Читать книгу The Widow Nash - Jamie Harrison - Страница 11

chapter 2

The Red Book of Disaster

•

Walton Joseph Remfrey, engineer, earthquake enthusiast, and sufferer of tertiary syphilis, had been born in the Cornish seaside village of Perranuthnoe in 1842. His father died when he was two, before his brother, Christopher, was even born, and when their mother, Catherine, died four years later, they were sent to the workhouse in Redruth.

At fifteen, when Walton gained an engineering apprenticeship in a copper mine on the Beara Peninsula in Ireland, he first scribbled into a plain leather notebook:

12 February 1858—

The roar was like a monster’s breath, a dragon exhalation: red, yellow, then following darkness. Timbers came down like spears, through a boy’s head, a boy’s back, a rock fall landing with a sucking sound. I ran.

The notebook was a gift from an Allihies miner’s widow, who’d plucked Walton from the novice pack and slept with him. Five boys died next to him in the mine that day, and forty-six years later, while he was sick in Seattle, he would scribble down variations of what had happened without knowing if they were memories or dreams. Dulcy wasn’t sure if it made a difference: mining deaths were repetitive, and dreams were repetitive, and what did it matter, what was true or imagined? A big dark hole in the earth, and people dropped inside and disappeared. Walton had earned his nightmares.

Still, he’d enjoyed life:

8 August 1867—

I’m leaving, I said. Show me some mercy, show me your sweetness, and I’ll make it happy with mine.

No, no, no, says Ellen.

It’s my birthday soon, I said. I might die on that ocean and never know. Let me touch you—you have fevers, you might not last, you need to know, too. And, well, isn’t this wonderful?

It is, she said. Most other things are worth forgetting.

Walton had worked just as hard for his syphilis as he had for his dreams, but even before his illness, he tried to keep topics separate. Sullying the body was all good fun, but his mind deserved a system. He worked his way up and purchased two new journals, black and dull red. He scribbled an introductory limerick about a maid in his rooming house into the black one (There once was a woman from Norway , who ’d happily kneel in doorways ). By the time he was twenty-five and had saved enough to leave the Beara mines, he had separate notebooks for his travels, his scientific theories, his favorite poetry. The first brown leather notebook became a record of his financial life, while the red had the right look for disaster. He traveled with scissors and glue, pens and ink and blotting paper, trimming and pasting down newspaper accounts of tragedy, pornographic cartoons, stock prices. When he was older, he put most of these journals aside for weeks at a time—he was a busy man, not a dilettante—but the black, the red, and the brown averaged an entry a day for most of his life.

•••

When Walton’s last ship from Africa (Cape Town to Wellington to Honolulu to Seattle) docked on the morning of October 30, 1904, Henning Falk found him perched on a trunk on the docks, clutching his satchel of notebooks. He was singing—

Columbo went to the queen of Spain and made a proposition,

But what she wanted most to do was fuck in the prone position.

The queen of Spain then said to him she’d give him ships and cargo,

He said, “I’ll kiss your royal ass if I don’t bring back Chicago.”

He knew the world was round-o. The queenly cunt he’d pound-o.

That fornicating, royal-mating son-of-a-bitch, Columbo.

Henning was no sissy, but as the lyrics rolled out, and people veered away from them, he stuffed Walton into Victor’s maroon Daimler. Walton hated automobiles, and the horror of the vehicle broke the melody in his head. He began to talk about the fact that it was almost the anniversary of the All Saints’ Day disaster in Lisbon: a great wave after the shock, thousands crushed as they prayed in swaying stone churches. “And now here we find ourselves, old friends together in another port city prone to shaking.”

Henning asked about Walton’s other luggage, the proceeds from the sale of three mines; Walton said he thought he’d thrown the money overboard as an offering to the gods of seasickness, and that the thing to do, now that he could smell rocks and a city, was to have a razzle-dazzle, and find a woman or two.

•••

Back in the other world, Walton’s daughter left New York on her third train across America. Dulcy’s full name was Leda Cordelia Dulcinea Remfrey, but no one but distant relatives and teachers had ever called her Leda. Her hair was thick and brown, and her eyes were large and brown. She had a long face and nearsighted eyes, a figure that was generous without being lewd, and nervous movements. She was twenty-four years old with good posture but the shadow of a limp from breaking her leg as a young child. She seemed patient to people who didn’t know her well, but she had a bad temper and a habit of saying cruel, articulate things she later regretted. She was flawed in other ways, but she loved her sister and friends and aunts and even her older brothers, though at a distance. Her mother, Philomela, had died when she was ten, and she’d spent much of her life since then traveling with her father. She’d only missed this last trip to Africa to spend the summer in Westfield, New York, watching her grandmother Martha die. She loved her father, and she was happy enough to see him again alive, but she did not want to see her former fiancé, Victor.

When Dulcy, still trimmed in black, reached Seattle on November 5, 1904, Henning Falk met her, too. It was raining, and he was wet despite an umbrella, the city and harbor and man all shining like metal. Henning never looked quite human, anyway: when he smiled he was golden and angelic, but at rest he was so sharp-angled and preoccupied—long, slanted gray-blue eyes, high cheekbones, and hooked nose—that people moved out of his way on the crowded sidewalk here, just as they had in New York.

With Dulcy, he was usually lighthearted, almost silly; he was only a year older. He hummed, used the wrong slang, talked about a play he’d just seen, offered her a cigarette. Victor would never notice, he said; Victor had stuffed the apartment with spruce boughs to ward off the smell of Walton’s many medicines. But though Henning didn’t explain the crux of the issue as blatantly as he’d described what Walton had been doing in the auto, by the time she arrived at Victor’s apartment in the Butler Hotel, she understood that at least one million dollars—the entirety of the profit from the African mines Walton had just sold on Victor’s behalf—really was missing. Walton had arrived with a letter from the mines’ new owners, hoping they would do business again, but there’d been no other hint of the profit, gold or cash or bankers’ notes or documents.

