The Long-Lost Jules

by Jane Elizabeth Hughes

  “So what?” Kali snapped. “I’m not Benji’s mother either.”

  We both looked at the girl, her cheeks flushed with indignation and her eyes bright with passion. She had told me Élodie had taken her to have her hair stripped of the gooey brown dye so she was blond again. She was fresh-faced as well because Élodie somehow hadn’t managed to find the time to take her to buy makeup after the twins threw her vials and potions into the laundry.

  I wondered if Kali had transferred her hero worship from me to Élodie and, absurdly, felt a sharp twang of jealousy.

  Leo and Kali were still talking. “Maybe she was just pretending to resent the baby,” Kali suggested. “Maybe she wanted people to think she didn’t like her and wouldn’t take care of her. Babies need lots of snuggling and attention, you know,” our resident childcare expert said.

  “But why on earth?” I asked.

  Silence.

  “Someone must have cared about her,” Leo said. “She was the first cousin of the King.”

  Kali frowned. She still didn’t have a firm grasp on the Tudor family tree.

  “Her father, Tom Seymour,” I explained, “was the brother of Jane Seymour, King Edward VI’s mother. She was the one who died in childbirth.”

  “Oh, right. Well, maybe someone was afraid she might try to take the throne from him?”

  Leo glanced at me. “We thought of that. But she had no Tudor blood at all, no claim to the throne.”

  “Well, then . . .” Kali’s voice trailed off as she tried to think of a reason why Catherine Willoughby would have feigned disinterest in and dislike for an “enchanting” little girl, her BFF’s daughter.

  I was hardly sentimental or maternal, but even I—I looked at Kali, so precious and so fresh, almost reborn—even I would take care of such a child. I looked away.

  Leo had reserved a suite for us at the Casa Dalí, a whitewashed villa perched on the rocky cliffs above town, with a ground-floor tearoom decorated with what Leo said were original Dalí prints. The suite was two bedrooms and a living room, a corner unit (of course) with a wraparound balcony that offered panoramic views of the town, harbor, and dark blue, glittering sea beyond. With a glance at Leo, I picked up my bag and started to follow Kali into the second bedroom.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” he said.

  “But Kali—”

  He turned to the girl, who was trying not to smile. “Kali,” he said gravely, “will it traumatize you if I share a room with your sister tonight?”

  Neither of us corrected the “sister.”

  Just as gravely, she said, “You have my blessing.”

  He turned back to me. “You see? Now, get over here, my girl.”

  So I followed him into the master bedroom.

  The next morning, we ate breakfast overlooking the harbor and then discussed our plans for the day. We would descend on Señor Moscardo en masse, hoping that whatever papers he had would be in English, not Spanish. “Elizabethan English is hard enough to read,” said Kali, whose education had been magnified by our fits of historical research. “Elizabethan Spanish would be impossible.”

  “I can read Elizabethan Spanish,” Leo said absently.

  “Of course you can,” I said, a little sourly.

  Kali said to me, loyally, “You can read Russian. That’s a really hard language.”

  Not medieval Russian, though, I thought. I remembered Leo’s telling me that his Spanish was “fair” and scowled at him. I hated being bested at so many things by a man.

  Seeing my face, he grinned at me with the sparkle of the night before still in his eyes, and I reddened.

  Kali grinned too. “Ah, young love,” she teased, and Leo laughed out loud.

  It wasn’t love, I thought. But it was something.

  Señor Moscardo’s studio was above the town too, but up a different hill. So we had to walk down the steep, narrow streets into the village, replete with the aromas of baking bread and fish, and back up more steep, narrow streets that wound their way up into the foothills of the massive Pyrenees. The sights were magnificent: dark, looming mountains on one side and the long stretch of heaving gray sea on the other. I could imagine why artists loved this place so much.

  Leo had to stoop in order to get through the low stone doorway of the studio, but once inside we were dazzled by the richly detailed seascapes that lined the walls. Murmuring in Hebrew, Leo studied the paintings closely, and I realized that despite his professed disinterest in his family’s business, he surely knew and appreciated fine art. “Hmm,” he said to me. “Some of these are quite good.”

