A Desperate Fortune

  She smelled the pipe smoke first. She stiffened, for she did not wish to see Mr. MacPherson, nor yet any of the people who had brought her into such a business. Loyalty to king and country she could understand, although the king and country she was being asked to bear allegiance to were ones she scarce could call her own. Yet theft was theft, and there could be no honor in the robbing of the innocent, no matter how well cloaked it was in patriotic purpose. She had cast her lot with criminals, and Thomson had this morning stood at Mass beside her and received the Host and he had done it as though his soul was pure white as the snow that Frisque was turning round and round upon this moment. It was, Mary thought, a hard thing to forgive.

  She had kept silent for the most part since they’d stopped here, and declined an invitation by the elder of the daughters to repeat their play at cards, and over supper she had spoken only when directly spoken to, and risen when it was polite to do so and retreated to her room, and would have been there still had not Frisque now demanded to come out.

  The pipe smoke swirled its scent again from somewhere close behind her, and she braced herself and turned prepared to face Mr. MacPherson. But it wasn’t him at all.

  It was the Englishman.

  His name was Stevens. Mary wondered what he would have thought to know the fugitive he hunted had been sitting to his right hand all through supper, and had passed him salt and bread.

  He said, “You’re brave to come outside, mademoiselle, after the tales we heard at supper.”

  Mary drew the warm hood of her cloak about her face and lied to him. “I do not understand.” Perhaps, she thought, if she repeated that enough he’d let her be.

  “The wolves.” He came another step until he stood beside her, looking out where she was looking. “I have hunted wolf before. It is a most diverting sport, yet dangerous.”

  “To hunt,” she said, “is dangerous.” She said it in a simple tone, as though to make it seem she were repeating what he’d said and nothing more, and yet he took it as a warning. Or a challenge.

  “Not if one approaches it with thought,” he said, “and planning. Do you know what I liked best about the wolf hunt?”

  Mary shrugged apologetically and said, “I do not underst—”

  “The cubs,” he said, as though she had not spoken. “I did find it most diverting, hunting wolf cubs, for they are too young and innocent to know how to behave when they are hunted. They will run not in a line but in a circle, and soon tire and think to go to ground to hide themselves, not knowing that is no way of escape. The trick is that you have to draw the mother off with hounds, or else she’ll sacrifice herself to save her litter,” he explained. She felt his hand brush lightly on her back, as though it were by accident. He smiled. “And there is little sport in sacrifice.”

  Frisque had finished with his necessary business. Turning round, the dog caught sight of Mr. Stevens and began to bark as though he sought to argue with the Englishman.

  The sound shook Mary from her frozen state, and telling Frisque to hush she quickly lifted him and held him tightly.

  Stevens said, “I see you have your fierce protector.”

  Mary did her best to smile to show she had not been at all affected by what she was half afraid had been a cleverly directed threat. She told him simply what she’d said before, when he had given Frisque slight praise. “Yes, he is good.”

  “I was not speaking of the dog.” The Englishman smiled one last time and bowed and turned and left her, and in leaving gave a nod to the tall man who had been standing in the shadows by the doorway of the inn, behind them both, the glowing bowl of his own pipe a stab of burning red against the darkness.

  Mary gathered Frisque against her heart and moved towards the doorway, and MacPherson struck the ashes from his pipe and let her pass, but as she crossed the threshold he fell into step behind her casually, as though it were his place, and for the first time since she’d met him Mary felt a little safer knowing he was at her back.

  Chapter 22

  I was starting to agree with Jacqui that the diary read more like a thriller than a chronicle of everyday events.

  We find ourselves again in danger, Mary had confided, in the form of Mr. Stevens who did join us at Auxerre and who appears to have discovered Mr. Thomson’s true identity, or at the least suspect it very strongly. He has friends in Paris, so he said, who told him Mr. Thomson headed south, and I do fear they’ve also told him that he travels with a sister, for tonight he told a tale of hunting wolf cubs that did seem to me an allegory meant to warn me nothing good would come of an attempt to sacrifice myself to shield another. Though I am not certain that was his intent, I do suspect it, and I warrant Mr. M— suspects it also, and I hope that this encounter does not have its end in violence.

  She’d described this Mr. Stevens in some detail and had written of their journey from Auxerre to Saulieu so minutely I could all but see the people crowded in that diligence and feel the sense of Mary’s disappointment when she’d learned that Mr. Thomson was no grand romantic outlaw but a fraudster and a thief.

  I had the sense as well that, while she disliked Mr. Stevens, she was nonetheless in sympathy a little with his purpose, since she’d added:

  He did tell us of the poor investors driven sadly into bankruptcy and ruin, and there must be a host of people now in London injured by this swindle of the Charitable Corporation who do nightly pray to see its architect brought home to justice.

  By Monday night I’d come no closer to an understanding of “this swindle of the Charitable Corporation.” I had looked it up online, and read reports to the committees of the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and academic articles and snippets out of history books that analyzed the workings of the scandal and the men who’d been involved in it—but as with many things, the more I read, the less I understood.

