‘It is thought that albatrosses live a long time. And we live a long time. Hendrich Pietersen founded the society in eighteen sixty-seven as a means of uniting and protecting us – people like us – the “albatrosses” or “albas” – from outside threats.’
‘And who is this Hendrich Pietersen?’
‘A very old and very wise man. Born in Flanders but has been in America since it was America. He made money during the tulip mania and came to New York when it was still New Amsterdam. Traded furs. Built up his wealth. Amassed, ultimately, a fortune. He got into property. All kinds of things. He is America, that is who Hendrich is. He set up the society to save us. We are blessed, Tom.’
I laughed.
‘Blessed. Blessed. It is a curse.’
She sipped her red wine.
‘Hendrich will want to know that you appreciate the nature of the gift you have been given.’
‘I will find that hard to do.’
‘If you want to stay alive, you will do it.’
‘I don’t know if I actually care too much about staying alive, Agnes.’
‘Not Agnes,’ she whispered sharply. She looked around the room. ‘Gillian.’
She took something out of her bag. Some Quieting Syrup cough mixture. She poured it into her whisky. She offered to do the same to mine. I shook my head.
‘Do you understand how selfish you sound? Look at everyone else. Look around this dining room. Even better, think of all those émigrés in steerage. Most of them will be dead before they are sixty. Think of all those terrible illnesses we have known people to die from. Smallpox, cholera, typhoid, even plague – I know you are old enough to remember.’
‘I remember.’
‘That will not happen to us. People like us die in one of only two ways. We either die in our sleep aged around nine hundred and fifty, or we die in an act of violence that destroys our heart or brain or causes a profound loss of blood. That is it. We have immunity from so much human pain.’
I thought of Rose trembling with fever and delirious with pain as she was on that last day. I thought of the days and weeks and years and decades afterwards. ‘There have been times in my life when shooting myself in the head seemed profoundly preferable to the blessing of existence.’
Agnes gently swirled the cocktail of whisky and Quieting Syrup in her glass. ‘You have lived a long time. You must know by now that it is not just ourselves we endanger when our truth begins to surface.’
‘Indeed. Dr Hutchinson, for instance.’
‘I am not talking about Dr Hutchinson.’ She swiped back faster than a cat. ‘I am talking about other people. Your parents. What happened to them?’
I took my time, chewing on the fish, then swallowing, then dabbing the side of my mouth with a napkin. ‘My father was killed in France due to his religion.’
‘Ah. The Wars of Religion? He was a Protestant? A Huguenot?’
I nodded three times.
‘And your mother?’ Agnes’s eye stared at me. She sensed that she had me. And she did, I suppose. I told her the truth.
‘You see? Ignorance is our enemy.’
‘No one is killed for witchcraft now.’
‘Ignorance changes over time. But it is always there, and it remains just as lethal. Yes, Dr Hutchinson died. But if he had lived, if his paper was published, people would have come for you instead. And others.’
‘People? What people?’
‘Hendrich will explain. Don’t worry, Tom. Your life is not in vain. You have a purpose.’
And I remembered how my mother had told me I needed one – a purpose – and as I ate the tender fish I wondered if I was on the cusp of finding it.
New York, 1891
‘Look at her,’ said Agnes, as we stood outside on the upper deck of the Etruria. ‘Liberty Enlightening the World.’
It was my first sighting of the Statue of Liberty. Her right arm raising that torch high into the air. She was a copper colour back then, and shone, and looked most impressive. She glowed in the sun, as we got closer to the harbour. She seemed vast – epic and ancient – something on the scale of sphinxes and pyramids. I had only been alive since the world had become smaller, more modest again. But I looked at the New York skyline and felt like the world was dreaming bigger. Clearing its throat. Getting some confidence. I put my hand in my pocket, held Marion’s penny between my fingers. It was, as ever, a comfort.
‘I’ve been up close,’ said Agnes. ‘It looks like she is standing still but actually she is walking. She is breaking out of the chains of the past. Of slavery. Of civil war. And she is heading towards liberty. But she is caught for ever in that moment of stopped time. Look, can you see? Stop looking at the torch and look at her feet. She’s moving, but not moving. Heading towards a better future, but not quite there yet. Like you, Tom. You’ll see. Your new life awaits.’
I stared up at the Dakota, a magnificent, ornate, seven-storey buttercream stone building with elegant balustrades and a steep gable roof. I had a feeling of dizziness caused by that rare sense that things were moving fast, not just in my life but in the world. I had been in New York for a few hours now, and the feeling had not waned. There was something about New York in the 1890s. Something exciting. Something so real you felt you could breathe it in. Something that made me feel again.
I paused for a moment on the threshold.
What would have happened if I had run away right then? If I had pushed Agnes away and disappeared into the park or sprinted fast along 72nd Street and somehow got away? But I was dizzy with it, I suppose, with all the novelty of the city. It was already making me feel more alive, after all those dead years of nothingness.
A statue of an American Indian – Agnes called him ‘the watching Indian’ – gazed solemnly down at us. In 1980, while on a job in S?o Paulo, I would watch the news of John Lennon’s assassination on a small colour television screen. The footage was of that same building, where Lennon was shot. I wondered if the building itself had a curse, affecting all who passed through its doors.
Standing outside, I was nervous. But at least it was a feeling. I wasn’t used to them recently.
‘He will be testing you, even when he isn’t testing you. It is all a test.’ We climbed the stairs. ‘He can read people – faces, movements – better than anyone I have met. Hendrich has developed, over the years, a seemingly unnatural aptitude.’
‘An aptitude for what?’
Agnes shrugged. ‘He just calls it aptitude. It’s an aptitude for people. An understanding of people. Apparently, between the ages of five hundred and six hundred, your cerebral talents become heightened to a point beyond a normal human range. He has dealt with so many people, in so many different cultures, that he can read faces and body language with an astounding accuracy. He knows if he can trust people.’
We were there, in the French flat – we didn’t use the word ‘apartment’ in America back then – on the top floor of the Dakota building, with Central Park spread beneath us.
‘I try to pretend it’s my garden,’ said the tall lean bald sharp-suited man at the window. He held a cane, which he clutched tightly. As much for show as for his arthritis, which hadn’t yet taken him over.