Not far onward, they reached a church, small and old, crowded between houses, with the name St. Odran on the front gate. Sooty stone went upward in many sharp points, some with knobs on the top, and it had small, bright windows.

“We are really going to church?” They had said so, but she had not taken that at face value.

“Contact with the established religion will leave no outward scars.” Galba collected his hat from the seat beside him.

She walked through the church door between two men, armed to the teeth, and saw, almost at once, Adrian in the back row, looking like a tomcat at a tea party so little was he suited to this place.

“You will kill me with bafflement, you,” she whispered to Grey.

“Look reverent,” he advised, and he left her to sit beside Galba. He went somewhere behind her. After that, she felt him watching her most of the time.

Galba sat imperturbably through the long, incomprehensible service. He was transformed, as soon as he entered, into the very portrait of a prosperous city merchant, a shade cunning and foxlike, but fitting wholly into this assemblage of petty bourgeois. He had about him an air of conscious self-satisfaction, as if he were a proud grandfather taking his pretty young granddaughter to church.

So she played the pretty young granddaughter, as she had played so many roles, and held an English prayer book when he handed it to her. After searching her memory, she concluded this was entirely the first church service she had ever attended. She stood and sat and knelt with everyone else and tried to relate these activities to what was happening at the front of the church and failed.

While she was sitting and the man in black talked at great length, she paged slowly through the Book of Common Prayer and put it in her memory, for one never knows what will become useful. She felt bewildered through all of this, without pause, until finally they stood and chanted and everyone except them started to leave. Grey joined them. After a few minutes, they were the only ones in the tiny church.

The minister finished shaking hands at the door of the church and bustled to see them. He greeted “Mr. Galba” and “Mr. Grey” and then took her hand.

“This is Miss Jones,” Galba said. Such names, the British Service chose. It had struck her from time to time that the men of this Service had a peculiar sense of humor.

The clergyman smiled upon her benignly. “I married your mother, you know. You want to see the entries, I understand. I’ve put them out in the vestry. Do follow me.”

She was completely on the other side of the church, walking in a puzzled daze, before she realized that the old man in black was not claiming to be some husband of her mother, but rather the clergyman presiding at a marriage.

Maman had married someone? She was not completely amazed, except that it had happened in England. But her mother had done many interesting things in her life, so one more was not impossible, even in England.

A vestry turned out to be a small room. One came to it through a narrow door set between stone columns and, once there, found it dusty and full of cabinets. On the table a large book had been laid open. It filled the entire table.

“Mr. Galba tells me your mother passed away recently. Allow me to offer my condolences. I remember her well, though she wasn’t one of my regular parishioners. A most beautiful young woman. You have a great look of her, by the way. This is the record.”

He pointed to one line. In the dim light that came through the diamond-shaped panes, she saw that on September 3, 1781, Lucille Alicia Griffith had married Peter Daffyd Jones.

There are not so many Lucille Alicias in the world. It appeared that, indeed, her mother had been married to someone.

“The christening.” The minister lifted one huge page, turned it, and trailed his index finger down the entries. “Here. This is it.” Small, neat, spidery script, a bit faded, read, Anne Katherine Jones.

She had been christened. How odd. Galba took the minister away and talked to him.

“Do you accept this as authentic?” Grey asked her.

“What?” She had not thought of that. She drew her fingers across the page. The powdery slickness under her fingertips told of undisturbed inks. No trace of discontinuity. No telltale roughness. The colors were properly faded, and they matched. The binding was untouched. The smell, old. “It is real. I just don’t understand.”

“Not a forgery. Not a substitution. You accept this as genuine.”

She nodded. “I was in England as a child. I remember it, just on the edges of rememberings. But I did not know I was born here, in London. Why would I be born in England?”

“We all get born someplace. Let’s get out of here.”

Outside, Adrian waited, his back against the wall, watching everything with the impartial, carnivorous attention of a hawk. He passed a few words to Grey.

“One scuffle in the churchyard,” Grey said to Galba as they got into the coach.

