A Desperate Fortune

by Susanna Kearsley

  For a moment Mary hesitated, sifting in her memory through the places that the merchant had described, and then she dipped her quill in ink again and carried on:

  I understand there is a great cathedral at Lyon, named for Saint John the Baptist. I intend to make my way there and petition for assistance from the priests, who will, I trust, be able to direct you where I may be found.

  There, she thought. That should suffice. Her page was nearly full now, and she closed her letter simply.

  You will find me greatly changed and none the better for my travels, I do fear, but not so changed that I am yet prevented from remaining your most faithful and sincerely loving niece,

  She signed her name and tore the page with great care from her journal. Then she folded it and sealed it and addressed it and secreted it between the pages of her journal while she finished her long entry for that day and evening.

  There the letter stayed all through the night, till the next morning when she rose a little earlier than was her custom, and with the excuse of taking Frisque out for his necessary business, went downstairs alone.

  She had observed the mother and her daughters wakened early, and this morning Mary was in hopes of finding some brief chance of speaking to the younger daughter and of asking her in private, as a favor, if she’d carry Mary’s letter with her own and post it when they reached Lyon.

  There’d be small opportunity for Mary, once they’d reached that place, to post a letter—she was not even certain she would have the chance to seize this one small moment on her own this morning—but the younger sister had a most romantic nature, and if she believed that she was helping Mary keep a secret correspondence with the mythical Chevalier de Vilbray, she might agree to take the letter.

  Mary had her story all arranged: how the chevalier had declared his love, and begged that she should write to him, and told her to address her letters to another name so their affair could be kept private, and had warned her to on no account expose them to her “brother,” lest he disapprove. She’d made the story pretty in her mind with several flourishes, but in the end she did not get to tell it after all, because the younger daughter was already occupied.

  “Good morning,” was the greeting that she brightly gave to Mary. She was sitting at a table in the little public salon of the coaching inn, a pewter cup of chocolate set before her with a plate of toasted bread, both pushed aside to make room for a dainty silver watch that lay in several pieces on the weathered wooden tabletop. The largest piece, to Mary’s great surprise, was firmly held within the strong efficient fingers of the Scotsman. Sitting in the chair beside the youngest of the daughters, with her mother and her sister looking on from their position on the sofa by the hearth, he was calmly and methodically assembling the pieces of the watch with the assistance of a small-edged knife, and aided by the light of a tall candle.

  He did not rise, as would a gentleman, when Mary took a step into the room, although the women from their seats paid her the customary honors with their gracious nods and greetings.

  “You were quite right,” the younger daughter said. “Señor Montero is not fierce at all. He’s very kind. The pin of Maman’s equipage broke on the stairs this morning and her watch was dropped, and truly she was desolate, but as you see he’s offered to restore it.”

  Mary did not wear an equipage—that partly useful, partly ornamental bit of jewelry for the waist, with chains that held a whole array of trinkets: little jars of smelling salts, and sewing scissors, and, as often was the case, a watch. This one seemed far too tiny for MacPherson’s fingers, but he deftly set the pieces back in place and with a final turning of his knife, clicked shut the glass and gave the watch a final wind and fastened both the key and watch again onto their chains and passed them to the younger daughter, who replied in Spanish with what sounded like effusive thanks and in her turn presented the repaired equipage to her mother, saying, “There, you see? It is as Mademoiselle Robillard assured us: señor Montero is a man of many talents.”

  “Indeed he is,” her mother granted, in a tone that was not ready to forgive him all, “though he does keep those talents hidden well behind that most unpleasant face of his.”

  “Maman!” The younger daughter shot a glance towards MacPherson but he’d missed their whole exchange and was now sitting back and stretching out his shoulders slightly as though sitting working on the watch had left them stiff. The knife, Mary noticed, had already disappeared. To where, she knew not; although she was starting to think if he turned out his pockets they’d be full of nothing but blades, some more deadly than others.

