A Desperate Fortune (31 page)

Mary had stirred to defend her creation. “And why is that?”

“None but a fool,” he’d replied, “trusts a stranger he meets in a cave.”

She’d have argued the point with him, but she’d been simply too tired from the day’s walk—indeed from the nearly a week’s worth of walking that had come before it—and so she had leaned her head back on the cold stone and let her eyes close. When she’d opened them, he had been watching her.

She’d felt him watching her a few times after that, when they had ventured out again into the rain, but she had kept her head down and her own gaze on the ground, to keep from stumbling. It had not been till that ground had changed from rough stones into squared ones that she’d noticed they were climbing a steep winding street into a town.

And when MacPherson had conducted them into a proper guesthouse where they’d found themselves with rooms and fires and beds with pillows, Mary had been too amazed to speak at all, much less to thank him.

Madame Roy had set out Mary’s gown to dry before the fire, and had a copper tub filled with hot water for a bath. “You’ve been a fine, strong lass so far, but walking in the wet can raise a fever in those not accustomed to it.”

Mary had obediently bathed without a protest, feeling all the aches and soreness of her body swirl away within that blissful, steaming water. She had even let Madame Roy wash her hair—a rare indulgence that stirred memories of her childhood and made Mary close her eyes. It was the second time Madame Roy had done something Mary’s mother used to do. The evocation of those memories had grown even stronger when Madame Roy, having combed out Mary’s hair before the fire, had tucked her warm and snug beneath the sheets and blankets of her bed, with Frisque a softly breathing weight beside her feet.

And Mary’s thoughts had drifted sleepily to Saint-Germain-en-Laye—to happy days and happy evenings, and the voices that surrounded her: the lilting Scottish voices that were strange and yet familiar. Madame Roy’s voice, then, had seemed to fit so well with them that Mary of a sudden had decided that a French name did not suit the older woman near as well as that by which their hostess in Lyon had called her. And so, drowsily, her face half buried in the softness of her pillow, she’d asked, “May I call you Effie?”

For a moment there’d been silence, then the other woman’s hand had gently stroked the hair from Mary’s face. The Scottish woman had said, just as gently, “Aye.”

And Effie she had been, to Mary, from that moment on.

They had set out this morning, Monday morning, fresher in their minds and in their steps, though Thomson soon fell back to grumbling.

“You do know,” he said to Mary, with a nod ahead to where MacPherson walked now with his long gun in his hand, “why he’s been carrying that gun today? This region, so they told me in the town, is rife with bands of thieves and brigands, who will boldly strike by day to rob and plunder the unwary.”

“Then it’s a good thing,” she told him, “that Mr. MacPherson is never unwary.”

It was, she thought, perfectly true. Though his attitude seemed to imply he was merely ignoring them, Mary felt certain he heard and marked well every word that was said, and with her spirits rising today she had found it diverting to try to provoke him to break his unwavering silence. She hadn’t succeeded, though it had been just as diverting to watch that same silence push Thomson to greater impatience.

When they came to a place where MacPherson desired them to keep to the right, he merely gestured with his hand that gripped the long gun to an outcropping of rock in that direction, causing Thomson—who’d been asking why they hadn’t thought to hire a mule this morning—to stop long enough to ask, “And what is
that
supposed to mean?”

Mary quipped it was obvious. “He’s saying we might as well speak to that stone as to him, for in truth it would give us as lively an answer.”

MacPherson, not breaking stride, half turned his head to glance back at her and looked away in one movement, but Mary thought she glimpsed the faintest twisting of his mouth in what, incredibly, appeared to be a smile. Even more incredibly, when Effie spoke up from behind her and said something briefly in their Highland language, MacPherson replied with a short sound that came close to being a laugh.

But he said nothing more until late afternoon, when they came to a river and found it had risen with yesterday’s rain, and the ford where they clearly were meant to cross now lay submerged by a shallow but swift-moving current.

The river was broad, but the bank on the far side was level with a clearing edged by trees. MacPherson, handing Frisque to Mary, had a brief exchange of words with Effie before he told Thomson, “Turn your back,” and did the same himself.

Effie bent and stepped out of her shoes and stripped her stockings off, and rolling them together took the little dog from Mary’s arms. “Ye do the same,” she said. “I’ll help ye cross.”

The men respectfully stayed standing with their backs turned while the women hitched their skirts up past their knees and stepped into the rushing water. It was freezing cold, and Mary could not help but give a little shriek, and then a laugh. Her bare feet slipped a little on the wet stones but Effie, having gathered both her skirts and Frisque into one arm, now linked her other arm with Mary’s and helped her to balance as they crossed together.

