“Your mother was a native woman then?” Aunt Margaret remarked in a disapproving tone. “You seem to have her coloring.”
I realized then that the weeks (or months or years) that I had spent on the Never-Isle had tanned my skin a soft brown. I said nothing, which she took as an assent.
“And the island was discovered recently by some wandering ship?” Grandfather asked. “I saw nothing of that in the papers.”
“It’s a very small island,” I answered.
“And the watch,” my aunt queried. “He still kept the watch after all these years?” This was not so much a question as it was a kind of wondering.
“So it is his watch?” I queried.
“Why would you doubt it?” Aunt Margaret asked, skepticism edging her voice.
I had nearly given myself away. I steered the topic in a slightly different direction.
“What I meant to ask is—who is A.D.? The other initials. He never told me.”
She blinked back a tear, and in that instant seemed to become even harder, like a seaman battening the hatches against a storm. Was she A.D. herself?
“Margaret,” the old man commanded, “see that he’s better clothed. Get someone from Harvey and Son to measure him for a suit and some shirts. I don’t want my grandson dressed like a filthy highwayman.”
And with those words I was dismissed.
* * *
Within the hour Mr. Harvey the Son came and measured me in the parlor for a suit of clothes. He also saw that I needed socks, undergarments, handkerchiefs, and a better pair of shoes. Within two more hours I had all but the suit, and before evening fell even that was delivered. My grandfather, I could see, was a powerful man.
I was shown to the top floor of the house, where a low-ceilinged room was to serve as my sleeping quarters. There I changed into the new suit, once it arrived, and was surprised to find that, for all the careful measurements taken by Harvey Junior, the suit was rather tight and a bit short in the legs and arms. I carefully removed Daisy from my old pocket, then stowed the clothes acquired from Scroff, along with the Wedding Knife and the pouch of Flying Sand, in an old travel valise I found in a corner of the room. It bore my father’s initials and so, I thought, might have been his equipage during his years at Eton. Why, this very room must be my father’s old bedroom! I had found him, in some sense, at last.
Daisy was famished, and I let her suck on the meat of my palm. Something was different about her, but I wasn’t sure what that something was at first. And then I realized—she was several inches longer. At last she was beginning to grow! The sea air of England was proving to be bracingly beneficial for crocodile maturation.
It was then that I glanced at my pant legs and jacket sleeves, and another thought came at once. I was growing too: longer, taller, and—my God—older.
Fourteen and a half years had passed and I, returning to Greenwich Mean Time, was catching up. I felt my face. The beginnings of a whiskery stubble were sprouting on my jawline. I rolled up my shirtsleeve. The hair on my forearm was decidedly darker and thicker.
How old was I? No longer fourteen. (I now understood why Aunt Margaret and Grandfather had both thought me older.) If this was 1888, then I was twenty-eight years old! Gradually, as the day advanced, I was advancing too.
Quite suddenly all that had taken place in these weeks and years overwhelmed me. For some time I sat in the attic room contemplating everything I had missed. Had I remained in England, I would be well into my career by now, perhaps a vice president of a firm or, if I stayed a sailor, a first mate or master. I would most likely be married, and a father. My oldest son might be as old as eight, thinking himself near-grown and hoping to follow in the old man’s footsteps! Had I been blessed with a daughter, she would be breaking little boys’ hearts! The Beauty of Penzance! Not as beautiful as her mother, of course, but still—
And then I thought of Tiger Lily. Had she been dead for twenty-four hours, or for fourteen years? My sorrow nearly drowned me at this point. It filled my chest, tightened my throat, watered my eyes until, like a heartsick maiden, I flung myself on my father’s boyhood bed and wept.
* * *
A storm was beginning to rage as I descended to the basement kitchen for my evening repast. Aunt Margaret, it seemed, did all the housekeeping herself. Her cleanliness was above godliness, as far as I could tell, but her cooking skills were barely rudimentary. The meal she served me was little more than a thin fishy broth punctuated by a few overcooked carrots.
