A Desperate Fortune (9 page)

Mary, frowning just a little, said, “But if you had a husband…”

“Yes?”

“Forgive me, but if you did have a husband and if he loved
you
, how could he then permit that you would put
yourself
in danger?”

Another pause, and then a shrug. “My mother likes to say some people choose the path of danger on their own, for it is how the Lord did make them, and they never will be changed.” Emptying the settled tea leaves from her cup into the common slop bowl, Mistress Jamieson continued, “If I had a husband, and if he loved me, then he would understand my nature and not think that he could sway me by withholding his permission, for he’d know I cannot stay beside the hearth and tend my needlework when those I love risk more in their adventures.”

At that moment Mary felt convinced that Mistress Jamieson was all at once the bravest and most fascinating woman she had ever met, and emptying her teacup in her turn she reached to take her pen in hand and started searching through the lines she had last written in her journal for the places where she’d mentioned Mistress Jamieson by name, and with a new respect for secrecy began to strike them out so as to leave no written record that could carelessly incriminate this woman she admired.

Mistress Jamieson, observing her, remarked, “There is a better way to guard your secrets, when you write. Would you like me to show you?”

“If you speak of ciphers,” Mary said, “you need not waste your time, for I am sure I never could remember anything so complicated.”

“He never rode that never fell,” the other woman answered, but since Mary had not ever heard that proverb she was unsure what it meant till Mistress Jamieson translated it more simply: “Nothing venture, nothing have. Come, take a clean page from your journal—tear it out, for you must keep it loose—and we’ll devise a cipher. Is there tea left in the pot?”

“Yes, I believe so.” Mary rose in what she hoped was a fair imitation of the other’s competence and grace. “Shall I pour?”

The cipher proved to be a simple thing for her to master after all. She had converted her own name and Frisque’s to numerals by the time Sir Redmond’s wife returned to keep them company, at which time Mary closed her journal altogether with the ciphered sheet set at the place where she’d been writing, laying it aside as Lady Everard went over to inspect the little linnet in its cage.

“Will not you sing for us this morning?” Lady Everard addressed the bird, and tapped a finger lightly on the bars. “You’ve had your breakfast, give us payment. Don’t be selfish.”

Mary said, “Perhaps he’s sad.”

The older woman clucked her tongue. “What reason has he to be sad? He’s warm and fed and fussed over.”

“But you have set his cage beside the window,” Mary pointed out, “where he may see the wider sky, and any bird on seeing that would want to try his wings in it.”

“He’d freeze were he to try his wings out there this morning.” Lady Everard turned from the linnet’s cage and settled in a nearby armchair and remarked, “You do that very neatly, Mistress Jamieson. I can no more play at cards than I can shuffle them, though dear Mr. O’Connor has been trying to instruct me in the simpler games.”

The Scottish woman, who had once again been idly shuffling through the pack of cards and drawing out the knave from time to time, stopped the repeating motion, looking up to ask, “Mr. O’Connor? You’ll forgive me, I’m acquainted with some members of that family, and I wonder…”

“Do you know him, then?” Sir Redmond’s wife looked pleased. “He comes with Colonel Brett quite often here to visit with us. Mr. Martin O’Connor, of the Mine Adventurers Company.”

Mary, who was watching Mistress Jamieson, saw something that looked strangely like relief and disappointment intermingled cross the other woman’s features as she answered, “Ah. Then no, I do not know him.”

“He’s a very charming gentleman,” Sir Redmond’s wife continued. “Very charming, though my husband has his doubts about his teaching me to play at cards.” She turned a little to address her husband who was entering the drawing room. “Is that not right, dear?”

“Oh yes, very likely,” he indulged her, though he could have hardly known what she was referencing, a fact they both acknowledged with a shared smile of affection.

“I was saying,” she informed him, “that you had your doubts about Mr. O’Connor teaching me to play at cards.”

Her husband nodded. “Most emphatic doubts. O’Connor is an unrepentant sharper, and I fear he’ll teach you all his means of cheating.”

“Mistress Jamieson, although she does not know him, is acquainted with some others of that name.”

“They are more honest men, I hope?” Sir Redmond asked the Scottish woman, jokingly.

