A Desperate Fortune

by Susanna Kearsley

  To her mother and her sister, speaking once again in French, she said, “He has a more provincial accent than our dancing master, but I would suppose that is a function of his class, for he is clearly not a gentleman. How kind of Monsieur Robillard to take him on.”

  Her mother turned to Thomson. “Yes, indeed. In what position does he serve you, for in truth he seems quite fierce for a valet?”

  Mary observed that Thomson had been caught off guard and had to think about his answer, so she sought to turn attention from him with a bit of teasing of her own. She told the other women, “He may seem fierce, but I promise you señor Montero is not half as hardened as he looks. He’s rather soft beneath it all. Quite sentimental. Frisque, my dog, adores him. And he never will admit it but I’m told that he writes poetry.”

  “Indeed.” The mother looked towards MacPherson, and her daughters followed suit with interest, making Mary glad that he was standing at her back and so she could not see his face, although she knew he had not understood what she had said.

  She bravely carried on, “Oh, yes. And reads it, too. Which does remind me,” she said to the younger sister, “could you ask him, please, if he has finished with the book I loaned him lately to assist him in his efforts to learn French? I confess I do speak nothing of his language, and you manage it so beautifully.”

  Well flattered by this praise, the younger sister said, “Of course,” and asked a question of the Scotsman, who after a weighted pause responded with an answer that seemed longer than the others he had given.

  Satisfied, the younger sister translated, “He says that it is safe upstairs at present, and that after we have supped he will be pleased to fetch it for you and return it to your room, if that would suit you.”

  Mary felt like saying that it wouldn’t suit her in the least. She had no wish to have to face him in her room, even though Madame Roy would be there. It had been a gamble, certainly, to try to get her journal back in such a sideways fashion, but she’d seen no more straightforward way to ask for its return without resorting to the use of English, which might have betrayed their new disguises, for in truth there seemed no place where they might not be overheard if she’d confronted him. Except, perhaps, within a private room.

  She felt the pricking on her neck again, and buried the strong urge to rub her hand against her nape. Instead she briefly gave attention to the game she was still playing, as the elder sister made a declaration of three tens.

  “Not good,” said Mary, in the customary answer, as she countered with her own four queens. And then, encouraged by the simple fact her voice had sounded calm, she told the younger sister, “Do please tell señor Montero that he needn’t put himself to so much trouble. I am sure my brother could deliver me the book.”

  She played her cards with studied concentration while the message was conveyed in Spanish, and she tried to keep that concentration when his answer seemed as long and full of detail as the one he’d given previously.

  “What I think he said,” the younger sister told her, “is that it’s no trouble to him, and he knows the book is of importance to you, so he would be easier in his own mind if he returned it to you by his own hand. He did say he enjoyed it, I could understand that much, and that he has some questions on the text he wishes to discuss with you.”

  “Well,” Mary said, and sought to smile. “I’m sure that will prove something of a challenge.”

  She had lost the hand. She lost the next one, too, so though she won the next three and thus won the game itself, she felt off balance all through supper, tasting little of the food or wine, and when they’d parted company and gone up to their rooms she could not make herself relax.

  There was no point, she knew, in trying to do anything at all until he came to bring the journal to her. Frisque had raised his head with keen anticipation when she’d entered, but seeing she was in no mood for play he’d tucked his head into the blankets as before, content and warm beside the sleeping form of Madame Roy. The older woman’s gown and cloak were neatly hanging in the clothespress, and she seemed so very peacefully asleep that Mary did not have the heart to wake her, so instead she lit a single candle from the hearth and set it on the small round table near the center of the room. And waited.

  From her short experience, she’d half expected that the Scotsman would move like a ghost and somehow make it down the corridor without her hearing his approach, but he did not. She heard the even measure of his footsteps coming nearer, and had ample time to meet him at the door.

  He did not wait upon the threshold like a gentleman to be invited in, but gave a short nod and stepped forward so that she was left no choice but to step back and let him enter, or be flattened.

  In English, in an undertone, he told her, “Shut the door.”

  Or else I’ll kill you, Mary finished in her mind, which raised an inner smile that eased a little of her nervousness. She did as he instructed, and then turned to find him standing at the center of the room already, looking round as though he had a vague distrust of everything within it.

  Frisque had raised his head again, and now the little dog rose to his feet and wagged his tail with such a force it set his body shaking. Mary, fearing he might bark, crossed quickly to the bed and took him in her arms. There was no way she could avoid the Scotsman, nor could they converse and keep their voices low as caution would require unless she moved to stand quite close to him, so with reluctance Mary did just that. The deeper shadows cast by the lone candle and the low flames of the hearth made harder angles of his features, but she faced him squarely anyway, and said, “You have my journal.”

  Without answering, he drew the book and penner from his pocket, and as wordlessly he set them on the table.

  Frisque was squirming. Mary, settling the dog, said, “Thank you.”

  “Your brother,” said Mr. MacPherson, “is Nicolas Dundas?”

