Darwinia

“I suppose she must. But—”

“You kept them under the bed.”

“Yes!”

“Olivia dusts under the bed. She knows when you’ve looked at the box. She knows because the dust is disturbed. She pays attention to dust.”

“That’s possible, but—”

“You haven’t opened the box for a long time. More than a year.”

Mrs. Sanders-Moss lowered her eyes. “But I’ve thought of it. I didn’t forget.”

“Olivia treats the box as a shrine. She worships it. She opens it when you’re out of the house. She’s careful not to disturb the dust. She thinks of it as her own.”

“Olivia…”

“She thinks you don’t do justice to the memory of your daughter.”

“That’s not true!”

“But it’s what she believes.”

“Olivia took the box?”

“Not a theft, by her lights.”

“Please — Dr. Vale — where is it? Is it safe?”

“Quite safe.”

“Where?”

“In the maid’s quarters, at the back of a closet.” (For a moment Vale saw it in his mind’s eye, the wooden box like a tiny coffin swathed in ancient linens; he smelled camphor and dust and cloistered grief.)

“I trusted her!”

“She loved the girl, too, Mrs. Sanders-Moss. Very much.” Vale took a deep, shuddering breath; began to reclaim himself, felt the god leaving him, subsiding into the hidden world again. The relief was exquisite. “Take back what belongs to you. But please, don’t be too hard on Olivia.”

Mrs. Sanders-Moss looked at him with a very gratifying expression of awe.

She thanked him effusively. He turned down the offer of money. Both her tentative smile and her shaken demeanor were encouraging, very promising indeed. But, of course, only time would tell.

When she had taken her umbrella and gone he opened a bottle of brandy and retreated to an upstairs room where the rain rattled down a frosted window, the gaslights were turned high, and the only book in sight was a tattered pulp-paper volume entitled His Mistress’s Petticoat.

To outward appearance, the change worked in him by the manifestation of the god was subtle. Inwardly, he felt exhausted, almost wounded. There was a rawness, not quite pain, which extended to every limb. His eyes burned. The liquor helped, but it would be another day until he was completely himself.

With luck the brandy would moderate the dreams that followed a manifestation. In the dreams he found himself inevitably in some cold wilderness, some borderless vast gray desert, and when out of a misplaced curiosity or simply mischief he lifted up a random stone he uncovered a hole from which poured countless insects of some unknown and hideous kind, many-legged, pincered, venomous, swarming up his arm and invading his skull.

He wasn’t a religious man. He had never believed in spirits, table-rapping, astrology, or the Resurrected Christ. He wasn’t sure he believed in any of those things now; the sum of his belief resided in this single god, the one that had touched him with such awful, irresistible intimacy.

He had the skills of a confidence man and he was certainly not averse to a profitable larceny, but there had been no collusion in the case of, for instance, Mrs. Sanders-Moss; she was a mystery to him, and so was the servant girl Olivia and the memento mori in the shoe box. His own prophecies took him by surprise. The words, not his own, had fallen from his lips like ripe fruit from a tree.

The words served him well enough, mind you. But they served another purpose, too.

Larceny, by comparison, would have been infinitely more simple.

But he took another glass of brandy and consoled himself: You don’t come to immortality by the low road.

A week passed. Nothing. He began to worry.

Then a note in the afternoon mail:

Dr. Vale,

The treasures have been recovered. You have my most boundless gratitude.

I am entertaining guests this coming Thursday at six o’clock for dinner and conversation. If you happen to be free to attend, you would be most welcome.

RSVP

Mrs. Edward Sanders-Moss

She had signed it, Eleanor.

Chapter Three

Odense docked at the makeshift harbor in the marshy estuary of the Thames, a maze of colliers, oilers, heighters and sailing ships gathered in from the outposts of the Empire. Guilford Law, plus family, plus the body of the Finch expedition and all its compasses, alidades, dried food, and paraphernalia, transferred to a ferry bound up the Thames to London. Guilford personally supervised the loading of his photographic equipment — the carefully crated 8''x10'' glass plates, the camera, lenses, and tripod.

The ferry was a cold and noisy steamer but blessed with generous windows. Caroline comforted Lily, who disliked the hard wooden benches, while Guilford gave himself up to the scrolling shoreline.