The Long-Lost Jules

by Jane Elizabeth Hughes

  Kristen S. pulled out her cell phone, scrolled to some pictures, and then passed it around the table; when it came to me, I forced myself not to laugh out loud at the shots of the Kristens swinging through the jungle on zip lines and lying on golden-sand beaches.

  I handed the phone back. I had never been to Costa Rica, since it was the most prosperous country in Latin America and really didn’t need foreigners to do anything except spend tourist dollars there. “Looks great,” I murmured.

  “Did you go anyplace besides Costa Rica?” asked Jake. “My college roommate spent a week in Haiti, building a schoolhouse.”

  Kristen S. shuddered. “My parents would never let me go to Haiti!”

  For a moment I felt wistful; when I was at IDC or with my father, I spent most of my time in blisteringly hot or freezing-cold (and always dangerous) places like that—the barrios of Central America, the high mountains of Tibet—and I loved it. Every hot/cold, nerve-jangling minute of it.

  Matt S. said, “The Jakes and I spent last Saturday building houses with Habitat for Humanity.” He proudly displayed a green-and-black thumbnail. “I swing a mean hammer!”

  “You’ll lose that nail for sure, bro,” Jake S. predicted, and they high-fived each other.

  “What an after-party!” Jake T. put in. “Those Habitat people are great drinkers!”

  Audrey turned to me, and I pushed my glasses up on my nose. “What are you doing for your volunteer hours, Amy?”

  I swallowed uncomfortably. “I work with a group of Syrian refugees every Sunday.”

  Incredulous stares.

  “What?” Audrey asked.

  “At-risk teenagers,” I half whispered, feeling all eyes focused on me in disbelief.

  “Why?” someone asked. Clearly, I had missed the point of “mandatory volunteer work.” It was supposed to be full of camaraderie and fun, not dreary, dark-skinned teenagers.

  “Well . . .” I couldn’t tell them that I had once been something of an at-risk teenager myself—and that was without the heavy burden of being a Muslim refugee in a European country. “It’s something to do,” I said lamely.

  More silence.

  Eventually Audrey said, “Honestly, Amy, it’s just community service. You don’t have to get carried away. Just go to the SPCA for a few hours and play with the puppies and kittens that are looking for homes, all right?”

  I nodded obediently.

  “Amy’s so peculiar,” Kristen R. whispered to Kristen S.

  Leo hadn’t specified a meeting place, but he was waiting for me in the lobby of my building when I came down at noon. He was leaning against the wall, his dark eyes intent on the elevator doors, watching for me.

  I noticed several women sending covert glances his way. He was that kind of man: tall, black-haired, and black-stubbled; a little mysterious; a little moody; scruffy but still with an indefinable air of command.

  It occurred to me that maybe I could have an affair with him. It had been more than two years since Scott.

  “Let’s go to the local on the next street,” he suggested. “They’ll do you some smashing fish and chips.”

  Once again, I noted his odd mixture of British and American idioms. Schooled at Harvard and Oxford, I recalled. I wondered what he considered his home. Perhaps he was homeless, like I was.

  So when we sat down, I asked him, “Where are you from, anyway?”

  “Um . . . well, that’s a complicated question, my dear Jules.” Then, as I half stood up to leave, he said, “My dear Amy, I mean.”

  I sat down again.

  “Let’s see. I was born in Paris. Moved to Tel Aviv when I was six. Back to Paris when I was twelve. Went to New England for prep school and college. Did my military service in Israel. Did my PhD at Oxford. I live in Oxford now.”

  Well, that explained the intriguing mix of accents.

  “So, your native language is . . . French?”

  “French, Hebrew, Arabic, English . . . Who knows?” That smile flashed again; I wondered when he would realize that I was immune. Unless I decided not to be, of course.

  “Now it’s your turn,” he said.

  “Let’s see,” I said, mimicking him. “I was born in Moscow, but my parents are American. My father was an international energy consultant, so we moved every few years. I lived in Washington for a while, then back to Moscow, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Ukraine. Went to UCLA.”

  He was staring. “So, what is your native language?”

