I glowed; I had been weighed, and found worthy.
In the early summer of 1906 I was almost twelve. The RMS Lusitania had just launched as the largest ship in the world (Mr. Locke promised we’d get tickets soon); the newspapers were still full of grainy pictures of the wreckage in San Francisco after that awful earthquake; and I’d used my allowance to buy a subscription to Outing magazine just so I could read Jack London’s new novel every week. Mr. Locke was away on business without me, and my father was, for once, home.
He was supposed to have left the day before to join Mr. Fawcett’s expedition to Brazil, but there was some delay with documents getting stamped by the proper authorities and delicate instruments that required careful shipping—I didn’t care. I only cared that he was home.
We ate breakfast together in the kitchens, seated at a big scarred table marked with grease spots and burns. He’d brought one of his field notebooks to review, and ate his eggs and toast with a tiny V creasing his eyebrows. I didn’t mind; I had the latest installment of White Fang. We disappeared into our separate worlds, together but apart, and it was so peaceful and right-feeling that I found myself pretending that it happened every morning. That we were a regular little family, that Locke House was our house and this table was our kitchen table.
Except I guess if we were a regular family there would be a mother at the table with us. Maybe she’d be reading, too. Maybe she’d look up at me over the spine of her book and her eyes would crinkle, just so, and she would brush the toast crumbs from my father’s scrubby beard.
It’s stupid to think things like that. It just gives you this hollow, achy feeling between your ribs, like you’re homesick even though you’re already home, and you can’t read your magazine anymore because the words are all warped and watery-looking.
My father gathered his plate and coffee cup and stood, notebook wedged beneath his arm. His eyes were distant behind the little gold-rimmed spectacles he wore for reading. He turned to leave.
“Wait.” I gulped the word out and he blinked at me like a startled owl. “I was wondering if—could I help you? With your work?”
I watched him start to say no, saw his head begin a regretful shake, but then he looked at me. Whatever he saw in my face—the damp shine of almost-tears in my eyes, the hollow aching—made him draw a sharp breath.
“Of course, January.” His accent rolled over my name like a ship at sea; I reveled in the sound of it.
We spent the day down in the endless cellars of Locke House, where all the uncategorized or unlabeled or broken items in Mr. Locke’s collections were stored in straw-stuffed crates. My father sat with a stack of notebooks, muttering and scribbling and occasionally directing me to type out little labels on his shiny black typewriter. I pretended I was Ali Baba in the Cave of Wonders, or a knight stalking through a dragon’s hoard, or just a girl with a father.
“Ah, the lamp, yes. Put that over with the carpet and the necklace, please. Don’t rub it, whatever you do—although—what could it hurt?” I wasn’t sure he was speaking to me until he waved me closer. “Bring it here.”
I handed him the bronze lump I’d dug out of a crate labeled TURKESTAN. It didn’t look much like a lamp; it looked more like a small, misshapen bird, with a long spout for a beak and strange symbols carved along its wings. Father stroked one finger along those symbols, gently, and oily white steam began to spool from the spout. The steam rose, coiling and writhing like a pale snake, making shapes almost like words in the air.
My father’s hand swept the smoke away and I blinked. “How—there must be some kind of wick in there, and a spark. How does it work?”
He tucked the lamp back into its crate, a little half smile curling his mouth. He shrugged at me, and the half smile stretched wider, a glint of something like merriment behind his spectacles.
And maybe because he smiled so very rarely, or because it had been such a perfect day, I said something stupid. “Can I go with you?” He tilted his head, smile retreating. “When you go to Brazil. Or the place after that. Will you take me with you?”
It was one of those things you want so much it burns, so you keep it deep in the center of yourself like a banked coal. But—oh, to escape the hotel lobbies and department stores and neat-buttoned traveling coats—to dive like a fish into the thrumming stream of the world, swimming at my father’s side—
“No.” Cold, harsh. Final.
“I’m a good traveler, ask Mr. Locke! I don’t interrupt, or touch things I oughtn’t, or speak to anyone, or wander off—”
Father’s brow crinkled into that puzzled V again. “Then why should you want to travel in the first place?” He shook his head. “The answer is no, January. It is far too dangerous.”
Embarrassment and anger crept up my neck in hot prickles. I didn’t say anything because then I would cry and everything would be even worse.
“Listen. I find valuable and unique things, yes? For Mr. Locke and his Society friends?” I didn’t nod. “Well, they are not the only, ah, interested parties, it seems. There are others—I don’t know who—” I heard him swallow. “You are safer here. This is a proper place for a young girl to grow up.” That last part came out with such a rehearsed, echoey sound that I knew it was a direct quote from Mr. Locke.
I nodded, eyes on the straw-strewn floor. “Yes, sir.”
“But—I will take you with me, one day. I promise.”
I wanted to believe him, but I’d met enough empty promises in my life to know one when I heard it. I left without speaking again.
Safely cocooned in my room, wrapped in the pink-and-gold bedspread that still smelled of nutmeg and sandalwood, I removed the coin from its tiny pocket in my skirt and studied the silver-eyed queen. She had a mischievous, run-away-with-me sort of smile, and for a moment I felt my heart swoop like something taking flight, tasted cedar and salt in my mouth—
I crossed to my dresser and tucked her into a hole in the lining of my jewelry box; I was too old to carry around such fanciful trinkets, anyway.
In March 1908 I was thirteen, which is such an intensely awkward and self-absorbed age that I remember almost nothing about that year except that I grew four inches and Wilda made me start wearing a terrible wire contraption over my breasts. My father was on a steamer heading to the South Pole, and all his letters smelled of ice and bird shit; Mr. Locke was hosting a greasy group of Texas oilmen in the east wing of Locke House and had ordered me to stay out of their way; I was just about as lonely and wretched as any thirteen-year-old has ever been, which is very lonely and wretched indeed.
My only company was Wilda. She had grown infinitely more fond of me over the years, now that I was a “proper young lady,” but her fondness only meant that she smiled too often—a creaking, cobwebbed expression that looked as if it had been stored in a musty trunk for decades—and sometimes suggested we read aloud from Pilgrim’s Progress as a treat. It was almost lonelier than having no company at all.
But then something happened that meant I was never truly alone again.
I was copying a stack of ledger books for Mr. Locke, hunched over the desk in my father’s study. There was a writing desk in my own room, but I mostly used his instead—it wasn’t like he was home often enough to object. I liked the stillness of the room, too, and the way the smell of him lingered in the air like dust motes: sea salt and spices and strange stars.