When Henry died, however, Katherine’s good sense deserted her. She married her Tom in a secret ceremony just a few short months after the King’s death, and without the permission of his council. Tom proved exactly the type of husband one might have expected, dallying with Princess Elizabeth—a nubile, lively girl of fourteen, compared with Katherine’s nearly elderly thirty-five—and conspiring against his brother, Edward Seymour, the Lord Protector during the childhood of the boy King Edward.
Thus, Katherine’s happiness was short-lived, and, as Leo had said, she died barely a week after giving birth to her daughter, Lady Mary Seymour. Then the fatally foolish Tom was executed for treason, and the baby girl was an orphan and an unwanted reminder of the Queen’s folly and her little-mourned husband.
Seven-month-old Lady Mary was given over to her mother’s closest friend, Catherine Willoughby, the Duchess of Suffolk. Eager to learn her fate, I paged down swiftly but was disappointed to find that, just as Leo had told me, the baby had disappeared entirely from history. Quickly, I Googled “Lady Mary Seymour” and, after lots of digging, finally came across an obscure article on the forty-seventh page of references, titled “Fate of Lady Mary Seymour Discovered?”
Ha, Leo the historian! I exulted. I’ll show you!
The answer to the long-lost child’s fate, the author wrote, might lie in a Latin book of poems and epitaphs by John Parkhurst, Katherine Parr’s chaplain, who also served the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk. Published in 1573, the book included the following poem, which the author was kind enough to translate for me:
I whom at the cost
Of her own life
My queenly mother
Bore with the pangs of labour
Sleep under this marble
An unfit traveller.
If Death had given me to live longer
That virtue, that modesty, That obedience of my excellent
Mother
That Heavenly courageous nature
Would have lived again in me.
Now, whoever
You are, fare thee well
Because I cannot speak any more, this stone
Is a memorial to my brief life
Though no name was given, the researcher concluded, this must surely have been the epitaph that Parkhurst, who would have known Lady Mary Seymour (perhaps even baptized her?), wrote on her death.
I shut down the computer and sat with my head in my hands, too depressed to even open the Mr. Goodbar. I felt no exultancy after all; the story was too tragic. Imagine surviving the embraces of the gross old king to marry your one true love, only to find that he was a knave after all—and then to die a miserable, painful death.
And the baby, the poor little girl who was orphaned and dead before she even knew her parents . . . I was not a sentimental woman, but even I was moved and saddened by the demise of this little family.
Poor Leo. I would have to break the news to him gently.
The next day was Sunday, so I trekked up to Bradford again, half hoping, half fearing that Leo would follow me again. But I took my kids to play soccer with the YMCA team, and he never showed. Mariam told me she had read her first book in English, though (The Cat in the Hat), and Mohammed asked me to help him prepare for a job interview (bagging groceries at the local Waitrose). It was just as well that Leo was a no-show, of course; I had already let him see way too much of me. He was likable and seemed harmless, despite the whole Jules thing, but he was also much too curious and quick; I simply couldn’t let him see any more.
Monday was boring and uneventful, except for an agonizingly uncomfortable phone call with Sheikh Abdullah, in which I tried to explain the concepts of tax evasion and money laundering to him. He interrupted me only once, to remind me that his granddaughters would like personal shoppers to guide them through the trendiest boutiques in New York’s SoHo district.
But his assistant called me on Tuesday morning to pass on the ominous news that Abdullah’s sons, Kareem and Nasir, would be in London the following week to meet with me. Ominous because I had never had any contact with either one. They seemed happy to do nothing but collect the massive dividend payments that financed life in their many homes (Courchevel and Vail for the skiing, London and Manhattan for the shopping, Antibes for the glamour, Mustique for the sun, and Riyadh for their conservative father). The Kristens and Matts and Jakes, in fact, were constantly jetting off to one of their sheikhs’ fabulous homes for birthday parties and anniversary galas, but my relationship with Dull Boy was limited strictly to the phone.