“I fear,” said Mistress Jamieson, “the unrepentant sharpers do outnumber honest men within that family.” Setting down the pack of cards, she stood and shook her skirts to smooth them, startling Frisque who leaped to stand alert himself, tail wagging with anticipation. “Do you have the letter, then, for Mrs. Farrand?”

“Yes, I have it here.” He made to hand it to her, but his wife delayed him.

“But you’ll not be leaving yet so soon?” she asked the Scottish woman. “You must stay to dinner.” Turning to her husband, she said, “Darling, do persuade her she must stay to dinner.”

Any effort he could have put forward to persuade her was cut short by the distinctive sound of horses’ hooves outside and wheels that crunched and squeaked upon the snow, and looking through the window nearest to her Mary saw a covered carriage with a driver sitting huddled in his cloak upon his box, his hat drawn low upon his forehead as he turned the mismatched team of horses—one a chestnut, one a bay—to smoothly halt before the house. A man, no doubt Sir Redmond’s groom, came briskly out to greet him, and the two spoke briefly before the groom turned again and headed round the house.

Lady Everard peered out as well, with interest. “What now?” she asked her husband. “Who is this? Are you expecting someone?”

“No, not I. But here comes Evans now, to tell us,” said Sir Redmond, as the tramping of the groom’s boots could be heard approaching from the rear part of the house. “What, Evans, who is come?”

The groom, ignoring Frisque’s excited sniffing at his boots, touched his forehead respectfully. “Beg pardon, Sir Redmond, my lady,” he said, and looked to Mistress Jamieson. “It is your driver, madam, come from Paris. He desires me to remind you that the morning is a cold one and he asks you would you very kindly hurry.”

Mistress Jamieson, who during this had also looked out through the window, turned her head to show the same small, private smile she’d given when she’d found the knave of hearts within the pack of cards. “I do suspect he said it rather less politely.”

“Yes, madam,” the groom replied.

Sir Redmond’s wife stared in open surprise at the form of the driver outside. “He is insolent.”

Smiling still, Mistress Jamieson told her, “Aye, frequently.”

Taking the letter Sir Redmond held out to her, she took her leave of them, wishing them all a good day, and on seeing that Frisque had begun a small circling dance on the floorboards, observed, “Your dog needs to be taken outdoors, Mistress Dundas. Come, wrap yourself well and walk out with me.”

Mary wished her own cloak was as elegantly cut as Mistress Jamieson’s, and had a fur-lined hood. Outside, the air was so intensely cold it burned her lungs when she drew breath, then turned that breath to steam when she exhaled.

Beside her, Mistress Jamieson stepped lightly in the snow as though accustomed to the cold. “You said your brother came to fetch you home. Where were you previously?”

“With my uncle and my aunt, who raised me.” It was difficult to speak in such a cold wind.

“I have always lived in other people’s houses,” said the Scottish woman. “As an education, I do highly recommend it. But,” she added, “you were right about the linnet, Mistress Dundas. Some things weren’t meant to live in cages.” They were halfway to the carriage now. She stopped and turned to Mary. “And the sky is very wide.” Her smile was warm. “I hope you get to try your wings in it.”

With all her being Mary wished she could have found an eloquent reply, because it seemed to her that such a rare and memorable encounter should be marked with words less commonplace than “Thank you” and “I hope you have a pleasant journey.” But the better words, as always, were eluding her.

And Mistress Jamieson seemed not to mind. “And you,” she said. “A safe trip home.” And giving one last pat to Frisque she turned and walked away.

The driver had dismounted and was standing by the carriage door, and Mary could now see he was a tall man and broad shouldered in his snow-flecked cloak and polished boots, for all he stood there hunched against the cold. He raised his head as Mistress Jamieson approached, and Mary saw his face was handsome, made more handsome when he grinned.

He spoke, and though she stood too far from them to be completely certain she had heard his words correctly, she’d have sworn that in a deeply pleasant Irish voice he’d told the Scottish woman, “See now, this is why I cannot leave you anywhere. You never will sit still.”

And Mistress Jamieson said something in return that Mary could not hear at all because the other woman’s back was to her, but the driver laughed aloud and offered Mistress Jamieson his hand and helped her climb into the carriage with a solid sort of masculine protectiveness that set off a strange longing within Mary that she might, at least once in her own life, have a man who took such care of her.