This explained why Victor, who hadn’t spoken to Dulcy in three years, was willing to see her: he was virtually ruined. “Drained dry, tapped out,” said Henning. “Mightily buggered. He paces and he boxes and he watches your father, waiting for him to remember.”

Dulcy didn’t pretend to mind Victor’s pain. “And what does my father do?”

Henning smiled and looked away. “He tells stories about earth shocks.”

It was early morning, and an army of bowler–clad men moved around the cab, a school of fish in a port city, under a sky clotted with gulls. “What does the doctor say?”

“That it’s in his brain; I wanted to say well it’s always been there, hasn’t it? This is just the last stage, true?” A wagon of seltzer bottles dawdled in front of them, and he pressed on the horn. “Victor’s angry, but he isn’t drinking. He is awake all night. They should both go to clinics. Different clinics.” He flicked his cigarette onto the wet cobbles. “The point is all the goddamn notebooks. You must see what might be new, what he might have written down before he forgot everything.” He slowed the Daimler for a trolley, and a covey of office girls, pressed together under a glass awning, surged forward into the rain. Henning watched until the last had boarded. He met Dulcy’s eyes and smiled. “He doesn’t let me out often.”

•••

And what would cousin Henning do, if he could get out? Different things than Victor Maslingen, honey-blond coward, rich, pretty, tortured brat. They seemed only to share the same color hair and a great-grandfather, a Swedish fisherman who’d married a Danish fisherman’s daughter and started a minor herring and cod empire (not really a minor thing at all, in the Baltic). One son kept fishing, but the other bought a bigger boat to ship his catch, and by mid-century Victor’s branch of the family had a fleet of ten. They ran barricades during the American Civil War, while Henning’s side raised chickens and taught school. Victor’s father invested another rich bride’s dowry in Pacific Northwest shipping and timber. Henning’s father, a middling playwright, drank himself to death. By the time Henning got into trouble, and his cousin took him in, the whole notion of family equality was long gone, but they had settled into roles: Victor dealt with bankers and ideas and dinner conversations; Henning was pure and pragmatic, a weapon, the man for direct action and dirty work: newspapers, unions, bribes, and beatings. He was tall and wide-shouldered but moved quickly. Dulcy had often turned to see him leave a room she hadn’t realized he’d entered.

Victor had used his inheritance to buy hotels and newspapers, but had wanted a faster profit, and it came with an introduction to Walton Remfrey, engineer, fixer, inventor of machines aimed at safety—engines and portable braces and magnometers, gas masks and heat suits and probes, hoists and bolts and engine designs—with a royal pedigree. Walton had been trained by Michael Loam, inventor of the man engine, a hoist to bring men up from a mile-deep ore. Loam, in turn, had been trained at Wheal Abraham by Arthur Woolf, who perfected the Cornish steam engine. And Woolf had been trained by Joseph Bramah, who invented the world’s first hydraulic press, Queen Victoria’s favorite water closets, an unpickable lock, a bank-note printer, and a beer-making engine. Walton had access to an army of engineers who knew what not-quite-depleted mines should be bought and how and when they should be refurbished and reopened: copper in Butte and Keweenaw and Arizona, silver in Idaho, everything imaginable in southern Africa, where he’d managed to stay in the game despite the expulsion of other Uitlanders—English and Cornish outlanders—during the Second Boer War. He’d been in and out of the Cape Colony, Natal, and Transvaal for years, gathering options, keeping an eye out for the next big territory, and in late 1900 he swapped Boer partners for British and helped Victor buy three flawed copper mines. In September of 1904, before he climbed aboard the boat to Seattle, he had sold these mines, now gold mines, for a hundredfold profit.

Victor, his office papered in African maps, would never see the scene of this triumph. He would not get on a boat, and did not even tolerate trains well. He disliked being off-balance, and forays into wine and sex and emotion rattled him badly. He had no direct knowledge of Africa at all, and now that Walton had returned empty-handed and empty-headed, the whole adventure might as well have been a dream. The money was gone.

Despite Henning’s explanation, Dulcy still found it hard, arriving at the Butler Hotel—not grand by New York standards, but at least marbled—to feel that there wasn’t a small vault of gold left. Victor owned the whole hotel, and lived in the top two floors, just as he had at the Hotel Braeburn in New York. Henning would tell Victor she needed to rest from the train ride, but she went to her father instead and startled him out of a nap.

Walton began talking immediately: no greeting, no surprise at seeing her. In his dream, he’d been in the mountains, in some Ottoman area, and a kaftaned nurse had given him a bed on the ledge of a cliff, ideal for the view of the rock strata looming above and a canyon below. But one of his legs kept dragging him closer to the edge when he dozed off, and finally he woke in midair. “I felt like a bird with wet feathers,” he said. “There was nothing to be done but fall.”

A crane trapped in a greenhouse, soggy and white, all sharp angles and flopping plumage. He was flushed and his long hair was damp and tangled; he’d lost twenty pounds since she’d seen him in July. Someone had stuffed him into a high-necked, long-sleeved nightshirt and given him red wool socks. Except for the ceiling-high French windows, the room was similarly padded: cushioned carpets, velvet walls, a tapestry that showed dancers who had very short noses and legs. Victor had packed the room with palms, as if he thought he could coax Walton into an African memory. Maybe Victor thought Johannesburg was a jungle.