  The problem with hindsight, I thought, was that there were just too many documents. And when they touched on the issue of stockbroking, I was at sea.

  As I passed through the kitchen Denise, chopping something to bits on the worktop, looked up. “Heading out?”

  “Yes.”

  “You should wear your coat,” she advised me. “It’s cold once the sun sets.”

  “I’m not going far. I’ll be back before dinner.”

  In the tops of the tall bare-branched chestnut trees in the back garden a chattering cluster of swallows was gathering, filling the air with the sound of their wings as they rose and resettled, preparing to fly. They were likely midway through migration, those swallows. A long way from home.

  Through the trees and above the gray wall at the end of the garden I saw a light burning a warm golden welcome upstairs in the window of Luc’s house. I passed through the door in the wall and went out to the lane and along underneath the low archway of branches. His car was parked where it should be, at the side of the house, and the lights were on downstairs as well. As I climbed the short flight of curved steps to the porch I could hear Noah laughing—a small, friendly sound in the darkening evening that tugged somewhere under my rib cage.

  I reached for the dangling cord of the old-fashioned bell Luc had hung to the side of the door. It was rusted from being exposed to the weather, but I liked the clear sound of its ring.

  When the door opened I felt surrounded by warmth from the light in the entry hall and the quick genuine flash of Luc’s smile as he stepped to the side and invited me in.

  I had not yet been inside the house. It reminded me of my aunt’s mock-Tudor cottage: a central hall plan with two rooms at the front and a kitchen behind and a staircase that climbed from the back of the hall to the bedrooms above. I knew that the door at the back, at the foot of the staircase, led into the kitchen because of the smells of roast chicken and some sort of vegetable drifting out from it. The front entry hall was narrow and I felt the brush of Luc’s arm on my own as he swung the door shut again,
then turned to me as though waiting for me to decide what the form of our greeting should be.

  We had moved past the handshake, I thought, so I led with the bise. He was due for a shave and smelt faintly of Scotch, but it wasn’t unpleasant. “I wasn’t aware you wore glasses,” I told him.

  “I need them for reading. I’m old.”

  “Thirty-two isn’t old.”

  “You’ve been learning my secrets.” He looked at the handful of papers I’d brought. “Do you need me to take you somewhere?”

  “No.” As much as I wanted to physically follow where Mary had gone, it would not have been practical. Going to Paris was one thing, but driving across all of France was another. Besides, she was moving too quickly and not staying long enough in any village or town to make seeing those places of use to my work.

  I said, “I need your help with a stock fraud.”

  He honestly had the best smile. Through the frames of his glasses I saw his eyes crinkle a bit at the edges. “OK.” With a nod to the room just behind, he said, “Come have a drink.”

  It was not a large sitting room, but it was cozy and comfortably furnished with lamps and a slouchy brown sofa and chairs and low tables that looked like they wouldn’t much mind if you set down a drink on them. Luc had been doing just that. On the table in front of the sofa he’d set a large Scotch glass beside a ring binder of papers. He closed the ring binder now, sliding it off to the side as he shifted a small stack of newspapers and a one-armed robot built out of LEGO bricks to tidy up. He had left me a choice between taking the armchair or sharing the sofa. I sat on the sofa.

  He took off his glasses, still standing, and sliding them into the breast pocket of the plain white cotton shirt he was wearing, he asked, “What would you like? I have sherry or whisky or rum or épine…”

  “What’s épine?”

  “It’s homemade, from the leaves of the blackthorn.”

  “You made it yourself?”

  “Noah helped. It’s not bad.”

  I opted to try it and watched while he crossed to the drinks cabinet in the front corner beside the big window that looked to the front of the house. He must do something other than sit at a desk, I decided. He had to belong to a gym, or go running. Men didn’t stay lean with long muscles like that just by sitting around all day working with numbers. I knew. Every office I’d worked in was full of men glued to computers, and there was an obvious difference between those who did nothing else and the ones who stayed active.

  I glanced round the room for a clue as to what sport he played, but I didn’t see anything, so I just asked him.

  He shrugged and said, “Different things. Racquetball. Football. I walk. You?”

  “I’m not good at sports.”

  “You can walk, surely? We’ll take you walking some weekend,” he promised me, “Noah and I. When the weather is good.”

  I was frankly surprised how appealing that sounded. “All right.”

  “Now,” he said, coming back to the sofa and setting my glass down in front of me, “what is this stock fraud you’re needing my help with? I won’t go to jail for this, will I?”

  The sound of electronic Robo Patrol music preceded the light creak of footsteps that came down the hall. Noah asked us, “Who’s going to jail?”

  “No one,” Luc said. “Madame Thomas needs me to help with her work, I think.”

  Noah greeted me very politely, but said as though he were correcting his father, “I help with her work.”

  Luc said, “Well, come and help, then. But first get the red bowl of nuts from the dining room, will you? We might as well try to convince Madame Thomas we have a few manners.”

  Obligingly Noah crossed over the hall and returned with a small dish of almonds and set it down carefully, and would have squeezed himself onto the sofa between us if Luc hadn’t told him to sit in the chair. I was grateful for that. I liked Noah, and I liked Luc, but I was feeling a little hemmed in and I needed my personal space.

