A Desperate Fortune (40 page)

“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 walked, 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.

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 simply 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.

Then they’d come over the last of the hills and found…nothing.

A ruin.

A hollow of stones where the cottage had been, partly tumbled and blackened by fire, and the wind blowing lonely and weeping across the scarred earth.

The earl said in a somber tone, “I’m told MacPherson said nothing. Did nothing. He stood and he looked, that was all.”

For what else could he do, Mary wondered, when all of his memories and hopes had been struck from the place where they ought to have been? When the light in the window that beckoned him home had been naught but a false fire that died in the darkness? She saw him again standing out in the night at the farmhouse near Maisonneuve, chopping at wood as though killing the demons that Effie’s sad Highland lament had released, the song of the warrior who had outlived all his loved ones and had none left now who could comfort him.
Which
way
, she’d asked him that night,
is
your
home
from
here?
And he had looked to the stars and had pointed the way.
Do
you
miss
it?
she’d asked. And she understood now why he’d answered,
There’s nothing to miss
.

The earl told her, “The
saighdearan
dearg
—that’s what they call them in the Highland language. The red-coated soldiers, the government soldiers, not all of them English unfortunately. In the wake of the Fifteen, they punished those men who’d come out for the king.”

Little knowing or caring that Hugh’s father lay dead already at Preston, the red-coated soldiers had burnt both his home and his livelihood, setting the loom ablaze, and finding no men to punish they’d turned to the women and…and…

Mary could not imagine the terror and pain that Hugh’s mother and sister had suffered. Nor what he’d suffered in learning their fate, knowing he had not been there to shield and protect them.

Again a small piece of the puzzle that was Hugh MacPherson fell into its place, and she knew why he’d stepped in where others might not have, to safeguard the honor of one who had none to defend it, that night in the yard of the inn at Valence.

“He carried but two things away from his old home,” the earl said. “A piece of the wood, not yet burnt, from the loom of his father, and part of the blade of the sword that was left for his mother to use to defend herself if need be, that he found broken and left in the dirt. You’ll have seen both these things if you’ve spent any time with him.”

Mary knew where. He had fashioned them into the dagger—the dirk—that he wore at his belt. The wood-handled dirk that he used when he killed to protect those he guarded. The blade that he touched to his lips when he swore an unbreakable oath.

Mary nodded and looked away, seeing the golden light scattered like small shattered dreams on the river they strolled beside. She’d asked Hugh on del Rio’s ship how he had made the journey from a man who liked to fix things to a man who killed. And he had fallen silent and his mouth had twisted in the smile that was not like a smile, and he had told her:
Step
by
step
.

And walking now beside the Tiber while the earl continued telling her the story of that summer, Mary pictured in her mind the steady striding steps Hugh would have taken while he was half helping and half carrying the earl’s ill brother through the rugged Highlands, every one of those steps taking him a little farther from the man he might have been, and leading him along the path to what he would become.

He got the earl’s brother to safety and a ship across the Channel, and the three men meeting up in the Low Countries had then found their way again to Spain. For nearly nine years after that, Hugh guarded the earl’s brother through his various adventures in the Spanish service, into France and out of it, and all through the five-month-long siege of Gibraltar, until the earl’s brother, on finding that being a Protestant stood in his way of advancing his rank, finally went into Russia to join the service of the empress there.

“It is not an easy thing, gaining admittance to Russia,” the earl said. “The invitation sent to Jemmy was for him alone, and so MacPherson could not follow.”

Since then, these past few years, Hugh had been serving the Earl Marischal, loaned out upon occasion to his friend the Duke of Ormonde, who at length had heard from Paris that a trusted man was needed there to guard the warehouse keeper of the Charitable Corporation.

“And from there,” the earl said, “I believe your knowledge of MacPherson’s actions will be fuller than my own.”

They walked a little ways in silence. Then the earl remarked, in tones more casual, “He’d kill me if he knew that I had told you this.”

She glanced at him. “Why did you tell me?”

“I could say, because you asked me to,” he speculated. “Or because I thought that you should know what manner of a man had brought you here from Paris, though I rather think you know already, do you not?”

She told him, simply, “Yes.”

“Then I could say I told you of MacPherson’s life because he would not tell you it himself. He did not tell
me
most of it, I learned it secondhand and sometimes even that was difficult. He is a very pri—”

“Private man,” she finished for him. “Yes, I know.”

She felt his gaze upon her face but kept her own steadfastly on the river and the dancing play of light.

“Then let us say,” the earl said finally, “that I told you what I did because he would not kill a sparrow.”

Mary did not know if the Earl Marischal had heard tell of her story of the huntsman, or if he had somehow guessed at her connection to Hugh’s unexpected show of mercy, and the earl did not choose to enlighten her on that count for already he had moved on to a newer subject.

“But I’m meant to be showing you some of the sights of Rome,” he reminded her.

They had by this time come round a long bend of the river and were now approaching a small island set in the Tiber, attached by an ancient arched bridge to the shore.

“There’s a bridge on the far side to match it,” the earl said. “The island itself was shaped into the form of a ship, with this end of it here as the stern, and the bridges at each side are set as its oars, which itself is a pretty arrangement.”

There were several buildings clustered on the island—a church, he pointed out to her, and a hospital, warm plastered walls and uneven tiled roofs in a picturesque huddle, but Mary admired the bridge most of all. It was not very wide, and curved up and across in a gentle arc. Built in the time of the Caesars, its softly red bricks showed the signs of their age, but the parapet where she was leaning felt very strong. Doing his part as her guide, the earl showed her the twin pillars set on the parapets, one very near to the place where she leaned—a squared stump of pale marble with faces set round it, their features now worn by the years and the weather.

“These were not set here when the bridge was first built, but some few hundred years ago. I have been told they are meant to show Janus.”

The god of the Romans who stood at the gates with one face always turned to the future, and one to the past.

“’Tis an emblem well fitted for Rome,” said the earl, “for although it is beautiful here, it seems always some part of this city must stand as a monument to what has already passed.” The earl moved to lean on the parapet next to her, looking as Mary did down at the river that flowed swiftly under the arches beneath them and folded itself on the rocks into two white-laced currents that sent up a sound like the roar of the sea.

Mary knew what he meant. She felt it herself here, the strange juxtaposition of ruins and life, of things all at once moving and stuck in their place, like this oar of a bridge and the ship of an island beside them that held but the shape of those things and would never go anywhere, held fast forever in bedrock and mud.

“’Tis an emblem as well for the court of our king, at the moment.” The earl spoke more gravely, and when she glanced over he showed her a half smile. “I always have and always will do what I can to serve King James, but you will find it is an open secret here that I do not approve of his reliance on Lord Dunbar, and I will not stay where such counsels prevail as cannot frankly be told to an honest man; where none but mean servile souls are welcome, and those who have spirit are forced to be silent.”

She focused on one part of that speech alone. “You are leaving?”

“We are. I have written by this last post to my friend the Duke of Ormonde, to help us get away with the least noise, so as not to do hurt to the cause nor the king. As soon as it is possible, I hope before this month is out, MacPherson and I will return to Spain.”

Her heart became a heavy weight that dropped a fraction lower in her chest and pressed against her ribs until it caused her pain to breathe. She raised a hand to shade her eyes, although the sun by this time was behind them, sinking ever lower, and deliberately she looked ahead and asked, “What is that bridge?”

It was not properly a bridge, for it did not go all the way across the river, having fallen at its middle and collapsed so that it only touched the farther bank.