Desperate Fortune

by Susanna Kearsley

  He turned then and looked at me. Quickly he spoke again into his mobile and ended the call but he didn’t approach me. He stood there, his figure distorting and wavering like a mirage. He was saying my name: “Sara? Sara, I’m sorry. It’s OK. I’m here. It’s OK.”

  But it wasn’t OK, and I knew it. I said so. “It’s not OK.” And like a wheel spinning round in a rut I repeated it over and over: “It’s not OK. Not OK. Not OK. Not OK…”

  And then sensation and pain flooded up and took over and I was in meltdown.

  I felt the hot tears overflowing and knew I was yelling at Luc but I wasn’t aware anymore of the things I was saying, although I could hear the accusing tone of my own voice. I heard him asking me quietly whether I wanted him to leave the room, and I told him I didn’t, I screamed it, and then I was curled on the sofa, my arms locked around my bent knees while I rocked myself, sobbing and sobbing, unable to stop…

  Until slowly, like floodwaters draining by steady degrees, it began to subside.

  I felt shaky. My head ached. My eyelids felt swollen and my throat felt raw.

  I had folded myself into the furthest corner of Luc’s leather sofa. The light in the room now was blissfully dim, and he’d taken the armchair across from me, where he sat quietly waiting. His voice when he spoke was incredibly calm. “Sara? What do you need? Can I get you a blanket?”

  I nodded and he rose and left the room, returning with a blanket of the perfect heaviness so when he draped it round my shoulders it was like a reassuring hug. And then I wanted one of those, as well. I asked him, “Can you hold me?”

  “Sure.” He sat and I curled myself into his arms and the feel of them round me was perfect as well—just the right weight and pressure.

  We stayed there like that without moving. Without saying anything. Slowly the floodwaters lowered still more and were followed behind by a dark seeping current of shame.

  It went deeper than simple embarrassment. I couldn’t even imagine what Luc must be thinking; how much his opinion of me must have lowered.

  I said, “I’m so sorry.” My voice hurt.

  “You don’t need to be sorry.”

  “Your brother…” I had no idea how much time had passed, but I knew I had ruined our plans for the lunch with his brother in Paris. My chance of a job.

  “There’s no problem. I texted him. He understands.”

  He was trying to make me feel better. I shook my head. Ordinary people, I knew, wouldn’t understand something like this. “No, he doesn’t. How could he? How—?” I was about to say, “How could you?” when I stopped talking because for the first time I’d noticed what lay on the table in front of the sofa: a booklet of Sudoku puzzles, with a pencil laid on top of it. It wasn’t my puzzle book, but one that looked a lot like it, and it was set out so tidily within my reach that it couldn’t have been a coincidence. Taking a moment and trying to think, I looked once more around the room, noticing all of the things Luc had done.

  He had turned off the music. He’d closed the curtains to dim the light. He had stayed close but not too close. Kept calm. Moved quietly. Brought me a blanket.

  I shifted my head on his shoulder to look at him. Study him.

  Luc went on holding me. “Fabien understands meltdowns because he still gets them himself, sometimes. Not very often. He usually shuts down instead. But his meltdowns were very…spectacular, when we were young.”

  What seemed strangest to me wasn’t what he was saying but how he was saying it, in the same tone people used when they talked about commonplace things like the weather.

  I asked, to be perfectly certain, “Your brother has Asperger’s?”

  “Yes.”

  His brother who was, like me, a computer programmer. A skilled one, apparently, to have been put at the helm of developing Morland Electronics’s tactical and sonar systems. “And when did you…how did you…?”

  “When we had breakfast,” he said. “That first morning, when you told me all you had learned about Jacobites.”

  I felt my face flushing as I recalled how I’d monologued, talking and talking till Jacqui had signaled me. “You must have thought I was crazy.”

  He turned his head then and looked down at me with those incredible eyes that could hold my world steady. “I thought you were beautiful.”

