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