“There,” the older woman said, and set the squirming dog down as they reached the other bank, “go have a run, if ye’ve a mind to.” And he did just that, in circles, snuffling happily at all the new discoveries he was making in the clearing. Mary dried her legs and rolled her stockings on, her fingers feeling numb upon the buckles of her shoes. When she was done and Effie had called over to the men to tell them it was safe for them to turn around, she turned herself and saw that Frisque had ventured near the trees. She called him back.

But he had found something. His hair was raised, his ears were back, and even while she thought she’d never seen him look like that, he started barking, and it was a fierce and frenzied sound she’d never heard him make.

She clambered to her feet and looked to where the dog was looking.

Something colder than the water of the river touched her then.

She’d never seen a living wolf. She’d seen their pelts, and even once the lifeless corpse of one that had been killed by hunters, but she’d never seen one standing like a predatory shadow with its rough brown coat concealing it amid the trees, its eyes locked with a fixed and hungry purpose on its prey.

She did not scream. She yelled, and ran for Frisque with all the speed she had, and as the wolf broke from the tree line Mary reached the little dog and snatched him up and wheeled about and went on running, with her lungs on fire.

MacPherson, from the river, yelled as well, “Get down!”

She did not understand. Her gaze in panic fell upon him, standing in the water to his knees, the long gun leveled to his shoulder as he sighted down its barrel.

“Mary!” he called out more strongly. “
Down!
”

She did as ordered, dropping with her body curled round Frisque, the wolf so close behind she heard it panting.

And MacPherson fired.

Send thou the night away in song; and give the joy of grief.

—Macpherson, “Fingal,” Book One

The Bas-Vivarais

March 4, 1732

Thomson was still speaking of it come the morning. “Flung me,” he repeated, as he told the tale again to the three older children of the family where they had been taken in the night before. “Did not ‘let me go,’ he
flung
me on my ar—well, on my backside in the middle of the river.”

“Did you drown?” The littlest boy had asked this question twice already, but appeared distrustful of the answers he’d received before. He was perhaps five years of age, with wide brown eyes. There were two children in the family younger still than him—one barely walking, and an infant in its cradle, but they were not at the table.

Thomson, having twice denied it, told him now, “I did. I drowned. But as you see, I have recovered.”

He’d recovered his good humor, Mary noticed, thanks in large part to the generous share of wine their hosts had given him, together with a good hot meal of fish and bread, and a good long sleep that, while it had been on a pallet made for him beside the stove, had nonetheless been in the house and nowhere near a barn or hayloft, so had left him most contented.

He was speaking French, as they had done since they’d first chanced upon this house a quarter of a league beyond the river, since with Mary all disheveled and a little bruised and leaning hard on Effie it had proved to be much easier to make their explanations all in French, though they had kept to their identities, their English names, asserting they had lived in Paris some years and so learned the language.

Seeming satisfied at last by Thomson’s answer, the small boy sat back and said, “It was not nice of him to let you drown.”

“No,” Thomson told him in agreement, “and I thought so at the time. As I was sinking underneath the water, I thought, ‘This is not so very nice of him,’ but—”

“But,” said Mary, smoothly picking up the story, “Mr. Jarvis needed both his hands to hold his gun, so he could shoot the wolf.”

The children all looked curiously at the Scotsman sitting in his chair. He took no notice. He’d said nothing yet this morning and indeed had spoken little since the incident itself.

He’d killed the wolf with one shot, as it leaped. She’d seen it struck and twisted by the impact in midair, and then its body had dropped heavily upon her legs and she had curled more tightly round her dog as all the trembling aftermath of fear coursed through her.

Effie should have reached her first. She’d been the nearest, and she could run strongly for a woman of her age, but it was not a woman’s boots that kicked the carcass of the wolf aside, nor yet a woman’s legs that knelt beside her.

“Are ye hurt?” MacPherson’s voice had sounded too rough. “Mary, are ye bitten?”

“No.” She had not thought her voice would come at all, yet there it was, if weak. And Effie had by then arrived and knelt beside her too.

MacPherson had said, “Search her and be sure. Be sure.”

He’d risen and his boots had paced in Mary’s line of vision until Effie, having looked at Mary’s feet and legs and arms and hands, had told him in relief, “She’s not been bitten.”

He had moved away then and had stood beside the river for some minutes, paying little heed to Thomson who had finished crossing on his own and seemed much taken with the marksmanship of his protector. “Truly, I have never seen a shot like that, sir, not in all my life. Is it the rifling that does make the gun so accurate?”