  Just for that moment, while I looked at him and he looked back at me and those words hung suspended between us, I felt in my heart it might truly be possible, what we were trying to do. But the tear that I felt slowly trailing its way down my heated cheek hadn’t been caused by my meltdown. I brushed it away.

  “I can’t do this,” I said. “Not to you. Not to Noah. I ruin things, Luc. I’m not capable—”

  “Who told you that?” he asked quietly, as he had asked me that day in the old ruined troglodyte house, when I’d tried to convince him the first time that I couldn’t do real relationships. “Was it your cousin?”

  “No.” Jacqui had always looked after me, guarded me, watched out for “friends” who were taking advantage of my lack of social awareness, my need to be liked, for their own ends—to help with their homework or do little chores for them. “Real friends,” she’d told me once when she had rescued me from a posh restaurant where four girls had taken me out for a birthday lunch and left me stuck with the bill, “don’t just take from you all the time. Real friends look after you.” She’d been especially watchful of boys, though there hadn’t been many. My few teenage boyfriends had not hung on more than a couple of months before backing away in what quickly became a predictable pattern: they’d promise to call me and then never would, and I’d wait while my hopefulness slid into heartbreak.

  “Why do they always leave me?” I’d asked Jacqui through my tears one night. “What’s wrong with me?” And she of course had reassured me there was nothing wrong with me at all, but even though I hadn’t yet been diagnosed with Asperger’s I’d felt my difference painfully.

  When I’d started university, my cousin had been going through the first of her divorces. It had been a messy battle that had claimed much of her energy. I’d felt alone, and lonely. And in one of my computer science classes, I’d met Gary.

  He’d been captain of the rugby team, a golden boy in every way, blond haired and so incredibly good-looking that the first time he had spoken to me I’d assumed he’d done it by mistake. But he had asked me out and taken me to dinner and he’d danced with me and kissed me and by half term I’d been totally in love. So when he had assured me that a programming assignment we’d been given was supposed to be collaborative, I’d believed him. I had reasoned I must simply have misunderstood the lecturer’s instructions, wrongly thinking we were meant to work on that assignment independently. Instead I’d worked with Gary and another classmate, Erica.

  She’d been a friend as well. We’d worked together as a team before, and Erica had commented on how well Gary treated me, and I’d said I was honestly amazed that he had chosen me at all, and even more amazed he hadn’t left me yet, as all the others had. We’d talked of past relationships, and Erica had told me that I ought to have more confidence. “He really likes you,” she had said of Gary. I’d believed her, too. And being—as I often was—the first to solve the problem of the program we were working on, I’d freely shared my code, only to find myself called up before the head of the department, charged with cheating.

  As I told this now to Luc, he settled back into the cushions of the sofa, with his arms still round me firmly and protectively. “They stole your code and passed it off as theirs.”

  My nod was slight. “We weren’t supposed to work in teams. They lied.”

  They’d changed the code in tiny ways to distance it from mine, but code could be as individual as handwriting to some discerning eyes. And then of course I’d told the truth, because I could do nothing else.

  I had been very fortunate. I’d been believ
ed. My marks had been reduced as a small penalty for not taking enough care to be sure of the assignment’s true requirements, but I had been cleared of cheating. Unlike Erica and Gary, who had been kicked off the course.

  “Stupid bitch,” was what Gary had called me before he’d left. I hadn’t seen him again after that. Erica had been more vocal, coming round to tell me in great detail what she thought of me. She’d weaponized the private things I’d told her, flinging all my insecurities back at me with a force that made them sting. “You know why all your boyfriends leave? Why no one ever stays with you? Because you’re weird,” she’d told me. “You’re not normal. You’re not capable of having real relationships because you’ll always end up letting people down, the way you’ve let down me and Gary.”

  Saying those words over now to Luc still stung a little, even now. “But she was right,” I said.

  “No, she wasn’t. They’re the ones who took advantage of your trust. They let you down.”

