Still, he listened as Libba told him where the important folk were sitting and waited for Lem to unveil the two portraits of Willa that Hattie had sent ahead for this event, each perched on an easel next to the stage.
Willa as a child with her parents. Willa as a bride with her husband.
They had never found the third portrait, of Willa as a mother with her wards.
He glanced up once his papers were arranged as needed and nodded at Libba, taking a bracing breath.
She quieted the crowd somehow.
Elias was not certain how.
She did not wave her arms or shout or flap a flag around.
Everyone just silenced themselves because Liberty Lennox had decided they ought to, and they all turned to him, expectantly.
He almost laughed at how eerie and alarming it was.
“Good afternoon,” he said, raising his hand. “I do not know many of you assembled here today, but I am Elias Selwyn, Baron Selwyn, and I am here to open the festivities to honor the life of my Aunt Willa, the longtime dowager baroness, and the mind behind the prodigies of Brighton Beach.”
He cleared his throat, casting a nervous glance at Libba before he shattered their carefully rehearsed script. “We had prepared an elegy for today’s opening,” he said with a wry smile and a shrug. “But last night, I read the final letter my aunt wrote to me, and she asked me in no uncertain termsto please not be so damned maudlin.”
There was a ripple of laughter, a drawing closer of parasols and top hats as the crowd began to thicken.
He could feel Libba’s glare but did not dare meet it.
He laughed, shaking his head. “I spent all night in her library,” he said. “My aunt loved to correspond with people in far-flung lands. She had a fascination for everything alien and queer and unknown to her. Every book on her bookshelf was littered through with correspondence from friends she had made and figures she had written in the varied corners of the globe. Many included, at her request, artistic interpretations of their homes and notes about the things they loved.
“I have brought some today, which I will display later, for open viewing, as a testament to her passion for living.
“But I have also decided to honor her final wish and shrug off the impulse to give a maudlin farewell, no matter how sad I might personally feel about her absence. Here amongst the keepsake cards with art of places like Marakesh and Melbourneand the Mississippi River, I found a poem about just such a queer creature as those for which Willa always had a fondness, and to me, it seemed the right thing to read to welcome this final farewell to her legacy.”
He could see Hattie out of the corner of his eye, a swish of white and blue as she drew nearer, her hair glinting like molten bronze on her head.
“When we were children, Willa took us to see a collection of exotic creatures,” Elias said, chuckling a little in memory. “And then she told us the most unusual creatures in the menagerie that day were us children, not the lemurs and tigers and kangaroos. Still. She had spent a great deal of time admiring the kangaroos.”
“We all did,” Ruby called, winning another little laugh from the assemblage.
Elias took a breath and opened the book in front of him, flashing a grin at the crowd. “This is not a completed poem. It is a draft, shared with my aunt in friendship and happiness, sent to her after she had already vanished and left unopened in her quarters until I discovered it there. I do hope that someday, this work is published. I hope that someday it is completed and shared with the world at large, for it spoke to me in a way that reminded me strongly of my aunt. And I think it will speak to you too.Kangaroo,” he recited. “By Barron Field.”
And he lost himself a little, as he read.
She had made the squirrel fragile;
She had made the bounding hart;
But a third so strong and agile
Was beyond ev’n Nature’s art;
So she join’d the former two
In thee, Kangaroo!
To describe thee, it is hard:
Converse of the camélopard,
Which beginneth camel-wise,
