A Desperate Fortune

by Susanna Kearsley

  “As with real life,” Claudine pointed out.

  Thinking of Alistair’s unfinished trilogy, that for the moment would have to remain so, I looked from the mutely accusing eyes of his framed portraits to those hung beside it, my gaze unexpectedly finding another familiar face.

  “Wait,” I said. “Is this…?”

  “Madeleine Hedrick,” she named the famous actress. “Yes, she was one of my first assignments when I went to London. Such a wonderful woman.”

  “You worked in London?” Which explained, I thought, how she had learned to speak such perfect English.

  Claudine said, “When I was starting out, yes. By the end I worked all over—New York, London, Rome—although I think I spent more time in airports in those days than anywhere.”

  Surprised by all of this, I turned and asked, “What did you photograph?”

  Claudine, fitting another of the wedding prints into the album, shrugged. “My specialty was high-end advertising and fashion, but for a few magazines I also did some celebrity portraits. That one of Alistair, second one down on the right, I took that for a magazine.”

  I looked. It wasn’t the portrait of him I liked best—the quiet one where he was sitting by the window, reading. Here he was more energetic, standing midway up a hill in what appeared to be a Scottish glen, the sky behind him streaked with clouds that cast long shadows on the curving land below. “And was that how you met?”

  “No. Alistair wasn’t a celebrity, when we first met. We had mutual friends,” Claudine told me, “in London, and sometimes when I’d go to parties he’d be there, and one day he said he was writing a book about the Scottish exiles in the Netherlands, and asked me would I like to take the pictures for him? All our friends were teasing him because they knew my fees were too expensive for him, and he looked so embarrassed that I told him yes. I had the time. I took the photographs. I didn’t charge him much. And when he came to write the second book, the one at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, I took the photographs for that as well. That,” Claudine told me, “was an even better job, because my aunt was living here, you see. This was her house. I played here as a child, I always loved it. So we stayed here, Alistair and I, and did the research for his book. It was…”

  She paused, and I turned round again and saw she’d stopped her work and wore a faint frown like the one my cousin sometimes wore when trying to decide what words to use, describing something.

  Claudine said, “For years I’d been so busy. Always traveling. But here… It was like coming from a crowded place to somewhere I could breathe. Does that make sense?”

  I nodded. I felt that way here, myself.

  She said, “I found I liked to breathe. I liked the person I became when I was here. I think we all wear masks we show the world, and here I didn’t have to wear it. It was very…”

  “Liberating,” I supplied, when once again she seemed in search of the right word. I wasn’t thinking of Claudine, though, when I said it. I was thinking back to yesterday, and how I’d woken in Luc’s sitting room in early evening to find Noah sitting at the far end of the sofa, being careful not to lean against my feet which were still covered in the blanket.

  He’d been playing Robo Patrol, without the sound on. When I’d stirred, he’d turned and told me, “Papa says I need to let you sleep.”

  I’d blinked, and focused. “That’s all right. I’ve slept enough.”

  “He says you had a meltdown.”

  Children were direct. I liked that. I had given Noah a plain answer. “Yes.”

  He’d set his game down, seeming to find me of greater interest. “Did he give you ice cream? Uncle Fabien feels better if you give him ice cream.”

  “No,” I’d said. “He didn’t.”

  “Uncle Fabien punched a hole right in the wall once, when he had a meltdown. Do you punch through walls?”

  I’d thought he’d looked a little hopeful I would say I did, as though I had a kind of superpower.

  “No. I just cry, mostly. And I’m very loud.”

  “Oh. Well, next time you have one, be sure that you have it when I’m here,” had been his advice, “because I’ll give you ice cream.” And having said all he had wanted to say about that, he had held out the Robo Patrol game. “Want to try the next level?”

  I’d felt something new in my chest, like a fullness around my heart. “Yes,” I had said, “I would like that.”

  I felt that same fullness now, holding it close as Claudine gave a nod at the word I’d suggested.

  “Yes,” she told me, “liberating. Alistair had moments of that here as well, I know, but his career was on the rise. His second book did very well. It made him famous, and he had to travel. For a while I tried to do it with him, but I couldn’t be that person anymore. Sometimes you try a coat on that you used to wear, and it just doesn’t feel the same. The style, the cut—it’s not that you’ve outgrown it, but it doesn’t really fit. So you stop wearing it.” She bent her head again above her work. “He didn’t understand that. I’m not sure he ever will.”

  She fell silent again for a moment. I didn’t say anything either. I’d been curious about Claudine’s relationship with Alistair, and apparently today she felt inclined to talk about it, but I’d learned through observation it was sometimes best to not leap in with questions. Questions sometimes went unanswered. But faced with a stretching silence, people often sought to fill it.

