A Desperate Fortune, by Susanna Kearsley
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A Desperate Fortune, by Susanna Kearsley
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The highly anticipated time slip romance from New York Times bestselling author Susanna Kearsley
For nearly 300 years, the mysterious journal of Jacobite exile Mary Dundas has lain unread-its secrets safe from prying eyes. Now, amateur codebreaker Sara Thomas has been hired by a once-famous historian to crack the journal's cipher.
But when she arrives in Paris, Sara finds herself besieged by complications from all sides: the journal's reclusive owner, her charming Parisian neighbor, and Mary, whose journal doesn't hold the secrets Sara expects. As Mary's tale grows more and more dire, Sara, too, must carefully choose which turning to take... to find the road that will lead her safely home.
A Desperate Fortune, by Susanna Kearsley - Amazon Sales Rank: #590417 in Books
- Brand: Kearsley, Susanna
- Published on: 2015-05-19
- Formats: Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 2
- Dimensions: 6.75" h x .68" w x 5.25" l,
- Running time: 16 Hours
- Binding: MP3 CD
A Desperate Fortune, by Susanna Kearsley Review "Mary and Hugh's ending is one of the most moving I've read this year... this journey is worth the ride." " - Dear Author, "Recommended Read""Kearsley is an expert at seamlessly merging contemporary and historical fiction... The colorful history and romance of the 18th century, combined with the contemporary mystery, create a tale readers will savor." - RT Book Reviews"Kearsley's decision to offer a fully developed, romantic lead with the perspective of Asperger's is a welcome and refreshing idea. Incorporating rich historical details that feel as vivid as the present enables readers to quickly lose sense of time as the author weaves threads from two eras into one dramatic tapestry." - Library Journal"Susanna Kearsley deftly conjures both historical intrigue and a contemporary heroine as unique as she is memorable. -- Deanna Raybourn, New York Times bestselling author" - "Enchanting! Beguiling! Gorgeously romantic! Susanna Kearsley weaves together a captivating tale of secret codes and hidden desires. " - ""A grand adventure...Susanna Kearsley just keeps getting better and better! --Lauren Willig, New York Times bestselling author" - "Fans of historical spy fiction will enjoy the dangers risked by Jacobite sympathizers, while Kearsley's gentle drama and accurate detail are sure to satisfy lovers of historical fiction and romance." - Publishers Weekly
About the Author New York Times and USA Today bestselling author and RITA award winner, Susanna Kearsley is known for her meticulous research and exotic settings from Russia to Italy to Cornwall, which not only entertain her readers but give her a great reason to travel. Her lush writing has been compared to Mary Stewart, Daphne Du Maurier, and Diana Gabaldon. She hit the bestseller lists in the U.S. with The Winter Sea and The Rose Garden, both RITA finalists and winners of RT Reviewers' Choice Awards. Other honors include finaling for the UK's Romantic Novel of the Year Award, National Readers' Choice Awards, and the prestigious Catherine Cookson Fiction Prize. Her popular and critically-acclaimed books are available in translation in more than 20 countries and as audio books. She lives in Canada, near the shores of Lake Ontario.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
My cousin didn't try to catch the bride's bouquet. She knew me well enough to know I wouldn't try to catch it, either.
"Come keep me company," she said, and drew me firmly to one side of all the colorful commotion. "I need to sit."
My father's wild Aunt Lucy, nearly lost in layered flounces of bronze taffeta, tried once to herd us back as we went past. "Oh, girls, you mustn't run away. Go on, get in there. Have a go." Smiling at my cousin, she said, "Third time lucky, Jacqueline, so they say. And Sara, dear," she added in a cheering tone, to me, "there's always hope."
I might have pointed out there wasn't, really. Catching things had never been my strong suit, and it always seemed ridiculous to go through all that effort just to field a bunch of flowers that, while pretty, only showed which of the women at the wedding was the most determined to be married next, not which one would be.
Jacqui didn't give me time to point out anything. She simply answered, "Yes, Aunt Lucy, thanks for that, but Sara isn't feeling well."
And then she steered me off again.
I looked at her. "I'm feeling fine."
"I had to give her some excuse, or she'd have never let us be. You know the way she is. And I could hardly say I wasn't feeling well-she'd only think that I was pregnant."
