Monty pushes himself up with a moan, twisting around until his back pops. He touches my head gently as he passes. I look up, and he nods toward the stairs. “Come on, come have some coffee.”
“No, I’ll stay here.”
“You can take a break. Give your eyes a rest. It’s so dark, I don’t know how you read anything.”
I turn back to the book in my lap and flip to the next flapped page. “I want to stay.”
A pause, so long I wonder if he somehow left in an uncharacteristically sneaky fashion, or maybe I just didn’t notice. But then he says, “Can I bring some down for you, at least?”
“You can, but I don’t want it.”
“How long do you intend to stay here?”
I set the book aside and pick up the next one—a heavy atlas with an inscription on the front cover in Dutch. When I open to the frontispiece, there are no words, just a hand-drawn illustration of a charcoal-gray ship, the only color on the page a swatch of flame-red paint. “As long as it takes.”
We follow this routine for four days—Monty and I arrive early to the atheneum and I retreat down to the basement for further excavation. I can tell Monty is trying to help, but I don’t trust his judgment about what’s worth making note of, so I end up going through all his work again, and when he notices this, he retreats. Sometimes I’ll throw him a book to look through or a crate to figure out how to open, but mostly I do the work, and he watches. It makes me feel like a child in a nursery, busily stacking blocks with the sincere intention of creating a critical foundation while his nurse watches from the corner, their world in proper scale. Every day, Cornelius makes coffee at two in the afternoon, and, as the old church clock chimes, he folds himself down the stairs to offer us some. Monty always goes. I am pried up from the archives only when Cornelius leaves for the day and has to close the chapel, though I would have asked him to lock me in for the night if I thought Monty would let me get away with it. Afterward, Monty and I meet Johanna and Felicity—usually with dogs but without Jan—for a meal at the In’t Aepjen, a sailors’ bar that Johanna loves because she knows everyone there.
I find the bar almost unbearable. It’s tiny and forever crowded with sailors who smell like it’s been years since they crossed paths with a bar of soap. The lacquer on the dark walls is so thick that the candlelight reflects off the wood, making the room look as though it’s on fire. Huge casks line the tops of shelves buckling under the weight of more liquor than I’ve ever seen in one place, bottles of every color and size and shape and with labels in every language. Monkeys run across the rafters, pets brought home from faraway places and then abandoned in port. They stare down at us with bright eyes, occasionally cackling or stealing herring from someone’s plate. The dogs wait outside, noses pressed to the glass until it’s so fogged they can’t see through it, tracking the monkeys’ progress with their jowls and barking whenever one of them gets too close to Johanna.
“Today will be the day!” Cornelius says each morning when we arrive. “Today you will have some good luck!” And at the end, “Tomorrow, you will have better luck! Tomorrow you’ll find what you need.” It feels more buoying in the morning—by the end of the day, I’m covered in dust and smell of seaweed and in no mood for misplaced optimism.
But the fifth day—he isn’t wrong.
The first thing I find is a set of books from a Dutch freight company, with a red leather marker stuck in the middle. I open it without much hope and there, in glorious, official documentation, is a catalogue of voyages of the Flying Dutchman. The real ship, not the story or the ghost, with descriptions of the masts and the names of crew members and freight capacity all spelled out in meticulous detail. The captain’s name has been smudged, unreadable, as have the first three entries on the log of its stops.
The final entry, a docking in Iceland, just like Saad predicted.
The date is the summer solstice. One hundred years ago.
And there’s nothing after that.
I snap the book shut, heart hammering. It’s now. It’s this year. The Dutchman makes landfall on the summer solstice of this year. Did my mother know? Was that a factor in her death? Did she feel the Dutchman coming for her, mark the date in her diary and count down the days to it, or was it lurking unknown on her calendar, not seen but felt, that dread without a source that so often overtakes me rooting itself in her heart?
I have to find Saad. We have to leave now. We’re just weeks from the solstice—I don’t know if it’s even possible to sail to Iceland in that time. And I still don’t have the rest of the spyglass.
I start shifting papers, frantic. More manifests, more logs, pages and pages and pages. I have no clue how long I’ve been at it when I finally—finally, impossibly—find a court transcript, all in Portuguese but for the name of the ship—Persephone.
“Adrian.” I jump, almost knocking over my lamp, and look up. Monty’s standing on the bottom of the stairs, the light tumbling from the chapel windows above pinning him in silhouette. “Adrian, are you listening to me?”
I have no idea what he said, but I reply, “Yes, I’m listening.”
“Then let’s go.”
“What? No. It’s not time yet.”
“Come on, you’re done here.” He sounds peeved. Or tired. Or both. It had rained on us the whole walk to the chapel, and I could tell his leg was bothering him. He didn’t even feel up to taking the stairs down to the crypt, so he’s been sitting above with Cornelius all morning, strains of their conversation occasionally wafting down to me.
“What’s the matter?” I ask him.
“This is a waste of time,” he snaps, raking a hand through his hair. He must have spent all his reserves of tender patience over the last few days, for he sounds like he did that first day we sat down across from each other in a Covent Garden bar: irritated and tense. “There’s nothing for you to find.”
I flap the book at him. “I’ve literally just found something.”
“Adrian, please.” He slumps sideways against the stairway wall, shifting his grip on his cane. I can hear the pain in his voice. “I want to go back to Johanna’s.”
“So go. I can find my way home alone.”
A pause. I flip the book open again, scanning the page frantically. Did I imagine it? Goddamn Monty had come down at exactly the wrong moment.
“We’re not going out for supper tonight, all right?” I vaguely hear him say. “Come home when you’re finished. Adrian.” A pause. “Adrian. Indicate that you—Adrian, do you hear what I’m saying to you?”
I give him a half wave. “Come to Johanna’s, I’m listening.”
“Could you please . . .” He pinches the bridge of his nose, then shakes his head. “Never mind. Have a wonderful time down here in the dark.”
“Why are you being sour?”
The court documents are endless, and all in Portuguese—why hadn’t I realized they’d be in Portuguese?
I’m considering running upstairs and asking Cornelius if he reads Portuguese when I find it—the only page I’ve yet seen in English. A witness statement signed by Caroline Montague.