by Lyndsay Faye
“Thank you, but I—”
“You must have a taste of something fortifying, Miss Steele, for I fear I may shock you. There are a few solicitors, you will find, who are actually aware their clients possess sensibilities. Sherry?”
“Please,” I said rather faintly, “though …”
“Brandy, then,” he curtly suggested. “Considering your background, it must have been administered as a restorative at one time or another, and once having had brandy, one ought not go backwards.”
The man, for all his resemblance to your more affable variety of fungus, was riveting. I drew my soft blue cloak, which I had neglected to shed, closer about my frame as Mr. Cyrus Sneeves planted a brandy snifter before me; he deposited half as much before himself and resumed his place behind the desk.
I soon came to understand from his complete silence that I was expected to make an overture.
“Mr. Sneeves, thank you for seeing me—you must have wondered at my letter’s contents.”
“Heavens, no.” Mr. Sneeves took another great pinch of snuff, making my own eyes water. “No, Miss Steele, I only wondered who told you about me.”
Faltering, I removed my gloves. “My mother left a few letters—”
“May I see them?”
Turning over my mother’s letters felt a strangely intimate act, for all that my solicitor would learn nothing he did not already know; I had so little of Mamma left that all my relics were magical, more talismans than mementoes. At last, finished, Mr. Sneeves scrubbed a hand over his mottled pate.
“Miss Steele,” he questioned, “do you know more of your legal standing beyond what I have just read?”
When I shook my head, he rapped his desk, as if signalling the start of a race. “I was first recommended to your father in Paris, where Englishmen often preferred to do business with a firm operating upon both sides of the water. His concerns had to do with his status as a landholder. Highgate House was in good repair, but your father desired to settle minor liens and generally ascertain whether keeping the manor was feasible; I am happy to state that he was doing very well indeed in Paris, no less than were his partners in London, and so my advice was, if the property gave him pleasure, to keep it. It was not only matters of his estate upon which he consulted me, however.”
Mr. Sneeves waited as my heart pounded a brisk martial beat.
“And these other matters?”
“Were matters to do with your mother.” His voice softened, and he smoothed errant grey wisps behind his ears. “Mrs. Anne-Laure Steele was such a woman as you do not meet twice in life, Miss Steele—beautiful, charming, and artistic. Sadly, not long after your first birthday, your father fell prey to an inflammation of the lungs, and your parents wished to know your precise legal standing in Britain should the worst happen. I was tasked with setting measures in place to ensure both you and Mrs. Steele were protected. You remember your aunt, Mrs. Patience Barbary?”
“Naturally.”
Mr. Sneeves, dappled head bobbing, made quick work of gathering papers. “She was very strongly against your and your mother’s residing at Highgate House—and your father proved to be ill with consumption at an advanced and virulent stage, so your parents were forced to act quickly. Here is the marriage license between Anne-Laure Fortier and Jonathan David Steele; here also is a special contract they devised to be signed by your aunt as a dowager, stating that Highgate House should be your sanctuary for life.”
I examined the documents. Rather than clearing the mists, however, the atmosphere thickened—sanctuary for life did not mean inheritance. For the first time, I examined my mother’s statements against the backdrop of what I knew to be true as an adult woman. Unmarried females scarce ever inherited, particularly when wills were disputed; my mother had assured me of my place time and again, but had never explained the whys or wherefores.
Meanwhile, supposing it was mine, why should Mamma and I have lived in the cottage, why not the main house, why should not Aunt Patience and Edwin have lived in—
“Miss Steele, do you know the man in this picture?”
I found myself holding a sketch from a French newspaper describing a series of audacious trades enacted at the Palais de la Bourse.
“Of course—this is my uncle,” I answered readily. “Richard Barbary.”
“That is your father,” Mr. Cyrus Sneeves said, “who for a time—when courting your mother in the guise of a rich gentleman of leisure—went by the name Jonathan Steele.”
“No, no.” The words emerged before I even had thought them. “That’s impossible.”
