The Widow Nash. Jamie Harrison

      Cordelia Blake had spent the beginning of the end of her first life, an All Souls’ Day, wandering through the new east galleries at the Metropolitan, studying marble running girls and naked men with weapons, squinting at vases and sarcophagi and gold boxes that had once served as coffins. Upstairs, a millennia later, the girls and angry men were made of oil and watercolor, framed between the play of light on hanging game and wine glasses and lemon peels, sharp and beautiful; beyond every scene of human pursuit, and through the windows of the still lives, almost all the paintings had moving water and idealized ruins, smashed down by time or war or—possibly— earthquakes.

      Which made Miss Blake laugh.

      —Lewis Braudel, The Lady Vanishes, 1908

      Chapter 1

      Almost All Souls’ Day

      •

      People paid attention when they arrived because Carrie was beautiful and Dulcy had jilted a rich man. Dulcy hadn’t been to the city since, and once she had a glass in her hand, she found she enjoyed the spiky, expectant whispers, the open curiosity. They wore black dresses and masks, because they were in mourning for Martha, but most of the other women were pretending to be Marie Antoinette or Cinderella, and the dust from their powdered hair dropped like dandruff. Dulcy studied the men, skimming over the earnest costumes—kings and knights—for odder types like headhunters, sheiks, and Vikings, but as she often did, she found she liked the idea of people more than the reality. An insurance man at her elbow put aside his bullfighter’s cape and cap and began talking about oysters—their different shapes, their increasing rarity—and for a little while his obsession, his sliver of strangeness, was interesting. But he didn’t bear long study; he dissolved like a bad mint.

      “I met your father once, at my club,” he said. “A genius, but such a character. A little all over the place. I gather you are always in the process of traveling.”

      The insurance man came from a good family, with bundles of money, but his eyes were evasive, and she could see him work through his memory, try to suss out stories of the lost engagement. As he thought, he pursed his lips and moved them in and out.

      All around them, Carrie’s friends were playing divination games, courtship games: people were supposed to drip candle wax in finger bowls, blow out lines of candles and count the years they’d stay unwed, throw peels over a shoulder and guess what letter they formed, and bob for apples. There was no one in this room Dulcy felt like bobbing for, and probably no one who wanted to bob for her, but she allowed herself to be herded toward a dangling, tarnished hand mirror, to look behind her reflection for the man she would marry. For Carrie, who’d left a trail of peels every Halloween since she was three, the man in the mirror was peachfaced, hovering Alfred Lorrimer, who seemed to expand with wine and her attention that night, not so much opening like a flower as swelling like a sponge.

      Dulcy stood obediently in line and opened her eyes on cue: she saw her face and a black curtain, and felt a train move below them, not a sound but a shudder. “Of course it was black,” Carrie hissed in her ear, pointing to the drapery that faced the mirror. “I want you to have fun. Can’t you just do that for a bit?”

      A line of handsome, placid-faced men in silly costumes, waiting to be picked, found this amusing. “All right,” said Dulcy, finishing a second glass. “How do you say yes in Halloween?”

      “As if it were a language?” asked one man.

      “As if it were a language,” she said. The whole strange city vibrating around her, and here she was in a puddle of normal.

      “We give up,” they said.

      “Oui ,” she said. “And ja.”

      “Hohoho ,” said the bullfighter. And: “Let me fetch another glass for you.” When he headed off, as Dulcy slid toward the door, she could hear Carrie pipe away: her sister had spent years with their difficult father, months at the farm in Westfield helping their dying grandmother, but she was so happy to see people again, happy to be social. In the front hall, Dulcy put her finger to her lips when she asked a maid for her coat.

      Outside, she walked away from the line of waiting hansoms, heading south down Fifth Avenue and Broadway. The champagne had done wonderful things for her brain, now that she was alone. In Madison Square she stopped at a cart for a cheesy Greek pastry and skipped on, giddy, wiping oily fingers on a churchyard’s brick wall. Past the half-lit triangle of the Fuller Building, she turned east at the Rivoli Hotel and waved to the doorman, who was loading a collection of large people into a carriage. A moment later, she heard footsteps and turned to find the doorman hurrying up behind her. “A telephone call,” he said. “We just sent someone to the apartment to find you.”

      In the Rivoli lobby the German at the front desk pointed to the telephone, and