  He looked at her then, and before he could guess at her thoughts Mary masked her expression, not letting him see how she felt. But the truth was, she knew that her chance had been ruined. The diligence d’eau would depart in an hour, and the others were up now and coming for breakfast. She heard Thomson’s voice on the stairs.

  Inspiration struck suddenly. She held Frisque close against her midriff, close against the letter that was lying flat and snug between her stomacher and stays, and smiling at the younger sister used the same excuse that Mistress Jamieson had used to draw her out from crowded company. “My dog,” she said, “needs to be taken outdoors. Come and walk with me.”

  Chapter 25

  A page had been torn from the diary. It had been done cleanly and carefully, close to the binding, without having any effect I could see on the day’s entry, which ran from the page before into the following page without breaking:

  …and though we are relieved of Mr. Stevens for the moment, his diversion to Dijon will put him but two days behind us, and perhaps not even that if he can find a private boatman to convey him down the river. Mr. M—, although pretending sleep, did not relax his guard all day and even now is up and walking in the next room, keeping watch, which is I gather meant to ease our worries but in my case does the opposite. He seems to never sleep as would an ordinary man, but Mr. M—, for all his faults, is far from ordinary. Were I free to tell a proper fairy tale I’d cast him as an ogre, but the tales I have been telling have no magic in them, so I could do no more than depict him as the surly captain of the guard who stood at the town gate and was defeated by my brave Chevalier.

  She had written down the story, all of it, just as she’d told it to her fellow travelers on the diligence d’eau that day, and I’d transcribed it faithfully although I couldn’t see how it would be of use to Alistair.

  “She does this more and more as she goes on,” I told Denise. “She makes up stories.”

  “They’re good stories,” was her judgment. I had finished reading two of them to her while she was busily assembling her galette des rois—the king cake for Epiphany—while I sat at the table in the kitchen being no help whatsoever, drinking coffee and complaining.

  “Yes, well, sometimes they’re so good I don’t know if the people she’s talking about are real or not. And they take as much time to decipher and transcribe as do her proper diary entries, so really I’d be happier if she’d just left them out.”

  “Perhaps she meant to publish them someday.” She was beating the eggs for the frangipane filling now, having already rolled out the first round of her homemade puff pastry. “You said she was hoping to visit a Paris salon in her time there, yes?”

  I had to think. “Yes, she mentioned it when they were first getting settled in Paris, how wonderful it would be if she could go to that salon. I’d have to look it up.”

  “Well, this is what the women did at that time, in salons. They told their stories. And the fairy tales for some years before that were very popular. It’s obvious she read them and admired them, from the name she gave the villain in her last tale.”

  “Monsieur Furibon?”

  “Yes, that name is from a fairy tale, a famous one by the Countess d’Aulnoy, called ‘Prince Ariel.’ The villain is a wicked prince named Furibon.”

  “I don’t think I
’ve ever heard that one.”

  “Well, these are not the fairy tales that we grew up with. These were written for adults, and they belonged to a distinct period of time, and a distinct group of writers, nearly all of them women of the noble class. It was a clever and subversive thing they did, to tell these fairy tales. Sometimes they would take well-known tales from folklore and adapt them, but as often they created them from their imaginations, and you see how they are commenting on how life is around them, on the world and how it limits them.” She folded the ground almonds in and stirred all to a flawless paste. “The heroines of these fairy tales, their lives are often dictated by overbearing men—by their fathers and their suitors, kings and princes whom they must outwit and guard themselves against, and the fairies who helped them were usually female, and powerful. They’re very feminist, these stories.”

  “Which is probably,” I said, “why we don’t hear of them.”

  She smiled. “Yes, very likely. There were men in these salons, too. Charles Perrault—you know, the writer of ‘The Sleeping Beauty’? He was always with these women. His own niece had a salon, a very famous one. But where her princesses were strong and stood up for their rights, her uncle’s heroines were meek and weak and beautiful, and needing to be rescued.”

