A Desperate Fortune Read online

  She did remember, clearly, that she’d cried for him and called him back, and that he had not turned; he’d walked away from her with quick, determined strides, head bent, until her aunt’s broad skirts had rustled round to block her vision as the carriage wheels had rattled down the road.

  She looked towards that same road now and squared her shoulders as her father had, and asked her aunt, “Why do you wish to know what I remember?”

  She had never known Aunt Magdalene to search for words, and yet it seemed to Mary that her aunt was doing just that, in the moment’s pause. And then her aunt remarked, “We’ve had a letter from your brother.”

  Even less expected. The surprise, this time, stopped Mary in midstep, and made her heedless of the fact that she was standing ankle-deep in snow. She had three brothers. “Which of them?”

  Aunt Magdalene said, “Nicolas. Do you remember him at all?”

  Her eldest brother. Nicolas. Broad shoulders and a pair of boots. Two hands that tossed her in the air and caught her when she came down laughing. In a voice that hurt her throat a little, Mary answered, “Yes.”

  “He has returned to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and now he wishes you should join him.”

  Mary tried to take this in. Her mind, resisting the attempt, focused instead on little Frisque, who seemed convinced that there was something of great interest hidden underneath the snow that mounded round the rooted base of one staked vine, and had begun to dig in earnest to discover it. A mouse perhaps, thought Mary, sleeping in its winter burrow with its family.

  “When,” she asked, “did he return?” She’d thought he was in Italy.

  Aunt Magdalene paused longer this time. Then she said, “Two years ago.”

  Mary looked from Frisque to her aunt, well aware her feelings would be plainly written on her face. “Two years? He has been here two years? So close, and yet he has not ever…” She could not continue. She looked sharply down, then up again, and out across the river to the darkly distant forest.

  “He has family of his own now,” said her aunt. “A wife and children. And a life at Saint-Germain has never been a certain one financially. Perhaps he wanted to be sure that he was well and settled, before sending for you.”

  Mary nodded, saying nothing, thinking hard and blinking harder, while her aunt, who knew her well, allowed her space to turn things over in her mind. They turned so very quickly that she could not get them sorted, or begin to make much sense of them beyond the simple fact that just beyond those trees, the brother whom she had not seen for fifteen years was even now attending to the business of his day. Perhaps, like her, he was outdoors. Perhaps his gaze was even turned in this direction…

  “I did not expect,” she said, in that tight voice that hurt her still, “that anyone would ever send for me.” And then, because that made her sound too needy, and she was not altogether sure exactly what she needed, she let her forehead crease into a thoughtful frown. “Am I to have a choice?”

  “My dear, you always have a choice.” Her aunt spoke calmly, in a voice that carried strength and reassurance. “Uncle Jacques and I would never send you where you did not wish to go. But Nicolas does seem to want you with him very much. And Saint-Germain,” she said, her own chin lifting in a nod towards the unseen castle past the forest on the far side of the river, “is a world apart from this one. You were too young, I think. You have forgotten how it is to live within a royal court.”

  A dim remembrance flickered in the corner of her memory: someone’s hands—her brother’s, maybe—hoisting her up high to see above the heads of others, while a murmur of excitement chased around them like the wind across a summer field. Look, Mary. Look! The king!

  The flicker died, and left a darkness in its place.

  And Mary said, “There is no court at Saint-Germain. Not anymore.” The king, if he had ever truly been a king, was gone. The queen, his mother, had been dead for years.

  “But there are courtiers still,” her aunt remarked. “They will have daughters of your age for you to meet and talk with. And young men with whom to dance.” The smile was coloring Aunt Magdalene’s warm voice now as she took the few steps needed to draw level with the place where Mary stood, an undemanding presence at her side, but giving comfort nonetheless. “Unless,” she said, “you’d rather linger here and battle with Colette to catch the eye of the Chevalier de Vilbray?”

