‘Sylvia?’ I asked.
‘Nathaniel.’
‘He – he – is yours?’
‘Unfortunately, yes.’
‘Forgive me. I was under the impression that you thought Sylvia had been unfaithful.’
‘Would that she had. It was bound to catch up on me when I attempted to sire my own.’
‘I do not understand.’
And then he pulled off his hat, and tugged at his hair, and it came off in his hand too, and again I saw that peculiar vision I had not comprehended that fateful night in Berkeley-square.
‘Must I spell it out to you, Dora?’ he said, almost plaintively. His scalp was speckled with dark tufts of close-shaven hair.
And so he told me of his father, a French diplomat, named Yves Florent Chevalier, who married his mother, Elizabeth Talbot, a renowned English beauty, in Paris in the summer of 1825. Two years later Chevalier was posted to the French consulate in Algiers, as diplomatic relations were deteriorating between Algeria and France.
‘You have heard the story of the Dey and the flywhisk?’
I shook my head.
‘The Dey, as Deys are renowned for so doing, was getting all hot and bothered by an invoice for some trifle, a bag or two of wheat or something like that, some thirty years overdue. My father was in the famous meeting where the agitated Dey got so consternated he frapped the consul with, of all things, a flywhisk.’
‘A flywhisk?’
‘An ornate bamboo flywhisk, such as a eunuch would hover with around a concubine.’
‘What happened?’
‘Only that the King of France decided to come over insulted, ordered a naval blockade of the entire Algerian coast, and the rest is, as they say, history.’
‘Is this the same Dey that features in The Lustful Turk? Was that not set in Algiers?’
Sir Jocelyn laughed and seized my hand in his.
‘I always hoped it were. What do we have as the likely first publication date of The Lustful Turk?’
‘1828.’
‘Exactly. But the Dey who flicked the flywhisk was called Khodja Hussein. And our fictional hero was called . . .’
‘Ali.’ The tale was still alarmingly clear in my head. ‘But forgive me, Sir Jocelyn. What does this have to do with your parents?’
‘Yves Chevalier was in the very room in the palace where this infamous and fateful meeting took place. My mother, alas, was elsewhere.’
‘Where was she?’
‘They never told me the full story. I like to think that she was the first luscious lovely that the Dey met as he stormed out of the meeting-room, flywhisk still in hand, and that his lusts overtook him . . .’
‘Sir Jocelyn! How you speak about your mother!’
‘. . . but in truth, Dora, I believe she was found wandering the streets around the palace in a state of undress. I was born nine months later in Paris, after which she and I were returned to England in disgrace, she was thrown into a lunatic asylum, where she lived out her days, and I was sent to her sister, my Aunt Maude.’
‘I remember asking you if you had adopted your aunt’s surname, on your first visit to the bindery,’ I said.
‘You remember well. She was a reputable old girl; she had married well, and was widowed young, so under her influence I was able to become a person of reasonable standing.’
‘And your father?’
‘Yves Chevalier was killed in Algiers in the battle of 1830. My real father is the stuff of my fantasies: you see now why I would rather my mother had been seduced by the Dey than violated by any old common or garden son of Ham who happened to be in the streets of the city that night.’
‘Are you telling me that you – you – are . . .’ I struggled for the words.
‘Half-caste. Mulatto. Yes.’
‘Hence the . . .’ I gestured down at the wig he was holding in his lap.
‘. . . hairpiece. Yes. My skin is blessedly pale, but the hair has always been a giveaway.’
I sat silently for a while, trying to comprehend fully what I was hearing.
‘So now you know why I was unable to deliver you to the police for killing Charles. Or rather, you know one of the reasons why I would not have done so. We were bound each to the other that night. I witnessed your sin, you mine.’
‘I still don’t understand. Your sin, as in, your books?’
‘No, you fool. Have you not heard a word I have said? My heritage.’
‘Your heritage is not a sin, Sir Jocelyn, any more than mine is.’
‘That, Dora dearest, is debatable.’
‘But still, Sir Jocelyn, how could I possibly have used that knowledge against you? How could it have been an equal threat to the revelation of a murder?’
‘You might not have done, but Sylvia would have. It would have been sweet revenge, to ruin my name in society, and all I have fought against the odds for. I have built my very career on the subjugation of my own race, and time after time I have come to the painful conclusion that we are the inferior species.’