Darwinia

Postscriptum. With the aid of our “Martian mules” we will be able to portage the folding motor-launches — clever light constructions, white oak and Michigan pine, sixteen-footers with watertight storage and detachable skags — and travel above the cascades probably as far as Lake Constance (which Erasmus calls the Bodensee). All that we have collected and learned to date sails back to J’ville with the Weston.

Preston Finch I think resentful of my parley with Erasmus — he looks at me from under his solar topee like an irritable Jehovah — but Tom Compton seems impressed: he is at least willing to speak to me lately, not just suffer my presence on Sullivan’s account. Even offered me a draw on his notorious spittle-drenched pipe, which I politely declined, though perhaps that put us back to Square One — he has taken to waving his oilcloth bag of dried leaf at me laughing in a manner not altogether flattering.

We march in the morning if weather is at all reasonable. Home seems farther away than ever, the land grows stranger by the day.

Chapter Nine

Caroline adjusted to the rhythms of her uncle Jered’s household, strange as those rhythms were. Like London, or most of the world these days, there was something provisional about her uncle’s home. He kept odd hours. Often it was left to Alice (and more often now, Caroline herself) to mind the store. She found herself learning the uses of nuts and bolts, of winches and penny nails and quicklime. And there was the mildly entertaining enigma of Colin Watson, who slept on a cot in the storeroom and crept in and out of the building like a restless spirit. Periodically he would take an evening meal at the Pierce table, where he was faultlessly polite but about as talkative as a brick. He was gaunt, not gluttonous, and he blushed easily, Caroline thought, for a soldier. Jered’s table talk was sometimes coarse.

Lily had adjusted easily enough to her new environment, less easily to the absence of her father. She still asked from time to time where Daddy was. “Across the English Channel,” Caroline told her, “where no one has been before.”

“Is he safe?”

“Very safe. And very brave.”

Lily asked about her father most often at bedtime. It was Guilford who had always read to her, a ritual that left Caroline feeling faintly and unreasonably jealous. Guilford read to Lily with a wholeheartedness Caroline couldn’t match, distrustful as she was of the books Lily liked, their unwholesome preoccupation with fairies and monsters. But Caroline took up the task in his absence, mustering as much enthusiasm as she could. Lily needed the reassurance of a story before she could wholly relax, abandon vigilance, sleep.

Caroline envied the simplicity of the ritual. Too often, she carried her own burden of doubt well into the morning hours.

Still, the summer nights were warm and the air rich with a fragrance that was, though strange, not entirely unpleasant. Certain native plants, Jered said, blossomed only at night. Caroline imagined alien poppies, heavy-headed, narcotic. She learned to leave her bedroom window open and let the flowered breezes play over her face. She learned, as the summer progressed, to sleep more easily.

It was Lily’s sleeplessness, as July waned, that served as notice that something had changed in Jered’s house.

Lily with dark bands beneath her eyes. Lily picking dazedly at breakfast. Lily silent and grim at the dinner table, cringing away from Caroline’s uncle.

Caroline found herself unwilling to ask what was wrong — wanting nothing to be wrong, hating the idea of yet another crisis. She summoned her courage one warm night after another chapter of “Dorothy,” as Lily called these repetitious fables, when Lily was still restless.

The little girl drew her blanket above her chin. “It wakes me up when they fight.”

“When who fight, Lily?”

“Aunt Alice and Uncle Jered.”

Caroline didn’t want to believe it. Lily must be hearing other voices, perhaps from the street.