A Desperate Fortune

by Susanna Kearsley

  With a cry sounding only half human, another man called out, “My hand! Bastard near took my hand off!”

  “You still have your hand, you great coward,” the first stranger taunted. “’Tis only your wrist. Now come help—”

  But in that same breath he was also disarmed, and a second sword dropped to the dirt. Spewing curses, the man flung himself at MacPherson and found himself knocked to his knees for the effort, and Mary could see the long blade of MacPherson’s sword lower to point at the fallen man’s neck. “Are ye finished?”

  The man with the slashed wrist apparently was, for he’d taken off running already, his steps growing rapidly faint in the dark.

  Frisque, as always when he thought a danger had safely retreated, barked louder, until he was hushed from within the coach. Below it, Mary held her breath.

  The answer came: “Not yet.”

  Not from the man who should have spoken, but from one who had come forward from the place of his concealment in the stables and stood now beneath the lantern in the open stable door. The light, because it was behind him, showed his shape alone, including the short barrel of the pistol in his hand, but Mary recognized his voice.

  “I had much rather do this quietly,” said Mr. Stevens.

  He left the light, coming across to them steadily—keeping his pistol, presumably, aimed at MacPherson.

  “Take his sword,” he instructed the other man, who rose uncertainly.

  Mary, astonished and horrified, saw the sword turn as MacPherson relinquished it.

  “And the dirk,” Stevens added. “A most uncouth weapon, befitting a barbarous people who can barely speak but to lie and deceive.”

  He was careful, she noticed, to stop his advance a few paces beyond where the Scotsman could reach, and she guessed that, like Frisque, he barked loudest and bravest when there was little real danger of his being brought to account for it.

  He said, “That was quite a neat game you played back in Chalon. And a bold move to have that lad hasten me on from Lyon. Very clever. But I’m clever, too. I did ask, on my way down the river, if any had seen you stop in at the towns, and on finding none had, I deduced you had not gone before me at all, but were coming behind. In your place,” he confessed, “I’d have done the same. And I would never have risked passing straight through Valence, where there might be so many eyes watching, and some of them English. No, I’d have come this way. So here’s where I waited. And whether you passed by or stopped, I would have you. And him.”

  He meant Thomson, she knew. There was nothing but silence above in the coach. Not a snuffle or whine from her dog.

  Stevens said, “I will take him, now. And I’ll be having that handsome gun too, while I’m at it.” He ordered the other man, “Take it. That case he has over his shoulder.”

  The other obeyed. Mary heard the sharp slide of one blade on another as first the man gathered the forfeited sword and the evil long dagger that Stevens had called a dirk into his one fist. They must have been heavy to hold, for she saw the sword’s point touch the ground near the wheel close to where she was lying. And then she saw his boots step forward as he came between the tall Scotsman and Stevens, preparing to lift off the strap of the case.

  What happened next happened almost too quickly for her to untangle its order. She heard a quick gasp and a shuddering wheeze, and then the sword point lifted and was raised beyond her line of vision as the other man was lifted too, caught hard upon whatever blade he had been stabbed with to become a human shield against the pistol Stevens held, as in a swift and fatal rush, MacPherson charged the Englishman.

  The noises Stevens made while dying, while not loud, were nonetheless disturbing. Mary cupped her hands against her ears to shut them out, and when she saw MacPherson’s boots returning she shrank closer to the coldness of the ground.

  He crossed to the coachman, who having been cudgeled and not run through had been attempting to stand with the aid of the horse harness. “Sir, I can drive,” he said hoarsely. MacPherson assisted him round to the coach step and said to the others inside, “Take him.”

  Then he crouched low to look under the coach, finding Mary unerringly, even in such little light. Stretching his hand to assist her, he waited.

  She knew there’d be blood on that hand. There was no way his hands could stay clean when he’d done so much violence. She shook her head to tell him she did not need help, and crawled out on her own, and he moved back to let her do it. He said nothing, only looked her over briefly as though seeking signs of damage. Mary warranted he’d find none save the rough disorder of her hair and scrapes of dirt along the bodice of her gown, which were, from what she could make out, no more than he himself had suffered in the fight.