His sons were well educated, though—at least in comparison to the barely literate Abdullah—and would surely understand the implications of an FBI investigation. Audrey decreed that Kristen R., my designated handler, would lead the meeting and I should take notes. I couldn’t decide whether to be insulted or relieved, so I settled for both.
My stomach growling, I settled back in at my desk, relieved for once to anticipate another boring afternoon arranging for Tiffany bracelets to be purchased for the sheikh’s granddaughters. Since he had only eight granddaughters and was demanding twelve bracelets, I amused myself by speculating about who the other recipients might be.
But then the other shoe dropped, in the unlikely form of an email from my mother.
Chapter 9
My mother and I exchanged polite emails a couple of times a year, so I was startled to see her name on the message. It had been only a month since our last exchange. But that was nothing compared to the content of the message.
Hello, dear,
Hope all is well with you. As you will see from the itinerary below, your sister Kali is landing at Heathrow this afternoon and will be expecting you to pick her up. I haven’t wanted to burden you [Ha! I thought], but I’m afraid that she has gotten herself into a great deal of trouble, and Warren and I are at a loss. We hope that some time away will do her good, and appreciate your stepping up to support the family.
Best,
Mom
I read the note once, then read it again, still disbelieving. Scrolling down to the bottom, I saw that Kali was arriving on a Virgin Atlantic flight in—let’s see—ninety minutes.
I read it one more time, a cold lump of horror settling into the pit of my stomach. This could not be happening. Had they all gone mad out there in California? Had the earth suddenly upended itself? I hadn’t seen Kali or her twin, Kelley, in at least five years and wouldn’t have known her if I’d fallen over her. My mother sent Christmas cards with pictures of two vapidly pretty blond girls that I consigned to the wastebasket after one brief glance. I didn’t need to be reminded that my mother had left me without a moment’s regret, apparently, but was a loving mom to these girls.
Reaching for my cell phone, I fled for the stairwell, where I could be assured at least a modicum of privacy. But neither my mother nor her husband, Warren, answered their phone. Probably, I thought angrily, they were screening to block out any call from me.
Holy fuck. Holy shit. What was I going to do?
My mother detested foreign travel, after those years trailing my father all around the globe. It was possible that Kali had never even been out of the country before. The girl must be around sixteen or seventeen.
What would happen if I just didn’t show up at the airport?
But I couldn’t forget when IDC forced me to see a psychiatrist after Chechnya, for the first of what were supposed to be weekly meetings. She told me, after all of eighteen minutes, that I had abandonment and trust issues. No shit, Sherlock. In the two years since then, I had never gone to another “weekly” session.
So I wasn’t about to abandon this teenage girl at an airport in a strange country.
Disbelief had turned to rage by the time I threw myself into a seat on the Heathrow Express train. I stabbed viciously at the keys of my cell phone, but it was clear that no one in California had any intention of taking my calls. I emailed my mother one sentence—I’m putting her on the first plane back to California—but got no r
esponse.
I reread my mother’s message for the tenth time. Kali wasn’t my “sister”; she was my stepsister. No real relation. Just because my mother had been idiotic enough to take on her second husband’s twin daughters didn’t mean I had any responsibility to them.
I was definitely putting her on the first bloody flight back to America.
Tensely, obsessively, I twisted my hair around my fingers until the train arrived at Heathrow. Then I hurried through the crowds to Arrivals and watched for an anonymous blond surfer girl. I twisted my hair into tight coils and registered dimly the beginnings of a blinding headache.
I was punching the numbers on my cell phone one more time when I got my third unpleasant surprise of the day. A girl tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Hey, Sis! Remember me?” and I swung around to see someone quite different than the Barbie doll I recalled.
