The Long-Lost Jules

by Jane Elizabeth Hughes

  Her enthusiasm loosened Leo’s tongue. He went on, almost loquacious now: “My great-grandparents were art dealers in Paris and Avignon before the war. Thanks to a fortuitous combination of paranoia and wealth, they managed to escape with most of their fortune intact before the Nazis arrived—first to Switzerland, then, underwhelmed by the dubious hospitality of the Swiss, to Israel. After the war, my grandfather moved back to reestablish the business in Paris, and his brother remained in Tel Aviv. My family became experts in helping to find and restore looted art to Holocaust survivors. We now have businesses in Paris, Tel Aviv, New York, and Antibes. Satisfied?”

  Oh my God! Leo was rich! Seriously rich! How had I not realized that earlier? I don’t know why I was so surprised, given the American prep school, the worldliness, his air of ease anywhere and everywhere.

  But he was an Oxford don too, not just another trust-fund baby like the Kristens and the Matts.

  My silence must have telegraphed something to Leo, for he slanted a look down at me and arched an eyebrow. “Disappointed, motek? See, this is why you shouldn’t ask questions.”

  Still I said nothing, and he shrugged.

  Kali seemed to share my surprise. “So, you’re one of them,” she said accusingly.

  “Who?” Leo inquired.

  She exchanged glances with me.

  “Never mind,” we said in unison, and Kali settled back to pout into her iPhone.

  But the ride was interrupted almost immediately by the discreet ring of Leo’s cell phone, which was hooked into the dashboard. “Léo ici,” he said, with a glance at me. “Rachel, Rachel, pas si vite. Plus lentement, je vous en prie.”

  Kali leaned forward, her ears almost twitching in her eagerness to hear, and I wondered if she had studied French in school.

  Leo must have wondered the same thing; in an instant, he switched to Hebrew. Because the phone was on speaker, we could both hear the agitated woman’s voice on the other end and Leo’s calming, placating tones. Finally, they hung up. He scowled, pressing some numbers on his cell phone, and a male voice answered. Leo addressed him in Hebrew too. They spoke briefly; then Leo disconnected to answer another angry woman’s call.

  I raised my eyebrows. When he disconnected from the second woman, I said to him, “Romantic troubles? Angry husband calling?”

  He looked annoyed. “I wish,” he said. “My sisters are having an argument, and they expect me to mediate. As always.”

  I considered, realizing that it was easy to see him in the role of all-knowing big brother. Then his phone rang again, and Leo, looking exasperated, picked up the call. To me, he said, “God gave the plague to Pharaoh and sisters to me.”

  My first view of Sudeley Castle was an enchantment. The sprawling edifice of richly mellowed Cotswold stone, set in lush gardens of still-blooming flowers and greenery, was exactly what I would have designed for myself if I could have. As we drew closer, I was charmed to see fawns scattered about the grounds, cocking an inquisitive ear as our car drove by, and even a few peacocks strutting about, displaying full, glorious plumage. The sky was a particularly soft shade of pale blue, with just a few clouds scudding overhead.

  I sighed to myself in sheer pleasure.

  Leo smiled at me. “Can’t you just see her?” he asked.

  “Who?”

  “Katherine, of course. She loved this place. She would walk with her ladies in the gardens for hours every day, discussing religion and politics and flowers and falconry, always dressed in her finest robes. . . .” His voice drifted off dreamily, and Kali rolled her eyes at me. But it was a friendly eye roll, and I grinned back at her, our argument forgotten in mutual amusement.

  “Anyway,” Leo said, clearing his throat, “I have a special treat in store for you: We have been granted permission to access the library here, so I hope you’re prepared for some dusty research.”

  Kali’s face fell, and I couldn’t blame her. Why spend the day in a dusty library when we could wander the beautiful grounds, walk in Katherine’s own footsteps among her beloved gardens?

  But the library was magnificent too, every wall a masterpiece of floor-to-ceiling books, with a handsome rolling ladder to access the very highest shelves. A wide gallery ran along the top of the room, with more books and a collection of red velvet chairs for comfortable reading. Kali stared in wonder, her phone relegated to her jeans pocket, for once.

