When he was a young man, Grandfather had fled to France on his way to America to join the revolutionaries. He applied to John Wilkes, the radical parliamentarian and scandalous libertine, for a letter of support though he’d never met the man. Wilkes immediately informed his family, who had him arrested and returned home for the sedate life of the law. Grandfather’s father was a silversmith who’d come to England through Spain. He sent Wilkes an intricate silver presentation as a thank-you for the return of his wayward son.

Grandfather’s admiration was undiminished by this betrayal. Eventually he married John Wilkes’ niece, who died giving birth to their third child. Back in Britain, there are other relatives also named John Wilkes. The name has revolutionary and familial significance. It’s an ordination.

When Mother’s labor begins, Father hastily takes himself off to the Bel Air saloon. He returns as soon as Joe brings him word of the safe passage. Father is rarely home for the birth of a child, but Johnny is only three hours old when Father first meets him.

He takes an unusual interest in the baby, in whom he finds, like poor lost Henry Byron, the best possible combination of his wife’s beauty and his own brilliance. These things are being talked of even when Rosalie can only see a baby, no more exceptional than any other.

Edwin’s caul and stars are quickly forgotten. He’s not the only boy in the family now with a destiny. Johnny has one, too. It arrived on a colicky night, the whole house asleep except for Mother and Baby, sitting downstairs by the dying fire. They were wrapped together in a single blanket, John’s little body hot against Mother’s breasts. She was looking down into his flushed and fretful face, when on sudden impulse she’d said a prayer asking to know what his fate would be.

Instantly a flame rose from the ashes and, shaping itself into an arm, stretched toward the baby as if to knight him. In that flame, Mother said, she could read the word Country, followed by Johnny’s name. And then the arm fell back and faded away. This strange, unfirelike behavior taking place on their own little hearth has the whole family excited. It may be an ambiguous fate, but it’s clearly a glorious one, a narrative of such power that Asia will write a poem about it one day, forgetting how angry she once was not to have been given a glorious fate of her own. She was less upset by her own lack of a destiny than by the fact that nobody had ever even bothered to ask the fire if she had one.

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