Darwinia

But Lily’s room had only a postage stamp of a window, and it looked out on the back alley, not the busy market street. Lily’s room was in fact a reconstructed closet off the rear hall, a closet Jered had converted into a tiny but comfortable bedchamber for his niece. Enough space for a girl, her bear, her book, and for her mother to sit a while and read.

But the closet shared a wall with Jered and Alice’s bedroom, and these walls weren’t especially thick. Did Jered and Alice argue, late at night, when they thought no one could hear? They seemed happy enough to Caroline… a little aloof, perhaps, moving in separate spheres the way older couples often do, but fundamentally content. They couldn’t have argued often before or Lily would have complained or at least showed symptoms.

The arguments must have started after Colin Watson arrived.

Caroline told Lily to ignore the sounds. Aunt Alice and Uncle Jered weren’t really angry, they were only having disagreements. They really loved each other very much. Lily seemed to accept this, nodded and closed her eyes. Her demeanor improved a little over the next few days, though she was still shy of her uncle. Caroline put the matter out of her mind and didn’t think of it again until the night she fell asleep halfway through a chapter of Dorothy and woke, well after midnight, cramped and uncomfortable, next to Lily.

Jered had been out. It was the sound of the door that woke her. Lieutenant Watson had been with him; Jered said a few inaudible words before the Lieutenant retired to his cellar. Then came Jered’s heavy tread in the corridor, and Caroline, afraid for no reason she Could define, pulled Lily’s door closed.

She felt a little absurd, and more than a little claustrophobic sitting cross-legged in this lightless chamber in her nightgown. She listened to the unbroken rhythm of her daughter’s breath, gentle as a sigh. Jered rumbled down the hallway on his way to bed, trailing a steam-engine reek of tobacco and beer.

Now she heard Alice’s low voice greet him, almost as deep as a man’s, and Jered’s, all chest and belly. At first Caroline couldn’t distinguish the words, and she couldn’t hear more than a phrase even when they began to raise their voices. But what she did hear was chilling.

… don’t know how you could get involved… (Alice’s voice.)

… doing my Goddamned duty… (Jered.)

Then Lily woke and needed comforting, and Caroline stroked her golden hair and soothed her.

… you know he might be killed…

… nothing of the kind!

… Caroline’s husband! Lily’s father!

… I don’t rule the world… I didn’t… wouldn’t…

And then quite suddenly the voices lapsed into silence. She imagined Jered and Alice dividing the big bed into territory, marking borders with shoulders and hips, as she and Guilford had sometimes done, after an argument.

They know something, she thought. Something about Guilford, something they don’t want to tell me.

Something bad. Something frightening.

But she was too tired, too shocked to make sense of it. She kissed Lily mechanically and retreated to her own room, to her open window and lazily twining curtains and the odd perfume of the English night. She doubted she could sleep, but slept in spite of herself; she didn’t want to dream but dreamed incoherently of Jered, of Alice, of the sad-eyed young Lieutenant.

Chapter Ten

The summer of 1920 was a chill one, at least in Washington, for which people blamed the Russian volcanoes, the fiery line of geologic disturbance which marked the eastern border of the Miracle and which had been erupting sporadically since 1912, at least according to the refugees who left Vladivostok before the Japanese troubles. Blame it on volcanoes, Elias Vale thought, on sunspots, on God, the gods — all one and the same. He was simply glad to step out of the dreary rain, even into the drearier Main Hall of the National Museum, currently under renovation — work which had been postponed in 1915 and each of the four following years, but for which Eugene Randall had finally prodded funds from the national treasury.

Randall turned out to be an administrator who took his work seriously, the worst kind of boor. And a lonely man, compounding the vice. He had insisted on bringing Vale to the museum the way mothers insist on displaying their infants: the admiration is expected and its absence would be considered an insult.

I am not your friend, Vale thought. Don’t humiliate yourself.