  “So why,” I asked, “did his stories survive all this time, while hers haven’t?”

  “Because he was a man. And because the society those women skewered with their stories was just as quick to skewer them for their success, for being popular. It happens still today, I think. But those women, those writers,” she said, “they were really the start of the genre we now would call fantasy. Their fairy tales were not meant to be read on their own, in the way we now think of a fairy tale—they were woven into novels, into memoirs, and intended to reflect the larger themes and stories in those books. So really,” she concluded, “what this girl who keeps the diary, Mary Dundas, what she’s doing is a part of that tradition. She’s creating, in a way, a travel memoir, and the little stories she creates are just another part of that. You can’t just read them on their own, that’s like trying to listen to the words of an opera without the music—you’re only getting half the effect. You have to look at them in context. Like this last one, where she has her hero having to escape from his pursuers and outwit the evil merchant. I would think she’s working out her own plans how to leave these people, wouldn’t you? Whether she can do it or not, it’s what she’s wishing for, and so she puts it all into that story.”

  I’d never thought of it that way before. “So then she’s the chevalier, when she tells these tales?”

  “That’s what I think.” Denise filled her piping bag carefully, gave it a twist at the top, and began to pipe almond paste onto the puff pastry, filling the king cake.

  I watched her with interest, wondering how she’d developed such a detailed knowledge of such a curious subject. In the end, I simply asked her.

  With a shrug she said, “I wrote a paper on it once, at university. I loved studying literature, back then. I planned to one day teach it.”

  “Really?” That surprised me.

  “Really. But I never finished university.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “What happened?”

  “Noah happened.” Glancing over, she took one look at my face and added, “No, it’s fine. I didn’t mind. I could have gone back afterwards and finished, but by then I’d stumbled into doing this.” She spread her hands, the gesture taking in the whole room. “When I was younger I always worked summers for my aunt and uncle at their hotel, I enjoyed it. And soon after Noah was born one of Luc’s friends was starting a restaurant and needed some help with the cooking, so I said I’d help. I enjoyed that, as well. And then one of the waiters, his mother came out of the hospital and needed someone to help cook and clean for her, so…” She shrugged again, turning to roll out more pastry. “I like this. I’m happy.”

  “But you might have been happy,” I pointed out, “being a teacher.”

  “It’s possible. But we all change, you know? When other people come into our lives, our priorities change. This is perfect for Noah,” she said, “this arrangement. He comes home at lunch if he likes, and I’m here when he gets home from school, and I’m here on the days that he’s ill.”

  I’d never had to arrange my own life around somebody else’s routine, or their needs, so I thought about this for a moment. When I had been Noah’s age, I’d gone next door to my neighbors most days after school and had stayed there till either my mother or father had come home from work. It had never occurred to me that, for those few years, my parents had probably had to arrange that, to make sure that I was looked after, since I’d been too young to be left on my own in the house for so long. Just like Noah. “So where does he go after school on the weeks that he lives with his father?” He didn’t come here, I knew.

  “This is a Wednesday,” Denise said, “so Luc will be working from home. On the other days, Noah goes to play at a friend’s house. His best friend, Michelle. They’re like this.” She held up two fingers pressed tightly together. “She’s quite a character, Michelle. You’ll see that when you meet her.”

  I sometimes found it hard to keep pace with the easy way she shifted subjects. “I’m meeting Noah’s best friend? When?”

  “It will be soon, I would imagine. Noah likes when all the people in his life know one another.” She looked at her hands for a moment and frowned and crossed over to where I sat, holding her hand out to show me the jumble of tiny and colorful ceramic figurines. By tradition, the galette des rois had a single fève hidden inside it—the French word for “bean.” In the old days, I gathered, it had been an actual bean, but as time had gone on it had slowly evolved to a small figurine. In the king cakes that I had been served at my neighbors’ house during my childhood, the fève they’d used year after year had been Mickey Mouse, which I’d adored. And I’d twice found the fève in my own piece of cake, meaning I’d been the “queen” for the dinner that year, and been able to wear the gold foil card crown Ricky’s mother kept tucked in a drawer, and had chosen my “king”—always Ricky, of course, out of loyalty—and for those few hours had felt very special.

