“Oh.” Spark doesn’t know how to react. She can hardly grieve for someone whose existence she has only just found out about.
“I’m sorry,” says Mum. “That was a bit abrupt. I didn’t mean to sound heartless. I only met her a couple of times.”
“Do I look like her?”
“Very like. At least now you don’t have to worry about taking after me, eh?”
“Don’t be daft, Mum—”
“Sometimes I think about Thérèse and everything I took away from her. All the happiness you’ve given me—”
“It was her choice to give me away—”
“And her loss was my gain.”
An Unexpected Visit
Life goes on. Dan is told. He tries to hide his shock and tells Spark it makes no difference to him. There are conversations behind closed doors. One surprising thing in all of this is that there is a small part of Spark that isn’t actually surprised. It is as if, over the years, certain attitudes, certain carelessly phrased remarks or the exchange of meaningful looks, particular differences in physique and temperament, have all accumulated, and paved the way, inescapably, to this moment. In a sense, this disclosure has been seeded with a lifetime of clues.
Each morning Spark wakes up, vaguely aware that something is wrong, and then she remembers. She does her best to keep herself occupied: reads, goes with Dan to the hospital, does her chores, fails to find a holiday job so late in the season. Mum has been patient, supportive, and understanding; the irony of this role reversal hasn’t been lost on either of them. There has been cheering news at the hospital: Somehow Dan has already found his way to the top of a waiting list. He’s been fitted out with a vest studded with electrodes, which will allow the consultant to pinpoint the precise area in the heart muscle that has been causing the problem. The consultant is now confident of being able to perform a surgical procedure that could permanently correct Dan’s arrhythmia.
One morning a letter arrives with an Italian stamp on it. Mum scrutinizes it and hands it to Spark. “For you. It’ll be from Ludo,” she says. “Feels like a postcard.” Seeing his handwriting makes Spark’s heart thump, which irritates her. “He seems a nice enough lad,” comments Mum, “though it’s a shame he couldn’t have stayed around a bit longer to keep our Dan company.”
“Yes,” replies Spark, noncommittally, and disappears up to her room to open it. Her letter does, indeed, contain a postcard. It is a sweeping view of Florence from the Piazzale Michelangelo, and portrays a green river and a mosaic of terra-cotta roofs. Dominating the cityscape is a great dome. This whole town is incredible, Ludo writes. It’s like a museum. You should see it. Dan called to tell me what’s been happening. I hope you’re okay—it can’t have been easy. When I get back it would be great to talk.
Spark texts to ask how long he’s planning to stay in Italy. It will be a while, she says, before she gets used to the idea that she’s adopted. That word: “adopted”—it’s the first time Spark has used it about herself. I’m adopted. It feels like trying on a style of shoes she’d never think of wearing and having to buy them whether she likes them or not. Ludo texts back immediately: I get back to the UK next week. I’ll be staying in London for a few days. Want to meet up? Maybe Wednesday? Hope you’ve forgiven me for Stowney House.
Has she? Spark resists texting back yes. Their trip to Suffolk—the fight, Ludo’s confession in the rest stop, the awkward drive home—seems such a long time ago. As for his invitation, she’s not going to read more into it than there actually is. Not this time. Ludo probably feels sorry for her. Maybe a little guilty. If she decides to meet him, she could tell him that she’s been to see the painting he told her about in the National Portrait Gallery—although perhaps she ought not to encourage him. Any similarity between those strokes of oil paint and the real John Stone is a fluke, just one of those things, a case of the mind struggling to make sense of random patterns. All the same, she recalls the shock of noticing that familiar face looking out at her from a crowd of Victorian social reformers.
Ludo acted like an idiot that day, but Spark supposes that she has—sort of—forgiven him. Which is more than she can say for the inhabitants of Stowney House. When she thinks about how they behaved that day—John Stone, above all—it makes her angry. And it makes her sad.
* * *
One evening, after taking a long shower, Spark lies on her stomach in her pajamas, idly flicking through the help wanted section of the free newspaper. Mum is downstairs watching a film, but right now Spark prefers the privacy of her own room. She is still consumed by a revelation that is too big to comprehend. Who is Stella Theresa Park? For now, all Spark knows for sure is that her identity is less a fact than a process.
As she circles an advert for hourly paid staff at a local hotel, a sound makes her start. There is a loud, metallic chink followed by a high-pitched vibrating sound. A small pebble has hit a lamp and is now spinning on top of the chest of drawers. Ludo has fixed her window so that it actually opens, and now, as she maneuvers herself off her bed and stands with her cheek against the patterned curtains, a second pebble whizzes through it and lands on her bed.
“Hey!” she calls, sticking her head through the gap.
The kitchen light is not on, so that the backyard is dark except for the small amount of light spilling out from her own window. It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust.
“Oh!” she gasps. “It’s you!”
The pale, coarse hair that grows vertically from a weather-beaten scalp belongs to Jacob. Spark becomes aware that she has brought her hands to her face and lowers them. They regard each other.
“What are you doing here?” she whispers. Like Jacob, Spark instinctively feels that this is a private matter.
