The beaters in their high boots continued punishing the earth until the stump-runners paid attention. The swarms rotated around the brush fires like living cyclones, pressed together until the ground was invisible under their combined mass, then turned away from the tumult of the beaters and flowed into the shadows of the forest like so much water draining from a pond.
“A loose hive won’t last long. They’re prey for snakes, scuttlemice, billy hawks, anything that can tolerate their poison. We’ll rake the fires for a day or two. Come back in a week, you won’t recognize the place.”
The work continued until the last of the creatures had disappeared. The beaters leaned panting against their posts, exhausted but relieved. The insects had left their own smell in the smoky air, a tang of mildew, Guilford thought, or ammonia. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, realized his face was covered with soot.
“Next time you come away from town, outfit yourself for it. This isn’t New York City.”
Guilford smiled weakly. “I’m beginning to understand that.”
“Here for long?”
“A few months. Here and on the Continent.”
“The Continent! There’s nothing on the Continent but wilderness and crazy Americans, excuse me for saying so.”
“I’m with a scientific survey.”
“Well, I hope you don’t plan on doing much walking with ankleboots like those on your feet. The livestock will kill you and whittle your pins.”
“Maybe a little walking,” Guilford said.
He was glad enough to find his way back to the Pierce home, to wash himself and spend an evening in the buttery light of the oil lamps. After a generous supper Caroline and Alice disappeared into the kitchen, Lily was sent to bed, and Jered took down from his shelf a leather-bound 1910 atlas of Europe, the old Europe of sovereigns and nation. How meaningless it had come to be, Guilford thought, and in just eight years, these diagrams of sovereignty imposed on the land like the whim of a mad god. Wars had been fought for these lines. Now they were so much geometry, a tile of dreams.
“It hasn’t changed as much as you might think,” Jered said. “Old loyalties don’t die easily. You know about the Partisans.”
The Partisans were bands of nationalists — rough men who had come from the colonies to reclaim territory they still thought of as German or Spanish or French. Most disappeared into the Darwinian bush, reduced to subsistence or devoured by the wildlife. Others practiced a form of banditry, preying on settlers they regarded as invaders. The Partisans were certainly a potential threat — coastal piracy, abetted by various European nations in exile, made resupply problematic. But the Partisans, like other settlers, had yet to penetrate into the roadless interior of the continent.
“That may not be true,” Jered said. “They’re well armed, some of them, and I’ve heard rumors of Partisan attacks on wildcat miners in the Saar. They’re not kindly disposed toward Americans.”
Guilford wasn’t intimidated. The Donnegan party had not encountered more than a few ragged Partisans living like savages in the Aquitaine lowlands. The Finch expedition would land on the continent at the mouth of the Rhine, American-occupied territory, and follow the river as far as it was navigable, past the Rheinfelden to the Bodensee, if possible. Then they would scout the Alps for a navigable pass where the old Roman roads had run.
“Ambitious,” Jered said evenly.
“We’re equipped for it.”
“Surely you can’t anticipate every danger…”
“That’s the point. People have been crossing the Alps for centuries. It’s not such a hard journey in summer. But never these Alps. Who knows what might have changed? That’s what we mean to find out.”
“Just fifteen men,” Jered said.
“We’ll steam as far as we can up the Rhine. Then it’s flat-bottom boats and portage.”
“You’ll need someone who knows the Continent. What little of it anyone does know.”
“There are trappers and bush runners at Jeffersonville on the Rhine. Men who’ve been there since the Miracle, nearly.”
“You’re the photographer, Caroline tells me.”
“Yessir.”
“First time out?”
“First time on the Continent, but I was with Walcott at the Gallatin River last year. I’m not inexperienced.”
“Liam helped you secure this position?”
“Yes.”
