“Aldana’s son?”
“And Aimery’s. The boy was the son of Charlemagne’s daughter and the King of the Jews. He was the eldest grandson of Charlemagne and heir to the throne of Septimania. He wrote about standing on the circle of porphyry in St. Peter’s after the coronation. Next to him was his grandfather, Charlemagne, and his parents. And there was another man, a friend of his father’s, who had traveled all the way from Baghdad.”
“So Haroun kept his promise and came back!” Ottavia walked a few steps down the track and then turned back to Malory full of light. “And why do you think he did that?”
“For Aimery, his old friend Gan, of course,” Malory said.
“But couldn’t it be that he came back for Aldana?” Ottavia asked. “That he kept his promise to Aldana and came back to see the boy. Isn’t that possible? Isn’t that the answer?”
“To what question?” Malory had an uncomfortable feeling, a residual pain like a rope burn on the back of his skull.
“Haroun didn’t come back for Aimery. He came back for Aldana.”
“Why? Because he promised?”
“To see his son!” Ottavia’s exasperation with Malory was real, but charming, Malory thought, which relieved his discomfort a touch.
“You’re saying …” Malory corrected himself. “You’re suggesting that perhaps it wasn’t Aimery who was the father of the boy, but Haroun?”
“Oh, Malory!”
“And that the line of the kings of Septimania, and queens for that matter, descended not from the line of King David, but from the Caliph of Islam?”
“Why …?”
“And that therefore I, Malory, am not King of the Jews after all?” Malory knew he was lecturing, but the rope burn drove him on. “But as a consolation, I am the Messiah of the Muslims?”
“Stop, Malory!” Ottavia said. “I didn’t mean to get you so upset. But can’t you see that sometimes people celebrate uncertainty?”
“What uncertainty?”
“The boy,” Ottavia said. “Aldana knew that his father was either Aimery or Haroun …”
“But didn’t know which?” Malory asked.
“Aimery was born in the same fertile crescent as Haroun,” Ottavia smiled. “Olive skin, curly hair — Aldana probably didn’t have much to go on to identify the boy as the son of one or the other. And in those days, millennia before DNA testing …”
“Nobody knew how to open the box, or even which box to search,” Malory said. He didn’t expect Ottavia to understand, but she smiled. “Here, Ottavia.” Malory reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small flash drive. “I had Settimio scan the Complete History of Septimania onto this for you. You can open the box yourself if you want and search for an answer. Or at the very least, it’s a lifetime supply of bedtime stories. I suppose you have a computer of some sort?”
“Malory,” Ottavia said, “I don’t care whether you are Holy Roman Emperor, King of the Jews, Caliph of the Muslims, or all three rolled into one. I’m glad you’re here. With Tibor. With me.”
The force of Ottavia’s hug, her arms around Malory, her cheek next to his, stopped him from nattering away. When she was through she said nothing, just took Malory’s arm and led him to a building at the edge of the field.
“This is the Blue House,” she said. “There is a room upstairs for you and a room downstairs for the Driver, as well as a garage for your car, although the space is tight next to the firewood. Cristina and Tibor are up the hill in the White House. The Nurses and the Bomb Squad are usually in the Red Barn. But it’s only the four of us today.”
“The Nurses and the Bomb Squad?” Malory repeated, suddenly struck with a terrible thought. “You aren’t one of? You haven’t become?”
“A Nurse-in-Training?” Ottavia laughed again, but the laugh wasn’t quite as melodic as before, and Malory immediately wished he could undo the question and tune away the pain he detected behind the dissonance. “Never. No,” she said, leading Malory up the blue staircase at the side of the house.
And before she left him, another hug. No matter what, Malory thought, I am glad.
Malory’s room was simple. An iron bed stood at the far end, a mosquito net draped from a serrated crown above its center. Malory wasn’t certain whether there were curtains for the windows. But there was a Shaker hook rug on the painted blue floor, and a bathroom whose fixtures were so intricately designed that Malory, while ignorant of their function, understood that they were of the same high quality as the hair creams and skin emulsifiers and loofahs and face cloths and bathrobes and even the tarantula-shaped juicer that shared the bathroom with him.
“I’m giving you fifteen minutes to wash your face,” Ottavia said, as the Driver set Malory’s suitcase on the wicker bed stand, “then I’m coming to get you. Cristina’s so excited she’ll kill both of us if it’s any longer.”
“Ottavia …” Malory called to her.
“Yes?”
“Promise me you’ll come back? To Septimania?”
“Only if you promise to read me another bedtime story and tuck me in.” A final peck on Malory’s cheek and she was gone.
The air was appreciably cooler when Malory opened his eyes and realized that the peck had carried a charm. Somehow, he had showered and climbed into a bathrobe before navigating the mosquito netting into an hour of dreamless sleep.
“Feel better?” the girl asked. She was nestled into the cracked leather of a Morris chair in a still-sunny corner of the room, legs folded beneath her. She smiled, and the mole at the top of her left cheekbone reached towards heaven. Malory blinked. “Coffee?”
“Actually,” Malory said, “just some water would be lovely.” Were there two heads he saw through the curtain? He hadn’t remembered the mole on the girl’s cheek.
“I found him.” The two heads separated.
“Cristina?” Malory pulled himself up on the bed and adjusted his robe.
“You did. You found him.” Cristina leaned down and brushed Ottavia’s forehead with her lips. “Why don’t you get the Driver a cupcake and a Cosmo and let me have Malory to myself for just one minute?” Ottavia smiled and hopscotched out the door. “I love that girl,” Cristina said to Malory. “She makes me happy.”
Truth be told, very little made Cristina happy any more. She would be happy, more than happy if all the Nurses went away. And the Bomb Squad. And the celebrities and the interviews with presidents and ministers and actresses and dictators and flying to Libya and flying to Chile and flying to Ascot on the private helicopter of someone who wanted to be richer and more famous than he was and thought that Cristina’s presence in a hat — no matter how gorgeous it was — in his private box, within four feet of the Queen would further that ambition. What she wanted was an old story, but one that still made her cry when she stayed up alone late at night wrapped in her shawl, drinking still water from a blue bottle and watching any one of a number of movies that celebrated the days of innocence when apples were still black-and-white.
She wanted Tibor back. Back to before, before the flight to Rome, before the flight to Fatebenefratelli, the flight to America. There were things Tibor knew. He knew her blind father, her Jewish grandmother, the way her parents’ apartment smelled when Tibor bartered a few smuggled strands of copper wire for two kilos of bacon and a dozen eggs, the school where she was the top student from age eight to seventeen, and the way she looked in a bikini the summer after she graduated. He knew about the abortion and he knew about the birth. And although they slept in separate rooms more often than they slept in separate countries; and sometimes in his separate room there were separate girls and separate sounds and separate activities that he sometimes insisted, awash in a haze of vodka and creation, that she enter and join; he was the only one who knew how to stop her from shaking when she saw things in the dark that threatened to separate her from sanity. In spite of everything, more times than not, she wanted Tibor back. And the curious man in the bathrobe on the bed, the curious man she hadn’t seen in twenty years, who had been avoiding her and Tibor for who knew what imagined or unimagined slight — and there were slights that Tibor had inflicted on Cristina that were worse than unimaginable — might make that happen. Malory had brought Tibor to her in Rome. Malory might be the only one now who could bring Tibor back.