  He looked away from her and said to Thomson, who was only now emerging from the safety of the coach, “Come. We’ve little time.”

  “To do what?” asked Thomson.

  In a low, impatient voice that clearly felt the answer was self-evident, MacPherson said, “Hide them”—he nodded at the corpses—“change our horses, and be gone.”

  “But…” Thomson glanced towards the dark wall of the inn, and Mary saw him working through the facts to realize, as she had already done, they could not stay the night. The wounded man who’d run off minutes earlier might even now be in the city finding friends to help him seek revenge, or at the least he might inform upon them, leaving them but little time to get away before they either faced a new attack or were discovered.

  With a sigh that mourned the loss of his anticipated tankard of warm wine more than the loss of life around him, Thomson helped MacPherson drag the bodies of the two dead men into the stables. From the sounds that followed, Mary guessed they were pitching hay or straw over the bodies.

  Frisque whined and Madame Roy leaned from the coach and told Mary, “Will you take him? He would come to you, and I can’t hold him.”

  Mary took Frisque woodenly and cradled him against her, but she did not go inside the coach. She did not wish to be confined. A cage, however comfortably appointed, was a cage, and left the creatures in it vulnerable to those who were outside, and she already felt too vulnerable, her senses strained and heightened to the point of pain.

  So when the shutters of an upstairs window in the inn banged open, she had heard the bolt slide back beforehand, and been warned in time enough to turn her face to meet the light that speared with sudden brightness down into the yard. A man, presumably the landlord, called in French, “What’s happening? What’s going on? Who’s there?”

  She did not know how much he’d heard, or whether he’d conspired in the ambush, but she knew she didn’t have the luxury of time to sort things through, and being trapped upon the spot she took a chance and played her part. “Good evening, sir. Do you speak English?”

  All the furtive noises from the stable had now ceased, and she was not the only one who waited for his answer.

  “Yes,” he said, speaking more loudly. “A little.”

  “Oh, I’m glad. My uncle’s fallen ill. He’s had a fever half the day that’s making him delirious and difficult to manage. I’m afraid, were we to stay here, we might pass on his contagion to your other guests, but as you see our horses cannot stir another step, they are exhausted. If we could but have some fresh ones…?”

  “Yes, of course. Of course. I’ll send the palefrenier.”

  She noticed he’d drawn back as if he feared the illness might spread upward on the air, but when she thanked him, she asked one thing more. “We’d also be most grateful for a meal, however small, that we could carry with us. Bread and cheese would do, perhaps with two bottles of wine?”

  He promised those as well, and withdrew from the window, making sure to bolt the shutters as before, securely.

  Mary felt her spine and shoulders sag against the stalwart lacing of her stays and breathed a little deeper in relief. Then she turned and
saw MacPherson in the doorway of the stable. He was standing there and watching her, with Thomson close behind, and with the lantern hanging just above his shoulder she could see his features. He was looking at her closely, as he’d studied that small broken watch in Mâcon; as if she were made of gears and wheels and he would seek to understand her workings.

  Let him look, she thought. And slipping on her calmest face, she held to Frisque more tightly so the Scotsman would not see her hands were trembling in reaction to the night of fear and trauma, as she simply said, “He’s sending out the groom.”

  And turned away.

  Chapter 30

  Ghosts are seen there at noon: the valley is silent, and the people shun the place…

  —Macpherson, “The War of Caros”

  The Bas-Vivarais, near the village of Maisonneuve

  March 3, 1732

  A week had gone by and she still was no closer to guessing the place where MacPherson was leading them.