  Denise asked, “Which of these should I put in the king cake for Noah?” There must have been more than a dozen fèves cupped in her hand. “I have two little robots, a blue and a red one, or else there’s this soldier. Which one do you think—?”

  “The cat,” I said. “It looks just like Diablo.”

  “So it does. I didn’t even notice him. All right, then, it’s the cat.”

  I watched her take the little figurine and press it gently down into the filling of the king cake before fitting on the final round of pastry. “But how,” I asked, “can you be certain that Noah will get that piece?”

  “I just do this.” She was marking out shapes on the top of the cake with the tines of a fork, and she made a small extra mark over the spot where she’d hidden the fève.

  “Oh.” It made me think back to my childhood again, to the things that I’d thought had been random that actually weren’t.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Denise said. “This girl with the diary, this Mary Dundas. You said that before her brother brought her here to Chatou, she was living with her aunt and uncle, yes? And not her parents?”

  “Yes. I think, from how she writes about her mother, that her mother’s dead.”

  “Which means her father also must be dead, or else he’s left her for some reason with her aunt and uncle. And her brother, now he’s also left her.” With the cake set to the side, she started tidying the worktop, clearing all the small unwanted scraps away. “There’s a thing, you know, when children are abandoned by the people that they love. It’s psychological. They start to feel they can’t be very lovable, that nobody will want them as they are, and so they try to act like someone who they’re not. Maybe her stories are a part of this.�
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  I hadn’t considered that, either. “You studied psychology, too?”

  Smiling, she said, “No. But Luc, when his mother left, he had some trouble adjusting.” She’d lost me again, only this time she noticed it, backtracking to explain: “She’s an American, Luc’s mother. From California. When Luc’s older brother was fourteen he went to a school in America, so she went with him, and Luc stayed in France with his father. They didn’t divorce, they were still all one family, but for a few years they were separate. And Luc, he was only twelve when she first left, and it wasn’t so easy for him.”

  I was trying to follow along and make sense of this, feeling the sadness that Luc must have felt when his mother and brother had left, and attempting to draw the connection to Mary Dundas and her stories. “Did Luc act like someone he wasn’t, then?”

  “Oh, yes.” Bending, Denise slid the king cake into the oven of the old enameled cooker and shut the door with a decided clang before she straightened. “He turned into a tough guy. Always making trouble.”

  “Luc?”

  “I know. He’s such an easygoing person, right? Such a good man. But when we were teenagers, to those who didn’t know him well, he was this very dark, bad boy.”

  “Luc?”

  With a nod she poured a cup of coffee for herself and held the pot up. “More?”

  “Yes, please.”

  She came to join me at the table. “In the end, I think it was just too exhausting for him, to pretend to be this other kind of person. People can’t pretend forever.”

  She was talking about Luc, and maybe Mary, and I gathered from the way her voice pitched downwards on those final words that they were meant to be a statement, not to ask a question, so I only gave a nod and didn’t comment. But if it had been a question, I could easily and from my own experience have given her the answer:

  Yes, they can.

  * * *

  I looked for some hint of the dangerous bad boy remaining behind Luc’s blue eyes, but I just couldn’t see it. I’d met his gaze several times over the course of the dinner, and from where I sat I could see the whole corner behind him where both walls were covered with framed family photographs, some very old and some recent and some showing Luc as a teenager, and even in the one where he was staring out unsmiling with his arms crossed he still looked like himself. He must have been either much angrier then or a very good actor to make anybody believe he was capable of doing anything stronger than mischief.