A Desperate Fortune (14 page)

They found the playhouse without any incident and joined the crowd inside, and Mary watched enraptured as the clever pantomime unfolded, set to music that spoke for the silent actors as they told the tale of lovers kept apart by an unyielding mother who preferred a suitor much less worthy for her daughter. There was poignancy and laughter—mostly laughter, as the better suitor bested his dim-witted rival at each turn and finally won his mistress and her mother’s good opinion.

Mary had not ever seen a play performed before. For her, this was the Paris she had dreamed about, at long last spread before her in its glory and its opulence. The candlelight and costumes, and the music and the mirth within the playhouse, made her feel as though a veil had been drawn back to show her Paradise. Jacques looked at her and smiled and turned to Madame Roy. “I would not cut her pleasure short. Let’s walk back through the Fair.”

The older woman nodded her consent, and when the pantomime was finished they walked down together through the throngs of people to the grand and covered spectacle that was the Fair of Saint-Germain.

If Mary had been dazzled by the play, she was near ecstasy while walking through the Fair. It was a tiny village in itself all held beneath a wooden roof, with rows of open wooden stalls and balconies and stairs, the whole lit warmly with what seemed a thousand candles, some suspended from the ceiling overhead. Each stall held something new to see or buy—the vendors selling everything but books and weapons, or so Madame Roy maintained. There were performers here as well; they stopped to watch a man who juggled knives, and marveled at the flash of steel and his dexterity. They watched a couple dancing to the playing of an oboe, and a woman who walked lightly on a rope strung between balconies as though it were the ground itself, and did not fall.

And pressed around them seemed to be the whole of Paris, glittering as brightly as the finery contained within that festive place.

“Take care,” Madame Roy warned, “for with the nectar come the wasps. Guard well your purses.”

Mary, who had no purse to be careful of, felt free to simply wander and enjoy.

She was well satisfied and weary when they finally took the turning at the Fair’s end and walked through the little laneway to the rue du Coeur Volant and started up towards their lodgings.

With the Fair behind them it was quieter. The street for once looked empty and the wind that had so often chased between the houses now had changed direction and was blowing from the east, and so was blocked by the high walls. When Mary hummed a lilting line of music she remembered from the pantomime, it seemed to echo back to her as happily.

A little way ahead, she saw the cook’s boy had come out to sweep their front step clear of snow, and when he noticed their approach he stood and held the door for them and waited, letting lamplight from within slant welcoming and warm across the frozen ground.

Mary felt quite warm enough already. She had taken off her gloves to cool her hands a little in the air and started to push back her hood when suddenly a man burst from the shelter of a doorway she was passing.

Startled, Mary had no time to move aside. He roughly shoved her, snatched the kid gloves she was holding in her hands, and took off running.

Jacques reacted angrily. “Stop, you—!”

“Thief!” Mary cried in French across his words, alarmed as much because he’d spoken English as because she’d lost her favorite gloves.

The man who swiftly moved from close behind them seemed at first to have been born directly of the shadows. She saw but a passing blur of gray and heard a low cry as the thief was caught and briefly overpowered and released with flailing speed into the night, and then her gloves were being offered to her, held within the bare hand of a tall man in a gray cloak, whose bent head concealed a face already hidden by a dark three-cornered hat.

In height and in form he looked much like the coachman who’d come to collect Mistress Jamieson, but when she finally found her voice to thank him for his chivalry, the stranger partly raised his head to show a pair of eyes as hard as any she had seen, set in a face that was not handsome. With a silent nod he crossed the street ahead of them to enter through the doorway of the house that faced their own. The door closed after him, and Mary stood and stared at it, while Jacques and Madame Roy both sought to reassure themselves she was not harmed.

The cook’s boy, who appeared to have been shaken by the whole adventure, held the door still wider as they hurried her indoors.

“My dear, you’re trembling,” Jacques observed.

“It is but shock,” said Madame Roy, “and quickly cured with brandy, warmth, and bed.”

The brandy helped, but it could not completely chase away the cold she felt within her. Upstairs she did a thing she rarely did and took Frisque with her into bed and curled her body round him for the comfort of his warmth. She did not need to draw the curtain back to view the window of the house across the street, nor look to see the glowing light of the man’s pipe against the dark, for now she knew not seeing it meant nothing.

