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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