  The thought drew Mary from her deeper ones and made her smile, as well. “The chevalier pads his stockings. And his breath is none too pleasant.”

  Frisque’s quarry had eluded him. Abandoning his digging, the undaunted spaniel trundled through the snow towards another vine, his plumed tail wagging. He’d never seemed to mind that his entire world was bounded by this property, thought Mary, and for that she’d always envied him. For fifteen years now, she’d been looking daily to that forest and the wider world beyond it, to the smudge of smoke and rooflines that lay further still than Saint-Germain-en-Laye, past the next bend in the bright river: Paris.

  Daily she had looked in that direction and had wished and hoped and dreamed, and all the while she had stayed rooted in this village as securely as these rows of tied and fruitless vines that slumbered here and waited for the sun.

  We do not always get the things we want, her father’s voice reminded her.

  Aunt Magdalene was watching her. “Marie, my darling, you are twenty-one. Your mother, at that age, had met your father, and she would have never done that if she had stayed here.”

  “I know.” Anticipation waged a war with reason in her heart. “But I don’t like to think of leaving.”

  “Then perhaps you ought to view it not as leaving, but returning.” Her aunt laid a warm arm over Mary’s shoulders. Hugged her close. “We have been blessed to have you with us, but I think that always here”—she tapped her fingers on her cloak, above her heart—“you’ve had a little voice that calls to you. And maybe now, my darling, is the time for you to let it lead you home.”

  Chapter 4

  Thou scarce hast been known to me…

  —Macpherson, “Fingal,” Book Five

  On the road near Poissy

  January 22, 1732

  His eyes were blue. She marked the fact because her own were brown, just like their mother’s in the portrait. And where her hair was brown, as well—a plain dark brown, and straight—her brother Nicolas had hair so fair that when he’d combed the front and sides up over the front edges of his wig, he’d needed hardly any powder to blend all into the same clean shade of white. His eyebrows, too, were fair, as were his lashes, and his features weren’t at all like hers. He had her mother’s oval face, the same long nose and narrow mouth, the steady eyes that made him look intelligent and thoughtful.

  Her face, she knew, was like a heart, more pointed at the chin, and while she’d often been called pretty she’d met no one who, at first glance, had assumed she was intelligent. She didn’t really mind. It often worked to her advantage and she’d used it as a shield, having observed that people seemed to value wit above intelligence; vivacity and merriness above demure and shy behavior. Wanting to be liked, she’d learned to bury her own shyness and become another person when in public, one who entertained with turns of phrase and flirted with a confidence she rarely felt inside. It made her popular and sought-after at gatherings and village dances, and had drawn the admiration of a few young men, but it had also kept her safe.

  She wore that braver face, so lively and at home in bright society, to guard the smaller girl within her who’d been left behind once, and who’d long ago determined she would never be so vulnerable again.

  Except today. Today, that braver face gave no protection. This was Nicolas, her brother, and from earlier this morning when he’d greeted her so warmly with a genuine embrace, to this moment when she sat here pressed so closely to his shoulder in the confines of the horse-drawn chaise, she’d felt every i
nch that smaller girl. He only had to smile at her, as he was doing now, and she had no shields left to hide behind.

  He said, “You always used to do that.”

  They were speaking English, and for once she felt most grateful that her uncle had insisted she not lose that language, even if she had to think more carefully to answer, “Do what?”

  “Frown so that it made this little line, just here”—he touched one finger lightly to the spot between his own pale brows—“whenever you were thinking.”

  “Oh.” She consciously relaxed her forehead, trying to make light of it. “I can’t imagine that it happened often, then.”

  He told her, “On the contrary. You were a small philosopher. I always had to work to make you smile.”

  “You used to toss me in the air.”

  “I did. You remember that, do you?” Nicolas looked pleased. “Our mother often scolded me and worried I would drop you, but I liked to hear you laugh.”

