Jane Steele(95)

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.