Felicity continues like Johanna hasn’t spoken, and I have a sense that, if she were to pause each time Johanna became emotional, every conversation would take days. “We recently discovered that she left behind one half of a spyglass that she kept on her person at all times, which we suspect may possess some rather unusual properties.”
“Oh, please tell me what these unusual properties are,” Johanna says. “May I see it?”
“No,” I say too quickly. Monty deals me a curious look, but I suspect I’m twitchy enough that my overzealous response will be written off as yet another personality flaw. I still haven’t told either of them about Saad, or our pact. Or that he may be arriving here any day. Or perhaps he outsailed us and has already arrived—we certainly took a long route.
“It belongs to the Flying Dutchman,” I say.
Johanna gasps. “Good Lord, really?”
“You know it?” I ask.
“I know the lore—about the captain and the bargain and such.” She catches sight of our faces. “Do you not?” She pours herself a cup of coffee, then fishes a clump of fur from it with the tip of her pinky. “There are a thousand variations, but I think the common narrative thread is this: In the midst of a storm that was sure to sink them, the young captain of a ship called the Flying Dutchman made a deal with the devil. The captain’s life would be spared, but he was doomed to sail forever, ferrying the souls of drowned sailors from the land of the living to the dead.”
“That’s a far more friendly Dutchman than we’ve heard of,” Monty replies. “Generally there are more storms and death and shipwrecks and damnation involved.”
Johanna picks up another biscuit, and one of the dogs takes it calmly out of her hand without her even offering. “Well, when your job involves death, you’re bound to get a bad reputation simply by association. Some people are wary of grave diggers.”
“My mother—our mother—was on a ship that was sunk by the Dutchman on its way from Barbados to London,” I explain. “She was the only survivor.”
Johanna looks as though I’ve just handed her a new puppy. “Did the spyglass come from the shipwreck? Or did she meet the captain of the Dutchman on the one day a century he is permitted to make landfall? Perhaps your mother encountered—oh good gracious!” She clasps her hands to her face. “What if your mother is some great lost love of the captain? She slighted him! He’s out for revenge! He won’t stop until he’s wiped out the whole of your family line!”
“Putting that aside,” Felicity interrupts, “we have been trying to find any records of the shipwreck, and we have been led to believe they may be here.”
Johanna frowns. “In God’s name, why?”
“We aren’t sure,” Felicity replies. “But we were hoping to find the man who purchased them. He lives here.”
When she says nothing more, Johanna blinks at her. “So? Tell me everything. Do you know his name? Or where in the city he is or where he works or anything about him?”
Felicity seems suddenly distracted by the stalactite of drool hanging off the chandelier. “Maybe we should wait—” she starts, but I am not about to wait, not for anything, not now that we’re here.
“His name is van der Loos,” I supply.
“Van der Loos?” Johanna repeats, then looks to Felicity. “The archivist?”
“Do you know him?” I ask.
“I know a van der Loos—he works at the university. It must be him. He’s why I know the Dutchman story, actually. Or all the variations of it. He’s a folklorist and has a massive collection relating to Dutch nautical lore.” She’s still watching my sister. Felicity is still staring at the ceiling. “You know him, don’t you, Felicity?”
Felicity reaches for her coffee mug, seems to remember halfway there that it’s empty, and lunges instead for a biscuit. “I’ve met him.”
“He’s on sabbatical, but he has a lovely boy running his collection at the university,” Johanna says to me. “I’m sure he’d show you around and help you find whatever it is you’re looking for. Though Felicity might have better connections there than I do. Fel, I swear, wasn’t he the one you were talking to about—”
Which is when Felicity accidentally overturns the plate of biscuits, and all three dogs lunge to clean up the spill, including Boleyn, who is under the table. She lifts it off the ground, sending the coffeepot flying as well. The clang as it connects with the polished floor sends all three dogs cowering, Cleves straight into Monty’s bad leg, and the conversation collapses entirely from there.
26
That night, we meet Johanna’s husband, Jan, a tall, stick-thin broker on the Exchange who seems to be known equally for his keen mind for stocks and his enormous mustache. They are a perfectly mismatched pair—her chatty and bursting with energy, him quiet and serious, a man of very few, very carefully chosen words. Physically, she doesn’t reach his shoulder, and while he could hide himself behind a flagpole, Johanna is round, like she’s made from clouds. They are also clearly and beautifully in love, and seeing them together makes me miss Lou fiercely.
The house is warm, and crowded, and the dogs are so large and present it seems impossible there are only three of them. Johanna makes the parlor into a bedroom for Monty, Felicity shares her bed, and Jan takes the spare, while I’m shuffled to a low cot in the attic. The stairs leading there are so steep it seems impossible for the dogs to navigate, and yet, just like Johanna predicted, as a church clock somewhere down the street tolls two, I hear heavy paws on the stairs, accompanied by very wet, snuffling breaths. Then Cleves slowly hefts himself onto the low cot, as though moving at a glacial pace will render him invisible. The bed ropes whine under his weight, threatening to snap. After a few tottering steps on the uneven mattress, he settles himself directly on top of me, chuffing hotly onto my neck until I make room for his head on the pillow beside mine. He’s snoring within moments.
I hardly sleep at all that night, though that can’t be blamed entirely on my strange bedfellow. The anticipation of visiting van der Loos’s collection the next day builds with every passing hour. I’m so restless that, were I not being held down by this anvil of a dog, I would get up and pace. I keep feeling the need to check the window, though what I expect to find there, I’m not sure. Saad waiting on Johanna’s doorstep? Ghostly sails on a distant horizon? Something is nagging at my brain, like a forgotten appointment. I feel like I’m on the cusp of remembering there’s somewhere else I have to be. I almost wake Felicity to ask if I can have more of her dragon snuff, but I’d likely wake Johanna as well, and then the dogs, and then the whole house, and I’d have to explain to everyone that I am worried about something but I have no idea what it is. So instead, I lie awake until the sun rises, scratching the skin on my forearm until it bleeds.
I insist we leave for the university as soon as breakfast is finished, though Monty strongly hints that the archive isn’t going anywhere and he would have loved a lie-in. Felicity declines the invitation to accompany us with no explanation, so it’s Monty and I who go with Johanna. All three dogs come too. They trot along in a pack, unleashed, each with a colorful bow around its neck. It feels a bit like having a royal escort that occasionally stops to piss on curbs.