“Was it my fault?” Was it? I don’t remember it that way. I can remember being ten or eleven, too young to have an objective view of myself or the world around me. Had I kept him from going to her when she needed him?
“Not unwell,” Father corrects himself. “But after your mother left so unexpectedly, you didn’t like being alone. I missed a year of Parliament—”
“What was it called?” I interrupt.
He looks up, clearly annoyed at having to cut short his list of complaints about my boyhood self. “What?”
“The ship. The ship that sank.” Why isn’t he understanding me? I almost lean forward, the need to know—to be understood—so strong my body is tilting toward him like a magnetic pole. I should have asked her. “What was the name of it? The ship she was on. Do you remember?”
“Of course not,” he sputters. “That was a decade ago.”
“But she was on it.”
“That doesn’t mean I remember the name of her ship.”
“It sank.”
He stares at me, and I can’t decide if he’s being intentionally or sincerely obtuse. “I’m aware.”
“So I would think that would make its name memorable. Do you know who has the other half?”
“Other half of what?”
“Of the spyglass!” I burst out.
My father—maddeningly—looks at me as though this is an absurd question, when it feels like one of the more reasonable queries I’ve ever posed, though I immediately begin to doubt it. Maybe the way I sound in my own head is nowhere near what others hear. “I will not have this conversation with you. Not until you have recovered.”
“Recovered from what?” Is something wrong with me?
“Recovered your composure. You need to calm down.”
Am I not calm? What’s the opposite of calm? Hysterical? I don’t feel hysterical—but these questions are urgent. Questions decades old that cannot wait a second longer. That doesn’t make any sense, you idiot.
“This is not a matter for discussion,” Father continues, though I’ve made no move to do so. Sometimes I feel as though he isn’t talking to me but some imagined version of me in his own head, a son who is stronger willed and smarter and more assertive. He closes his hand into a fist on the desktop. Veins bulge beneath his papery skin, bruise-blue and throbbing. “Your mother was never the same after.”
Was she different? I don’t remember one version of my mother going to Barbados and a changeling returning in her place. She was affected, surely—anyone would be by surviving something like that. But whatever wound it left scarred and became skin. Just another part of her.
Unless she had been dying slowly for the last decade and I never realized it. Was that even possible? It wasn’t cancer or consumption or some protracted illness that had taken her. Can it take a decade for someone to misstep on a morning walk?
“And,” Father continues, “her obsession with that spyglass was unhealthy. I don’t want you to grow ill as she was.”
I look down at the smooth golden lens in my hand. He says it like the spyglass is a vial of poison she sipped from each day until it killed her, and now I too have raised it to my lips. “Was she ill?”
He pauses, and for a moment I think I’ve caught him in a lie. But then he says, “Not in a way most people would consider illness.”
“How did a spyglass make her ill?”
His lips thin. “I did not say that.”
“Am I ill?” My voice pitches as the struggle to breathe intensifies. “Why do you think this is going to make me ill? It’s a spyglass, not a plague rat! Why would you say it that way?”
“Adrian, please—”
“Why don’t you remember the name of her ship?” My halting breath is starting to get in the way of what I’m trying to say. Each word comes like a piece of glass I’m struggling to gag up. “That’s important. You should know. I should have asked her. Can we—isn’t there some way we can—can we find out?”
“Take a breath.”
“I can’t.”
“Goddammit, stop that!” He slams his hand against the desk, so hard that the inkwell jumps in its stand. “Why must you always make everything so difficult? You and Caroline both, you refuse to be disabused of even the most outlandish notions once they enter your mind.”
I want to go above stairs, get into bed, and put my head under the covers, where no one is looking at me, or talking to me, or asking anything of me. I want to be swallowed up until I no longer take up any space. I want this panic to go away—or at least tether itself to a tangible source. I want to stop my thoughts, a task that feels as dangerous as jumping in front of a wild stallion.
Does everyone feel this way or is it just me?
Just me and my mother.
Father waits while I choke for breath. I see him cringing each time my lungs fail me. When I’ve finally started breathing again rather than wheezing, he takes his own moment to compose himself—I’m so goddamn envious he can do it in a moment—before he says in a more even tone, “You are not ill. You are grieving.” The inflection he puts on the word makes it clear how unseemly he finds it. “Your mother, however, dealt with conditions that she chose not to make you aware of. She was never a well woman, and this spyglass became some kind of talisman for her. The sicker she grew, the more obsessive she became.”
To my surprise, Father reaches suddenly across the desk and places his hand on top of mine. He lets go almost as soon as he touches me, and I have a sense we both deeply regret he moved at all. “I know you loved her, Adrian. I know she was important to you in a way I never will be. But you must understand: when she was with you, she was only a piece of herself. She was your mother, and she was who you needed, but that was not the entirety of her.” He retrieves the lid of the box and replaces it, pausing once again to align the edges with his desk. “You may keep the spyglass,” he says, like he’s granting me an enormous favor. “But I don’t want you obsessing over it like she did. Or obsessing over her. Or her death. And I don’t want to hear of any more involvement with Edward Davies and his radicals.”
“I can’t avoid Edward Davies; I’m marrying his sister,” I say, unable to keep the incredulity from my voice.
“If you are so keen to join them rather than bringing Miss Davies into our family and values, then perhaps we shall have to reconsider the engagement.”
“No, please.” My mind skips ten years down the road, to me, alone, or worse, with someone who isn’t Louisa, one of the only fixed points in my future suddenly knocked off the map and my whole world struggling to recalibrate around it. “I promise, I’ll be better. I will. Please.”
“Then limit your engagement with Edward Davies,” my father says. “And you’ll let your mother rest easy. Do I make myself clear?” When I don’t answer quickly enough, he snaps, “Indicate that you understand me, Adrian.”
“Yes, sir. I understand.”
“Very good. You may go.”
I snatch up the spyglass and the wedding ring, then clamber to my feet. I have to hold on to the back of the chair for a moment to regain my balance before I turn for the door.