She read through the doctor’s notes and found no obvious slide: he didn’t have fresh sores, his vision was fine, and much of his confusion could possibly be put down to overmedication, rather than end-stage tabes dorsalis. He’d never looked like someone with syphilis: he was a good-looking man, outwardly austere, a cultured figure with a solid sense of humor, tall and lean with a strong, bony face. He dressed well and spoke well and no one meeting him guessed he was sick, let alone that he’d been raised in a workhouse. Under the bespoke suits he tracked the progress of potential sores with pens, drawing circles and stars and arrows around potential gummas, the necrotic holes many tertiary syphilitics developed. His lesions came and went, but they rarely left a scar and almost never appeared on visible skin, his face or neck or hands. He kept a chart in the last pages of his medical notebook listing rumored victims and the men (and women) he’d met at the world’s clinics, with notes on the duration of what he called their benign suffering , and at every clinic, worn down by language—chancres, preputial edema, indolent buboes—he’d peer through doors at the other, hidden patients, his imagination wrestling with the horror of dissolving eyes, food falling through an open cheek. Some people survived for decades without the events he dreaded: a dropped nose or penis or mind.

Dulcy read the spines of the books on his table—mythology, minerals, medicines—while he told her about the ship home, a new plan to buy diamond mines in Namaqualand, the injustice of being kept captive as he recovered. The cold air from the open window cut through the violet and aspidistra fug, and while she listened she arranged the talismans he always carried: a soft chunk of native copper, one small root of silver, an acorn of gold. He began to wind up: If he could not walk down a sidewalk, was he truly alive? Where did they think he would go, an old unsteady man? Why were his nurses ancient and ugly? He hissed—in a whisper like a magpie call—that everyone was trying to take his money and his medication, and that he’d appreciate Dulcy locating both. His medicine chest had been replaced by a bottle of Bromo–Seltzer and a bellpull. He wanted a new doctor, and he wanted his potions back.

The chest had been taken away when he’d been found trying to jam several substances up his nose. “Henning says you took too much of everything. They’re afraid you’ll kill yourself.”

“I should think it would be a relief.” His eyes fogged. “I had forgotten that you and Victor had reached an agreement.”

“We haven’t,” she said. “I’ve come to see you.” She gave him a sip of water, but he kept his eyes on the window and a roof across James Street, where a young workman hurried to patch some tar before the rain fell again. Clouds scudded behind the building, which had a glassed turret and an open door. It looked like a fine place to hide, but she doubted the workman would be allowed inside for long. He’d stacked lumber next to the tar bucket, and she wondered if the person in the turret would have a roof garden.

“My bad moments are due to the state of my stomach. The bilge they give me—raw cabbage and rolls with wheat like quartz shards. Fetch that journal, the one on top.”

He pointed to a gaudy turquoise silk-covered notebook at the end of the bed. “A new one?” she asked, before she took in a dozen jewel-toned journals nearby. “You’re starting fresh?”

“No,” he said. “The same old. I spruced them up a bit. This one’s for dreams; I seem to spend half my time having them now. I found a talented Hindu binder in Cape Town.”

“Why this color?” she asked.

“Daydreaming. Looking at the sky.”

Not Seattle’s sky. The air above the workman across the street was a resolute battleship gray. Walton, man of science, had never cared about the sleeping world before. He smelled boozy, but maybe the spruce bows in the hall had ruined her nose. She was surprised that Victor, who was terrified by illness, would knowingly have Walton under the same roof.

But: the money. She flipped the new book open and stared down at someone else’s writing, a baby’s jiggery lines. “Oh, Dad.”

“What? I had such visions on this last ship, beautiful things. A woman appeared to me—semi-classical, you know—and as she came closer all the fog or fabric fell away entirely.” He smiled, locked on other skin even though his own looked as if it would crack over his cheekbones. “She was soothing.”

Inside, he still believed he was beautiful and adept, fast and smart and smooth. Dulcy started to drizzle, tears rolling down her face. “What the hell is wrong with you, Dulce?”

“You can barely hold a pen. You must have brain lesions.”

“Spare me, please. I’m only a bit punky, and if your fiancé could find a real doctor in this fogbank town, there’d be no problem at all. If he can’t, I’m off.”

“He’s not my fiancé.” This was how things would fall apart, if Walton kept it up.

“Well, I’m sure that’s news to him.” But he looked away, a retreat. Walton was arrogant, but he wasn’t Victor; he hadn’t spent life on an untouchable plateau. So much hung on keeping both altitude (though Walton still used the word as a synonym for drunkenness) and a certain dose of self-deprecation, even in a nightshirt, even with a tremor that could thresh wheat. She watched him seesaw, searching for a safe change of tangent. “I would appreciate some meaningful medicines, darling. You’ll set these people straight. I have a snake in my gut.”

“No,” said Dulcy. “You don’t.”

“A snake on fire, running up my throat to my brain. Go fetch a real bottle.”

One snake would lead to another—he could talk about nearly stepping on a rattlesnake in a Nevada silver mine for hours. She stalled by turning pages: the newest entry was a description of a childhood dream, about being small and trapped. At the end of underground , you can hear the rocks scrape and talk , Walton had scratched out and talk and replaced it with and swell and growl .

“Is your silly sister cavorting in the city?”

Dulcy nodded. Swanning, dancing, running a finger too far up timid Alfred’s sleeve. And why not? The workman across the street moved with economy and grace. She liked his curly hair, and wished she were in the turret, though it made her queasy when the man walked near the edge. She was no good at heights.