  I suspected that was very high praise. For Señor Moscardo’s sake, I hoped so. And maybe if Leo bought some of his works, he would be more kindly disposed toward us.

  The man himself appeared, shuffling out of a back office that was crammed with half-finished canvases, scrolled-up work, and all manner of brushes and paints. Leo said to him, in English, for our sake, “I represent Schlumberger’s, and I like your work.”

  Moscardo’s eyes widened.

  Leo pointed at one massive seascape. “I would like to buy that piece and”—he swiveled, indicating three small oils that together formed a jewellike triptych of Cadaqués harbor—“those pieces and . . . that one.”

  The third was a landscape depicting the Pyrenees enveloped in a misty, romantic cloud. I didn’t know why, but it sent chills down my spine. I had never wanted any object so much in my life as I wanted that painting. There were tiny figures climbing up the craggy mountains into the mist and looking up at a hint of shimmering rainbow through the clouds, feathery-soft plants at their feet. It made me think of my days in the outdoors with my father, always looking up, always feeling light and free and, somehow, above the mortal plane.

  Kali said to Leo, “Is your family going to resell those paintings? I thought they sold, you know, like, Renoirs and Picassos.”

  “Which one do you like?” he asked her.

  She pointed at the triptych. “I love that one.”

  “It’s yours,” Leo said. “The seascape is mine, and your sister gets the mountain landscape that she’s looking at so lustfully.”

  We both turned to him, faces aglow, and he waved it off.

  The now beaming Señor Moscardo held out a very plebeian cardboard box to Leo. “The papers of Father Ramon Moscardo,” he said in heavily accented English, and shrugged. “I don’t know why you want them. They have sat in my attic forever, and my father’s attic before that. . . .”

  With visible effort, Leo took the box politely rather than grabbing it out of the graying artist’s hands. “Gracias,” he said. “Muchas gracias.”

  The little man bowed politely. “De nada.”

  I had the feeling that he really thought it was nothing, and prayed, as fervently as I ever had in my life, that he was wrong.

  Chapter 32

  We decamped to the café next door, where Leo ordered pots of coffee and trays of pastries, enough to make the proprietor almost as happy as Señor Moscardo, and we commandeered an empty table in the back. I thought briefly about how easily money paved a path for Leo and his ilk. When Señor Moscardo asked diffidently about payment for the paintings, Leo handed him a card and scribbled a name on it. “Schlumberger’s bursar,” he said briefly. As easy as all that.

  Then Leo handed out museum gloves to us again, and my thoughts returned to the papers. Kali whined, “But whyyyy? They’ve been sitting in a moldy attic for years and years and . . .”

  “Around five hundred years,” Leo said briefly, and her eyes widened. “Put them on.”

  He handed around papers—keeping the best for himself, no doubt—and we all started reading. Or tried to; most were in English, but the old script was much too faded and stylized for me to understand much. Next to me, Kali kept sighing in disappointment as here and there she deciphered lines that turned out to be a recipe for butter bread or a bill for linen hangings.

  Leo, engrossed in his papers, noticed nothing.

  “H
ere it is,” he said. “Voyez-vous.”

  We crowded around to peer over his shoulders, but I still couldn’t make out the crabbed handwriting.

  “I can’t read it,” Kali said, sounding even more like a disappointed toddler.

  “Ici,” Leo said, too taut to remember his English. “‘Twenty shillings for a mantua for the Lady Mary. Two shillings sixpence for laundress to the Lady Mary.’” Carefully, he turned another page of the half-crumbling vellum scroll. “‘Three shillings tuppence for linens’—diapers to you, young ladies—‘for the Lady Mary.’”

  Impressed in spite of myself, I looked more closely at the unfamiliar script. It barely resembled English to my untrained eyes. But still, how remarkable, how touching, to see the long-ago minutiae of a long-gone life. For the first time, I really understood Leo’s passion.

  “And then,” he said, with a very Gallic shrug, “there’s nothing. No reference to Mary ever again. Except for that book that you found at Sudeley, Kali, the one inscribed ‘Lady Mary, the Queen’s Daughter.’”

