“What is it that you want to speak to me about?” she said.
He asked her if he might wait to explain himself until they met on Signal Hill.
She went upstairs, changed for the outdoors, came back down. He told her to wait for twenty minutes, then take the cabriolet to the top of the hill. He asked her to pretend, if they were approached by anyone on the hill or if someone later asked her who he was, that he was a visiting relative or an acquaintance of her husband’s from New York. He took her silence for agreement.
He went outside and strode briskly up the road. A raw cutting wind was blowing from the west, but his exertions kept him warm. She passed him when he was near the top of the hill. She looked at him, but he looked straight ahead.
She had been waiting perhaps five minutes in the cab by the time he reached the crest. There was no one else about. They could not be seen from the blockhouse, though he could tell by the smoke that spewed out along the ridge that it was occupied.
He joined her in the cab.
“Even Pete does not remember you,” she said. It was true. The horse, had he recognized his voice or scent, would have been tossing his head about by now, in greeting or in protest. “What do you want, Francis?” she said. “Obviously you do not mean to stay or you would not be dressed the way you are.”
For a trace of a second, she smiled in a way that infuriated him. “Dressed the way you are.” On the occasion of seeing him for the first time in years, she was trying not to laugh at how he looked.
They were sheltered from the wind and the noise it made by the hood of the cab. He told her about Peary, said that Peary had given him the name of the boy’s father. At this she gave a start and looked at him, but then she turned away again, as if she thought he might be trying to fool her into revealing the man’s identity. As he continued, she listened, her face expressionless, he thought, until he realized that she was mute with fear, realized that he was shouting, screaming at her.
He tried to calm himself.
“If you will just admit that you lied to me,” he said, “if you will just admit that much, that would be enough. I will not insist on your telling me his name or how you met, or anything else. If you will admit that you lied, I will not even ask you why.” If she had spoken up then … But it seemed to him that despite her fear, she could not bring herself to take him seriously.
“I told you the truth,” she said, “and I will not speak of it again.” She said it with such finality he knew that further questions would be pointless. He took her by the upper arm, put his face close to hers and tried to kiss her.
She pulled away from him and jumped from the carriage, began to run towards the road that led down to the city. He ran after her, blocked her way. She turned again and ran towards the blockhouse. Again he caught her, blocked her path, though he did not touch her.
“What are you doing?” he said.
She screamed something, but the wind carried the sound away from the hill.
Seeming to know just what she was doing, seeming to think it led to safety, she began to run down the hill towards the sea. She must have misremembered, miscalculated something, thought she knew of a path but, in her panic, was unable to find it. It was a very great distance to the bottom, but the grassy slope was so steep that he could run no faster than she could. On this, the side of the hill that in the spring faced the wind and rain, there was no snow left. When she could go no farther without plunging off the grassy ledge above the ice, she ran a little to the side, then stopped. She shouted something, seeming to have realized what a blunder she had made by running down the hill.
She turned to face him. Both of them were gasping for breath. “It crossed my mind,” she said, “down at the house. Just for a second, it crossed my mind that this was your intention. But I told myself you would never do such a thing. Yet it was only that you could not bring yourself to do it in that house. Francis, please think about the boy. The boy has no one else but me.”
“What do you mean?” he said. “What is it that you think I have brought you here to do?”
He had never seen such fear in a person’s eyes before. Behind her, perhaps fifteen feet below her, wave after wave of slushy water shrugged itself ashore from the edge of the ice.
“If you tell me his name, I will let you go,” he said.
She tried to get past him, but he caught her around the waist and dragged her to the edge. “Tell me his name,” he said, “or it will be your son’s turn next.”
“All right,” she said. “All right.”
“Do not lie to me,” he said. “If I find that you have lied to me, I will come back for the boy.”
She spoke the name.
“Let me go,” she said.
He could not believe how strong, how wild she was. She got loose from him two or three times, punching, biting, clawing at his face. A smaller man would have been no match for her. He believed that if she got by him, he could not have caught her going up that hill.
He grabbed her around the waist from behind and threw her over. She made no sound. She disappeared beneath the water and did not come up. Not once.
He climbed the slope, then descended the other side of the hill on foot. He met no one on the road. He did not really expect to get away with it. Though he had taken pains to avoid detection, he felt almost certain they would fail. He felt as though he didn’t care one way or the other.
He went back to his hotel and stayed there, waiting for the knock on the door that never came. He read in the paper the next day that her empty horse and carriage had been found on Signal Hill and her body in the water at the bottom. He was startled when he saw his name, thinking that he had been found out: “Wife of the explorer Francis Stead, who for the past few years has lived in Brooklyn, New York.” That was all it said about him, the words seeming to imply that, deserted by her husband, abandoned, she had died by her own hand. “Cause of death as yet unknown,” it said.
