I nodded. “I see.” And I did see. The girl in that shadow court had her own shape, now. Her own voice, which I could restore to her.
I let my gaze travel over the green of the Common to where a quaint pub stood at one of the far corners, with a tall Christmas tree set up in front of it, cheerful in tinsel and lights, a reminder that Christmas itself was a week and a half away. Christmas, that time of new hope born of winter, when someone like Alistair Scott might imagine it possible to share that rebirth himself.
Second chances, I thought, as my gaze shifted slightly to Hector, the dog who’d been branded as useless but rescued because one man firmly believed that a life shouldn’t be cast aside. And although I had never seen Calum MacCrae, much less met him, I suddenly very much wanted to see his works knocked off the bestseller lists by this new book of Alistair Scott’s.
I asked, “When would you need me to go to Chatou?”
“Well, as soon as you feel you could—”
“Boxing Day. Would that be soon enough?”
With that decided, my cousin said, “Brilliant.” She looked at the pub, too. “I’m actually starting to feel a bit cold…”
“Aye, this standing around isn’t good for a body.” And whistling to Hector, the Scotsman said cheerfully, “Let’s have a walk in the woods.”
Chapter 3
Another sport is drawing near: it is like the dark rolling of that wave on the coast.
—Macpherson, “Fingal,” Book One
Chanteloup-les-Vignes
January 14, 1732
It seemed on that morning to Mary Dundas that the new year intended to go on exactly the same as the last, bringing all the excitement, surprise, and adventure she’d come to expect in her twenty-one years: namely, none.
She had risen at five, as she always did, for her uncle held to the advice of the physicians quoted in the work of Rabelais: “To rise at five, to dine at nine, to sup at five, to sleep at nine,” and so he’d run his household for as long as she’d been part of it.
With the help of the maid she had dressed with her cousin Colette, as she always did, and they had talked, not of what they would actually do on that day, but of what might occur should the wind ever suddenly change its direction and blow in their favor. Perhaps then the handsome Chevalier de Vilbray who’d taken the nearby château for the hunting last autumn and stayed over Christmas would, feeling a need for companionship, come by to visit. Or maybe their other near neighbors were even now planning that musical evening they’d promised to host.
But at breakfast, while Mary had eaten her butter and bread and fresh milk, as she always did, no invitations had come to enliven the day and no handsome young nobles had called at the door, and here she was, sitting as usual in the salon in her chair by the window with Frisque, her dog, curled on her lap, and her other two cousins, Gaspard and Jacques, idly debating some trivial point about bridges and which was the longest, and Mary felt certain that anything, anything, would be a blessed relief.
“Does it honestly matter?” she asked Gaspard. “Surely each bridge is as long as it needs to be, and serves its purpose as well as the others.”
Gaspard, who was four years her junior, his dark hair just recently clipped to allow for the white-powdered wig with its short sides and black-ribboned queue that he thought made him look much more serious, turned now and spoiled the effect with a grin. “That is so like you English, to judge such an intricate thing as a bridge by its function, and no other measure.”
“How else would one measure a bridge, but by whether it does what you built it to do?” Mary countered. “And I am not English.”
“Half English, then.”
Colette, between them, looked up from her sewing and shook her head, setting her bright curls to dancing. “No, no, she is right. Uncle Guillaume is Scottish, not English.”
Gaspard blew a sharp puff of air to declare the distinction irrelevant. “What does it matter which nation she claims?”
He looked so very much the part of the young gallant then that Mary had to take great pains to hide her smile, for she was far too fond of him to wish to wound his pride. Instead, she settled one hand on the silken hair of Frisque’s warm back and felt the lazy thump-thump of the little dog’s tail on her lap. “I claim neither,” she said. “I am happily nationless.”
Jacques, who would not be fourteen till next month but who was, without question, more thoughtful than all of them, stirred in his own chair. “You can’t be.”
“Why not?”
“No person can truly be nationless.”
Mary knew otherwise. She had been born without a nation—daughter of an exile at the French court of a foreign king who had himself no country and no crown. The fact her mother had been French gave her but partial claim to call herself the same, and she had never tried to do so. Having lived these fifteen years, since she was six, within her aunt and uncle’s house, she had adopted French as her first language and adapted to the customs and the fashions of the nation, but while everybody else called her “Marie,” in her own mind she was still “Mary,” neither Scots nor French, but falling in between.
She plainly said so to her cousins now, and Colette answered, “Silly, if you will not stand in Scotland and you will not stand in France, you will have no place left to stand but in the water that divides them.”
To which Gaspard added slyly, “Perhaps then our talk of bridges will not bore you.”