But it was what she witnessed next that she marked most, for in the moment just before the driver swung the carriage door closed, Mistress Jamieson reached up from where she sat inside and took his darkly handsome face in both her hands and kissed him, and the golden ring upon her right hand briefly caught the light as he returned the kiss but swiftly, so that any who were watching from the house would have seen nothing but a driver taking care to see his passenger was safely seated.

Then he closed the carriage door and turned and tipped his hat to Mary, climbing once more to his box and taking up the reins to turn the horses back the way they’d come, along the road that Mary knew would lead at length across the bridge and over the horizon, into Paris.

She stood and watched the carriage out of sight, and stood there longer with her feet cold in the snow until the dancing rhythm of the horses’ hooves had ceased to echo in the air and all the frosty silence fell again around Sir Redmond’s house.

And then she sighed a breath that turned to mist before the wind stole past and scattered it to nothing, and with Frisque reluctant at her heels she turned and headed back towards the house where, at the window, hung the caged bird that for all its comfort had that morning chosen not to sing.

I had expected more.

Which wasn’t logical. I’d known that there would only be a single diary entry in plain text, and Alistair had told me he’d learned little from it but the names of Mary and her brother and the fact they’d been acquainted with Sir Redmond Everard, a famous Jacobite who’d lived here at Chatou. Not in this house, of course. I’d asked Claudine already, and she’d told me the Maison des Marronniers had not been built until the middle of the 1800s, and by her best guess Sir Redmond’s house would have been closer to the river, where the oldest buildings of the town had stood. It didn’t matter, really, but I liked to keep the details straight in my own mind.

I could have wished Mary Dundas had put more stock in minor details, but I knew, again, that wasn’t realistic to expect. I hadn’t honestly believed that she’d have kept a note of all that had been done and said by whom to whom. Most people didn’t, as a rule. I’d seen it done sometimes in novels, where the characters would keep a diary or write a letter that read like a narrative, complete with perfect dialogue, but even in the best of novels that device could never quite convince me, and I’d find myself detaching from the text enough to think, “She’d never write that down in that way. No one would.”

No, I thought it far more likely that a person in real life would summarize a conversation as Mary Dundas had done, and simply write:

She proved to be the bravest and most fascinating woman I have ever met, and we did speak awhile of things both great and small, while drinking tea.

No more than that, and having not been in the room while they were speaking, I would never have a clue what all those “things both great and small” had been.

I didn’t even know the other woman’s name. “What would you say that is?” I asked Claudine, and pointed to the name that had been scored through several times in ink to render it illegible. “Harrison? Mistress Harrison?”

“Possibly.” She leaned in for a closer look, and placed her hand directly on the page.

I felt my mouth fall open but I caught myself in time and didn’t comment. I’d assumed, from her refusal to allow the diary to be moved or copied, that Claudine would have concerns about the way that it was handled. I had done a detailed search on how to work with paper artifacts. I’d hunted down a shop that sold supplies designed for libraries and archives, and I’d built myself a kit of sorts to bring with me—a desktop beanbag pillow to support the diary in a way that spared its fragile spine, and little leather weights to gently hold the pages open while I worked. And even though the current state of research seemed divided as to whether the advantages of wearing gloves outweighed the disadvantages, I’d erred upon the side of caution and brought several pairs of cotton gloves to keep the paper safe from the potentially destructive oils that, regardless of how many times I washed my hands, remained on my own fingers.

I might simply have concluded that Claudine was one of those who thought that gloves were not desirable or necessary when one touched old paper, and that keeping one’s hands clean and dry was all that was required, except I’d seen her not five minutes earlier spill coffee on that same hand when she’d set her cup down on the desk, and all she’d done was wipe it dry with tissue, and that hand was now laid full upon the diary.

The coffee on the desk had been enough to make me wonder, with the diary sitting open so close by, but I had held my tongue then too, recalling Jacqui’s years of telling me that pointing out another person’s faults was rarely wise. And it was Claudine’s diary, after all. Not mine.