Kali—or so I supposed it must be—had transformed into a lank-haired, stoop-shouldered specimen of the worst in teenage American taste. Her hair hung in greasy, dull brown strands around a once bland face that was now pebbled with piercings. The one in her eyebrow appeared to be a little infected, I noted, but the one in her lip seemed the most painful. I winced just to look at it. Her eyes were still blue, of course, but she looked wary, like a cornered animal, not like the sunny child I so vaguely recalled.
What on earth had happened to this girl?
“Kali?” I said doubtfully, half hoping to be wrong.
When she nodded, her eyes shied away from mine. “Look, I didn’t want to come here any more than you want to have me. Just put me on a plane. Anywhere.”
I couldn’t stop staring.
She indicated the ratty backpack at her feet. “This is all I brought. I’d really like to go to Thailand. They have amazing dope there. If you’ll just whip out the plastic, I’ll be on my way.”
Words failed me. Kali still avoided my eyes and twisted her fingers in her already knotted hair, making the tangles even worse. I winced again, this time almost in sympathy. We had no genetic relationship whatsoever, but we shared the same nervous tic. It must be my mother’s influence.
“Come on,” I said shortly. “Let’s get you something to eat and figure out what to do.”
Kali blinked at me. “You don’t want me here.”
“I certainly don’t,” I agreed. Shock had made me blunt, and I regretted the words as soon as I said them. I was painfully familiar with the sensation of being a stranger in a strange land. It was the story of my life, from Chechnya to Atlantic Bank; perhaps it was even why I spent my Sundays with the Syrian teenagers. How could I be so unwelcoming to this broken girl?
And yet how could I let her into my life?
Unexpectedly, Kali’s heavily made-up eyes glittered with tears. “Your mother—Evelyn—must have told you what a screw-up I am.” She brushed impatiently at her face and grimaced as she accidentally touched the eyebrow ring.
The sense of almost sympathy was growing, but I fought it grimly.
“Well, not exactly . . .”
“She doesn’t know the half of it,” Kali said, defiant again. “I’m much worse than they even think I am.”
I swallowed hard. Two things were becoming clear to me: I couldn’t send this broken girl back to California, and I certainly couldn’t set her loose on the world with her grimy backpack and taste for “amazing dope.”
I might have to keep her. At least for a day or so.
I picked up her backpack, my decision made. “Kali,” I said, “if you’re going to stay with me, there are some things we need to get straight.”
We talked and negotiated and talked some more. She drove a hard deal, but in the end we reached a mutually satisfactory agreement. She would sleep on my couch and not bother me any more than was humanly possible, and I would pay her a hundred pounds per week to behave. If I saw any signs of drug use—and I assured her I knew all the signs—then she was on a plane back to California.
Still, I worried. I lay awake in my bed almost all night, listening as she tossed and turned, until she got up at about 3:00 a.m. to make herself some coffee. My thoughts raced. What could I do with her? Was it safe to leave her alone in my flat? Was it safe to give her cash? How serious was her taste for drugs?
I hated having someone in my space, and I hated even more the feeling of being responsible for another soul. An outsider at work, with no family ties, even an outsider from my old IDC gang, I had lived for the past fifteen years, since my father’s death, essentially relationship-free. Freedom, as Janis Joplin had told us, was nothing left to lose.
And here I was, saddled with a sullen, defiant, lost teenager.
When I stumbled out of bed on Wednesday morning, I had settled nothing in my head. Kali was asleep, so I left her detailed instructions on taking the tube to my office and set off, welcoming the solitude as I hurried to the tube.
Of course, as soon as I turned on my computer, the lunch with Leo popped up. I sighed loudly. How much worse could this week get? But then I reconsidered. Maybe this would be an almost welcome distraction from my assorted worries. After a moment’s thought, I texted Kali and invited/ordered her to join us for lunch, figuring that would keep her out of trouble, for an hour or so, anyway. Besides, Leo would have to behave in front of her, and it would be easier to hold him at arm’s length with someone else there.
When I closed my computer and put on a light jacket just before noon, Matt B. said, “Going out to lunch again, Amy?”