  She knew she’d written down her brother’s first name in her journal, in the single entry that she’d made in English before switching to the cipher. As to how he had deduced their surname, Mary did not know, but she could see no reason to deny it. “Yes.”

  He did not ask about the cipher, which at first she thought was strange, until she reasoned that if he had read that first long entry he’d have known about her morning spent with Mistress Jamieson, and how she had devised the cipher, and the purpose of it. All he said, after a frowning pause, was: “I would have your word that what ye write within those pages is for your eyes, and none other.”

  Mary looked at him in some surprise. “You have it.”

  She’d expected him to question her more closely; to demand to know the contents of the entries she had written, and perhaps even compel her to reveal to him the cipher. All he did instead was study her a moment with that gaze she could not penetrate.

  She held that gaze unwillingly, but did not look away, and in the end he broke the contact and looked down at where the journal lay, and with one square and well-formed hand he slid it closer to her, in an action that was also a decision.

  “Then guard it,” he said to her. “Burn it or bring it. Don’t leave it behind.”

  Which appeared to be all he would say on the subject. But when Mary thought he would leave her he paused again; brought his gaze back to hers, and for an instant she thought she discerned something searching within it, as though he were faced with a conflict of facts he was seeking to reconcile.

  “You are accomplished,” he told her, “at cards.”

  Having no notion how to reply to a compliment from this inscrutable man, she could only say, “Thank you.”

  “You had a carte blanche in the second hand.”

  Mary thought she had some faint idea, then, where he was heading with this line of talk. And she could have explained to him what her intention had been in not claiming the carte blanche, but telling him that would in turn have revealed near as much of her
mind and true self to him as claiming carte blanche would have revealed all of her cards to her gaming opponent, and Mary did not wish to be so exposed. She retreated instead, as she’d done for so long, behind that useful mask she had learned to adopt, of the pretty and witty but none-too-intelligent female. “How silly of me,” she said, “not to declare it. I must be more tired than I realized.”

  His gaze could no longer be read, at least not by the candlelight. Giving the short nod she’d noticed he gave in the place of a bow, he said nothing further but turned and departed.

  She bolted the door when he’d gone. Frisque whined and Mary hushed him with her mouth against his soft fur.

  “It’s all right,” she soothed the little dog. “He scares me, too.”

  Chapter 20

  My temper, though I didn’t often vent it, was my least attractive feature. Had I been at home I would have let loose with a stream of every swear word I could muster, but because I was in someone else’s house I held it in and fumed in steady, burning silence.

  It took a lot of effort, so much so I didn’t notice the by-now-familiar sound of Noah’s video game music until he was standing in the doorway of my little workroom, and when I glanced up there must have been a lot of anger in my eyes because he physically stepped back a pace, and instantly I felt remorse.

  “Good morning, Madame Thomas,” he said, speaking careful English. “I am sorry to disturb you. I will not disturb you more. I do not want to be disturbing.”

  I was briefly puzzled by his repetition of the word disturb until I realized I had taught it to him on the morning we’d first met, and he was probably just showing me that he’d remembered.

  “No, it’s fine,” I said. “I’m only frustrated by something here. It isn’t about you.”

  “Ah. Good. I’m looking for—”

  “Diablo. Yes. He’s there.” I waved a hand towards the boxes by the window, where the cat had been curled up in comfort, staring at me for the past half hour as though convinced I’d lost my mind. Perhaps I had. I said to Noah, “Take him.” Which of course meant: Take him with you when you leave, but Noah only lifted up the cat and stood there by the window, watching me.

  He asked, “Is frustrated the same as frustré?”

  “Yes, it is. The very same.”

  “I am sorry you are frustrated.”

  “It’s fine,” I said again, and then because it wasn’t fine and there was no one else to let off steam to, I went on, “It’s only that she’s changed the game. She based the stupid cipher on a card game, and I had it sorted out, but now she’s gone and changed the game, I think, and I can’t figure out to what.”

  He blinked at me a moment. Then he simply said, “OK.”

  It was the best thing anybody could have done to break my mood. He sounded so exactly like his father that I couldn’t help but be amused. I said, “You didn’t understand that, did you? Any of it?”

  Noah shook his head.

  I switched to French, and in less aggravated terms explained the problem.

  “Oh,” said Noah. “Can I help?”

  I nearly told him no, he couldn’t help at all, he was too young to be of any proper use to me…and then in time I caught myself, recalling that it had been Noah’s offhand mention of discarding cards that had been key to my decrypting Mary’s cipher in the first place, so I said, “All right.”

  I’d read in books of people “lighting up” when they were happy, but I’d never had a sense of what that meant, because a person couldn’t really light up. But the change in Noah’s features when I told him he could help me made him seem more animated. Brighter. Maybe that was what the books were on about.

  I shifted my chair to the side so he could come and stand beside me. “See this list? It’s all the different card games people played back in the early eighteenth century. The time when this cipher was written.”

  “Where did you find these?”