  “I don’t understand,” Kali said, a little petulantly. “I get why you were so excited about that book, but if there’s no mention of her here, after the . . . linens, then why are you so excited? Doesn’t that mean she did die as a baby after all?”’

  I didn’t understand either, but she was right. Leo was beyond excited; he was rapt.

  Cautiously, I reached out and flicked through the next pages to the end of the book. Leo was right: There were no more references to Lady Mary. She had disappeared, as all the historians said.

  I opened up the next book while Leo watched me indulgently. “It’s addictive, isn’t it, motek?”

  Like Kali, I wondered why he was smiling.

  But I wasn’t addicted. I was looking for something.

  Then, unbelievably, I found it.

  “Leo,” I said. “Look at this. Linens for the Lady Amanda.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  I paged forward. “Three shillings for laundress for Lady Amanda. Eight shillings tuppence for . . . oh my God. Eight shillings tuppence for nursemaid for Lady Amanda.” I looked at Leo. “What the hell? Who was Lady Amanda?”

  “According to Father Ramon, she was a ward of Catherine Willoughby’s,” he said. “A distant cousin who had been orphaned, so she came into Catherine’s household, coincidentally, right around the time Lady Mary ‘disappeared.’”

  Another “coincidence.”

  I almost had it. It was so close . . . but I wasn’t quite there yet. Kali sat watching us interestedly but uncomprehendingly.

  “If,” I began, “if Catherine had other wards—”

  “As did most noble households,” Leo interrupted me.

  “Yes. Okay. If Catherine had other wards, if she was in the habit of taking in other children, then why did she resent little Mary so much?”

  Leo looked as if he couldn’t believe he had to spell it out for me.

  “Remember when I thought you had changed your name? When we first met?”

  “Yes,” I said cautiously, and Kali stirred with surprise.

  “I thought you were in some danger,” he said. “Maybe from an abusive boyfriend?”

  “Yes . . . ,” I said again. Then the lightbulb went on, with a crashing, blinding burst of brilliance.

  “Leo,” I said, almost breathlessly, “you think Lady Amanda is Baby Mary, don’t you?”

  “You said it yourself,” he said. “Lady Amanda appeared right after Lady Mary disappeared, in late 1549.” He pulled out another volume and started leafing through it, almost reverent in his treatment of the fragile pages. Then he looked up at me. “‘Governess for Lady Amanda,’” he said quietly. “In 1554. So she must have been about five years old in 1554, about a year older than Mary would have been.”

  Kali had gotten it too. “But how could they have pulled it off? Wouldn’t people notice it was the same baby?”

  “Not if they kept little Mary out of sight for a month or two and then introduced Amanda. All babies look alike, after all—”

  “No, they don’t!” Kali protested.

  He ignored her. “And at that age, in those times, she would have been so swaddled up that no one outside the nursery would really have seen her face anyway.” He turned to me. “It could have been done. You see how it could have been done.”

  All babies looked alike to me too. “I see,” I said slowly. “But why? Why on earth would Catherine have done that?”

  Leo looked deflated, but only momentarily. “Good question,” he admitted. “But I’ll bet we can find answers.”

  Kali looked dubious.

  Leo tried to give the box of papers back to Señor Moscardo, but the artist waved dismissively. A flood of Spanish followed. Leo smiled and nodded at the old man, and we turned to go. I gathered that Schlumberger’s “bursar” had been more than generous and the paintings were already being packed for their flight to London. Kali and I smiled at Señor Moscardo as well, and he almost smiled back.

  Leo insisted that we go straight back to our hotel rather than stopping for food, or at least a celebratory drink. So, once again, we slogged down one hill and up another. Then it began to rain. As the rain grew steadier, the roads became narrow, rutted streams, and Kali and I held on to each other for support. Leo strode on ahead with his jacket draped over his precious box of papers, oblivious.

  As we settled back into the warmth of our suite with some relief, Leo, a man with a mission, went straight to his computer. “Call the desk,” he tossed over his shoulder. “Ask for coffee. Lots of coffee. And whatever . . . else.” Unable to tear himself away any longer, he turned back to his computer.