I sat across from her, sipping the “stew” (as she called it). There was something on her mind, yet she hesitated to begin conversation. So I took it upon myself to do so.
“Is Uncle Arthur—” I left the sentence unfinished.
“He traveled to New Guinea, to bring the Lord to the native population. I was to follow in a year.” A brief silence ensued. Then: “They ate him.”
I couldn’t help but think that Uncle Arthur would have made a better stew than what I had been served.
“I’m sorry, Aunt. I see you’re still in mourning. Was it recent?”
“Twenty-six years this past August.”
“I see.”
“His father was kind enough to take me in. The servant and kitchen help had both recently left and Father Cook needed someone to take their place. I was able to help him economize. Your grandfather is a very frugal man.”
I took a few more sips of broth. I was hesitant to explore further family history, but do or be d—mned, as they say.
“And the—other brother?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Not Arthur, the older one.”
“James?”
“No, no. My father spoke of his older brother, one he was very fond of, but he never said his name.”
“I don’t know to whom you’re referring. There were only two sons. Their mother died giving birth to Arthur.”
I distinctly remembered Raleigh mentioning an older son. “He was—well, from what I remember hearing—he was—disinherited. He overspent, and eventually drank himself into an early grave.”
“It must be your father you’re speaking of. Only he didn’t drink himself to death, he just drank.”
I didn’t understand. “My father was a wastrel?”
“And disinherited for it, yes. Not only did he gamble and drink, he . . .” She stopped, looking away as if remembering something. She did not complete her thought.
“You knew him?”
She stiffened slightly, fighting against some violent emotion.
I decided to dig deeper, in a more roundabout way. “When did you marry Uncle Arthur?”
She seemed relieved at the apparent change of subject. “Shortly before he sailed to New Guinea. I was widowed in less than a year.”
I did some quick calculating. If Arthur was twenty-six years dead, he was eaten in ’62. Consequently he and Margaret were married in ’61. My father vanished in ’60.
“So you couldn’t have known my father. He disappeared at least a year before your marriage.”
“I knew him,” she said, her voice wavering. “Before I knew Arthur. Through my sister.”
I could tell there was more she wanted to say. She reached into her pocket, I assumed to withdraw a handkerchief, and produced my father’s watch instead. Its ticking had stopped; at last it had run down. She opened it and gazed for a long moment at the inscription.
“ ‘To James Cook with love from Angela Darling,’ ” she translated. Then she closed the watch and absentmindedly rewound it. Her mind was leagues away.
“This Angela was your sister?” I prompted.
She glared at me as if I had stabbed her with a knife. “She was trapped in an unhappy marriage when she met James. Of course it was a sin, but her husband was a horrible man and James adored her. I connived in concealing her adultery.” She looked away again. “She loved him so. James was handsome, and dashing. And the worst thing to ever happen to her.”
“Her husband found out?
”
“No. No, he believed the child was his. George they named him, after the husband. James had just been given a captaincy. She had this watch inscribed to him as her congratulations. He promised, on his return, to marry her if she could obtain a divorce and to live with her in sin if she could not. He left, he disappeared—drowned, we thought—and shortly after the child was born she—she took her own life.”
Aunt Margaret closed the watch as if this were her final statement. In many ways it was. She reached across the table and handed me the watch. Then she rose and without another word climbed the stairs like a departing ghost. Her task was done, her soul unburdened. Now she would sleep, or not, and dream, or not. I never saw her again.
* * *
I returned to the attic room to think. I sat on the edge of the bed, Daisy (even larger) snoring beside me. The wind and rain beat against the bedroom window. I studied the ticking watch and its terrible inscription, thinking of my father, of the lies Aunt Margaret had told me, fearful of course that they were not lies. Had my father loved two women? His wife my mother and this Angela Darling? And had he fathered two sons, myself and a bastard named George? Indeed he was a wastrel, if this were so. I had to learn the truth.
