Desperate Fortune

by Susanna Kearsley

  She asked, “You’re still liking the job?”

  “I am loving the job.”

  “You’re not finding it lonely?”

  I thought of the room I now worked in at Luc’s house—our house—with my desk and the chair and the second chair next to it where Noah sat after school and did homework. I said, “No. I’m not lonely.”

  My cousin’s head turned and she looked at me, then she reached over and clasped her hand over mine, briefly. “I’m glad. I am glad for you, really.” She blinked very quickly and slid on her sunglasses even though we were in shade underneath the big chestnut trees. Looking away, she said, “Luc’s brother seems like a good man to work for.”

  He was. He was brilliant. I said so to Jacqui and followed her gaze to where Fabien stood near his daughters, head stoically bent to my mother as she rattled on about something. I did love my mother, but she talked a lot.

  Jacqui asked, “Should I rescue him, do you think?”

  “He’s fine.” I turned my head to smile at her. “You don’t need to be managing things all the time. Relax.”

  “It isn’t in my nature.” But she leaned back in her chair, to please me. “He doesn’t look much like his brother.”

  “No.” Fabien looked more like Luc’s mother, I thought—the tall build and fairer hair. Luc had his mother’s blue eyes but in all other ways he was like a young clone of his father. I’d found myself several times watching his father and thinking how Luc’s hair would lighten like that and turn gray one day, and how I’d be there to watch it. I twisted the broad band of gold on my ring finger, liking the feel of it, finding it soothing.

  My cousin asked, “What have you done with your husband?”

  “He’s taken my father to see the Ducati. They’re bonding.”

  In French from across the lawn, Noah called: “Sara? Michelle wants to know if the bouquet means she’ll be the next to get married.”

  When I confirmed that was indeed the tradition, Michelle gave a shriek and the bouquet was promptly tossed upward again and kicked off a great game in the garden, all the children catching it and passing it as though it were a hot potato no one wanted to be left with, but when it came round to Fabien’s middle girl she caught it tightly and proudly and held it, not letting it go.

  “There, you see?” I told Jacqui. “Things always work out as they’re meant to.”

  “I suppose they do.” She was looking, I noticed, not at Fabien’s daughter, but at Alistair, who sat not far away from us, discussing something with Luc’s parents. “I never thought I’d see him so relaxed.”

  “He’s like that all the time, here.”

  In the five months he’d been living with Claudine he’d made a good start on his new book, having given us a moment of suspense at first when he’d first read the transcribed pages of the diary, all in private, on his own. Emerging from the study he had crossed to the salon and fixed his gaze on me, and then on Jacqui, and had said, “It isn’t what I’d thought it would be.”

  Jacqui had said, “No, I—”

  “It’s so far beyond my expectations,” he had cut her off. “I really…I can’t tell you how incredible this is.”

  The names that had meant little to the rest of us when reading through the diary had been well-known names to Alistair, who’d sought to educate us all that evening in the throes of his excitement. “You see here, this Martin O’Connor who’s mentioned when Mary’s at Chatou? Well, he was with the Mine Adventurer’s Company, and he went down just after this to mine for silver in Provence. And Robinson, George Robinson, he set up with some other men to run some mines in Burgundy, and what they all were really doing was…”

  And so the diary we had feared would disappoint him had instead surpassed his hopes by shining new light on the efforts of the Jacobites to find a steady source of income for King James’s court in exile.

  “He had no way,” so Alistair had said, “of raising money like most kings. He had a crown but not the country or the taxes to go with it, only subjects who were landless like himself, and looked to him for their support. And having to rely upon the pope to give him money was humiliating. So…”

  And he’d been off again, explaining all the details of the silver mines and lead mines and attempts at trade, and efforts that went well beyond what Thomson and his cohorts did, or didn’t do, depending on one’s view of things. But I’d been watching Jacqui’s face, while Alistair had talked, and I had asked her later on why she’d been smiling.

