Darwinia (4 page)

What Pierce had not counted on was Caroline’s stubbornness. She would not be left alone with Lily a second time, even for a season, no matter the money involved or the repeated offers to hire a day maid for her. Nor did Guilford especially want to leave her, but this expedition was the hinge point of his career, maybe the difference between poverty and security.

But she would not be lenient. She threatened (though this made no sense) to leave him. Guilford answered all her objections calmly and patiently, and she yielded not an inch.

In the end she agreed to a compromise whereby Pierce would pay her way to London, where she would stay with family while Guilford continued on to the Continent. Her parents had been visiting London at the time of the Miracle and she claimed she wanted to see the place where they had died.

Of course you weren’t supposed to say that people had died in the Miracle: they were “taken” or they “passed over,” as if they’d been translated to glory between one breath and the next. And, Guilford thought, who knows? Maybe it really had happened that way. But, in fact, several million people had simply vanished from the face of the earth, along with their farms and cities and flora and fauna, and Caroline could not be forgiving of the Miracle; her view of it was violent and harsh.

It made him feel peculiar to be the only man aboard
Odense
with a woman and child in tow, but no one had made a hostile remark, and Lily had won over a few hearts. So he allowed himself to feel lucky.

After dinner the crowd broke up: the ship’s surgeon off to keep company with a flask of Canadian rye, the scientists to play cards over tattered felt tables in the smoking room, Guilford back to his cabin to read Lily a chapter from a good American fairy tale,
The Land of Oz
. The Oz books were everywhere since Brothers Grimm and Andersen fell out of favor, carrying as they did the taint of Old Europe. Lily, bless her, didn’t know books had politics. She just loved Dorothy. Guilford had grown rather fond of the Kansas girl himself.

At last Lily put her head back and closed her eyes. Watching her sleep, Guilford felt a pang of disorientation. It was odd, how life mixed things up. How had he come to be aboard a steamship bound for Europe? Maybe he hadn’t done the wise thing after all.

But of course there was no going back.

He squared the blanket over Lily’s cot, turned off the light and joined Caroline in bed. Caroline lay asleep with her back to him, a pure arc of human warmth. He curled against her and let the grumbling of the engines lull him to sleep.

He woke shortly after sunrise, restless; dressed and slipped out of the cabin without waking his wife or daughter.

The air on deck was raw, the morning sky blue as porcelain. Only a few high scrawls of cloud marked the eastern horizon. Guilford leaned into the wind, thinking of nothing in particular, until a young officer joined him at the rail. The sailor didn’t offer name or rank, only a smile, the accidental camaraderie of two men awake in the bitter dawn.

They stared into the sky. After a time the sailor turned his head and said, “We’re getting closer. You can smell it on the wind.”

Guilford frowned at the prospect of another tall tale. “Smell what?”

The sailor was an American; his accent was slow Mississippi. “Little like cinnamon. Little like wintergreen. Little like something you never smelled before. Like some dusty old spice from a place no white man’s ever been. You can smell it better if you close your eyes.”

Guilford closed his eyes. He was conscious of the chill of the air as it ran through his nostrils. It would be a small miracle if he could smell anything at all in this wind. And yet…

Cloves, he wondered? Cardamom? Incense?

“What is it?”

“The new world, friend. Every tree, every river, every mountain, every valley. The whole continent, crossing the ocean on a wind. Smell it?”

Guilford believed he did.

Eleanor Sanders-Moss was everything Elias Vale had expected: a buxom Southern aristocrat past her prime, spine stiff, chin high, rain streaming from a silk umbrella, dignity colonizing the ruins of youth. She left a hansom standing at the curb: apparently the renaissance of the automobile had passed Mrs. Sanders-Moss by. The years had not. She suffered from crow’s feet and doubt. The wrinkles were past hiding; the doubt she was transparently working to conceal.

She said, “Elias Vale?”

He smiled, matching her reserve, dueling for advantage. Every pause a weapon. He was good at this. “Mrs. Sanders-Moss,” he said. “Please, come in.”