I had to admit that was true. Jacqui's love life-including her two short-lived marriages, one to a singer flamboyant enough to ensure their divorce had been given a place in the tabloids-was frequently a source of gossip at these family gatherings. She fueled that gossip on her own sometimes when she got bored, and had been known to start a rumor in one corner of the room to see how long it took to travel to another, but this evening she did not seem bored.
I asked, because I couldn't see the man she'd come with, "Where did you leave Humphrey?"
"Over there. He found the punch bowl, I'm afraid, before I had a chance to warn him. Drank three glasses of it."
Uncle Gordon spiked the punch at every family wedding. No one knew with what, but even those of us who'd only ever heard about the hangovers knew better than to drink the stuff. "Poor Humphrey."
Jacqui sighed. "Poor me, more like. I doubt he'll make it into work on Monday, and we've got a sales meeting. That's what I get," she said, "for bringing my assistant to a Thomas family wedding."
I agreed she should have known better. I hadn't brought a date myself, but then I didn't have a Humphrey, clever and good-looking, sitting handily outside my office door. And no one here expected me to bring somebody, anyway.
"Let's find a table," Jacqui said.
We found one tucked quietly off in a corner, half-hidden by one of the faux-marble columns that held up the wedding hall's high ceiling, painted ethereal blue with winged cherubs. The whole setting was a bit over-the-top, but it suited our young cousin Daphne, whose wedding this was. Daphne lived and breathed drama, which made her quite fun in small doses but very exhausting in larger ones.
"All a bit much?" Jacqui asked me. At first I assumed she was thinking, as I was, about the wedding, but then she asked, "How are you coping?" and I understood.
She had always been something of my guardian angel, since I'd been put into her arms as a baby when she had been ten. She was, if one worked out the family tree, more properly my father's cousin, daughter of his youngest uncle, but that made her still my own first cousin once removed, and I had claimed her and was keeping her.
It had been Jacqui who'd first noticed something was a little different in the way I saw the world, and through my childhood and my teens she'd been close by to show me what to do, like an interpreter to guide me through the labyrinth; to pick me up and dust me off if I stepped off the path and took a tumble. And the first year I had spent at university, that awful year when things had started coming all unglued for me, it had been Jacqui who had taken me to lunch with a new author, whose first book she had been editing.
"He's a psychologist," she'd introduced him. "Brilliant book, just fascinating. All about these children who have-how do you pronounce it, Colin?"
"Asperger's." He'd said it with a hard g, as in hamburgers.
At Jacqui's prompting, he had talked all through our lunch about the syndrome that at that time was believed to lie midway along the sliding scale between the "normal" world and full-on autism, making those who had it all too miserably aware that they were different without understanding why, unable to read and interpret all the complex social cues most other people took for granted-tones of voice, and body language, and the strange figures of speech that made a person say that he had been "knocked sideways" when he hadn't moved at all.
And I had known.
It had, if I was honest, been a great relief to finally put a name to what the issue was. I'd gone for consultations later with that same psychologist, and with my cousin waiting just outside his office door, we'd done the proper tests. He had explained it very clearly, using terms I could relate to.
"You're a programmer, aren't you?" he'd asked me. "You work with computers. Well, if you think of your own mind as a computer, which it is, then your basic architecture is different from most of the other computers around you. You're wired differently, you connect differently, and you run different software on a different operating system. You're like the lone Mac," he'd concluded, "in an office of PCs. They're all running Windows, and you're running OS X."
That had helped. I'd been able to picture that one Mac computer alone on its desk with its own software, processing everything in its own way while all of the other computers, the PCs, shared their incompatible system.
But Jacqui hadn't liked that image. "You don't want to be alone, off in your own corner," she had told me in decided tones. And having helped me put a name to what the problem was, she'd tackled it the way she tackled everything: head on. She'd bought me books and studied on her own, and with a single-minded focus Henry Higgins might have envied, she had tutored me in how to hide the signs, to pass for normal.
"You just have to pretend," she'd said, choosing another analogy, "that you're an alien, come here to learn about earthlings. Our language, our customs, our idioms, all of that. Study and learn them, the way you would any strange culture. But you don't want to look like an alien, and that means learning to mimic. I'll show you."
