“Cured?”
Henning writhed in the chair, without visible movement. She waited until he finally looked at her directly. “Do you think I should change my mind?” asked Dulcy.
“No,” he said, reaching for his hat. He seemed relieved by the question. “He’ll only ever touch you when he’s angry or drunk.”
She went back to the farm. Martha, not understanding Dulcy’s reasons, was smug—she hadn’t liked Victor, and Dulcy now found this reassuring rather than maddening. Carrie passed on rumors from the city, sometimes out of kindness, and sometimes out of spite: people said Dulcy was a cold fish; that she’d had affairs during her travels with her father and fretted that Victor would discover the truth; that she’d been worried about all the normal things marriage entailed (this last was especially amusing). There had to be an explanation: all that money, and good looks. They didn’t usually go together. Why ever had Dulcy let that one go?
But as stories of Victor’s unraveling had begun to float up to Westfield—fights, some eruption at a whorehouse—any notion that she was in the wrong was lost to growing panic. Dulcy and Walton were due to leave for London and Portugal and Africa, a trip they’d planned as a last hurrah before the wedding was canceled. Now Dulcy slipped into the city a day early, and saw a doctor a friend had recommended, and understood she wasn’t free of Victor, after all. She told Walton—who’d had the sense to not tell Victor about Dulcy’s presence, or the trip—they’d have to delay, but Walton reacted to the news of her condition by telegramming a London doctor and booking them onto an even earlier ship. They were gone by nightfall.
•••
In Seattle, three years later, Dulcy was careful with her telegram, and Woolcock wired back immediately—
Dulce all grand hell of a turnaround, fine deal made, hope the Lord is happy, ask the Da when he’ll voyage next? Keeping mine eyes on happy places Huns and Sows haven’t noticed yet.
“Sows?” asked Victor.
“The English,” said Dulcy.
Henning looked amused, in a shuttered way. “Would he say more if you pretended to be your father?” asked Victor.
“I won’t,” she said.
“Mr. Woolcock wouldn’t feel the need to explain to Walton,” said Henning.
She’d be half in love with Henning, if he didn’t terrify her. She wrote again to Robert Woolcock:
Da ill now better soon please advise on new properties and remaining open accounts.
In the long hours before the reply, Dulcy imagined the wizened engineer studying the slip of paper.
Accounts here? How ill? Waht did he leave? Will advise on new prospects.
It was her turn to stare at a piece of paper. When she took Walton his lunch that day, she tidied his room, piled books by topic and color, and rattled on about wanting to be organized so they could leave soon. Did he have keys for a bank box or hotel box in Cape Town or Johannesburg, keys for her to keep from the last trip? Any bit of information she should pass on to Robert if Walton had some sad turn of health?
“Why would I keep a box in a tottery country like that, dear?” asked Walton. “And Robert knows to tell you everything.”
For the next round of wires, Dulcy was given permission to be circumspect but honest about the degree of Walton’s illness and the missing funds, and Woolcock sounded authentically frayed, even in telegramese:
I cannot believe. I will be discreet. Will he recover?
Dulcy didn’t know. That night she once again heard Victor in the gym, drumming on the punching bag while Henning talked through the rage, soothing, singsong, matter-of-fact. When they stopped, she listened to all the usual noises—drunks, wagons, ships’ horns; Seattle was a small city, but still a city—and sorted through the receipts in the brown book, peering down through the glasses she had too much vanity to wear in public.
She came up with nothing. Walton had docked in Cape Town on September 5 and checked in to the Mount Nelson Hotel. The next day, while Martha was beginning to die back in Westfield, he’d set up an account at Bank of Africa and given the bookbinder fifty pounds. This was mind-boggling: Dulcy wondered if the notebooks had gotten wet on the trip over, or if some blow to the head had driven Walton into this extravagance. He’d picked up the tab for a table of six that night at the Mount Nelson—Woolcock would have made the trip south from the Transvaal to meet him—and the next day he’d consulted a doctor she remembered too well, and then headed north to the mines, a two-day journey.
There was nothing about meeting the buyers on September 12, nothing about a transfer of nine hundred thousand pounds. A good hotel in Johannesburg and another doctor there, and then a train ticket south again, and two nights back in Cape Town. And then, after all this activity, nothing but receipts for a train to Port Elizabeth and stubs from that beach town—laundry, an Indian meal, whiskey, a pharmacist’s tab for a stomach fizz, morphine, and mercury. She looked in the black book and all the others, but there was no entry for any of those days, because all the notebooks but the brown were at the binder’s. He’d rendered himself mute—how had he possibly spent his time if he wasn’t recording his time?
A week later, he was back at the Mount Nelson. She imagined him wandering through Africa’s spring in the linen suits she’d found crumpled in his trunk, his mind filled with silk samples and women rather than mines. On September 27 he paid the Cape Town bookbinder one hundred pounds, and on September 28 he boarded his first ship home. There was nothing in the notebook to show if he’d left for even a moment when the ship docked in Australia or Hawaii.
Ides, wind, brain rot. He hadn’t lost anything important before, not even a pair of eyeglasses, but here they were.
Even when you are positive that a person has syphilis, it is not always best to say so... Indeed, in practising medicine, you will see and understand many sins and blemishes of which you must appear oblivious.
—Daniel W. Cathell, 1882
chapter 3
The Deep Yellow Book of Cures
•
Walton may have told Victor that he’d been cured by a fever treatment in Italy, but he knew better, whether or not he’d speak the truth out loud. Syphilis killed everyone, fast, slow, showily, invisibly. It had killed Dulcy’s twin brother and sister soon after birth, and it had killed her mother Philomela a few years later. The yellow book was filled with happy theories—written with a flourish, in a large hand—that Walton later covered with crabbed rage, big black hindsight X s, and brutal details: cock oozes, chancre on tongue, the lump on my ass cheek tells me their lie . He’d attempted lymph and blood inoculation, fever treatment, platinum, tellurium, vanadium, gold, every purgative in current use. He read historical accounts of the guaiacum cure and had Woolcock buy a lignum vitae plantation in Nicaragua near the harbor of Bluefields, where they’d first landed to cross the Isthmus in 1867.
Walton had either been lucky for twenty years or his energetic search for new treatment had been at least partially successful. He had recovered from palsies, bouts of mercury poisoning (ointments were the recognized treatment, but he’d tried older methods of inhaling or injecting; mercury always worked, after a fashion, but it deafened him, damaged his kidneys, and ulcerated his mouth), and a considerable amount of what was known as “excitability.” He had yet to experience a stroke, blackened teeth, blindness, meningitis, or—until now—memory loss. Unlike William Lobb (a fellow Cornishman), Calamity Jane, Oscar Wilde, Paul Gauguin, Randolph Churchill, or the thousands of other men and women who died from syphilis each year, he was still alive.
But