Jered met her and took the lunch box from her hand. He thanked her in his absent-minded way and said, “Tell Alice I’ll be home for supper. And to set another place.” A tall man in a neat but threadbare uniform stood behind him, his eyes frankly focused on her. Jered finally noticed the stare. “Lieutenant Watson? This is Caroline Law, my niece.”
The gaunt-faced Lieutenant nodded at her. “Miss,” he said gravely.
“Mrs.,” she corrected him.
“Mrs. Law.”
“Lieutenant Watson will be boarding in the back room of the store for a while.”
Caroline thought. Oh, will he? She gave the Lieutenant a more careful look.
“The city barracks is crowded,” Jered said. “We take in boarders occasionally. King and Country and all.”
Not my king, Caroline thought. Not my country.
Chapter Seven
“You know,” Professor Randall said, “I think I preferred the old-fashioned God, the one who refrained from miracles.”
“There are miracles in the Bible,” Vale reminded him. When the professor was drinking, which was most of the time, he inclined toward a morose theology. Today Randall sat in Vale’s study expounding his thoughts, buttons popping on his vest and his forehead dotted with perspiration.
“The miracles ought to have stayed there.” Randall sipped an expensive bourbon. Vale had bought it with the professor in mind. “Let God smite the Sodomites. Smiting the Belgians seems somehow ludicrous.”
“Be careful, Dr. Randall. He might smite you.”
“Surely He would have exercised that privilege long ago if He were so inclined. Have I committed a blasphemy, Mr. Vale? Then let me blaspheme some more. I doubt the death of Europe was an act of divine intervention, no matter what the clergy would like us to think.”
“That’s not a popular opinion.”
Randall glanced at the drawn curtains, the sheltering rows of books. “Am I in public here?”
“No.”
“It looks to me like a natural disaster. The Miracle, I mean. Obviously a disaster of some unknown kind, but if a man had never seen or even heard of, say, a tornado, wouldn’t that look like a miracle too?”
“Every natural disaster is called an act of God.”
“When in fact the tornado is only weather, no more supernatural than the spring rain.”
“No more and no less. But you’re a skeptic.”
“Everyone’s a skeptic. Did God lean down and put his thumbprint on the Earth, Dr. Vale? William Jennings Bryan cared deeply about the answer to that question, but I don’t.”
“Don’t you?”
“Not in that sense. Oh, a lot of people have made political careers out of religious piety and the fear of foreigners, but that won’t last. Not enough foreigners or miracles to sustain the crisis. The real question is how much we’ll suffer in the meantime. I mean political intolerance, fiscal meanness, even war.”
Vale opened his eyes slightly, the only visible sign of the excitement that leapt in him like a flame. The gods had pricked up their ears. “War?”
Randall might know something about war. He was a curator at the Smithsonian, but he was also one of that institution’s fund-raisers. He had spoken to congressional committees and had friends on the Hill.
Was that why Vale’s god had taken an interest in Randall? One of the ironies of serving a god was that one didn’t necessarily understand either means or ends. He knew only that something was at stake here, compared to which his own ambitions were trivial. The resolution of some eons-long plan required him to draw this portly cynic into his confidence, and so it would be. I will be rewarded, Vale thought. His god had promised him. Life eternal, perhaps. And a decent living in the meantime.
“War,” Randall said, “or at least some martial exercise to keep the Britons in their place. The Finch expedition — you’ve heard of it?”
“Certainly.”
“If the Finch expedition comes under Partisan attack, Congress will raise hell and blame the English. Sabers will be rattled. Young men will die.” Randall leaned toward Vale, the wattled skin of his neck creased and fleshy. “There’s no truth in it, is there? That you can talk to the dead?”
It was like a door opening. Vale only smiled. “What do you think?”
“What do I think? I think I’m looking at a confidence man who smells like soap and knows how to charm a widow. No offense.”
“Then why do you ask?”
“Because… because things are different now. I think you know what I mean.”
“I’m not sure I do.”
“I don’t believe in miracles, but…”
“But?”
“So much has changed. Politics, money, fashion — the map, obviously — but more than that. I see people, certain people, and there’s something in their eyes, their faces. Something new. As if they have a secret they’re keeping even from themselves. And that bothers me. I don’t understand it. So you see, Mr. Vale, I begin as a skeptic and end as a mystic. Blame it on the bourbon. But let me ask you again. Do you speak to the dead?”
“Yes. I do.”
“Honestly?”
“Honestly.”
“And what do the dead tell you, Mr. Vale? What do the dead talk about?”
“Life. The fate of the world.”
“Any particulars?”
“Often.”
“Well, that’s cryptic. My wife is dead, you know. Last year. Of pneumonia.”
“I know.”
“Can I talk to her?” He put his glass on the desk. “Is that actually possible, Mr. Vale?”
“Perhaps,” Vale said. “We’ll see.”
Chapter Eight
The Navy had a shallow-draft steamer at Jeffersonville to carry the Finch expedition to the navigable limits of the Rhine, but their departure was delayed when the pilot and much of the crew came down with Continental Fever. Guilford knew very little about the disease. “A bog fever,” Sullivan explained. “Exhausting but seldom fatal. We won’t be delayed long.”
And a few sultry days later the vessel was ready to sail. Guilford set up his cameras on the floating wooden pier, his bulky dry-plate camera as well as the roll-film box. Photography had not advanced much since the Miracle; the long labor struggles of 1915 had shut down Eastman Kodak for most that year, and the Hawk-Eye Works in Rochester had burned to the ground. But, as such things went, both cameras were modern and elegantly machined. Guilford had tinted several of his own plates from the Montana expedition and intended to do the same with his Darwinian work, and with that in mind he kept careful notes:
Fourteen members of expedition, pier at Jeffersonville, Europe: 1-r standing Preston Finch, Charles Curtis Hemphill, Avery Keck, Tom Gillvany, Kenneth Donner, Paul Robertson, Emil Swensen; 1-r kneeling Tom Compton, Christopher Tuckman, Ed Betts, Wilson W. Farr, Marion (“Diggs”) Digby, Raymond Burke, John W Sullivan.
B/ground: Naval vessel Weston, hull gunmetal gray; J/ville harbor turquoise water under deep blue sky; Rhine marshes in a light northerly wind, gold green cloudshadow, 8 a.m. We depart.
And so the journey began (it always seemed to be beginning, Guilford thought; beginning and beginning again) under a raw blue sky, spider rushes tossing like wheat in the wetlands. Guilford organized his gear in the tiny windowless space allotted to him and went up top to see whether the view had changed. By nightfall the marshy land gave way to a drier, sandier riverbank, the saltwater grasses to dense pagoda bushes and pipe-organ stalks on which the wind played tuneless calliope notes. After a gaudy sunset the land became an immense, limitless darkness. Too large, Guilford thought, too empty, and too plain a token of the indifferent machinery of God.