The Widow Nash. Jamie Harrison
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