A Desperate Fortune Read Online Free PDF Page B

mother and Aunt Magdalene as they had looked before they’d both been married. Mary liked that portrait well, but there was little in the pale determined face and calm brown eyes of the young woman who had grown to be her mother that stirred any sense of recognition. It was not her mother’s face that she remembered, but the feel of her—the soft warmth of her arms, the firmer softness of her silken bodice over stays, the ever-present tickle of the ruffled lace that edged her white chemise and brushed on Mary’s cheek and upturned nose when she was snuggling on her mother’s lap.
    And there were scents, as well—a whiff of roses, or of lavender. And later still, the scents of sickness, not so pleasant to recall. And that was all the memory of her mother that was left to her. No voice, though she’d been told her mother sang, and she imagined that her mother’s voice had been much like Aunt Magdalene’s, with warm and pleasant tones that seemed to always be prepared to open easily to laughter.
    Of her brothers and her father she remembered something more, but even then, their forms and features had long blurred to indistinction, and their words and voices were reduced to whispers in a language she now rarely used herself, despite her uncle’s stoic efforts to make sure she did not lose her English. “Any foreign language,” so Uncle Jacques had told her, “is an asset in this world. It will expand your opportunities.”
    He’d bought her English books, and when the local blacksmith had gone off to Amsterdam and come home with an Irish wife, then Uncle Jacques had happily employed her as a tutor, not to Mary on her own but all the children. Only Mary, though, who’d spoken English for her first six years of life, had truly profited from this arrangement. Colette, Mary’s cousin, had no ear for learning languages, and both Gaspard and young Jacques had been too distracted by the fresh blond beauty of the blacksmith’s Irish wife to pay attention to their lessons.
    Still, the end result had been that Mary, though she spoke in French, could switch to English when she needed to with hardly any accent. And she could at least put meaning to the words that she recalled her father saying, when he’d brought her here to leave her for the final time.
    “Now, Mary,” he had told her, “be a good lass for your uncle and your aunt, and mind the manners you’ve been taught, and use the sense that you’ve been given, and I promise you, you’ll have a better life here than I ever could have given you.”
    At least, that’s what she thought he’d said. The years, perhaps, had rearranged his words and phrased them into a more sentimental speech within her memory, the same memory that insisted she’d replied to him, “I want to stay with you.” And that his thumb had brushed a tear from her hot cheek, and he had said, “We do not always get the things we want.”
    She did remember, clearly, that she’d cried for him and called him back, and that he had not turned; he’d walked away from her with quick, determined strides, head bent, until her aunt’s broad skirts had rustled round to block her vision as the carriage wheels had rattled down the road.
    She looked towards that same road now and squared her shoulders as her father had, and asked her aunt, “Why do you wish to know what I remember?”
    She had never known Aunt Magdalene to search for words, and yet it seemed to Mary that her aunt was doing just that, in the moment’s pause. And then her aunt remarked, “We’ve had a letter from your brother.”
    Even less expected. The surprise, this time, stopped Mary in midstep, and made her heedless of the fact that she was standing ankle-deep in snow. She had three brothers. “Which of them?”
    Aunt Magdalene said, “Nicolas. Do you remember him at all?”
    Her eldest brother. Nicolas. Broad shoulders and a pair of boots. Two hands that tossed her in the air and caught her when she came down laughing. In a