  “Because when a writer gets like that,” she’d said, “so fired up, I know the book they write for me will be amazing.”

  He was still fired up.

  I reassured my cousin of this now, while she was watching him in conversation with Luc’s mother. “He’s decided to use Mary’s diary, Mary’s story, to tie all the parts together and give readers someone personal to root for, to connect with.”

  “Well, he always likes the little people best himself, does Alistair. The kings don’t hold his interest like the commoners.”

  I had to side with Alistair. In all that I had read about—the great financial scandal and the treachery and intrigue and betrayal—what had captured me the most was the small story of two people who’d been caught in the machinery of politics and history without knowing it, and brought together for a little while before the wheels had turned to separate them once again.

  My cousin said, “It’s too bad Mary’s diary doesn’t have a proper ending.”

  “Well,” I said, “I think she just stopped writing. She was sad. And Thomson did go back to Paris when they let him out of prison, so I think they very probably sent Mary with him. Maybe that was why he sent to ask her to come visit him. To tell her they were going back.”

  My cousin agreed that made sense.

  “Yes, I know,” I said. “Alistair thinks there’s a whole other diary. He thinks that they went into Spain.”

  “Why Spain?”

  “He says the Earl Marischal went to Spain later on that year, and he thinks Mr. MacPherson went with him, and both Luc and Alistair think that MacPherson had fallen for Mary, so they think he married her and took her with him.”

  “I see. So your husband’s a romantic, then.”

  “A hopeless one.” I watched as Claudine came to sit with Alistair, her hand linking so naturally with his. I added, “One of us is right, or maybe neither of us is and she went somewhere else entirely, or stayed in Rome. We’ll never know for certain.”

  We both pondered this in silence for a while. And then I said, in case my cousin hadn’t heard, “Claudine and Alistair are going to take a road trip in the autumn, traveling the same path Mary took, so Claudine can take photographs of all the places Mary wrote about, from Paris all the way to Rome. We’re going to watch the dog,” I told her, “while they’re gone.”

  “Diablo won’t be happy.”

  “He’ll adapt.”

  They had declared a brief truce for my wedding day, apparently, the cat keeping watch from the terrace while Alistair’s dog Hector ran with the children.

  My cousin said, “Hang on. If Alistair thinks that they all went to Spain…”

  “Yes?”

  “He hasn’t roped you in to doing research on your honeymoon, I hope?”

  “No. We’re not going to the part of Spain that interests him. We’re going to the north,” I said. “Luc’s boss has a house there he’s letting us have for the fortnight.”

  Jacqui looked at the dark-haired man who sat on the far side of Alistair. “Luc’s boss,” she told me, “is rather incredibly hot.”

  “Yes, I know.” He was not, to my eyes, as good-looking as Luc, but I saw the appeal. “He is also incredibly married.”

  “But happily?”

  “Yes. Very happily.”

  Jacqui pronounced that a shame. “I could use the male companionshi
p,” she said. “I’ve been abandoned.” She nodded to where her assistant, the gorgeous and affable Humphrey, was standing beside Denise, chatting and helping her set out the glassware.

  “He’ll have to get in line,” I said. “Denise’s current boyfriend is quite fierce.”

  “She didn’t bring him?”

  “He’s in Canada,” I told her. “Climbing something, I believe.” Still, watching Humphrey now in action I decided I should give him even odds. Denise did like a man who wore a suit with style.

  “Oh well,” Jacqui said, “it will do Humphrey good, getting out a bit. He’s worked long hours these past few weeks. We’ve got the fairy tales scheduled to come out next spring, did I tell you? You want to see some of the paintings that Julia’s done for them. Simply amazing. She’s done this incredible cage with a songbird to put on the cover—you know, from the tale with the wolf and the huntsman who’s really the prince, where the princess is turned to a bird.”

  I said quietly, “That one’s my favorite.”

