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 monologue: all he needed was another month of electrical magic wands or radioactive hypodermics in an Italian or German clinic. All he needed was another batch of nurses.
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,