  He would have been just a bit younger in those days than she was now, Mary decided—a young man of eighteen or nineteen—and yet in her memory he’d seemed so grown up, tall and strong in his long coat and boots with the sword at his side. And now he was nearing his midthirties, already showing the softness that men sometimes gained round their middles; the small lines of weariness and resignation that life settled into their features.

  “You could not do it now,” she said. “You’d do yourself an injury.”

  His laugh was not like hers. It was a lower sound, and brief, but it stirred memories. “Are you saying that the years have made me weak?”

  She shook her head. “But they’ve made me too old to carry so.”

  “You’re hardly old, my dear. You’ll not be two and twenty till July.”

  The chaise lurched and Frisque shifted in protest on her lap, and Mary seized on that as an excuse to look down for a moment, feeling a tingling warmth at the back of her eyes that she sought to control. He’d remembered her birthday.

  She hadn’t known what to expect when he’d come to collect her that morning. He had caused quite a sensation in the village by arriving in the chaise, its upright body painted fashionably green with two great yellow wheels that crisply cut the snow, the driver riding as postilion on the near horse of the well-matched pair in harness, looking every bit as grand as the Chevalier de Vilbray’s own team and coachman.

  Mary’s cousins had been slightly disappointed when her brother had explained the chaise was merely hired, and not his own, and yet for Mary when her brother had alighted from the chaise and come towards her with a quick smile and a voice that she remembered, she would not have cared a whit if he had made the trip on foot. It was enough to have him there, and hear him greet her by her name, and feel the warmth as he had wrapped her in his arms.

  He had not stayed there long. For all he’d started early in the morning, it had already been midday when he’d come to Chanteloup, and there would still be a long journey back to Saint-Germain ahead of them, so Nicolas had only lingered for the time it took to tend the horses, water them, and let the driver eat and briefly rest while Nicolas sat down to dinner with the family he’d not seen in years.

  He’d smiled across the table at Colette and said, “You were a tiny thing when last I saw you, naught but eyes and curls. And you,” he’d said, to Gaspard, “were an infant still, all dressed in ruffles.”

  Gaspard had flushed, not wanting a reminder of the childhood state that he was so impatient to discard, but young Jacques—who of course had not been born at all when Nicolas had paid a visit last to Chanteloup—had made the comment, “Gaspard still wears ruffles.”

  Nicolas had glanced at the long falls of lace at Gaspard’s cuffs and shirtfront. “So I see. He would be perfectly at home at court, with such fine clothes. A match for any gentleman.”

  And with that Gaspard, too, had been won over.

  Even Frisque, who had no love of strangers, had seemed most content at dinner to sit under Nicolas’s chair. And even now, as they went rattling in the chaise across the bridge at Poissy, one light touch of Nicolas’s hand was all it took to reassure and calm the little dog, who settled once again in peace on Mary’s lap.

  Her brother said, “He travels well, that dog.”

  “It is the first time he has traveled.”

  “Then I’m all the more impressed.” He looked at her, and Mary did not know what he was thinking. Perhaps he was contrasting her experience with his; her settled life with all the distance he had traveled, and the places he had lived.

  She knew, from what he’d said at dinner, that he and their father had gone with King James to Avignon, a town beyond the French king’s jurisdiction.

  “Why could he not stay in France?” young Jacques had asked, and Uncle Jacques had told him, “Because when the Spanish war was done, the father of our present king did sign a treaty promising he would no longer recognize or aid King James, but would instead acknowledge none but George, the Prince of Hanover, as Britain’s rightful king. I do not think it was a promise that he meant to keep. Our old king was the cousin of King James, and very fond of him, but then the old king died and King James went across to Scotland, where his armies were defeated, and when he returned to France our young king’s regent said he could not stay, and so…” His shrug had been expressive.

  Nicolas had said, “And so we went to Avignon.”

