And if one was caught, the results, on both sides, could be deadly.
The levels of spying and counterintelligence had caught my interest so deeply I’d spent the past week or so reading about them, until I knew most of the spies’ and the spymasters’ names—could have probably spotted them, from their descriptions, had I been alive back then. This was just part of the way my brain processed things: nothing by half measures. Every new interest became an obsession.
But at least it meant I could contribute to this conversation over breakfast, filling in a detail that Claudine could not remember, and then going on to properly set out the full chronology of what had happened after King James moved his shadow court to Rome, and those who had been left behind had struggled in the wake of the Queen Mother’s death to keep up their community at Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
The first time Jacqui kicked my ankle I assumed she’d done it by mistake, but when she did it for a second time I realized what I was doing. I reined in my thoughts, put a check on my monologue, and was self-consciously searching for some way to back out with some shred of dignity when Jacqui smiled reassurance.
“You’re going to have me looking over my shoulder,” she told me, “with all of this talk about traitors and spies.”
“I’m sorry. I do tend to ramble on a bit.”
Across the table, Luc Sabran looked from my cousin’s face to mine. “You don’t need to apologize. Go on, I find it interesting. I didn’t know this history.”
All throughout my monologue Denise had kept herself in nearly constant motion, back and forth between the kitchen and her own seat next to Luc. She said to Jacqui now, in careful English, “While Sara is here with us she must go visit the château.”
My cousin, smiling still, said, “Sara will most likely be too busy with her work to do much touring.”
Luc shrugged and raised his coffee cup to drink. “Perhaps that is a thing for Sara to decide.”
It seemed to me he held her gaze a moment longer than he needed to. For a moment, even though I knew it was ridiculous, I almost thought I felt a trace of tension in the air between them.
Claudine smoothly cut across it with a comment aimed at me. “But yes, of course, today is Sunday and you’ve only just arrived. Perhaps you’d like to visit Saint-Germain-en-Laye?”
“Or we could maybe take a walk around Chatou?” suggested Jacqui.
All the faces turned towards me made me feel uncomfortably the center of attention, and I couldn’t give an answer because honestly I didn’t know what choice to make or whom to please or what they all expected me to say.
Luc asked, “What would you like to do?”
Direct and simple, in a tone that brought my gaze round to the perfect angles of his features, and to those blue eyes that in that moment seemed to anchor me.
I found my voice with ease then. And I looked from Luc to Claudine and I said in total honesty, “I’d like to get to work.”
Chapter 7
Then shall the traveler come…
—Macpherson, “Temora,” Book Two
Chatou
January 23, 1732
The house where they had passed the night was large and grand with many rooms, yet Mary had awakened feeling restless. She had taken Frisque outdoors but it had been too cold to stay there, and since Nicolas seemed to be in no hurry to depart she had been left with little option but to find some way to pass the time within this house of strangers.
They were pleasant strangers, certainly. The master of the house, Sir Redmond Everard, had welcomed both her brother and herself on their arrival with as much warmth as if they had been his family, and had fed and entertained them all the evening with so little inconvenience that one would have thought they were expected guests. Sir Redmond was an Irishman of middle age whose educated voice held little trace of the same accent as the blacksmith’s Irish wife’s in Chanteloup-les-Vignes. It was not clear to Mary how he’d come to know her brother, but she’d gathered from their conversation they had many friends in common at the former court of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, among the exiles, though Sir Redmond had come over much more recently than most. She’d gathered, too, he had left an estate of worth behind him in Ireland, for his manners were the manners of a gentleman by birth, and all the things within his house were very fine.
She liked his drawing room the best. Not for the carpets and tapestry hangings and wainscoting, nor for the richness of furnishings—walnut-tree tables, and chairs with stuffed cushions and footstools, and even a cage with a red-breasted linnet whose twittering song had enlivened the evening while Mary and Nicolas had sat with Sir Redmond and his wife playing at cards. No, she liked the room best for its books: seven shelves of them, carefully dusted and ordered by binding and looking, to her, like a wonderland.
There had been few books in her uncle’s house: a Bible, and a book of plays by Molière that she and all her cousins had delighted in performing of an evening, with appropriate theatrics; three English sermons purchased by her uncle to help Mary practice reading in her native language, and two books by the Countess d’Aulnoy—one her famous novel of the Count of Douglas, and the other a collection of enchanting fairy tales that had delighted Mary until her Aunt Magdalene had one day found her reading them and promptly had reclaimed the book from Mary’s hands with the remark, “These are not meant for children.”
She’d obeyed her aunt, of course, until she’d reached her sixteenth birthday, when she’d judged herself to be grown-up enough to read the fairy tales. She’d learned them all by heart, and in the nighttime with her cousin Colette close beside her in the bed they shared, she would recite them and embellish them, and when she had told all the Countess d’Aulnoy’s tales she started to invent her own, of princes and forbidden love, enchanted lands and twists of fate and such romantic tragedy that often at the end of them Colette would be in tears.