•••

An hour later, Dulcy walked into Victor’s murky feudal study, an acre of Canadian rain forest smashed into four hundred pompous square feet. Her face was calm and scrubbed, and she wore a flattering moss-green dress that went well with the paneling, but her mind seethed. She didn’t want to be here; she didn’t want to be anywhere.

Henning gestured to a chair. It took her a moment to make out Victor in the gloom at the far end of the room, showing a kingly profile, backlit by the window she had to face. He nodded but did not come to greet her, and she sat down, rattled and queasy, and pretended to look around. This study was almost identical to the one she remembered from his Manhattan apartment, but maps of Africa had replaced logging regions in the Pacific Northwest, and everything that could be thrown—lamps, chairs, ashtrays—was metal or wood. No porcelain.

He said nothing. He looked well, though her examination was sidelong. He seemed a little thicker, not plump but plush; his frame was still graceful at thirty-five, though he’d never been boyish. He’d shaved his moustache and looked a little less like a catalogue illustration. He had glass-green eyes, smooth skin, even features. His voice was steady and low, his movements careful and contained, his mind a system of angry crevasses.

He thought things to death, one reason why he hadn’t greeted her: she needed to crawl through all three acts of the revenge drama he’d been writing in his mind before he’d deign to see her as human again. She was here only because of money; she was here because she was the keeper of Walton’s unreliable mind. They’d stacked all the bright notebooks on the table next to her chair, and somewhere above her head she heard a muffled phonograph play soothing violin music for the man himself, who was being bathed by two matronly nurses. Twice Dulcy thought she heard Walton’s cane hit the tile in time with the music.

Henning lifted the black notebook from the top of the stack and handed it to her with a glass of red wine. Tea leaves, or maybe a bowl of entrails: she was the oracle who’d be executed if she failed to divine a story. “We’ve looked through each book,” said Henning. “And we can find nothing helpful.”

She wanted the wine, but she opened the black journal. New shiny silk outside, the same musky interior. The first pages, the only part she’d ever seen, were in Cornish, and presumably gave an explicit account of every moment young Walton had spent touching a woman’s skin. Her brothers had filched it one afternoon when Dulcy was about ten, shrieking with joy while they worked out words like bronn and pedryn and kussynnow , lust and seks and plesour . “Say that we saw this, and we’ll drop you in a hole,” they said. Her mother had just died, but theirs had been gone for years.

When he sailed to America, Walton had left his Cornish evasions behind and recorded women’s names and dates. Failing names, he’d provided short descriptions:

Beryl, red top and bottom, plump. Bisbee, 2 April 1877, morning.

Mrs. Jas. Merton, Lafayette at Sixth Street, 13 November 1891. A horrible laugh.

A Circassian ! Every hair braided ! Constantinople, 7 and 8 August 1899.

Dulcy turned pages and determined a method: if Walton slept with someone more than a few times, an asterisk next to the name led to a separate page of hash marks and insights. Jane, his future first wife (some progress ; a conversation about alternative methods given her aversions ), was the ninth woman to earn this honor .

Across the room Victor shifted his feet and picked his nose. Sometimes, when he was nervous, he was capable of forgetting himself. Dulcy took a sip and turned pages. Philomela, Walton’s second wife, Dulcy’s mother:

So pliable, so reactive.

Dulcy had never been sheltered, but she didn’t want to know everything Walton’s memory had to offer. She flipped ahead and a carte de visite of a naked woman with a limber leg fell on the floor. Henning stretched out his own long leg, capped with a good boot, and dragged the card closer. He placed it facedown on a side table. She turned to the last entries.

Ayama, so very tall, Cape Town, last days of August.

Edina Branstetter (Brandsdotter?), brunette, so ill, 2 October, near lifeboats.

So, so, so. Dulcy wasn’t sure if Walton had meant that he wasn’t well, or Edina wasn’t well; if Edina had been well to begin with, she might not be for long. Only one of these women had given Walton syphilis, but he’d been criminally generous in giving it back to the world.

“Did you know?” Victor finally spoke, but he hadn’t budged from the far side of the room.

“Know what?” asked Dulcy, eying the pile, wondering what was missing.

“That he was sick again.”

There was no again ; Walton had been sick for twenty years. Victor had always been good at avoiding unpleasantness, and Walton certainly hadn’t volunteered the truth when they’d first bought the mines, or when he’d introduced his daughter to his new business partner. After the engagement, when business in Africa was going full bore and Dulcy finally understood Victor’s ignorance, she’d watched his face flatten as she told him his partner was syphilitic: he shook his head and walked out of the room, and she never brought it up again.

“He said he was a special case. He seemed so well, and his mind seemed so clear. Is it possible someone reinfected him deliberately? To bring me down?”

“There are no special cases,” said Dulcy. “And this has nothing to do with you.”

“This has a great deal to do with me.”

Well, she thought. Don’t tell Walton that he isn’t the center of his own universe. She started to speak, but he held up a hand: silence. Dulcy’s face burned, and she could feel Henning study the floor. “We must cure him.”

“Victor, there’s no cure. It kills everyone.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “Your father has mentioned a half-dozen new therapies.”

Dulcy, with the evidence of Walton’s optimism sitting politely on her lap, looked directly at Victor for the first time. His face was still perfect, but his eyes jumped around the room. The part of Victor that checked and double-checked most situations had always veered away from thinking sanely about Walton’s disease. She could imagine her father’s monologue: all he needed was another month of electrical magic wands or radioactive hypodermics in an Italian or German clinic. All he needed was another batch of nurses.

