A Desperate Fortune

by Susanna Kearsley

  Thomson replied, “There was no misadventure. The diligence coming by land was delayed on the road by a problem with one of the horses, and so—”

  Cutting over his speech, the tall Scotsman asked, “Where is Mr. Foster?”

  If the woman thought him rude, she did not say so. She was poised, even gracious. “My husband has gone to Bordeaux. He departed the day before we had the news of your coming, so sadly you’ve only myself and my son to attend you. Ah, here he is now. Johnny, do show the gentleman where he may put all that baggage.”

  Her son was a young man of sixteen or so, slightly built and not tall, barely visible behind MacPherson. His nervous but polite “This way, sir” had no visible effect.

  MacPherson did not shift an inch.

  The woman, who presumably was Mrs. Foster, stared in some surprise till Mr. Thomson broke the tension with a charming smile, apologizing, “As you see, my friend is very diligent in guarding me. Come, sir,” he told MacPherson. “I’ll accompany you. Then you will be certain of my safety.”

  As the footsteps of the men receded up an unseen flight of stairs, Mrs. Foster said to Mary and Madame Roy, “Please, sit down. You must be weary from your travels. Will you have some wine, or water?”

  Madame Roy took wine, and Mary, having no great wish for either, asked if Frisque might have some water.

  “Yes, of course. A darling little dog,” their hostess called him. When she brought the porcelain bowl, she added, “Put him down and let him run a little, if he likes. This carpet will not mind a bit of hair, nor even soiling. I’ve had two dogs of my own and lost the last just over Christmas, so I’m glad to have yours here awhile.”

  Mary obliged and let Frisque have his freedom. “He’s very well trained.”

  “Unlike some,” Mrs. Foster said drily, and pointedly glanced where the men had gone. “I was not given your actual names, only those you’d be using for travel, yet I presume señor Montero hails from colder climes than Spain.” She let her eyes dance briefly as she looked at Madame Roy. “As do you, if I am not mistaken. You’ll forgive me, but you do remind me of a woman I knew years ago at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and she was of the Highlands. She was…” Mrs. Foster stopped, and looked more closely. “Faith, it is you! Euphemia Shaw!” In delight she crossed the carpet. “You’ll not recognize me, after all these years, but I was Barbara Ellis then. You were my sister Ann’s friend, more than mine, but even so…”

  Madame Roy smiled too, as Mary had not seen her smile before. It made her look years younger. “Barbara Ellis! Aye, I see it now. You’re not so changed.” She stood to meet their hostess’s embrace.

  “Dear Effie. Are you still called Effie, or is that too girlish now? We all grow older, do we not? I’d heard that you were married to a Frenchman.”

  “Aye, so I was.”

  “And is he not then with you?”

  “No.” Madame Roy’s features had begun to settle back into their former lines. “No, he is with our poor wee daughter, in a better place than we can know.”

  “I’m sad to hear it. Bless them both.” She paused in a way that acknowledged and honored their passing, and then in an echo of her former cheerfulness said, “But I am glad to see you. You must tell me all the news from Saint-Germain. I’ve not been there in years.”

  “Nor have I,” admitted Madame Roy. “I fear I have no stories I can tell ye. This lass here, she is the storyteller.”

  “Truly?” Mrs. Foster looked round, but whatever she may have intended to say was forgotten when she saw the focus of Mary’s attention. Instead she asked, in tones that needed no answer because it was plain, “You like books, my dear? If you see one that interests you, do please feel welcome to read it. They’re gathering dust these days, and there are some there you might find amusing. I have all of Gulliver’s Travels, and nearly all of Mr. Pope’s Odyssey—the fourth volume seems to have traveled off somewhere itself, though the fifth one is there. And there are some writ by various ladies, although my husband does think them all frivolous and less important.”