  I looked at Kali and shrugged. Together we managed to order hot soup, hot coffee, and hot tartes from “the desk,” and then I made her change into dry clothes before we perched over Leo’s shoulder. He was paging through long lists of names and dates, muttering under his breath.

  I asked, “What exactly are you looking for?”

  “A record of Amanda Willoughby’s marriage. A lot of careful digging should eventually turn up some letters or diary entries mentioning the wedding of a ward of Catherine Willoughby. Anyone being married from that house would merit some comment. But if we’re lucky, we might be able to find it in the parish register.” He grinned. “Which happens to be online. God bless the British Historical Trust.”

  “What if she didn’t get married in Catherine Willoughby’s parish?” Kali asked.

  He shrugged. “Then we’ll start the really tedious digging.”

  But we were lucky. Only a few moments later, Leo shouted triumphantly, “That’s it! Bloody hell and sacrebleu! That’s it!” He pointed to a line on the screen and read it aloud: “Lady Amanda Willoughby of Grimsthorpe Hall, spinster, wed to Lord Edward Seymour, August 15, 1564.”

  We stared.

  “That’s it,” Leo said again. “That’s it.” Suddenly subdued, he had the air of a man whose dreams had come true and who didn’t know what to do next.

  Kali said it for him. “So, what do we do now?”

  Leo closed the computer and looked straight at me. Our eyes met, until I looked away.

  “That,” he said, “depends on your sister.”

  Chapter 33

  I refused to respond to Leo’s statement to Kali, and he worked furiously on his notes for the rest of the day while Kali and I shopped our way through the little village. Dinner was a mostly silent affair. Leo ate in abstracted silence, I was shell-shocked that it had come to this, and Kali created an uncomfortable barrier between us.

  Back in our beautiful bedroom, Leo helped me pull back the thick white comforter, and I took my hair down from its messy bun, very messy, after the day’s rain and humidity.

  He said, “We have to discuss this sooner or later. Now that I’ve traced a clear path from Lady Mary Seymour in 1548 to Juliette Mary Seymour in 2017, all I need is Jules to stop the property deal.”

  “But you haven’t traced a ‘clear’ path,
” I said. “It’s all conjecture.”

  “I’m confident I can persuade enough fellow historians,” he said calmly. “That’s as ‘clear’ as a five-hundred-year-old path ever gets. The weight of the evidence is on my side. But . . .” He crossed the room and stood in front of me. “But . . .”

  “You need Jules,” I said flatly.

  “Yes. I need Jules.”

  He watched me closely as I stepped back from the intensity of his gaze. “I’m sorry,” I said, turning away. “I can’t help you.”

  “Please,” he said. “I’m asking you. In the name of all that’s good in the world.”

  It was extraordinary to hear a man as confident and competent as Leo reduced to begging insignificant little Amy Schumann. I felt sick. “I’m sorry,” I said with finality, and a door slammed shut between us.

  We went to bed in utter silence.

  The next morning, Kali begged to return to one more store, where she wanted to buy a piece of pottery that she thought Élodie would like, so Leo and I sat awkwardly together at the harbor café while we waited for her. In silence, I watched fishermen bringing in their nets from an ancient trawler and throwing fish into barrels on the beach.

  Clearly groping for a safe topic of conversation, Leo said, “Élodie says the kids are fascinated by Kali. Élodie made her get a whole new wardrobe, though.”

  “I noticed,” I said.

  More silence. Leo tried again: “I know Kali says she’s dumb, but I think she has some sort of learning disability.”

  “Why? Don’t you think her parents—my mother and her father, I mean—would have noticed?”

  “From what she says, I think her twin sister, Kelley, helped her through school for a long time.”

  I thought about that.

  “I’m sure Kelley thought she was doing a good deed,” he added, “but really it would’ve been better to let Kali fail so that she could have gotten the help she needed.”

  “How do you know so much about this?” I asked.

  “Amy, I have a dozen nieces and nephews, not to mention sisters. I know how sisters operate. And I’m a professor. I know something about different learning styles.”