My dear friend,
A great misfortune has befallen our family and I can see no end to it. I am certain that, by now, you will know of what I speak. My father has enemies at court. What they say about him is not true. My mother died when I was very young, and my memories of her are few and indistinct, but I can assure you that she died of a fever, away from the court, in the house where she grew up in Normandy.
Some weeks ago I accompanied my father to mass in the royal chapel. As we were leaving, a woman ran forward and spat in my father’s face. I recognized her: She used to be our servant when I was a child. “Murderer!” she hissed. “May you burn in hell for what you did to your wife!” My father was taken aback and made no answer other than telling her to get out of his way. But the woman appeared again last week, accusing him of poisoning my mother. This time my father caught hold of her sleeve and asked who was paying her to tell such monstrous lies. We were in a large crowd of people, yet no one spoke up against her. I was sent to stay with my aunt in Rambouillet that very afternoon.
My aunt urges my father to argue his innocence before the situation gets out of hand. Once, in Paris, she saw a mob tear apart a cornered criminal and she fears that if my father does nothing, the best he can hope for is that scandalmongers do the same with his reputation.
My father disagrees, and refuses to defend himself publicly. He is of the opinion that to do so is to acknowledge a crime that did not take place. It is unfortunate that the only man who could have testified on my father’s behalf—the physician who tended my mother on her deathbed—died two years ago. And so it seems that our family’s honor depends on whether the court of Versailles chooses to believe my father’s word or a malicious rumor.
I wish, with all my heart, that I were not here in Rambouillet, and that I could talk with you, for your presence would be a comfort to me. Alas, I fear that my stay here will be lengthy. Is it not curious, Jean-Pierre, how our positions at court have been reversed? You are raised up while my family is brought low. I only pray that you do not think the worse of me on account of the evil that has befallen the d’Alembert family. I hope that your health is good and that all is well with you and Signor de Lastimosa.
Please believe me when I say that I am affectionately yours,
Isabelle d’Alembert.
I folded the letter and placed it carefully in my pocket, my mind too agitated for coherent thought. “Oh, Isabelle,” I said aloud, addressing the air and the trees. “What can I do?” I looked at the still fountain, at the horses that surged silently out of green water ready to pull Apollo’s chariot across the sky; I looked up at the palace of the Sun King in the distance, but no answer came. Isabelle asked me in her letter not to think the worse of her. What she should have written was: If you had not been so rash and stupid, if you had not knocked down the Prince de Montclair in the Colonnades, his family would have had no reason to hate mine and my father would not now be wrongly accused of this terrible crime. She was right to say that our positions at court had been reversed. I had been raised up, while the d’Alemberts had been brought low. And it was my fault.
I ran along the banks of the Grand Canal as if trying to outrun the bad fortune that had beset all those connected to me. I, who loved Isabelle, had brought this misfortune on her. On my account the King had forbidden my father to attend court and the Spaniard had been ordered to Sweden. My mother died bringing me into the world. Juan Pedro was killed within days of my birth. My brothers’ lives were soured enough by my arrival in their family to turn them into brutes. How could I atone for the trouble I had caused? What could I possibly achieve in my life that would justify the suffering of those around me?
Only when my lungs were burning and my whole body trembled did I stop running. I bent over, retching, at the water’s edge, and the notion came to me that the world might be a better place if I were to just slip beneath the sparkling surface, lie quietly on the muddy bed, and choose never to breathe air again. But if I were to do this, how would that help Isabelle?