She'd shown me. Most days, I still felt like an alien, if I was honest. But Jacqui had done her job so well these past several years that my own parents, even when faced with the facts, still refused to believe I was anything more than a little bit quirky. And in a family like mine, I thought-bringing my mind firmly back to the present as new bursts of clapping amid shrieks of laughter announced that somebody had caught the bouquet-being quirky was hardly unusual.
"How are you coping?" asked Jacqui again, and I shrugged.
"I'm all right. I could have done without the DJ."
"Yes, well, so could we all. It was too loud for me," she admitted, "so I can only imagine what it must have been like for you."
My senses were...sensitive. Easily jangled and jarred. The wiring of my mind made sounds that other people could ignore strike at me with the full force of a whining dentist's drill. Strong lighting sometimes gave me headaches, certain fabrics rubbed as painfully as sandpaper against my skin, and when all that was added to a room packed full of people, interacting in a way I had to work to understand, then staying calm became a test of my endurance.
Jacqui smiled and took a piece of paper from her handbag. "Here," she said, and slid the paper over to me. "This might help."
Shaking my head, I assured her, "I'm not at that stage yet."
"What stage?"
"The Sudoku stage." Then, because she was still watching me with that expression I'd known from my childhood, I added more firmly, "I'm fine."
I admittedly found it a little endearing that she'd always fed my addiction to numbers, in full understanding that, when I felt overwhelmed, nothing could calm me like complex equations or, lately, Sudoku-the neat, tidy patterns of numbers in squares, like a warm, fuzzy blanket that wrapped round my mind and was instantly soothing.
It hadn't surprised me that Jacqui had noticed when I'd made the switch to Sudoku. There wasn't much Jacqui missed noticing. And for the past several months she had seemed to have one of the puzzles conveniently tucked in her handbag whenever I'd needed one. But...
"You can stop looking after me," I told her. "Honestly. I'm a big girl now."
"I know that." Her tone told me nothing, but I'd learned that whenever her mouth tightened down at the corners like that, she was being defensive. "And anyway, that's not a puzzle, exactly."
I looked at the page. She was right. These were numbers, but not in an order I recognized-just numbers printed in pairs and threes, with dots between them:
106.62.181.189.68.172.766.86.128.185.64.175. 19.67.164.186.65.47.679.55.173.25.122.13.64. 562.215.128.196.29.56.63
I was already starting to look for the patterns when I asked, "What's this?"
"It's a code. Codes were one of your things, weren't they?"
"When I was ten, sure." I'd been in Year Six then. Our studies had taken us through World War II and the work of the code breakers at Bletchley Park, and I'd been so obsessed with cryptanalysis that, for the whole remainder of that winter, I had written all my school notes in a cipher of my own devising, much to the frustration of my teachers and my parents. "But that was almost twenty years ago."
"Well, I'll lay odds you've not forgotten. That code," she said, with a nod towards the paper I was holding, "is an old one, from the early eighteenth century."
It wasn't actually a code, I could have told her, but a cipher. More specifically, it seemed to be a substitution cipher, in which numbers had been used in place of letters of the alphabet. But I only asked, "And why do you have it?"
"I got it from one of my authors. You've never met Alistair Scott, have you?"
"Who?"
"The historian, Alistair Scott. He's quite famous. He used to be on television all the time."
I took her word for it. I didn't have a television. "And?" I smoothed the paper with my fingers as I focused on the numbers. There weren't many that were higher than 500, so I guessed those might be placeholders, to mark the ends of words.
"He's working on a new book," she went on, "and there's a source he needs to use, but it's in code. He wants someone to break it for him. So I thought of you."
"I'm hardly a professional."
"You need the work."
I paused, and faintly smiled. "I wondered how long it would take before you brought that up. Who told you?"
"Need you ask?"
My mother, then. I looked more closely at the numbers, noting the most common ones were in the 60s. Probably the e's, I thought. The letter used most frequently in English, after all, was e. It also was the letter we used most for ending words. If I was right about the placeholders, then two words in this cipher ended in 60-somethings, so again, they were most likely e's. I took a pencil from my handbag. "So she's told you all the details, has she?"