“No doubt he thought he was doing the right thing. But Liam is insulated by the Atlantic Ocean. And by his money. He may not understand the position he’s put you in. Passions run high on the continent. Oh, I know all about the Wilson Doctrine, Europe a wilderness open for resettlement by all, and so on, and it’s a noble idea in its way — though I’m glad England was able to enforce an exception. But you had to sink a few French and German gunboats before their rump governments would yield. And even so…” He tamped his pipe. “You’re going in harm’s way. I’m not sure Liam knows that.”
“I’m not afraid of the continent.”
“Caroline needs you. Lily needs you. There’s nothing cowardly about protecting yourself and your family.” He leaned closer. “You’re welcome to stay here as long as necessary. I can write to Liam and explain. Think about it, Guilford.” He lowered his voice. “I don’t want my niece to be a widow.”
Caroline came through the door from the kitchen. She looked at Guilford solemnly, her lovely hair awry, then turned up the gaslights one by one until the room was ablaze with light.
Chapter Four
Spending time at the Sanders-Moss estate was much like having his testicles removed. Among the women he was a pet; among the men, a eunuch.
Hardly flattering, Elias Vale thought, but not unexpected. He entered the house as a eunuch because no other entrance was open to him. Given time, he would own the doors. He would topple the palace, if it pleased him. The harem would be his and the princes would vie for his favor.
Tonight was a soirée celebrating some occasion he had already forgotten: a birthday, an anniversary. Since he wouldn’t be required to offer a toast, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that Mrs. Sanders-Moss had once again invited him to adorn one of her functions; that she trusted him to be acceptably eccentric, to charm but not to embarrass. That is, he wouldn’t drink to excess, make passes at wives, or treat the powerful as equals.
At dinner he sat where he was directed, entertaining a congressman’s daughter and a junior Smithsonian administrator with stories of table-rapping and spirit manifestations, all safely second-hand and wry. Spiritualism was a heresy in these lately pious times, but it was an American heresy, more acceptable than Catholicism, for instance, with its Latin Masses and absent European Popes. And when he had fulfilled his function as a curio he simply smiled and listened to the conversation that flowed around his unobstructing presence like a river around a rock.
The hard part, at least at first, had been maintaining his poise in the presence of so much luxury. Not that he was entirely a stranger to luxury. He had been raised in a good enough New England home — had fallen from it like a rebel angel. He knew a dinner fork from a dessert fork. But he had slept under a great many cold bridges since then, and the Sanders-Moss estate was an order of magnitude more grandiose than anything he remembered. Electric lights and servants; beef sliced thin as paper; mutton dressed with mint sauce.
Waiting table was Olivia, a pretty and timid Negress whose cap sat perpetually askew on her head. Vale had pressed Mrs. Sanders-Moss not to punish her after the christening dress was rescued, which accomplished two purposes at once, to spotlight his kindheartedness and to ingratiate himself with the help, never a bad thing. But Olivia still avoided him assiduously; she seemed to think he was an evil spirit. Which was not far from the truth, though Vale would quibble with the adjective. The universe was aligned along axes more complex than poor simple Olivia would ever know.
Olivia brought the dessert course. Table talk turned to the Finch expedition, which had reached
England and was preparing to cross the Channel. The congressman’s daughter to Vale’s left thought it was all very brave and interesting. The junior administrator of mollusks, or whatever he was, thought the expedition would be safer on the continent than in England.
The congressman’s daughter disagreed. “It’s Europe proper they should be afraid of.” She frowned becomingly. “You know what they say. Everything that lives there is ugly, and most of it is deadly.”
“Not as deadly as human beings.” The young functionary, on the other hand, wanted to appear cynical. Probably he imagined it made him seem older.
“Don’t be scandalous, Richard.”
“And seldom as ugly.”
“They’re brave.”
“Brave enough, but in their place I’d worry more about the Partisans. Or even the English.”
“It hasn’t come to that.”
“Not yet. But the English are no friends of ours. Kitchener is provisioning the Partisans, you know.”
“That’s a rumor, and you shouldn’t repeat it.”
“They’re endangering our European policy.”