  “English, of course.” I was embarrassed to admit that I had no flair for languages. I did speak Russian, but only because I had spent so many years in Russia, being raised by nannies there.

  “You said your father was a consultant? What does he do now?”

  “He’s dead,” I said flatly.

  “Oh.” He said something in Hebrew (at least, I think it was Hebrew) and bowed his head for a moment. “I’m sorry.”

  I couldn’t bear his sympathy. Even fifteen years later, the wound was too raw. My father had been gunned down on the streets of Moscow, apparently the victim of mistaken identity. He lay on the sidewalk for hours, his blood draining away into the icy, slushy snow while pedestrians gave his body a wide berth and the police drank huge mugfuls of vodka to stay warm.

  I had been thousands of miles away, drinking huge mugfuls of margaritas at a beach party in LA.

  “And your mother?” Leo asked after a moment.

  “Oh, she left when I was ten. Sick of traveling the world in my father’s wake.” And, as I had learned many years later, sick of his affairs too. “She lives in California with her second husband and his twin daughters.” Both tall, slim California blondes whom she adored and I detested. We rarely spoke.

  “How very . . . American,” Leo said. He had never sounded more French.

  Time to turn the questioning on him. “How about your family?” I asked. “Are they in Israel?”

  He shrugged. “My parents and two of my sisters are there.”

  “How many sisters do you have?”

  Again that smile. “Four. I’m the eldest, followed by four girls. For my sins.”

  “Wow.”

  “Quite.”

  The fish and chips arrived, dumped on the table by the sweating, red-faced pub owner whose stained apron bore witness to all the meals he had cooked that day. Leo thanked him with a nod, and we dug in.

  Leo swallowed a huge bite and asked me if I was close to my mother now.

  “Oh, no. My father was my best friend.”

  He cocked his eyebrow at me.

  “He wanted a son,” I explained. “Instead, he got me. So he decided I would be his buddy. We went on adventures together.” I smiled at the memory.

  “Adventures?”

  “Oh, like, we went rock climbing in Morocco and heli-skiing in Canada and desert trekking in Jordan. You know—adventures.”

  “Quel casse-cou,” Leo said.

  I didn’t speak a word of French, which was perhaps fortunate. I Googled it when I got home, and I think he said, “What a daredevil.”

  But now Leo was examining me closely; I thought that, perhaps for the first time, he was considering me as a person rather than as his pathway to Jules. As always, I had dressed to fade into the background at the bank, and I could see him trying to reconcile the woman in front of him with his mental image of an adventurer.

  “Heli-skiing in Canada?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said reluctantly. How had we gotten back to his questioning me?

  “Anyway,” I said, “the purpose of this lunch is for you to tell me about Jules—and why you think I’m her.”

  He took one last bite, patted his mouth with a paper napkin, and then took a long swallow from his beer.

  “You—Jules Seymour, I mean to say—are the last living descendant of Queen Katherine Parr and possibly the heiress to a considerable tract of rural England.”

  My jaw dropped.

  He grinned at me. “Now are you interested?”

  Obvious
ly, the man was a lunatic. But he was a very well-educated and interesting lunatic, so I sat back to listen to his fairy tale. After all, it was best to humor lunatics. Besides, this was much better than what I had been imagining.

  “Katherine Parr was the last of Henry VIII’s wives,” Leo began. “She was one of the most interesting of his wives. Well, they were all interesting—except for poor little Catherine Howard, maybe. She was just a flighty girl, and then, of course, there’s Anne of Cleves. . . .” His voice trailed away as he stared back into history, lost in his thoughts.

  “Katherine Parr,” I prompted gently.

  “Oh! Yes. She was extremely well educated. A Reformist, of course. And practically a saint to put up with Henry.”

  “I thought Henry VIII was really good-looking!” I protested, thinking of the handsome, well-built Jonathan Rhys Meyers in TV’s The Tudors. I had lusted after him when the series was on.

  Leo smiled indulgently. “In his youth, yes, of course. But by the time he got to Katherine Parr, he was an old man, so obese that it took six stout grooms and a purpose-built crane to heave him onto his horse. He had a weeping, open wound on his leg that had to be drained very painfully every day, and it stank to high heaven. God only knows how he and Katherine . . . well . . .”

