Dulcy put the black book down and tried to speak without rage, derision, or drama: Walton’s brain had been invaded, and it might finish dying slowly or overnight. There was nothing anyone could tell her about the disease that she hadn’t heard from forty doctors at twenty clinics in a dozen countries, and if and when there was a new therapy, it would be too late for Walton. He might remember what he’d done with the money, and he might not.
“No,” said Victor. “You’re wrong.”
“I don’t understand how this money could simply have been lost,” said Dulcy. “If it was a check, never cashed—”
Another wave of the hand, but Victor’s voice had a hint of a whistle. “Didn’t he write you? Why didn’t you go on this trip? Perhaps there’s a code in this book,” he said. “This particular one, filled with numbers. You would know, wouldn’t you?”
He pointed to the black book. He only thought that because he couldn’t comprehend the notebook’s topic. Henning, who plainly could, stretched again in his chair.
“My grandmother was ill,” said Dulcy. “He sent one message in three months.” Thieves everywhere, but I’ve outwitted them, and have found a safe way in strange winds. Curries everywhere, too—I’ve begun to like them! Seattle by the end of October, New York on the ides of November. Even for Walton, who was fond of words like ides , this had been theatrical. She’d read the telegram on the porch steps in Westfield, bees zipping through the apple trees in the sticky September heat. Martha had died a week earlier, and Carrie was crying upstairs. Dulcy had tucked the message in her apron and gone back to planting bulbs—she was happy to hear he’d been eating, but she had no patience for imaginary thieves.
Now she opened her bag and held the telegram out to Victor. He didn’t move—Henning had to bring it to him. The handsome cheek twitched while he read, and the brain on the far side of the dainty ear churned through a variety of unacceptable thoughts; she knew he was suffering. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“I’m sure he hid the money. He loves to hide things, even in the best of times.”
A commotion overhead, and the nurses’ voices piped. Henning reached for the notebooks. “We need to replace them before he returns to his room,” he said. “Or he’ll be upset.”
Dulcy finished her wine. “I think you’re missing his accounts book,” she said. “It used to be plain brown leather. It might help; I’ll give a look.”
•••
Since 1867, Walton had traveled thousands of miles each year. Once he established himself financially—and once he fell ill—each grand tour had four legs, four purposes: the acquisition and tending of mines, research into an earthquake (preferably recent and deadly), pleasure, and bodily recovery from task number three. Mining and earthquakes determined the itinerary, though the order might vary, and pleasure was possible anywhere, but a clinic was inevitably the last stop.
Why Victor needed Dulcy, beyond the fact her father was crazy: she had been his companion on half of these trips since she was fifteen, and she knew he’d hidden treasure everywhere, because she had been the keeper of most of the keys. She had six in a jewelry pouch for different bank boxes across this country, and she knew where others were hidden in the Manhattan apartment. Some of this urge to hide money came from his workhouse days, and some was a matter of control: he didn’t want his sons, Dulcy’s half-brothers, both beginning bankers who’d already been given plenty, to tell him what to do.
Victor knew about the trips, but not 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
Tab 1: Storage, listed by nation and city.
Tab 2: Bank boxes and accounts, same.
Tab 3: Properties: Westfield and Manhattan; Chile page 10, Butte page 12, Bisbee page 13, Pachuca page 14.
Tab 4: Properties sold, and profit noted: Redruth, Blue Hill, Lone Pine, Hailey, Douglas & Bisbee, Calumet, Butte.
Tab 5: The Transvaal.
Tab 6: Stray items (bonds, art, furniture of value, scientific instruments, horses).
Under Tab 5, Walton’s last note was dated September 12: Sale pending Verre Bros.
Pend away, thought Dulcy, watching Victor flip through the translucent pages. Today he acted as if there were nothing out of the ordinary, as if they were all at ease with each other. “This is all copper money, from the New Levant in Namaqualand, and this is from that small investment near Cape Town. None of it has to do with the Swanneck, the Berthe, or the Black Dog. And how would he have made a deposit anywhere, if he hasn’t left this building?”
Henning copied the accounts, and Dulcy ran the book back to Walton’s room—happy splashing sounds coming from the bathroom—before they sat down to lunch in the long dining room. Victor, talking to a point near the salt, announced that he didn’t know how to proceed.
“Perhaps someone should speak to the binder,” said Dulcy. “He must have spent a good deal of time with the man.”
Victor dabbed at his mouth. “Would he really chat with an Indian?”