He booked passage out on a ship that would make port in two days. By the time the ship arrived, the whole city was talking about “poor Mrs. Stead who drowned herself,” though the official cause of death was accidental drowning. It had never occurred to him that suicide would be suspected. More than suspected—assumed. Apparently, she had long been regarded as “odd,” “peculiar,” something of a hermit, people said.
Her reputation was his alibi. It seemed to him that he was meant to get away undetected.
His ship made port, and he went back to Brooklyn.
“I have known of this for so long,” Dr. Cook said. “I did not think it would pain me so much to speak of it.”
He covered his face with his hands and sobbed. I, too, was crying, looking out the window of the train at my reflection.
“I cannot bear to think that she died that way because of me,” Dr. Cook sobbed. “Alone, at the bottom of that hill, at the hands of a man driven mad by what I did. I turned away from her, Devlin. Three weeks. Three weeks I knew her, and every day I think of her and wish that I had had the courage to answer her last letter, to say yes.
“Nothing in her life was undone by the manner of her death. I tell myself that over and over.”
I could speak no words of comfort to him, nor even feel anything for him. I had never really felt my mother’s presence, her absence, until now. For the first time in my life, I felt sorrow for her, which was so much heavier, so much more gravid, than mere sadness. Had I been standing, I would have fallen to the floor beneath its weight.
I thought of that unremembered afternoon when I had sat in the house, wondering until it got dark where my mother was, why she was not there to meet me at the door as she always was.
“She told him my name, Devlin, in the hope of saving you. For all she knew, he would go straight to the house anyway when he was done with her. But there was at least a chance he would not. I’m sure it was not just in the hope of escaping that she struggled with him. She tried to throw him from the ledge or pull him over with her.”
Dr. Cook looked at me.
“When Francis finished his story, I asked him what he meant to do with me. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I joined this expedition with the intention of killing you. But I have changed my mind. I mean to do nothing at all.’ He turned and began to walk back to Redcliffe House. Then he faced me again. ‘I have told Peary everything,’ he said. ‘Just a few hours ago. I also told him that I would confess to you.’
“That night, he walked away from Redcliffe House and was never seen again.”
He looked as drained as if he had just heard of her death for the first time.
For ten minutes, as the train jostled about on the tracks, we both looked out the window.
“Over the next few months,” he said, “some parts of Francis Stead’s story kept coming back to me. Such as his account of how ferociously your mother struggled for her life. There should have been bruises on her body that gave evidence of such a struggle, bruises that even someone predisposed to think that she had killed herself would have noticed. Her forearms, especially her wrists, would have been bruised from where he held her to keep her from striking him. She would have had bruises on her face, especially around her mouth, from having tried to bite him. Her clothing would have been in a telltale state of dishevelment, certainly torn and probably with pieces missing. Yet her death had so quickly been ruled an accident and the rumours of suicide had been allowed to flourish.
“I was so puzzled that about a year after the expedition I visited St. John’s to conduct an investigation of my own. I discovered that there was no coroner, as such, in St. John’s at the time of your mother’s death. Post-mortems were conducted, at the request of the police, by whatever physicians were available. I looked up your mother’s death certificate. Accidental drowning, it said. It was signed by your uncle. I am not suggesting that he was in any way involved in your mother’s death. He might have guessed, however, or considered it a possibility, that Francis was responsible. Without ever having communicated with Francis, he might have done what he could to cover it up, but it does not seem very likely. I think something like this happened: The police allowed him to do the post-mortem as a favour to one of their own, so to speak, a favour to a doctor they had often worked with in the past. Given your mother’s circumstances, the police would have presumed suicide, as would your uncle. A matter to be handled delicately, everyone would have agreed. Your uncle might have asked if he, a family member, could do the post-mortem just to keep gossip to a minimum. Then, to his surprise, he finds evidence of murder, which he withholds from the police, not to protect Francis, but to minimize the scandal, to keep it from getting out that his brother’s wife was murdered. People are almost never murdered by strangers. There had, I discovered from talking to some people when I was in St. John’s, been rumours about your mother. Unfounded rumours, I have no doubt whatsoever, though your uncle might have believed them. Even if he was certain or thought it likely that the rumours were unfounded, he would have known that people would draw their own conclusions: that she was killed by one of the many men she supposedly consorted with, disreputable men. In the public mind, her having been murdered would, perversely, confirm the rumours, especially if the murder went unsolved, which he would have known was likely, given the absence of any suspects. Better to cover it up for the sake of the family name, for his and his brother’s sake, and even, I supposed, not yet knowing your uncle, for Amelia’s sake.
“When I wrote to him, I told him that Francis had confessed to the murder of Amelia. I did not, of course, tell him that I was your father. I made no explicit threats, no mention of the death certificate. I was fairly certain that he would co-operate. Francis spoke often about your uncle. I think he was the only man that Francis Stead understood. He understood his brother much better than he understood himself, even though the two of them were very much alike.
