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Summary:
For nearly three hundred years, the cryptic journal of Mary Dundas has lain unread. Now, amateur code breaker Sara Thomas has been sent to Paris to crack the cipher.
Jacobite exile Mary Dundas is filled with longing—for freedom, for adventure, for the family she lost. When fate opens the door, Mary dares to set her foot on a path far more surprising and dangerous than she ever could have dreamed.
As Mary’s gripping tale is revealed, Sara is faced with challenges that will require letting go of everything she thought she knew—about herself, about loyalty, and especially about love. Though divided by centuries, these two women will be united in a quest to discover the limits of trust and the coincidences of fate.
From her short experience, she’d half-expected that the Scotsman would move like a ghost and somehow make it down the corridor without her hearing his approach, but he did not. She heard the even measure of his footsteps coming nearer, and had ample time to meet him at the door.
He did not wait upon the threshold like a gentleman to be invited in, but gave a short nod and stepped forward so that she was left no choice but to step back and let him enter, or be flattened.
In English, in an undertone, he told her, “Shut the door.”
She did as he instructed, and then turned to find him standing at the centre of the room already, looking round as though he had a vague distrust of everything within it.
Frisque had raised his head again, and now the little dog rose to his feet and wagged his tail with such a force it set his body shaking. Mary, fearing he might bark, crossed quickly to the bed and took him in her arms. There was no way she could avoid the Scotsman, nor could they converse and keep their voices low as caution would require unless she moved to stand quite close to him, so with reluctance Mary did just that. The deeper shadows cast by the lone candle and the low flames of the hearth made harder angles of his features, but she faced him squarely anyway, and said, “You have my journal.”
Without answering, he drew the book and penner from his pocket, and as wordlessly he set them on the table.
Frisque was squirming. Mary, settling the dog, said, “Thank you.”
“Your brother,” said Mr. MacPherson, “is Nicolas Dundas?”
She knew she’d written down her brother’s first name in her journal, in the single entry that she’d made in English before switching to the cipher. As to how he had deduced their surname, Mary did not know, but she could see no reason to deny it. “Yes.”
He did not ask about the cipher, which at first she thought was strange, until she reasoned that if he had read that first long entry he’d have known about her morning spent with Mistress Jamieson, and how she had devised the cipher, and the purpose of it. All he said, after a frowning pause, was “I would have your word that what ye write within those pages is for your eyes, and none other.”
Mary looked at him in some surprise. “You have it.”
She’d expected him to question her more closely; to demand to know the contents of the entries she had written, and perhaps even compel her to reveal to him the cipher. All he did instead was study her a moment with that gaze she could not penetrate.
She held that gaze unwillingly, but did not look away, and in the end he broke the contact and looked down at where the journal lay, and with one square and well-formed hand he slid it closer to her, in an action that was also a decision.
“Then guard it,” he said to her. “Burn it or bring it. Don’t leave it behind.”
Which appeared to be all he would say on the subject. But when Mary thought he would leave her he paused again; brought his gaze back to hers, and for an instant she thought she discerned something searching within it, as though he were faced with a conflict of facts he was seeking to reconcile.
“You are accomplished,” he told her, “at cards.”
Having no notion how to reply to a compliment from this inscrutable man, she could only say, “Thank you.”
“You had a carte blanche in the second hand.”
Mary thought she had some faint idea, then, where he was heading with this line of talk. And she could have explained to him what her intention had been in not claiming the carte blanche, but telling him that would in turn have revealed near as much of her mind and true self to him as claiming carte blanche would have revealed all of her cards to her gaming opponent, and Mary did not wish to be so exposed. She retreated instead, as she’d done for so long, behind that useful mask she had learned to adopt, of the pretty and witty but none too intelligent female. “How silly of me,” she said, “not to declare it. I must be more tired than I realized.”
His gaze could no longer be read, at least not by the candlelight. Giving the short nod she’d noticed he gave in the place of a bow, he said nothing further but turned and departed.
She bolted the door when he’d gone. Frisque whined and Mary hushed him with her mouth against his soft fur.
“It’s all right,” she soothed the little dog. “He scares me, too.”
