loaned you today was his favorite. He never lets anyone touch it.”

  She said that the same way a school friend might point out a boy in your classroom who fancied you. Maybe, I thought, I was doing a poor job of reading her tone and was missing the jealousy. Then again, she didn’t look out of sorts. She was putting the clean sheets away on the shelf of my wardrobe, without any cat this time lurking on top to surprise her. She swung the doors closed and said, “These few belong in the next room, the room where your cousin stayed. Then I’ll be out of your way.”

  In honesty, I didn’t really want her to be out of my way. I liked Denise. And there was something I wanted to ask her, so when she moved into the small adjoining room I trailed behind her. The bed here was stripped to the mattress, and Denise explained, “I should have done this right after your cousin left, but I got sidetracked with my trip to Chinon and since then it s
lipped my mind.”

  I watched her shake out a sheet. “Would you like me to help you?”

  “You needn’t bother,” she said. “I can manage.”

  “It isn’t a bother.” I’d always enjoyed making beds. I enjoyed the precision of centering sheets on the mattress and smoothing the wrinkles and tucking things in, and I’d always felt soothed by the feel and the smell of fresh bed linens. Taking the end of the sheet Denise handed me, I stretched it over the bed and asked, straight out, “Why did you and Luc get divorced?”

  Even to my ears, that sounded too blunt, so I added, “It’s only that you seem to get on so well with each other. Like friends. And you’re nice, and he’s…well, he’s…” I faltered, not sure I should tell her I thought he was “hot,” as my cousin would say, but Denise seemed to know what I meant.

  “Yes,” she said, smiling, “he certainly is. And we are friends. We’ve been friends a very long time, since my parents brought me from Chinon to Paris. I wasn’t much older than Noah then, and I was lonely. Luc’s desk was beside mine at school. He was good-looking then, too,” she told me, “but I never saw him that way. I still don’t.”

  “But you married him.”

  “Yes, well, we did a ridiculous thing, once. There might have been wine involved. Maybe a lot of wine. And I had just broken up with a boyfriend, so partly I wanted to be reassured that it hadn’t been me, you know? That I was worth being loved by a man.” With a shrug she selected a blanket and shook it out, passing one side of it over to me. “It was stupid, but there you are. And I got pregnant. My parents were not pleased, but Luc…well, he tried to make everything right. To take care of me. And for a while, I let him,” she said. “But you can’t make a spark where there isn’t one. We don’t belong with each other like that. We both knew it. The day of our wedding I knew it, but I didn’t want to hurt Luc any more than he wanted to disappoint me, so we didn’t say anything. Then on our first anniversary—there might have been wine involved then, as well—we finally sat down and said what we felt, and we felt the same thing, so we fixed it.”