Darwinia

“For the last month you’ve been nervous as a cat. You hardly touch an evening meal. Now this.” She paused. “The fire chief told me it wasn’t an accident.”

His turn to hesitate. “Tim Mackelroy says a couple of homemade firebombs came through the window.”

“I see.” She folded her hands. “Guilford, why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then what’s been bothering you?”

He said nothing.

“Is it something that happened before we met?”

“I doubt it.”

“Because you don’t talk about those times much. That’s all right — I don’t have to know everything about you. But if we’re in danger, if Nick is in danger—”

“Abby, honestly, I don’t know. True, I’m worried. Somebody torched my business, and maybe it was random lunacy or maybe somebody out there is holding some kind of grudge. All I can do is lock up and talk to Sheriff Carlysle in the morning. You know I wouldn’t let anything happen to you or Nick.”

She gazed at him a long time. “I’ll go to bed, then.”

“Sleep if you can,” Guilford told her. “I’ll sit out here a while.”

She nodded.

The arson.

The stranger at the door.

The picket.

You leave a thing behind, Guilford thought, and time passes, ten, fifteen, twenty-five years, and that ought to be the end of it.

He remembered it all vividly, in all the bright colors of a dream, the killing winter in the ancient city, the agony of London, the loss of Caroline and Lily. But, Christ, that had been a quarter of a century ago — what could be left of that time that would make him worth killing?

If what the picket had told him then was true -

— but he had written that off as a fever dream, a distorted memory, a half hallucination -

But if what the picket had told him was true, maybe twenty-five years was the blink of an eye. The gods had long memories.

Guilford went to the window. The bay was dark, only a few commercial vessels showing lights. A dry wind moved the lace curtains Abby had hung. Stars shivered in the sky.

Time to be honest, Guilford thought. No wishful thinking. Not when your family’s at stake.

It was possible — admit it — that old debts were about to be collected.

The hard question. Could he have prevented this?

No.

Anticipated it?

Maybe. He had wondered often enough if there might not one day be a reckoning. Far as the world knew, the Finch expedition had simply vanished in the wilderness between the Bodensee and the Alps. And the world had got on well enough without him.

But what if that had changed?

Abby and Nicholas, Guilford thought.

No harm must come to them.

No matter what the gods wanted.

He followed Abby to bed a couple of hours before dawn. He didn’t want to sleep, only to close his eyes. The presence of her, the soft music of her breath, eased his thoughts.

He woke to sunlight through the east window, to Abby, fully dressed, her hand on his shoulder.

He sat up.

“He’s back,” she said. “That man.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

He thought of all the ways the continent had changed in the last quarter century.

New harbors, settlements, naval bases. Rail and roads to the interior. Mines and refineries. Airstrips.

The new District system, the elected Governors, the radio networks. Homesteads on the Russian steppes, this side of the volcanic zone that divided Darwinia from Old Asia. Skirmish battles with Arabs and Turks. The bombing of Jerusalem, this new war with the Japanese, the draft riots up north.

And so much land still empty. Still a vastness of forest and plain into which a man might, for all purposes, vanish.

Abby had given the stranger a seat at the breakfast table. He was working his way through a plate of Abby’s flapjacks. He handled the knife and fork like a five-year-old. A dewdrop of corn syrup lingered in his thicket of beard.

Guilford gazed at the man with a torrent of emotion: shock, relief, renewed fear.

The frontiersman speared a last bite of breakfast and looked up. “Guilford,” he said laconically. “Long time.”

“Long time, Tom.”

“Mind if I smoke?”

A fresh briar. A tattered cloth bag of river weed. Guilford said, “Let’s go outside.”

Abby touched Guilford’s arm questioningly. “District police and the fire chief want you to call them. We need to talk to the trust company, too.”

“It’s okay, Abby. Tom’s an old friend. All that other business can wait a while. What’s burned is burned. There’s no hurry now.”

Her eyes expressed grave reservation. “I suppose so.”

“Keep Nick in the house today.”

“Thank you kindly for the meal, Mrs. Law,” Tom Compton said. “Very tasty.”

The frontiersman hadn’t changed in twenty-five years. His beard had been trimmed since that awful winter, and he was stockier — healthier — but nothing fundamental had changed. A little weathering, but no sign of age.

Just like me, Guilford thought.

“You’re looking well, Tom.”

“Both of us are healthy as horses, for reasons you ought to have figured out. What do you tell people, Guilford? Do you lie about your age? It was never a problem for me — I never stayed in one place long enough.”