  “But—”

  “There’s no ‘but.’ She lied to you about the course assignment, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And have I ever lied to you?”

  “You said it was tradition for a man to take a woman out to lunch at New Year’s.”

  I could feel the movement of his mouth against my hair. Perhaps a smile. “Apart from that.”

  I thought back through the time that I had known him and admitted, “No.”

  “Then which of us does it make sense to believe?” he asked. “Me, or someone who was angry and out for revenge and had already lied to you?”

  It wasn’t the most perfect logical argument. I couldn’t know if a person had lied to me until that lie was exposed, but I knew in my heart Luc had always been truthful. And so I said, “You.”

  “Then believe what I’m telling you. This, what we’re having, is a real relationship. You’re more than capable. You’re doing fine. Every couple,” he told me, “has moments that challenge them, but when you’re with the right person, a person who loves you, a person you love, you work through them together. Those others who left you, who hurt you, they weren’t the right men for you, that’s all. And just because they left, that doesn’t mean I will.” He gathered me closer, as though I were something of value. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  I leaned against his chest and shut my eyes and sorted through what he’d just told me, trying to decide if he’d been speaking hypothetically or if he had just said he loved me.

  I thought of what Denise had told me when she had explained about their marriage and divorce: “He deserves to be properly loved,” she had said. And I wanted to give him that, wanted to be the right person for him. Still with my eyes closed, I told Luc, “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.” Easily, simply, with no hesitation.

  He gently smoothed the tangled hair back from my forehead and I lifted my own hand to hold his there, to press it firmly to my eyes because it felt so comforting, the steady rhythm of his heartbeat strong and soothing at my temple where my face was resting on his shirt.

  Recalling something else Denise had said about Luc’s family, I asked, “Was that why your mother took your brother to America to go to school? Because he has Asperger’s?”

  “Yes, it wasn’t so well understood in France. The opportunities were better in America for Fabien to get the education that was suited to his way of learning. And he met his wife there, so it’s good he went.”

  “He’s married?”

  “Very happily.”

  “With children?”

  “Yes. Three daughters. Why?”

  I hadn’t expected that. Hadn’t allowed for it in my own life, having long since resigned myself to the idea of being alone like the single computer that Jacqui’s psychologist author had used to explain how my mind was wired—one little Mac in an office of PCs, unable to fully connect. Incompatible. But when I tried to explain using this same analogy now to Luc, he pointed out, “But Macs can do things a PC can’t do. And in my office, Macs and PCs share the same network.”

  “You’re not ever going to let me win an argument, are you?”

  “Do you want to win this one?”

  “I don’t know.” I suddenly felt very drowsy. “I don’t know what I want.” Then I thought for a moment and added, regretful, “I wanted to meet your brother.”

  I felt Luc’s shrug. “He’s in Paris for two more days. We can try again tomorrow.”

  “But tomorrow’s Thursday,” I reminded him. “You’ll be at work.”

  “I have a very understanding boss. I’ll work from home. We’ll try again, same time. I won’t be late,” he promised.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll leave it up to you.” His hand felt warm against my forehead. Safe. “It’s your choice.”

  I was half asleep already, sinking fast beneath the weight of the exhaustion that so often struck me after meltdowns. “My choice…”

  He bent his head to mine again, and when he spoke it stirred my hair and sang within my ears above the restful rhythm of his heartbeat. “Always.”

  Chapter 37

  The king of the world sits in his hall, and hears of his people’s flight.

  —Macpherson, “Carthon”

  Rome

  April 22, 1732

  It proved to be a difficult decision, choosing what to wear to meet the king. She knew it was ridiculous, with all she had encountered and endured, that such a silly detail now should hold her all but paralyzed, yet in the days they’d been in Rome it had become a problem. Both her winter gowns from Paris were too warm for such a climate, where by afternoon the hotness of the sun even so early in the season kept most people shuttered in their rooms and houses, and the scents of sun-warmed stone and brick and plaster fought the drifting perfumes of the hanging flowers, and the carriage horses by midafternoon stood drowsy-eyed in harness in the shade cast by the ancient buildings of the many squares—called by the people here piazzas—that were set like little beads within a lacy web of narrow, twisting streets.