I placed the watch on the bed, secretly wishing I had never discovered it, then descended to the ground floor, where I walked to my grandfather’s room. The door was partially open. The fire burned low, its light reflected in the pale gray eyes of the old man.
Outside thunder rumbled.
“Put a log on, James, would you?”
I entered. The heat was stifling. I lifted a small log from the pile beside the hearth and placed it gently on top of the glowing ashes. I stirred the embers with the fireplace poker as sparks chased each other up the chimney.
“Thank you.”
I turned and went to his bedside. He seemed a bit afraid of me; I must have resembled, silhouetted in the firelight, the suntanned ghost of his son. His eyes quite suddenly widened with surprise.
“Where is it?” he asked.
“Where’s what?”
“Your shadow. You have no shadow.”
A perceptive old fellow.
“I gave it away. To a boy I know. I don’t really miss it.”
He looked away, trembling, staring at the fire. His brow wrinkled, as if he were trying to solve a particularly nasty puzzle. “You’re the very Devil, aren’t you? Come to bring me home.”
Was he joking? He looked back at me, a smile curling his thin lips. Thunder crashed. Lightning outlined the room’s heavily curtained window. “What do you want to know?” he finally asked.
I took a deep breath and began.
“My mother. Did you know her?”
“Your mother?” His eyes studied me, as if for a moment he was not sure who I was.
I had continued to grow in the hours since he had last laid eyes on me. The sleeves of my new suit barely reached the middle of my forearms. My trouser legs exposed my socks and muscled calves. I no longer resembled a boy, that’s for certain; I looked to be a man of twenty or more. Perhaps now he would believe my story.
“I was born in 1860, Grandfather. I was the boy you sent to Eton. I was falsely accused and expelled for thievery. I was on my way to you when—something happened.”
“Ah” was all he said. Then his face convulsed in pain.
He began to cough, and I sat beside him on the bed and helped him sit up straighter. He motioned for a small dish resting on a bedside table. I handed it to him and he spat a large globule of bloody mucus into it. Then he sat back, as if his troubles were over.
“Your mother.” A statement now, not a question. “Was a common whore.”
My hands were around his neck, pressing him against the bedstead, squeezing the life from him. “Liar,” I rasped. My voice too had changed by now, become deep and gravelly.
He was choking. He made no effort to pull my hands away.
I did so of my own volition.
“My mother was Daisy Cook. She and my father were happily married. I lived with her in a house in Kensington, a house that you donated for our use. Until she died and then you cruelly took it away. I had my mother, and then I had nothing.”
He took a deep breath. And another. “Your mother—and your father—were never married.”
“That’s a lie.”
Another breath. “Did you ever see”—another breath—“a marriage license?”
“She had a wedding ring. This ring.” I held out my fist, displaying the thin gold band. “ ‘To My Eternal Love,’ it says inside. He loved her.”
“Cheaply bought. Any jeweler has them. She wore it for show.”
“He loved her,” I repeated.
Another breath. “He loved”—another breath, shallower this time—“many women.”
I wanted to deny this, but remembering Aunt Margaret’s tale I said nothing.
“Why did you support us then? If they weren’t married, if I was a . . . bastard, why would you house us, and educate me?”
He shrugged as if the answer were obvious. “You were my grandson. Your aunt thought I was foolish, but I hoped to produce the kind of boy that your father most definitely was not.” A slower breath. “Obviously my experiment failed.” He looked at me directly now. Tiny flames flared high in his irises, as if he were stoking a fire inside. “I did not take into account that both of your parents were corrupted by vice. Else I would not have wasted my money.”
“My mother was a saint.”
“Your mother was a drug fiend.” He flung his words at me like darts. “Your father met her in the lowest of gambling dens, where she was selling herself for a cheap pipe and instant oblivion.” He took pleasure from the pain he was giving. “She was lovely, I imagine, and obviously desperate—James was an easy mark for beautiful, needy women. He fell upon her with the kind of missionary zeal your uncle Arthur professed toward the natives who ate him.” The storm outside seemed to energize his cruelty. “He hoped to save her and succeeded to a point, I’ll grant him that. He took her out of the pit and weaned her of her habit. He told me this in a final letter, asking me to care for her and his child if he failed to return from his voyage. How prescient of him.”
