“Is it?” After so many false starts across the city, I had begun to worry no one but my mother thought so.
“May I?” He gestures to the spyglass, and I nod. He takes a set of fine white gloves from his desk drawer and pulls them on before picking up the lens, which immediately has me wondering if I should be showing it more care than toting it around in my pocket alongside loose coins and peanut shells. Perhaps I should get white gloves of my own. “What you have here,” he says, tipping the lens toward the light, “is, obviously, two lenses of a captain’s spyglass. They were often given as gifts upon the promotion of rank in the Dutch navy, and the captains would have the names of their ships engraved upon the side—you can see the first few here.” He points to the engraved The Flyi, the letters split neatly as if the crack had been drawn there. “This is a family heirloom, you said?”
“Something like that,” I mumble.
“Are your family sailors?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Perhaps they were involved in the shipping industry, then? Your father’s side is aristocracy, but your mother?”
“Her parents were plantation owners,” I say, trying to ignore the bubble of guilt that rises inside me every time I think of it. I’m shocked Lou didn’t refuse to marry me based solely on the fact that a good deal of my inheritance was earned on exploited African labor. “They sold sugarcane in Barbados. She came to England when she was seventeen.”
“Do you have family in the Netherlands?” When I shake my head, he frowns. “Curious.”
“Is it so unlikely it would have been acquired in Barbados?” Lou asks.
“Yes, in fact. This one dates somewhere around the early 1600s. It likely came from the workshop of the Dutch spectacle maker Hans Lippershey, who first applied for a patent on what we think of now as the nautical spyglass in 1608. He died in 1619, so I would imagine your spyglass lens here was made sometime in between. You can see the touchmark of his shop here, along the rim. Of course, the spyglass or telescope was already in existence before then, and he was one of several men across Europe to apply for the patent, and it was improved upon later by the famous Galileo Galilei. Your mother wouldn’t have been likely to come by it in Barbados since it’s Dutch made—and these are the sort of items that are passed down through families, not given to charity shops. Was it passed down to her?”
“I don’t . . . I don’t know.”
“Do you know where the rest of it is?”
I shake my head again, feeling like a fool for my lack of information. Under the desk, Louisa squeezes my hand.
Mr. Buddle examines the piece of the spyglass, raising it not to his eye but instead to eye level. “When fully assembled, it would have two additional lenses, though based on the thickness of this glass, I’d estimate it had a magnification distance of about six leagues. Fairly standard.”
I didn’t expect any of this. After the total disinterest by the antique dealers, I had begun to suspect there wasn’t actually anything to be known about the spyglass—it was a trinket my mother had picked up at a seaside store, an item that held no real value except in her heart. I was already making peace with the fact that my mother’s strange death wouldn’t be solved by this particular clue, but here suddenly is more information than I know what to do with. I can’t say what any of it means, but the fact that it exists—that there is something to know about it—sends a shudder of excitement up my spine. I sit forward in my chair, resisting the urge to snatch the lens back from Mr. Buddle’s careful hands.
“I thought you specialized in sea creatures, Mr. Buddle,” Lou says with a breathy laugh.
“I do,” Mr. Buddle replies, and adds hopefully, “The offer to see the narwhal still stands.”
“Then how do you know so much about a telescope?” Lou asks. “About this telescope in particular?”
“Well.” Mr. Buddle sets the lens on the desk between Lou and me and removes his gloves, pausing only when the threads snag on his wedding ring. “It happens I did rather extensive research on this very item several weeks past. A gentleman brought in a description of this exact make and model of spyglass in hopes I could help him locate two missing lenses.”
The hair on the back of my neck stands up. “Someone is looking for this spyglass?”
Buddle beams at me, like I’m a narwhal. “Quite an extraordinary coincidence, isn’t it?”
“Did he have the other half?” I ask.
“If he did, he didn’t show it to me,” Buddle replies. “It sounded more like he had the same half you do and sought the same missing lenses. But he only brought a written description from a letter—I believe he said his mother sent it to him—and asked if I might point him in the direction of more information. Oh! And I found a reference painting. Just a moment.” He retrieves a thick volume from the windowsill, its placement suggesting it was recently perused, and flips through to a marked page, then turns it around for Lou and me to see. The painting reproduced in ink is a still life—a skull atop a stack of books, alongside a wilted tulip and a burnt stub of a candle. Lying unfurled and resting against the base of the skull is the exact same telescope as my mother’s—the details are unmistakable. Even with only the one lens, it would have been impossible to argue they came from different workshops. In fact, they look so similar—the engraving, the small notch on the rim of the lens, the touchmark—that it’s easy to think that my spyglass is not only kin to, but the very one used for reference.
The title of the painting is printed in Dutch at the bottom—Vanitas van de Vliegende Hollander.
“Do you have an address for this man who was looking for the spyglass?” I ask.
The man looking for the same pieces I am, the man with a letter from his mother, a letter from his mother about a spyglass like mine, a spyglass my mother always kept with her. I can’t make sense of it—my thoughts are moving so fast, even the words seem to rearrange themselves into an incomprehensible order. Spyglass. Letter. Mother.
“Somewhere here, I’m certain I do.”
As Buddle fishes in his desk for his diary, Louisa puts her hand on my knee. “Breathe,” she whispers, and I realize I’ve been bouncing my leg nervously, and the motion is starting to rattle my chair. It takes a great deal of focus to stop, even with Louisa’s hand pressed there.
“Do you know what a vanitas is?” I ask. She looks at me quizzically and I nod to the book. “That’s the name of the painting.”
“Oh, I didn’t notice.” She peers at the title. After a trip to Amsterdam with Imogene, Lou had gone through a period of intense fascination with Vermeer, and it seems likely she’d encountered the term before. “It’s a style of still life meant to represent the nature of life and death—ephemeral and inescapable. I think it’s from the traditional Dutch schools of the Golden Age—am I correct, Mr. Buddle?”
“I don’t know much about the painting,” Buddle replies, surfacing from his desk. “I was interested in the spyglass, not the image itself. Here’s his card.” He slides a paper across the desk to me—it seems closer kin to a scrap of newsprint wrapped around a fish than a calling card. Written upon it in aggressively poor penmanship are the words Hoffman Enterprises, Exeter Street, Covent Garden. “The proprietor’s called Newton. I’ve had some dealings with his company before, and they’re honest men.”