Victor’s cocoon was absolute, but Walton would have talked to a Martian, if a Martian could bind a book or cut a suit or whisper about a vein of ore. Henning elaborated: they had wired Walton’s hotel, his engineers, his doctor, but they needed to be circumspect, and could finally only ask if payment had been satisfactory, if all was well. Could she perhaps wire her father’s partner, Mr. Woolcock, and suggest that Walton was ill but improving, a little confused? No one could know the full disaster.
Walton and Robert Woolcock had been friends since the workhouse, which meant that Woolcock had known everything there was to know about Walton since approximately 1846. Dulcy ground pepper onto her chowder and decided not to puncture the impression that this worked in one direction: Woolcock likely knew everything about Victor, from his physical aversions to his poor understanding of smelting. “I’d say Dad was ill on his return, and I wanted to make sure there were no loose ends, and that I asked in greatest confidence.”
“As if you were not telling us?” asked Henning. He sat across the table from her, watching a sleet storm bash the grand windows.
“Yes.”
“But will you tell us?” asked Victor. He’d finished his glass of wine and stared pointedly at the bottle on the sideboard, but Henning ignored him. Now he looked at Dulcy directly, a small but ugly flare of self-pity and old longing.
“Yes,” she said.
“Please pass the pepper,” said Henning calmly.
“He tried to get into his trousers this morning,” said Dulcy. “If I were you, I would freeze any joint accounts. But let him walk a bit, or he’ll just keep trying to run.”
“I suppose he was the one who taught you how,” said Victor, reaching for the wine bottle.
•••
That night, as Walton watched her glue the two account pages back into the brown book—he insisted it be remade, though she had copied the information and tucked it into the brocade jewelry bag—they listened to Victor hurl things in his office, and heard Henning talk him down. A half hour later, they heard the elevator.
“They’re out to find a girl,” said Walton. “He’s soused enough to try that now. They could have had me along.”
Dulcy tossed the brown book in his lap.
“I’m sorry,” said Walton. “I’m sorry I said that, and I’m sorry you ever met him.”
Too late, but he couldn’t have known, and apologies were rare. She kissed him good night, went into her room, and locked the door to the hall.
•••
Years earlier, after Walton had introduced them, Victor would sit near her without quite touching, and this containment made her head reel. It seemed like a promise, and of course it was one. When they walked, he would touch her elbow and no more;
when they sat together at parties, he was always two inches away, heat instead of touch. He was so handsome, so smart, so painfully shy: she daydreamed a revolution, a revelation, a man reborn, but that had been before the clarity of their first physical encounter.
In 1901, Henning had only been in the country for two years—he was slender, young, and silent, more of a servant than a cousin—but as he circled in the background, he was already vigilant for something Dulcy hadn’t quite understood. She was a veteran of Walton’s world, and she knew Victor loved her, could tell that he desired her, but whatever difficulty he had—not entirely mysterious, as she watched his ramrod parents across crowded Manhattan ballrooms—so much of him was considerate, and literate, that she didn’t pause to worry. Dulcy was fond of saving people, and the sense that Victor was somehow suffering within his phenomenally handsome skin, and the idea that she might change his life by allowing him even a small loss of control, was powerfully tempting.
In early November of 1901, they set a wedding date for the following spring—sealed with a peck against her hair—and started into the fall season of dinners and dances. She was a horrible dancer; he steered her with glancing fingers. But just before Thanksgiving, after people opened cases of champagne at a city mansion, and Victor, who never drank, had several glasses, he argued with some Princeton friends about who had enlisted, and who hadn’t, in the Spanish war three years earlier. Victor had his hands up to box, but another man simply swung a bottle. He missed, and Victor was on him.
Dulcy hadn’t really comprehended what followed; she’d only wanted it to stop. A few weeks later, as she sailed to London with Walton, he pointed out that “murderous rage,” in a sentence, was a very dry thing, and the sound and vision of it was quite wet.
After the men were pulled apart, Dulcy tried to calm Victor down in a side room, forced him to let her touch him for the sake of sponging blood off his face and his hair, and suddenly he was on her, saying he loved loved loved her, rubbing his face against hers as if he thought he were kissing her, ripping her skirt up, forcing himself inside her, with a hand against her mouth. She wasn’t sure if it was to hide her voice or hide her face. Minutes later he wept, he apologized, he was unable to look at her, clearly revolted by the naked, sticky, panting moment. He said that she had to understand that everything would be different when they married; now that they’d done this, everything would be easier, and sweet. He’d never been so happy in his life; he’d never been able to do this thing before.
The Widow Nash: A Novel Page 3