13. Chapter 13
Chapter thirteen
J essica
There's a man outside my first class and a different man outside my second, and the one who walks me across to the administration building doesn't talk, which I appreciate, because the last four days everyone has talked.
Torres comes as far as the stairs.
"I can wait."
"You've got protection at eleven."
"I can miss protection at eleven."
"Torres."
"I know." He doesn't move. "I'm saying I can."
I put my hand flat on his chest for a second, which is as much as I'm doing in a stairwell with a security officer four feet away, and go up.
And here's the thing that's actually making me itch, all the way along the corridor.
I'm in the room.
I asked for this. I stood in Luke's sitting room and said get me in the room like it was a fair demand, and then I said it to Falken, and he wrote it down, and now there's a meeting about the Fourth House at ten o'clock and my name is on the list of attendees.
Apparently I demanded a seat at the table just in time for the table to get frightening.
The door opens and I know before I've fully crossed the threshold.
There are four people. Falken. Jon, at the far end, with a notebook he isn't writing in. Faris. And a woman I've met twice on video calls and never in person — Hess, the Council's records specialist, sixties, cardigan, reading glasses pushed up into her hair.
And the table is covered.
Not with folders. With enlargements. Somebody's had documents blown up to A3 and mounted so nobody has to breathe on the originals, and they're laid out in a sequence, and there are little printed labels beside them.
Nobody is drinking coffee. Nobody's talking about the weather.
Faris looks up when I come in and does not look remotely smug.
That's the thing that gets my heart going. In fifteen months I have never once seen Celeste Faris in a room about me without the expression of a woman waiting to be proved right.
"Okay," I say, sitting down. "What?"
"Miss Miller—" Falken starts.
"You've all got the same face. What did you find?"
Falken glances at Hess.
"Quite a lot," Hess says.
She starts where we left off in October, which I appreciate, because I have had enough of people beginning at the beginning.
"Your father's line runs back cleanly to Emil.
He arrives in 1856, aged twenty-three by his own account, and the name settles into Miller within a generation.
" She taps the first enlargement — the manifest, blown up until the clerk's slanting hand is the size of my palm.
"Before the crossing, nothing connects to him.
Two stated birthplaces, neither of which produces a record. Two different men named as his father."
"Right."
"So we stopped trying to find Emil. Emil doesn't want to be found — that's the entire point of Emil." She moves her hand along the table. "We started at the other end instead."
"Which end?"
"The end of the war," Faris says.
I look at her.
"Twelve weeks in the post-war administrative archive," Faris says. "Not the histories. The paperwork. The histories were written to be read. The paperwork was written to be filed."
And there's something in her voice I've never heard before, which I think might be the sound of Celeste Faris enjoying herself.
Hess moves to the second enlargement.
"A household inventory," she says. "Taken after the fall of the House, as part of the seizure of the estate. It lists rooms. It lists furniture. And at the back, because that's how these things were done, it lists the household."
I lean in.
Two columns of names in a copperplate hand, and beside each name, a short notation.
"Staff, mostly. Then at the top of the page, the family." Her finger moves. "Every entry is marked. Accounted for. Accounted for. Deceased, confirmed. Deceased, confirmed. "
She stops.
There's one line near the bottom of the family group where the notation is longer, and the ink is different, like it was added later.
"And this one," Hess says.
I read it.
Youngest daughter. Not recovered.
The room is very quiet.
"Not recovered," I say.
"Not recovered."
"That means dead."
"It means not recovered ," Faris says. "Which is what a clerk writes when he cannot write deceased, confirmed , because he has not been shown a body and he is not permitted to invent one."
"And nobody followed it up?"
"Everybody followed it up, extensively, for a period of months.
" Faris folds her hands. "Then the war ended, and the House was struck from the record, and everyone who disappeared during its destruction was counted among the dead.
Which was reasonable. It was almost certainly correct for every other name on that page.