  Mary rose from her chair in a fine graceful motion, and in imitating the bearing of Mistress Jamieson chose to make use of her words as well, finding them fitting: “In truth, so few women write anything, that when they do it can never be deemed unimportant.” And feeling great pride in the way that came out, she moved over to look at the spines of the books, spotting one title that drew her eye above all others: Hypolitus. Taking it in hand, she found it was indeed the novel by Madame d’Aulnoy—the same one containing the story she’d used just that morning when she had adapted the fairy tale of the doomed Russian Prince into her own new-invented account of MacPherson’s sad love affair.

  She said, “I did not know this had been translated to English.”

  “Which is that? Oh yes, her books are very popular. I also have her Travels into Spain, there on the shelf below.” She might have said still more but Mary did not hear her, having found the comfort of remembered words that, even in another language, lightly played within her mind as though it were an instrument and every word a touch upon familiar strings that summoned forth a tune from her imagination:

  Under the Reign of Henry VII, King of England, George de Neville, Earl of Burgen, had the Misfortune to be suspected of having had a Hand in the Conspiracy of Edmund Prose…

  While the other women turned back to their talk of Saint-Germain, she took the opportunity to curl into her chair again and read, and so remove herself from all her greater cares and all the people causing them. At suppertime her thoughts remained within the novel, and she held herself aloof from conversation, eating all in silence and excusing herself afterwards to seek the solitary peace of sitting in the drawing room and reading, which if only temporarily allowed her to escape.

  Frisque had deserted her to beg scraps of the kitchen maid with evident success, so Mary did not have the dog’s attentive ears to give her warning.

  She didn’t know Thomson had come in the room till he settled himself in the chair next to hers, stretched his hands to the fire on the hearth, and said, “That was a very large meal. I’ll be all night digesting it.”

  Mary said nothing. Truth was, she had decided herself to be done with all of them, and was now only counting the hours until she could effect her escape more completely and not have to live anymore among criminals, no matter how kind they might seem to be.

  Thomson glanced at her. “You’re very quiet. Are you feeling well?” When she nodded, he said, “Then it must, as I feared, be my company. You do not seem to be finding the same pleasure in it you once did. I’m sorry. Perhaps…” Here he stopped, looking into the fire as though seeking his words there, while Mary determinedly went on with what she was reading.

  The novel’s much put-upon heroine was just embracing her sister and wistfully saying: If I knew you could keep a Secret, how pleased should I be to repay your Goodness, with making you my Confident…

  “Perhaps,” said Thomson, starting over, “I could tell a story that might rival that within your hand for danger and betrayal, and might even make you feel some pity for its hero. May I do that? Would you listen?”

  Mary had no wish to hear any defense of his defrauding all those people of their money. “Mr. Thomson…”

  “Please.”

  She raised her eyes then from her book and looked at him, and that was her undoing. If a man could look more miserable, in truth she’d never seen it. Though she knew she would regret the impulse, Mary marked the page she had been reading and she set her book aside. “Very well,” she told him. “I am listening.”

  And so his tale began.

  Chapter 27

  Dark in thought, a-while, he bends: his words, at length, come forth.

  —Macpherson, “Temora,” Book Eight

  Lyon

  February 21, 1732

  “I’ve always been,” he told her, “of an e
asy temper, which I am come to believe has been given me not as a gift but a scourge for my sins, for all my misfortunes proceeded from that.”

  The greatest of these, so he said, began when he was not yet one and twenty and against his father’s good advice decided to become involved with what then seemed to be as good a company as any young man might desire to work for: the Charitable Corporation. To move from his father’s offices in Edinburgh to the financial heart of the City of London had been itself exciting, and when he’d been made the Corporation’s warehouse keeper he’d seen nothing in his future but advancement.

  “I had already, with my father’s guidance, been a man of business. Now I was a man of reputation, with not one but two assistants and the trust of the directors.”

