“I hate to think of you at sea. There have been threats to shipping, you know. They say the American fleet is massed in the North Atlantic.”
“I don’t care about that.”
“Perhaps you should.”
Mrs. de Koenig passed her a note from Colin later that week. There was a general mobilization, he said; he might be shipped out; he wanted to see her as soon as possible.
War, Caroline thought bitterly. Everyone was talking about war. Only ten years since the world was shaken to its foundations, and now they want to fight over the scraps. Over a wilderness!
The Times, a six-page daily pressed on fibrous mosque-pulp paper, had devoted most of its recent editorials to chastening the Americans: for administering the Continent as if it were an American protectorate, for “imposing boundaries” on the British Isles, for various sins of arrogance or complacency. Caroline’s accent provoked raised eyebrows at the stores and market stalls. Today Lily had asked her why it was so bad to be an American.
“It isn’t,” Caroline told her. “That’s all just talk. People are upset, but they’ll calm down sooner or later.”
“We’re riding a ship soon,” Lily said.
“Probably.”
She had stopped taking meals with Alice and Jered. She would have rented a room for herself and Lily at the Empire if her stipend from home had been more generous. But even pub meals were an ordeal now, with all this talk of war. Her aunt and uncle were stiffly formal with Caroline when they couldn’t avoid her altogether, though they still fawned over Lily. Caroline found this easier to bear since her talk with Colin. She found herself nearly pitying Alice — poor staunchly moral Alice, locked into a network of guilt as tight as those curls she wove into her graying hair.
“Sleep,” Caroline told Lily that night, tucking her under her cotton sheets, smoothing the fabric. “Sleep well. We’ll be traveling soon.”
One way or another.
Lily nodded solemnly. Since Christmas, the girl had stopped asking about her father. The answers were never satisfactory.
“Away from here?” Lily asked.
“Away from here.”
“Somewhere safe?”
“Somewhere safe.”
A sunlit morning. There was pavement being poured on Fenchurch, the smell of tar wafting over the town, everywhere the clap of horses’ hooves and the flat ring of buckles and reins.
She saw Colin waiting on Thames Street near the docks, sunlight at his back, reading the newspaper. Her sense of excitement rose. She didn’t know what she would tell him. She didn’t have a plan. Only a collection of hopes and fears.
She had taken a bare handful of steps toward him when sirens wailed from the City Center.
The sound paralyzed her, raised gooseflesh on her shoulders.
The crowd on the quay seemed paralyzed too. Colin looked up from his paper in consternation. Caroline raised her arm; he ran to her. The sirens wailed on.
She fell into his embrace. “What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“I want my daughter.” Something bad was happening. Lily would be frightened.
“Come on, then.” Colin took her hand and gently pressed it. “We’ll find Lily. But we have to hurry.”
The wind came from the east — a steady spring wind, smoky and fragrant. The river was placid and white with sails. South along the marshy bank of the Thames, the stacks of the gunboats had only just appeared.
Chapter Twenty
It’s simple, Crane had told him. We’re part of something that’s getting stronger. And they’re part of something that’s getting weaker.
Maybe it looked that way from Crane’s point of view. Crane had slid into the ranks of Washington’s elite — well, the semi-elite, the under-elite — like a gilded suppository. Only months in town, and now he was working for Senator Klassen in some shadowy capacity; had lately taken his own apartment (for which small mercy thank the gods); he was a fixture at the Sanders-Moss salon and had earned the right to condescend to Elias Vale in public places.
Whereas Vale’s own invitations had dropped off in number and frequency, his clients were fewer and less affluent, and even Eugene Randall saw him less often.
Randall, of course, had been subpoenaed by a congressional committee investigating the loss of the Finch expedition. Perhaps even a deceased spouse takes second place to such lofty obligations. The dead, in any case, were notoriously patient.
Still and all, Vale had begun to wonder whether the gods were playing favorites.
He sought distraction where he could find it. It was one of his newer clients, an elderly Maryland abortionist, who had given Vale the amber vial of morphine and a chased-silver hypodermic syringe. Had shown him how to find a vein and raise it and prick it with the hollow needle, a process which made him think abstractly of bees and venom. Oh sting of oblivion. He took to the habit recklessly.
The kit — it folded into a neat silver sleeve about the size of a cigarette case — was in his jacket pocket when he arrived at the Sanders-Moss estate. He hadn’t planned to use it. But the afternoon went badly. The weather was too wet for winter, too cold for spring. Eleanor welcomed him with an uneasy expression — one can only coax so much mileage out of a lost christening dress, Vale supposed — and after lunch a drunken junior congressman began to bait him about his work.
“Stock market tips, Mr. Vale? You talk to the dead, they must have a few choice observations. But I don’t suppose the dead have much opportunity to invest, do they?”
“In this district, Congressman, they don’t even vote.”
“Touched a sore point, Mr. Vale?”
“It’s Doctor Vale.”
“Doctor of what would that be exactly?”
Doctor of Immortality, Vale thought. Unlike you, you rotting slab of meat.
“You know, Mr. Vale, I happen to have looked into your past. Did a little research, especially when Eleanor here told me how much she was paying you to read her palm.”
“I don’t read palms.”
“No, but I bet you know how to read a balance sheet.”
“This is insulting.”
The congressman smiled gleefully. “Why, who told you that, Mr. Vale? John Wilkes Booth?”
Even Eleanor laughed.
“This is not the guest bathroom!” The maid Olivia tapped irritably at the door. “This the help bathroom?”
Vale ignored her. The hypodermic kit lay open on the green-tile floor. He slumped on the toilet. He had cranked open the pebbled window; a chill rain came in. The chain of the water closet tapped restlessly against the damp white wall.
He had taken off his jacket, rolled up his sleeve. He slapped the crotch of his left arm until a vein came up. Fuck them all, Vale thought primly.
The first shot was easeful, a still calm that enveloped him like a child’s blanket. The bathroom looked suddenly vague, as if wrapped in glassine.
But I am immortal, Vale thought.
He remembered Crane driving the knife through the back of his hand. Crane, it turned out, had a perverse fondness for self-mutilation. Liked to pierce himself with knives, cut himself with blades, prick himself with needles.
Well, I am no stranger to needles myself. Vale preferred the morphine even to Kentucky whiskey. The oblivion was more certain, somehow more comprehensive. He wanted more of it.
“Mr. Vale! That you in there?”
“Go away, Olivia, thank you.”
He reached for the syringe again. I am, after all, immortal. I cannot die. The implications of that fact had grown somewhat unnerving.
This time his skin resisted the needle. Vale pushed harder. It was like probing cheddar cheese. He thought he had found the vein at last, but when he pushed the plunger the skin beneath began to discolor, a massive, fluid bruise.