“What makes you think I haven’t told him?”
“Have you?”
Jacqui hesitated. “No.”
“There you are, then. Just as well. He can decide if it’s of any use to him when he’s had time to read it. If it isn’t, he won’t have to pay me anything.” I took note of the time on my computer screen and said, “I have to finish up here. Promise me you’ll bring him over. Those exact words.”
Jacqui sighed. “I promise I’ll bring Alistair to Chatou just as soon as it can be arranged. All right?”
“This weekend would be nice.”
“I’ll do my best.” When I’d accepted that, she asked, “So, how does Mary’s diary end?”
“It doesn’t,” I replied. “It doesn’t end.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You can see it for yourself,” I said, “this weekend.”
Ringing off, I gave my concentration back to the computer, typing in the final lines of what I had transcribed this morning:
On the 15th after breakfast Captain Hay did call upon us with the message Mr. Thomson wanted me to visit him.
Which, it appeared, was the first thing of any real note that had happened since Mary had seen the king. She’d given a full and colorful account of that, down to a detailed description of what they’d all worn to the palace, but afterwards her entries had grown sparser, and more dull.
Her days seemed duller still, and while she tried to keep herself amused by telling stories to her fellow guests at the hotel at mealtimes, from what I could tell they were the old tales she had told of the Chevalier de Vilbray, and not her newer, more original creations. She referred to them, but did not write them down.
A week before this final entry, on May 9, she’d written:
So at dinner told the story of the storm, which was well liked by all, and Effie later said to me in private she believes if the chevalier ever comes to Rome he will be most amazed to find himself so celebrated here for his adventures. Her remark did make me smile, which pleased her, for she holds I am become too melancholy. When I answered that it was a melancholy thing to wait so long at someone else’s whim, she gently did remind me that had been her whole life’s lot, and that she meant to wait upon me longer yet, and stay with me as long as she was wanted, which I told her would be always. I am glad to have her with me, but I count it still a hard thing that we are not free in life to choose our road, for Hugh must go wherever the Earl Marischal would have him go, and I must go where I am sent.
And there, I thought, was Mary’s problem written in a sentence: she no longer had MacPherson.
If she’d seen him since she’d seen the king, she’d written nothing of it, but the fact that he had gone from being “Mr. M—” to being “Hugh” since they had shared the cabin on the pirate hunter’s ship gave me good reason to believe his absence was the root cause of her melancholy.
Captain Hay had been the only visitor she’d mentioned, and this visit—after breakfast on the morning of May 15, in Mary’s final entry of the diary—was the first time he’d brought any news that she had deemed worth noting.
He will return this afternoon and take me to the place where Mr. Thomson is confined. I cannot think why Mr. Thomson would desire to see me, nor am I assured what he might say to me should be believed. Each time he has spoken of coming abroad he has altered the facts in small ways yet without seeming less than sincere. In truth he is more a chimera than I am, and I know not whether to count him a friend or a villain. In truth there is but one man in the whole of Rome whose honor I am certain of, whose friendship I have come now to rely upon, and if it were my choice to make I would lay all my heart before him and refuse to leave his side. My father said, we do not always get the things we want, and he was right; for though my aunt once reassured me I would always have a choice, if there is one before me now I do confess I cannot see it, so instead I must—
And that was where the diary ended.
I would never know what Mary had felt she must do, or what I would have done in her predicament, but where she had not had a choice, I knew I had a simple one.
I made it now.
I read the time again on my computer, switched it off, and stood, decidedly.
“I won’t need lunch,” I told Denise as I passed through the kitchen on my way to the back door. “I’m going out.”
“All right, then. See you later. Mind the cat,” she warned.
Diablo had been lying like an obstacle outside the door. He walked across the garden with me, weaving round my legs, but when we reached the door within the wall, I aimed him back towards the kitchen. “Go on, then. Go home,” I told him, and because I thought that good advice, I carried on into the lane myself and ducked beneath the low-arched tree branch, climbed the few steps of Luc’s porch, and rang the bell.
The door swung open right away. He had been in the entry hall, and waiting.
“Hi,” he said.
I looked at him and understood what Mary had been feeling when she wrote: I would lay all my heart before him and refuse to leave his side.
“I’d like to go to Paris now,” I said. “I’d like to meet your brother.”
Luc stood looking down at me a moment, then he kissed me very gently, almost carefully, and straightened with a smile that made the whole world disappear except the two of us. “OK.”
Chapter 39
My cousin didn’t try to catch the bride’s bouquet. She knew me well enough to know I wouldn’t try to throw it to her, either.