Dulcy put the black book down and tried to speak without rage, derision, or drama: Walton’s brain had been invaded, and it might finish dying slowly or overnight. There was nothing anyone could tell her about the disease that she hadn’t heard from forty doctors at twenty clinics in a dozen countries, and if and when there was a new therapy, it would be too late for Walton. He might remember what he’d done with the money, and he might not.

“No,” said Victor. “You’re wrong.”

“I don’t understand how this money could simply have been lost,” said Dulcy. “If it was a check, never cashed—”

Another wave of the hand, but Victor’s voice had a hint of a whistle. “Didn’t he write you? Why didn’t you go on this trip? Perhaps there’s a code in this book,” he said. “This particular one, filled with numbers. You would know, wouldn’t you?”

He pointed to the black book. He only thought that because he couldn’t comprehend the notebook’s topic. Henning, who plainly could, stretched again in his chair.

“My grandmother was ill,” said Dulcy. “He sent one message in three months.” Thieves everywhere, but I’ve outwitted them, and have found a safe way in strange winds. Curries everywhere, too—I’ve begun to like them! Seattle by the end of October, New York on the ides of November. Even for Walton, who was fond of words like ides , this had been theatrical. She’d read the telegram on the porch steps in Westfield, bees zipping through the apple trees in the sticky September heat. Martha had died a week earlier, and Carrie was crying upstairs. Dulcy had tucked the message in her apron and gone back to planting bulbs—she was happy to hear he’d been eating, but she had no patience for imaginary thieves.

Now she opened her bag and held the telegram out to Victor. He didn’t move—Henning had to bring it to him. The handsome cheek twitched while he read, and the brain on the far side of the dainty ear churned through a variety of unacceptable thoughts; she knew he was suffering. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“I’m sure he hid the money. He loves to hide things, even in the best of times.”

A commotion overhead, and the nurses’ voices piped. Henning reached for the notebooks. “We need to replace them before he returns to his room,” he said. “Or he’ll be upset.”

Dulcy finished her wine. “I think you’re missing his accounts book,” she said. “It used to be plain brown leather. It might help; I’ll give a look.”

•••

Since 1867, Walton had traveled thousands of miles each year. Once he established himself financially—and once he fell ill—each grand tour had four legs, four purposes: the acquisition and tending of mines, research into an earthquake (preferably recent and deadly), pleasure, and bodily recovery from task number three. Mining and earthquakes determined the itinerary, though the order might vary, and pleasure was possible anywhere, but a clinic was inevitably the last stop.

Why Victor needed Dulcy, beyond the fact her father was crazy: she had been his companion on half of these trips since she was fifteen, and she knew he’d hidden treasure everywhere, because she had been the keeper of most of the keys. She had six in a jewelry pouch for different bank boxes across this country, and she knew where others were hidden in the Manhattan apartment. Some of this urge to hide money came from his workhouse days, and some was a matter of control: he didn’t want his sons, Dulcy’s half-brothers, both beginning bankers who’d already been given plenty, to tell him what to do.

Victor knew about the trips, but not the tendency to hide; he thought he needed her simply because the Cornish stuck together. Henning had tried telegramming the men Walton worked with in Africa and had learned nothing. Walton’s greatest asset had been this birthright: he’d given Victor a whole network of men who knew what rock was profitable, promising, played out. Those men wouldn’t talk to a civilian, but they would talk to Walton’s daughter. People bitched about the Irish and tribalism, but they had no idea of how far it went with other Celts. Cornishmen were so white and so Protestant and sober, so competent and buttoned-down, that Good People in the States, who assumed they were actually English, never doubted them. The Cornish mining captains all had good educations, careful accents, well-built suits. They asked no favors, and kept their voices down, and no one recognized that they had successfully achieved one form of world domination.

On the other hand, Walton and his oldest friend, Robert Woolcock, had been particularly successful because they chose their tribal moments carefully in Africa. When most Uitlanders—either English or Cornish—were expelled in 1899, Walton learned to selectively shed his English accent and flaunt German bank accounts. Woolcock, with a Boer wife and a Swahili mistress, stayed in southern Africa throughout the war, funneling Victor’s American money into devalued mines. By the time the war wound down to guerilla attacks, and other Uitlanders flooded back into the Rand, they’d purchased the right mines. Walton and Victor stuck to the partnership despite the broken engagement and made a fantastic, now missing, profit.

Dulcy usually knew so much about what Walton owned and leased that her dawning sense of ignorance about this last trip was hard to accept. He’d had no chance to stash a cent since he reached Seattle. Henning had vetted the nurses, and had his four brothers follow them on off-hours. He’d brought the brothers over from Sweden one by one, dotting them throughout the Northwest, all doing small chores for Victor while they studied trades—tailor, printer, carpenter, detective. Now, in Victor’s time of need, they were in Seattle. The morning after she arrived, she watched all five Falks from her window, fascinated enough to get close to the pane. From this distance, she couldn’t tell the difference between the men until they began to move, and Henning’s wolfy lope gave him away.

On her first night, while Walton slept, she brought all of the notebooks she could find into her bedroom. She’d been given a room with a connecting door, presumably so she could spy, but it only meant she had to listen to him talk in his sleep. She’d heard him through dozens of thinner-walled hotels, but now there was no one to seduce, no one to amuse but himself, and his mutter was unnerving: Deafness . Daftness . Daphne ’s dapper Dan .