  Why did children ask the most inconsequential questions? “On the Internet. Now, I’ve got through this list to here,” I said, and pointed to the place. “So when I ask you to, just read me the next game that’s got a star beside it, and then tell me what the numbers are beside that name, all right?”

  “OK.” He took the list into his hands, a move that shifted the black cat held in his arms so that Diablo’s face was level with my own. It was a little disconcerting being stared at by a cat, and definitely not my normal solitary working pattern, but at least I’d lost the anger and could turn my focus fully on the task at hand.

  “All right,” I said to Noah. “Read me out the next one.”

  “Whist,” he told me, with exaggerated emphasis upon the wh so that it came out: “Wuh-hist.”

  “And the numbers?”

  “Two and twelve.”

  I set to work with those.

  “I like this other name,” said Noah. “Lanterloo. It’s funny. It’s a funny word to say.” As though to prove it, he repeated “Lanterloo” in different tones at different speeds.

  I interrupted him. “You did say you would help me, yes?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, that’s not helpful. Does it have a star beside it?”

  Noah peered down at the list. “No.”

  “Then it isn’t one we need to know.”

  “What does the star mean?” Noah asked.

  I wasn’t used to having someone asking questions at my shoulder while I worked. “It means that cards are taken from the pack before they start to play that game. Like in belote.” I realized that he didn’t know the help he’d been to me already, so I told him how his comment New Year’s Eve had set me on a course to solve the cipher.

  He was smiling. “Really? Did I really help you?”

  “Yes. Perhaps you’ll be a spy when you grow up.”

  “I wouldn’t like to be a spy. They’re like assassins,” Noah said. “They can’t have friends.”

  The perfect sort of job for me, then. “Is that right?” I only said this because Jacqui always said it, I had noticed, when she was absorbed in something else yet wanted to appear to be involved in someone’s conversation. And it worked. While I was focused on my numbers, Noah rambled on about some comic book, and I paid no attention. When I’d finished, he was finishing as well.

  “…so it was only that his family had been killed and he was left alone and that’s why he became a hit man, but he wasn’t really bad.”

  “That’s nice,” I said. “The next one, please.”

  “Why do you only want the games where they take cards out first?”

  One saving feature of his questions, I conceded, was the fact they were direct enough that I could answer easily. “Because she used a game like that to be her key the first time round. It makes the cipher trickier. I’m guessing she’ll have made another game like that her key this time, as well.” If I was wrong, I thought, at least I’d have eliminated several possibilities among the many. Evidently people in the eighteenth century had loved their card games.

  Noah frowned. “A key like in the door?”

  “In a way. A door key can unlock a door, a cipher key unlocks the cipher, but it doesn’t look the way a door key looks. In this case it would be a piece of paper, where she wrote a list to show what number stands in for what letter.” Which was simplifying things, because of course some ciphers used more complicated keys.

  “Why,” asked Noah, “is it called a cipher?”

  In his arms the cat had changed position, rolling so his head was upside down but with his gaze still steady on me as though he was also interested.

  “I’m not sure anybody knows, exactly. The word itself comes from an old French word, cifre, which comes from an earlier Arabic word meaning zero, and later we used it to mean any numeral, so people might just have begun to use cifre to mean secret writing like this, that used numbers.”<
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  He nodded. “You like ciphers, madam?”

  “I like puzzles.”

  “Papa always says I’m a puzzle.” He flashed a grin. “Maybe that’s why you like me.”

  I did like him, actually. It didn’t hurt that he had the same eyes as his father, but just on his own he was still pleasant company. “Maybe,” I said. “But I’d like you still more if you’d read the next game with a star on that list. And no silliness this time, just read me the name.”

  “OK.” There was a pause as he searched down the list, then he made an odd snorting noise.

  “Noah.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Just read me the next name.”

  He giggled.

  I sighed. “Noah.”

  “Sorry. I’m sorry, madam.”

  “What’s the name, please?”

  He looked at me, trying to hold in the giggles enough to be able to get out the word. “Gleek.”

  And even I had to admit that was funny.

  It wasn’t gleek, though, in the end. It was one of the games further down the list: piquet.

  “Two, three, four, five, six, and seven,” read Noah. “And eight. What’s the eight?” he asked. “Why is it separate?”

  “Each player’s dealt eight cards,” I told him. I worked through the numbers and to my relief saw words appear: Upon the 14th…

  “Does that work?” asked Noah.

  “Yes, that’s the one.”

  “We found the key?”

  I didn’t mind including him, because it seemed to make him happy. “Yes, we did.”

  He cheered with such exuberance it brought Denise into the doorway. “What,” she asked, “is going on in here?”

  “I’m helping,” Noah said.

  “Well, come and be some help to me,” his mother told him. “I have breakfast dishes to be dried.”

  He didn’t argue, though he didn’t move as quickly as he could have to the door, and when he’d reached Denise he turned back for a moment and said, “Thank you for allowing me to work with you, madam.”