  “Now,” said Luc to me, “how can we help you?”

  I set down my notes and attempted to put them in order. “The Charitable Corporation,” I said, “was a British corporation formed supposedly to make small loans to poor people who needed money. In exchange, the poor people put items in the corporation’s warehouse as security, and when they paid the loan back then their items were returned.”

  “So, like a pawnshop,” was Luc’s summing-up.

  “Exactly like a pawnshop, really. Only the directors of the corporation started running some sort of a fraud, taking money for themselves, and they were speculating with the shares and buying stock in this”—I showed another paper to him—“the York Buildings Company, and it all went bad and people lost their savings and the corporation’s banker and their warehouse keeper took off into France, and it’s the warehouse keeper, Thomson, who the woman in the diary is supposed to be protecting, and she’s really angry with him now for what he’s done, but I don’t have a clue exactly what it was he did.” I had to stop for breath. “They lost me,” I confessed, “in all the rates of interest and the price of shares, and…well, I just don’t understand it. And I thought, you’re an accountant, maybe you can tell me what was going on.”

  Luc turned one paper slightly on the table, put his glasses on again, and read it over carefully.

  I took a sip of my épine. It was a lovely, honey-colored liquor, very sweet and with the pleasant taste of almonds. It was also very strong. I wasn’t used to drinking anything but wine or sherry, and with those I knew how much to drink without it having an effect. Épine was different. It kicked straight into my bloodstream and I set it down with care.

  “OK,” said Luc, “I see. It’s not so complicated. Just forget about the interest and the price of stocks, it doesn’t matter. This is very simple. I can show you.”

  He did just that, and in the way that I always found easiest when I was learning new concepts: by teaching with actual objects. Calling on Noah to bring him four cereal bowls, Luc set them on the table in front of us; designated them his warehouse, stock shares, lending bank, and marketplace, and proceeded to show me how a corporation like the one that Thomson worked for was supposed to operate. He used a handful of his own business cards in place of stock certificates, almonds for his merchandise, and coins from his wallet to represent cash, moving all of them round in the four bowls to show how things all ran smoothly until he began scooping out coins from the “bank” for himself. At first he was able to cover this by putting more “stock certificates” into play and selling the pawned items from his warehouse, thus earning more coins to cover his losses, but in the end Noah grew frustrated with him for messing things up.

  Luc agreed it was all out of balance. “The more I try to make things right, the worse it gets, and if I keep on doing this my money will be gone, and then my warehouse will be empty, and the only thing that I’ll have left is lots of paper stock things,” he said, using Noah’s term, “that aren’t worth anything.”

  “That’s silly,” Noah said. And giving up on things financial, he resumed his game of Robo Patrol and tuned us out while Luc, his lesson done, leaned back and calmly ate an almond.

  I was processing.

  He looked at me. “Did any of that help?”

  “It did.” I thought I understood it now more clearly. “So the banker and the warehouse keeper, Thomson, and the other men in league with them, just helped themselves to money, only nothing new was going in the warehouse that could balance the amount that they were taking out.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And then they sold more stock to try to cover what they’d taken, and when people in the Parliament got wise to this and asked to see their books, they just ran off. Well, Thomson did. The banker, too.”

  Luc said, “That’s what it sounds like, from that article you’ve got there.”

  I wa
s quiet for a moment while I processed this some more. I took a sip of my épine. “And all the people who’d invested money…”

  “Their certificates were worthless. There was nothing left to pay them with.”

  I gave a nod. I got it, now. Except for one thing. “But,” I said, “they didn’t only take a few coins, Thomson and the banker. The report said they took something like five hundred thousand pounds.”

  “A lot of money,” Luc agreed. “Especially in those days.”

  “Yes, but where did it all go? What did they do with it?”

  Luc shrugged again, and reached for his own drink. “I would imagine only two men ever really knew the answer to that.”

  “Thomson and the banker.”

  With a nod he said, “And both of them are dead.”

  * * *

  He walked me back. It wasn’t necessary. Even with the darkness in the lane there was still light enough to see by, and it wasn’t far to go. But he’d insisted, and in honesty I hadn’t really argued. It felt nice to have him walking here beside me, hands in pockets, with his shoulder brushing mine. Men sometimes made me nervous but with Luc it was more simply being aware of him—very aware, as I’d felt in his house, when he’d sat with his arm on the back of the worn leather sofa, behind my shoulders, never touching me but simply there.

  I’d nearly answered yes when he’d invited me to stay for dinner, but I knew Denise had been at work the past few hours cooking something fairly finicky. I didn’t want to disappoint her, so I’d said, “I have to go.”

  His son had said, “Tomorrow, though. You’ll come tomorrow, won’t you?”

  “Well…”

  “You have to,” Noah had informed me. “It’s Epiphany. We’re having dinner here.”

  “Yes,” Luc had promised him, “they’ll all be here tomorrow night.”

  I must have looked a little undecided because Noah had sweetened the offer with, “We’ll have balloons. And a king cake.”