The Widow Nash. Jamie Harrison
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
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