Mr. Sneeves made no answer; I stared at the artist’s rendering, all breath ripped from my lungs.
Richard Barbary’s portraits had occupied many places of honour at Highgate House before the arrival of Mr. Thornfield, and here he was in starkly inked miniature: a calculating businessman with an air of mischief about him. Effortlessly, I recalled how those portraits had beckoned to me, with their brown eyes like mine, their mocking half smiles, their air of roguish mystery.
I felt as if my bones were curling up inside my body.
“It can’t be,” I whispered, knowing it true.
Mr. Sneeves took a fortifying pinch of snuff.
“Mr. Richard Barbary was one of our best clients, Miss Steele, and when he informed us of the … situation, we strove in every way to accommodate him. Initially, he had only sought an affair with your mother, who was quite destitute save for the odd sou made from her street portraits and work as a cabaret dancer in Montmartre, which I believe is how the pair met. But when Anne-Laure Fortier and Richard Barbary had lived together for over six months and she informed him of her pregnancy, he impetuously determined that her pleas for wedlock be indulged, and he married her under the false name he had given, fearing to reveal all and lose her regard. This was no light task, but your father was a rich man, and so managed the necessary documentation—he avoided mentioning the fact, of course, that he had already left a wife and child behind in England.”
Fighting dizziness, I marked him, the words falling as lightly upon my ears as the patter of rain upon a window.
My half brother. Edwin, who tried to rape me, was not my cousin, he was my half—
“Here you are, Miss Steele,” a smooth voice intoned.
I drained the brandy Mr. Sneeves had thrust beneath my nose and watched as he poured another, setting it within easy reach. Memories untangled themselves before my eyes, twisting and contorting—Aunt Patience’s calling my friendship with her son family feeling, my mother’s open disgust for Edwin, my aunt’s visible loathing of me. Sickened, I tasted the spirits again.
“Tell me,” I rasped. “Everything. Please.”
Mr. Sneeves sniffed, not unkindly. “I fully intend to. Miss Steele, when your father first fell ill, another event threatened the tranquillity of his, ah, French family life: your mother found a portrait of Patience and Edwin Barbary amongst his belongings. These led to a frenzied quarrel, but your father soon fell into agreement with his illegitimate second spouse: he had no intention of abandoning you, not even in death, for a match begun in the sort of lies wealthy men tell had developed into profound mutual devotion. Mrs. Barbary, I ought to mention, was dealt a bad hand—she was an arrangement made by your paternal grandfather in the interests of money and pedigree, and though your father never loved her, I believe she loved your father, or so Anne-Laure Steele led me to conjecture.”
Recalling all the times my aunt begged my mother not to speak of Jonathan Steele, recalling in my mother’s own letter to the firm her reluctant, when I imagine myself in her shoes, I cannot bring myself to censure her, I felt as if my world had been blasted to shrapnel, and I left clutching the shards with bleeding fingers.
“Why did my father create such a wretched quagmire?”
“As much as in looks you resemble your mother, Miss Steele, you have your father’s direct manner about you, and I find I must battle nostalgia in your presence.”
“I
cannot begin to imagine whether or not that is a compliment,” I rasped. “Please continue.”
“Very well, then. Mr. Barbary was the heir to an estate which might once have proven impossible to maintain; he was told to marry Patience Goodwill, whose holdings after her elder sister, Chastity, eloped were considerable. After he proved himself an expert trader here at Capel Court and her wealth proved superfluous, the marriage, already fragile, fizzled despite the birth of a son named Edwin.”
“Is that the reason he fled to France?”
“I believe so, though the story given out emphasised the professional benefits of his temporarily relocating. In any case, Mr. Barbary travelled to Paris when offered a liaison with one of la Bourse’s officially licensed agents de change, and he presented himself to your mother as a gentleman of leisure named Jonathan Steele. You were conceived, your parents were married, your father fell ill, your mother found out his true marital status, and he and your mother threatened Patience Barbary with exposure of all his sins should she refuse to cooperate—your father blackmailed his wife with his own ill-usage of her, knowing the second marriage illegal.”