“We were talking about the Finch expedition, not the English.”
“Preston Finch can run a river, certainly, but I predict they’ll take more casualties from bullets than from rapids. Or monsters.”
“Don’t say monsters, Richard.”
“Chastisements of God.”
“Just the thought of it makes me shiver. Partisans are only people, after all.”
“Dear girl. But I suppose Dr. Vale would be out of business if women weren’t inclined to the romantic point of view. Isn’t that so?”
Vale performed his best and most unctuous smile. “Women are better able to see the infinite. Or less afraid of it.”
“There!” The congressman’s daughter blushed happily. “The infinite, Richard.”
Vale wished he could show her the infinite. It would burn her pretty eyes to cinders, he thought. It would peel the flesh from her skull.
After dinner the men retired to the library with brandies and Vale was left with the women. There was considerable talk of nephews in the military and their lapses of communication, of husbands keeping late hours at the State Department. Vale felt a certain resonance in these omens but couldn’t fathom their final significance. War? War with England? War with Japan? Neither seemed plausible… but Washington since Wilson’s death was a mossbound well, dark and easily poisoned.
Pressed for wisdom, Vale confined himself to drawing-room prophecies. Lost cats and errant children; the terrors of yellow fever, polio, influenza. His visions were benign and hardly supernatural. Private questions could be handled at his business address, and, in fact, his clientele had increased considerably in the two months since his first encounter with Eleanor. He was well on his way to becoming Father Confessor to a generation of aging heiresses. He kept careful notes.
The evening dragged on and showed no signs of becoming especially productive: not much to feed his diary tonight, Vale thought. Still, this was where he needed to be. Not just to bolster his income, though that was certainly a welcome side effect. He was following a deeper instinct, perhaps not quite his own. His god wanted him here.
And one does what a god wants, because that is the nature of a god, Vale thought: to be obeyed. That above all.
As he was leaving, Eleanor steered a clearly quite drunken man toward him. “Dr. Vale? This is Professor Randall, you were introduced, weren’t you?”
Vale shook hands with the white-haired venerable. Among Eleanor’s collection of academics and civil-service nonentities, which one was this? Randall, ah, something at the Natural History Museum, a curator of… could it be paleontology? That orphaned science.
“See him to his automobile,” Eleanor said, “won’t you? Eugene, go with Dr. Vale. A walk around the grounds might clear your head.”
The night air smelled of blossoms and dew, at least when the professor was downwind. Vale looked at his companion more carefully, imagined he saw pale structures under the surface of Randall’s body. Coral growths of age (parchment skin, arthritic knuckles) obscured the buried soul. If paleontologists possessed souls.
“Finch is mad,” Randall muttered, continuing some abandoned conversation, “if he thinks… if he thinks he can prove…”
“There’s nothing to prove tonight, sir.”
Randall shook his head and squinted at Vale, seeing him perhaps for the first time. “You. Ah. You’re the fortune-teller, yes?”
“In a way.”
“See the future, do you?”
“Through a glass,” Vale said. “Darkly.”
“The future of the world?”
“More or less.”
“We talk about Europe,” Randall said. “Europe, the Sodom so corrupt it was cast into the refiner’s fire. And so we pluck out the seeds of Europeanism wherever we find them, whatever that means. Gross hypocrisy, of course. A political fad. Do you want to see Europe?” He swept his hand at the white-columned Sanders-Moss estate. “Here it is! The court at Versailles. It might as well be.”
The stars were vivid in the spring sky. Lately Vale had begun to perceive a kind of depth in starry skies, a layering or recession that made him think of forests and meadows, of tangled thickets in which predatory animals lurked. As above, so below.
“This Creator men like Finch drone on about,” Randall said. “One wants to believe, of course. But there are no fingerprints on a fossil. Washed off, I suppose, in the Flood.”
