But the moment the breath cooled into words, the moment Malory said that Ottavia was Cristina’s daughter, he knew that the sentence was out of tune. There was Cristina, on page five of the Times, in a quarter-page photo from an era more recent than the death of Tibor, but looking no less glamorous. And although he hadn’t seen Ottavia in all that time, Malory couldn’t conceive of pale, golden-haired, comfortably small Ottavia being the issue of Cristina. Malory knew immediately that Antonella had touched on the truth. Ottavia was not Cristina’s. She was not Tibor’s. She was Malory’s daughter, the daughter of Malory and Louiza. For the past twenty years, he had allowed himself to live in a world where he refused to see his daughter — that his daughter was his daughter — refused to believe that she even existed. For twenty years, Malory had bottled, boxed, trapped, hidden, disguised so many memories. To protect Louiza, surely. To keep the red-bearded man and who knew how many others from taking her away. And into that box, Malory had also stuffed the information that red-bearded man had given him.
Ottavia was his daughter. Ottavia was Louiza’s daughter, the daughter, the child who had pushed her tiny hand from within Louiza’s womb to meet his in the drafty October cold of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Ottavia was the lost girl, the girl who had disappeared along with her mother. He had thrown into the storage bin his memories of that little girl, Ottavia, her miraculous appearance at the villa, the way she sat upright, hugging her knees beneath the duvet as he told her about Septimania and the Caliph Haroun al Rashid and read to her the same goodnight story about Judar the Son of Omar that Haroun’s ambassador had read to the Princess Aldana in the court of Charlemagne. The way Ottavia so naturally linked her arm in his as they walked through the pastures of TiborTina. The way Ottavia so simply and delicately removed Bernini’s apple from the Newton statue. Ottavia was his daughter and she was also the once and future Queen of Septimania.
These stored memories added up to loss. Boxes full, tunnels full, libraries and mountains full of loss. But instead of the stale taste of outdated regret, Malory felt joy. It was a joy he had known only at those brief moments when he had drawn together with Louiza and Ottavia. But now, here with Antonella, the patient nurse who had cared for him with biscuit tin and copper curls for twenty years, Malory felt a joy with this woman who had removed the glaze from his eyes and given him back his sight, given him a family.
That night he bicycled down to the Off-License and brought back a bottle of a Cahors from the Pyrenees. There wasn’t much in the pantry she could throw together to fit the moment. But she lit a pair of candles and she talked with Malory; Malory talked with her, about her, asked her about her own children. Antonella looked at the Malory before her, the smaller Malory, the still mobile Malory, the seventy-year-old man, more tonsure than hair, but still the comfortably lost Malory, and she talked about her own lost Matteo, the lost Anna, all the lost years of her marriage. There were tears and there were kisses, their dry, unpracticed lips moistened by Cahors and years of tacit intimacy. And when the time came to separate for the night, Malory took Antonella by the hand to lead her into his room. But neither his bed — her Matteo’s bed — nor Antonella’s own seemed a comfortable option. So they lay in the candlelight in the bay window. And Antonella removed the copper curls that disguised the chemical savannah of her scalp, unzipped and exposed the runnels of operations and rough edges of tests and countless medical ravages she had hidden and perfumed away from Malory’s sight over all these years. For the first time, Malory looked at Antonella. He looked and he saw past the scars, past the gravity that had drawn the skin to the bone and the bone closer to the Earth, the time and the time that had thrown its own disguise over the eternally young Italian woman who loved him. He saw what Antonella had been and what she had grown into. He saw the copper Tuscan curls and the full curves of the Antonella who first opened her biscuit tin to him in the Maths Faculty. And Antonella discovered that, late though he was, barely imaginable as it might seem, her Malory had finally returned.
The next morning was a Saturday. From that same bay window, Antonella watched Malory bicycle off to Histon to teach his seven-year-olds about the pedals. The view out the Coton footpath had changed over the years as Corpus Christi sold land to a developer who shot up a constellation of seventy-two prefabricated cottages that seeped off the Barton Road to the edge of their sports grounds. And if she looked out the right panes of the window, she could see the towers of the Newton Institute, where for more than thirty years she had looked after her mathematicians when the university booted them out of their cozier home at the Sidgwick Site, where the one piece of Antonella that remained was the biscuit tin she had donated to the Faculty. But the view from the center of the bay window was of the Coton footpath. And as Malory bicycled away, the perspective of his diminishing form — as ideal as in any late Renaissance painting — gave her a sense of balance and tranquility.
As soon as Antonella could see no more of Malory out the window, she went to her closet. There, from the carton she reserved for her marriage license, the children’s birth certificates, and two cameos of a pair of dead Romans, she took out a faded envelope holding two more ancient sheets of paper. They had been folded in the Chapbook that Malory had given her to translate. As they were written in English, Antonella had put them aside in this envelope all those many years before and had forgotten to bring them with her translation to Rome. They were Malory’s, of course, and she should have given them to him before. But now was as good at time as any.
They were both written on the same quality paper smelling of comfortable age, embossed with a seven-sided S.
The first:
11 September 1692
Dear Mr. Newton,
I regret to inform you that, on the night of 10 September, after consuming a light supper with a bottle of claret, Her Royal Excellency, the Queen of Septimania, retired to Sanctum Sanctorum for the last time. Enclosed, please find a letter in her hand addressed to you. I rest
your most humble & most
obedient Servant,
Settimio
And the second — although written the day before the first:
10 September 1692
My dearest Isaac,
What we did was simple. Simplex sigillum veri—the simple is the sign of the truth. Isn’t that what you said, twenty-odd years ago? And yet, for twenty-odd years, my letters to you have remained unanswered, my envelopes returned unopened.
Yet what could be simpler than two hearts, two bodies joining together in science and in sympathy? When I left Rome and traveled to Cambridge, I knew that the future of Septimania was beyond my sole power. I needed a second body. And when you left your mother’s garden to travel with me, you knew that your own quest, your own questions were beyond the capabilities of any one man.
You never knew your father. I never knew mine. Yet we solved problems, Isaac, we created life — a child I’d hoped you might lift onto your shoulders the way Aeneas or the giant Hercules bore their futures. Our son of flesh and blood, our twenty-odd-year-old son lives to carry on the line of Septimania. And he will have daughters and they will have sons, and doubtless there will be others who will stand on our shoulders and solve problems which exist beyond our horizons.