  Their piazza had a fountain, and a very ancient structure called the Pantheon, or sometimes the Rotunda, built to honor all the gods that had been prayed to in the old Rome of the Caesars, with a dome that Mary marveled at, so perfectly constructed that it stood without the benefit of buttresses. It had become a church now and there was but one God honored there, but Mary felt the weight of all the old forgotten gods still pressing round her in the shadows when she entered in that building, where the daylight and the moonlight shone by turns from a great open circle at the very center of the dome. She had a good view of the massive pillars of its portico and front from the tall window of their room in the hotel, where she was wont to lean each morning and again at evening, simply listening to all the splendid sounds of Rome and drinking in the sights.

  And she was at that window now when Effie called to her.

  Frisque barked, and Mary shushed him, lest the other guests of their hotel complain about the noise. Frisque had been out of sorts since their arrival here, and Mary had at first blamed it upon the warmer weather, but she’d seen him pacing round the room at night as if in search of something, and she now believed it was because he had grown used to having Hugh close by, and missed him. As did she.

  Since the name Symonds had so clearly been discovered at Marseilles, their names had changed again, with papers Hugh had drawn from a compartment in his gun case before burning all the others. She was back to being Mr. Thomson’s sister, with their surname being… Well, it hardly mattered, Mary thought, for it would surely change again.

  “Come try your gown,” said Effie from the cool and airily high-ceilinged room they shared. The room that Hugh and Thomson had was over theirs, up one more pair of stairs, and while she often heard them walking round she rarely saw them but at meals. She found it hard, having grown used to shar
ing nearly all her hours with Hugh, to have him now so separate from her, and to see him only in the company of others where she could not draw him into conversation nor enjoy his calm companionship without another person intervening.

  With a sigh she turned and went to Effie.

  “Now,” the older woman said, “I’ve done my best with it, but I’m no seamstress.”

  They had found the gown by sheer good fortune, having gone in search of a mantua maker and stumbled upon one not many streets distant who had been about to reuse parts of this one in making another. It was somewhat plainer than her Paris gowns—not a new robe volant but a simply cut bodice set over a closed skirt, and it had been torn at the seams in three places and missing its laces, but made of light silk in a pale frosted blue Mary found very calming.

  A fine trade, she thought, for the plum-colored gown. And with Effie’s repairs and a length of new ivory silk ribbon to thread through the sides of the bodice across the plain stomacher, matching the trimmings of ivory lace showing around the low neckline and under the gathered sleeves from her fine linen chemise, Mary thought the effect very pretty.

  “You’re sure you won’t come?” she asked Effie.

  “I’ve seen the king often enough in my time. And who else would look after this bundle of mischief?” She nodded to Frisque. “He would ruin the room if ye left him alone in it. There now, that’s done. Not too tight at the elbows? Good. Then all ye need is your cap. Here, I’ve finished that too.”

  She had crafted a new cap from one of her own, adding small bows she’d fashioned from scraps of silk ribbon that matched the frost blue of the gown.

  Mary, keeping her head still while Effie adjusted the pins through the lace of the cap, felt a twinge of uncertainty. “What is he like, the king?”

  Effie appeared to be sorting through words to describe him and settled on: “Kind.”

  It wasn’t what Mary expected, but it eased her worries a little since she hoped to ask his assistance in finding her father. She’d thought, when they’d first arrived, she might just find him—that he would be easy to locate, but Rome was a crowded place, and while they’d waited for King James to make his reply to the letter that Thomson had sent to acquaint him with their arrival, she had not been at liberty to ask around in her own name, to learn where her father might lodge.