There had been a daughter, too—I knew that much from Alex. My queer cousin Fran, he had said, in one of the few times he had referred to this side of the family at all. Queer cousin Fran had died in 1917, though Alex’s letter from the Front had not said how or why. She has died, poor thing, he wrote. Are the rations as bad back home as I hear? He never spoke of her again, and in the months I’d worked for her, Dottie had never mentioned her queer daughter Fran at all. Her photograph was certainly not in the book.
I turned back to the water. I should quit. I should have done it long ago. The position was unpleasant and demeaning. I had been a typist before I married Alex, before my life had been blown upward like a feather, then come down again. My skills were now rusty, but it was 1921, and girls found jobs all the time. I could try Newcastle, Manchester, Leeds. They must need typists there. It wouldn’t be much of a life, but I would be fed and clothed, with Mother’s fees paid for, and I could stay pleasantly numb.
But I would not quit. I knew it and, I believed, so did Dottie. It wasn’t the pay she gave me, which was small and sporadic. It wasn’t the travel, which had simply seemed like a nightmare to me, as if I were taking the train across a vast wartime graveyard, the bombed buildings just losing their char, the bodies buried just beneath the surface of the still-shattered fields. I would not quit because Dottie, viperish as she was, was my last link to Alex. And though it hurt me even to think of him, I could not let him go.
I had last seen him in early 1918, home on leave before he went back to France to fly more RAF missions, the final one from which he did not return. His plane was found four days later, crashed behind enemy lines. There was no body. The pack containing his parachute was missing. He had not appeared on any German prisoner-of-war rosters, any burial details, any death lists. He had not been a patient in any known hospital. The Red Cross, in the chaos after Armistice, did not have him on any prisoner or refugee lists. In three years there had been no telegram, no cry for help, no sighting of him. He had vanished. My life had vanished with him.
He died in the war, Dottie had said, but it was just another sting of hers. According to the official record, my husband had not died in the war. When there is a body, a grave, then a person has died. But no one ever tells you: When you have nothing but thin air, what happens then? Are you a widow, when there is nothing but a gaping hole in what used to be your life? Who are you, exactly? For three years I had been trapped in amber—first in my fear and uncertainty, and then in a slow, chilling exhale of eventual, inexorable grief.
As long as I was with Dottie, part of me was Alex’s wife. He still existed, even if only in the form of Dottie’s innuendoes and recriminations. Just hearing someone—anyone—say his name aloud was a balm I could not let go of. I had followed her across Europe for it, and now I would follow her to Wych Elm House, her family home. Where Alex had lived part of his childhood, something he had never thought to tell me.
I stared out to sea, uneasy, as England loomed on the horizon.
CHAPTER TWO
When she’d hired me, I had assumed Dottie’s trip to the Continent was a pleasure jaunt, the sort of thing rich middle-aged women did for no reason. By the time we arrived in Rome, I understood that my employer’s aim was entirely different: Though she was already richer than I could ever be, Dottie was in business to make money.
The war, Dottie explained to me as we sat in a train carriage and she inserted a cigarette into its holder, had created a great many ruined and cash-starved denizens of the upper class. The smart ones had invested in arms factories and army supplies when war broke out. The foolish ones, the ones who had sat on their ancient piles of property and waited for the old world to right itself, had lost, and Dottie meant to take advantage of it.
Her currency, her Great White Whale, was art. Paintings, sculptures, sketches, from shards of ancient Greek masterpieces to rolled-up canvases by the geniuses of the last century—all of it could be found on the Continent, owned by someone who was desperate for money. And money was something Dottie had. She offered them low prices for the contents of their galleries, paid in cash, and was slowly building a stockpile of art that would be priceless once the postwar depression lost its hold, as she believed it would.
“But you already have money,” I said that day in the train car. “You’re going to a lot of trouble.”