He points first at her and afterward at the back door.
“You want me to come down?”
Jacob nods.
“Are you okay, love?” Mum calls from the sitting room as Spark bounds down the stairs two steps at a time, pulling her dressing gown on as she does so.
Spark puts her head round the door. “Just putting the kettle on! Do you want anything?”
“No,” comes the reply. “You’re all right.”
Closing the kitchen door behind her with a quiet click, Spark pulls the light switch and opens the back door. The fluorescent light flickers on, blue and cold, illuminating the mean concrete patio, with its hanging baskets and half-empty bag of potting compost shoved into a corner. The drain smells like it needs unblocking. In the shadows, Jacob is standing to a sort of attention. She hopes he doesn’t have an axe hidden beneath his jacket. He is clean-shaven and, bizarrely, wears an old-fashioned dark suit and thin tie. She can’t make out the color. From the sitting room come waves of canned laughter.
“Hello, Jacob. This is . . . unexpected.”
“I have come a long way to talk with you—”
“It is a long way. How did you know where to find me?”
Jacob pulls out a carefully folded piece of paper from his top pocket. “I have your letter, and a tongue in my head.”
Disconcerted, she realizes it is her letter to John Stone. If a panther had strolled into their backyard it would feel no odder than to see Jacob here. Spark never imagined him having an existence outside the grounds of Stowney House.
“I’m not a madman—”
“I didn’t say you were—”
“You didn’t need to.”
“Why have you come, Jacob? What do you want?”
“To give you something. And to ask you something.”
All at once Jacob leans in toward her. There’s the smell of pipe tobacco on him. He reaches out and grabs her left hand, holding it in his own dry, calloused palms. The same hands that tried to throttle Ludo. Spark instinctively pulls back, but Jacob presses something into the flesh of her palm, folding her fingers over something small and solid that has been wrapped in cloth. He holds her fist tightly between his two hands so that the object digs into her bones. It is as if he
is transferring ownership. He lets go.
“It is a gift.”
“A gift?”
Jacob nods. “I made it for you.”
“Did Mr. Stone send you?”
“You think I have no will of my own?”
“I didn’t mean that—”
“John doesn’t know I am here.”
“Well. Thank you for my gift. I’m sure I’ve done nothing to deserve it.”
“I do not blame you for what happened—”
Spark is at a loss to know where to begin replying to this. “You don’t blame me?”
“Your arrival at Stowney House. It put things out of kilter. It changed things that can’t be put right without you. Will you come back?”
“Me? Why would I go back? Mr. Stone will have to find someone else to help him. It shouldn’t be difficult.”
Jacob, who seems to have anticipated this, pauses to consider his response. He reaches deep into his pocket and takes out his pipe, then, thinking the better of it, puts it back again. “There’s things you should know—”
“Like what?”
“It’s not my place to say.”
“So I should come back to Stowney House to find out? After what happened, do you think that’s likely? You never wanted me there in the first place—”
“Since you left John has not been himself.”
“Is that what you came here to tell me? That Mr. Stone isn’t feeling himself?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m sorry you’ve had to come all this way, but my answer’s no. I’m not going back.”
“You say that because you do not know. If you knew, you would give a different answer.”
“Except you’re not going to tell me what I don’t know—”
“I can ask you to reply to the letter that John left for you here.”
“What letter? Mr. Stone was never here—”
“He was. We know that the lady of the house grew angry with him and drove him away.”
“The lady of the house? Mum? Mum drove Mr. Stone away?”
Jacob nods emphatically and his eyes shine. Spark finds his physical presence unnerving: There’s something feral about him. Jacob doesn’t belong in a suit and he doesn’t belong in their backyard. Strangely, though, Spark believes what he says.
“If Mr. Stone were here, Mum would have told me.”
Jacob’s pale eyes, which have been fixing her intently, dart away from Spark and toward the kitchen. In one fluid movement he turns and levers himself up and over the wall with his wiry arms. As his shoes scrape over the top edge, he glances back at her and nods. Then he jumps down and lands quietly in the back alley. A moment later Mum enters the kitchen. If it weren’t for Jacob’s “gift” in her dressing gown pocket, Spark might wonder if she’d imagined his visit. Jacob must have acute hearing: She didn’t hear anything.
Mum stands on the back step and yawns. “You didn’t miss much. I don’t why I carried on watching it.” She rests her pointy chin on Spark’s shoulder. “What a beautiful night.”
There’s a small patch of sky visible from their yard. Spark looks up: It is thick with stars. Even that fleeting glimpse of the infinite vastness of things is enough to take the edge off her anger. Out in the street there’s the put-put-put of an old motorbike receding into the distance, and she wonders if that was how Jacob got here. “You should have told me that John Stone came to see you,” she says.
Mum removes her chin from Spark’s shoulder. “Who told you?”
“I just had a visitor from Stowney House. He wanted to know why I hadn’t replied to John Stone’s letter.”
* * *
Mum is unrepentant, still furious that John Stone felt he had the right to invade her family home. She describes their encounter.
