Then upon the back of this, they’d learned the City had petitioned Parliament to make a close examination of their books and warehouses, which meant that all their losses and their schemes would be discovered. So the others had decided Mr. Thomson should abscond, and thus divert suspicion from the truth by making it appear that he alone had stolen all the Corporation’s missing money and run off with it.

“And since my choices were to come abroad as they proposed or stay in London and be made to bear the blame for their misdoings anyway, I came to France and threw myself upon the mercy of my countrymen,” he said. “My fellow exiles.”

There was sadness in his smile, and Mary felt a twinge of sympathy.

He said, “And so you see, from being of an easy temper, and trusting a rogue who presented himself as a man of an easy fortune, I am myself become a man of a desperate one—the most unhappy creature that ever lived. And whatever the Company may in their malice and revenge say, I never was one shilling the better for them, and have lost all, and the blame of their loss laid at my door in attempting to save them.” His shoulders raised and lowered in a sigh. “As for the poor investors who have lost all too, I had no intention to hurt them, and perhaps when their first fury is over and they are disposed to hear reason, I can set everything in a clear light. In the meantime, I’ve nothing to offer them but my regret.”

He sat a moment longer with his head bent and his gaze upon the fire, no doubt reflecting on the miserable state in which he found himself. And then, as though he felt he had imposed on Mary’s patience for too long, he stood. The line of buttons down his waistcoat front had gone askew and tugging at its hem he set it straight again, as though by fixing that one slight disordered thing he could fix all.

He turned once at the door before he left the room, his eyes cast down, his voice turned quiet. “And I do especially regret, my dear, that I have lost your good regard, as I’ve so clearly done,” he said. “And caused you disappointment.”

* * *

Mary, when she sat before a fire, had always fancied she saw pictures in the flames. On any other night, had she been left to sit alone like this, she might have looked to find them, seeing faces and fantastic beasts and palaces that briefly danced and glimmered in amongst the burning logs. Tonight her focus was distracted by her notice of the ashes that had fallen through the grate and would be swept away tomorrow and discarded as a necessary product of destruction.

They’d once been living things, those ashes—trees within a forest, cut and shaped to suit another’s purpose, and reduced now to a sad, ignoble state with no good use remaining but to cloud the water in the washing tub to keep another’s linens white and clean.

So it was with Mr. Thomson, fallen from his status as “a man of reputation” to a fugitive, reviled by all and forced to shoulder all the blame that ought to have been shared with Mr. Robinson and others with the power and position to conceal their guilt.

Although he may have acted less than wisely and put faith in people who did not deserve it, and although the outcome of his actions certainly had caused harm to the innocent, there seemed to her injustice in the fact that those he’d trusted in his business had abandoned him, and Mary having heard his tale could not now find it in her heart to follow their example and abandon him as well.

She slipped her hand into her pocket and withdrew the letter she had written last night to her uncle and her aunt. And as it had upon the night when Nicolas had left her at Sir Redmond’s house, her aunt’s voice stirred with clarity within her memory, telling her: “You always have a choice.”

She did. She had a choice. And casting her misgivings to the wind she made one now and leaning forward tossed the letter on the fire.

She heard the patter of Frisque’s paws upon the floorboards in the passage before he came bounding in to greet her with a wagging tail, his muzzle stained with gravy. Mary gathered him onto her lap, receiving his affection and returning it by laying her own cheek against his silken head, and would have made more fuss of him had not a shadow passed them both to stop before the fireplace.

Mary stiffened as MacPherson took a twisted paper spill from the container on the mantel and bent forward to apply it to the fire. She quickly looked to where her letter, nearly all consumed by flames, sat barely recognizable as such amid the logs, its few surviving edges curled and blackening. MacPherson, to her great relief, seemed not to have observed it, for he straightened unconcerned and lit his pipe, then with his unprotected fingers pinched the burning end from the long spill and set it with its fellows on the mantel.

Frisque, as though he craved the Scotsman’s notice, gave a short attention-seeking bark and was rewarded by the flicker of a glance from those emotionless blue eyes, but Mary used that bark to her advantage, rising from her chair with the excuse, “My dog does need to do his necessary business.”

Whether MacPherson believed her or not he gave no indication, but answered her with a brief nod that, although not completely polite, was not rude. As with most of his gestures, as Mary had found, it fell stubbornly somewhere between.

Being mindful of her own good manners at least, she returned him a smile. “Good night, Mr. MacPherson.”

“Mistress Dundas.”

Again, Mary thought, that fell somewhere between a “good night” and an abject dismissal, but making good use of it she turned and left the room, glancing one final time into the fire where with some satisfaction she saw that her letter had now been entirely lost to the flames and was no more in evidence.