Ludo’s Theory
When Spark grates the old station wagon’s gears and the engine stalls, Ludo does not even react. He has let his head fall back against the headrest and his eyes are closed. As she starts up again and jams her foot on the accelerator, the wheels spin in the deep gravel and a fine white dust rises up around them. Spark has not yet passed her driving test, but what choice does she have? The car lurches forward and she checks in the rearview mirror, half expecting to see Jacob brandishing his axe. Though it is the actions of John Stone that have truly shaken her. She’d trusted him. Spark steers Andy’s car jerkily up the drive, every muscle tensed, gripping the wheel as tightly as if someone were trying to prise it from her grasp. What else were these people capable of doing? And she’d slept in their house! The bridge is narrow but Spark maneuvers the station wagon across it, grimacing with concentration, barely avoiding the deep ditch as she turns into the lane.
Changing up a gear, the car stalls again. Spark glances over at her passenger. Ludo is pale and still; water drips from the ends of his hair onto his soaked T-shirt, which clings to the muscles of his chest. He holds his hands clamped to his throat, crossing them at the wrist, as if simulating Jacob’s brutal grip.
“Ludo? How are you doing?”
He doesn’t respond. Spark turns the ignition key but this time to no avail. The coiled spring of her panic explodes. “Start!” She bangs the flats of her hands on the steering wheel. As she checks the rearview mirror for any sign of Jacob, Spark feels her heart hammering wildly against her rib cage. She tries again, this time turning the key more slowly. The starter motor makes a noise like a decrepit machine gun.
“Try more choke,” croaks Ludo, the irony of the phrase registering with her, though not enough to raise a smile.
Spark eases out the choke as she is told, and this time the engine roars to life. She jams her foot down on the accelerator and they speed away from a place to which, she thinks, no one could ever persuade her to return. The image of Jacob and Ludo thrashing through the water flickers in her mind’s eye, overlaying her view of desolate marshland. If she follows this single-track road, it leads, via a circuitous route, to a main A-road some four or five miles away. In the rearview mirror a dying sun peeps over the mound of trees that conceals Stowney House from the eyes of the world. She drives on, and with each mile Spark breathes easier.
* * *
When they reach the nearest village, Spark pulls up outside a squat, redbrick police station.
“I’ll be your witness,” she says.
Ludo looks a better color, at least. “No way!”
“We should report it.”
“We should get out of here before you get arrested for driving a vehicle without a license!”
“It was an emergency—”
“Tell that to the judge.”
“But Jacob tried to drown you! And John Stone chucked your cell into the marshes!”
“I don’t want to report it.”
“But why?”
“Can we get out of here—please—and then I’ll talk about it? Okay?”
Ludo gestures impatiently for her to get going. Spark shrugs her shoulders and moves off. Soon they reach a rest stop where there is a clapped-out caravan selling burgers and hot dogs. It must be a favorite with the long-haul drivers for there is a long line of trucks parked nose to tail. They drive through trails of blue smoke and the smell of frying onions enters the car. Spark draws up behind a mud-splattered truck with a Polish license plate.
“Man, I’m hungry,” says Ludo.
“Me too,” says Spark. “I’ll get you something.”
Spark opens the car door. Unseen, on the other side of a hawthorn hedge, lambs bleat plaintively for their mothers. She hesitates for a moment before getting out, then takes hold of Ludo’s hand.
“You were only trying to help me out—me and Dan. I am so sorry about all of this.”
Ludo smiles back at her—it is a rueful smile
—and he squeezes her hand. Spark can’t read what’s going on behind those flecked amber eyes and before she loses courage, she leans across and kisses his cold cheek. Now she slides out of the car without looking back and lines up with the hefty truck drivers at the window of the caravan. The legs of her jeans are sodden and stick to her skin. Even in this warm breeze she shivers a little.
* * *
“There,” she says, pushing greasy paper bags and Styrofoam cups onto the dashboard. “Burgers and hot, sweet tea—for the shock.”
“That is good,” says Ludo, biting into soft white bread and steaming beef.
They wolf down the burgers, giving each other sidelong looks, wiping the grease from their mouths with the backs of their hands. Spark feels strangely euphoric. She doesn’t want to go home. She wants to sit in Andy’s old station wagon with this American boy forever.
