“Don’t speak to her like that,” I say, but he rounds on me.
“Stay out of this. You don’t get to show up adorable and damaged twenty years later and have everyone fall all over themselves to put your mind at ease. For the love of God, where is my coat?”
“Lower hook nearest the door,” Felicity mumbles.
“Finally.” Monty shakes his coat free of the rack, nearly pulling the whole thing over, and I can’t let him go, not yet. No matter what’s happened between them, he has to know. I need him to know, and I need him to stay and tell me why my mother is different from those other sailors who saw the Dutchman, why she was labeled a lunatic but none of them were, because it has to be the spyglass, this has to prove it. I fumble in my pocket, struggling to extricate the folded page of my mother’s court testimony. “Monty, wait. Don’t go—I found something. I have to show you—”
“For God’s sake, Adrian, I don’t care! I don’t bloody care.”
“It doesn’t matter if you care, I found—”
And then he puts a hand on my chest and shoves me.
It’s not hard. Just enough that I stumble a few steps backward, my elbow knocking a tray of calling cards off the entryway table.
“Henry!” Felicity cries behind me, her voice caught between scolding and shock.
Monty turns sharply from me, face to the door. His shoulders are heaving, and I think for a moment, he won’t go. He can’t, not after that. Not without another word.
But then he shakes his head, yanks open the front door, and leaves with his coat slung over one arm.
I stare at the spot where he just was, blinking furiously, trying to make sense of what happened. The raw spot on my collarbone is throbbing—he had put his thumb right overtop of it without knowing.
“Adrian, are you all right?” I hear Felicity say behind me.
“I’m fine.” I touch the spot on my neck, then turn to her.
She’s slumped against the door frame, the back of her fingers pressed to her mouth and her other hand rubbing the burned spot on her forearm. She’s red faced but dry eyed, a feat I have never managed to achieve, though she hardly looks able to stand without a prop.
“The reason I know van der Loos,” she says, and it takes me a moment to work out what she’s saying, and that it’s me she’s saying it to. She’s started in the middle of a thought, like we were midconversation. “Is that I broke my pact with the Crown and Cleaver not to bring any Europeans into their waters. In exchange for access to sunken Dutch freighters, van der Loos agreed to grant me university funding I needed for my research. Sim knew, and she turned a blind eye. Her father did not. When he found out, she lost her inheritance, I was marooned, and our company lost access to all our protected routes in the Atlantic.”
“What happened to van der Loos?” I ask quietly.
“He’s dead. Shot in a skirmish with the Dey.”
My stomach drops. “Does anyone—”
“No one knows what happened to him,” she says. “No one knew where he was, so no one knows to ask. It’s my fault.” She pulls her hair over her shoulder, then sighs, a deeper breath than I’m certain I’ve ever taken. “That’s the whole story,” she says, and she sounds a thousand years old. “And now everyone knows it.”
27
I sup with Jan and Johanna alone that night—Felicity stays in her room, and Monty hasn’t reappeared since his storm-out. I sit up with them in the parlor for a while after, Jan reading and Johanna working through a piece on the pianoforte while I sit on the floor and pet the dogs, my knees pulling closer and closer to my chest without me even realizing it. I feel as though I’m shriveling up, like a hermit crab that’s lost its shell. Suddenly I long to see the sea. Maybe that’s what’s pulled me from my bed every night, that urge to check the windows for something I couldn’t name.
I go up to bed as usual, wait until I hear Jan and Johanna retire, then come back down again, escaping notice by the dogs only because their snores cover any noise I make.
The In’t Aepjen is as crowded at midnight as it was when we came for supper. I’m not sure if I should wait at the bar, or outside, or find a table or order drinks. Maybe Saad is already here and we’re sitting on opposite sides of the room wondering where the other is. Maybe he isn’t coming. Maybe he didn’t get the note. I was certain the Dey had been on the harbor log, but perhaps I only saw it because I wanted to. I try to recall the exact shape of the word on the page, but I can’t. Or maybe he’s changed his mind and absconded with my spyglass after all. I scrape my hands up my arms, trying to look calm and not like I’m wondering how to best navigate the exquisite awkwardness of meeting up with someone in a public place.
“Hey.” The bartender raps his knuckles on the bar in front of me. It’s the same gent who’s been serving us for the past week, his beard trimmed to a stabbing point and white eyebrows that turn up at the ends. He must recognize me, for he asks in accented English, “Did you come to fetch him?”
“What? Fetch who?”
He tips his head down the bar, just as a crash echoes through the room from that direction. Someone shrieks. I glance down, to where a man has pushed over a card table. Dice scatter across the floor, and one of the monkeys darts down from his perch to snatch a gold coin before it rolls beneath the bar. “Je speelde vals!” the man is shouting at his opponent, who is still seated at the now-vanished table.
“Come now,” his opponent, back to me, says. “It’s not cheating just because I win.”
“You have cards up your sleeve.”
The second man ruffles his hair, considering this. “Yes, I suppose that does make it cheating.”
“Oh no,” I say aloud without realizing it.
The bartender glares at me. “Tell him to find another place to play. He’s putting off my customers.”
“Right, of course. I’m so sorry.”
The bartender flicks a damp rag in my direction. “He’s welcome back when he’s sober.”
Oh God. I pick my way through the crowd to the circle forming around the overturned table. The irate man—a tan sailor with one eye covered by a patch and skin the texture of tree bark—has Monty by the front of his coat, dragging him out of his chair.
“Come on, stop it, now stop it. You’re being dramatic,” Monty is saying. “Look at me, I’m crippled.”
The man kicks his cane out, and Monty stumbles, nearly knocking his teeth out on the bar.
“Stop!” I manage to grab my brother by the collar and pull him to his feet. “I’ll pay for him,” I tell the sailor. “Whatever he owes you.”
The sailor bares his teeth at me. There aren’t many of them, but the menace behind the action is clear. “Ga weg, kleine muis.”
I swallow. “I don’t know what that means.”
“Get out of my way.” He knocks an empty glass off the bar, the remnants of foam at the bottom spattering Monty and me. “That man’s a liar and a cheat.”
“I know,” I say.
“You should be ashamed of him!”
I shovel a parcel of notes into the man’s hands. It’s British currency, but far more than they had on the table.