A Desperate Fortune

I was finding it difficult focusing with all the movement and noise from the cabaret program combined with the sounds of the video game and the room’s conversation, so I only had half an eye on the boy as he rummaged in one of his pockets and drew out a pack of cards, but when he said, “I just need to take some of them out, first,” and Claudine asked, “Why?” I recovered my focus in time for his answer.

“Because this trick’s done with a pack like you use when you’re playing belote, when you first take out all of the cards between one and six.”

I sat more upright. I doubted that anyone noticed, because they went on with what they had been doing around me, but if all the gears in my brain had been audible, there would have been an explosion of noise that stopped everyone else in their tracks. I excused myself quietly. Crossed to the workroom.

The lines from the first journal entry of Mary Dundas leaped insistently into my view:

Supper being done we then amused ourselves at play upon the cards. There being three of us (for Lady Everard declined to play but chose instead to sit apart and so be entertained) we played the Renegado with Sir Redmond and myself aligned against my brother…

Renegado. The computer took a moment to oblige me, but eventually it told me renegado was a form of the once-popular game ombre, in which the eights, nines, and tens were removed before play, thus creating a forty-card pack.

I turned round in my chair again, seeking the small blotted numbers marked down in the margin, to make very certain they still read the same as they always had: eight, nine, and ten.

It was not just the cards on their own, I thought, feeling the warm spreading thrill of discovery. No, it was the game.

“Clever you,” I applauded the long-faceless woman who’d crafted this over a tea table so long ago. It was simple, as Mary had said, but with all the right twists to avoid being obvious. Taking my pencil in hand I began to work through the results, reading over the rules of the card game again and fine-tuning the whole thing before I applied what I’d learned to the first line that Mary had written in cipher. The patterns made sense now, and words started shaping themselves from the numbers.

I nearly missed hearing the knock at my door.

It was open, and Luc had stepped into the room by the time I looked up. He was wearing his hat with the mistletoe stuck to the brim. From across in the salon behind him I heard a man singing along to the musical strains of the cancan. “It’s midnight,” said Luc. “Happy New Year.”

I met the blue of his gaze with a smile that felt brilliant from my side. “I’ve got it!” I told him. “They did it with playing cards, and they had played renegado, so they took out all of the eights, nines, and tens, and each player’s dealt nine cards to start with, so that means you have to begin with the ninth letter, and now I’ve got the whole key to the cipher. I’ve got it!”

He looked at me a moment, as though something in my features held him fascinated, then he left the doorway and came forward in two strides and leaned across the desk and bending down, he kissed me. It was not the same as when I’d kissed him before dinner in the salon. This was warmer, lasted longer, and the pressure of it changed and deepened, lingering as he drew back to smile into my eyes.

“Come have champagne. We’ll celebrate,” he said.

I heard my cousin’s warning voice flash briefly through my mind: “That’s not a rabbit hole you want to tumble down. Don’t get involved.” And then I pushed that voice aside and took the hand that Luc was holding out.

“All right,” I said.

I left my workbook on the desk, where the first words of Mary’s secret diary lay reclaimed from silence, written out in plain text for the world to read:

At three o’clock, my brother came to fetch me with the news that I was wanted…

Chapter 12

They best succeed who dare.

—Macpherson, “Fingal,” Book Three

Chatou

January 23, 1732

Frisque had fallen asleep. Mary might have done likewise, for dinner had been a large meal and a full hour after they’d finished, her body was still wanting time to digest it. And now she’d been called to this room where the air was uncommonly warm from the fierce fire Sir Redmond kept stirring to life with his poker and tongs, and the ponderous tick of a longcase clock’s pendulum lulled her with every swing closer to slumber. What saved her from falling asleep was the fact that the chairs in this small upstairs chamber were favored with cushions as firm as their rush-bottomed seats, and while Frisque had the softness of Mary’s own lap and the satiny folds of her skirts to surround him in comfort, she was forced to sit upright or risk an undignified fall to the hearth rug.

Her brother had taken a seat in the armchair beside her and stretched out his boots to the fender, and now with a long sigh Sir Redmond sat too, on her other side. Taking a bright silver snuffbox from one of his pockets, he followed her gaze to the two portraits hanging in narrow gold frames just above the dark wood of the mantelpiece.

“Very good likenesses, wouldn’t you say?” he asked Mary.

She couldn’t be sure, since she recognized neither the boy nor the girl in the portraits. She wouldn’t have guessed at their ages—they looked to be no longer children, exactly, and yet not quite adults. The girl, with her lovely large eyes and her delicate features and curling brown hair crowned with flowers, gazed straight from the canvas at Mary and smiled. She was holding more flowers in one of her ladylike hands, and her richly blue gown was embroidered in gold with a light fall of lace at the edge of her sleeves. The boy, who had similar features, was looking away with one hand on his hip, with a chest piece of armor strapped over a red coat with gold braid and buttons. His hair was brown too, though in his case the long fall of curls was more likely a gentleman’s periwig much like the ones Mary’s father had made, in the style men had worn at the time of her birth.