Each book had thick new boards and quilted spines, but even the original endpapers had been saved, still covered with a blurred mess of old addresses, some erased and some simply crossed out. Hotels and houses, different lives in different inks and ages, scrawled on trains, on boats, in clinic beds. On each creamy new inner board, Walton had glued down a fragment of the original covers and written a fresh title and date above: Theories of Science, by myself and others, belonging to Walton Remfrey, October 22, 1904, Transvaal . His subjects had stayed the same, but all the titles were newly phrased—My Understanding of Seismic and Volcanic Events, My Family & Life, My Financial Affairs, Advances in Medicine, Travels Around the Globe, Correspondences, Anomalies of the World, Green Things(this was really Dulcy’s book; she’d thought she’d lost it but he’d had it rebound in a silk leaf pattern), and Adventures (the short pithy title of the black book)—and all but Dulcy’s were signed with his signature and date and “Transvaal.” Only four of the ten had fresh entries—the black book, earthquakes (Sichuan, August 30,400 dead ), medicine (I fear I am become a leper ) and travel (I must never board another of this company ’s ships). No fresh code, no account numbers, riddles, names. She had no idea what towns he’d seen on that last trip, and now, given the inscriptions, she wondered if an incident or a fever or a night of drinking had been enough to tip him into idiocy.

Henning had shown her the bill for the rebinding, and the work had cost a fortune, old penny notebooks dressed up for ten and twenty pounds apiece: more evidence of brain rot. Walton had stuck with his old color schemes: the notebook about anomalies, originally a faded blue peacock paper, was now rich lazuli silk; the family book was innocent peach velvet. Dulcy couldn’t remember why theories were garnet or miscellaneous facts and statistics were dark jade, but if Walton thought of illness and pain and medication, he’d reach for dark yellow, the color of bad urine. Green, surrendered years earlier to Dulcy, was meant for gardening. If he wanted to make a comment on travel, he’d find the gray of oceans. If he wanted to enter information about a recent earthquake, he’d think of red blood soaking into the shaken ground, and the new fabric brought the notion home with appropriate vibrancy. Love poems were rosy pink, but sex was black.

It all made sense, to Walton; it would never make sense to Victor.

•••

Where’s your money book?” she asked the next morning. He’d been served invalid’s oatmeal with chunks of canned peach and knobs of butter and brown sugar, presumably to fatten him back to health.

“With me, always. I didn’t have that one touched.”

She could see it now, half under his pillow. “Could I see it?”

“No, dear. You’ll give it to Victor.” He slid it inside his robe and combed out his hair with his fingers. “He’s a murderous neurotic. It’s unfortunate that he still loves you.”

“I would not, and he does not. He needs to know where you put the money from the mines. Then we can get on the train and be done with him.”

“He longs for someone who knows him. He longs to not have to explain. I do, too. I don’t know what you’re going on about, moneywise.”

But she thought he did—the side of his mouth curled in a smile, and his mood was fine and cocksure. He stabbed out the chunks of fruit and left the mash. “Do you remember where the money is or not, Dad?”

He drained his tea and looked down at his shaking hand; by now she understood he shook most of the time and had noticed his strange, choppy walk. “What money?”

She waited. “Don’t give me that sort of look,” said Walton. He tried for glib, but his eyes were flustered. “Why do you keep asking? I remember that it’s safe. It will all come clear when I stop feeling so spavined. And, Dulce?”

“What?”

“If he must see the account books, take out the pages with the Western accounts. He has nothing to do with them, and you might need them someday.”

•••

That afternoon, when the nurses dragged Walton down the hall for another bath—cleanliness, godliness, Victor believed in living underwater—she slid the brown money book out from under the pillow. She sliced out the two pages that listed accounts in Seattle, Denver, and Butte and tucked them into her underwear drawer next to the bag of keys Walton had always had her keep. She brought the notebook down to Victor’s study.

This was the only journal which had grown thinner rather than fatter: when Walton updated his accounts, he ripped out most old notes, and so only fifty or so pages of onionskin were left, though the little silk folder pocket sewn into the inside cover was stuffed full of receipts, and though he had, for some reason, decided to keep drafts of seven different wills. The first will left everything (not much) to his first wife, Jane; after she died in childbirth, he’d left his small fortune to Philomela; in 1895 he’d left everything to Dulcy’s older brothers—Jane’s sons—Walter and Winston; in 1898, it had all gone to his mother-in-law Martha (who hates me but has good sense. In 1900, all my worldly possessions to my daughters, who at least enjoy life ; in 1902, angry with everyone, he instructed that any survivors of his era in the Cornish orphanage should split the estate. And in October of 1904, on his way back from Africa, he left a little to all his children, with Victor overseeing the consequent mess.

None of these theories of life were signed, and Dulcy was surprised he’d saved them. For a memoirist, he had an aversion to reflection. Most pages were refreshed yearly:

1904—WHAT I POSSESS

Tab 1: Storage, listed by nation and city.

Tab 2: Bank boxes and accounts, same.

Tab 3: Properties: Westfield and Manhattan; Chile page 10, Butte page 12, Bisbee page 13, Pachuca page 14.

Tab 4: Properties sold, and profit noted: Redruth, Blue Hill, Lone Pine, Hailey, Douglas & Bisbee, Calumet, Butte.

Tab 5: The Transvaal.

Tab 6: Stray items (bonds, art, furniture of value, scientific instruments, horses).

Under Tab 5, Walton’s last note was dated September 12: Sale pending Verre Bros.

Pend away, thought Dulcy, watching Victor flip through the translucent pages. Today he acted as if there were nothing out of the ordinary, as if they were all at ease with each other. “This is all copper money, from the New Levant in Namaqualand, and this is from that small investment near Cape Town. None of it has to do with the Swanneck, the Berthe, or the Black Dog. And how would he have made a deposit anywhere, if he hasn’t left this building?”

Henning copied the accounts, and Dulcy ran the book back to Walton’s room—happy splashing sounds coming from the bathroom—before they sat down to lunch in the long dining room. Victor, talking to a point near the salt, announced that he didn’t know how to proceed.