MacPherson had not answered, nor said anything at all since then that Mary could remember.

“Was it a mad wolf?” the elder boy asked. He was not that much older than his little brother, but had, Mary thought, the most serious eyes.

So she soothed him with, “No, it was only a hungry one. Sometimes, when winters are long, it makes animals desperately hungry.”

“And would it have eaten Frisque?”

“It wanted to.” She looked across at where the little dog was lying in the elder boy’s arms, reveling in all the new attention being paid to him.

This family was a young one, with the parents not yet thirty and the eldest of the children—a small girl with golden hair—no more than ten. The children had been turned out of their bed last night to bundle round their parents on the mattress and the floor, while their bed had been given to Mary and Effie, but they did not seem to feel themselves hard done by, and they’d made a great fuss over Frisque, who had abandoned Mary’s feet last night to sleep among the children.

Now the elder boy stroked Frisque’s soft ears and said, “
I
would not let him walk so close beside the river. It’s too dangerous. You should take better care of him.”

His mother turned then from the hearth, where she’d been seasoning a pot of soup. She was a tall and straight-backed woman with a pretty face. “You must not speak like that,” she told her son. “It’s very rude. Apologize.”

He did, but put his face down so it rested on the dog’s smooth head, and Mary gently said, “But you are right, I should take better care of him. He is an old dog now and is not used to such long journeys.”

“You could leave him here with us,” the boy suggested.

And his mother turned again. “Why don’t you go and help Papa?”

“He’s gone to cut more wood. He does not like me helping, when he’s cutting wood.”

“Then take your brother and your sister and go clean the bedrooms. Go.”

“Can Frisque come, too?”

The children’s faces turned with hope to Mary, and she nodded, and in a confusion of scraping chairs and dancing feet they rose and went off to their chores.

“I apologize, madam,” their mother said, and smiled. “They’ve never seen so small a dog before. They’re very taken with him.”

Mary said, “And he with them. It’s been a long time since he has had children he could play with.” And she told the woman of Frisque’s history: how he had been raised and loved by her own neighbor’s children, only to be left behind without a backward glance when they had moved away. “This likely brings back happy memories for him, being here. Perhaps,” she said, “perhaps he thinks
his
children have come back for him.”

Effie, entering the kitchen, asked, “Whose children?” She had two herself, just then—the tiny infant in her arms, the little toddling girl in tow and clinging tightly to her skirts. When Mary answered, Effie nodded. “Yes, he’ll not wish to leave with us.”

Thomson said, “Nor will you, from the look of it.” He smiled as he watched Effie settle herself in a chair with her charges, cradling the baby in the crook of one elbow while the toddling girl climbed to her lap to be held with the other arm. “You do that very gracefully, madam.”

“I’ve had much practice.”

The mother asked her, “Have you many children of your own?”

“I only had the one, God rest her soul, but I have been a nurse to many.”

“Then,” the mother said to Mary, “you must start a family soon, so she’ll have children she can care for.”

Mary faintly smiled and looked away. Her wandering gaze fell on MacPherson, sitting looking at the mantel of the kitchen hearth, and in English she remarked, “You’re very quiet, Mr. Jarvis.”

His glance slid briefly sideways, as though waiting for there to be a point to that comment, and when none was provided he looked back to the mantel. “She should wind her clock.”

Mary hadn’t noticed the clock, to be honest. It wasn’t a large one—a wooden-cased table clock with a small handle on top and a face edged with brass. When she translated MacPherson’s comment for their hostess, the young woman said, “Oh, I know. It was my mother’s, but it’s broken, it no longer works. It used to have a lovely chime.”

Distilling this to English for MacPherson, Mary only said, “It’s broken.”

And he nodded, losing interest.

Mary nearly asked if he could fix it, as he’d fixed the watch at Mâcon, but his face didn’t invite questions. Instead, she turned her focus to her own concerns.

There was her gown to sponge and clean; her stockings to be mended where they’d torn when she fell running to the ground. And after that, she took her journal out and brought it up to date as best she could from the last time she’d written, through their day of walking in the rain and their most welcome sojourn in the hillside town—whose name, she had since learned, had been Joyeuse, a name of happiness—and all of their encounter with the wolf, that led to where they were today.

We are to spend another night here. Mr. M— claims it is to confound any who have sought to follow us, but I believe it is because I slightly hurt my ankle in my fall and he would let me rest a little longer before I must face a full day’s walk on it.

She had no rational foundation for that curious belief, nor could she think of any reason why MacPherson might have gone against his nature so completely as to change his plans so she could be more comfortable, but more and more she felt it must be so.