She stepped inside the doorway, folded her umbrella and dropped it without ceremony into the elephant’s-foot holder. She blinked as he closed the door. Vale preferred to keep the lights turned low. On gloomy days like this the eye was slow to adjust. It was a hazard to navigation, but atmosphere was paramount: he dealt, after all, in the commerce of the invisible.

And the atmosphere was working its effect on Mrs. Sanders-Moss. Vale tried to imagine the scene from her perspective, the faded splendor of this rented town house on the wrong side of the Potomac. Side-boards furnished with Victorian bronzes. Greek wrestlers, Romulus and Remus suckling at the teats of a wolf. Japanese prints obscured by shadows. And Vale himself, prematurely white-haired (an asset, really), stout, his coat trimmed in velvet, homely face redeemed by fierce and focused eyes. Green eyes. He had been born lucky: the hair and eyes made him plausible, he often thought.

He spun out silence into the room. Mrs. Sanders-Moss fidgeted and said at last, “We have an appointment… ?”

“Of course.”

“Mrs. Fowler recommended—”

“I know. Please come into my study.”

He smiled again. What they wanted, these women, was someone
outré
, unworldly… a monster, but
their
monster, a monster domesticated but not quite tame. He took Mrs. Sanders-Moss past velvet curtains into a smaller room lined with books. The books were old, ponderous, impressive unless you troubled to decipher the faded gilt on their threadbare spines: collections of nineteenth-century sermons, which Vale had bought for pennies at a farm auction. The
arcanum
, people assumed.

He steered Mrs. Sanders-Moss into a chair, then sat opposite her across a burnished tabletop. She mustn’t know that he was nervous, too. Mrs. Sanders-Moss was no ordinary client. She was the prey he had been stalking for more than a year now. She was well-connected. She hosted a monthly salon at her Virginia estate which was attended by many of the city’s intellectual lights — and their wives.

He wanted very much to impress Mrs. Sanders-Moss.

She folded her hands in her lap and fixed him with an earnest gaze. “Mrs. Fowler recommended you quite highly, Mr. Vale.”

“Doctor,” he corrected.

“Dr. Vale.” She was still wary. “I’m not a gullible woman. I don’t consult spiritualists, as a rule. But Mrs. Fowler was very impressed by your readings.”

“I don’t read, Mrs. Sanders-Moss. There are no tea leaves here. I won’t look at your palm. No crystal ball. No tarot cards.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I’m not offended.”

“Well, she spoke very highly of you. Mrs. Fowler, I mean.”

“I recall the lady.”

“What you told her about her husband—”

“I’m happy she was pleased. Now. Why are
you
here?”

She put her hands in her lap. Restraining, perhaps, the urge to run.

“I’ve lost something,” she whispered.

He waited.

“A lock of hair…”

“Whose hair?”

Dignity fled. Now the confession. “My daughter’s. My first daughter. Emily. She died at two years. Diphtheria, you see. She was a perfect little girl. When she was ill I took a lock of her hair and kept it with a few of her things. A rattle, a christening dress…”

“All missing?”

“Yes! But it’s the hair that seems… the most terrible loss. It’s all I have of her, really.”

“And you want my help finding these items?”

“If it’s not too trivial.”

He softened his voice. “It’s not trivial at all.”

She looked at him with a gush of relief: she had made herself vulnerable and he had done nothing to hurt her; he had understood. That was what it was all about, Vale thought, this roundelay of shame and redemption. He wondered if doctors who treated venereal diseases felt the same way.

“
Can
you help me?”

“In all honesty, I don’t know. I can try. But you have to help
me
. Will you take my hand?”

Mrs. Sanders-Moss reached tentatively across the table. Her hand was small and cool and he folded it into his own larger, firmer grip.

Their eyes met.

“Try not to be startled by anything you might see or hear.”

“Speaking trumpets? That sort of thing?”

“Nothing as vulgar. This isn’t a tent show.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Never mind. Also, remember you may have to be patient. Often it takes time, contacting the other world.”

“I have nowhere to go, Mr. Vale.”