“Perhaps someone should speak to the binder,” said Dulcy. “He must have spent a good deal of time with the man.”

Victor dabbed at his mouth. “Would he really chat with an Indian?”

Victor’s cocoon was absolute, but Walton would have talked to a Martian, if a Martian could bind a book or cut a suit or whisper about a vein of ore. Henning elaborated: they had wired Walton’s hotel, his engineers, his doctor, but they needed to be circumspect, and could finally only ask if payment had been satisfactory, if all was well. Could she perhaps wire her father’s partner, Mr. Woolcock, and suggest that Walton was ill but improving, a little confused? No one could know the full disaster.

Walton and Robert Woolcock had been friends since the workhouse, which meant that Woolcock had known everything there was to know about Walton since approximately 1846. Dulcy ground pepper onto her chowder and decided not to puncture the impression that this worked in one direction: Woolcock likely knew everything about Victor, from his physical aversions to his poor understanding of smelting. “I’d say Dad was ill on his return, and I wanted to make sure there were no loose ends, and that I asked in greatest confidence.”

“As if you were not telling us?” asked Henning. He sat across the table from her, watching a sleet storm bash the grand windows.

“Yes.”

“But will you tell us?” asked Victor. He’d finished his glass of wine and stared pointedly at the bottle on the sideboard, but Henning ignored him. Now he looked at Dulcy directly, a small but ugly flare of self-pity and old longing.

“Yes,” she said.

“Please pass the pepper,” said Henning calmly.

“He tried to get into his trousers this morning,” said Dulcy. “If I were you, I would freeze any joint accounts. But let him walk a bit, or he’ll just keep trying to run.”

“I suppose he was the one who taught you how,” said Victor, reaching for the wine bottle.

•••

That night, as Walton watched her glue the two account pages back into the brown book—he insisted it be remade, though she had copied the information and tucked it into the brocade jewelry bag—they listened to Victor hurl things in his office, and heard Henning talk him down. A half hour later, they heard the elevator.

“They’re out to find a girl,” said Walton. “He’s soused enough to try that now. They could have had me along.”

Dulcy tossed the brown book in his lap.

“I’m sorry,” said Walton. “I’m sorry I said that, and I’m sorry you ever met him.”

Too late, but he couldn’t have known, and apologies were rare. She kissed him good night, went into her room, and locked the door to the hall.

•••

Years earlier, after Walton had introduced them, Victor would sit near her without quite touching, and this containment made her head reel. It seemed like a promise, and of course it was one. When they walked, he would touch her elbow and no more; when they sat together at parties, he was always two inches away, heat instead of touch. He was so handsome, so smart, so painfully shy: she daydreamed a revolution, a revelation, a man reborn, but that had been before the clarity of their first physical encounter.

In 1901, Henning had only been in the country for two years—he was slender, young, and silent, more of a servant than a cousin—but as he circled in the background, he was already vigilant for something Dulcy hadn’t quite understood. She was a veteran of Walton’s world, and she knew Victor loved her, could tell that he desired her, but whatever difficulty he had—not entirely mysterious, as she watched his ramrod parents across crowded Manhattan ballrooms—so much of him was considerate, and literate, that she didn’t pause to worry. Dulcy was fond of saving people, and the sense that Victor was somehow suffering within his phenomenally handsome skin, and the idea that she might change his life by allowing him even a small loss of control, was powerfully tempting.

In early November of 1901, they set a wedding date for the following spring—sealed with a peck against her hair—and started into the fall season of dinners and dances. She was a horrible dancer; he steered her with glancing fingers. But just before Thanksgiving, after people opened cases of champagne at a city mansion, and Victor, who never drank, had several glasses, he argued with some Princeton friends about who had enlisted, and who hadn’t, in the Spanish war three years earlier. Victor had his hands up to box, but another man simply swung a bottle. He missed, and Victor was on him.

Dulcy hadn’t really comprehended what followed; she’d only wanted it to stop. A few weeks later, as she sailed to London with Walton, he pointed out that “murderous rage,” in a sentence, was a very dry thing, and the sound and vision of it was quite wet.

After the men were pulled apart, Dulcy tried to calm Victor down in a side room, forced him to let her touch him for the sake of sponging blood off his face and his hair, and suddenly he was on her, saying he loved loved loved her, rubbing his face against hers as if he thought he were kissing her, ripping her skirt up, forcing himself inside her, with a hand against her mouth. She wasn’t sure if it was to hide her voice or hide her face. Minutes later he wept, he apologized, he was unable to look at her, clearly revolted by the naked, sticky, panting moment. He said that she had to understand that everything would be different when they married; now that they’d done this, everything would be easier, and sweet. He’d never been so happy in his life; he’d never been able to do this thing before.

She said she had to clean herself, but instead she walked out the door without her coat. In the morning, lying in bed in the crowded top floor of the 19th Street house, she thought it through with mounting nausea and found no intellectual way around the problem. Was this something that happened to other people, all the time? She didn’t think so, but how did she even start the conversation with city friends, people she saw twice a year? On the other hand, it was a simple decision: she didn’t want to marry someone who was insane, who was violent, and who would apparently never want to make love in the way she assumed people made love. She felt sympathy for his ruined mind, but it was coupled with a profound aversion, and fear.

She wrote a letter saying that she released him from his promise and hoped that he would have a good life. They had misled each other. She slid the emerald engagement ring in the envelope and had one of the Germans from the corner hotel take it up to Victor at the Braeburn. She packed for Westfield while Carrie raged at her: Carrie thought Victor was wonderful, and wonderfully well connected. She was finally of the age when she could go to dances, and Dulcy was ruining her life. Dulcy showed her the bruises on her neck but didn’t elaborate.