  But those same directors, as he came to learn, were so infatuated with the great advantage they were making of their money that they paid no great attention to their duties, running all things in a fashion most irregular, and while they often grumbled and found fault with everything they could find fault with, not a one of them was minded to apply the rules and articles by which the corporation should be governed.

  “This fatality of their affairs left things unguarded for my two assistants to indulge in schemes and speculations and to wreak so much havoc that by the time I discovered what they had been up to the damage was done, and the company was like that log there,” he said with a nod to the fire, “seeming sound on the outside yet eaten away from within by the flames, and prepared at any moment to collapse.”

  She was not moved to pity him, for he must also have neglected his own duties to allow the damage to become so far advanced, and in her mind there would have been but one way for an honest man to deal with such a fraud. She asked, “Why did you not denounce them?”

  “Because there were others involved in their schemes, men more senior than I in the company, and they persuaded me that if the losses were ever exposed and made public, the whole corporation would fall into ruin and all its investors made bankrupt. The remedy, they said, was to restore the balance of the books, and to this end they brought into our company another man: George Robinson.” He spoke that name in darker tones and brought his gaze to Mary’s. “Mark that name, my dear, and shun the man if ever you encounter him, for truly he’s a rogue to be avoided. But the others did persuade me he was the most proper man to suit our purpose, being well-known as a broker in Exchange Alley, and a man—so they assured me—of an easy fortune.”

  Looking to the fire again, he watched the flames in silence for a moment, as though thinking on a memory he would rather have forgotten. In the interlude, the log he’d pointed out before as being half-consumed and on the point of falling splintered at its center and collapsed in fragments, sending up a swirl of sparks that briefly burned and just as quickly vanished.

  Thomson settled deeper in his chair. “We had a plan that would have raised a profit large enough to pay back all that had been taken. To achieve this, we had but to borrow money from the Corporation’s coffers for a brief time and replace it shortly afterwards, but when the time arrived for us to put our plan in action we discovered Mr. Robinson had taken all the money into his own hands and lost it by mismanagement. And so we were then worse off than before, and forced to grasp at any scheme we could to try to set things right again.”

  By now there were suspicions among others in the company, and some few men stepped forward to insinuate they knew the secret, and had to be paid off or dealt with otherwise.

  “One man, our late cashier,” he said, “had often in a merry way inquired of my assistants what they did with all that money, and as time went on he gained a sharper instinct that the funds were misapplied and had expressed himself to me more fully on that subject; even threatened to expose it. Mr. Robinson arranged to have him taken off and paid a handsome salary, which might have been the end of it, but…”

  Something caught his conscience then and made him look away, and Mary pressed him. “But?”

  “Our late cashier,” he told her, “is now very late indeed. If you would seek him now you’d have to seek him in the churchyard, where you’ll find him in his grave.”

  Her eyes grew wide as she made sense of what he’d just revealed to her. “They murdered him?”

  “I have no proof,” he said. “No proof. But you perhaps will see why I was hesitant to go against the others. With the secret having killed one man already, I feared it would kill me, too, though I was not its instrument nor cause.”

  So he’d held his silence, and together with the other men had latched upon another scheme, yet more ambitious than the first and every bit as certain to restore their funds, but once again their need forced them to turn to Mr. Robinson. And as before, “While we were satisfying ourselves with the prospect of repaying what we owed, he up and cut our throats a second time and sold the stock from under us, and so we all together were in debt for half a million pounds.”

  The number dropped into a somber silence. In the fireplace one more log fell in amongst its fellows in a slide of sparks and ashes. Mary tried to form an image of that great a sum of money. There could be no quick way to climb from such a pit, she knew. Small wonder Mr. Thomson had despaired.

  “I will admit,” he said, “when Mr. Robinson imposed that new deceit upon us, I was on the point then of submitting to my fate and telling all to the authorities, but he and all the others made apologies and promises, and God forgive me, I believed them.”