  The queen, as she’d been then—King James’s mother—had stayed on at Saint-Germain, allowed to keep the royal pension she was paid each year from France, but King James had been forced to seek a welcome elsewhere. Finding Avignon too isolating, he had moved first to Urbino, then finally to Rome, where he’d settled in his new court with the blessing and protection of the pope.

  Nicolas had spoken, over dinner, of the ancient curiosities of Rome, and of the palace of the pope, and of the people who were living at King James’s court who had once been acquaintances of Mary’s aunt and uncle. He’d talked to Mary briefly of her other brothers: Charles, just one year older than herself, and John, four years above that, who had both been sent away to school the year that she’d been left behind, and who were now reportedly in Rotterdam and Spain. And he had told her of their father, who still worked as a perruquier for King James and his nobles, crafting wigs as fine as any made in France or England.

  Gaspard, with his newfound love of wigs, had been intrigued. “Do you think Uncle Guillaume would make me a wig, were I to ask him?”

  Nicolas had smiled. “Well, you would have to go to Rome to do the asking, for my father will not make the journey north. He’s too fond of the sunshine and the pleasures of the court, and there is nothing here to draw him back.”

  Aunt Magdalene had quickly looked at Mary then, her kind eyes always ready to give sympathy, but Mary had already schooled her own face not to show the stab of hurt those words had caused.

  “And what was it that drew you back?” she’d asked her brother, in a tone that strove for lightness.

  He’d regarded her a moment while she waited for his answer, then he’d faintly smiled and looked away to share that smile with everyone and, lifting up his glass, had said, “I do confess it was the memory of my uncle’s fine red wine, for in these fifteen years I’ve never drunk its equal.”

  The talk had turned to other things and Mary had not pressed him further, though she would have dearly loved to know the reason why he had returned to Saint-Germain, and why he’d waited two long years to tell them he was back, and why he’d chosen after all that time to come now and collect her.

  They were questions that still hung between them now, in the close confines of the horse-drawn chaise, while Nicolas looked down at her and Mary did not know what he was thinking.

  So she asked him, and he told her in that same plain, forthright manner, “You are not what I expected.”

  No, thought Mary. No, of course she wasn’t.
He would have expected that she’d grown to be the image of their mother, who from all accounts—and from the portrait’s evidence—had been a beauty of the court, a woman of accomplishments.

  Guarding her reaction as she’d done before at dinnertime, and in a voice as light, she said, “You must be disappointed.”

  “Quite the contrary.” He moved his hand and laid it over hers where it was resting on Frisque’s silken back, and gathering her fingers in his own he said a second time, more serious and quiet, “Quite the contrary.”

  A warmth spread from his touch and, just as Frisque had calmed beneath it when they’d crossed the bridge, so Mary felt the comfort of it now, and felt the tension leave her body and her mind. She’d slept so poorly these past days with all the worry and excitement, waiting for her brother, both impatient for and dreading his arrival, and in truth she had not realized just how weary it had made her till that small but tender action and its show of his approval seemed to lift from her the burden of uncertainty.

  In the peaceful moments following, with Nicolas’s shoulder pressing close against her own within the jolting chaise, she watched the fall of snow between the branches of the dark trees growing close beside the road, a sign they’d entered the great forest that belonged to Saint-Germain-en-Laye. She had so often looked towards this forest and imagined it, but now she let her eyes drift closed against the sight and wondered if she’d ever felt this measure of contentment in her childhood, with no cares or fears to vex her for the moment, and her brother close beside her, and the sense that she was loved and safe and wanted.

  * * *

  She had slept. The trees were gone, replaced by level farmland lying thick with shadows in the blue of twilight, and the night was coming on. Already shapes were indistinct; through the front window of the chaise she saw the driver’s figure outlined by the yellow braid that trimmed his coat and by the paleness of the powdered wig beneath his hat, but both the horses, being dark, were nigh invisible, the bursts of their warm labored breath appearing in the winter air like shapes of passing ghosts.