Obviously Randall shouldn’t be saying any of this. The climate of opinion had shifted since the Miracle and men like Randall were themselves a kind of living fossil — wooly mammoths trapped in an ice age. Of course Randall, a collector of bones, could hardly know that Vale was a collector of indiscretions.
Who would pay to know what Randall thought of Preston Finch? And in what currency, and when?
“I’m sorry,” Randall said. “This could hardly interest you.”
“On the contrary,” Vale said, walking with his prey into the dewy night. “It interests me a great deal.”
Chapter Five
The flat-bottom riverboats arrived from New York and were transferred to a cross-channel steamer, the Argus. Guilford, Finch, Sullivan, and the surveyor, Chuck Hemphill, supervised the loading and annoyed the vessel’s cargo master until they were banished to the tarry dock. Spring sunlight washed the wharfs and softened the tarry planks; clots of false lotus rotted against the pilings; gulls wheeled overhead. The gulls had been among the first terrestrial immigrants to Darwinia, followed in turn by human beings, wheat, barley, potatoes; wildflowers (loosestrife, bindweed); rats, cattle, sheep, lice, fleas, cockroaches — all the biological stew of the coastal settlements.
Preston Finch stood on the wharf with his huge hands clamped behind his back, face shadowed by his solar topee. Finch was a paradox, Guilford thought: a hardy man, powerful despite his age, a weathered river-runner whose judgment and courage were unquestionable. But his Noachian geology, fashionable though it might have become in the nervous aftermath of the Miracle, seemed to Guilford a stew of half-truths, dubious reasoning, and wistful Protestantism. Implausible no matter how he dressed up the matter with theories of sedimentation and quotations from Berkeley. Moreover, Finch refused to discuss these ideas and didn’t brook criticism from his colleagues, much less from a mere photographer. What must it be like, Guilford wondered, to have such a baroque architecture crammed inside one’s skull? Such a strange cathedral, so well buttressed, so well defended?
John Sullivan, the expedition’s other gray eminence, leaned against a wharfhouse wall, arms crossed, smiling faintly under a broad straw hat. Two aging men, Finch and Sullivan, but Sullivan smiled — that was the difference.
The last of the crates descended into the Argus’s hold. Finch signed a manifest for the sweating cargo master. There was an air of finality about the act. The Argus would sail in the morning.
Sullivan touched Guilford’
s shoulder. “Do you have a few free minutes, Mr. Law? There’s something you might like to see.”
Museum of Monstrosities, announced the shingle above the door.
The building was hardly more than a shack, but it was an old building, as buildings went in London, perhaps one of the first permanent structures erected along the marshy banks of the Thames. It looked to Guilford as if it had been used and abandoned many times over.
“Here?” Guilford asked. They had come a short walk from the wharfs, behind the brick barrelhouses, where the air was gloomy and stagnant.
“Tuppence to see the monsters,” Sullivan said. His drawl was unreconstructed Arkansas, but on his lips it sounded like Oxford. Or at least what Guilford imagined an Oxford accent might have been like. “The proprietor’s a drunk. But he does have one interesting item.”
The “proprietor,” a sullen man who reeked of gin, opened the door at Sullivan’s knock, took Sullivan’s money into his grimy hand, and vanished wordlessly behind a canvas curtain, leaving his guests to peer at the taxidermical trophies arrayed on crude shelves around the narrow front room. The smaller exhibits were legitimate, in the sense that they were recognizable Darwinian animals badly stuffed and mounted: a buttonhook bird, a miscellany of six-legged scavengers, a leopard snake with its hinged jaws open. Sullivan raised a window blind, but the extra light was no boon, in Guilford’s opinion. Glass eyes glittered and peered in odd directions.
“This,” Sullivan said.
He meant the upright skeleton languishing in a corner. Guilford approached it skeptically. At first glance it looked like the skeleton of a bear — crudely bipedal, a cage of ribs attached to a ventral spine, the fearsome skull long and multiply jointed, teeth like flint knives. Frightening. “But it’s a fake,” Guilford said.
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