him seesaw, searching for a safe change of tangent. “I would appreciate some meaningful medicines, darling. You’ll set these people straight. I have a snake in my gut.”
“No,” said Dulcy. “You don’t.”
“A snake on fire, running up my throat to my brain. Go fetch a real bottle.”
One snake would lead to another—he could talk about nearly stepping on a rattlesnake in a Nevada silver mine for hours. She stalled by turning pages: the newest entry was a description of a childhood dream, about being small and trapped. At the end of underground , you can hear the rocks scrape and talk , Walton had scratched out and talk and replaced it with and swell and growl .
“Is your silly sister cavorting in the city?”
Dulcy nodded. Swanning, dancing, running a finger too far up timid Alfred’s sleeve. And why not? The workman across the street moved with economy and grace. She liked his curly hair, and wished she were in the turret, though it made her queasy when the man walked near the edge. She was no good at heights.
•••
An hour later, Dulcy walked into Victor’s murky feudal study, an acre of Canadian rain forest smashed into four hundred pompous square feet. Her face was calm and scrubbed, and she wore a flattering moss-green dress that went well with the paneling, but her mind seethed. She didn’t want to be here; she didn’t want to be anywhere.
Henning gestured to a chair. It took her a moment to make out Victor in the gloom at the far end of the room, showing a kingly profile, backlit by the window she had to face. He nodded but did not come to greet her, and she sat down, rattled and queasy, and pretended to look around. This study was almost identical to the one she remembered from his Manhattan apartment, but maps of Africa had replaced logging regions in the Pacific Northwest, and everything that could be thrown—lamps, chairs, ashtrays—was metal or wood. No porcelain.
He said nothing. He looked well, though her examination was sidelong. He seemed a little thicker, not plump but plush; his frame was still graceful at thirty-five, though he’d never been boyish. He’d shaved his moustache and looked a little less like a catalogue illustration. He had glass-green eyes, smooth skin, even features. His voice was steady and low, his movements careful and contained, his mind a system of angry crevasses.
He thought things to death, one reason why he hadn’t greeted her: she needed to crawl through all three acts of the revenge drama he’d been writing in his mind before he’d deign to see her as human again. She was here only because of money; she was here because she was the keeper of Walton’s unreliable mind. They’d stacked all the bright notebooks on the table next to her chair, and somewhere above her head she heard a muffled phonograph play soothing violin music for the man himself, who was being bathed by two matronly nurses. Twice Dulcy thought she heard Walton’s cane hit the tile in time with the music.
Henning lifted the black notebook from the top of the stack and handed it to her with a glass of red wine. Tea leaves, or maybe a bowl of entrails: she was the oracle who’d be executed if she failed to divine a story. “We’ve looked through each book,” said Henning. “And we can find nothing helpful.”
She wanted the wine, but she opened the black journal. New shiny silk outside, the same musky interior. The first pages, the only part she’d ever seen, were in Cornish, and presumably gave an explicit account of every moment young Walton had spent touching a woman’s skin. Her brothers had filched it one afternoon when Dulcy was about ten, shrieking with joy while they worked out words like bronn and pedryn and kussynnow , lust and seks and plesour . “Say that we saw this, and we’ll drop you in a hole,” they said. Her mother had just died, but theirs had been gone for years.
When he sailed to America, Walton had left his Cornish evasions behind and recorded women’s names and dates. Failing names, he’d provided short descriptions:
Beryl, red top and bottom, plump. Bisbee, 2 April 1877, morning.
Mrs. Jas. Merton, Lafayette at Sixth Street, 13 November 1891. A horrible laugh.
A Circassian ! Every hair braided ! Constantinople, 7 and 8 August 1899.
Dulcy turned pages and determined a method: if Walton slept with someone more than a few times, an asterisk next to the name led to a separate page of hash marks and insights. Jane, his future first wife (some progress ; a conversation about alternative methods given her aversions ), was the ninth woman to earn this honor .
Across the room Victor shifted his feet and picked his nose. Sometimes, when he was nervous, he was capable of forgetting himself. Dulcy took a sip and turned pages. Philomela, Walton’s second wife, Dulcy’s mother:
So pliable, so reactive.
Dulcy had never been sheltered, but she didn’t want to know everything Walton’s memory had to offer. She flipped ahead and a carte de visite of a naked woman with a limber leg fell on the floor. Henning stretched out his own long leg, capped with a good boot, and dragged the card closer. He placed it facedown on a side table. She turned to the last entries.
Ayama, so very tall, Cape Town, last days of August.
Edina Branstetter (Brandsdotter?), brunette, so ill, 2 October, near lifeboats.
So, so, so. Dulcy wasn’t sure if Walton had meant that he wasn’t well, or Edina wasn’t well; if Edina had been well to begin with, she might not be for long. Only one of these women had given Walton syphilis, but he’d been criminally generous in giving it back to the world.
“Did you know?” Victor finally spoke, but he hadn’t budged from the far side of the room.
“Know what?” asked Dulcy, eying the pile, wondering what was missing.
“That he was sick again.”
There was no again ; Walton had been sick for twenty years. Victor had always been good at avoiding unpleasantness, and Walton certainly hadn’t volunteered the truth when they’d first bought the mines, or when he’d introduced his daughter to his new business partner. After the engagement, when business in Africa was going full bore and Dulcy finally understood Victor’s ignorance, she’d watched his face flatten as she told him his partner was syphilitic: he shook his head and walked out of the room, and she never brought it up again.
“He said he was a special case. He seemed so well, and his mind seemed so clear. Is it possible someone reinfected him deliberately? To bring me down?”
“There are no special cases,” said Dulcy. “And this has nothing to do with you.”
“This has a great deal to do with me.”
Well, she thought. Don’t tell Walton that he isn’t the center of his own universe. She started to speak, but he held up a hand: silence. Dulcy’s face burned, and she could feel Henning study the floor. “We must cure him.”
“Victor, there’s no cure. It kills everyone.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “Your father has mentioned a half-dozen new therapies.”
Dulcy, with the evidence of Walton’s optimism sitting politely on her lap, looked directly at Victor for the first time. His face was still perfect, but his eyes jumped around the room. The part of Victor that checked and double-checked most situations had always veered away from thinking sanely about Walton’s disease. She could imagine her father’s