It fit everything I knew, and it hurt accordingly—from my scalp to my soles, I was altered.
I am not who I thought I was.
Neither had Edwin been—he was my dear, repellent, spoilt brother rather than my dear, repellent, spoilt cousin. What other grotesque errors had I made in my life that I should find myself sitting in an office being told my own father’s name?
Meanwhile, my mother—oh, my mother. It had been a love match; I had not needed Mr. Sneeves to tell me so. She had been mad with grief over him, and now I understood that Aunt Patience had been similarly afflicted; two women, both in love with a different name, forced to live with revolting insults right before their eyes. It would have been sensible to have hated my aunt Patience all the more now I knew she had kept me in ignorance, to have loathed my father as a philanderer and my mother as a blackmailer; rotten as my own core had proven, all I could do was pity the lot of them.
As for my half brother, I reflected with the cold scrape of an icicle down my spine, the less contemplation of Edwin the better. Everything I knew about my blood and bones had been stripped from me, leaving me bare.
“Is my name even Jane Steele?”
“If you like—we’ve no documentation save that name, so if it suits you better than Jane Fortier …”
“It does.” I sighed, draining the second brandy. “Mr. Sneeves, supposing as the illegitimate daughter of Richard Barbary I can do nothing whatsoever regarding Highgate House, what is the wrong you meant to put right?”
Mr. Sneeves wheezed in disbelief. “I should have though that was obvious.”
“It isn’t,” said I, with some asperity.
“Miss Steele, I am sorry for what you have learnt today,” Mr. Sneeves replied, clasping his fingers together. “But the wrong I meant to right was that you should know who you are, as I had strong suspicions that no one ever bothered to tell you. You are not without inheritance.”
“Oh.” It was all I could summon.
“You have an allowance of three hundred a year.” Cyrus Sneeves wrote a note to himself, as if that clinched matters. “You do not possess any part of Highgate House, but your independence is assured, as guaranteed by Mr. Richard Barbary. I have your current address here from your last correspondence, I take it? Very good. I shall lose no time in setting up an account for you to draw upon and transferring your yearly allotments there, which after all this time amounts to a tidy nest egg. Lacking your whereabouts but hoping you lived still, I held the funds in trust. Now. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
Dazed, I glanced again at the newspaper sketch of my father. As a child, I had felt about his portraits as I would an imaginary friend; trying to summon greater depth of feeling now, however, I found the task impossible. He was a collection of pen strokes who resembled me vaguely. I ought to have felt grateful to know him at last; instead, I felt grateful for his money.
“Yes,” I said quietly. “Burn any evidence of their wrongdoing save documents attending to my stipend, including the letters I brought you from my mother. All of it—and then tell me your fee.”
• • •
By the time I left my solicitor’s office, I was no longer dwelling upon my mother’s attempts to escape the cage she had locked herself within, nor my father’s inability to ponder future catastrophes of his own making.
No, reader: by then I was mourning the death of my world entire. I did not even know my own name.
Oh, I knew who I was—a scarlet-toothed tigress, one forever burdened by the iron weight of her own black stripes. I was apparently also the illegitimate daughter of a two-faced stockbroker (as if there were any other kind).
Until something has been taken from you, it is difficult to gauge what sort of holes will be left by its absence. Guessing that Clarke’s departure would make a yawning cavity would have been obvious, the loss of Charles Thornfield an equally predictable pit; but I hope, reader, that you have never lost something you took entirely for granted, like your name.
Returning to the Weathercock in Orchard Street was a blur of draughty omnibuses and crooked roads, a dreadful numbness settling over me. All I wanted was to call for a hot bath and read Mr. Thornfield’s letters. Trudging into the lodging house, I waved a vacant hand to the clerk who had come, however contrarily, to like me.
“No visitors of any kind, please!”
