A Desperate Fortune

  The captain nodded understanding, and seemed on the cusp of saying more when they were interrupted by a short respectful knock upon the outer door. Excusing himself, he went to answer it, and after speaking briefly with the guardsman who had knocked, the captain turned back to them, told them, “Forgive me, I won’t be a moment.” And stepped out.

  “An interesting man,” Thomson said. “And a brave one. My brother in St. Petersburg has told me stories…but I wander too far from my purpose.” With a slight and charming smile, he turned as well and crossed the room to where his deal-box sat atop a lacquered table in the corner. “I’ve given up most of my papers and things, for the sake of appearances, you understand—so our king may be seen and believed to have done all he could to restore what the people in England believe I have taken. But some things are left to me still.”

  Mary, while he was saying this, took a step closer herself to the table at which he’d been writing, her gaze falling to the still unfinished letter he’d told them was meant for his father. He had a clear hand. It was easy to read.

  “Where the devil…ah, here they are.”

  Mary looked up and stood waiting while Thomson approached with a tiny bag of softest velvet nestled in his hand.

  He said, “These are a gift for you, my dear. To thank you for your help.”

  Inside the bag were earrings made of gold and set with opals fashioned as small teardrops. Mary looked at them, and not at him. And then because she could not hold her silence any longer she asked, quietly accusing, “Who in London is now bankrupt for the want of these?”

  “No one, I can promise you. They are my own to give,” he told her earnestly. “I bought them years ago as an investment, and I wish for you to have them as a token of my gratitude and friendship.”

  Friendship. Mary turned her hand a fraction, watching how the opals changed their colors in the light. “This friend of yours,” she said, “this Mr. Robinson you told the captain you must see in Paris—would that be the Mr. Robinson who came away with you from London?”

  She did not raise her head to seek the truth in his expression, for she knew she would not find it there, and anyway, his silence was itself an answer.

  Still she carried on, “The man who swindled you? The man you warned me in Lyon was someone I should shun were we to meet for he was nothing but a rogue,” she said from memory, “and a liar?” On that final word she did look up, and met his wary gaze with one that did not try to hide her disappointment. Nor her growing anger. “I am sorry, Mr. Thomson, I cannot accept your gift.” She slid the earrings in the velvet bag and gave it back to him. “Nor would I claim the friendship of a man who could write that,” she added, pointing at the letter on the table.

  He looked down as well, and at his frown of faint confusion Mary took the letter in her hand and read the passage that offended her, as evidence might be read out in court to the accused: “A report (which I never heard of) it seems was spread when I went abroad that I had carried all off in money to the Pretender, and that reached this place, and sometime after my arrival I was taken up and everything I had seized. If my intention had been to assassinate the Pope they could not have used me any worse. This is what you write, sir, to your father. From this room, this room, where you are kept and fed and sheltered by the kindness of that king you would deny as a pretender.” Mary was so angry at this new betrayal she could feel the paper trembling in her fingers, and she dropped it as though it were poisoned.

  “But my dear. You must consider what I’m writing may be opened, may be read.” He was trying to calm her, she knew. To cajole her. “And you of all people should know that one tailors the tale to the listener.”

  She paused and collected her thoughts before answering, knowing in one sense that what he’d just told her was true, and yet knowing it was for that reason she could not believe him.

  “The thing is,” she said, in a voice that surprised her with how small it sounded, how sad, “it is one thing to tailor the tale, and another to tailor yourself—for by doing the first you may only lose sight of the truth, but by doing the latter you stand then to lose your original form so completely you are become naught but a cipher, a nothing, that changes as smoke changes shape on the wind, and is lost and forgotten as quickly.”

  “My dear.”

  Mary steeled herself against the part of her that even now sought to pity him, seeing the good in him, wanting to think what he said was sincere. She said only, “Good-bye, Mr. Thomson.”

  And turning, she left him alone with his writings that may or may not have been speaking the truth.

  * * *

  Captain Hay was in the courtyard, talking to another man whose back was to her, so she could but guess from his expensive suit of clothing that he was a man of some importance, with a fine and educated voice that, like the captain’s, had retained its Scottish intonations.

  “—likes it very well indeed,” the man was saying. “He is missing the company of the Duke of Liria, naturally, for they were always very close, but General Lacy keeps him well amused and our friend Admiral Gordon is as kind to him as ever. I have just in fact sent several pounds of snuff by ship from Leghorn to St. Petersburg for Admiral Gordon to pass to my brother.”

  “If he does not use it first.” The captain smiled. “I miss the admiral. Though I dare say he has not the opportunity for mischief he once had. When last he wrote me, he was waiting for his granddaughter’s arrival on a ship from Leith, and I believe Sir Harry Stirling and the admiral’s daughter Nan now have two children of their own to keep him busy in St. Petersburg.”

  “All men must settle, in their time. And I am glad to see the admiral so well set in Petersburg, and General Lacy too, for they are worthy of it. Better they rise by their merit in Russia than molder away here.” His voice had grown cynical. “To see some of our old gentlemen, once clever men, turned to old women here in Rome is a melancholy sight. ’Tis why I am so often in the country.”