" She looks at the enlargement. "By the time the histories were written, the phrase in every account is that the royal line was destroyed.
Nobody was lying. They were summarising. "
I'm looking at four words in brown ink.
"So there was a kid," I say.
"There was a kid," Hess says. "And now the second document."
The third enlargement is completely different. Smaller hand, different paper, a printed form filled in.
"A residency registration. Different jurisdiction, well outside the Fourth House lands, dated a little under five months after the inventory. An adult woman registers herself and a child. She gives a surname that appears nowhere in her stated town of origin. She gives the child's age."
"Which is?"
"Seven."
Seven.
"And the woman?"
"The name she registers under isn't hers, as far as we can establish.
" Hess pushes her glasses up further. "But three of the household staff on that first list share it.
A servant family, attached to the House for at least two generations.
" She spreads her hands slightly. "That is not proof.
It is a coincidence I would be embarrassed to ignore. "
"So somebody got her out."
"Somebody got a child of that age out of that region in that year and registered her under a household surname. Whether it was the woman on this form, whether there were others, what route they took, what it cost them—none of that is written down anywhere I can reach."
"And after?"
"After that it gets easier. That's the part nobody expected.
" Hess moves along the table. "The child appears twice more in the same registry under the assumed surname, with the same woman named as guardian.
Then, at seventeen, she appears in a marriage record.
Same name, same age, same guardian, who signs as a witness. "
"So it's the same girl."
"I'd defend that, yes."
She moves to the next enlargement.
"She has three children."
I look at her. "Three."
"Two daughters and a son. Which is where this became considerably more work than tracing your ancestry backward."
"Because all three could have descendants."
"Exactly." Hess gives me a look that suggests I've finally said something useful. "Once we had a possible surviving child of the Fourth House, following only the line that eventually reaches you would have proved very little. We had to follow all of them."
She taps the first name.
"The son dies at twenty-three. Unmarried, no children that I've found.
The older daughter marries and has two children.
One dies in infancy. The other lives to thirty-one, marries, but there are no children in the parish records, no children named in either probate record, and no later claimant through that household. "
"So that branch ends."
"As far as the surviving records can establish, yes."
Her finger moves to the younger daughter.
"This is your branch."
The next sheet has another surname.
Then another.
"She marries," Hess says. "Her daughter marries. Two generations later it happens again. Every time, the family I'm following changes names. There is nothing remarkable about any of them. Farmers. One schoolmaster."
Hess moves on.
"Some of those families have several children, so each time the line divides, we follow every branch again.
Most end exactly the way ordinary families end.
Children die. People don't marry. Couples have no children.
One branch produces six children and looks extremely promising until you discover that none of the surviving three had children of their own. "
"Jesus."
"Genealogy is largely people dying inconveniently."
Faris makes a small sound that might be disapproval.
Hess ignores her.
"By the time we reach the nineteenth century, there's only one branch I can carry forward."
She lays her hand on the next enlargement.
"And that's the one that eventually gets us to Emil."
"Eventually?"
"Unfortunately, Emil appears to have had a personal objection to being found."
"That sounds common in this family."
"It may be hereditary."
Faris looks over her glasses.
Hess continues before either of us can enjoy that.
"The household immediately before Emil is documented. Marriage, burial, probate, children. One of those children is a son of the right age, born in the right place, who disappears from the local record at exactly the point Emil appears elsewhere."
"That's Emil."
"I think it's Emil."
"But you can't prove it."
"I can prove a young man was born into that household. I can prove he disappears. I can prove a man with the same given name, age and place of birth appears on a passenger record shortly afterward under a surname close enough that I would normally blame the clerk and move on with my life."
"And then?"
"Then he crosses an ocean." She taps the next sheet. "And eventually we get Miller."
I sit back.
"Is that it? Is that the whole thing? Is that finished?"
"No," Faris says.
Everyone looks at her.
"There are two links in that chain I would not defend in front of a hostile audience."
Hess nods once.