Darwinia

He would look the mystery in the eye: he was that brave, at least.

But Mars was only a swimming point of light, lost in the Darwinian heavens, and the wind was chill and Dr. Sullivan was not talkative, and after a time Guilford went back to his tent and slept restlessly until morning.

Chapter Twelve

The end product of fear, fear not baseless but without any tangible object, was anesthesia. Each new omen seemed bleaker, until bleakness became the landscape through which Caroline must toil, eyes averted, registering nothing. Or at least as little as possible.

She told her aunt that Lily was having trouble sleeping. Alice turned and looked absently into the depths of the dry goods store, past rows of stitched white grain bags, into a latticework of sunbeams from the high rear window. She wiped her hands on her apron. “Jered comes in at odd hours. He may have disturbed her, walking down the hall. I’ll speak to him.”

The secret was kept, she was not privy to it, and Caroline was privately relieved. Lily slept better after that, though she had picked up nervous tics in the absence of her father: tugging her lower lip until it was sore, twining her hair around her fingers. She hated to be left alone.

Colin Watson continued to haunt the house, a smoky presence. Caroline tried to draw him in to conversation but he said little about his life or work; only that the Service seemed to have forgotten him, that he had few duties to perform save rounds of guard duty at the Armory: he had been misplaced, he seemed to suggest, in Kitchener’s obsessive shuffling of the British forces. He couldn’t say why there were so many soldiers in London these days. “It’s like a plague,” Caroline said, but the Lieutenant wouldn’t be provoked. He only smiled.

Soldiers and warships. Caroline hated to go down to the harbor now; most of the British Navy seemed to have anchored there in the last few weeks, battered dreadnaughts bristling with guns. The women in the market street talked about war.

War with whom, for what purpose, Caroline couldn’t fathom. It might have something to do with the Partisans, the returned dregs of Europe, their ridiculous claims and threats; or the Americans or the Japanese or — she tried not to pay attention.

“I miss Daddy,” Lily announced. It was Sunday. The dry-goods store was closed; Jered and Alice were taking inventory and Caroline had brought Lily to the river, to the blue river under a hot blue sky, to watch the sailing ships or see a river monster. Lily liked the silt snakes as much as Caroline hated them. Their great necks, their cold black eyes.

“Daddy will come back soon,” she told her daughter, but Lily only frowned, hardened against consolation. Faith is a virtue, Caroline thought, but nothing is certain. Nothing. We pretend, for the sake of children.

How perfect Lily was, sitting splay-legged on a log bench with her doll in her lap. “Lady” was the doll’s name. “Lady, Lady,” Lily sang to herself, a two-note song. The doll’s flesh-colored paint had been worn down to bone porcelain on her cheeks and forehead. “Lady, dance,” Lily sang.

It was at that moment, an uneasy peace brief as the tolling of a bell, that Caroline saw Jered hurrying down a log-paved embankment toward her. Her heart skipped abeat. Something was wrong. She could see the trouble in his eyes, in his walk. Without thinking, she put her hands on Lily’s shoulders; Lily said, “That hurts!”

Jered stood before her breathlessly. “I wanted to talk to you, Caroline,” he said, “before you saw the Times.”

He was patient and compassionate, but in the end Caroline remembered it as if she had read it in the brutal cadences of a newspaper headline:

PARTISANS ATTACK U.S. STEAMER

“Weston” Returns Damaged to Jeffersonville,

and then, more terrifying:

Fate of Finch Expedition Unknown.

But these were only naked facts. Far worse was the knowledge that Guilford was beyond her help, impossibly far away, possibly injured, possibly dead. Guilford dead in the wilderness and Caroline and Lily alone.

She asked her uncle the awful question. “Is he dead?” she whispered, while the earth twisted under her feet and Lily ran to the bench where Lady had been abandoned, eyelids drooping, with her skirt hiked over her head.

“Caroline, no one knows. But the ships were attacked well after they put the expedition ashore at the Rheinfelden. There’s no reason to believe Guilford has been hurt.”

They will all lie to me now, Caroline thought: make me a widow and tell me he’s fine. She turned her face to the sky, and the sunlight through her eyelids was the color of blood.

Chapter Thirteen