She looks so sincerely confused for a moment I wonder if I’ve spoken in another language, or if the words I think are coming out of my mouth sound nothing like they do in my head. “Nothing’s wrong with it,” she says slowly. “It tastes of iron because it comes up from the spring. I only meant I had fresher water in the house.”
I don’t believe her. Why should I believe her? I’ve only just met her, for God’s sake. I dig my nails into my palm. My hands are somehow both numb and throbbing in equal measure.
“Why?” she asks carefully, the word like a soft step over broken glass. “Are you feeling unwell?”
“I think our mother met the Flying Dutchman.”
Monty and Felicity glance at each other and oh God, they think I’m mad. They think I’m mad and they don’t even know I’m plastered in leeches.
“Basira Khan recognized our spyglass,” I say, like if I keep talking before either of them object, they may not realize how outlandish this theory is. “She said it came from the Flying Dutchman and it carries a curse. Our mother was in a shipwreck; she was the only one who survived. That’s what the Dutchman does—it sinks ships. Or—or something with shipwrecks. It does something bad. And if it was the Dutchman that sank them—or it was there when they sank—maybe she survived because she took the spyglass. Or part of it. Maybe she broke it. Or it broke in the storm.”
Monty holds up his hands. “Jesus, Adrian, take a breath.”
I laugh, though the irony of that statement is lost on everyone but me. “Father said something happened to her.”
“Yes—she was in a shipwreck,” Monty says.
“It did something to her brain. She was sick, and the sicker she got, the more obsessed she was with the spyglass. Those two things can’t not be linked.”
“Surviving something like that can leave a person touched,” Felicity says, but I shake my head.
“She wasn’t touched. She wasn’t mad or insane or—”
“No one’s saying she was,” Monty interrupts.
“She left it behind!” I’m starting to shake, my heart racing, and I don’t want to fall apart. I don’t want to prove myself right by collapsing into hysterics in front of both of them but Listen to yourself, you sound insane. “The last thing she did before she died was take off her wedding ring and leave her spyglass behind after a decade of taking it everywhere with her. Everywhere. The one time she leaves without it is the day she dies. So maybe it protected her. Or maybe—” I’m starting to feel outside myself again, like I’m my own ghost. “Why did she leave it? And why did she never mention that I had a brother and a sister and she was seeing doctors at an asylum—”
“Let’s discuss this later,” Felicity interrupts. “I think it’s too much—”
The whole goddamn world is too much. It’s all too loud. Why is it so much louder for me than anyone else? Doesn’t anyone hear the screaming all the time? I clench my jaw and try to make my voice level and lungs work like goddamn human lungs instead of a punctured bellows.
Felicity is still speaking, but I only hear every other word, like I’m bobbing in and out of water. “It’s been a long few days. For you more than anyone, I suspect. We should wait—”
“I don’t have time to wait.” I stagger to my feet, accidentally kicking over the bucket I was seated on. The room sways. I close my eyes, trying to ground myself, trying to grab the line that has come unmoored inside me, but it’s already floating out to sea, and I’m alone, watching the last bits of my sanity ride the current toward the horizon. “Something is wrong with me.” I don’t know how to make them understand it. I don’t know how to make anyone understand it. I don’t know how to understand it.
“Adrian—” Felicity reaches for me, but I pull away so violently I smack my arm against the kettle. It flies off the stove and clangs against the floor, the foamy contents hissing against the stones.
“I think I’m going insane. I get these thoughts and they’re not real but they won’t go away and they feel real and I worry and I obsess and I know everyone does that but it’s different for me; I’m just so scared all the bloody time. And when she was alive, it was all right because she understood it, but turns out something was making her sick and insane, and now I’m sick and insane, and if I don’t figure out how to stop it, it’s going to kill me like it killed her.”
“Adrian!” I’m not fast enough this time, and Felicity manages to grab me around both wrists. I thrash, though I know it makes me look like even more of a madman, first ranting and now fighting restraint. She’s stronger than I expected—I can’t break from her grip, though I also can’t stop myself from trying. “Adrian, stop! Stop!” She manages to pull my hands between us and I think she’s going to tie me up and stick me on a ship of exiles and sail me to Australia so they can close the door on their mad younger brother for good.
But then she says, “You’re bleeding!”
I look down. The sleeve of my shirt is blooming poppy red. There are flowers on my arm, I think, as a long, red stem runs down to my thumb and then drops onto the floor. Or maybe I slit my own wrists without realizing it. Maybe they’re not flowers at all.
My vision wavers.
And then I faint.
20
When I come to on the surgery floor, I’m not hurt so much as humiliated.
It takes me a moment of watching, detached, as Felicity peels long black stripes off my arm, before I realize they’re the leeches and oh God where did they all come from? There are so many, all gluttonously fat, so blood-drunk they’re hardly wriggling as she removes them. I put them on both my arms. I didn’t realize I had done that. Each one leaves behind a small circle on my skin, like a burn from the tip of a cigar, that bleeds through the towels Felicity instructs me to hold over them. She spreads a paste that smells like yarrow onto each bloody spot, then binds both my forearms from elbow to wrist. “Did you put them anywhere else?” she says, and all I can do is shake my head and wish I was dead.
She doesn’t look as though she quite believes me, but thank God she doesn’t insist on checking for herself. She takes my shirt to wash—when I knocked the kettle, one of the leeches burst, all the blood it had sucked up soaking suddenly through my shirt sleeve like I’d been shot—and gives me a blanket to wrap myself in.
“Don’t you dare move,” she says, though it’s a redundant instruction. I have absolutely no desire to. I lie on my side on the floor, knees pulled up to my chest, leaking tears, and as spent as though I just climbed a mountain. When she returns, she kneels beside me and peers into my face, her fingers stroking my neck until she finds my pulse.
“When was the last time you ate something?” Felicity asks.
I don’t have an answer, so she brings me two of the promised scones from that morning, and water, but I can’t make myself drink any of it. I try a bite of scone and gag, unable to swallow and already fretting about what great insult she’s probably taking from my choking on her baked goods.
“You have to drink the water.” Felicity sets the cup on the floor and slides it toward me. It’s barely half full. “All of it.”