But in front of the king, she’d be able to be her own self.
Effie told her, “Now mind what I telt ye, about how to pay him your honors, and how ye should speak. Let me see how ye curtsy.”
For Mary, the long years rolled suddenly backwards and just for a moment she felt a small girl again. Show me your curtsy, a woman’s voice spoke in her mind from a great distance, followed by praise. There’s a clever wee lassie.
She curtsied.
It satisfied Effie, who turned to rummage in the bottom of their portmanteau, and drew out something wrapped within a handkerchief. “I’ve had this,” she remarked, “since I was your age, when I lived at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which makes it near as ancient as that fountain ye keep staring at outside. So have a care when ye first use it or the dust might make ye sneeze.”
She took the lace fan Effie handed to her, and the voice stirred for a second time, in gentle warning: Have a care, ye’ll raise the dust and make your mother cough.
She had to look away from Effie; fight the siren pull of shared experience. I used to live at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, she longed to say. My father served the king there as a wig maker. Perhaps you knew him…? But she’d grown too good at keeping secrets. She said nothing.
Till she spread the fan to open it, releasing a familiar scent that made her briefly close her eyes.
“What ails ye?”
“Nothing.” Mary shook her head. “It’s…lavender. My mother smelled of lavender.”
The curtains lifted on a breeze that carried to her ears the lovely dancing sound of water in the fountain at the heart of the piazza, its continual cascades forever falling to be gathered and borne upwards once again in sparkling mimicry of life.
The older woman reached a gentle hand to rearrange a curl of hair so it trailed artfully along the line of Mary’s neck. “Your memory’s playing tricks with ye. Your mother, rest her soul, used naught but rosewater. The lavender was mine.”
Mary stood silently a moment, not quite certain she had heard those few words properly, and then her eyes came open and she turned to meet the Highland woman’s gaze. “You were my nurse?”
A pause, as though a final threshold waited to be crossed, and one that seemingly could not be crossed with words, because instead of saying anything in answer, Effie nodded.
Mary’s eyes began to fill. “Oh, Effie. That is why you came? Because you…oh—” She broke off, bringing one hand quickly to her mouth in sudden pain. “And I forgot you! Effie, how could I forget you?” And uncaring of propriety, she flung herself at Effie in the same impulsive way she knew she must have done in childhood, when she had been hurt and wanted comfort.
Effie’s own arms folded round her, sturdy and yet tender, and she stood there rocking Mary as she might have soothed a baby.
Mary, clinging to the older woman, whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
“Hush, now. Hush, there’s nae harm done. Of course ye’d not remember me, ye were a wee small thing. I never thought that ye’d remember me.”
“Then why?” asked Mary. “Effie, this was such an awful journey for you. Why would you agree to it, if I could not—?”
“Because,” said Effie, “when your brother found me—and that was no easy thing for him to do—and when he telt me he was sending ye to Paris and had need of one to watch ye, I knew well enough whose hand it was that sent him there.” She laid her hand on Mary’s hair. “God always gives us people for a reason, lass. He takes them from us too, but when He puts them in our path and gives them back to us again, we would be great fools not to realize that He means us to belong to them.”
* * *
She met Hugh’s eyes again across the confines of the coach and tried to smile, but could not. Partly because she had just now realized why the frost blue color of her gown had drawn her so compellingly—because it was the same shade as his eyes.
He wore new clothes as well, and they were like no clothes she had seen a man wear. His shirt and stock and cuffs were as they’d always been, but over them in place of his usual long coat he wore a short gray one with sleeves slashed to show strips of darkly green velvet, and one sword belt slung over that, from which his fine Scottish broadsword was hanging. And in place of a gentleman’s breeches he wore the Highland garment made of checkered wool in green shot through with white and red and gold, that had been wrapped and belted so it covered him from waist to knees and wound up over his left shoulder like a folded cloak, to freely fall and swing behind. His Highland dagger in its sheath hung at the front edge of his belt, as did a hanging pocket, and his legs to just below his knees were cased in stockings of a different checkered pattern, with his feet in buckled shoes.
If she had read those clothes described on paper she’d have thought that any man who wore them must look feminine, but Hugh MacPherson sitting with his strong legs bare looked more a man than Mr. Thomson did in proper breeches.
There was nowhere else to safely turn her gaze but to the lace fan she held folded in her hands. She would have hoped to see the streets through which they rattled and she had so wished to have a view of the king’s palace, having overheard it being highly praised by an Irish priest at their hotel who’d been talking at breakfast last week to another guest, one of his countrymen.
“I do confess,” so the priest had admitted, “’tis nowhere so impressive as his French palace at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, being not set apart in its own grounds or park, and the building itself is not nearly as large, but it yet has a fine situation, and shares the same Square of the Holy Apostles with the palace of that noble family of Colonna who are cousins to our king.” Moreover, so the priest had said, whatever the king’s palace here in Rome lacked in its outward beauty, it was very fine within. “There’s a grand courtyard and an even grander staircase, and the Chapel Royal where His Holiness our last pope did baptize the younger of the little princes. You should see it if you’re able,” he’d advised the other Irishman. “I’m told there are yet many people daily, even Englishmen, who come to pay their honors to the king.”