  I wasn’t one drawn to old books—unlike Leo, apparently, who seemed starstruck at the sight of a dusty, moldering volume under glass in the middle of the room. But even I fell under the spell of the great room’s classic grandeur. Kali reached out a hesitant hand toward a brightly colored book, and Leo woke from his reverie to snap at her, “Don’t touch anything! Wait till they bring us the museum gloves.”

  She shrank back, and I gave Leo an accusing glare.

  “Sorry,” he said. “These books are very fragile.”

  The curator scurried in with three pairs of museum gloves and a box of assorted equipment that looked like a medicine kit to me. Leo took it and nodded his thanks. We sat around a plebeian modern table in the corner, and the curator started bringing us boxes.

  “These are the Katherine files,” Leo deigned to explain.

  Kali, having donned her gloves, pronounced the boxes boring and got up to explore. “What’s in these cabinets?” she asked, opening one at random.

  “Miscellaneous materials,” Leo said briefly. “Odd donations that they’ve received but haven’t bothered to file. Nothing of interest to us.”

  Kali, apparently, was drawn to the miscellaneous. She sat down cross-legged on the floor and began sifting through the (very dusty) papers.

  I started reading through Katherine’s correspondence with her husband, Tom, and was immediately charmed. In June 1548, she wrote to him:

  I gave your little knave your blessing, who like an honest man stirred apace and before.

  “Oh, Leo,” I cried. “She’s pregnant and can feel the baby move!”

  For Mary Odell being abed with me had laid her hand upon my belly to feel it stir. It hath stirred these three days every morning and evening so that I trust when ye come it will make you some pastime.

  I was not a woman to go googly-eyed over babies, but for just a moment, in her own library, in her own castle, I could picture the dignified queen dowager, married for love at the ancient age of thirty-five and pregnant with her beloved’s child. The child that would become Lady Mary, I remembered. Poor little orphaned baby.

  I bent my head to the letters again.

  Here was Tom’s reply:

  I do desire your highness to keep the little knave so lean and gaunt with your good diet and walking, that he may be so small that he may creep out of a mousehole.

  “They were worried about childbirth,” I told Leo, looking up at him.

  “With good reason,” he responded. “About one in three women died during her childbearing years, and at her age . . .” He sighed.

  I sighed too. Poor baby. Poor Katherine.

  Leo opened another box and reached carefully inside to pull out a few very odd-looking objects sealed in some sort of plastic.

  “These were found in her chest of personal belongings after her death,” he told me. “These are cramp rings.” He held up two small circlets of dull metal. “For use against the pains of childbirth—”

  “Did that work?” Kali asked, her eyes round. I hadn’t thought she was following our conversation.

  “One would doubt it,” Leo said. “And here are three pieces of unicorn horn, a remedy for stomach pains.”

  Both Kali and I looked at the three tiny shards of what looked like petrified wood.

  “If you say so,” she said, returning to her papers.

  “Katherine spent her last three months at Sudeley, preparing for her confinement,” Leo explained. “She and Tom were excited about the baby. The account books show that she decorated the nursery, which overlooked the gardens and chapel, with crimson and gold velvet an
d taffeta. She bought furniture and china, as if preparing for a royal birth rather than the child of a mere baron.”

  “How sweet,” Kali said. I wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic or not.

  “Then there’s this,” Leo said, holding up another, plastic-encased object: an old, heavy, ornate ring with a reddish gem encircled by tiny seed pearls.

  Kali commented, “Yuck. I could buy that for fifty cents at a yard sale.”

  Leo laughed. “Not this ring, my girl. This is a ring that Tom gave to Katherine, and it’s inscribed, ‘What I have I hold.’”

  Even Kali couldn’t think of a thing to say. She took the ring from Tom and turned it over, wonderingly.

  “And Tom spent one thousand pounds having the confinement rooms prepared for her,” Leo added.

  “Wasn’t he playing around with Princess Elizabeth at the same time?” I asked, proud to show off my internet-gained knowledge.