"Only that you handed in your notice," Jacqui said. "You can't keep doing that."
"They wouldn't let me work alone."
"Most people in IT do work in teams."
"I don't." And if the 60-somethings were all e's, that meant it was the 6 alone that mattered, and the final digit didn't count. Testing this, I tried removing all the final digits right across the board, from all the numbers, and put e's where all the sixes were, and spaces for the placeholders. I ended up with:
10.e.18.18.e.17.space.8.12.18.e.17.1.e.16.18.e.4. space.5.17.2.12.1.e.space.21.12.19.2.5.e
There, I thought. Much less unwieldy. Right then. Twenty-six letters in the alphabet. Except if I were dealing with a simple substitution cipher, in which a was 1, and b was 2, and so on, then e would be written as 5 and not 6. I flipped e and f round, and got gibberish: Jerreq hlreqaepred fqblae ulsbfe.
Jacqui told me, "It would mean a trip to Paris. You like Paris."
"In December?"
"Well, you wouldn't have to go till after Christmas."
"Even worse."
She held her silence for a moment, then she said, "You're right. You'd do much better staying here and moving back in with your parents. That would be a lot more fun."
I wasn't always good at detecting sarcasm, but in this instance just the words alone were all I needed to be certain she was teasing. Glancing up, I tried to straighten out my smile. "Ha-ha."
"No, really. And your mother could invite young men to lunch on Sundays. You could have a lovely time."
"I won't need to move home," I said. "I've got three months left on my lease. I'll find another job."
"This one would let you work alone. Besides, he pays obscenely well, you know, does Alistair."
I shook my head. "I couldn't take his money." I flipped a few more letters, moving closer to an understanding of the patterns used by whoever had made this cipher. "This," I said, "is really pretty basic, not so difficult. I've nearly got it. When I've finished here, I'll let you have the key, and you can pass it on to him, and he can do all the deciphering himself, for nothing."
"Yes, well, there's one problem with your logic," Jacqui told me.
"What's that?"
"The code you've got there," she informed me, "is not the one Alistair needs to have broken."
My pencil paused, but only briefly, because I was too far along to just stop. "Then why do I have it?"
"It's sort of a test. I told Alistair you were a wizard with codes and things, and he said if you cracked this one in under a week, he would not only hire you, he'd buy you a bottle of whisky."
I wasn't sure what letter had been flipped with r. The first word, with its double r, was likely my best clue. It might be meant to be a double l, perhaps, or double t. Since t was the most common English consonant, I went with that. Jetteq, read the first word now, unhelpfully. "He knows what this says, then?"
She nodded. "It's out of an old book, or something."
I had only two bits of the cipher left to unravel.
"Tell Alistair Scott," I said, "that if he's buying me whisky, my preference is sixteen-year-old Lagavulin." I jotted the translation down and rotated the paper to slide it back over the table towards her.
I knew that I'd done it correctly when I saw her smile. That was how Jacqui always smiled when I did something to make her proud. "See? I was sure you could do it."
"I'm not a real code breaker."
"Sara." She held up the paper. "You solved this in seventeen minutes. You're good at it."
Probably not good enough, said my inner perfectionist.
Jacqui, who'd known me so long and so well that she likely could hear that voice, too, said, "Come with me tomorrow, I'll take you to meet him."
"To Paris? Be serious."
"Alistair Scott's not in Paris."
"But you said-"
"He only lives over the river, in Ham. It's the job that's in Paris."
She asked me again to come meet him, and of course I told her yes, because I knew she wouldn't let it go until I gave the answer that she wanted. But my gaze stayed on the paper in her hand while we were talking, and I wondered who had written it, and whom they'd meant to warn with those four words. Not me, I knew...and yet the final two words resonated, curiously:
Letter intercepted. France unsafe.