I looked away deliberately and focused on the other features of the room instead. I liked this room. It was much smaller than the others I had so far seen within the house, and set just off the entry hall across from the salon, so that its windows—there were two, set close together—overlooked the narrow terrace and the front drive with its chestnut trees. The floor was done in hardwood in the same herringbone pattern as the salon and the dining room and overlaid, as they were, with an oriental carpet, and the walls were painted warmly yellow, making things feel cozier. I liked the desk, too. It was large and serviceable, made for work and not for decoration, and had room enough for me to set the diary on its pillow in the middle with my working papers and my pencils to the right, and still leave ample space for the ceramic table lamp that squatted to the left, its large shade angled perfectly to cast light where I needed it.

But best of all, there was no second chair in here—no place for someone else to sit and socialize while I was working. I could work, as Jacqui had assured me I’d be able to, alone.

My cousin, knowing I preferred to work with no one else around me, had considerately stayed to drink her coffee in the dining room, where I could hear her talking now in English with Denise and Luc, no doubt attempting to keep them both there as well, and let me have my breathing space.

But it was Claudine’s house, and Claudine’s diary, and I couldn’t tell her not to come along, and not to touch it.

“Yes, I think it might be Harrison,” she said at last, and straightened.

As her fingers left the page I looked for any signs of damage to the paper and found none, although I knew such damage could take time to show.

“Your cousin,” Claudine told me, “when she came last June to see this, could not make that word out either. Nor this one.”

“That’s ‘Frisque.’ See how she writes her
F
’s, and then the
s
? It’s probably a dog’s name, as she says that she ‘attends to’ Frisque by walking outside in the cold, and then they both come back indoors. A dog’s the only pet that people walk and bring indoors again. At least the only pet that I can think of.”

“So she had a dog? How very clever of you, spotting that.”

I didn’t think it all that clever. I had seen some samples of old documents, old handwriting, and I’d been braced to find this entry of the diary tricky to transcribe, but in fact Mary Dundas had written her words in a very clear hand. It was fairly elaborate, and she wrote her
l
’s and her
t
’s in a manner that made it a bit of a chore to tell one from the other, but still it was perfectly legible.

Claudine leaned over again to touch three little blots in the margin. “And what are these, do you think? Numbers?”

“They could be.” I’d brought a magnifying glass with me as well, on the advice of the shopkeeper from whom I’d bought my archival supplies, and I lifted it now to examine that part of the page. The three marks had been meant to conceal what she’d written beneath, as she’d done with the name of the woman she’d met at Sir Redmond’s. “Yes, they’re numbers. That’s eight, and that’s nine. And that last one,” I said, “might be ten. I’m not certain.”

“A key to the cipher, perhaps?”

“Not the key. That would be on its own separate paper, it’s probably lost. But the numbers might still be a clue of some kind.” I had glanced at the pages that followed—no words, only numbers divided by points, looking just like the cipher that Alistair had given Jacqui to test me with. Only it wasn’t the same. “I don’t know, it’s a lot of effort to go to for something so commonplace,” I said, choosing to ignore that I’d done much the same thing years ago when I’d encrypted all my school notes. “She’d have had to work out what she wanted to write down, and then translate it into cipher. All these pages. That would take a lot of time.”

Claudine remarked, “She must have had her reasons.”

I, for one, could not imagine what would make an ordinary woman keep a diary in the first place. I could never see the point in taking time in which you could be doing something, and then simply wasting it by writing down the things you had already done. But Mary Dundas clearly had not shared my view.

Her diary was the size and thickness of a modern hardcover novel, with a leather spine and worn cloth-covered boards and pages turned a golden beige by time, and with a texture of fine ribbing that I gathered was a feature of the way that it had been produced. The color of the ink had changed, as well. It would have once been black, but time had faded it to brown, though it was dark enough to stand out easily against the page.

For all its age and wear, someone had taken quite good care of it. And judging from the way that she had handled it this morning, I was fairly sure that person had not been Claudine.

I asked, “How did you come by this? It’s not a family heirloom, is it?”

“No. Oh, no, my family does not keep such things. They are not sentimental for the past. But several years ago here in Chatou there was an antiques market, and I saw this in a stall and thought that it might be of interest to…” She coughed, and raised her cup to take a drink of coffee. “It looked interesting. Can you break the cipher, do you think?”

“I’ll do my best.”

“I’ll leave you to it, then.” She closed the double doors as she went out, and I was left in blissful solitude—the thing I had been wanting all along.