  Since killing Stevens at Valence the Monday before, he’d been more than annoyingly secretive, and if the others knew where they were going they hadn’t seen fit to tell Mary. They’d driven straight through that long night from Valence, getting what sleep they could in the coach, till at sunrise they’d come to a town called Étoile where they’d struck out on foot, crossing over the Rhône while the coachman, relieved of his passengers, carried on south with instructions to turn when he could to the east and proceed towards Switzerland, hopefully drawing off any men still in pursuit.

  While the bodies they’d left in the stables would not have lain long without being discovered, it stood in their favor the night had been dark and their contact with those at the inn had been brief and thus few there got a good look at them. But there was always a risk, as they’d been well reminded by something MacPherson had come across while he’d been emptying Stevens’s pockets of evidence of his identity, before concealing the bodies with hay: a page torn from the London Gazette from October last, giving notice that anyone capturing John Thomson would be rewarded with the staggering amount of one thousand pounds. It had given a detailed description by which any person would know him, although that description had raised Thomson’s ire.

  “I do not,” he’d said, “go with my knees in. Nor are my legs ‘thick.’ And to claim I’m ‘inclined to be fat’ is no less than a libel.”

  He had continued irritated for the better part of that first day they had been walking, until Mary, seeking peace, had pointed out he should be grateful they’d described him so imperfectly, because it might then spare him being recognized.

  But truly, she had written in her journal that same night, apart from those few things which wounded him—and reasonably so, for he is straight of leg and while not lean is not rotund—the notice Mr. Stevens carried listed Mr. Thomson’s features to the hazel of his eyes and color of his eyebrows, and it would take no great skill to match the man to that description, which if it be widely circulated could be very worrisome.

  It was, she’d thought, the reason why they had not stayed at inns since they had started this new segment of their journey, but had stopped each evening at a farmhouse of MacPherson’s choosing and had paid well for whatever hospitality was granted them, most often beds on straw within an outbuilding or barn, and a good share of the plain food the families had on hand to offer. In the villages and towns through which they’d passed they’d stopped for water and bought bread and then moved on, the one exception being on the second morning when Madame Roy had insisted they begin their day by hearing Mass, because it was Ash Wednesday. There had been a short debate between the older woman and the Scotsman as to whether this was really necessary, being that the day was not a holy day of obligation on which people were required to go to Mass, but Madame Roy had not been swayed, and so they’d gone. MacPherson had stood with them in the church, though Mary doubted that the ritual—of being touched by ashes while the mournful priest intoned they had been born of dust and would someday return to it and should no longer sin but seek salvation—could have meant much to a man so comfortable with killing.

  Thomson, as they’d left the church and started on their way again, had pointed out a different sort of irony. “We promise to observe a holy Lent in imitation of the days our Savior wandered in the wilderness,” he’d said. “And look where we now find ourselves.”

  It was, in truth, a wilderness.

  They’d traveled far enough now to the south there was no snow upon the ground, and from the place where they had crossed the Rhône the level plain had quickly given way to the forbidding mountain foothills of the Vivarais. The narrow paths and drover’s roads were full of rocks and stones that rolled with unpredictability, the ways forever climbing or descending through rough stunted trees and sheer faces of gray stone and forested hills rising steeply to either side.

  In this wild and rugged place, the Scotsman’s stamina and strength were things to marvel at. He’d passed one portmanteau to Thomson, who could barely manage that together with his deal-box, but MacPherson kept the larger of the portmanteaus slung over his own shoulder so it rested on his back beside the long case of his gun. The heavy basket-hilted sword was at his side again, the ordinary sword hung at his other hip, his evil-looking dirk sheathed in its place along with heaven only knew how many other blades. A walking, breathing armory—and yet he moved in silence with a steady gait as though he carried nothing.

  Mary, walking in his wake, had often found herself lulled into calmness by the rhythmic swagger of his stride that set his coat to swinging from his shoulders like a cape. He was a fine-looking man from the back, and she thought it a shame he had not been born handsome, nor reared with more care for his manners, for he would have otherwise made a good hero.

  Her mind, in such moments, had frequently wandered to thoughts of new stories, new tales of adventure…and had just as frequently been yanked back down to reality by a new volley of Thomson’s complaints.

