Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [106]
For I have seen it and I have felt it and I know that it is love, not death, that undoes us.
* * *
I lay my head on my pillow. I’m afraid to read any more.
Please let this have a happy ending. Let one thing in this shitty world have a happy ending.
I think back to the television interview with G and my father, sifting desperately through what I remember of it for something hopeful. G said that some people believed Louis-Charles was smuggled out of prison and a dead child’s body was placed in his cell, autopsied, and buried. He said that several people came forth years after Louis-Charles supposedly died and claimed they were him. Dad said bones from the most likely contender—Naundorff—had failed the DNA tests.
But what if they’re wrong—Dad and G? What if Naundorff wasn’t the most likely contender? What if the most likely contender never came forward?
I mean, why would he after what he’d been through? So they could interrogate him? Maybe throw him in prison again? No way. Most likely, he’d lie low in some little cottage in the middle of nowhere and hope like hell that the world that had treated him so badly would forget he’d ever existed.
Let Louis-Charles have escaped, I say silently. Let the heart not belong to him. Let it belong to some poor kid who was already dead when they smuggled him into the Temple.
Please.
50
A door slams. I wake with a start.
The clock on my night table says it’s nearly two a.m. I must’ve fallen asleep. I hear keys jangling. Footsteps from the hallway. It’s Dad. Why is he so late?
I rub my eyes. Crawl out of bed. By the time I pull a sweater on and walk to the hallway, he’s in the living room. Talking on the phone.
It smells like alcohol out here. I’m closer now and can see that there’s an open wine bottle on the coffee table in front of him. He’s sitting on the sofa, rubbing his forehead. I hear him ask Minna how she’s doing and about Helix, their cat. I don’t want to listen to their personal stuff, so I head back to my room. But then he starts talking about the heart and I stop in my tracks.
I hear mtDNA and D-loop and PCR amplification. I vaguely understand that stuff. I mean, I’ve been hearing about it since I was in the womb. Dad once took blood samples from me and Truman and took them to his lab. A few days later he brought home the results.
“That’s you,” he said to us, taping the gels on our kitchen window. He pointed at the columns of little gray bars, then said, “Everything you are, everything you ever will be, is right there. Eye color, height, intelligence, predisposition to diseases, aptitudes, abilities—DNA tells us so much about life.”
“No … no results yet. We’ve just finished sequencing,” he says now. “I know, it is amazing. I had pretty low expectations but the sample was surprisingly good. We’re comparing it against hair samples from Marie-Antoinette, two of her sisters, and two living Habsburg descendants. Yeah, it is comprehensive.”
There’s a pause, then, “Mmm-hmm. We did the excision at the Coté medical lab. Took off the end and a piece of the aorta. It was as hard as rock. I had to use a saw. We put the samples for Cassiman and Brinkmann into jars and sealed them. The seals were broken by notaries in Belgium and Germany. We did the extractions two ways—with silica and with phenol-chloroform. Yeah, it probably is overkill, but no one’s taking any chances. It was in such good condition. Really well preserved. I could see the muscles, the vessels …”
His voice trails off. “Yeah, I’m still here,” he says. He gives a small, sad laugh. “I wonder why, sometimes, Min. I wonder how.” He listens, then says, “I know, I know. I’m supposed to stay objective but I’ve become a monarchist. G gave me the background to read. It was horrible what was done to them. Horrible. I’m finding I have a great deal of sympathy for the king and queen. They suffered for their sins. I can’t even imagine their torment. No, not at losing their own lives. At leaving their children behind in such a terrible place with such cruel people. Knowing