“What if she was afraid to tell him?” he countered. “What if their relationship wasn’t…?”
The implication turned my stomach, but it made sense. “You think she might have been his mistress.”
Divorce was taboo within the Society. Affairs were of no consequence…unless you got caught.
Having a love child smacked of incontrovertible proof to me. And yet, Mom had kept me.
“The theory fits with her leaving him after she learned of her condition. If the Marchands suspected, and after she refused to abort, it would explain why her family disowned her.” He reached across the table, his cool pointer tapping my forearm. “The only truth to be found at this table, in this moment, is that we simply don’t know.”
“We moved around so much.” I stared at the elegant bend of his fingers where they curled on the table, flexing as though comfort were a butterfly he feared crushing in his hand before gifting it to me. “Mom made no secret about our gifts. She never taught me, but she let me watch when she performed resuscitations.”
Those had been off the books, a means of earning money to feed us, but I hadn’t known that until I turned Woolly upside down in search of clues. Mom had kept a ledger with notations in the margin, in case she ever got caught, and it was packed away with her belongings in the attic. Sifting through those fragments of her life hurt too much. Tears in my eyes, I had folded the box shut and hadn’t returned since.
“We changed cities so often, I couldn’t get a familiar. She told me about them, and I wanted a kitten so badly, but there was no guarantee the next place we lived would allow pets.” I blasted out a sigh. “I was so young when she died.” Five years old and an orphan. “I don’t remember much about her, just bits and pieces of our life together. I’m afraid…” I bit my lip, “…that what I do recall isn’t real. Maud told me so many stories. I can’t tell them from memory anymore.”
The chair legs scraped as Linus stood. The cold of his touch bit through the thin fabric of my shirt when his palm came to rest on my shoulder, but I covered his hand with mine anyway.
“I have to know,” I confessed. “Not only what I am, but who I am too.”
“I understand better than you might think.”
“There’s no question of your paternity, buddy.” I patted his hand. “You’re one-part Woolworth to one-part Lawson. Mixed vigorously.” I tasted bile in my mouth. “Scratch that last part. I really don’t want to know if you were shaken or stirred into existence.”
“No.” His hand eased away. “I’m not.”
“What?” I toppled my chair in a rush to stand and face him. “Are you…? Were you…?”
Adoption would explain how Linus could be both a decent guy and related to the Grande Dame. Admittedly, by eliminating the “related to the Grande Dame” part, but still.
“Don’t get too excited,” he teased. “Clarice Lawson is my biological mother.”
Oh, well. No one was perfect. “And your biological father?”
“He was a donor, my father’s cousin twice removed, to keep the bloodline pure. I was carried via surrogate because of Mother’s advanced age, so no one was the wiser.”
Surrogacy was common among necromancers due to a propensity for females to undergo menopause around three hundred years of age. Sperm donors weren’t uncommon, either. Necromancers weren’t the most fertile bunch. That’s how we ended up with a Low Society in the first place. They were interbred with humans in a bid to increase fertility rates, and it worked, but they sacrificed magic in the bargain.
Actually, now that I thought about it, as a Woolworth seeking a financially and socially superior match rather than a genetic one, the Society would likely applaud the Grande Dame’s choice to engineer her ideal heir.
“Advanced age,” I echoed. “Maybe never retell this story within your mother’s hearing if you want to hold on to your favored-son status.”
Clarice Lawson was a lot of things, and vain was chief among them.
“This information is, as I’m sure you can imagine, sensitive.” He studied the glossy tips of his dress shoes. “I would appreciate it if you kept this between us.”
“You keep my secrets.” Oscar, my ghostly ward, came to mind. “Keeping yours is the least I can do.”
That earned me the tiniest smile, and my lips twitched to return his confidence.
“There’s nothing more natural than to wonder, Grier.”
“Speaking from experience?” A hungry mind like his wouldn’t have let a mystery as compelling as his paternity go unraveled, confidentiality clause or not. “What do you know about the donor?”
“His name is Timothy Mercer.” Linus tucked his hands into his pockets. “He lives in Montana with his wife and their daughters.”
“You have half--sisters.” A trill of curiosity shot through me. “Have you met him? Or them?”
“I met him once,” he admitted. “He lived in Savannah at the time, so it was easy enough for me to take a bus to the Lyceum and confront him.” He shrugged like it didn’t matter when it must have for little Linus to brave public transportation alone. “Mr. Mercer was polite about the whole thing. He told me I was the spitting image of his grandfather.” That memory earned a faint smile. “He called Mother, and she came to collect me. That was the last time I saw him. I went back once, years later, but he had already moved out west by then. Given their arrangement, it didn’t feel right to pursue the connection further, even with sisters to consider.”
Most likely, Mercer had been pink-slipped the night he met his son. “Thank you for telling me this.”
All kids with question marks for parents longed for a link to their roots. A connection to their past. An understanding of who they came from that might shape who they became. I got lucky. I grew up hearing stories about Mom from Maud and Odette and flipping through the scrapbooks of their lives. My father might have been a blank page, but the others overflowed with proof I had been so very loved.
Mom had given up the right to call herself a Marchand, though she had anyway. She had forfeited her position within the family firm, forcing her to rely on her reputation to support us. She had cut ties with her relatives, forsaken her lineage. All for me.
So yeah. I had been lucky. The luckiest. Even if I had lost her all too soon.
Linus sharing his story with me might not count as a ringing endorsement for what I had done in recruiting Odette to make inroads with the Marchands, but it made me less ashamed for my curiosity.
The backs of my eyelids stung, but I blinked away the blurred vision to read him better. “What is it?”
“Let me help you find your father.”
A tiny bubble of happiness rose in me. “Does this mean you approve?”
“Approval is not the issue here.” Those six little words torpedoed that hope. “How you’re gathering the information is what concerns me.” He wiped a hand over his mouth. “Odette is family to you, and asking her for a favor might seem like a small thing, but she’s a world-renowned seer. She’s hardly inconspicuous. Having her contact Dame Marchand was bound to raise eyebrows. There are members of the Marchand family, Evangeline’s contemporaries, who will immediately make the connection between her and Odette and wonder what prompted the call given the disownment. Eloise might not be the only one who overheard their conversation. Even assuming her motives are pure, others’ might not be.”
The urge to smack myself in the forehead twitched in my palm. “When you put it like that…”
“The fewer people who know you’re looking, the better chance you stand of finding your answers.” His gaze cut to me. “I have contacts who can be trusted. Let me make a few calls, see what they can uncover.”
“All right.” Knowing a good deal when I heard one, I stuck out my hand to shake his. “I accept your offer under the condition that you let me foot the bill. Retainer, equipment, bribes, all of it. And—” I squeezed his icy fingers, “—you tell me everything. Every. Single. Thing. No matter how bad or how much you think it might rock my world, I want to know.”