Mary wished her own cloak was as elegantly cut as Mistress Jamieson’s, and had a fur-lined hood. Outside, the air was so intensely cold it burned her lungs when she drew breath, then turned that breath to steam when she exhaled.

Beside her, Mistress Jamieson stepped lightly in the snow as though accustomed to the cold. “You said your brother came to fetch you home. Where were you previously?”

“With my uncle and my aunt, who raised me.” It was difficult to speak in such a cold wind.

“I have always lived in other people’s houses,” said the Scottish woman. “As an education, I do highly recommend it. But,” she added, “you were right about the linnet, Mistress Dundas. Some things weren’t meant to live in cages.” They were halfway to the carriage now. She stopped and turned to Mary. “And the sky is very wide.” Her smile was warm. “I hope you get to try your wings in it.”

With all her being Mary wished she could have found an eloquent reply, because it seemed to her that such a rare and memorable encounter should be marked with words less commonplace than “Thank you” and “I hope you have a pleasant journey.” But the better words, as always, were eluding her.

And Mistress Jamieson seemed not to mind. “And you,” she said. “A safe trip home.” And giving one last pat to Frisque she turned and walked away.

The driver had dismounted and was standing by the carriage door, and Mary could now see he was a tall man and broad shouldered in his snow-flecked cloak and polished boots, for all he stood there hunched against the cold. He raised his head as Mistress Jamieson approached, and Mary saw his face was handsome, made more handsome when he grinned.

He spoke, and though she stood too far from them to be completely certain she had heard his words correctly, she’d have sworn that in a deeply pleasant Irish voice he’d told the Scottish woman, “See now, this is why I cannot leave you anywhere. You never will sit still.”

And Mistress Jamieson said something in return that Mary could not hear at all because the other woman’s back was to her, but the driver laughed aloud and offered Mistress Jamieson his hand and helped her climb into the carriage with a solid sort of masculine protectiveness that set off a strange longing within Mary that she might, at least once in her own life, have a man who took such care of her.

But it was what she witnessed next that she marked most, for in the moment just before the driver swung the carriage door closed, Mistress Jamieson reached up from where she sat inside and took his darkly handsome face in both her hands and kissed him, and the golden ring upon her right hand briefly caught the light as he returned the kiss but swiftly, so that any who were watching from the house would have seen nothing but a driver taking care to see his passenger was safely seated.

Then he closed the carriage door and turned and tipped his hat to Mary, climbing once more to his box and taking up the reins to turn the horses back the way they’d come, along the road that Mary knew would lead at length across the bridge and over the horizon, into Paris.

She stood and watched the carriage out of sight, and stood there longer with her feet cold in the snow until the dancing rhythm of the horses’ hooves had ceased to echo in the air and all the frosty silence fell again around Sir Redmond’s house.

And then she sighed a breath that turned to mist before the wind stole past and scattered it to nothing, and with Frisque reluctant at her heels she turned and headed back towards the house where, at the window, hung the caged bird that for all its comfort had that morning chosen not to sing.

Chapter 9

I had expected more.

Which wasn’t logical. I’d known that there would only be a single diary entry in plain text, and Alistair had told me he’d learned little from it but the names of Mary and her brother and the fact they’d been acquainted with Sir Redmond Everard, a famous Jacobite who’d lived here at Chatou. Not in this house, of course. I’d asked Claudine already, and she’d told me the Maison des Marronniers had not been built until the middle of the 1800s, and by her best guess Sir Redmond’s house would have been closer to the river, where the oldest buildings of the town had stood. It didn’t matter, really, but I liked to keep the details straight in my own mind.

I could have wished Mary Dundas had put more stock in minor details, but I knew, again, that wasn’t realistic to expect. I hadn’t honestly believed that she’d have kept a note of all that had been done and said by whom to whom. Most people didn’t, as a rule. I’d seen it done sometimes in novels, where the characters would keep a diary or write a letter that read like a narrative, complete with perfect dialogue, but even in the best of novels that device could never quite convince me, and I’d find myself detaching from the text enough to think, “She’d never write that down in that way. No one would.”

No, I thought it far more likely that a person in real life would summarize a conversation as Mary Dundas had done, and simply write:

She proved to be the bravest and most fascinating woman I have ever met, and we did speak awhile of things both great and small, while drinking tea.

No more than that, and having not been in the room while they were speaking, I would never have a clue what all those “things both great and small” had been.

I didn’t even know the other woman’s name. “What would you say that is?” I asked Claudine, and pointed to the name that had been scored through several times in ink to render it illegible. “Harrison? Mistress Harrison?”