“If I am meant to be your wife, I ought to know your Christian name. What is it?”
“Hugh.”
It fit him well, she thought. A simple name, and solid: Hugh MacPherson.
“And how many languages do you speak?”
There was a pause, and his tone held a thread of indulgence that seemed to acknowledge the reason she’d asked. “Counting English? Four.”
“So, French, English, Spanish, and…what do you call your own language?”
“The Gaelic.”
“The Gaelic,” she echoed. “And nothing else?”
“Not really. No.”
Mary let that one pass. “And how did you learn to fix timepieces?”
Once more the pause, and then, “It was my trade.”
Surprised by that, she turned her head towards him even though she could not see him in the dark. “You were a clock maker?”
“A watchmaker’s apprentice.”
“Truly?”
“Aye.”
Her first thought was to ask him what had happened, why he hadn’t carried on to become master of that trade, but she was checked by her remembrance that the late rebellion more than sixteen years ago had happened when MacPherson would have been about the age of an apprentice. She’d been sheltered, first at Saint-Germain-en-Laye and then at Chanteloup-les-Vignes, as were many of the second generation exiles who lived insulated from the brutal fighting in their homeland, but MacPherson, with the war in Scotland, clearly had been made too soon a man, as Effie had observed, and Mary wondered what things had been lost to him because of it.
Instead she asked, after a pause of her own, “Why did you not take the letter away from me?”
“What letter?”
“You know what letter. The one I intended to post from Lyon.”
If a silence could shrug, Mary thought, this one did. He told her simply, “Who was I to come between yourself and the Chevalier de Vilbray?”
She wasn’t fooled. With his sharpness of mind, he would easily have figured out, from what she’d said while he was present, what she had been planning. And from his dry voice, she knew he had not been fooled by all her stories about the chevalier. So what she said next was a matter of fact to them both: “You knew I meant to leave.”
When no reply came, Mary asked, “Would you have stopped me, for fear I’d expose Mr. Thomson? Or would you have let me go?”
“Which is the answer that makes ye stop talking?”
“I believe you would have kept me from leaving. I think you’d have killed me,” she said, “if you’d needed to. Wouldn’t you?”
The silence lasted so long this time Mary thought for certain he had gone to sleep. But then she heard him move, his voice less clear as though he’d rolled to face away from her. “The letter’s burnt, and I’ve not killed ye. Let the past be past.”
An easy thing to say, thought Mary. Far less easy to accomplish.
But she tried, and she was drifting with the peaceful, lulling rocking of the ship when one last question struck her.
“Hugh?” she asked him, softly. “What’s a broken man?”
No answer came except his steady breathing; but she had the sense that he, like her, was not yet sleeping, only lying silently and staring at the dark.
Chapter 35
“Come thou,” I said, “from the roar of ocean, thou rider of the storm. Partake the feast within my hall. It is the house of strangers.”
—Macpherson, “Fingal,” Book Three
The Mediterranean
April 1, 1732
She counted twelve knives at the table. Eight pistols. A sword at the hip of each seated man; two on MacPherson, which made five in all. And the wickedly pointed gilt handle of the heavy walking stick held by the ship’s first mate could have quite easily cracked a man’s skull, so the whole party gathered for dinner looked dangerous.
Mary smiled faintly as she raised her cup of wine, thinking of her brother Nicolas telling her back in Chatou there was no danger in her assignment, and that he would never consent to a scheme that would place her in harm’s way. And yet, here she was, having traveled these past weeks from Paris with danger her constant companion, and sitting down now to a meal with a pirate.
“Pirate hunter,” was Captain del Rio’s correction of Thomson’s remark as they started their first course, a rich fish stew served with brown bread. “It is true, in my younger days I was more reckless, maybe less discriminating in the ships I took for prizes, but my government like yours has learned there’s nothing better than a thief to trap another thief, and so now I protect the flota—all our ships that cross together every year from the Americas—and in the other seasons I hunt the corsairs of the Barbary Coast. They are pirates,” he added, and pointed with his knife at Thomson to emphasize. “It’s a good thing you are with me, they do not dare to attack the Princesa Maria.”
He’d been very gracious, inviting a man who he thought was a servant to join them at table, but Mary had already noticed that Captain del Rio did not keep to social conventions. When she’d asked him earlier if Emiliana—the pretty young woman who’d been so attentive to Effie—was his wife, he’d grinned and said, “Yes, all right. Why not? My wife.” And the young woman sat near the top of the table now, at his left hand, although she wore no ring on her own.
Mary, realizing she herself had no ring either, tried keeping her hand out of sight, finding frequent occasion to feed scraps to Frisque, who lay under her chair, but the captain had sharp eyes. “Your husband does not like to part with his money, I see, Mrs. Symonds. He gave you no wedding ring.”