  It spoke to me on a deep personal level, that tale of the princess who’d rescued her brother and father when they had been lost in the forest of thorns.

  I remembered how lost I had felt sometimes, out of my element, and how my cousin had always been there for me, leading me out of the labyrinth, keeping my feet on the path.

  Now I looked round the garden at everyone—Fabien once again trapped by my mother beside the geraniums, and his adorable family—my family—still hunting for spiders, and Noah at play with Michelle, and Denise flirting madly with Humphrey, and Geoff and his wife talking politics now with Luc’s parents while Claudine and Alistair sat holding hands, and my father and Luc coming through from the lane, and it all seemed so wonderful I felt my eyes stinging hotly. I closed them. And opened them.

  Jacqui asked, “Are you all right? Do you want a Sudoku?”

  Shaking my head I said, “Jacqui?”

  “Yes, darling?”

  “I love you.”

  I wanted to thank her for not giving up on me. Thank her for making me take the job Alistair offered; for keeping me on the straight path that had brought me here. Thank her for leading me out of my personal forest of thorns. But there were too many words that needed saying all lodged in a jumble somewhere in my throat, so I didn’t say anything.

  And yet she heard me.

  “I love you, too,” Jacqui said simply, and turned her attention to Luc, who was crossing the garden towards us, the sun on his hair. “Now, let’s see if this beautiful, romantic man of yours knows how to mix me a decent martini.”

  Chapter 40

  He stood like a cloud on the hill, that varies its form to the wind.

  —Macpherson, “Fingal,” Book Five

  Rome

  May 15, 1732

  It had been built as a tomb and it felt like one. Back in the time of the Caesars, this massive and stern tower had been the tomb of the emperor Hadrian, and his bones lay still beneath them as they climbed the broad shallow staircase of herringbone bricks that ascended the cavernous space.

  Mary was glad of the company of Captain Hay, who had come to collect her this morning at her hotel, walking beside her the whole way and over the broad stone bridge guarded by pale sculpted angels who’d seemed to look down with as much melancholy as could be felt within the heavy walls of the Castel Sant’Angelo, this fortified and impenetrable place that was at once a mausoleum and a prison. She felt small and cowed in its echoing passages. They had passed small dismal rooms and dark cells behind barred doors and wooden ones, and heard the coughing and shuffling below in the dimness their sight could not penetrate.

  Captain Hay said, “It is better than this further up, do not fear.”

  She did not tell him she was not afraid. These past weeks while she’d waited at the hotel, she had found herself retreating to that place behind the shields she’d used so long and which had always served her well when she felt vulnerable.

  At first, when Thomson had been sent to prison here and she had been taken back to Effie at their hotel in the piazza close beside the Pantheon, she had not realized how much things would change. She’d thought that Hugh would still be staying there to guard them, but he had not even come back with them in the coach, and on the next day men had come to clear his few things from the room upstairs, and all she could assume was that he now was lodging closer to the palace or within it, where his patron the Earl Marischal could call upon his services more readily. She’d hoped he might come pay a visit to them when he’d settled in his duties and could find the time to spare, but he had not. At least, not in a formal way. One night as she’d looked down upon the fountain in the square beneath her window, she had thought she’d glimpsed the faint red glow of a lit pipe from deep within the shadowed darkness of the great tall pillars standing at the porticoed front entrance of the Pantheon, but even as she’d tried to look more closely it had vanished.

  She had seen him in the street a few days later—he’d been walking at the shoulder of an elegantly dressed man slightly older than himself, and although the other man was talking to him, Hugh had glanced her way instead. Their eyes had met. But when she would have nodded to acknowledge him he’d shaken his head slightly, and she’d yielded to the warning and passed on, though she had not been able to resist the urge to look behind, to find the other man had turned his head as well to look at her with interest.

  “Was that the Earl Marischal?” she’d asked Effie that night.