  Claudine finally said, “Success, for him, is something that you win, that other people have to give you. But if other people give you something they can take it back. For me, the work itself, just being able to create—that’s what I want. I don’t need all the high acclaim and recognition. Capturing a wedding, this is not less than a fashion shoot. In many ways, it’s more important. More worthwhile.” She slid the final print in place and closed the album, keeping one hand on its leather cover. “You’ve met him, have you? Then you’ll have seen how he’s restless; how quickly he walks.”

  I thought of my cousin’s complaints as we’d kept pace with Alistair all through the woods of Ham Common.

  Claudine went on, “Always he’s looking for something, he’s chasing it. Always the neighbor’s grass is greener, somewhere else, over the next hill.” Her smile was slight. “My grass is green enough.”

  I looked around the room, at all the many pictures in their frames, with new appreciation for the scope of what she had accomplished, what she had abandoned.

  When my gaze returned to rest upon the single photograph of Alistair, relaxing with a wineglass in his hand, head bent above his book, my first thought was: He isn’t walking. And my second was: He looks content, and happy. And then I noticed something that I hadn’t before.

  I had already guessed Claudine had been the person sitting in the empty chair, who’d left her wineglass on the table while she’d snapped the photograph, but now I looked beyond the curtain at the casement window by his shoulder, lifting in the faint suggestion of a summer breeze, and saw the outline of a peaked roof framed by trees. Luc’s roof. The chestnut trees in the back garden. The same view I saw myself each day when I looked out the window of my bedroom.

  “This was taken here,” I said. I wasn’t sure why that surprised me.

  Claudine said, “It was.” And then she said, “I had hoped…”

  But she didn’t finish, didn’t tell me what she’d hoped. She only stood and smiled and said, “Come, let’s go down and have some coffee with Denise. We ought to celebrate your finishing the diary.”

  * * *

  “Darling,” said Jacqui, “you’re not making sense. What do you mean, he’ll have to come to France?”

  “Not only France. He’ll have to come here, to Chatou. It’s what she wanted him to do from the beginning.”

  “Now you’ve lost me. Who wanted, and why? And what does any of this have to do with some drawing from America?” The force
of her sigh made me hold the telephone briefly away from my ear.

  I tried again, purposely slowing my speech as I took things a step at a time.

  “The drawing,” I said, “is of one of Luc’s ancestors. It was drawn, so the story goes, by a young woman who loved him.”

  “The ancestor.”

  “Yes. And when Claudine first saw it, she said that the girl who had drawn it had shown us her heart in the drawing, had shown us she loved him.”

  “The ancestor.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m just trying to follow along,” she explained, in response to my tight reply.

  “There is a photograph in Claudine’s studio,” I said, “of Alistair.”

  “Ah.”

  “Have you seen it? The one where he’s reading?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well, I think Claudine, in that photograph, showed us her heart,” I said. “She was in love with him then. She still is.” I tried backing my opinion with a summary of everything Claudine had said, and finished with: “That’s why she bought the diary in the first place, don’t you see? Not because she values it for what it is—she doesn’t—but because she hoped that it would bring him back here. Back to her.”

  “I see.”

  I wasn’t sure she did. I found it frustrating to talk like this, unable to see Jacqui’s face. I might not be able to read everyone’s expressions but I’d studied Jacqui’s long enough to guess, most times, at what she might be thinking. But her tone of voice was lost on me.

  She said, “It seems a complicated way for her to do that, don’t you think?”

  I thought most people did things in a way that was ridiculously complicated, coming at them sideways all the time instead of saying what they wanted. “Look, just get him here, all right? And if you haven’t told him yet what’s in the diary, then for heaven’s sake don’t tell him now. Don’t give him any reason to decide he needn’t come.”

  “What makes you think I haven’t told him?”

  “Have you?”

  Jacqui hesitated. “No.”

  “There you are, then. Just as well. He can decide if it’s of any use to him when he’s had time to read it. If it isn’t, he won’t have to pay me anything.” I took note of the time on my computer screen and said, “I have to finish up here. Promise me you’ll bring him over. Those exact words.”

  Jacqui sighed. “I promise I’ll bring Alistair to Chatou just as soon as it can be arranged. All right?”

  “This weekend would be nice.”

  “I’ll do my best.” When I’d accepted that, she asked, “So, how does Mary’s diary end?”

  “It doesn’t,” I replied. “It doesn’t end.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You can see it for yourself,” I said, “this weekend.”

  Ringing off, I gave my concentration back to the computer, typing in the final lines of what I had transcribed this morning:

  On the 15th after breakfast Captain Hay did call upon us with the message Mr. Thomson wanted me to visit him.

  Which, it appeared, was the first thing of any real note that had happened since Mary had seen the king. She’d given a full and colorful account of that, down to a detailed description of what they’d all worn to the palace, but afterwards her entries had grown sparser, and more dull.

  Her days seemed duller still, and while she tried to keep herself amused by telling stories to her fellow guests at the hotel at mealtimes, from what I could tell they were the old tales she had told of the Chevalier de Vilbray, and not her newer, more original creations. She referred to them, but did not write them down.