  “Where was it this time?” asked the captain.

  The other man named the place, which meant nothing to Mary, adding, “You ought to have come with us. It is only twenty miles from Rome, and the shooting was excellent.”

  “Next time.” The captain had noticed her now.

  Through all their talk she’d stayed discreetly to the side, not wishing to intrude, but when the captain greeted her it made the other man turn too, and Mary recognized him then, for she had seen him walking in the street with Hugh—the Earl Marischal.

  Mary’s curtsy was low, from respect for his noble rank, but also because it allowed her to divert her gaze from his, which for some reason seemed to be trying to measure her. “My lord,” she greeted him when they were introduced.

  “Mistress Dundas.” The earl was a well-formed man of about forty years old, with a long nose and strongly arched eyebrows and keen and intelligent eyes. “Do forgive me for detaining Captain Hay with gossip.”

  Captain Hay said, “I have been detained by more than that, my lord. I’ve been told I must wait for a messenger sent by His Holiness, who would have me carry something in private to give to the king, so I very much fear,” he told Mary, “we cannot go yet. If you’re anxious to leave, I could try to have one of the guards—”

  “I can take her.” The Earl Marischal had a genuine smile. “If she’ll have me as escort.”

  She looked at him and took his measure in her turn, and took his arm.

  She was glad to be free of the Castel Sant’Angelo. Glad to be free of its sighs and its sufferings, and of the darkness that seemed such a part of its stones. Outside its walls the air felt softer and a little warmer even though the afternoon was coming to its end, the angels casting longer shadows on the bridge while golden light spilled down the ripples of the River Tiber. The prospect of the great church of St. Peter’s in the distance was so lovely Mary could not help but keep her eyes upon it while she wa
lked, in hopes that she might fix within her memory how it looked with the sun striking it at just that angle, turning it to something from a dream.

  The earl looked down at her. “This is the first time you have been in Rome?”

  “It is, my lord.”

  “And what is your impression of it?”

  “I’ve not been able to see much of it, but what I have seen has been very beautiful.”

  “‘Not able to see much of it’?”

  “Why yes, my lord. I’ve been with my companion at the hotel for the whole time of my stay here, and we could not venture far afield without a man to guide us.”

  “So you’ve been here all this time and not seen any of the greatest sights?”

  She told him, “I have seen the king.”

  He looked at her again as they stepped off the bridge, and stopping for a moment asked, “Are you in a great hurry to return to your hotel? Because if not, we might walk back the longer way along the river. You should at least see something of the place before you leave it.”

  Mary said, “I’m in no hurry to return.”

  He was an easy man to walk with. Mary wondered what her cousin Colette would have thought, to know that she had traveled all the way to Rome and was now strolling by the ancient River Tiber, with an earl.

  He asked her, “Have they arranged your passage back to Paris?”

  She would not have thought a man of his estate would take even a passing interest in her own affairs, but she supposed Hugh might have spoken of them, and being a gentleman the earl was merely asking now to be polite. “Not yet, my lord.” It must be soon, she knew. The king, for all his goodness, could not pay their keep indefinitely, and she and Effie surely were a burden to his finances.

  “No word yet of your father?”

  “No, my lord.”

  She did not wish to talk about herself. An hour before this, Mary might have played her practiced part and tried amusing the Earl Marischal with lively conversation, but she no longer had the heart for it—not only because she half feared she might become like Thomson and change shape so often she no longer recognized her true self, but because she only really wanted to discuss one thing.

  She asked, “Did Mr. MacPherson go with you, my lord, to the country?”

  She felt him glance down at her, but if he thought it a bold or a curious question he did not remark on it, only replied, “Yes, he did.”

  “And were you very long away?”

  “A fortnight, more or less.”

  Which made her feel a little less forlorn, explaining why she had not lately seen Hugh here in Rome.

  The earl continued, “I do not believe he much enjoyed the country, to be honest, though as usual he did so well at shooting that the rest of us were forced to stand in awe of him. Except,” he said, “when it was wagered that he could not hit so small a target as a sparrow. You have seen him shoot?”

  She had a vivid memory of it. “Yes.”

  “So then you know how safe that wager was, particularly since the sparrow was at rest upon a hedge. I laid my money down as well,” he said, “and lost it all.”

  “He missed the shot?” She was amazed.

  “He did not take it. With the sparrow in his sights he changed his mind and set his gun down, and would not be moved to fire. A thing I’ve never seen him do.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “I asked him that, believe me, after I had paid his losses and my own. He said that when the sparrow chirped he reckoned it was telling him to save his shot, and so he did.”

  “He said that? Those exact words?”

  “Yes.”

  She thought about the story she had told while they had waited near to Nîmes for Thomson’s fever to subside—the story of the crown prince who’d been exiled far from home and had become a huntsman in the forest full of thorns, and who had nearly killed his father and his sister in disguise until the princess had made use of her enchanted songbird form to sing and stir the memory in the prince’s heart of what he had once been. She’d told him: Save your shot, dear brother. Do not let your heart grow cold enough to kill without a cause.