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58 of 61 people found the following review helpful. There are a large number of reasons as to why this author has become my true favorite. A few of those reasons are that her ... By L. Shaw If someone was capable of actually seeing the books lining my shelves most of what would be seen is books written by Kearsley. There are a large number of reasons as to why this author has become my true favorite. A few of those reasons are that her stories are that of mysteries intertwine with fate, history and of course romance. Those descriptions only highlight a sample of what this author has accomplished within her stories and for the most part A Desperate Fortune did live up to my expectations.A brief encounter with Anna, the heroine from the author's previous The Firebird made a brief apperance in the opening of this book so I felt like I was being greeted by an old friend and that was an added treat. If you haven't read any of the author's previous releases no need to fret as this book stands on its own.I loved the historical aspects of this book which is only is the prime focus of any of the author's stories. I've always admired the idea of ancient journals that are waiting to be explore. The journal in many ways is the driving force behind the story and I was amazed to uncover just how much Mary Dundas and Sara, the heroine of the story had in common.This story is one of suspense, romance and history that I think all readers will enjoy. I did. One most also appreciate the amount of effort that Kearsley's puts into each and everyone of her stories. Rest assured I will be adding the printed copy of this book to my shelf as well as with all future releases from the author.
31 of 32 people found the following review helpful. Exquisite!!! By D. Salvagin, La Deetda Reads Mary Dundas starts out on this 1732, adventurous journey an innocent, sheltered, naive young woman. She is not a stranger to heartbreak having her father and brothers leave her with family when she was young. When she accepts the challenge to help the Jacobite King she does so with a touch of anxiety but feeling also she will be of service. Her brother Nicholas does not really give her a choice. On this assignment she meets Thomson who is on the run from the English Parliament for fraud, MacPherson who is a body guard and Effie who is to be her chaperone. Some characters that Ms. Kearsley explains in an afterward are historically accurate. Adventure and danger are around every corner but MacPherson manages to protect the small group through the journey.Sara Thomas, who is decoding Mary's diary in the present day, has Asperger's Syndrome and is fully aware that she does not have the ability to read others' feelings accurately. So she has difficulty understanding her own feelings toward a new friend. But Sara's budding romance also confounds her since she has become very friendly with "his" ex-wife. Sara cannot understand how they can remain good friends.I could say so much more about the story but truly it is all exquisite! There is no other way to describe this book. Oh, yes, I could say that the narrative is well paced, the romance slow building, the plot riveting, the characterization well developed but that all evolves into "exquisite". This book contains the most romantic declaration of love I've yet to read in any novel. I'll say no more about that so I don't spoil it for you. Because I do expect that you will move mountains if necessary to read this one.Susanna Kearsley has written other novels centering on the Jacobites or this late 17th and early 18th century time period. They are all well written page turners, as are her Time Travel novels. I highly recommend them. If you are new to this author you are in for a treat.1. The Winter Sea2. The Rose Garden3. The Shadowy Horses4. Mariana5. The Firebird
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful. An amazing book from an amazing author! By Sarah M. I should start this review by saying that Susanna Kearsley is one of my favorite authors, so it will be completely biased. I've been waiting for this book for months, and it absolutely didn't disappoint! It is a wonderful, fascinating story, or stories rather. I love the way that Kearsley writes books partly in the past and partly in the present. It's almost two different writing styles, the sections in the past and the present, and yet they meld together so well. She always comes up with interesting ways to connect the two storylines and I thought the way she did it in this book was so clever, with the present-day heroine transcribing the journal that the heroine from the 1700s had written.The characters from both the past and the present were extremely likable. I especially liked that Susanna Kearsley chose to write a heroine who had Asperger syndrome. I thought she handled it really well and it's not something I've seen done before in fiction. The present-day story, where Sara Thomas goes to France to transcribe a diary written in code, was fun, sweet, and interesting. The story set in the past, focusing on Jacobite rebels, was exciting, sad, sometimes scary, and also sweet. Two of the author's other books, The Firebird and The Winter Sea, also focused on the Jacobites, so there were some familiar faces. For Kearsley fans, you'll get to see characters you know from those books, and also a couple of mentions of characters from Mariana, an earlier book.So, to conclude this jumbled review, I guess I'll just say that this book has everything I've come to expect from Susanna Kearsley – interesting and complex plots, likable characters that you can relate to, laugh with or sometimes cry with, politics and intrigue, romance, and well-researched historical characters and events. I can't recommend it highly enough and I'm excited to see what the author is going to do next, because her books just keep getting better.
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