He stopped outside the door of one of the smaller apartments. His handsome face was tense with exhaustion, and I felt a stab of guilt that I’d taken a hard tone. It wasn’t Montgomery’s fault. He’d saved Edward a second time, even against Father’s wishes.
“The doctor’s peculiar about his diet,” Montgomery said. “Doesn’t want them to develop a taste for meat.”
“Them? The natives, you mean?”
But he’d already turned to the door. It had a strange knob: a smooth, straight cylinder and a hook latch with holes for the fingers. The keyhole had been soldered closed.
“Isn’t there a key?” I asked.
“No need. Only the main gate is locked.” He tugged on the latch a few times with his middle finger. “The interior doors have a safeguard. Only five-fingers can open them.”
“Five fingers?”
“Sorry. I mean, it’s a special mechanism. It keeps wild animals from getting in but lets those of us in the compound come and go as we please.”
“Even into my room?”
He grinned briefly and pushed open the door. “You haven’t anything to fear from us, Juliet.”
I followed him inside. The room was large and airy, with a wooden bed and a table and chair. A screen fashioned from a bit of old netting split the room into a bedroom and a dressing area with a dusty mirror. I crossed the room to a barred window that framed the fading sun, muted now behind rain clouds, as it sank below the rolling treetops toward the dark horizon. Far below, I could see the three hulking islanders coming up the road with trunks slung across their backs.
I was alone with Montgomery and the unsettling images of the islanders’ twisting limbs. Mother’s voice whispered in my ear that drawing attention to the deformities would be impolite, but my curiosity wouldn’t be silenced. I turned away from the window.
“What’s wrong with the natives?” I whispered.
Montgomery tugged on the window bars, testing them, eyes flickering to the figures on the road. The pistol was gone from his belt, but not from my mind. What was out there? Tigers? Wolves? We’d sailed across the Pacific with a panther that Montgomery had treated like a harmless kitten. If a panther didn’t frighten him, what outside my window did?
“What do you mean?” he asked.
Wasn’t it obvious? “The deformities. Are they some sort of product of an isolated development?”
“To be sure,” he muttered. Instead of meeting my eyes, he tapped his muddy boot against a dusty old trunk in the corner. “Anyway, take a look at this.”
He was avoiding my questions again. Hiding things.
I knelt by the trunk anyway. He lifted the lid. Inside, folded and pressed, was a stack of ladies’ dresses. I ran my hand over the soft fabric. Silk. Tulle. These were expensive pieces, a few years out of fashion, in good condition except for faintly yellowing lace at the cuffs. I sorted through the first few dresses. Below were an assortment of things: undergarments, a shawl, a wide-brimmed hat with a pink ribbon.
“They belonged to your mother,” Montgomery said.
I looked at him in surprise. I touched the dresses again, more gently this time. “How did you get these?”
He shrugged. “There was an estate sale when I went to London a few years ago. I thought the doctor might want them.” His boot tapped nervously against the edge of the trunk. I knew Father wasn’t the sentimental type. He’d never care about a trunk of old dresses. It must have been Montgomery who wanted these, to remember her and our old life. A string tugged around my heart.
He’d loved my mother like his own.
“Anyway, now you’ve something clean to wear,” he said, suddenly flummoxed as I pulled out a soft handful of satiny undergarments.
I peered at him, seeing the quiet boy I once knew. Maybe I’d judged him too harshly, before, for obeying my father so strictly. He must have felt so alone out here with only the sea as company. “I can’t wear these dresses in the jungle. They’ll be ruined.”
“You haven’t much choice. The closest shop is in Brisbane.”
I replaced the dresses carefully and closed the lid. Something about wearing Mother’s dresses felt wrong. Unearthing her dresses was like unearthing her long-buried corpse.
I stood, twisting her diamond ring. “They’re fine. It just . . . brings back her ghost.”
He nodded. I wondered what he remembered of his own mother, buried in a common plot somewhere in an overgrown London churchyard. He intertwined his fingers in the mesh dressing screen, pushing it gently in the breeze. I feared I’d said something wrong, stirred up ghosts from the dark places of our pasts. At least I had a father. What did Montgomery have? A story about a Danish sailor who shipped out two weeks before he was born and never returned. Was that why he was so reluctant to tell me the truth? Because no matter how awful the truth was, no matter if I loathed and shunned and hated my father, I had one.
“Montgomery.” My voice was a whisper. I stepped closer until only a small space separated us. It was the first time we’d been alone in a long time. His fingers continued to twist restlessly in the mesh strings. My chest swelled with things I wanted to ask—about him, about the island, about my father. I parted my lips to speak, but the words wouldn’t form. I intertwined my fingers in the mesh screen next to his. I opened my mouth to ask if the rumors were true.
But I couldn’t.
Instead, something else came out. Something unexpected. Something I should have told him six years ago but never had the chance.