Page 53 of Legacy Elite

"You should sleep," he says, and doesn't move, and neither do I.

Chapter seven

Jessica

"Your family lied," Freya says.

I look up from a photocopy of a marriage certificate so faint I've been reading it at an angle in the light.

"Could you possibly sound less delighted about that?"

"No," she says.

We've got the small study room on the third floor of the library, the one with the bad radiator and the table you have to prop with a folded index card so it doesn’t wobble. It is currently covered end to end in paper. The Council sends copies through Falken every few days now — not the sensitive material, and not anything from the private-collection side, but the ordinary stuff. Civil registration. Census pages. Church records. Passenger lists.

Two weeks ago I would have said that a table full of photocopies was the least interesting object in the world.

Freya has been in here every evening since Tuesday. She brought a lamp from her room.

"Come here," she says.

I come there.

She has four documents lined up in a row, squared to each other, because Freya cannot leave paper crooked.

"This is your father's line," she says. "You, your dad, your grandfather, your great-grandfather, and so on back. All of it ordinary. Farms, a foundry, a lot of people who stayed in the same three counties for a hundred and forty years, which is enormously helpful for me and says nothing interesting about you."

"Thanks."

"And then here." She taps the end of the row. "1856. He comes off a ship."

I look at where her finger is.

It's a passenger manifest. Ruled columns, a clerk's slanting hand, forty names on the page and most of them illegible.

"Emil," I read.

"Emil. Twenty-three years old, at least according to him." Freya slides the next document across. "Marries in 1859. Two children. Works, builds a house. Buried in 1893 exactly where you'd expect a man like that to be buried, next to his wife." She looks up. "Everything after that boat is completely normal. That's the whole American side of your family, and it's boring, and boring is good, because boring is traceable."

"So what's the problem?"

"The problem," Freya says, "is that Emil doesn't come from anywhere."

Here's what Freya has actually found, and it takes her twenty minutes to walk me through it, and I understand about eighty percent.

The name is wrong first. Not wrong — untraceable. On the manifest it's written one way. On the marriage record it's spelled another. There's a land document where somebody's put down a third version, and by the time his eldest son turns up in a census in the 1880s it has settled into Miller and stayed there ever since.

Möller. Moeller. Muller. Miller.

"Okay," I say. "So he changed his name."

"Probably. That isn't strange."

"It's a bit strange."

"It's the least strange thing on this table." Freya sits back. "Half of everyone who came through in that decade came out the other side with a different name. Clerks wrote what they heard. Half these men couldn't write it down themselves to correct anybody. Families anglicised deliberately because it made life easier. If a changed surname were suspicious I'd have to suspect about nine million people."

"So it's nothing."