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.