In return, I can only stare at him, stars blinking at the corners of my vision. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what I would say if I could. I can’t feel my hands anymore. I might be swaying.
He folds his arms and surveys me coldly. I have no idea who this man is, other than possibly a painting of myself twenty years in the future, but he’s staring at me like I’m a slug turned up in his newly tilled flower bed. Poppy-red splotches rise along his neck, betraying the distress he’s trying to mask with that overreached impassivity.
I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what he wants of me or who he is, though something in my bones knows it. His must be telling him the same.
The office boy glances slyly up from his ledger, like it’s possible to be subtle about eavesdropping when there’s nothing but a skull separating the three of us. The man must notice too, for he shoots the boy an irritated look. “You’re done for today, Marvin. Go home. We’ll see you next week.” As the office boy slides off his stool and retrieves his coat, the man snaps at me, “Come on, then,” and turns toward his back office.
I consider running again. I could leave right now and still meet Lou for supper. I don’t have to know this answer. I don’t even have to stay long enough to ask the question. But I have a sense a grave was overturned the moment I set foot in his office, and I’ll be haunted until I know who this man is.
As I follow him, I trip over the same crate he did.
The back office is in the same state of stressful disarray as the front. I start to shift papers off the chair beside the door, but several cascade free and land in a haphazard pile. The man’s eyes flick in my direction, so instead of making an attempt to shift the stacks again, I just sit on them. His jaw tenses, though I think more in response to the fact that I sat myself rather than that I did so atop his paperwork.
He doesn’t sit. Instead, he plants himself against the opposite wall, as far from me as possible, and I think again of my father, and the way he is never without a desk between us if he can help it. “What do you want from me?” the man says flatly. He has his arms folded, his mouth set in a hard line that leaves no room for assuming he’s anything but hostile.
“Nothing,” I say quickly, then realize that’s the opposite of the reason I’ve come. “I mean, I had a question about . . . we went to the British Museum and . . . they gave me your . . . your address . . . I’m sorry, but . . . have we met?”
He gives me a pointed look, and I feel as though he’s waiting for me to crack a smile and reveal a jape he does not think is funny. When I don’t, he says, “Are you in earnest?”
“You seem to know me,” I say. “Or at least have some kind of feeling about me—but I’m not sure who you are.”
He stares at me for a moment, like I’m a book written in a language he doesn’t understand but is trying to read anyway. Like he can’t make sense of me. At least we have that in common.
“For Christ’s sake.” He wets his lips and stares at the ground for a long time. His shoulders rise with a deep inhalation that makes me realize I’ve been holding my breath.
Breathe, Adrian.
Then he looks up at me, and somehow, I know. Even before he says it.
“My name is Henry Montague,” he says. “I’m your brother.”
6
I speak without thinking, which results in the first words that leave my mouth being, “Are you certain?”
His lips twitch, though I suspect in prelude to a grimace rather than a smile. “You are Adrian Henry Laurence Montague,” he says, and I immediately cast backward in my memory, trying to remember whether or not I gave him my name, though I’m almost certain I didn’t, and if I had, certainly not the middle bits. “You were born—God, let’s see, it would have been January the . . . fifteenth? Sixteenth? Am I close?”
“Fifteenth,” I murmur. I feel dizzy.
“And that would make you”—he does a quick tally in his head—“nine and ten years. Your parents—our parents are Lord Henri Montague and Caroline Montague, née Braithwaite. You must have been raised in Cheshire, same as I was, about an hour’s ride south of Chester, Wrexham to the west. Close to a five-hundred-acre property, though I may be misremembering. The house is gray stone with a columned facade, a pond adjoining the main garden; you would have slept on the second story, eastern corner, above the hedges that would always die before they bloomed, though she may have replanted—”
“Stop.”
This must be a joke. A trick. Some kind of elaborate hoax—for the first time in my life, I’m dying to be laughed at for being gullible. I don’t have a brother. Or—he must be illegitimate. Though I can see both my parents so clearly in his features. And unless he were their child, he never would have been raised in the manor—or even spent any time near enough it to be acquainted with the details of the house and the grounds. But surely someone would have said something to me before now. There would have been some clue, some hint, his name carved into a windowsill or written in the frontispiece of a book.
Perhaps there was, and I had simply never known what I was seeing.
“Am I right?” he asks. When I don’t answer, he looks up at the ceiling and drags a hand down his face with a sigh so heavy it should have dropped through the floor. “Why are you here? Can I interest you in investing some of your certainly not insubstantial fortune—you’re welcome, by the by—in a shipping route to the West Indies?” I have no idea what to say. I can’t find my footing enough to move. I’m staring at this man—this stranger—my brother—and I cannot understand the convergence of those things. Henry must sense I’ve lost my tongue—and perhaps also sense the sincerity of my protestations of ignorance, for he says, still flat but less openly mocking, “How did you find me if you had no knowledge of our relationship?”
If there is more clinical phrasing to be used, I can’t come up with it, though I’m grateful for a question I know the answer to. “The museum.”
“What museum?”
Before I can reply, we’re interrupted by the sound of the front door opening. I sit up, thrilled for a conversational intermission—the devil himself would have been a welcome intrusion, so long as it gave me time to collect myself. Henry glances at his office door, and a moment later, a dark-skinned man in a rough coat enters, his cloud of curly hair pulled back into a knot at the nape of his neck. “Monty, why is there a skull with the . . .” He catches sight of me and breaks off, looking between us. “Sorry. I didn’t realize you had a meeting.”
Henry—Monty—what?—sighs. I swear, even that small twitch is enough to make the dimples in both his cheeks pop out. I only inherited one from our father, but he appears to have the matching set. “Johanna sent it. I believe it’s meant to be some kind of present. Or possibly we are meant to keep it for her until she’s next in London. It’s always so hard to tell, and it has arrived so near to your birthday.”
“I would imagine the latter.” The dark-skinned man takes a wide stride over the pile of papers I inadvertently scattered and extends a hand to me. He has a broad smile, which is deployed in full as he says, “Good day. I’m Percy Newton.”