“John Stone knew that I was adopted!” Spark is outraged. “He knew I was adopted when I didn’t!” Mum agrees to give Spark his letter but warns her that she’s having nothing to do with him. The last thing she wants is his charity. His charity has cost her enough already. Spark makes no comment. “Give me the letter, Mum.”
“All right,” she replies, going back into the house to fetch it, “though I wish I’d burned it. Our family’s business has got nothing to do with him.”
* * *
Back in her room, Spark holds John Stone’s letter in one hand and Jacob’s gift in the other. She unwraps Jacob’s gift first. There are two flat wooden ovals in hardwood, one pale as straw, the other the color of dark ale. She turns the object round and round between her thumbs and gazes at it in wonder. The ovals can slide apart or lock seamlessly into each other like a puzzle that has been solved. Jacob has carved a face, in relief, on each wooden disc. The first face belongs to John Stone; the second belongs to her. Never would she have supposed Jacob to be capable of such artistry. They are like the carvings you see in churches and cathedrals. How can he have recalled every nuance of her face? Where did he learn how to do this? It is beautiful work, yet uncanny at the same time. What is the significance of this double portrait? Is it meant to be a souvenir of her stay at Stowney House, or to lure her back? Some hope of that.
Spark folds it back inside the felt square and sits listening to the hot water pipes gurgling. Dan has come home. She can hear him brushing his teeth in the bathroom. Downstairs Mum is locking up before going up to bed. But Spark is wide-awake.
Now she tears open the envelope. John Stone’s letter is short—less a letter than a note—and all it says is that he has left some notebooks in safekeeping at his lawyer’s offices in London. He believes that the notebooks would be of great interest to her. If she wishes to read them, his lawyer can arrange for her to do so. It strikes her that if John Stone knew Thérèse, it might have been his intention, all along, to talk to Spark about her birth mother. Could that be what this is all about? Is that why Jacob was encouraging her to return to Stowney House? But if it was, why would he care?
Dan rattles her door handle and shouts good night through her bedroom door. “Night, Dan!” she calls back.
How can she not read his notebooks? She berated Ludo, that day, for killing two birds with one stone, but perhaps she could do the same: accept his invitation to meet up in London and arrange to read John Stone’s notebooks on the same day.
Notebook 8
XXVII
I came early to the Hall of Mirrors and positioned myself next to the Salon de la Paix in order to see everyone who entered. I paced up and down impatiently, waiting for the d’Alemberts to appear, my task being made more difficult by the unusually large crowd that had gathered that morning. I became agitated and started to doubt the information that their valet had passed on to me in Rambouillet. When, promptly at ten, the crowd grew silent and I heard the beat of the King’s cane, I pushed forward in an attempt to gain a good position, but found myself enclosed in a dense mass of wigs and fans. I stood on tiptoe and gathered from the whispers around me that the agreeable-looking man at the King’s side, who had such an assured air about him, was none other than Nicolas-Gabriel de La Reynie, chief of the Paris Police. I think the King’s physician stood behind them, although he was of small stature and I could see only the top of his curly wig. I saw that the King was speaking, and that he held a letter in his hand, which he tapped repeatedly for emphasis. Intrigued, I strained to distinguish his words, but to no avail. Before moving on, the King seemed to make a show of presenting the letter to La Reynie.
As the King walked briskly in the direction of the royal chapel, those who had stood within earshot of him eagerly described what had taken place to their neighbors, so that the news of it spread like a wave across the Hall of Mirrors. I spotted the twin daughters of the King’s physician, whom I knew well, and ran over to them. “What did the King say?” I demanded. “What was in the letter?” They reprimanded me for my abruptness but told me all the same. The letter was written by the late Madame d’Alembert’s physician shortly after her death. In it he described the symptoms of her final illnes
s, symptoms that, according to the twins’ father, were not consistent with poisoning. Thus the letter proved (here they spoke in unison, as was their way) that the rumors about the Comte d’Alembert were entirely false.
Instantly, the burden of guilt, which had pressed down on me for days, lifted, and a smile broke out on my face. So the Sun King had kept his side of the bargain.
“Look,” said one of the twins, “isn’t that d’Alembert?”
I swung around, and there, in the center of the room, reflected in one of the giant mirrors, I saw her. “Isabelle!” I cried out. What joy that familiar profile provoked in me! She walked behind the royal party and between her father and aunt, both of whom were acknowledging the greetings of those who had, until now, been perfectly happy to believe the scandalous rumors about the Comte. Bringing up the rear of the procession were the Montclair family. After spreading such a damaging rumor, I supposed that they desired to put themselves in a good light. I noted that Monsieur Bontemps (he acknowledged me from afar with a slight nod of his head) was also in attendance.
Resolving to wait for Isabelle to reappear after attending mass with the King (I wanted her, at the very least, to see my face), I installed myself in a quiet corner. There I listened to the soothing sound of heels and conversations echoing down the corridors of the palace. My daydreams were interrupted by a footman. Monsieur Bontemps had sent him to remind me of my ten-o’clock appointment. To check for messages from the King had, indeed, been the last thing on my mind. Now I hurried back to Monsieur’s apartment in order to be outside the royal chapel when mass finished.