It’s my pamphlet—John Everyman’s pamphlet—speckled with a few errant drops of blood.
Breathe, Adrian.
I want to run. I want to throw myself out the window. I want to grip the arms of the chair like I’m riding the imperial on a runaway carriage. I want my heart to stop beating so fast and hard it fills my whole body. I want the feeling back in my fingers. I want to not care so goddamn much what my father thinks of my politics.
“Where . . . did you get that?” I ask, taking each word at a measured pace and praying none of my rising panic bleeds into my voice.
“Lord Parkgate’s valet brought it,” Father replies, “when he came to tell me you and Miss Davies had been picked up by the Bow Street Runners and were awaiting bail in their office.” He glances down at the pamphlet without moving his head, like it’s a grotesque corpse he is trying hard not to look at but he cannot resist his own morbid curiosity. “I can only assume you have no knowledge of this slander or its contents.”
I don’t answer. I’m not sure if it’s a question, but I am certain he’ll keep talking if I don’t give him a reason to stop.
“When I agreed to your marriage with Miss Davies, her parents were still alive and her brother had not yet gained his particular”—he makes a show of selecting his next word, like a man perusing proffered cigars—“reputation. Had I known what he would become, I would never have permitted the two of you to be matched. However, I am a man of my word, and I hope that when you take over the management of this estate, you will follow in that example.” He pauses, and when I still don’t say anything, again continues, “And I hope you will uphold the political foundations I have worked for my entire career to establish.” He taps a finger against the pamphlet. “The Saint James Workhouse is one of my proudest accomplishments, and I hope you will defend it in Parliament as I have. Any behavior otherwise would effectively sever the majority of our relationships within the peerage, and make you and any family you might have social exiles. The scandal of a son turning against his father would be”—another pause and perusal—“considerable.”
I bite the inside of my cheek. If Louisa were here, she would say something like, It says quite a lot about the character of a man that his proudest achievement is an exploitive money-grubbing death camp disguised as charity.
When I don’t immediately offer an affirmation that of course I’m not going to torch his legacy as soon as he hands me the flint, Father sighs, pressing his fingers to the bridge of his nose for a moment, then turns in his chair. “Now. The reason I’ve come.” He retrieves a box from the windowsill and sets it on the desk between us. My heart rate spikes for no reason. It looks like a box for a hat—he could be about to pull out a hat. Or a pistol.
What is wrong with me? Who thinks like that?
Father fumbles with the ribbon, struggling to undo the knot. The ever-present quaver in his fingers seems more pronounced, and his brittle nails can’t find purchase on the satin.
“May I—” I start, but he snaps, “I don’t require your assistance.”
The ribbon snaps, and he yanks it roughly away, like he’s shucking an ear of corn. The edges of the box are soft and collapsed under the press of the ribbon, not quite reshaping themselves entirely once free. I can’t imagine what’s in this box that he’s taken such pains to bring to me but is now mauling like it’s rubbish meant for the fire.
He tosses the ribbon onto the desk, and I wait for him to open the box. Instead, he lets out another one of his through-the-nose sighs and presses the tips of his fingers together. “This was sent to me by the Woolman Hostel, in Aberdeen, where your mother was staying while she took the waters at Well O’Spa. Where she—”
“I know,” I interrupt, like I need a reminder of where it was my mother died.
“Apparently she left this behind.”
I stare at the box, all the noise suddenly snuffed out by a far more terrifying silence. I’m not ready for this. I haven’t had time to shore up the particular bastions of my heart needed to talk about my mother, though I’m not sure any warning would have been sufficient. It feels like there will never be a day I can look her memory in the eye without blinking first.
“Why wasn’t it sent before?” I ask. Her trunk was sent with her body. I assumed that was everything she left.
“The hostel is being renovated, and the staff found this box when they were cleaning out the room. It was concealed, apparently.” He brushes an invisible spot of dust from one corner, then adjusts it with the tip of his finger so that it’s aligned perfectly with the edge of his desk. “I have already opened it. There’s nothing of any particular sentiment or value, and I’m unsure as to why she felt the need to keep it hidden, though I suspect she was . . .” He trails off, and his lips bulge as he runs his tongue over his teeth. “She was not thinking clearly,” he finally finishes, then looks up at me. “Stop fidgeting.”
“What?” I hadn’t realized how hard I was twisting the hem of my coat around my fingers. A button falls off and hits the floor with a soft plink, the thread trailing behind it like the tail of a comet. I force my hands together and press them against my thighs. “I’m sorry.”
My father’s jaw clenches, staring at the button for a moment before he returns to me and the box. “I wanted to give you a chance to look through it before I disposed of its contents.”
“Oh. Thank you.”
A pause. I reach for the box, intending to take it with me up to my room to sift through in privacy, but he snaps, “Open it now, please.”
“Why?” I almost never question him, and even if this is the most toothless impertinence a son has ever given his father, it still surprises both of us.
It takes him a moment to compose an answer. “I’d like to see what you take.”
“Does that matter?” I ask.
“Open it.”
“I want to look through it alone.”
Father takes off his spectacles and rubs a hand across his face with such force I’m seized by the fear that he will tear his thin skin. “Please, Adrian,” he says, the words a sigh. The torn ribbon trembles on the desk, like the whole room moves at his whims. “Don’t make this difficult.”
I can’t work out how wanting a moment in private with my mother’s last worldly possessions is difficult, but I feel guilty as soon as he says it. I look down at the box again and realize she wrote her name on it. Caroline Montague. Her hand, always so light the nib barely made an impression, is sloppy and blotted, like she scrawled it in a hurry, but I can picture those same letters, slightly neater and with less of a slant, written in the inside cover of every book she ever gave me. Just before she left for Scotland, she bought me a new edition of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, as I had read the pages loose in my first copy.
Suddenly I feel as though I might turn to the study door and she’ll be standing there, in her blue morning dress with her hair plaited, dirt from her garden beneath her fingernails, her eyes downcast as she explains she’s going to bed early. I’ll stop by her room after supper, and we’ll look through her dictionary of flowers like we did when I was small, and she’ll test me on how to spell their names, and suddenly the grief hits me like a hunger pang. Though I’ve devoted many sleepless nights since youth to anxiously concocting scenarios in which the people I love died and I was left alone, it’s only now she’s gone that I realize I was afraid of the wrong thing. It’s not the moment the world splits in two, it’s all the days after, trying to live a cleaved life and pretend you never knew it whole and don’t feel the space of that missing piece that can never be repaired or replaced. Even the best facsimiles fall short.