  He’d deplored the poor make of his shoes, and the weight of his deal-box; the muscular soreness that sleeping on hay had produced, and the pace of their walking; the quality of the plain food they’d been eating, and his unendurable hunger, and even the sun, which in his view was either too bright or too little in evidence. Mary had once thought she never would hear someone find fault with so many things as her cousin Gaspard could, but as each day passed, Mr. Thomson continued to prove she’d been wrong. For a man who claimed to be “of an easy temper,” as he’d told her in Lyon, he did not rise well to adversity.

  Madame Roy, on the other hand, had shown herself to be nearly as hardy as Mr. MacPherson. Mary thought this unsurprising, since they both were of the Highlands where such walking would have doubtless been a common thing, and where—from the few woodcuts she had seen—the land was similarly rugged. Mary, healthy as she was, had felt impatient with herself for tiring so easily upon the uphill paths, and pushed herself to match the others’ steps without complaining, though at times she’d wished she could, like Frisque, stop walking and sit stubbornly upon the ground till someone deigned to carry her.

  Conveniently, each time she’d found herself approaching that level of weariness, MacPherson had stopped anyway for varied other reasons—once to readjust the crossed straps of his sword belts, and another time to work a bit of thorn out of the top edge of his boot—and so she’d gained her moment’s rest. Had she been more suspicious she’d have said that he was doing it on purpose, but it seemed such an unlikely thought that Mary had dismissed it almost instantly, remembering MacPherson did not do things out of pity.

  Still, the third day in the afternoon, when she’d begun to feel her knees grow more unsteady as she climbed, she’d seen MacPherson glance behind a minute before he had stopped to reorder the portmanteau’s contents as though he desired to better distribute the weight.

  Thomson, seizing the chance to set down his own burdens and sit for a moment, had grumbled,
“My back will be bent by the time we get out of this desolate place. Can we not find an actual bed for tonight?”

  But MacPherson in typical fashion was quietly focused on what he was doing and couldn’t be bothered to make a reply.

  Stubborn man, Mary thought, as she’d watched his bent head, and as though she had spoken aloud he’d looked up then, directly at her.

  Thomson, seeming to think that he hadn’t been heard, had tried again: “Can we not stop at an inn? Plainly no one has followed us, and I would happily risk being recognized if I could sleep but one night in a bed.”

  After holding the silence for half a beat longer, MacPherson had dropped his gaze back to the task at hand. “If someone’s following us, ye’ll not see them,” he’d said. “And the risk is not only to you.”

  As he’d fastened the straps of the portmanteau, he had glanced once more at Mary, who had just set Frisque on the ground for a moment to stretch out her arms. The dog wasn’t a great weight to carry, but holding her arms bent so long left them aching and numb.

  MacPherson had watched her. And then he’d advised, “Let it walk.”

  “He’s a ‘him,’ not an ‘it,’” she had said, “and he’s too old to walk so far.”

  Frisque had already curled into a tight round of fur on the hard ground, his eyes drooping shut. For a moment MacPherson looked down at him, then bending forward he scooped the dog up with one hand and, before Mary could even offer a protest, he’d put the tiny spaniel in the large and deep hip pocket of his horseman’s coat. Frisque had all but disappeared, only his muzzle and eyes and ears showing, and after a brief scrabble round with his paws to align himself upright, the little dog had seemed delighted.

  And after MacPherson had slung the repacked portmanteau on his back as before with the gun case and set out again, Mary could not deny it had made walking easier, not having Frisque in her arms. She was wearied at times by the weight of her cloak, but whenever the changeable clouds had rolled over the sun and the winds had blown harsh through the valleys and gorges she’d been very grateful to have it for warmth, and when sleeping she’d used it to soften her “bed,” rolling into its folds in the way she’d seen Mr. MacPherson roll himself within his great horseman’s coat when he lay down to rest before keeping his watch through the night.