I choke as discreetly as possible on my tea.
“He should even keep the leg,” she goes on, like a detailed surgical report is common breakfast conversation, “unless it gangrenes.”
“That’s . . . that’s good,” I say.
There’s nothing wrong with the water you drank. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not sick. Your stomach is not melting inside of you, it may feel that way, but it’s not.
Felicity takes a sip of her tea, watching me over the rim. “Do I make you nervous?”
“Yes,” I say immediately.
Felicity laughs, then wraps both hands around her mug as it sinks into more of a sigh. The skin along her knuckles, cracked into chalky webs, and I notice for the first time that the hair at both her temples is white, one distinct stripe above each ear. “How exactly did you come to be here?” she asks. There is something out of place in her tone that I can’t quite decipher—perhaps if I had had more sleep and had eaten more than half a sip of tea and stopped thinking about what was wrong with the water, I would be able to identify it. She sounds . . . not unhappy I’m here, but tense, like I’m a constable who’s dropped by unexpectedly and asked if he can take a quick look around.
“We were looking for you,” I say. “We went to Rabat because Monty thought you were living there, and the governor told us you’d been banished—”
“You met Basira Khan?” Felicity interrupts. “Did she know who you were?”
“She knew we were your relations.”
“So how did you escape?”
“We didn’t, really,” I say. “She let us go.”
“Just like that?” Felicity arches an incredulous eyebrow. “Surely she at least took off a finger as punishment for your familial lineage.”
“I talked to her.”
“Yes, I tried that as well. It went poorly.”
Silence again. I have a sense I’ve done something wrong, though I’ve hardly done anything other than not drink tea. And stick my head under the pump like a goddamn animal.
There’s nothing wrong with the water, stop thinking about the water.
Felicity pushes a hand through her wild pile of hair in an attempt to corral it back into a precarious lump on top of her head. “Not that I’m not happy to be the cause of international expeditions, but why were you looking for me? Other than, I’m sure, a deep concern for my well-being, which must have come out of nowhere, for Monty has been entirely untroubled by it for years.”
“He’s been troubled. Or maybe that’s not the word. He’s missed you, I think . . .” I trail off. I don’t feel awake enough—maybe that’s it. I’m exhausted. I’m exhausted and my chest hurts and this is starting to feel like trying to have a conversation through cheesecloth.
I try a different approach. “Our mother had a spyglass. Half a spyglass. She was in a shipwreck when I was ten, off the coast of Portugal, and she returned home with this broken spyglass. When she died, I got a piece of it, and it led me to Monty and—” Felicity blinks, and I realize my error. “Oh God.” I almost drop my mug. “You didn’t know she died.”
“No, I didn’t. Don’t apologize,” she says, like she can sense how badly that’s all I want to do for the rest of the day. She takes another sip of her tea, one hand folded into the crook of the opposite elbow. There’s a shiny patch of skin on her forearm, like something there was burned away and then plastered over. “Oh, stop. You’ve not upset me,” she says, and I realize I have one hand clamped theatrically over my mouth. “You caught me by surprise, that’s all. The cost of doing what I wanted with my life was forfeiting contact with our family. I hadn’t suspected I’d even get this close again.” She gestures between us, and though I know she must not have meant to be intentionally cruel, my confidence folds up like a parasol. She didn’t want to find me either. Did I display some sort of repulsive personality trait in infancy that soured both of them toward me? Surely they knew I’d grow out of colic and milky belches and expectorations from every orifice and all the other things that make babies so unfun to be around.
I realize Felicity is still speaking—I lost myself for a moment, and return in time to hear her say, “I’m more sorry for your loss. You were likely a good deal closer to her than I ever was. How long ago was it?”
“The summer solstice of last year.”
“How did it happen?”
I suddenly feel as though I’m about to cry, overwhelmed with . . . Regret? Loneliness? Melancholy? Other words that are all just grief when boiled down to their purest form? My tarry thoughts are growing more and more difficult to peel apart. “She fell,” I say. “She was walking, and she fell.”
“Dying on the solstice sounds very poetic. Or, I suppose, being born on the solstice would maybe be the better material. It’s a grand start to a life, not an end, so much.” I can tell she’s trying to fill the silence until the tears retreat from my eyes—she’s determinedly not looking at them, as though in fear that noticing them will require her to acknowledge them and then offer the requisite comfort, and we are definitely not at a point in this relationship where I can cry in front of her without it being horrifyingly awkward. “Dying on the solstice sounds more like the fulfillment of a curse.”
I swipe a hand under my nose. “Do you believe in curses?”
“Depends on the context.” She cocks her head. “Curses as in . . . ?”
“Like fairy tales,” I say, feeling foolish before the words have left my mouth. I trace the shape of the stave on the back of my hand, long washed away, though I swear I can still feel the imprint, like it scarred. Or maybe the paint was poisonous and is eating my skin. Don’t think about the water. “Or maybe like the Bible.”
Felicity drains her mug. “I think the most effective curse is telling someone they’re cursed and then every time something bad happens to them, they think ‘Oh, it must be because of that curse that was placed on me.’ It only needs be in their head.”
The back of my hand itches, and I resist the urge to scratch it. There’s no poison on your skin, I tell myself.
But what about the water?
“Adrian?” Felicity prompts, and I realize she must have asked me a question. I’ve lost the thread of this conversation so many times it’s like I’m picking apart a tapestry. I feel foolish for everything I’ve said to her since we met. I’ve only known this woman a grand total of twenty minutes and we’ve gone from Hello, I am your long-lost brother to Do you believe in magic? Please love me.
Felicity checks her pocket watch, then sets her empty mug on the edge of the washbasin. “Could I ask a favor of you? Would you walk back to town and fetch wormwood and leeches? There’s a chemist on the main street.” She retrieves a tin from the windowsill and tips a handful of coins onto the tabletop, counting them out quickly before she swipes them into her palm. “And yes, I am trying to get rid of you,” she says before I can ask. “But only because I won’t have you standing in my kitchen letting perfectly good tea go cold.”