He was in that room. She knew it just as surely as she knew the color of his cloak. The hardness of his eyes.

And all the pleasure of her lovely evening had now vanished with the knowledge that in all the time he’d walked so close behind them in the shadowed street—and possibly before that—she had never once suspected he was there.

I fear the man across the street…

I set my pencil down and sighed as once again the labored notes of the piano in the salon broke my concentration. Noah had been practicing the same arpeggio for several minutes now without much sign of progress. Getting up, I crossed to close my door, which didn’t stop the sound but muffled it enough that I could turn my focus back to my deciphering of Mary’s words.

After two days I was getting faster with my work, having gained a better eye to tell her sevens from her nines, and I was starting to develop a good sense of how she phrased things. Her cadence was clear from the first line I’d finished deciphering, just after breakfast on New Year’s Day:

At three o’clock, my brother came to fetch me with the news that I was wanted, and of the lies he told me I hold that to be the hardest to forgive.

I’d had to edit that and put the commas in and the apostrophes, and modify her spelling. She had written “aclock” for “o’clock” and used a
y
for “lyes” instead of “lies,” but those were easy things to sort in context. Easier than Mary sorting out the tangled circumstances of her life. It must have been a blow to learn her brother hadn’t wanted her for who she was, but only for the use that he could put her to. And while she didn’t list the lies he’d told her, it was obvious that he’d been less than honest about why he’d brought her to Chatou. The “wagon overturned upon the road” that had supposedly diverted them and made them go the long way round could not have been an accident. Sir Redmond had been waiting all along for their arrival.

He had said as much to Mary, as she’d written in her diary:

On the 24th arose to find Sir Redmond had obtained a bed for Frisque, with the apology he had not been informed beforehand that I’d have a dog with me, or else he would have had the room more properly arranged. “Did Nicolas then tell you that I would be on my own?” I asked, and “Aye,” said he, and told me that my brother had informed him full a week ago that we would be arriving on the Tuesday as we did, which did show faith I think upon my brother’s part, since having not yet met me grown, he could not have known then if I would suit his purpose. Happily
—and Jacqui, when I’d read the entry to her on the phone, had seemed to think that word had held some sarcasm—
Sir Redmond tells me I am perfect for the part I am to play, not only for the fact I do speak French but for the simpler fact that no one of the former court at Saint-Germain-en-Laye will know my face should they encounter me in Paris, nor suspect that I am other than what I will then appear to be: a woman living with her brother. I shall take it to be practice for the day my brother Nicolas has promised, when I will indeed go home with him, though I confess I do not fix my hopes upon the coming of that day.

I didn’t, either. Which was why, when I had read that entry New Year’s Day, I’d called my cousin.

“It isn’t noon yet,” had been Jacqui’s protest, in a husky voice that told me she’d been out late celebrating. “Have a heart.”

“She hasn’t gone to Saint-Germain-en-Laye.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Mary,” I explained. “She’s being sent to Paris.”

I could hear the creak of bedsprings as though she’d rolled over. “Sorry, what? Who’s Mary?”

“Mary Dundas, in the diary. She’s—”

“What, did you break the code?”

“Cipher. And yes, but—”

“That’s wonderful!” Jacqui was sounding awake now. The bedsprings creaked a little louder, and I guessed that this time she was sitting up. “Just wait till I tell Alistair. He’ll be so pleased.”

“He may not be, that’s what I’m saying. Mary Dundas hasn’t gone to Saint-Germain-en-Laye,” I said a second time. “Her brother lied to her, and now she’s being sent to Paris on some sort of secret mission for the Jacobites. He’s promised he’ll bring her back afterwards, only I don’t think he will. When she writes ‘Saint-Germain-en-Laye’ it makes a long, specific set of numbers in the cipher, and I’ve had a quick look through the diary and she doesn’t mention it much after this.”