Galba held his gun across his lap on this trip back. Grey kept his at his side, resting on the seat. The coach skirted Booth Square to take a different route home. She felt the presence of men out on the streets, shadowing the coach on all sides, protecting her. She had a sense of moving in an ocean of events, pulled by tides she did not understand.

Meeks Street had been emptied of its assemblies of spies. She was escorted up the stairs by hard-faced men, looking serious, and Doyle, looking amiable and completely relaxed. She was so preoccupied she scarcely noticed she was walking back into her prison.

In the parlor, while they waited for Giles to unlock the door to the inner portion of the house, she said what had been on her mind since she left the church. “Peter Daffyd Jones.” Grey and Galba turned. “Has anyone told him my mother is dead?”

Grey said, “He’s dead, too, Annique. Peter Jones was your father.”

It was impossible that they did not know. This was common knowledge about her. “My father was Jean-Pierre Jauneau, called also Pierre Lalumière. He was a hero of the Revolution. He was hanged in Lyon with the other leaders of the Two Sous Rebellion when I was four.”

“Pierre Lalumière was Peter Jones. He was Welsh. Stay still a minute. I think I’ll disarm you for a while.”

She pulled back her sleeve and held out her arm so Grey could unstrap the sheath. “This makes no sense. My father was Basque, or perhaps Gascon. Do you tell me my father was Welsh? Why should he be a Welsh? Nobody is Welsh. I have never known a single person in my life who was Welsh. It is an utterly stupid thing to be.”

“I’m Welsh,” Galba said. “Come upstairs.”

“That does not wholly amaze me, for I should suppose there are many in England, which is nearby, but there are not any in France that I ever heard of. Why should someone who is Welsh live in France? Why should he pretend to be French?”

She was halfway up the stairs when the first of several realizations hit her. She stopped dead. “Sapristi. If that is true, I am legitimate.” She put her hand on the wall, not to hold herself up but to reassure herself that something in the world remained solid and reliable.

Grey waited beside her, so she informed him. “I am not a bastard.”

A shadow of amusement crossed his eyes. “Does it matter so much?”

“I don’t think so.” She felt inside herself and did not notice anything different. “It is just that I had not thought of myself in that way.” She climbed two more steps, and a thought struck. “I have a name then, one that is rightfully mine.” Another thought followed. “Jones? That is a name? But no one on earth is truly named Jones. It is preposterous.”

Grey obviously expected her to continue upstairs and then to walk the length of the hall to the front of the house. They came to a wide, light room with five tall windows and a view, through white curtains, over the street. She had not been here before. It had broad leather chairs and a fireplace and racks of swords on the wall and many bookcases. An oval oak table was empty except for a few files in a stack. She could smell coffee and tobacco and the leather of the chairs and the fire. Homey smells. Meeks Street was a house of many such comfortable places.

“Jones is a perfectly ordinary Welsh name,” Galba said.

Giles had come upstairs behind them with a tray, carrying coffee and bread. He gave coffee to Galba, who took it, and offered to Grey, who refused, and set a cup on the table next to her without asking. They were insidious, these English.

These English. Another realization came upon her. “I am half Welsh.” She could not help feeling dismal about it.

“You are fully Welsh,” Galba said. “Your mother was born in Aberdare.”

The map flashed into her head. Aberdare was in Wales. “Maman was not truly named Griffith, was she?”

“She was.”

“But that is an ugly name. One cannot pronounce it. It is no wonder she called herself Villiers, which is euphonic. At least Griffith is not laughable, as Jones is.”

She had eaten nothing for a day and had no coffee, and now she felt dizzy and light-headed. Many unpleasant truths stared her in the face. She was not prepared for this. No one on earth could be prepared for this. “You are telling me my mother was named Griffith, and she was Welsh. I am not French. Not one little drop.” No one contradicted her.

After a while, she said, “We spoke English when I was very little. Maman called me Annie Kate, before she called me Annique. I had forgotten.”

So serious, their faces. This was all true, not some elaborate lie. She remembered the language her father and mother had whispered to each other in the night when they were alone. She had the certainty that if she remembered hard enough and asked, she would discover it was Welsh.