  “Oh, yes,” Leo said. “Right in these rooms and gardens here. Right under Katherine’s eye. After he was caught going to her room early in the morning and pretending to tickle her while she was still in bed, Katherine sent her away.”

  “What a perv,” Kali said.

  “No doubt,” Leo agreed. “Elizabeth was younger than you at the time.”

  Kali scowled. Suddenly she said, “I thought you told me the baby—Lady Mary—died when she was an infant.”

  “She did,” I said, and Leo looked pained.

  “She may not have,” he said.

  “Well, then whose is this?” Kali asked, holding up what appeared to be a small psalm book.

  Leo took it and opened it to its gaily decorated frontispiece, which was inscribed in a clear, childish hand: Lady Mary, the Queen’s Daughter.

  In the sudden silence that followed, Leo reached out and gripped my hand tightly.

  Kali looked pleased. “Did I find something important?” she asked.

  Chapter 14

  Leo was muttering strange imprecations to himself in a mixture of languages. Delicately, he flicked past the frontispiece to the next page and gave a great shout. “Yes! Published in 1554!” Even more delicately, he put the book down on the table and looked at it for a moment, his head bowed as if in prayer.

  Then he took the very surprised Kali in his arms and waltzed her around the polished floors, singing in some mad mishmash of French and Hebrew and English.

  “What? What?” Kali demanded.

  “Yes, what?” I asked, more calmly. “You already knew the baby didn’t die in infancy. Or at least that’s what you told me. So what’s so exciting about this book?”

  He dropped his arms and turned to me, grinning ruefully. “Well, I may have exaggerated a trifle about the extent of my knowledge. . . .”

  “You told me . . . ,” I started indignantly.

  “There isn’t—my God, there wasn’t—any proof one way or the other. I thought maybe she survived, since there was no record of her death. And there were some—”

  Even more indignant, I interrupted. “So you chased Jules—I mean, me—all around London just because you thought maybe the baby survived and maybe she had living descendants and maybe . . .”

  “Forget that now!” Kali said. “Leo, what does all this mean?”

  He picked up the book again and cradled it lovingly in his arms. “What it means, my dear girls, is that Baby Mary almost certainly did not die in infancy. She lived long enough to learn to read and write, which dramatically increases the chance that she lived to adulthood. Which means, in turn, that you—Jules, I mean—are in fact her direct descendant. Oh my God,” he added. “What a find!”

  Kali started to say something, but just then the library doors flew open, and the agitated curator bustled in. “Really, Dr. Schlumberger, what is going on in here?” His eyes fell on the little volume, which Leo still cradled. “What is that?”

  In silence, Leo showed him the frontispiece. In respectful silence, the curator inspected it and then put on an eyepiece and examined it again. When the man looked up, his eyes were bright with tears.

  “Lady Mary, the Queen’s Daughter,” he said quietly, almost reverentially. “In 1554. When she would have been . . . six years old.”

  “Quite,” Leo said.

  “We must . . .” The curator’s voice trailed off.

  “Quite,” Leo said again.

  After several urgent phone calls, the scholars agreed that the precious book had to go to the conservation lab at Oxford’s Bodleian Library immediately and that Leo was the man to take it there. He signed receipts and daunting mounds of insurance papers before the curator’s minions wrapped the book in even greater mounds of museum-quality paper and linen and boxing. I waited patiently, bemused by Leo’s air of quiet triumph, while Kali tapped away furiously on her cell phone.

  By the time we retired to the castle’s tearoom late in the afternoon, it was obvious that the news had spread. Leo had to walk a gauntlet of men who wanted to slap him on the shoulder and women who wanted to shake (or kiss) his hand. Then a spontaneous round of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” broke out in the sun-splashed room. Leo kept trying to insist that it was Kali’s discovery, really, but she absolutely refused to join him in the limelight.

  Still, she was having a marvelous time. Caught up in the general spirit of bonhomie, I snapped a quick picture of her luminous face as she sang along lustily, and sent it to her parents.