“What is it with you English and tea?” Ludo asks. “It doesn’t do anything—it’s tea.” He pulls a face. “How many sugars did you put in?”
“Six. Get it down you. So are you going to tell me what happened—with you and Jacob, I mean?”
Spark waits expectantly.
Finally Ludo says: “I guess there’s something I should admit to you.” Spark shifts around in her seat to face him.
“I wanted to see John Stone’s gallery. . . . The key was in the lock. I only had to turn it. It was too easy. I went in and closed the door behind me—”
“You did what?”
“Only the guy walked in on me. I’d gotten back into the house through the French windows in your room. He must have been watching me—”
Spark covers her face with her hands. “The gallery is John Stone’s private place—no one goes in there, not even Martha. Jacob must have thought you were a thief! You weren’t . . . I mean, you weren’t trying to—”
“Steal something? No! No! I wanted to check out his paintings, so I just snuck in—”
“Snuck in! Why the heck were you checking out his paintings?”
“I know this must look bad.” Ludo makes calming gestures with his hands. “Can I borrow your phone to show you something?”
Spark lifts up her hips and slides her phone from the back pocket of her jeans. Ludo huddles over it, sighing in frustration at the slow connection speed. The daylight is beginning to fade and a silvery glow is mirrored in his glasses. “Finally,” he says, handing back the phone. “It’s an app I’ve been developing at college. I’m going to market it on genealogy sites.”
“Genealogy?”
“Family trees.”
Spark scrutinizes the small screen. It’s a web page. LOOKING FOR THE NEEDLE, she reads. Perform visual searches on multiple images using facial recognition software. There are two photographs: one, in color, is of a middle-aged man; the other, in black-and-white, is a high school photograph, class of ’78. A circle has been drawn around one of the teenage boys. At the bottom of the page is a figure: 99 percent.
Spark looks in confusion at Ludo. “Why are you showing me this?”
“Just stay with me. When you’re researching family trees, it can be hard to identify people at different stages in their lives. No one looks the same at eighty as they did at eighteen—but underneath the wrinkles they mostly do. What my app does is analyze a whole set of measurements—distance between the eyes, length of nose, skull size, stuff like that—and compares them to a second set of measurements.”
“So the ninety-nine percent refers to . . . . ?”
“The probability that it’s the same person in both images.”
“Is it? They don’t look alike—”
“Actually they’re both pictures of my dad. It’s not foolproof, but it’s a useful tool. It indicates probability. I’m also working on an algorithm—with my professor, who knows a whole lot more about it than I do—that will calculate the probability that two people are related. Though I’m a long way from that—”
“Is that what this is about? Do you think you’re related to John Stone?”
“No!”
Spark is becoming exasperated. “Can’t you just tell me why you went into his gallery?”
“Remember the picture you left me of John Stone in New York—with the street woman?”
Spark nods.
“Great picture, by the way—”
“Thanks.”
“So, I was testing my app—trying to break it, do all the dumb things you know users are going to do—and I got it to sift through every image on my hard drive looking for matches. And I’ve got a lot. What was awesome was that it matched up your photograph of John Stone with a painting. I can’t even remember how that painting got into my image library. But it’s British. It dates from the 1840s. And it’s hanging on a wall in the National Portrait Gallery in London. It’s huge. It shows a crowd of people debating the abolition of slavery. And four rows from the front is a guy who, I’m telling you, could be John Stone’s twin. If you could see it, you’d think there’s no way that the two of them can’t be related.”
Spark has turned away and is looking through the open window at the hedgerow, at the potato chip bags caught up in the thorny branches, at the cigarette butts ground into the earth. “I see,” she says. “That must have been interesting for you.” Her tone is flat. Ludo continues talking at her.
“If I could just prove that the guy in the painting was one of John Stone’s ancestors, it would be a real breakthrough—”
“So when I told you John Stone had a gallery—”
“I couldn’t resist. When we were in the kitchen, if he hadn’t told me to step outside so he could talk to you, I was going to ask him if . . .” Ludo stops speaking and stares at her. “What’s wrong?”