  Disappointed, I said peevishly, “Then why did she marry him?”

  “My dear girl, one didn’t refuse the King of England.”

  “So, what does this have to do with me?”

  “Katherine had a daughter, Lady Mary Seymour.”

  “Seymour?”

  “Yes,” Leo said. “You will be happy to know that Katherine married for love after Henry went toes up and left her a very wealthy, handsome widow. She married a reckless scoundrel named Tom Seymour with indecent haste after Henry died, and had a baby barely a year later, at the very advanced age of thirty-five.”

  A year older than I was. “Good for her,” I said.

  “But poor Katherine died when the baby was only a week old, of childbed fever.”

  “Oh.”

  “And her useless husband, Tom, was executed for treason when the little girl, Lady Mary, was only seven months old.”

  “Oh, dear.” I found myself saddened by this long-ago tragedy and pushed away the rest of my uneaten meal. Leo reached out a long arm and helped himself to some chips.

  “So, what happened to the baby? I assume she was your Jules’s great-great-whatever-grandma?”

  “Yes, exactly,” Leo said. “She was lost to history after her father died. Until recently, it was assumed that she died in infancy. But . . .”

  Here it came. “But what?” I asked, curious in spite of myself.

  “I’ve found evidence suggesting that she survived her childhood, grew up to marry, and had a son, the many-greats-grandfather of Juliette Mary Seymour. You.”

  “Not me,” I protested. “Though it would be nice.”

  My iPhone dinged, reminding me that it was time to get back to the office, so I couldn’t question Leo more on his “evidence.” I had to admit that my curiosity was piqued. I knew I would be diving into Google as soon as I got home from work.

  But more than anything, I had learned that Leo was nothing more or less than an eccentric Oxford don after all. When I thought about my fears, I had to smile. A historian obsessed with a long-dead queen and her progeny. How much more harmless could you get?

  Chapter 6

  That morning, I had gotten an email from Audrey, whose desk was ten feet away from mine. It was a Google Calendar invitation to Kristen R. and me for a meeting at two o’clock that afternoon. What the hell, I thought apprehensively as I accepted the invite. Audrey was constantly meeting with the other vice presidents, who handled much more important members of the Saudi royal family. My minor clients, with their constant nagging demands, were well beneath her consideration.

  Today, the two Jakes were wearing matching bow ties, having decreed that Fridays would be Bow Tie Day. And a new Kristen had just started—Kristen M., whom I had privately dubbed Kristen the Younger. She was only twenty-three, a recent graduate of Princeton, where she had been (of course) the president of her eating club. She would be assisting Kristen P. and Kristen R.

  Glumly, I watched them bonding over “Do you know So-and-So?” and squeals of “Oh my gosh, I love your earrings!” Through some strange osmosis, Kristen the Younger had already sussed out my inferior status and had wasted no squeals on me; just a quick introduction and handshake were enough. I wasn’t a member of the sorority.

  My computer pinged to remind me that it was time for my meeting with Audrey. I gathered up some random files and hurried to the conference room, speculating about how late Audrey would be this time. The average for a meeting with me was fifty-seven minutes, although I hadn’t factored in the number that she just blew off. In the past year, I had met with her exactly twice. Which was fine with me.

  Her assistant poked her head in the door to tell me Audrey was running late. What a surprise. I leafed through my files, trying to look busy, but my stomach was sour with anxiety. What had I done?

  Forty-five minutes later, Audrey and Kristen R. hurried in together, talking in hushed tones about a derivatives investment for the Saudi minister of finance. My boring old sheikh never invested in anything sexier than US T-Bills, so I listened with some envy.

  Audrey sat down and turned to me. “Amy,” she said, “you have a problem.”

  Well, fuck me, I thought. I tried to look appropriately frightened.

  “The FBI has launched an investigation into Sheikh Abdullah for tax evasion and money laundering.”

  I stared at her in disbelief. Sheikh Abdullah? My Sheikh Abdullah? Conservative old Dull Boy, as I had nicknamed him, whose idea of a daring investment scheme was buying a thousand shares of Microsoft?

