Growing up, I was intrigued by the stories I heard about my great-grandmother, who died two years before I was born. About my grandfather’s “natural father” (as they used to say) we knew almost nothing; he’d disappeared from the scene before my grandfather was five years old, and a few years later my grandfather was adopted by his mother’s second husband and his name legally changed from Clarke to Tuttle. Family lore claimed Queen Victoria had appointed the elder Clarke as Physician to the Court of St James.