It must be written all over my face, for my father says quietly, “Collect yourself, Adrian.” I suspect I will get no more consolation from him beyond that oft-repeated admonition to fold up my feelings like an old shirt and tuck them in the bottom of the wardrobe, too unseemly for public display. But then he adds, “This may not be worth your attention.”
How could my mother’s last effects not be worth my attention? I want to grab the box and run, but my father keeps talking. “You know that your mother was a”—he searches for an appropriate word and finally finishes—“mercurial woman. And considering the circumstances of her death . . .”
“What circumstances?” I ask. Her death was unexpected, but not strange. She went to Scotland to take the waters, as she had done many times before. She was walking along the edge of a sea cliff on the morning of the summer solstice, so early it was still dark, and she misstepped. That was all.
“Adrian.” Every time he says my name, it sounds more and more unpleasant, like it’s a sour taste in his mouth that, even after he’s swallowed, lingers. He looks down at the box again, then says, “We both know your nerves are delicate.” He winces on the word, too feminine to describe anything about your only son without sparking shame. “I do not want this to upset you further.”
Upset me more than my mother dying? My upsetness has already reached the brim, and a last gift, however unexpected, would hardly spill it over.
I reach across the desk and take the lid off the box.
He warned me the objects were of little consequence, so I’m surprised by how let down I feel to see this confirmed. There’s a layer of fine paper like something a tailor might wrap a dress in, and beneath it, a set of gloves, fur-lined and too warm for the summer, even in Scotland. A mostly empty bottle of scent, its contents leaked out and gummed around an insufficiently stopped cork. A set of handkerchiefs she embroidered flowers upon. A small diary with scribbled appointments and lists.
Her wedding ring.
That’s the first item I stumble over. There was briefly a concern of foul play raised in the investigation into her death because the ring was missing, but that was quickly quashed by the fact that she had been wearing a pearled necklace and diamond studs that were worth a substantial amount and much easier to steal than a ring. In the end, it was decided that some unfortunate combination of the sea currents and the natural changes of a body after death had conspired to send it to the ocean floor.
But here it was.
“Obviously, you are welcome to take that,” my father says, following my gaze. “For Miss Davies, when you wed.”
She put it in a box. She left it in her room. She stowed it away and then left. I had never seen her without her wedding ring—why take it off? And what were the chances the first time she removed it in almost thirty years of marriage would be before the walk that ended in her death? Something grates inside me, an old irritation flaring up again.
“Adrian,” my father says, but I’m already pulling back the rest of the paper, revealing the last item, tucked in the bottom corner and wrapped in one of the embroidered handkerchiefs.
It’s her spyglass.
It’s such a shock to see it there that I shy, like I’ve reached into the dark and felt a spider skitter across my palm. I asked about it after she first died, but my father had been so intent on clearing her life from our home as quickly and efficiently as possible. He claimed it was not with her things sent down from Scotland, but I knew she had taken it with her. She took it everywhere. But he changed the topic so abruptly, and by the time I thought to ask of it again, it was surely too late. There was so much else to think of.
Now, as I pick it up, it feels like running across an old friend unexpectedly and far from home. Suddenly I can smell her powder—the special case that held the spyglass when I was small rested next to her puff on the dressing table. I remember sitting on her bed as she placed the case between us and lifted the lid with the reverence of offering a saint’s relic to pray over. I was never permitted to look through it, which I suspected was due to the fact that it was broken. Two of the four extendable lenses were missing, leaving her with only the eyepiece and a second lens, with a long crack running down its side, bisecting the words engraved there.
When I was older, she took to carrying it everywhere with her, looped around her wrist or tucked in her pockets, its presence betrayed by the way one side of her skirt always strained at its fastenings from the weight. It was small enough that sometimes she even wore it around her neck. It never seemed strange to me. Some women have a favorite piece of jewelry they wear each day, some men don club rings and still carry the engraved snuff boxes their headmasters gave them at Eton. My mother had her spyglass.
She never told me where it had come from, though I couldn’t remember her having it before she went to Barbados—a sudden trip to her childhood home when her father died. She had been there for almost a year, our house ringing with her absence in a way that, I remembered thinking upon her return, it never would again. She’d hardly told my father she was leaving, and hadn’t written when she’d return—we learned when a letter arrived from Portugal that she was the sole survivor of a violent storm off the Iberian coast that had wrecked her ship back to England. I’ve always assumed that was why it was important to her. They survived together. The spyglass had always been such a part of her, I never thought to ask what it was or where it had come from or why it was so dear to her, the question as foolish as inquiring as to why she had fingers. Why didn’t I ask her?
“I would prefer,” my father says softly, “if you did not keep that.”
I look up. “You said I could—”
“Please don’t be pedantic, Adrian,” he interrupts. “I want to be rid of it.”
“Why? I want it. It was hers; I want to keep it.”
He presses his fingers into the tabletop so hard that his nails mottle. “Nothing good came from her obsession with that spyglass.”
“Why would she have left this behind?”
“She went for a walk—”
“She wouldn’t have left her spyglass. She took it everywhere; she never left it behind. Never. She wouldn’t have left it in a hidden box in her apartments.” My chest tightens, panic clenching its fist around me with no warning. There’s so much I should have asked her—why didn’t I ask her when I had the chance? I spent so much time with her relishing the fact that we could sit in comfortable silence, and now I wish I had never stopped asking for every detail of her life. “Did she get this in Barbados?”
“I suppose.” Father picks up one of her gloves and smooths the material between his fingers.
“Did it belong to her family? Was there more?”
“I don’t know. Though that”—he gestures to the two broken pieces—“is all she ever had of it.”
“Did she get it here? When she was in—where was she? Where did the ship wreck?”
“God, I don’t recall. They took her to Portugal. I wasn’t there.”
“Why didn’t you go to her? She’s your wife—she almost died. You couldn’t go to Portugal to meet her?”
“She had to stay in Porto for months—there was a court case. Something about insurance, we didn’t know when she’d be finished. And I had a great deal to contend with at the time. You were unwell—”