  A week before this final entry, on May 9, she’d written:

  So at dinner told the story of the storm, which was well liked by all, and Effie later said to me in private she believes if the chevalier ever comes to Rome he will be most amazed to find himself so celebrated here for his adventures. Her remark did make me smile, which pleased her, for she holds I am become too melancholy. When I answered that it was a melancholy thing to wait so long at someone else’s whim, she gently did remind me that had been her whole life’s lot, and that she meant to wait upon me longer yet, and stay with me as long as she was wanted, which I told her would be always. I am glad to have her with me, but I count it still a hard thing that we are not free in life to choose our road, for Hugh must go wherever the Earl Marischal would have him go, and I must go where I am sent.

  And there, I thought, was Mary’s problem written in a sentence: she no longer had MacPherson.

  If she’d seen him since she’d seen the king, she’d written nothing of it, but the fact that he had gone from being “Mr. M—” to being “Hugh” since they had shared the cabin on the pirate hunter’s ship gave me good reason to believe his absence was the root cause of her melancholy.

  Captain Hay had been the only visitor she’d mentioned, and this visit—after breakfast on the morning of May 15, in Mary’s final entry of the diary—was the first time he’d brought any news that she had deemed worth noting.

  He will return this afternoon and take me to the place where Mr. Thomson is confined. I cannot think why Mr. Thomson would desire to see me, nor am I assured what he might say to me should be believed. Each time he has spoken of coming abroad he has altered the facts in small ways yet without seeming less than sincere. In truth he is more a chimera than I am, and I know not whether to count him a friend or a villain. In truth there is but one man in the whole of Rome whose honor I am certain of, whose friendship I have come now to rely upon, and if it were my choice to make I would lay all my heart before him and refuse to leave his side. My father said, we do not always get the things we want, and he was right; for though my aunt once reassured me I would always have a choice, if there is one before me now I do confess I cannot see it, so instead I must—

  And that was where the diary ended.

  I would never know what Mary had felt she must do, or what I would have done in her predicament, but where she had not had a choice, I knew I had a simple one.

  I made it now.

  I read the time again on my computer, switched it off, and stood, decidedly.

  “I won’t need lunch,” I told Denise as I passed through the kitchen on my way to the back door. “I’m going out.”

  “All right, then. See you later. Mind the cat,” she warned.

  Diablo had been lying like an obstacle outside the door. He walked across the garden with me, weaving round my legs, but when we reached the door within the wall, I aimed him back towards the kitchen. “Go on, then. Go home,” I told him, and because I thought that good advice, I carried on into the lane myself and ducked beneath the low-arched tree branch, climbed the few steps of Luc’s porch, and rang the bell.

  The door swung open right away. He had been in the entry hall, and waiting.

  “Hi,” he said.

  I looked at him and understood what Mary had been feeling when she wrote: I would lay all my heart before him and refuse to leave his side.

  “I’d like to go to Paris now,” I said. “I’d like to meet your brother.”

  Luc stood looking down at me a moment, then he kissed me very gently, almost carefully, and straightened with a smile that made the whole world disappear except the two of us. “OK.”

  Chapter 39

  My cousin didn’t try to catch the bride’s bouquet. She knew me well enough to know I wouldn’t try to throw it to her, either.

  Luc and I were married the first Saturday in June, having decided that was time enough to let my family settle from the shock, although my father had still seemed a little dazed when he had walked me up the aisle, between the chairs in Claudine’s garden, and my mother, when she’d watched Denise set out the cake and cutlery, had asked no fewer than three times, “And who is she again?” as though the tangle of relationships was mystifying.r />
  We had kept the guest list small—no aunts and uncles—so the day thus far had been an easy one to manage, though in honesty I knew that I’d remember little else beyond the look in Luc’s blue eyes as we’d exchanged our vows.

  The bouquet went to Noah’s friend Michelle, who made a most impressive dive to catch it, ending with a grass stain on her frock to the resigned amusement of her mother, and preventing open warfare among Fabien’s three daughters.

  They were clever lively girls and close in age, the eldest being thirteen and the youngest just turned nine. The middle girl was very clearly on the spectrum like her father and like me, for having failed to catch my bouquet she at first turned gloomy, blaming her own clumsiness and uselessness, until her sisters rallied round to cheer her with a hunt for spiders in the garden.

  “Spiders,” said her mother to my cousin, “are her current special interest.”

  “Oh, I know,” said Jacqui, picking up on something in the other woman’s tone that I had evidently missed. “With Sara, it was snakes. We had to visit them at zoos. I had to pet one.”

  I sat patiently through all of this till Fabien’s wife went across to supervise her daughters. With indulgence I remarked to Jacqui, “You might try not talking as though I weren’t here.”

  Smiling, she said, “Sorry. I suppose I’ve just got used to it, having you so far away.”

  “Not so far.” She had kept popping over at weekends as though to be certain I hadn’t made some huge mistake, though her visits were less frequent now, which I took as a sign of approval.