The tiny and stick-thin Audrey said complacently, patting her flat abdomen, “I’m never hungry at lunchtime.”
My stomach growled, startling us both.
Audrey half smiled kindly; a pathetic soul like me was to be pitied, not scolded.
Somewhat to my surprise, Kali was waiting exactly where I had told her to wait in the lobby of my building. The buttoned-down bankers cast curious and slightly hostile glances her way—she was an unwelcome interloper in their staid world—and her mouth had settled into a defiant twist.
Leo pushed himself off the wall across the lobby where he’d been leaning and sauntered over. “Who’s this, then?” he asked.
“This is my stepsister from California, Kali. Kali, this is my . . . my acquaintance Leo.”
Leo smiled at her. “What’s your name, again?”
“Kali.”
“And what’s your sister’s name?”
“Kelley.”
Leo was momentarily taken aback, then rallied. “I mean this sister,” he said.
Asshole, I thought. Did he still think I was his Juliette?
“Amy,” she said, sounding surprised. “And she’s not my sister. She’s my stepsister. We’re not really related.”
Amen to that, I thought.
“Ah,” he said. “Well, then. I get two lovely ladies for the price of one. On y va, mes amies.”
Kali looked at me with some confusion.
“Never mind,” I said wearily.
But by the time our food arrived, my annoyance at Leo for the “What’s your sister’s name?” question had eased. He was pleasant in an avuncular way to poor Kali, and he was about to absorb a heavy blow. So I smiled at him when he came back with our second round of beers, and lifted my glass in a toast.
“To Lady Mary Seymour,” I suggested.
“To Lady Mary Seymour,” Leo echoed. As he had when I’d told him about my father, he bowed his head for a moment and murmured some words in Hebrew. The show of piety surprised me, and I cleared my throat.
“Who’s Lady Mary Seymour?” Kali asked.
Leo, clearly delighted at the chance to introduce a neophyte to the wondrous world of Tudor queens, opened his mouth.
But I interrupted. “Leo, I have some bad news for you.” As quickly as I could, I told him about the website and the epitaph and the baby’s death. “I’m sorry,” I added awkwardly at the end.
To my surprise, he burst out laughing, in such an infectious way that I felt my lips twitching upward as well, and
even Kali almost smiled. “I don’t understand. What’s the joke?”
“You,” he chortled. “You looked like you were going to tell me the Beatles were splitting up and Elvis was dead and Donald Trump was going to be president for life, all on the same day. My dear girl, Lady Mary Seymour is most certainly dead.”
A little affronted—why had I bothered trying to spare his feelings?—I sniffed, “Well, I thought you would be upset to learn that she died in infancy and that there’s no long-lost heir after all. Excuse me for caring.”
He chuckled again and then put a comforting hand on mine. “Thank you, motek.”
I stood abruptly, so abruptly that my chair scraped roughly against the stone floor. “Excuse me. I have to go to the loo.”
Kali, whose eyes had been following our conversation like those of a spectator at a tennis match, stood up too. I could see that she was full of questions for me, and I braced myself.
“It’s downstairs,” he said.
I was still annoyed as we went down the narrow, winding stairwell into an even narrower, darker basement hallway. Typical of small pubs, the loo was a tiny, unventilated closet lit by one unenthusiastic thirty-watt bulb. I took the time to wash my hands and then opened the door again so that Kali could go in.
Suddenly the hallway light sputtered out, and in the same moment Kali let out a terrified shriek as she tumbled to the floor. Hard hands grasped me—the same hard hands that had flung Kali aside—and threw me back against the wall. A dark shape loomed huge as a man’s body pressed against mine. I opened my mouth to shout, but his hand was across my mouth in an instant. I gasped for breath, my hand flying involuntarily to my waist, where my cell phone was clipped. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kali curled in a fetal position on the stone floor, her hands over her head in a desperate attempt to protect herself.
The Long-Lost Jules Page 5