  “Aye. A man of great influence, of an old family that long has supported the king and has lost their estate back in Scotland because of it. My clan and Mr. MacPherson’s are bound to the earl’s noble family by ancestry, and there’s not one of my kin would not rise if he called us.”

  Mary had only a small understanding of the complex obligations binding one man to another in the Highlands, but she understood enough to know that Hugh, by virtue of his duty to the earl and to the king, was now departed from her life as fully as her father and her brothers were. In weaker moments, lying in her bed at night, she’d wondered what might happen if she called to him as he’d advised her once to call to Frisque—and then she pushed the thought aside because it was a foolish one, and even had he wanted to, she knew he could not stay.

  No more than she could stay that happy woman she had been aboard del Rio’s ship. If it were true, as Mistress Jamieson had said, that any man deserving of her love would see her as she truly was and need no more from her than that she should be nothing but herself, then Hugh was more deserving of her love than any other man could hope to be, for through some subtle alchemy his presence had allowed her to be who she truly was, and now, without him there, she could not manage it at all. She did not try to reason why, nor did she let herself admit she loved him—only told herself that having never been in love, she could not know for certain it was love that had consumed her thoughts and heart. Besides, since Hugh had moved beyond her sphere it made no sense to feel towards him anything but gratitude and ladylike affection, for to love him could but lead to greater heartache when she left.

  She’d cloaked her sadness in the old familiar fashion and become again that lively, undemanding, and flirtatious person who at Chanteloup-les-Vignes had been so entertaining; though she found that skin now fit her much less comfortably and left small holes and gaps that sometimes showed along the seams.

  She tried to hide them now, and answered Captain Hay’s kind reassurance that the dark Castel Sant’Angelo was less oppressive on its upper levels with, “I’m glad to hear it. I feared Mr. Thomson might be inside one of these cells.”

  Captain Hay said, “He was for a time, which we had not expected, but luckily he wrote Lord Dunbar to tell us and we were then able to have him moved into more comfortable rooms. As you’ll see.”

  It was indeed completely different on the upper levels. From a long, protected courtyard that stood open
to the sunlight, they climbed up another flight of steps and into a curved loggia with lovely vaulted ceilings painted with frescoes in beautiful colors, where airy breezes blew through open archways framing views across the hills and roofs of Rome.

  Thomson’s new “cell” was a spacious room, soaring and square with fine leaded glass windows and elegant curtains and, set at its center, a table at which he’d been writing. He rose as they entered.

  She’d been of two minds when the captain had called at her hotel this afternoon, bringing her word Mr. Thomson was asking to see her. She did not know what to believe about Thomson.

  Each time he has spoken of coming abroad he has altered the facts in small ways yet without seeming less than sincere, she had written this morning in her private journal. In truth he is more a chimera than I am, and I know not whether to count him a friend or a villain.

  This afternoon, he seemed the same man he’d been when she’d met him in Paris, his pleasure at seeing her genuine. “I am so glad you could come. Thank you, Captain, for bringing her. And for the paper you sent.”

  Captain Hay, with a nod at the table, remarked, “I can see you have put it to good use.”

  “Indeed.” Thomson’s tone was well satisfied as he looked over the neat stacks of letters and papers himself. “I have written a private memorial for His Majesty’s use, as well as the one for his banker…Signor Belloni, is it? Yes, I thought so. For Signor Belloni to send into England, to Parliament. And I am just now writing to my father, to tell him I’m well and expect to be soon set at liberty.” Turning to Mary, he added, “But I did not wish to depart, my dear, without this meeting.” His eyes, though they held not the depth of loneliness they’d held in Lyon, still craved her esteem.

  Captain Hay asked, “Have you reached a decision on where you will go when you leave Rome?”

  “I expect I’ll return by the same way I came, though I trust that the journey will be somewhat easier. I’m told there is an order from the cardinal to prevent my being seized in any part of France, so I need have no fear of going back. At any rate, I am obliged to go to Paris, for till I have seen my friend Robinson I cannot know the true situation of my affairs.”