  The earl was walking closest to the river, and the sun was angled low behind him so she could not easily observe his features, but she knew that he could see her own. She bent her head. “Did it surprise you,” she asked, “seeing him compassionate?”

  “What actually surprised me was the fact he spared the effort to explain. He does not bother, as a rule.”

  Mary matched his dry amusement with a small smile of her own. “You’ve known him long.”

  “I’ve been acquainted with him long. I’m not sure anyone can know MacPherson.” He looked at her. “He has not had a very pleasant or an easy life, you understand. Would you like me to tell you what I know of it?”

  She nodded, and he told her, in the simple way that men were wont to tell things, without sentiment.

  And broke her heart.

  Chapter 41

  He afterwards walked the hill. But many and silent were his steps round the dark dwelling…

  —Macpherson, “Fingal,” Book Two

  Rome

  May 15, 1732

  Hugh came from the Highlands near Inverness, born the third son of a weaver. He was but a lad of fifteen in the year fifteen, when the rebellion began and he rose with the rest of his clansmen in favor of King James and marched with his father and brothers and cousins on Preston, just over the border with England.

  They came into Preston in early November, proclaiming the king in the marketplace, and for a handful of days all was easy—until they had word that the government of the usurper was sending up troops from the south to attack them. The Jacobites dug themselves in and prepared for a battle. They got one. Hugh’s father fell in the first hours of the fight with the government troops, on a Sunday, while shooting down over the barricades from the upper window of an occupied house. Hugh, lying next to him, picked up his father’s dropped musket and carried on firing.

  “He lay on his belly the whole of that day,” said the earl, “and through all of the night, with his father there dead at his shoulder.”

  By nightfall the town was in flames, and next morning the government forces received reinforcements that let them surround the town, trapping the Jacobite army within. Still, the men were for staying and fighting, but some of the gentlemen officers voted instead to surrender, and Hugh, just like all of the other brave Highlanders, was told by his own commanders to lay down his weapons. His father was thrown in a ditch to be buried, and Hugh and his brothers and cousins and all of the others were taken up prisoners.

  Numbers were hanged. For the rest, several hundred men crowded all into the jails where they lay upon straw with no covering, there was but fever and sickness and suffering through the raw winter months until their trials.

  “I know not what horrors he saw there,” the earl said, “but one of his cousins died and the surviving ones were, with his brothers, condemned to be transported to the Americas and sold for slaves for seven years.”

  Mary remembered the depth of the darkness and pain she had glimpsed in Hugh’s eyes in Marseilles, when he’d looked at the galley slaves. Now she knew why.

  “How was he spared?”

  The earl said, “He was not.” Then more quietly, “He was not spared.”

  Hugh, the youngest of his family captured and condemned to transportation, was so dangerously ill when they were sent on board their ships his brothers feared that he would not survive the voyage, so they gathered what they could among them—all they had remaining—and they bribed the captain to set Hugh down on the coast of Ireland. He was too ill and unaware to raise a protest, or to even see them before they were gone across the sea without him, and he never after heard if they were taken to America or to the harsh plantations of Jamaica and Antigua. They were sim
ply gone and lost to him, with neither trace nor word.

  The rebellion meantime had been lost, and the earl with his own younger brother had made his escape through the Highlands to wait in the western isles until the king sent a ship out of France to collect them. Hugh’s own passage was less direct—from Ireland he found a boat to carry him to Cornwall, where he fell into the company of free traders who, unable to set him down in Scotland, took him safe instead to Spain.

  “We met him there, my brother Jemmy and I,” said the earl, “when the Governor of Palamos assigned him to us as a guard against the robbers on our road, when we arrived ourselves upon the coast of Catalonia in the first months of the year nineteen. Hugh and his clan are of the same origin as my family, if old tradition does not fail, so I did take a real concern in what regarded him, and finding him a loyal lad I hired him myself to guard my brother.”

  Then in the summer of that year the Jacobites made another descent upon Scotland, landing a body of soldiers, some Spanish among them, near Inverness. Hugh was one of the first men ashore, keen to finally return to his home and his family—what little remained of it—after his three years in exile.

  And then came the Battle of Glen Shiel.

  “The whole affair was poorly done,” the earl admitted. “We advised the Spanish to surrender, and ourselves made a retreat. I managed to get off the coast in safety on my ship, but Jemmy and MacPherson with some others were cut off and forced to escape as they could to the mountains.”

  Hugh led the way through the wild passes and mist-shrouded heights and made straight for his home. The earl’s brother, fighting off illness through all this time, spoke of it afterward—how Hugh encouraged him, telling him what they would find at the end of their climbing: a cottage slung close to the earth, with a roof of fine thatch that would keep out the rain that now plagued them; a fire to warm them, and beds soft with blankets Hugh’s father had woven himself on the loom that at one time had seemed to be always in motion; Hugh’s mother and sister within the door, waiting to welcome them.