“Well, she wouldn’t, though, if she were living there,” Jacqui replied. “I mean, I wouldn’t say, ‘Here I am in London, and I’m going to the hairdresser today, here in London, and after that I’m going to have dinner at the restaurant on the corner, it’s in London, too…’”

I saw her point and took it, but that didn’t stop me arguing, “But if she
doesn’t
go to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, then what she’s written in this diary won’t be what Alistair Scott needs to finish his book, and I can’t take his money for doing a job on false pretenses.”

“Darling,” she told me, “you worry too much.”

“But it wouldn’t be honest. I think you should tell him at least, so he’ll know about Mary and Paris.”

“All right, then. Tell
me
what you’ve got from the diary so far. Tell me more about this secret mission Mary’s being sent on.”

I had read her the few entries I had deciphered, that ended with Mary’s remark about not having much hope her brother would keep his word.

“But,” Jacqui had reasoned, “we don’t know for certain he didn’t. We don’t even know that she made it to Paris, yet, do we? She’s still at the home of this Sir Redmond whomever.”

“Sir Redmond Everard. I looked him up. He came from Tipperary, and he died in France around 1740, so eight years or so after Mary first met him.” I had started a reference sheet of all the people that Mary was mentioning, for my own use, and I’d reached for it. “He was the last baronet of his family line. I couldn’t find more than that, but I didn’t search all that hard, really.” I hadn’t let myself be too distracted from the task at hand.

And Jacqui hadn’t cared much. “What I mean is, you’ve just started this. I don’t think we can leap to any judgments or conclusions yet. Why don’t you carry on, and if you find firm proof that Mary didn’t go to Saint-Germain,
then
I’ll tell Alistair, and we’ll let him decide what you should do. All right?”

It had seemed very logical advice. “All right.”

We’d briefly talked of other things and wished each other Happy New Year, and then I got back to work.

I hadn’t mentioned anything about Luc or his New Year’s kiss. She wouldn’t have approved. Besides, in retrospect it seemed to have been nothing too important, since it hadn’t changed the way we interacted. When he’d dropped in after lunch on New Year’s Day and I had offered him a handshake he’d accepted it without a sign of having been offended that he wasn’t being greeted by the double kiss, the
bise
, and when he spoke to me directly he still used the formal way of saying you—
vous
—rather than the more familiar
tu
that French speakers dropped into as a sign that your relationship was growing closer.

I’d been fine with that, I’d told myself. I didn’t like entanglements to start with, and it was enough to have his perfect face and blue eyes to enjoy when I was looking at him, even if they tended to distract me. I’d been looking at him later on that evening, while we had aperitifs in the salon and everyone, including Noah, shared their New Year’s resolutions. Claudine’s had been, to my surprise, to give up smoking, to which I’d remarked, “I didn’t even know you smoked.”

“I’m very secretive,” she’d told me, with a smile. “But it is not good for my health, and I’m not getting any younger. Noah? What’s your resolution for this year?”

He was drinking ginger ale in place of wine, but still he held his glass with a sophistication older than his years as he replied, “I’m going to learn to play tennis.”

Denise had asked, “Why tennis?”

“Uncle Thierry plays tennis.”

I’d watched Luc smile slightly. “Uncle Thierry plays all sorts of things. And this is an expensive resolution for your mother and myself, if we will have to buy you lessons.”

“But Mama can teach me. Uncle Thierry says she used to play as well as he does.”

To which praise Denise had raised her own glass in a toast and said, “Well, there you are. That will take care of my own resolution, too, for I would like to lose some weight.”

“You say that every year,” said Noah, “and you always stay the same.”

When Luc had laughed, Denise had turned the tables with, “And you?”

“I am resolved to grow a mustache.”

Denise hadn’t thought that was a good idea. “It will make you look like one of those old villains in the silent films.”

“All right, then. I will travel less, and stay at home more.”

Noah had approved that with a heartfelt nod before he’d looked at me. “Madame Thomas?”

“I don’t make resolutions,” I had told him.

“But you must. It’s a tradition.”

I’d considered it a moment, till I realized I was taking too long to decide, and since it wasn’t something I’d be bound to do at any rate, I copied what Denise had said. “I’d like to lose some weight.”

I’d seen Luc shake his head. “Too easy. That one has been claimed already by Denise, and anyway like her you hardly need to. Try again.”