They sit in silence for a long moment. The car moves very slightly every time a truck whooshes by on the road.
“You meant to come to Stowney House all along, didn’t you?” says Spark quietly.
“I would have told you earlier, but it didn’t seem appropriate—you were too upset—”
“I don’t think you came to England to be a friend to Dan. You came because of John Stone, didn’t you?”
“One doesn’t exclude the other—I am Dan’s friend.”
“You didn’t come today to support me because I was upset. Did you? Did you?”
“Spark—it’s not like that—”
“No, it was a case of killing two birds with one stone. . . .”
Spark gets out of the car and slams the door behind her. She no longer trusts herself to speak. She doesn’t even know if she’s being unfair. Hugging herself, ignoring the curious glances of truck drivers, Spark strides up and down the rest stop. She is tempted to stop at the burger line and ask if anyone could give her a lift to Mansfield. Finally she walks back to the car. What else can she do?
Ludo has swapped seats. “I’m driving,” he says.
A Difficult Meeting
John Stone hands over the eight green notebooks to Edward de Souza, who places them in a box file and carries them to an adjoining office. There is the sound of filing cabinet drawers opening and closing. John Stone yawns and stretches. The dawn chorus had begun in Hyde Park before the ink had dried on the final page. He regrets his choice of stationery: It was all he had on hand when he decided, all those weeks ago, to set down an account of his early years at Versailles for Spark. Strange to think that when he started to write them, they were intended for someone he thought of as no more than a potential Friend. He had planned to put the notebooks into her hands in the archive room at Stowney House. How sad that he is about to deliver a formal invitation for her to read these documents at the London offices of his lawyer. He can only hope that she will accept.
John Stone pulls up the sash window and leans out. An enormous flock of starlings is descending, cloud-like, onto a nearby plane tree, the birds dissolving instantly into the dense foliage. Lincoln’s Inn Fields suddenly sounds like an aviary. Should he reveal to Edward that Spark is his daughter? No, he decides, not quite yet.
His emotions are still too raw. After speaking with Mrs. Park, things will be clearer. It is enough, for now, that Edward knows that Spark’s mother is Thérèse.
Presently Edward returns to his desk with the confidentiality agreement that he has drawn up for Stella Park to sign prior to reading the notebooks. John Stone does not believe such a document is worth the paper it is written on, but does not share this opinion with his faithful lawyer.
“Would you like me to write to Miss Park inviting her to view the notebooks?”
“Thank you, no. That is in hand. But if, as I hope she will, Spark responds to my invitation, bear in mind that she has no idea that she is adopted. I would hate for her to discover the truth by accident.”
“You know that I’d also be very happy to draft a confidentiality agreement to be signed by any doctor you might choose to consult.” John Stone rearranges his features into an expression of mild irritation, which Edward ignores. “Forgive me, John, but how can you be happy for Stella Park to know your history while you won’t even consider speaking to a neurologist?”
“Because I trust her! Because at some point she deserves to know that her mother was a sempervivens. As for the medical profession, doctors, more than anyone, have the most to gain from my secret. Longevity has, and always will be, a holy grail.”
John Stone is not being entirely open with Edward. He’s never had any faith in doctors, but he has another—more personal and more compelling—reason. In Thérèse’s letter, which was so freighted with revelations, there is one passage, in particular, that preys constantly on his mind. She wrote: And in your final judgement of me, grant me this, at least, that despite my opposing views, I never did anything to endanger the anonymity of our race—even in these final stages of my illness, when I have been sorely tempted to submit myself to a surgeon’s care. Thérèse died protecting their daughter, even while believing there were advantages to be had by revealing their existence to the world. For John Stone to weaken and consult a doctor now is unthinkable. It would be a betrayal.