So the preliminaries were over and all that remained was to focus his concentration and wait for the god to rise from his inner depths — from what the Hindu mystics called “the lower chakras.” He didn’t relish it. It was always a painful, humiliating experience.

There was a price to be paid for everything, Vale thought.

The god: only he could hear it speak (unless he lent it his own, merely corporeal tongue); and when it spoke, he could hear nothing else. He had heard it for the first time in August of 1914.

Before the Miracle he had made a marginal living with a traveling show. Vale and two partners had trawled the hinterlands with a mummified body they purchased through the back door of a mortuary in Racine and billed as the corpse of John Wilkes Booth. The show played best in ditch towns where the circus never came, away from the rail lines, deep in cotton country, wheat country, Kentucky hemp country. Vale did all right, delivering the pitch and priming the crowds. He had a talent for talk. But it was a dying trade even before the Miracle, and the Miracle killed it. Rural income plummeted; the rare few with spending money wouldn’t part with their pennies just for a glimpse of an assassin’s leathery carcass. The Civil War was another generation’s apocalypse. This generation had its own. His partners abandoned Mr. Booth in an Iowa cornfield.

By the blistering August of that year Vale was on his own, peddling Bibles from a frayed sample case and traveling, often as not, by boxcar. Twice he was attacked by thieves. He had fought back: saved his Bibles but lost a supply of clean collars and partial vision in one eye, the green of the iris faintly and permanently clouded (but that played well, too).

He had walked a lot that day. A hot Ohio Valley day. The air was humid, the sky flat white, commerce listless. In the Olympia Diner (in some town, name forgotten, where the river coiled west like lazy smoke), the waitress claimed to hear thunder in the air. Vale spent his last money on a chicken-and-gravy sandwich and went off in search of a place to sleep.

Past sunset he found an empty brickworks at the edge of town. The air inside the enormous building was close and wet and stank of mildew and machine oil. Abandoned Furnaces loomed like scabrous idols in the darkness. He made a sort of bed high up in the scaffolding where he imagined he would be safe, sleeping on a stained mattress he dragged in from a hillside dump. But sleep didn’t come easily. A night wind guttered through the empty flames of the factory windows, but the air remained close and hot. Rain began falling, deep in the night. He listened to it trickle down a thousand crevices to pool on the muddy floor. Erosion, he thought, pricking at iron and stone.

The voice — not yet a voice but a premonitory, echoing thunder — came to him without warning, well past midnight.

It pinned him flat. Literally, he could not move. It was as if he was held in place by a tremendous weight, but the weight was electric, pulsing through him, sparking from his fingertips. He wondered if he had been struck by lightning. He thought he was about to die.

Then the voice spoke, and it spoke not words but, somehow, meanings; the equivalent words, when he attempted to frame them, were a lifeless approximation.
It knows my name
, Vale thought.
No, not my name, my secret
idea
of myself.

The electricity forced open his eyelids. Unwilling and afraid, he saw the god standing above him. The god was monstrous. It was ugly, ancient, its beetle-like body a translucent green, rain falling right through it. The god reeked, an obscure smell that reminded Vale of paint thinner and creosote.

How could he sum up what he learned that night? It was ineffable, unspeakable; he could hardly bring himself to sully it with language.

Yet, forced, he might say:

I learned that I have a purpose in life.

I learned that I have a destiny.

I learned that I have been chosen.

I learned that the gods are several and that they know my name.

I learned that there is a world under the world.

I learned that I have friends among the powerful.

I learned that I need to be patient.

I learned that I will be rewarded for my patience.

And I learned — this above all — that I might not need to die.

“You have a servant,” Vale said. “A Negress.”

Mrs. Sanders-Moss sat erect, eyes wide, like a schoolgirl called on by an intimidating teacher. “Yes. Olivia… her name is Olivia.”

He wasn’t conscious of speaking. He had given himself over to another presence. He felt the rubbery peristalsis of his lips and tongue as something foreign and revolting, as if a slug had crawled into his mouth.

“She’s been with you a long time — this Olivia.”