I shake my head. “She wouldn’t.” I can’t explain the surety, but it suddenly feels foundational to everything I knew about my mother. She wouldn’t have taken off her wedding ring, and she wouldn’t have left her spyglass behind. “I’ve got to know what it was. And where it came from, and why it meant so much to her.” Meant so much. The kindest way to describe an obsession.
Louisa runs her tongue over her teeth. “Adrian. I love you and I loved your mother, but consider—just consider—that maybe there won’t be any answer to that.”
I tuck the spyglass into my coat. I’ve only carried it for a day, and already the weight of it there feels familiar and tethering. I think of the thousands of times I saw my mother reach for it—in her pocket or tied to her waist or resting on the bench of the pianoforte as she played. Sometimes only one finger pressed to the smooth brass. I feel the urge to touch it now—though I can still feel the weight in my pocket, I’m suddenly worried it’s vanished, same as she did.
One moment there, gone the next.
4
We first visit with a pawnbroker called Mr. Murphy, who tells us nothing beyond “It looks like a bit off one of those sailing things,” and mimes extending a telescope. He then starts working on us to buy some of what quickly becomes clear is fenced merchandise. We leave in a hurry, and a few blocks later, Louisa remembers that his name sounded so familiar because he was so often called to testify against thieves at the Old Bailey. I rib her over this all the way to the Newgate Market, where Imogene knows a dealer who, Lou swears, is both professional and doesn’t buy from thieves. He has no information about the origins of my mother’s spyglass, but sends us to an antiquarian in Soho who in turn promises he’ll ask a colleague who specializes in maritime goods, but then never sends a card.
I find two more antique shops in Belgravia—one that deals primarily in scientific artifacts, which is where we are at last given some practical advice: make an appointment with a historian at the Sloane collection of the newly established British Museum, which I do at once, though it’s another week before there’s room in his schedule.
Louisa has an early supper planned the day of my meeting, but refuses to be left behind, and I similarly refuse to leave her, as she does most of the talking and the eye contact in these interactions. We arrive together at the mansion on Great Russell Street in the middle of a torrential downpour. Even the short path from the hack to the door leaves us shaking rain from our cloaks. We give our names to the boy taking deliveries in the front hall and are promptly escorted above stairs. The collections aren’t open to the public and most are only half assembled. As we pass through galleries and offices, we catch a glimpse of the much-touted library, which, even at a cursory glance, is breathtaking in scale, and the hall of natural history, where a group of laborers is puzzling over the assembly of an enormous skeleton, still in too many pieces to be identifiable as any creature in particular.
The delivery boy shows us to a salon crowded with crates, their tops pried open but their contents still buried in straw, and stacks of books littering the tile beneath floor-to-ceiling shelves. The windows are still in the process of being installed, and several panes are covered with oiled butcher’s paper to keep out the rain. A man is sitting at a desk across the room, making careful notes about what appears to be a bone-white tusk the length of an épée. He startles when he hears our footsteps, and quickly snatches up his wig from where it’s resting upon his unlit lamp and smashes it onto his head.
“Your three o’clock, sir,” the delivery boy calls, then leaves without another word.
The man stands, trying to push his wig back up his forehead as discreetly as possible as he approaches us. “Good morning. Afternoon? I suppose it’s afternoon now. The day gets away from me.” He extends a hand with a broad smile. He’s ruddy cheeked and portly, with a Yorkshire burr that sits heavily in his vowels. “Rowan Buddle. I’m one of the trustees for the museum.”
I take his hand, painfully aware of how damp my palm is. “Adrian Montague,” I mumble.
“Montague?” He gives up on the wig and tosses it back onto his desk. The queue dangles off the edge, giving it the appearance of a sleeping cat. “Any relation to Henri Montague, the Earl of Cheshire?”
My stomach drops. I’m ready to bolt if this man gives even an inkling that he may know my father and subsequently report these investigations. “Do you know him?”
Mr. Buddle smiles brightly. “Not personally, no, but he was part of the coalition that opposed the British Museum Act. Claimed it was a gross waste of funding.”
“Oh.” I almost laugh in relief. “Well, he hates most nice things.”
I immediately regret saying it—it had sounded like a flip jape in my head, but as soon as it leaves my mouth, it feels far too pointed a joke to make in the presence of a stranger, and I say it much too straight-faced for it to register as facetious. I’m about to apologize, but then Buddle snorts, and makes only a halfhearted attempt to cover it with a cough as he turns to Louisa. “And you, miss?”
“Louisa Davies.” She gives him her hand. “Adrian’s fiancée.”
“Ah, felicitations.” His smile goes somehow wider. “I trust you will be certain that he supports the British Museum once he has come into his inheritance.”
“Depends how helpful you are today,” Louisa says with her own brilliant smile, and I envy the way conversation is so easy for her. Sod that, I envy the way she’s able to simply have a conversation without fretting about everything she says being taken wrong and the opinions others are forming about her, and then obsessing about them for days afterward. I’d settle for that.
We take the pair of chairs across the desk from Buddle. “Pardon the horn,” he says, as an explanation for the javelin about which he was making notes. “It’s quite fragile and not particularly mobile.”
“It looks like you’ve captured a unicorn,” Louisa says teasingly, though Buddle replies in earnest.
“A narwhal, Miss Davies. The unicorns of the sea. There’s a stuffed one on display in the natural history gallery. I’d be happy to show you—”
He starts to stand, but Louisa must sense how much I do not want to go to a second location with a stranger and pretend to be interested in dead animals, for she says quickly, “We’re on a schedule, I’m afraid. But perhaps another time.”
“Of course.” Buddle settles himself down again, looking only slightly disappointed. “Now, what is it you have come to show me? I confess, my specialty is in the natural maritime but many of the donations we’ve received include personal artifacts of the collectors, so I’ve become very familiar with a range of seafaring miscellanea.”
I withdraw the spyglass from the pocket of my coat and place it on the desk, careful to avoid the horn.
I suspect Buddle will take time to study it before making a pronouncement—perhaps pull some books for reference or a magnifier or even ask me if he can keep it for a few days to make a complete catalogue of its attributes—but instead he starts, like I’ve dropped a wriggling eel before him, and looks as delighted as a natural philosopher with a specialization in maritime life likely would be were he presented with an unexpected eel. “My word! This is extraordinary.”