I retrieve the spyglass lens and the slip of paper, studying the handwriting like I might recognize it. There’s a small part of me I can’t explain that’s searching for a hint of my mother’s penmanship in it, but there’s nothing familiar about it. Nothing legible either. I think it says Hoffman—it could be Hossmum, for how little effort has been put into properly closing the loops, or Hollnunmn, for there seems an excessive number of hills at the end. I shove the lens and the paper into my pocket, resisting the urge to immediately touch them both to ensure they’re still there.
“Now that that’s settled”—Buddle folds his hands on the desk and beams at us—“Would you like to see the narwhal?”
By the time we leave the museum, the rain has turned from a downpour to a drizzle. Lou presses up against me in the carriage home to ward off the chill, and I wrap my arms around her, though I feel flushed, like I’ve been sitting too close to a stove.
I’m aware somewhere in the back of my mind that Louisa is talking, but I can’t focus on what she’s saying. I feel like I am looking at the world through breath-fogged glass, nothing around me as real or present or important as what’s happening inside my own head. All I can think about is a letter about a spyglass sent to the offices of Hoffman/Hossmum/Hollnunmn/whatever those death throes disguised as penmanship had said, with a stranger who may have known my mother. I don’t know who he could be—I don’t know anyone called Newton. But perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps we weren’t meant to find each other until after she died.
“I need to meet that man,” I say.
Louisa stops talking and blinks at me. “What man?”
“The one who’s looking for my spyglass.”
“He’s looking for a piece of a spyglass,” she corrects. “It may not be related to yours.”
“But what are the chances there’s someone else looking for the exact thing she left behind?”
“Well . . .” She squints onto the street as another carriage rattles by ours, the footman clinging to the back trying to wring water from his wig. “Quite high. It sounds like that Dutch fellow made a lot of them.”
“Then what is the likelihood that there are two of us, here in London, looking for answers about its origin at the same time under instructions from a mother? I know,” before she can voice the counterargument I am certain is rising in her throat, “I know, I shouldn’t make a mountain out of a molehill, but it’s really the only thing I’m good at. And surely this is bigger than a molehill—a knoll at least.”
“Perhaps,” she says, though she doesn’t sound convinced. “Try not to get your hopes too high.”
“But what is the likelihood—”
She pushes away from me and takes my hands in hers. “Adrian. My darling. I will admit, there is the tiniest of chances that they might be related, but for your own sake, I think it’s best you don’t get worked up over it.”
I frown. “What do you mean for my own sake?”
“Only that you have a tendency to inflate things in your own mind, and then you don’t come down easy. I don’t want you to be disappointed is all, if this doesn’t have a thing to do with your mother.” Lou presses my palms between hers like we’re playing a child’s game. I was too anxious about the impending meeting to eat anything earlier, and I know Lou can feel the tremor in my hands because of it. “Why don’t you come have supper with Edward and Imogene and me tonight?” she asks.
“I can’t. I need to go to Covent Garden.”
“To that shop? Adrian, it’s late. They’re probably shut up for the day. And it’s raining. And it’s in a terribly unsafe area. You shouldn’t go alone. We can go first thing tomorrow. Please, I promise I’ll go with you. I bet we can even bring Edward along. He’ll protect us. And there’s a bookshop near there he likes.”
He may throw a good punch for a gentlemen’s club, but I can’t imagine Edward cuts a figure intimidating enough to ward away the gangs of Covent Garden.
“Come to supper with me,” Lou says again, teasing out the words. “Then we can go back to mine and dry off and cuddle up and read.”
There is literally nothing I want more, and she knows it. Minus the going out—I would have been content to take the meal at home rather than some noisy chophouse or social club—and perhaps a bit more than cuddling. Both suggestions I’m sure she’d be amenable to.
But she also knows me well enough that when I start, “I’ll—” she finishes for me.
“I know, I know, you’ll be thinking of it all night.”
“I’ll be unbearable.”
“You never are.” She presses a kiss to the tip of my nose. “You sometimes are, but it’s why I like you. At least go home and warm up and think on it before you make any decisions.”
The carriage jerks to a halt, and we both brace ourselves against the seat. I hear the squelch of mud as the footman jumps down from his perch, then calls that we’ve reached her address. “We’re dining at seven,” Lou says. “Please come.”
I kiss her cheek. “If I do, you have to tell Edward he’s not allowed to ask me about my pamphlet. Or if he does, you have to come to my defense.”
She gives me a small bow. “I am, as always, your knight in shining armor.”
“So long as that shining armor is easier to unfasten than your dresses.”
She slaps my shoulder playfully as the footman opens the carriage door. “Adrian Montague, you scoundrel. You’ll give a girl ideas.”
5
In spite of my promise to Lou, I don’t go home. I have the coachman drop me two blocks from Edward’s townhouse, then set off on foot to Covent Garden. A hack there would garner attention.
True to its Londony self, the rain does not so much stop as it turns to a foggy mist, so that by the time I reach the address I’m more chilled than seems proportional to the dampness of my coat. The office isn’t hard to locate—though it is, as Lou suggested, in a not overly savory area of town. On my way, I pass Chippendale’s workshop, an open-air cock pit, and what is almost certainly a molly house all on the same block. A printer three doors down from the office has stacks of the second edition of Harris’s List in their window, and I think I recognize a gent from my father’s social club ducking out of one of the unmarked brick houses with his face tucked into the collar of his jacket.
The office itself is trim and looks well kept, the shutters newly painted and the bricks scrubbed clean. It’s a stark contrast to the sagging waxwork that neighbors it, and I wonder briefly whether it’s not an office at all, but rather a front for something illegal. The hanging sign above the door sways in the light breeze, a three-masted schooner painted above the very legibly written Hoffman. It would seem the gentleman looking for the spyglass at least hired someone with better penmanship to make his signs. Below it, hung lopsided in haste, is another sign, this one no more than paint slapped on a shredded scrap of wood: FOR SALE. INQUIRE WITHIN.
I open the door, expecting to hear a bell. Instead, the bell over the door flies off its peg and crashes to the floor. I stumble backward in surprise, nearly tripping back out into the street.