The next morning, Alice read about the fire.
The news was old. In the noisy breakfast room she counted back the days in her head and understood it had happened six days after their going. It had started in the big top and leaped from there to the menagerie and in all eleven people and twenty-six animals had died. There was a poor linocut reproduction of a big top in flames. She looked at the boy with his plate of steak and eggs and his small serious face as he chewed while the rain tracked shadows across the dormer windows behind and cast a gloom over the table in front and she decided, devastation in her heart, that he must never know.
They spent the day in the city shopping for clothes for the boy and ate in a tea shop overlooking a park where a small fair was lighting up the dusk. Later that night she stayed awake at the window staring through the curtains, her revolver on the little table at her elbow. She again read through the article about the fire and then folded it into quarters and put it away in her sleeve, like a handkerchief. She blew out the candles. In the long puddles in the middle of the road the orange lights of the railway station rippled and danced.
Marlowe wasn’t one for talking. He’d hardly said two words all their first week of travel. She raked her fingers through her greasy hair. She thought about the fire, all those people. The newspaper had called it an accident. What would Coulton say of it? She thought of his grave pale eyes, his tired mouth. The darkness in his voice as he spoke of that man, Marber. Jacob Marber. The bounty hunter who was no bounty hunter. Behind her a black-haired boy breathed softly in the dark, alive.
Such things happened. The world was cruel. Still, something in it gave her pause. She thought of the asylum where her mother had lived out her days, the stillness of its scrubbed floors, the loneliness of its graveyard. Her mother. She tried to think of some kindness in the woman but could not. What kindness had she, Alice, shown in return? She ran a knuckle under her eyes. She didn’t even have a daguerreotype of her, any recollection of what she’d looked like in life. She was just gone, just as if she’d never existed at all. What does anyone leave behind? She looked at the boy, burrowed in his pillow. She’d get him to old Mrs. Harrogate, in London. She’d do that much. The rain was blowing in sheets against the glass. Two figures crossed the street at a stagger, hats drawn low against the gusts. In her heart lay a shadow, like dread, a presentiment of some wrongness, and she raised her hand unthinking to the folded paper in her sleeve.
“What is it, Alice?” she muttered, troubled. “What aren’t you seeing?”
While her face in the glass rippled ghostlike against the dark.
* * *
In the morning the boy slept late. Alice didn’t wake him. She sat on his bedclothes and resisted running a hand through his tousled hair and just waited for him to stir.
“Good morning,” she whispered, when he did.
“I dreamed about horses,” he said sleepily. “Like you told me to.”
He was so small. Though their journey had been uncomfortable he had not complained. For the first week he’d said nothing at all, and only in these last days had he started to talk a little. If he feared for his future he did not say it. She’d known few children in her adult life and was surprised by the good feeling in her whenever he touched her, or slipped his little hand in hers, or smiled up at her with his tiny crooked teeth showing. He slept with both hands raised up over his head as if he were in a holdup. He ate with a fork in one hand and a spoon in the other, scooping and scraping by turns. When he put on his new little black shoes, he was still getting them mixed up.
“Up up up,” she said now. “Train leaves at noon.”
He blinked his tired eyes, sat up. “You said we could stay here. See the lake.”
“You’ll get your fill of water when we sail out of New York. Let’s go.”
Under the blanket his little body lay very still. She thought he might say something more but he didn’t. No complaint, nothing. He got up, started to get ready. She watched him at the washbasin, feeling a pang.
“You sleep okay?” she asked, guilt lacing her voice. She hadn’t realized he wanted to see the lake so much. Why wouldn’t he? Poor kid probably never saw much that wasn’t next to a circus field.
He was scrubbing with great absorption at his little pink face, his pink ears, his pink neck. Rubbing the towel dry. He carefully did not look at her.
“It’s just, there are schedules,” she explained, drifting up behind him. “The liner departs in less than a week. I don’t want us to miss it.”
He frowned at her in the mirror.
“There are people depending on us, people who want to meet you,” she added. “They’ve been waiting a long time. Good people.”
Now he turned, looked up at her. “What are they like?” he asked.
She swallowed. “I don’t know. Kind?”
“You don’t sound very sure.”
Alice wet her lips. She didn’t know what to say. She said, “Marlowe, it’s your family.”
“Brynt’s my family.”
“No,” she said firmly. “She isn’t.”
But she felt a catch in her throat as she said it. It was more than he’d said in their entire two weeks together. Fuck Coulton for putting her in this position. Fuck this job. The rain was blowing up against the glass. Marlowe was looking at her steadily now and there was in his face something sad, and wise, as if he knew the ways of the world too well and pitied her for what she was doing.
She reached for her boots in disgust.
One last job, she thought. Then she was out.
* * *
But the bad feeling that was in her didn’t go away.
It just got worse, in fact, the closer they got to Grand Central Terminal. Three days later they were in New York City, stepping off the train into a cloud of white steam, the roar of the station overwhelming, a curving sky of smoke-blackened glass, steel girders. Alice was glancing warily all around at the pale faces passing, their dark hats, the flash of their silver-tipped walking sticks, heart in her throat. She had her right hand deep in the pocket of her oilskin greatcoat, working the hammer of a loaded Colt Peacemaker revolver.
As they descended, Marlowe reached up and took her free hand. She looked down in surprise. Maybe it was just that he was afraid of losing her in the crowd. But she liked it, was surprised by how much she liked it, and she gave him a quick tense smile as she shouldered their way through to the luggage porters.
At the edge of the platform lurked a blind woman, hair wild, face haggard. “Wrong way wrong way wrong way,” she was hollering at the passersby. No one paid her any mind.
Alice could feel the kid’s fascination. “Don’t stare,” she said. “She’s mad, Marlowe. She’s just talking to herself. Leave her be.”
But as they hurried by, the madwoman turned her milky eyes upon them. She seemed to follow them somehow as they went, dialing her ruined face slowly in their direction, watching them go, so that Alice, who kept glancing uneasily back, shuddered. The crowds flowed past.