“Is this all of it?” Monty remarks dryly, lifting the lid on one of the trunks with the tip of his cane, then quickly closing it again. It reeks of rotted fish.
“Most of it,” Cornelius replies brightly, my brother’s acerbity lost on him. He’s beaming around at the collection, the proud father of a crypt full of rubbish.
“How does the professor decide what’s worth keeping and what’s flotsam?” Monty asks. “My untrained eye can hardly tell the difference.”
“Ah, well, you see, his concentration is on the nautical folklore of Holland. He has been attempting to map the Dutchman around the world, cataloguing every recorded sighting and wreck, and how the story changes from place to place and the variances in its replication. Then he brings it all back here to Amsterdam, and I sort it.”
“What will he do after it’s sorted?” Monty asks.
“I’m not sure,” Cornelius replies. “And I’m not sure he knows either.” He ponders this for a moment, then beams again. “The world of academic research is strange!”
“And where in the world is your professor now?” Monty asks.
“Who knows?” Cornelius replies. “Somewhere in Africa, the last time I heard from him, but it’s been ages. That’s the way of these things—feast, then famine. Then more famine, and more famine until it begins to feel Biblical.”
“Do you know where we might start?” I cut in. “The shipwreck was off the coast of Portugal, if that helps.”
“It absolutely doesn’t,” Cornelius replies brightly. “Maybe over there?” He swings his lantern toward a corner of the room where atlases are stacked almost to the ceiling. “That odd hat there came from a Spaniard, so perhaps Portugal is nearby. Not much rhyme or reason, I’m afraid. This half here”—he indicates the opposite side of the room—“has all been organized.”
The two halves are indistinguishable, but I don’t comment.
“Does your professor buy many shipwrecks?” Monty asks.
“Oh, dozens,” Cornelius replies, seating himself on one of the sea trunks. Even sitting, his head nearly brushes the low stone ceiling. “Any wreck that carries even a whiff of the Flying Dutchman mythology.”
“Is that all he studies?”
“His broader field is nautical folklore and superstition, but he has a particular interest in the story of the Flying Dutchman. He’s descended from the man who painted one of the most famous still lifes in representation of it—done after the death of its captain.”
Monty moves to sit on a crate near the foot of the stairs, but reconsiders when the whole thing lists sideways under his weight. “And you’re a student of this as well?”
Cornelius nods. “Though I think my specialization will be thirteenth-century Laplandic wind knots.”
“I don’t know what any of that means,” Monty says, and Cornelius lights up like a pyre.
“Oh it’s fascinating! Let me explain—so in the thirteenth century—no, best start further back than that.” He steeples his hands against his lips in thought. “Would you say you’re more familiar with Homer’s Aiolos or Hesiod’s Uranus?”
“Definitely the anus one,” Monty replies.
As Cornelius chatters happily, I drop to my knees and start to sift through the piles, though my work is halfhearted. I’m so overwhelmed it’s turned me to stone. I don’t know where to start or how to go from there, so I keep reviewing the possibilities in my head while knowing none of them will make even a dent in this mess. Even if van der Loos didn’t return for half a century, it seems unlikely this could be sorted before then.
“Adrian.” Someone touches my arm lightly, though I startle like I’ve been slapped. Monty is behind me, his lantern hooked over the top of his cane. “Sorry, I thought you heard me.”
“Where’s Cornelius?” I ask.
“He went back to his work.” Monty leans against the edge of one of the coffins. There’s the distinct crunch of sand on stone beneath his boots. “You all right?”
“Course.” I flip the top page in front of me. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You’ve been going through that stack for half of an hour, and you don’t appear to actually be looking at any of them. And you’re wheezing. Not a lot—just a little. But a little more than I’d like you to be.”
He’s right—I can’t get enough breath. Every shallow inhale is followed with gasping in attempt to overcompensate, though they too fail to fully inflate my lungs. I try to shuffle the papers into a stack, like the precision of the edges will prove my all-rightness, but most of them are so waterlogged and rippled that they refuse to line up. “I think it’s the dust.”
“You don’t have to do this,” Monty says quietly. “Any of this. It doesn’t matter that we came all this way, or spent money, or any of it. And . . .” His voice falters, and he clears his throat. “It doesn’t matter what she left behind.”
“Of course it matters,” I reply. “I have to find . . .”
I stop. I haven’t told him about my deal with Saad. I haven’t told anyone. Somehow I suspect that, if either Monty or Felicity caught wind of our alliance, I would not be gently coaxed into possibly leaving this project behind, but instead dragged by the ear onto the next boat for London.
“I have to find the answer,” I say at last. “I have to know what killed her.”
I have a sense Monty wants to argue, but he seems to think better of it and instead says, “All right then. Let me help you.”
“You can start over there.” I gesture vaguely over my shoulder, trying to pretend I have some idea of what I’m doing, though I’m not fooling either of us. Still, Monty pushes himself to his feet, and I turn back to the documents with another halting breath.
The things she left behind have to matter because I’m one of them.
Monty stays in the crypt with me all morning, each of us working silently through different portions of the mess. Every so often, he’ll call out about something he found—“Adrian, come look at the tits on this mermaid!”—or the name of a place he’s never heard of before. I listen less and less each time. I have seen the words Flying Dutchman so many times they start to lose their meaning. I’ve been chasing a story and now suddenly I’m drowning in it. Though the more accounts I read of other sailors who, like me, saw a misty ship on the horizon in a storm, the less insane I begin to feel, and the more determined to find something here. Some of the transcripts mention a woman aboard the ship, her hair red as a summer sky, raising a spyglass to survey their deck. In other stories, there’s no spyglass. Most, there’s no woman at all.
But she’s here. The Dutchman is here, on every page, tucked in every sea chest and sewn into the seams of every molded sail. You’re not insane, I tell myself over and over with every new stone I turn. You’re not insane you’re not alone you’re not insane you’re not alone.
But still no mention of the Persephone.
“Yoo-hoo!” Cornelius appears at the top of the stairs. He has to bend almost double to squish his enormous frame through the door. No wonder he doesn’t want to work down here; he barely fits. “I’ve made a pot of coffee if either of you would like some.”