Read A Desperate Fortune for Free Online Page B

remember that, do you?” Nicolas looked pleased. “Our mother often scolded me and worried I would drop you, but I liked to hear you laugh.”
    He would have been just a bit younger in those days than she was now, Mary decided—a young man of eighteen or nineteen—and yet in her memory he’d seemed so grown up, tall and strong in his long coat and boots with the sword at his side. And now he was nearing his midthirties, already showing the softness that men sometimes gained round their middles; the small lines of weariness and resignation that life settled into their features.
    “You could not do it now,” she said. “You’d do yourself an injury.”
    His laugh was not like hers. It was a lower sound, and brief, but it stirred memories. “Are you saying that the years have made me weak?”
    She shook her head. “But they’ve made me too old to carry so.”
    “You’re hardly old, my dear. You’ll not be two and twenty till July.”
    The chaise lurched and Frisque shifted in protest on her lap, and Mary seized on that as an excuse to look down for a moment, feeling a tingling warmth at the back of her eyes that she sought to control. He’d remembered her birthday.
    She hadn’t known what to expect when he’d come to collect her that morning. He had caused quite a sensation in the village by arriving in the chaise, its upright body painted fashionably green with two great yellow wheels that crisply cut the snow, the driver riding as postilion on the near horse of the well-matched pair in harness, looking every bit as grand as the Chevalier de Vilbray’s own team and coachman.
    Mary’s cousins had been slightly disappointed when her brother had explained the chaise was merely hired, and not his own, and yet for Mary when her brother had alighted from the chaise and come towards her with a quick smile and a voice that she remembered, she would not have cared a whit if he had made the trip on foot. It was enough to have him there, and hear him greet her by her name, and feel the warmth as he had wrapped her in his arms.
    He had not stayed there long. For all he’d started early in the morning, it had already been midday when he’d come to Chanteloup, and there would still be a long journey back to Saint-Germain ahead of them, so Nicolas had only lingered for the time it took to tend the horses, water them, and let the driver eat and briefly rest while Nicolas sat down to dinner with the family he’d not seen in years.
    He’d smiled across the table at Colette and said, “You were a tiny thing when last I saw you, naught but eyes and curls. And you,” he’d said, to Gaspard, “were an infant still, all dressed in ruffles.”
    Gaspard had flushed, not wanting a reminder of the childhood state that he was so impatient to discard, but young Jacques—who of course had not been born at all when Nicolas had paid a visit last to Chanteloup—had made the comment, “Gaspard still wears ruffles.”
    Nicolas had glanced at the long falls of lace at Gaspard’s cuffs and shirtfront. “So I see. He would be perfectly at home at court, with such fine clothes. A match for any gentleman.”
    And with that Gaspard, too, had been won over.
    Even Frisque, who had no love of strangers, had seemed most content at dinner to sit under Nicolas’s chair. And even now, as they went rattling in the chaise across the bridge at Poissy, one light touch of Nicolas’s hand was all it took to reassure and calm the little dog, who settled once again in peace on Mary’s lap.
    Her brother said, “He travels well, that dog.”
    “It is the first time he has traveled.”
    “Then I’m all the more impressed.” He looked at her, and Mary did not know what he was thinking. Perhaps he was contrasting her experience with his; her settled life with all the distance he had traveled, and the places he had lived.
    She knew, from what he’d said at dinner, that he and their father had gone with King James to Avignon, a town beyond the