  I shook my head but then remembered to be deferential. “Sorry, but . . . I don’t think he even knows what money laundering is.”

  “Well, the FBI is serious about this,” Audrey said. “I trust that your documentation is in order?” Her tone conveyed her doubts.

  I thought of the piles and piles of currency transaction reports and other routine forms that I filed on the sheikh’s behalf. US authorities required bankers to submit these forms whenever a client initiated a transaction that seemed “suspicious”—whatever that meant.

  “I think so,” I said, with a good show of uncertainty. Already I was starting to question myself. Dull Boy liked to use cash because he didn’t understand computers and didn’t trust banks. Had I filed every form every time? What if I had slipped up?

  Audrey said slowly and carefully, as if I were a toddler, “Amy, you are aware that banks are on the front lines of the battle against money laundering. Criminals and corrupt government officials need to access the banking system in order to conceal the source of their funds.”

  “I know that,” I said, smarting inwardly. “I don’t think I could have forgotten—”

  She went on, ignoring me, “We have a very important responsibility to cooperate with the authorities in this valuable work.”

  With a huge effort, I swallowed my angry words. “I’m aware,” I murmured.

  Kristen R. said, “Audrey, I went to B-school with a guy who’s with the FBI now, in their financial crimes unit. Let me ping him and tee up some ideas about how we can work together.”

  Audrey almost smiled at her. “Super idea, Kristen. Thanks.” She turned back to me, her lips compressed again in a tight line. “Amy, I’m asking Kristen to second-chair you on this. She’s going to go through all your records to see where you might have dropped the ball. Please run everything by her from now on.”

  Well, fuck me twice.

  When I got back to my desk, I just stared blankly at my equally blank computer, my thoughts racing. There was absolutely nothing in my files to suggest that Dull Boy was a money launderer. I would stake my life on that. As for tax evasion, the old man had once asked me what the IRS was, so I had my doubts about his
ability to conduct tax fraud as well.

  But now I was saddled with Kristen R. as my “second chair.” In her faux-sweet, solicitous way she was bound to (kindly) point out any number of ways in which I might have slipped up. Thousands of transactions, thousands of documents, thousands of filings . . . After all, you couldn’t expect perfection from an elderly public-university graduate.

  And then there was Dull Boy himself. I shuddered to think of his reaction to an investigation by US authorities. He was no jihadist, but he had the usual Saudi view of dissolute, godless Americans. Those bumbling clods at the FBI are going to screw up all my hard work with Sheikh Abdullah and his family, I thought bitterly. I’ll be lucky if he trusts me to arrange dog sitting for his poodles after this, let alone handle his money.

  Fuming, I was starting to shut down my computer for the day when a new email flashed on the screen. It was from my friend Rosie. Subject line: Your historian. Eager for a distraction, I clicked on it.

  Did some more digging. Do you know about his military background? He served in a seriously elite unit with the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces, I interpreted] but all very hush-hush, so I can’t get a handle on what he did, exactly.

  Hmm.

  Do you have any deep, dark secrets that he might be trying to uncover? Be careful, Ames.

  I knew, of course, that Leo would have served in the IDF—all eighteen-year-old Israelis are supposed to do their service. But there is service, and there is service, from desk jobs to liaison jobs to the elite, hardcore military units. Despite his “sorrys” and stammering, I somehow wasn’t surprised at all that Leo’s service had been of the latter variety.

  My mind flashed involuntarily to the FBI investigation, but I shook my head to dismiss it. Ridiculous. Leo might be many things, but he definitely was not an FBI agent; his tailing of me had been seriously inept.

  Decisively, I shut down my computer and closed the lid.

  On Sunday morning, I dressed in my nonbanker clothes—skinny jeans, leg-hugging boots, deep-blue blouse, swingy earrings—and set out for King’s Cross station for the three-hour ride north to Bradford. I tucked my black cashmere sweater under my cheek and slept while the train bucked and swayed its way through the grimy London suburbs and up north to the even grimier Bradford suburbs. By eleven, I was in the refugee center, collecting my charges for the day: ten Syrian teenagers with sullen faces and slouchy attitudes. But the three girls’ faces lit up when they saw me, and one even smiled. I smiled back.