“Do you still have that letter?” I challenged. He was lying once again—I knew it.
“Of course not. I have my vices, but sentiment is not one of them.” He waved his hand as if he were dismissing my doubts. “At any rate, by the time you were born his ship was reported missing, and the pain of your birth and his disappearance drove your mother back to her old habits. I heard of this from Doctor Slinque, who was a friend of your father’s, and I hired him to treat her.” He chuckled, and the odor of decay spilled from his mouth. “It wasn’t enough. It never is, with women like her.”
In that moment I hated him more than I have ever hated anyone.
Without a second thought I went to the fire and picked up the poker I had left lying in the embers; turning back to face him, I raised it high to strike. He looked up at me, astonished. I saw him for the bitter, wizened, pathetic worm he truly was; killing him would be a mercy, but I hadn’t the courage. Instead I turned and, flinging the poker into a corner, left the room. I cursed him as I slammed the door behind me.
I had barely set foot on the stairs’ bottom tread when I heard him scream.
His cries were weak at first, and interrupted by another coughing spell. Soon they continued—louder, more desperate—and my conscience told me to return to the room.
Was this some sort of trickery to bring me back? The door that I had slammed was now stuck fast, and it was the sight of smoke curling from beneath the doorsill, not his escalating cries, that galvanized me. I pulled with all my might against the door, and finally succeeded—after kicking it—in wrenching it open. My grandfather was engulfed in flames.
In seizing the poker earlier, I had inadvertently sent some burning coals tumbling across the floor. His bedding, worn and dry with age (much like himself), caught f
ire, and now the flames enrobed him in a burning shroud. There was little I could do. I flung the contents of the washbasin and ewer, and then of the bedpan, onto the pyre and lifting the heavy quilted throw rugs did my best to smother the flames. By the time the conflagration was extinguished the old man was nothing but a crisp.
Aunt Margaret, inured to his nighttime retching, slept through it all. I had no desire to wake her; I was through here. I had given her a reason to remain in mourning for another twenty-six years. I quickly climbed to the attic, peppered myself with Flying Sand, grabbed my father’s valise in one hand and the two-foot-long Daisy in the other, and opened the top-floor window.
The storm had passed. Rain dripped from the eaves, but the night was warm.
Just as I was about to step out into the darkness, I remembered the watch. I returned to the bed, where I had left it, and looked for it but could not find it. It was somewhere near, that I knew, for I could hear its incessant ticking. I deposited Daisy on the dresser, then pulled off the bedclothes, decased the pillow, turned the mattress onto the floor, but was unable to locate my father’s timepiece. It was maddening. Where could it be? I stopped and stood very still, listening. Tick. Tick. Tick. Where was the noise coming from? I cocked my ear and followed the sound. I was led to the one place I would never have thought to look. The ticking of the watch, like the beating of a heart muffled in cotton, was coming from inside Daisy.
* * *
As we flew I pondered the science of my sudden growth spurt. Neither Daisy nor myself appeared to have increased in size and age since nightfall, so it was daylight, inexplicably, that seemed to affect our aging. We now were heading east, and soon to meet the rising sun. How much more would we grow? When I attained my 1888 age of twenty-eight, would I stop or grow even older? How much would Daisy’s size and weight increase? The Flying Sand made her light as a feather to carry, but as soon as we touched down I would be unable to hold her. How big, in fact, did crocodiles become? The leviathan in the cavern was enormous. How could I possibly explain a crocodile’s presence on the streets of London?
For London, indeed, was our destination. My goal was to reach the metropolis before daylight, but I was uncertain how quickly the Sand would allow me to travel. True, I had flown from a distant location in a matter of hours, but would the humid atmosphere of England slow me down? I needn’t have worried. Before long the clock face of Big Ben guided me like a beacon toward the Thames.
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