The Widow Nash. Jamie Harrison
for Victor ever since, moving up from an errand boy to an emissary and negotiator, working in his spare time and investing some of his own money in the growing number of film studios in Queens.
By the time he had to abruptly board a ship again late in 1901, this time to England after Victor had responded poorly to his broken engagement with Dulcy, Henning had begun to wonder at the point of returning. Victor had been drinking heavily, which always made him a little looser, a little likelier to act directly, and had started a fight at a friend’s wedding party that continued at the bars in the Village. The next morning a dead rich boy was found frozen into winter mud in an alley off of Bleecker Street, and Henning was perceived to have the least to lose as an inquiry began. Victor’s parents put him on a merchant ship to Southampton with a chunk of blood money in his pocket; Victor offered more if Henning found Dulcy in London and reported back.
In London, Henning did find Dulcy, and followed her long enough to understand what had happened, though he did not telegram Victor for weeks. He walked around the city, thought things through, and ended up buying himself a job at Clarendon Studios. He held the cameras for Alice in Wonderland, and he even did well writing the scripts, because his very direct English had a good pithy ring. He read—he still read—all the hours of the day he wasn’t working or sleeping around—and decided that he’d been born to record beauty: Shakespeare, fables, history. He didn’t want to film a stage—why limit yourself if you didn’t have to? Why not film The Tempest on a beach, or A Midsummer Night ’s Dream in a forest; why not give the words of the whole play underneath, while the image spooled out? If Henning could keep up, even with an immigrant’s English, surely the average schtuck could manage.
“Schmuck,” said Dulcy, as Henning explained all of this to her on a bench at the British Museum and promised that he wouldn’t tell Victor about the pregnancy.
“I worry he’ll kill you,” he said. “If he knows, he’ll kill you.”
Victor also left New York in the wake of the fight, and he took the train west. He bought the Butler in Seattle, and when the Maslingen family deemed it safe for Henning to return to this fresh coast, the balance had changed between the two young men. Henning had a key for every lock in the apartment and the padlock on the wine cellar, the combination for the safe, the numbers for all bank accounts. Henning had said no to selling his stake in the London film company to help Victor through the African mess. He had planned to use his 5 percent of the African profit to begin filming plays in London in April.
“Does this ruin things for you, too?” Dulcy asked now, out on the balcony in Seattle.
“I’ll be all right,” he said. “I’m patient.”
Henning liked to scribble down all of Walton’s mythic memories, and twice during their stay in Seattle, he set up a camera and showed them some English films: How to Stop a Motor Car, Alice, The Mistletoe Bough. Walton wanted to watch them over and over, the projector overheating. On other nights, Dulcy and Walton would play rummy or cribbage, though he had trouble holding cards or pegs, and sometimes she set up a skittles game, though he couldn’t pull his own top. Sometimes she read to him, and sometimes she gave him extra medicine and hid in her room. Sometimes he was himself, wandering from topic to topic: a plan to move to Veracruz to grow coffee, a consideration of his ultimate vindication by the Royal Society. When she got him to talk about the last few months in Africa, he seemed more or less coherent, but if she surprised him with a question about the money, he’d flinch, a little shard to the brain, and then they’d wade through confusion.
Did he want to see Carrie? she asked. Let her dance, said Walton. The Boys? Let them bank. “Carrie eventually,” he said. “I can do without a lecture from my sons.”
Eventually was an admission, which might help in the end, but he veered away. “Let’s have a game: If you were a bird, which?” He’d never cared a thing for birds, but Henning had given him an illustrated Swedish guide, all the colors cheerier than nature, and the names broke him out of that morning’s echo chamber: bats, battery, butter, bitter.
“A nuthatch,” said Dulcy. The only bird that tended to eat upside down.
“Sanglarka or notvacka!” He was delighted. “Carrie, all tall and pink, would be a flamingo, or better yet a roseate spoonbill, but there’s no good translation, naturally. Skedstork. Spoonbillen .”
He rattled on: owl was uggla, crow was kraka, bluebird was blasangare, curlew was spov. Gull was gratrut, which sent him spinning off to Gertrude, and Shakespeare. He summoned Henning for a copy of the plays and, dithering over which to read first, flipped the volume open to The Merchant of Venice . Dulcy, who was curled in the chair by the window and had fallen into her own fascination with Swedish bird names, knew the volume would be too heavy for Walton to hold, but Henning was so transparently happy she said nothing.
“It’s an ugly play,” said Henning. “And not fair. Have The Tempest or Much Ado.”
“Ah, but it’s the way our world works,” said Walton. “Cunning, dunning, haunting, hunting, Henning, lending, lemming.”
Henning sounded the last word out, and his face burned.
“I’m sorry,” said Walton, suddenly sane. “My mind goes at its own pace. Please accept my apologies. You will outthink us all by the end. Tell Dulcy the word for hawk.”
“Falk ,” said Henning.
•••
Two weeks after Dulcy arrived, Walton demanded a dressing gown, insisted that they all dine together, and took Henning’s seat at the end of the table facing Victor. He lifted an empty wineglass with an arched eyebrow. The staff hustled; Dulcy began to daydream of her own disappearance and tried not to watch her father talk and eat at the same time. Walton’s newest topic was the Rift Valley, which would surely be the site of the next great hard-rock rush after Namaqualand. They should buy now, before the fucking Germans figured out the fucking truth . Victor, who hated swearing, chose his battles. “I have nothing left,” he said. “You have lost my money.”
“Don’t fret,” said Walton. “Your money is in New York, practically speaking. I had it wired.”
“To which bank?” asked Victor.
“The bank you told me to use.” Walton dabbed his mouth, lurched upright, and left the room.
Dulcy started to follow, but Henning stopped her: he’d hired an agency to search for a wire, but so much money traveled into and out of the Rand that the task had proved impossible.
“If he kept the profit as cash or a check,” said Victor, “if he did not deposit it in some forgotten bank, it may have been taken from him on his way home. He talked of diamonds, but we can find no evidence he changed out the money. While I recognize his love of the symbolic, gold is hardly portable. He said something about a friend, a man named Penlawy who advised him, but our detectives haven’t managed to find him. Have you met this man?”
Dulcy stared down at Emil’s spongy fish. “Penlawy?”
“Yes. Charles, I think.”
“Penlawy was his childhood friend. He was sliced in half by a rock fall when Dad was a boy. A fall of quartz, before he even went to Ireland.”
She watched Victor’s mind go dark. In the corner, Henning hummed. It sounded like a lullaby, and she tried to imagine his mother, singing to her little boy. “He’d have said if it was stolen,” said Dulcy. “He’s never shied away from assigning blame before.”
Later, after Emil had tottered off to bed, she gave Walton a whiskey and made potatoes poached in cream, with a little sharp cheese. He ate like an ardent man for the first time since she’d arrived, and when he’d wiped the plate, he said, “Ah, well, I found out that someone from the bank had contacted wreckers, and they would have been lying in wait. I changed my plans.”
“Lying in wait where?” If he had wreckers on his mind, land wreckers rather than the people in his childhood who’d raided foundering ships, he was back in Cornwall.
“Jeppestown,”