Free The Navigator of New York by Wayne Johnston Page B

instructions.
    Only a few days later, he wore the red handkerchief again. I suspected another gratuitous rehearsal.
    Again he was in the chair on the landing, with what looked like the same book as before on his lap. I went straight into my father’s surgery.
    Again Uncle Edward had opened the envelope, slit it so cleanly hemight have used a scalpel. But it looked to me as if he had not removed the letter from inside. He had opened it as a precaution, to reduce the rustle and ripping of paper. I eased a sealed letter from the envelope, broke the seal, which was made of red wax and bore the imprint of a sailing ship. There was not just a single page as before, but several, tightly folded. I eased them open and began to read.
    My dearest Devlin:
    When Francis Stead took me aside on the North Greenland expedition, he said that twelve years before, in 1880, his wife had attended a party thrown for the graduates of the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. He correctly named the man and woman at whose house the party was held. Your mother told Francis Stead that at this party, she had got drunk and been taken advantage of by someone about whom she remembered nothing, not even his face or name. She could remember nothing of the party, she said, but the first half-hour. Her next memory was of waking up just before dawn, alone, in one of the many bedrooms of a strange house. As a result of this encounter, she was pregnant
.
    Your mother, when we met, had told me neither the first nor the last name of her fiancé, so I had, up to the point where Francis began his story, no idea what my fellow medical officer and I had in common
.
    He was in mid-story when I realized who he was, who I was, that the supposedly nameless, faceless man she had met at that party was me. “Amelia.” Not even when he first said her name did I suspect a thing, though of course I noted the coincidence. Bit by excruciating bit, I learned the truth. I had fathered a boy whose name was Devlin Stead, and who was being raised by his aunt and uncle. I could barely keep from crying when Francis told me that his wife was dead, when it hit me that the woman whom he said had accidentally drowned was my Amelia
.
    I am the cause of all of it, I thought as he kept on talking, allthat has taken place without my knowledge. His abandonment of you and her, the ruination of his life, the awful state of mind he was in. Even, in a way, the death of my Amelia, who, had she never met me, would have been led by the dictates of chance away from the accident that took her life. And later I would blame myself for the death of Francis Stead
.
    It took a great deal of effort to keep my composure. I sat there listening, one of the characters in his tale, but acting as though I was waiting to hear what would happen next. Had a third man been present, I’m sure he would have noticed the effect Francis Stead’s story had on me. But Francis was too absorbed in the telling of his story to notice
.
    “I was not with her before we married,” Francis said to me. He looked at me to be sure I knew what he meant by “with her.” I nodded
.
    He said that your mother implored him to keep her secret, which there were two ways of doing. He and your mother chose the more honourable one: they told their families that she was pregnant by him. Their wedding soon after followed
.
    “Nor was I with her after our marriage,” Francis Stead said as he walked away from me
.
    A few nights later, he disappeared from Redcliffe House. Most of what I wrote in the report that appeared in the papers is true, as is what was written later in
The New York Times. Francis
Stead, long before he confided in me, did have a falling-out with Peary and did ask for permission to remain up north after the rest of us had left for home. His interest in the Eskimos exceeded even my own, which is considerable
.
    Peary forbade him to stay behind, and they did not speak for months. Although I do not wish to