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She smiled sadly at his response. ‘Your father used to say the same thing.’
‘I remember.’ The sharp edge of his tone lashed and stung.
Forcing down the feeling, she delved into the legend that had captured her attention at a very young age and been the driving force behind her desire to delve into archaeology in the first place.
‘Princess Isabella had been sent by her father, the King, to her fiancé in the Dutch East Indies—a Dutch colony in what is now known as Indonesia—when her ship was attacked by pirates.’
‘There was a great battle,’ Mateo said, picking up the train of the story in an overly dramatic fashion. ‘The Princess’s people put up a valiant fight, enough so that the pirate captain was killed in the skirmish,’ he concluded, and then he frowned as if, for the first time, realising the story had a plot hole. ‘Everyone thinks Isabella also died during the attack, but my father believed she survived. So why didn’t she make it to her fiancé?’
‘Rumour was that he was a particularly vile man with a reputation for cruelty who only wanted the dowry, not the wife. And he’d already received the dowry.’
‘He intentionally let his fiancée get set upon by pirates? If she survived, why didn’t she just go home?’
Evie let out a half-laugh. ‘She was betrothed to a Dutch duke in a trade exchange. She was nothing more than a chattel and her father would simply have sent her back to Indonesia to her fiancé. There’s reason to believe that she was ignorant to that.’ Unwanted by parent and fiancé. Even as a child she had unconsciously identified with a princess disowned by her family and her future.
‘And she just walked into the position of captain? A princess?’ Mateo asked sceptically.
‘I doubt it was that easy. But within eighteen months, Loriella Desaparecer was sailing the high seas and causing more damage to the Dutch East India company than any other pirate or privateer operating during that time. The records are sparse and much of what we know is hearsay. But that’s not surprising, as the records are from the VOC—the Dutch East India company. And it’s unlikely that her ex-fiancé would want any specific details getting out about the beating they were taking from his betrothed.’
‘You believe it,’ Mateo observed, ‘that they were the same person.’
‘Yes, I do,’ she answered honestly, squaring up to him as if she expected him to meet her with a barrage of doubt and derision.
‘And you think this octant is proof of that?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she replied, immediately confusing him a little. ‘It is clearly possible that Loriella stole it from whoever ransacked Isabella’s boat, or was given it, or it fell into the sea and was discovered later. There are many, many ways in which the octant that once belonged to Isabella ended up with Loriella.’
‘Then why do you want the octant?’
‘I don’t, but someone else does, very much. And I will do anything I can to make that happen,’ she said.
‘Even give me back my father’s notebook?’ he asked.
She was torn. He could see that. Her connection to his father was almost visceral and tied to that damn notebook.
‘You paid two million dollars for the octant,’ she stated quietly.
‘A price I am willing to pay to put an end to this once and for all,’ he replied before finishing his glass of whisky in one mouthful.
‘But don’t you want to know?’ she asked, her large eyes glowing with an earnestness he felt too old for.
‘Know what?’ he asked, suspecting he didn’t want to hear the answer.
‘Know if he was right? Know if this could help even with the smallest possibility, prove that your father’s theories about Isabella were true?’ The plea in her voice, the eagerness, the desperation to redeem his father...it was as painful as it was obvious.
‘No. The veracity of his claims about Isabella in no way makes up for all the time he spent ignoring his duties as a husband and as a father. He just wasn’t there, Evelyn. He wasneverthere. Again and again he was absent from my life and you don’t know what that’s like, how it makes you feel.’
He could have bitten off his own tongue. Even if he hadn’t just remembered that she had been adopted and taken in by an rich, older English couple, the look on her face—the way that the blood had drained instantly from her features, the sheer excavated wound that her eyes exposed—was enough. He remembered his father’s complaints from back when they were still talking; frustration and incredulity at the behaviour, theabsence, of his assistant’s parents. He’d called them cold, aloof, and utterly unfeeling. Mateo had remembered because he’d not been able to understand how his father couldn’t see the irony of what he was saying. That his father was raging against the injustice of bad parenting had been a knife in his gut. And even now he remembered the twisting feeling of it but still that gave him no right to trample all over her pain.
‘Evelyn—’
She held up her hand, bringing his silence while she gathered herself.
Guilt scratched against his skin like sandpaper and he couldn’t stay still. He put his glass on the side and came to the chair angled ninety degrees from where she sat on the sofa. He sat and braced his arms against his thighs.
But before he could speak, she stood, rubbing her hands on the silk of her dress.
‘You want the notebook in exchange for the octant? You’re willing to do that?’
