Madame Roy observed that the dog did not look old, and Mary replied, “He is nine. He was a great pet of our neighbors’ children, but last winter they fell very ill of…very ill. Two children died, as did their father.”
“A most grievous loss. What was the illness?”
Mary hesitated briefly. “It was smallpox.”
Madame Roy, who very clearly from the scars upon her own face had an intimate acquaintance with that illness, made no comment in reply but only nodded.
Mary told her, “After that, the mother took the three surviving children and went home to her own people, where there was no room to keep the dog.”
“No room?” The older woman looked at Frisque. “But he’s so very small.”
“Some people,” Mary said, and could not keep from glancing at the Scotsman walking silently and unaware in front of her, not understanding what she said in French, “think only of the trouble that an animal will bring them, and they do not want the burden.” Which was true enough in his case. He had told her at the first she could not bring the dog. She looked away, recalling how the little dog had whimpered when her neighbors had gone off without him, and how desolate he’d been without the children. Like her father when he’d left her, none of them had looked behind—no faces peering from the windows of the coach for one last glimpse of their abandoned playmate—and when Frisque had whined and barked to call them back, it had fair broken Mary’s heart and raised her own pain from that place where she had long since sought to bury it.
We do not always get the things we want.
She knew her father’s words were true, and yet she pushed them down again into that grave where she’d now also buried all her brother’s promises.
“To people such as those,” she said, in hopes her words concealed the hurt that lay beneath them, “small things are the easiest to leave behind.”
They’d nearly reached the level of the citadel, a great imposing fortress which they did not try to enter but instead, upon MacPherson’s lead, ceased walking and upon a level place turned round to contemplate the view they now commanded—roofs and steeples huddled safe within the old town’s walls beneath them, and the gate they had come in by, and the curving width of river with its bridges and small island, and the plain that stretched beyond that to the distant row of ridges capped with white.
After a moment, Thomson asked, “What lies beyond those hills?”
The Scotsman answered him, “Geneva. And the Alps.”
“And where is Lyon?”
Nodding to the right, along the river’s course, MacPherson told him, “There.”
“Is there another way to travel there from here except by water?”
“Aye, but if he’s close upon our heels it matters little how we go.”
“So then the trick of it,” said Thomson, “is to make quite sure he’s not upon our heels.” He gave some thought to this, and then remarked, “If you’d brought more whisky I’d have said we ought to get him drunk enough that he would lie abed too late and miss our departure in the morning, but I doubt we could at any rate persuade him not to be suspicious of a friendly drink when we are none of us too friendly with him. Nor could he be tricked into a drinking contest unless we could tempt him with a wager—and apart from my own head upon a platter I have nothing I can wager that he’d want enough to set aside his caution.”
MacPherson’s gaze stayed level on the distant line of mountains as he told them, very sure, “I do.”
* * *
“One cannot fault the food in France,” said Stevens, as he pushed his plate away from him. “And this, although no rival for our English gin, is very good indeed. What did you call it?”
At his side, the merchant named the liquor: “marc,” although in proper form the c stayed silent so it came out simply “mar.”
It was made, Mary knew, by fermenting, distilling, and aging the leftover skins, seeds, and pulp of the grapes after they had been pressed to make wine, and her uncle had prized it, but Mary did not like the taste of marc. It was too strong. When Thomson had requested and received a bottle of it from the landlord for their table, she’d declined the offer of a cup and kept instead to the plain wine they had been served with supper.
“Sometimes it is not so good,” the merchant said, “but this, the Marc de Bourgogne—or of Burgundy, as you would say—it is the very best.”
“A good end,” Stevens praised it, “to a good meal.” He drank long and studied Mary boldly while he did so.
She was now the only woman at the table, since the other two young ladies had been hastened by their mother to excuse themselves the moment that their plates were empty, pleading the long journey and tomorrow’s early start as explanations for their quick retreat upstairs, though Mary knew it had been Stevens’s sly persistence in attempting to lay hands upon the elder of the sisters in improper ways beneath the table that had spurred the mother into taking such an action. Madame Roy had taken supper in her room again, as had become her habit of an evening on this journey, and was up there now attending to the dog.
Mary would have much preferred to have been upstairs as well, for of the men within this room there was not one she wanted to spend time with, Thomson having lost her trust, MacPherson having earned her fear, the merchant being a great bore and an uncaring master to his servant, who had taken early to his own bed from the cough he had developed in his days of being set to travel outside on the diligence, exposed to all the worst of winter’s wind and weather; and lastly Mr. Stevens, being the embodiment of everything that Mary found unpleasant.