I turned the diary to the first page written in the cipher, and began to work.

* * *

It should have been a simple thing. Mary Dundas had told me so herself, in words so plain I could not misinterpret them:

And she observing I was writing private thoughts advised me there were ways to write in secret, and when I replied I had no head for ciphers she assured me any person could devise one using anything to hand, whereon she crafted one upon the spot so simple in design that I do presently intend to follow her advice and practice it.

“So simple in design,” the diary promised, yet three days had passed and I had come no closer to unraveling the cipher that another woman had devised “upon the spot” while drinking tea. It drove me to distraction.

I had barely noticed Jacqui leaving Monday. She had smiled and kissed me lightly on the head and given me a hug and seeing I was well absorbed in work, had tiptoed quietly away to drive herself back to the airport. If the house felt slightly different with her gone, I’d scarcely noticed it. I’d socialized when necessary, sharing an aperitif with Claudine every evening before joining her at dinner, where I’d let her take the lead in conversation, which so far had touched on local wines, the euro, and photography, three things that I knew little of myself, so it was natural for me to be the audience for her impromptu and impassioned lectures.

If I had not seen Luc Sabran—which to be honest I
had
noticed slightly more than other things—it was because he had returned to work after the holidays, and truly it was just as well to not have the distraction.

It was bad enough the cat had found a way to sneak into my workroom when he wanted to, and even though he was a cat and therefore understood the rules of solitude, it still was disconcerting to glance up and find he’d settled in his favorite spot atop the box of files by the windows and was watching me, the way cats did, with steady and unblinking eyes.

I felt the weight of his stare now and raised my head to meet it with my own. “Well then,
you
try it. See how you get on,” I challenged him.

He twitched an ear and wisely did not answer.

“Fine then. Don’t be so judgmental.” In frustration I turned back to the first entry of the diary and read through it for what seemed the thousandth time in search of clues. What cipher could a person craft that would be “simple in design” and “using anything to hand”? What would a person have “to hand” in those days in a house belonging to a man of some estate? I didn’t know what room they had been sitting in, for Mary never mentioned it. The drawing room, presumably. There was no way to tell. They’d been drinking tea, which meant there’d been a tea service: a tea tray, teacups, lumps of sugar. Totally unhelpful. A design upon the teacups? It was possible. There would have been a fireplace, with its andirons and tongs and pokers. And because Sir Redmond was a man of means and education, there might have been books.

If there’d been books, I thought, and if they’d used one as the basis for their cipher, I was in deep trouble, for the key they’d chosen could be anything: a passage from a poem, or some rare religious tract. Odds were I’d never track it down.

Not giving in to that depressing thought, I pulled my mind back forcibly to focus on the other possibilities. The dog, I thought. Or something that the dog had with it. Or the number of wood panels on the door…

The knock that interrupted didn’t fully register at first. I knew Denise’s knock by now—she usually knocked lightly in an effort not to startle me, not wishing to intrude.

I said, “Come in,” in French, and she put her head round the double doors.

“How does it go this morning?”

“Not well.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, anyway, I’m leaving in a minute. If you want a little lunch before I go…perhaps some soup…”

“No, thanks. I’m fine.”

“You have to eat.” That was the mother in her talking now, I knew. She stood with hands on hips in the same stance that my own mother struck whenever she was getting set to tell me that I’d been indoors too long.

Denise, predictably enough, said, “You have been too long in this one room. You need a change of scene. Your brain can’t work without fresh air.”

Which from a scientific standpoint was debatable, I knew, but her suggestion of a change of scenery struck me suddenly as something that might be a good idea. Often when I labored on a tricky bit of programming, I found if I switched tasks to something simpler for a little while, my brain had time and space to better concentrate upon the more important problem.

And ever since it had been first suggested to me Sunday morning, there was one much simpler task I’d added to my list of things that needed doing. “Is it very difficult,” I asked Denise, “to get from here to Saint-Germain-en-Laye? Is there a train?”

She nodded. “Yes, the RER. But you don’t have to take it. I can drop you on my way, it isn’t far. I’m nearly ready. I just have to make a phone call first, then we can go. All right?”

The cat Diablo stared down from his perch atop the box of files and dared me to.