A Desperate Fortune by Susanna Kearsley Read Free Book Online Page B

the diary and offer to buy it. And that wasn’t in the winter, it was June.”
    I wasn’t sure what difference that made, since a road should lead you to the same place every time you took it, but another concern had distracted me. “You said they’d had a falling out. Claudine Pelletier and Alistair,” I added, when she glanced at me.
    Claudine, who’d be our hostess here in France, was a photographer who’d closely worked with Alistair on the first two books of his trilogy about the exiled Jacobites of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. I’d looked her up. She was about his own age, early sixties, though the portraits I had found of her online had shown her as a younger woman, mostly—taking photographs herself, the cameras hiding her own features.
    Jacqui answered, “That’s my understanding, yes. It’s all a bit before my time, I don’t know all the details, but I’m told they haven’t spoken for some years.”
    “Is that why she’s being difficult about the diary?” After all, the easiest approach, short of buying it, would be to have the whole thing copied. I could take it with me then, and work in private back at home in England, and not inconvenience her at all.
    “I’ve no idea,” Jacqui said. “One doesn’t argue with Claudine, I’m told, or try to second-guess her. This is how she wants to do it, so it’s how it will be done.” She glanced at me again and smiled. “Don’t worry, though. You’ll like Claudine.”
    The question was, would she like me? She had agreed to give me room and board and space to work within her own house for a month or maybe more, but she might change her mind once she’d met me. She obviously valued the encrypted diary highly, and she’d probably already formed a mental image of the kind of person who’d be sent by an historian like Alistair to do this job. I doubted I looked anything like Claudine had imagined. She might not even let me near the book.
    My cousin, if she shared my worries, didn’t let it show. She was steering our rental car over a bridge on the Seine, with a lovely old church rising out of the twilight to greet us. “We’re here,” she said. “This is Chatou.”
    We came off the bridge onto a boulevard, broad and divided, where buildings of pale stone with sloped mansard roofs and tall, graceful French windows shared space at the edge of the pavement with more modern offices, shop fronts, and flats. I had an impression of tall, bare-branched trees and bright Christmas lights strung over doorways and dangling like icicles over the edges of awnings. They sparkled against the blue light of the evening and made the whole street look decidedly festive.
    “It’s pretty,” I said.
    “Wait till you see the Maison des Marronniers.”
    “That’s the name of the house?” I liked houses with names. “Are there actual chestnut trees?”
    “Why would you ask that?”
    “Because that’s what marronniers are.”
    “Ah.”
    “How can you spend so much time visiting France without knowing the language?”
    “We can’t all be linguists,” she commented. “How many languages do you speak now? Twenty?”
    “Other than English? I only speak two.”
    “No, it’s more than that, surely? You’ve French, thanks to Ricky”—my childhood best friend, who’d moved over from Normandy when we’d both still been in nursery school, and in whose house, next to our own, I’d spent most of my after-school hours, in the bustle and warmth of his French-speaking family—“and Swedish, from when you were keen on that Swedish chap. What was his name?”
    “Vendel.”
    “Ah, Vendel, yes. Charming man.” That , I knew, was pure sarcasm. Jacqui had never liked Vendel. She added, “But then you took courses in German, and—”
    “I know a little of four other languages, but I can only speak two.”
    Jacqui gave me a sidelong look I couldn’t read as she slowed the car and steered us through a narrow gate within a high wall fronting on the pavement.
    Claudine