I couldn’t tell if he’d been teasing or if he was serious, but on the off chance that it was the latter I had answered him more honestly, “I’m going to find a job.”

Claudine had offered me the plate of little toasts spread with pâté. “But surely,” she had said, “this is the perfect job for you to have.”

I’d guessed, from how she’d smiled, she’d meant that lightly, but again I wasn’t sure.

“It isn’t permanent,” was all I’d said, and suddenly Luc’s face across the table had seemed too distracting, and I’d looked away from it.

The next day, Friday—yesterday—he’d been at work and I’d had no distractions whatsoever. Only Noah, who had wandered past my workroom now and then, his presence heralded by the repeating tune of his Robo Patrol game, like the ticking of the clock that had been swallowed by the crocodile in
Peter
Pan
and warned of its approach.

It hadn’t bothered me too much, though, and my work on Friday had been steady, following Mary Dundas as she finally left Chatou for Paris.

The 28th I did depart
, she’d written,
with the woman who was sent to be my chaperone, Madame Roy, who smiles little and speaks less but is in every other way agreeable. Her face has been disfigured by the smallpox which no doubt accounts for some of her demeanor. As we left, the bird was singing loudly at the window which I took to be a hopeful omen. Lady Everard herself remarked upon it when she came to farewell us, believing (for Sir Redmond has so told her) that I was but going to rejoin my brother, having lingered with them for no other reason than to give my brother’s wife more time to ready my new rooms. Sir Redmond seems most careful that his wife should be kept sheltered from his Jacobite activities, and I suppose he does this because, much like Mistress Jamieson, he does not wish his actions to put those he loves in danger.

I had paused here with a certain satisfaction to take up the list of names that I’d been keeping and write firmly “Mistress Jamieson” in place of “Mistress Harrison.” It was, when I looked back at that first entry in the diary that was written in plain text, quite clearly “Jamieson.” The woman who had thought this cipher up while drinking tea now had her proper name restored and duly noted, if that had in fact been her true name.

By bedtime Friday, I had settled in with Mary to the house in Paris, on the rue du Coeur Volant.

She had described the household neatly, with the six rooms on the first floor of the house and the two ground-floor rooms beneath, linked by the private staircase with a door out to the street. She had not named the cook, nor the cook’s boy—who from what Mary wrote of him appeared to be not actually the cook’s son but an older teenaged boy assigned to help her in the kitchen with the heavy work—but she did name the maid, Yvette, and Madame Roy of course, and there was Jacques.

And so here I was, pencil in hand, picking up where I’d been interrupted by Noah’s belabored arpeggios from the piano.

I
fear
the
man
across
the
street…

I concentrated, studying the numbers. The piano playing stopped, and in the blissful silence I was finally able to complete the line:

I
fear
the
man
across
the
street
is
watching
us.

Another interruption—a soft knocking at my door.

“Come in,” I told Denise.

She had her coat on. “We’ll be leaving in a minute,” she announced. This time, I’d paid attention when she’d rattled off her plans at breakfast, so I had remembered the rough schedule of her day: she would be driving Noah first to his piano lesson, then he had a birthday party to attend, while she went to the cinema. “We should be back by three o’clock. I’ve left you soup and cheese and bread, and there is still some chicken if you’re very hungry.”

“Thank you. Is Claudine at home?”

She shook her head. “She has a wedding. Saturdays are always very busy for her.” Giving me a long look she asked, “Have you been outside at all since yesterday?”

“I wasn’t outside yesterday.”

“Well, if you want to get some fresh air, take a walk, the keys to the back door are in the soup tureen,” she told me, “in the kitchen.”

“All right.”

She hovered for a moment. “It is beautiful outside. The sun is shining.”

“Yes, all right.” I kept my eyes fixed on my work.

“And Luc is home, I think, if you need anything.”

I only nodded this time, and she must have left it there because the next time I glanced up she had already gone. Returning to the diary, I continued, learning Jacques had not shared Mary’s doubts about the man across the street.

To prove to me my worries were unfounded he conveyed us all to church, where I was much soothed by the music and the liturgy. So back again and welcomed by a dinner from our cook as fine as any I have ever had, and then a peaceful afternoon and evening, and to bed.