He’d gone out late that morning with his gun in hand, returning with a brace of rabbits and an observation. “They have a mule in the barn,” he’d told Thomson. “Ask if they would sell it.”

And with the deal done and the money exchanged, Thomson had said with pleasure, “At last we’ll have something to carry our baggage.”

“It’s carrying
her
.” With a curt nod at Mary, the Scotsman had set Thomson straight.

Mary, thinking it imprudent to say anything, had bent her head a little closer to her journal and continued writing her new fairy tale about a huntsman and a wolf, in which the wolf was magic, and the huntsman not at all what he appeared to be.

But she’d asked Effie afterwards, while they had worked together to tuck in the blankets of their bed, “Are all men of the Highlands so unfathomable?”

“Some.” Effie smiled slightly, then grew serious. “And some like him, who’ve seen the wars, have depths we’ll never reach or know.”

“How do you know he’s been to war?”

“It’s in the eyes,” said Effie, very quietly. “It changes them. They go to war as boys and are made men too soon, too violently, and all of them return with something lost, with something missing. You can see it in their eyes.”

Mary had thought about this later, when MacPherson’s eyes had briefly met her own while they’d been sitting with the others after supper by the kitchen fire, the children all in bed except the baby who, resisting sleep, was cradled still in Effie’s arms.

The mother said, by way of an apology, “He does not like to sleep, this one. He is afraid he’ll miss something.”

“I nursed a child like that, once,” Effie said. “Always watching, always thinking, with a mind that would not rest.”

“It must be difficult,” the mother said, “to leave the children you have cared for.”

Effie, looking down upon the baby, started rocking gently in her chair. “They have their own lives, in the end. They grow, and they forget.”

Mr. MacPherson, Mary thought, had not forgotten. She was watching him when Effie began singing softly to the baby in their Highland language, and she saw his eyelids close for just a second as though he’d had something pain him from within, and Mary wondered whether his own mother had perhaps once sung him that same lullaby.

But when the song had finished and she said—in English, so he’d be included in the conversation—“That was very pretty,” he surprised her more than he had ever done.

He smiled.

As smiles went, it was but slight and did not show his teeth, but it did carve a line much like a dimple down his cheek and made his face look younger. “That,” he told her, “was the ‘Griogal Cridhe,’ a widow’s lament about seeing her husband beheaded.”

Mary was still too surprised by that smile to respond, but it didn’t keep Thomson from commenting, also in English, “And this is the sort of thing mothers will sing to their children, then, up in the Highlands? To teach them that life’s full of treachery?”

Shrugging, MacPherson said, “Or where to seek their revenge.”

Effie, still rocking the baby, directed her words to the Scotsman. “Shall I sing a song better matched to your mood, then?”

The shadow of the smile still lingered on his lips as he returned the older woman’s gaze, his own more of a dare, thought Mary, than an invitation.

But when Effie started singing this time, nothing of the smile survived. MacPherson sat in silence with his gaze cast downward, fixed upon the hard edge of the table, and when Effie’s voice had sung the final note he looked at her, and Mary thought she saw within his eyes the lost and missing things that Effie had been speaking of. Or rather, she could see the hollow places they had left behind.

He stood, and without speaking, went outside.

Soon after that they heard the steady striking of an ax blade chopping wood, and Thomson, attempting to lighten the mood, said to Effie, “Another beheading song, was it?”

The baby had fallen asleep now, and Effie replied in soft tones, “The lament of a warrior for his dead comrades and those whom he loved who lie cold in the ground and unable to comfort his wounds while he wanders alone and unloved.
Fada
atà mise an déidh chàich
, it begins, and in English the verse would be: ‘I have lived too long after the others, and the world yet troubles me, and there are none left to talk to,’” she said, “‘of the lives we once had, in the time before.’”

The past, Mary thought, was itself a great predator, chasing you always behind in a tireless pursuit so you ran from it, or lying ever in wait for you, ready to sink its sharp teeth in the spots where it knew you were weakest.

She tried to stay sociable out of regard for their host and his wife, who were both lovely people with kind and good hearts and seemed honestly glad to have been thus imposed upon, having four new mouths to feed and their household disrupted, because it had brought them new company.

Indeed they were so generous and so keen to please that Thomson had to do no more than mention his enjoyment of warmed wine for them to hang a pot upon the hearth and start to heat some. But when all the cups were handed round and their host ladled out one more and said, “I will just take this to your man, for it is cold outside and he is doing all my work,” then Mary without thinking set her own cup down and rose and said, “I’ll take it to him.”