“If accusations that Amelia had been murdered came out—if I made public the story I was told by Francis Stead and it was revealed that your uncle had signed her death certificate, citing accidental drowning as the cause of death—he would have been suspected of having covered up the murder of his brother’s wife. It would have ruined his reputation.
“So he complied with my every suggestion. I asked him to forward my letters to you unopened—that is, with the seal unbroken. I let him assume that I had instructed you to tell me when a seal was broken, and that I had devised some system whereby you would know if he had withheld a letter from you. I’m sure he never read the letters. You may think of what I did as blackmail. But I enlisted his help without harming him or extracting from him anything he valued. I felt I had to. Corresponding secretly with a grown-up is difficult enough. To do so with a child impossible without some such arrangement as I devised.”
So Uncle Edward, as I had suspected, did not know that Dr. Cook was my father.
“I should have told you before how she died. But imagine my dilemma. You had for so long believed that your mother had taken her life. Should I now break your heart a second time and tell you she was murdered by her husband?”
“Why have you told me now?” I said.
“So you would know that Peary is in part to blame for your mother’s death. Because he, for the pettiest of reasons, gave Francis Stead my name. Peary knows that I blame him, though we have never talked about it. He knows that he is to blame—he and I and Francis Stead. He despises me. How I regard him, he is well aware. It has never been more important to me that you understand his nature. That you understand why his failure is as important to me as our success.”
• CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE •
THE NEW YORK PAPERS DID NOT REPORT DR. COOK’S humiliation as fully as we had feared they would. Since there had been no mention of Dr. Cook in the stories about Peary’s plan to “abdicate,” there was also no explicit mention of the effect of Peary’s change of heart on Dr. Cook. The New York Times said that Peary had “unambiguously declared his intention to keep trying for the pole,” that he had expressed the fervent hope that he would succeed while Roosevelt was in the White House, and that his announcement had taken many by surprise, “including the evening’s alternative guest of honour, the mountain climber Dr. Frederick Cook.”
Still, I wondered how we would be received by Manhattan society. I had no doubt that it was widely known that the congress of explorers had all but thrown Dr. Cook a parade in advance of Peary’s speech, that he and I and countless others had assumed that we would return from Peary’s city to our own in triumph, Dr. Cook wearing the mantle that Peary had discarded.
“Perhaps we should wait a while before accepting any invitations,” Dr. Cook said. I told him that would only make things more awkward when we did accept one.
At first, it seemed to me that we were not regarded much differently than before. No one mentioned what took place in Washington. And therefore it seemed to be invoked by every word.
I wondered if I should talk about Washington, enough to give the impression at least, however transparently untrue it might be, that no great harm had come of what had happened, that we had merely suffered a rough knock of the sort to which, as explorers, we were well-accustomed. We had come out the worse, I might imply, but our friendly rivalry with Peary was far from settled. But I was not sure I could bring it off.
“They hardly seem to care about what happened,” I said one night as we were heading home from a Christmas party.
“Of course they care,” said Dr. Cook. “Everyone knows and cares. We are, if anything, even more interesting to them than before. A highly interesting chapter has just concluded, but it is still too soon, because of you, to guess how the book will end. I believe I would no longer be invited out if not for you.”
I told him that this was nonsense, that it was clearly his co
mpany they valued more. He said nothing, as if I had protested so lamely that I had proved his point.
“I think I would prefer it if they simply let me be,” he said. “There really is no reason why you cannot attend these functions by yourself. They believe that you are still worth watching. But they will soon see that I am not.”
This seemed to me to be an unfair assessment of the people at whose homes we were dining every other night and attending balls and parties. Most of them seemed to me to be far more sympathetic to us than he made them out to be.
“I am like a match,” he said. “They use me to start a conversation and then discard me.”
I demurred, but I soon realized that there was some truth in what he said.
Not that he was avoided or ignored. If anything, he was approached, addressed, even more often than before.
One evening, a woman asked him which of the poles he thought would be discovered first.
“The South,” said Dr. Cook. “In the Antarctic, there is a landmass beneath the ice and snow, so one does not have to deal with ocean currents. You see, there is no fixed North Pole per se, for the ice is always moving. The north polar explorer seeks after what is merely an illusion.”
This was followed by many disapproving murmurs and much shaking of heads.
“But surely, Dr. Cook,” said a man whose family had made its fortune in the manufacture of steel rivets, “those same ocean currents could be used to one’s advantage if one knew what one was doing. If, instead of travelling against the currents, one travelled with them, one would make up time, not lose it, would one not?” But he looked for a reply not to Dr. Cook but to a young man who sat across from him and nodded vigorously before elaborating on the other man’s suggestion. Neither of them had the faintest idea what he was talking about, but it was clear that Dr. Cook’s appraisal of their ideas would not be welcomed. He could, if he wished, have been just one of many disputants at the table, but this was not in his nature. He sat there in silence.
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