“Wait, Miss Smith!” he called, but after the strangely painful thought that isn’t my name either, I paid him no mind.
My alias rang out twice more, and urgently too, but my eyes flooded and I fled—up the stairs, half stumbling in my beautiful new dress, desperate for sanctuary. When I reached my room, I fetched the key from my reticule and was surprised to find the door already unlocked. Hesitant, I felt for the knife in my skirts with one hand and turned the knob with the other.
“Hello, Miss Steele,” Inspector Sam Quillfeather said when I discovered him occupying my own room.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Much enjoyment I do not expect in the life opening before me… .
Discovering the man who could see me hanged sitting on my striped chaise, smiling peaceably with his hat in his hand, might have been unbearable had I been in a merry humour; I am sure I could never have withstood the shock had I not just learnt I was the bastard child of a philanderer and an extortionist, which had invested me with a certain flexibility.
“Mr. Quillfeather,” I whispered.
“You are surprised to see me?” He rose and bowed, gangly limbs folding inward. “But … no, I see that you are dismayed? Forgive me, but I was eager to have a discussion with you, a very frank discussion, and you quit Highgate House quite precipitously. It was clear that I was the cause, Miss Steele, and I found myself unable to rest until I had located you?”
“How …” Swaying, I hid my weakness by leaning on the door as I shut it.
“Only by the most careful searching, Miss Steele! I knew after speaking with Mr. Sardar Singh—interesting man, that, and I’m glad to have made his acquaintance—you had taken the coach to London, and there the trail went quite cold. But doggedness, you will find, works miracles, and I canvassed every respectable guesthouse I could locate where single women of independent temperament might lodge, asking if a woman of your description had recently taken rooms. When I learnt a young lady named Jane Smith had lived here for precisely the right amount of time, could I ignore the possibility it was you?”
Broken in every way imaginable, I turned away from where I had stood with my head bowed before the door.
“Miss Steele!” Mr Quillfeather exclaimed. He crossed quickly to me, hand extended. “Have I already upset you so?”
The ground seemed to heave. For the briefest of moments, I considered a knife to his heart and a mad flight through alleys and over stiles until I had reached another sort of freedom, a true outlaw’s comfortless existen
ce—but it was not Sam Quillfeather’s fault he was a police inspector, and it was entirely my fault I was a killer.
So I stayed my hand and reached for his instead.
“I know your mind, Miss Steele,” he said quietly. “I will share mine with you, and we will reach an understanding after many years of poisonous secrets—does that suit you?”
Such an overwhelming dread possessed me that I thought my faculties must shatter. I opened my mouth, and just as I was about to make an idiot of myself, Mr. Quillfeather urged, “Oh, please, Miss Steele—won’t you sit down before you do yourself an injury?”
I obediently sat upon the chaise he had vacated, neck tingling with terror.
“Now, Miss Steele,” said he, seating himself upon the chair opposite and leaning forward in his sweeping fashion. “I have some hard words, and want you to understand—I don’t wish to say them? But I simply must, and I frankly regret not having said them to you when you were a little girl. I know, you see, why you lied to my friend Thornfield about your name, why you ran without even taking your luggage. You must know … I told him nothing? He believes you to be Jane Stone still. But I know the entire contents of your biography, and of your secret fears.”
“This is about Edwin, then.” My voice was parchment thin.
“Could it be about anything else?” he asked softly.
Yes, I thought, and swallowed what felt like a bullet.
“The fact is that I know … everything, Miss Steele, absolutely everything, about the events leading up to your cousin’s unfortunate demise.”
My eyes fell shut; so I was to lose my name, my claim to Highgate House, and my freedom, all in a single afternoon. In a way, I thought, it was kinder—in a way, it was better than I deserved.
“You were so young then, so … vulnerable? I never saw such a sensitive little girl in all my days. Now I have found you, however, and you have grown into such a lovely young woman, could my cowardice still, to this very day prevent my speaking out?”