Over the course of the day, a series of pleading notes and apologies arrived by messenger, and then a clichéd screed: he would spit on her grave; he would treasure the knowledge of her regret and loneliness. You cannot live without me, he wrote.

I can, thought Dulcy. That’s the point.

That evening he sent Henning. This was their first real conversation: Henning said that Victor would like her to know that he would never do anything “like that ” again, that by having “accepted ” him, she had cured him.

“Cured?”

Henning writhed in the chair, without visible movement. She waited until he finally looked at her directly. “Do you think I should change my mind?” asked Dulcy.

“No,” he said, reaching for his hat. He seemed relieved by the question. “He’ll only ever touch you when he’s angry or drunk.”

She went back to the farm. Martha, not understanding Dulcy’s reasons, was smug—she hadn’t liked Victor, and Dulcy now found this reassuring rather than maddening. Carrie passed on rumors from the city, sometimes out of kindness, and sometimes out of spite: people said Dulcy was a cold fish; that she’d had affairs during her travels with her father and fretted that Victor would discover the truth; that she’d been worried about all the normal things marriage entailed (this last was especially amusing). There had to be an explanation: all that money, and good looks. They didn’t usually go together. Why ever had Dulcy let that one go?

But as stories of Victor’s unraveling had begun to float up to Westfield—fights, some eruption at a whorehouse—any notion that she was in the wrong was lost to growing panic. Dulcy and Walton were due to leave for London and Portugal and Africa, a trip they’d planned as a last hurrah before the wedding was canceled. Now Dulcy slipped into the city a day early, and saw a doctor a friend had recommended, and understood she wasn’t free of Victor, after all. She told Walton—who’d had the sense to not tell Victor about Dulcy’s presence, or the trip—they’d have to delay, but Walton reacted to the news of her condition by telegramming a London doctor and booking them onto an even earlier ship. They were gone by nightfall.

•••

In Seattle, three years later, Dulcy was careful with her telegram, and Woolcock wired back immediately—

Dulce all grand hell of a turnaround, fine deal made, hope the Lord is happy, ask the Da when he’ll voyage next? Keeping mine eyes on happy places Huns and Sows haven’t noticed yet.

“Sows?” asked Victor.

“The English,” said Dulcy.

Henning looked amused, in a shuttered way. “Would he say more if you pretended to be your father?” asked Victor.

“I won’t,” she said.

“Mr. Woolcock wouldn’t feel the need to explain to Walton,” said Henning.

She’d be half in love with Henning, if he didn’t terrify her. She wrote again to Robert Woolcock:

Da ill now better soon please advise on new properties and remaining open accounts.

In the long hours before the reply, Dulcy imagined the wizened engineer studying the slip of paper.

Accounts here? How ill? Waht did he leave? Will advise on new prospects.

It was her turn to stare at a piece of paper. When she took Walton his lunch that day, she tidied his room, piled books by topic and color, and rattled on about wanting to be organized so they could leave soon. Did he have keys for a bank box or hotel box in Cape Town or Johannesburg, keys for her to keep from the last trip? Any bit of information she should pass on to Robert if Walton had some sad turn of health?

“Why would I keep a box in a tottery country like that, dear?” asked Walton. “And Robert knows to tell you everything.”

For the next round of wires, Dulcy was given permission to be circumspect but honest about the degree of Walton’s illness and the missing funds, and Woolcock sounded authentically frayed, even in telegramese:

I cannot believe. I will be discreet. Will he recover?

Dulcy didn’t know. That night she once again heard Victor in the gym, drumming on the punching bag while Henning talked through the rage, soothing, singsong, matter-of-fact. When they stopped, she listened to all the usual noises—drunks, wagons, ships’ horns; Seattle was a small city, but still a city—and sorted through the receipts in the brown book, peering down through the glasses she had too much vanity to wear in public.

She came up with nothing. Walton had docked in Cape Town on September 5 and checked in to the Mount Nelson Hotel. The next day, while Martha was beginning to die back in Westfield, he’d set up an account at Bank of Africa and given the bookbinder fifty pounds. This was mind-boggling: Dulcy wondered if the notebooks had gotten wet on the trip over, or if some blow to the head had driven Walton into this extravagance. He’d picked up the tab for a table of six that night at the Mount Nelson—Woolcock would have made the trip south from the Transvaal to meet him—and the next day he’d consulted a doctor she remembered too well, and then headed north to the mines, a two-day journey.

There was nothing about meeting the buyers on September 12, nothing about a transfer of nine hundred thousand pounds. A good hotel in Johannesburg and another doctor there, and then a train ticket south again, and two nights back in Cape Town. And then, after all this activity, nothing but receipts for a train to Port Elizabeth and stubs from that beach town—laundry, an Indian meal, whiskey, a pharmacist’s tab for a stomach fizz, morphine, and mercury. She looked in the black book and all the others, but there was no entry for any of those days, because all the notebooks but the brown were at the binder’s. He’d rendered himself mute—how had he possibly spent his time if he wasn’t recording his time?

A week later, he was back at the Mount Nelson. She imagined him wandering through Africa’s spring in the linen suits she’d found crumpled in his trunk, his mind filled with silk samples and women rather than mines. On September 27 he paid the Cape Town bookbinder one hundred pounds, and on September 28 he boarded his first ship home. There was nothing in the notebook to show if he’d left for even a moment when the ship docked in Australia or Hawaii.

Ides, wind, brain rot. He hadn’t lost anything important before, not even a pair of eyeglasses, but here they were.