There is so much in her, she won’t miss what we take.
All in the interest of science, of course. Hoping to discover one that will be named after him.
In this he will be successful. See: Porpita minusculus owenii.
So it is not all in vain after all.
• • •
My father perched on his stool, sewing transverse hoops into Harry Owen’s net, doing his best to assist in the plunder. He works with severe concentration, despite the juddering of the ship, the juddering of his heart. He has seen my mother up above; therefore is hiding. Unwitting of his impending capture.
Waves within, waves without.
Then the sudden heave. Leo Dell’oro, upended, unceremoniously flung, sent sprawling beneath the worktable, arms and legs akimbo, this is so undignified, tangled in the toils of the net he has lately been sewing, hopelessly raveled; and at the same time—accompanying clatter—a small object, liberated from somewhere about his person by the vehemence of the wave, careens onto the floor, bounces, slithers, is lost.
He rights himself and within moments is crawling around on his knees, feeling around in all the convolutions of the net, searching for whatever it is he has dropped. Aha! Here it is, in the corner, underneath the worktable. A lunge and it is in his hand. Safe there. But he does not immediately emerge. Kneels instead, oh eccentric father, makes a short, sharp, thrusting backward motion with his arm and hand, as if intending to throw something over his shoulder that he does not in fact throw, chanting, Black black bear-away, don’t come down by here-away!
It’s the same mysterious doggerel Harry Owen heard before, in the cabin. Only this time he won’t let it pass. He’s got a strong spirit of scientific endeavor, actually takes my father by the wrist this time. Refrains though, from the cotton wool and the ether.
What have you?
It’s n-nothing—
The nervous stammer coming out now. I wonder does Harry Owen remember Leo Dell’oro passed out in the bushes off the Embankment, that hollow vacancy, the tremor, the horrible, empty staring. The carapace.
Or is he too much of a gentleman to remember?
Purposeful pretense, that.
Show me. Severely, as if speaking to a child.
Sulky-eyed, like a child, Leo Dell’oro opens his fist, reveals, at the center of his small, pale palm, the tiny black figure of a horse, which Harry Owen quickly acquires, hefts, feeling the strange, porous lightness of this object, which is both and neither: wood and stone, wood nor stone. Feels the warmth of it, which is like the warmth of a living thing, though it is a borrowed warmth. Stolen.
This was made by a master carver, says Owen admiringly, all his tweeds and whiskers bristling with desire for the object, the smooth glistening blackness of it, the flared nostril, the shapely hoof, the veins beneath the polished skin, which have not been neglected by the evidently obsessive maker, these seeming to throb almost with life, though, of course, this is impossible, it is so tiny, simulacra merely, tempting simulacra, it longs to leap into his gaping pocket, to nestle there, that is what Harry Owen thinks, or rather feels.
Says Leo Dell’oro grudgingly, My father made it—
But this is excruciating, this blushing, the rubbing of the heel of the right hand against the left wrist, he can admit nothing, concede nothing, and always in the background the shadow of the small, severe man with round glasses, his posture stiff, upright, trudging up Church Street, in Whitby, in the rain. Carrying, in his pocket, a small box, tied up with a black ribbon. Requiescat in Pace.
Intaglio in jet of a child’s face, oh, those pin curls, and the initials in seed pearl around the border.