“To hunt,” she said, “is dangerous.” She said it in a simple tone, as though to make it seem she were repeating what he’d said and nothing more, and yet he took it as a warning. Or a challenge.
“Not if one approaches it with thought,” he said, “and planning. Do you know what I liked best about the wolf hunt?”
Mary shrugged apologetically and said, “I do not underst—”
“The cubs,” he said, as though she had not spoken. “I did find it most diverting, hunting wolf cubs, for they are too young and innocent to know how to behave when they are hunted. They will run not in a line but in a circle, and soon tire and think to go to ground to hide themselves, not knowing that is no way of escape. The trick is that you have to draw the mother off with hounds, or else she’ll sacrifice herself to save her litter,” he explained. She felt his hand brush lightly on her back, as though it were by accident. He smiled. “And there is little sport in sacrifice.”
Frisque had finished with his necessary business. Turning round, the dog caught sight of Mr. Stevens and began to bark as though he sought to argue with the Englishman.
The sound shook Mary from her frozen state, and telling Frisque to hush she quickly lifted him and held him tightly.
Stevens said, “I see you have your fierce protector.”
Mary did her best to smile to show she had not been at all affected by what she was half afraid had been a cleverly directed threat. She told him simply what she’d said before, when he had given Frisque slight praise. “Yes, he is good.”
“I was not speaking of the dog.” The Englishman smiled one last time and bowed and turned and left her, and in leaving gave a nod to the tall man who had been standing in the shadows by the doorway of the inn, behind them both, the glowing bowl of his own pipe a stab of burning red against the darkness.
Mary gathered Frisque against her heart and moved towards the doorway, and MacPherson struck the ashes from his pipe and let her pass, but as she crossed the threshold he fell into step behind her casually, as though it were his place, and for the first time since she’d met him Mary felt a little safer knowing he was at her back.
Chapter 22
I was starting to agree with Jacqui that the diary read more like a thriller than a chronicle of everyday events.
We find ourselves again in danger, Mary had confided, in the form of Mr. Stevens who did join us at Auxerre and who appears to have discovered Mr. Thomson’s true identity, or at the least suspect it very strongly. He has friends in Paris, so he said, who told him Mr. Thomson headed south, and I do fear they’ve also told him that he travels with a sister, for tonight he told a tale of hunting wolf cubs that did seem to me an allegory meant to warn me nothing good would come of an attempt to sacrifice myself to shield another. Though I am not certain that was his intent, I do suspect it, and I warrant Mr. M— suspects it also, and I hope that this encounter does not have its end in violence.
She’d described this Mr. Stevens in some detail and had written of their journey from Auxerre to Saulieu so minutely I could all but see the people crowded in that diligence and feel the sense of Mary’s disappointment when she’d learned that Mr. Thomson was no grand romantic outlaw but a fraudster and a thief.
I had the sense as well that, while she disliked Mr. Stevens, she was nonetheless in sympathy a little with his purpose, since she’d added:
He did tell us of the poor investors driven sadly into bankruptcy and ruin, and there must be a host of people now in London injured by this swindle of the Charitable Corporation who do nightly pray to see its architect brought home to justice.
By Monday night I’d come no closer to an understanding of “this swindle of the Charitable Corporation.” I had looked it up online, and read reports to the committees of the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and academic articles and snippets out of history books that analyzed the workings of the scandal and the men who’d been involved in it—but as with many things, the more I read, the less I understood.
The problem with hindsight, I thought, was that there were just too many documents. And when they touched on the issue of stockbroking, I was at sea.
As I passed through the kitchen Denise, chopping something to bits on the worktop, looked up. “Heading out?”
“Yes.”
“You should wear your coat,” she advised me. “It’s cold once the sun sets.”
“I’m not going far. I’ll be back before dinner.”
In the tops of the tall bare-branched chestnut trees in the back garden a chattering cluster of swallows was gathering, filling the air with the sound of their wings as they rose and resettled, preparing to fly. They were likely midway through migration, those swallows. A long way from home.
Through the trees and above the gray wall at the end of the garden I saw a light burning a warm golden welcome upstairs in the window of Luc’s house. I passed through the door in the wall and went out to the lane and along underneath the low archway of branches. His car was parked where it should be, at the side of the house, and the lights were on downstairs as well. As I climbed the short flight of curved steps to the porch I could hear Noah laughing—a small, friendly sound in the darkening evening that tugged somewhere under my rib cage.
I reached for the dangling cord of the old-fashioned bell Luc had hung to the side of the door. It was rusted from being exposed to the weather, but I liked the clear sound of its ring.
When the door opened I felt surrounded by warmth from the light in the entry hall and the quick genuine flash of Luc’s smile as he stepped to the side and invited me in.