A Desperate Fortune Read Online Free PDF

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.”
    A swish of skirts and briskly clicking heels announced the entrance of his mother, Mary’s aunt, who asked them, “Which of you can possibly be bored on such a morning?” But she knew. Her smiling eyes went straight to Mary’s. “You have been too long indoors, I think. Come, bring Frisque. He’s half asleep, as well. We’ll take a walk together.”
    “Now? Outside?”
    “Where else?” Aunt Magdalene, once having set her mind to something, could be like a plow horse walking in a furrow—difficult to turn. And to be truthful, Mary had no great objection to a walk. If not adventurous, at least it was a welcome change of scene.
    She fetched her cloak and muff and changed her slippers for the heavy shoes that better warmed her feet while she was walking, and with Frisque at her heels she trailed after her aunt down the corridor and out the back door.
    Outside, the snow lay soft and thick beneath the sleeping vines that climbed the hill behind the line of houses. Come the spring, the sun would bring those vines to life. The vines, in turn, would bring forth vibrant clusters of the little grapes that through the summer and the autumn would enliven the whole village, giving industry and purpose to the villagers who worked towards the harvest and production of the wine that had, for centuries, provided them a living. But for now, the vines lay dormant. And they waited.
    Mary, watching Frisque circle and sniff round those leafless vines, felt once again the stir of restlessness and discontent within her breast, and fought to push it down again before her aunt could notice any change in her expression. There was little, she had learned, that could escape the keenly empathetic eye of her Aunt Magdalene.
    They walked a little distance without speaking. Mary liked the silence, and the frosted air that smelled of wood smoke, and the view that spread and grew as they climbed higher. She could see, now, clear across the tiled rooftops of their neighbors’ houses, clear past the tall spire of the pale stone church of Saint-Roch with its two great bells, across the trees that hid the roofs of the next village, Andrésy, and over the thin curving ribbon of the River Seine, to the dark forest on the shore beyond: the woods of Saint-Germain.
    “Marie, my dear,” her aunt said—using, as she always did, the French form of her niece’s name, “how much do you remember of your life before you came to us?”
    The question caught her unprepared. Surprised, she tried to gather up her thoughts and focused harder on the dark mass of the forest, at the farthest edge of which she knew, although she could not see it, stood the great Château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye—the royal castle in whose shadow she herself had been baptized.
    She said, in honesty, “I have few memories.”
    Those she had retained were like a web of lace, connected in a loose way but with gaps and holes and spaces, and so frail and insubstantial she was never sure how safe they were to trust.
    Her mother’s face had long since faded from her mind and been supplanted by the image in the portrait hanging here in the salon that showed her