  Then upon the back of this, they’d learned the City had petitioned Parliament to make a close examination of their books and warehouses, which meant that all their losses and their schemes would be discovered. So the others had decided Mr. Thomson should abscond, and thus divert suspicion from the truth by making it appear that he alone had stolen all the Corporation’s missing money and run off with it.

  “And since my choices were to come abroad as they proposed or stay in London and be made to bear the blame for their misdoings anyway, I came to France and threw myself upon the mercy of my countrymen,” he said. “My fellow exiles.”

  There was sadness in his smile, and Mary felt a twinge of sympathy.

  He said, “And so you see, from being of an easy temper, and trusting a rogue who presented himself as a man of an easy fortune, I am myself become a man of a desperate one—the most unhappy creature that ever lived. And whatever the Company may in their malice and revenge say, I never was one shilling the better for them, and have lost all, and the blame of their loss laid at my door in attempting to save them.” His shoulders raised and lowered in a sigh. “As for the poor investors who have lost all too, I had no intention to hurt them, and perhaps when their first fury is over and they are disposed to hear reason, I can set everything in a clear light. In the meantime, I’ve nothing to offer them but my regret.”

  He sat a moment longer with his head bent and his gaze upon the fire, no doubt reflecting on the miserable state in which he found himself. And then, as though he felt he had imposed on Mary’s patience for too long, he stood. The line of buttons down his waistcoat front had gone askew and tugging at its hem he set it straight again, as though by fixing that one slight disordered thing he could fix all.

  He turned once at the door before he left the room, his eyes cast down, his voice turned quiet. “And I do especially regret, my dear, that I have lost your good regard, as I’ve so clearly done,” he said. “And caused you disappointment.”

  * * *

  Mary, when she sat before a fire, had always fancied she saw pictures in the flames. On any other night, had she been left to sit alone like this, she might have looked to find them, seeing faces and fantastic beasts and palaces that briefly danced and glimmered in amongst the burning logs. Tonight her focus was distracted by her notice of the ashes that had fallen through the grate and would be swept away tomorrow and discarded as a necessary product of destruction.

  They’d once been livin
g things, those ashes—trees within a forest, cut and shaped to suit another’s purpose, and reduced now to a sad, ignoble state with no good use remaining but to cloud the water in the washing tub to keep another’s linens white and clean.

  So it was with Mr. Thomson, fallen from his status as “a man of reputation” to a fugitive, reviled by all and forced to shoulder all the blame that ought to have been shared with Mr. Robinson and others with the power and position to conceal their guilt.

  Although he may have acted less than wisely and put faith in people who did not deserve it, and although the outcome of his actions certainly had caused harm to the innocent, there seemed to her injustice in the fact that those he’d trusted in his business had abandoned him, and Mary having heard his tale could not now find it in her heart to follow their example and abandon him as well.

  She slipped her hand into her pocket and withdrew the letter she had written last night to her uncle and her aunt. And as it had upon the night when Nicolas had left her at Sir Redmond’s house, her aunt’s voice stirred with clarity within her memory, telling her: “You always have a choice.”

  She did. She had a choice. And casting her misgivings to the wind she made one now and leaning forward tossed the letter on the fire.

  She heard the patter of Frisque’s paws upon the floorboards in the passage before he came bounding in to greet her with a wagging tail, his muzzle stained with gravy. Mary gathered him onto her lap, receiving his affection and returning it by laying her own cheek against his silken head, and would have made more fuss of him had not a shadow passed them both to stop before the fireplace.

  Mary stiffened as MacPherson took a twisted paper spill from the container on the mantel and bent forward to apply it to the fire. She quickly looked to where her letter, nearly all consumed by flames, sat barely recognizable as such amid the logs, its few surviving edges curled and blackening. MacPherson, to her great relief, seemed not to have observed it, for he straightened unconcerned and lit his pipe, then with his unprotected fingers pinched the burning end from the long spill and set it with its fellows on the mantel.