  Like an automaton, Leo put a spoonful of tomato bisque in his mouth and then looked at it in some surprise. “What is this?” he asked.

  “Tomato soup.”

  “Did I buy this?”

  “No, some American tourists brought over lunch for all of us.”

  “Oh.”

  “Eat some more,” I said.

  He was coming back to earth again.

  “I’m hungry,” he said with surprise.

  I gestured at the table, laden with food that our newfound friends had bought us. “Well, you’ve come to the right place,” I said.

  Kali put a spoonful of soup in her mouth too, but the spoon clanked against the ring in her lip, and she winced. “Ow!” she said involuntarily.

  Leo said, “Kali, I’m begging you, take those things out of your face. It hurts to look at you.”

  I smiled to myself.

  “Well, thanks a lot,” she said huffily.

  “You know I didn’t mean it that way. Just think how much more comfortable you would be,” Leo said coaxingly. Once again, we were allies.

  “It’s my statement.”

  “Of what? Bondage?”

  She refused to answer.

  Then a calculating look came into her eyes. “If you paid me,” she said, “I might consider taking them out.”

  Leo paused. “How much?”

  “Now, wait a minute,” I said.

  Intent on their negotiation, they both ignored me.

  “One hundred pounds.”

  “Ten,” Leo said.

  “One hundred. Per piercing.”

  “Why, you little robber!”

  I started to protest again, but within moments the deal was negotiated and Kali was tucking pound notes into her bag with a pleased look on her face. I noticed that she had switched to a small, cross-body bag like the one I carried.

  I leaned forward. “Kali, I’ll throw in fifty pounds more if you go to my hairdresser and get those lowlights taken out.”

  I had eventually figured out her lank, dirty brownish hair. She was the only natural blonde I had ever known who actually darkened her hair, apparently with some cheap drugstore goo.

  “A hundred,” she countered, fingering a greasy lock.

  I sighed in defeat.

  Exhausted by the eventful day, Kali fell asleep in the back seat of Leo’s car as soon as we pulled out of the castle grounds. He drove with casual confidence, one arm draped over the top of the wheel and the other resting easily on the open window. I glanced over at him, taking in the hard muscles of his forearms and his broad,
capable hands. He liked to roll his shirtsleeves up to the elbow, and I liked looking at his arms.

  I had had men who were lovers and men who were friends—but never a man who was both. Leo intrigued me. Behind that Hugh Grant–ish stammer (which was very annoying; if I decided to sleep with him, I’d have to get him to lose that habit), he was smart and intuitive. He didn’t seem to find me unapproachable or chilly or remote or intimidating—all of the things that other men had said about me (usually as I was bringing our affair to a close). Quite the contrary—he was alarmingly clued in to me.

  Maybe I shouldn’t sleep with him after all.

  Clearing my throat, I asked him, “Aren’t you tired?”

  “No,” he said, his eyebrows rising. “Are you?”

  I knew I would be when I got home, but right now I was still warm with Leo’s exhilaration.

  To divert myself, I reminded him that he had never explained the importance of finding Katherine Parr’s living descendant. Why did he care so much that he had stalked an innocent woman all over London, frightening her half to death?

  “Right,” Leo said. “I guess I never finished explaining it to you.”

  No, you had to “rescue” me from the man in the pub basement, I thought. Little did Leo know how easily I could have rescued myself, without the unwelcome encumbrance of Kali. My father had taught me well.

  “It’s quite simple. Baby Mary disappeared from the records before her second birthday.”

  “I know,” I said impatiently. “But you don’t think she died.”

  “I do not, and now I know she didn’t die. Look, Amy, she was a very famous child—the baby of one of England’s most powerful celebrity couples of the sixteenth century. Wouldn’t the death of such a prominent child be mentioned? Somewhere?”

  “Hmm,” I said. “But the poem—”

  “Makes no mention of the child’s name and was published in 1573—twenty-five years after Mary’s birth.”

  Huh. I hadn’t realized that.

  “And I found a letter. . . . It was in Catherine Willoughby’s papers—you know, Katherine Parr’s friend who took in the baby?”