“I’ll be all right,” he said. “I’m patient.”
Henning liked to scribble down all of Walton’s mythic memories, and twice during their stay in Seattle, he set up a camera and showed them some English films: How to Stop a Motor Car, Alice, The Mistletoe Bough. Walton wanted to watch them over and over, the projector overheating. On other nights, Dulcy and Walton would play rummy or cribbage, though he had trouble holding cards or pegs, and sometimes she set up a skittles game, though he couldn’t pull his own top. Sometimes she read to him, and sometimes she gave him extra medicine and hid in her room. Sometimes he was himself, wandering from topic to topic: a plan to move to Veracruz to grow coffee, a consideration of his ultimate vindication by the Royal Society. When she got him to talk about the last few months in Africa, he seemed more or less coherent, but if she surprised him with a question about the money, he’d flinch, a little shard to the brain, and then they’d wade through confusion.
Did he want to see Carrie? she asked. Let her dance, said Walton. The Boys? Let them bank. “Carrie eventually,” he said. “I can do without a lecture from my sons.”
Eventually was an admission, which might help in the end, but he veered away. “Let’s have a game: If you were a bird, which?” He’d never cared a thing for birds, but Henning had given him an illustrated Swedish guide, all the colors cheerier than nature, and the names broke him out of that morning’s echo chamber: bats, battery, butter, bitter.
“A nuthatch,” said Dulcy. The only bird that tended to eat upside down.
“Sanglarka or notvacka!” He was delighted. “Carrie, all tall and pink, would be a flamingo, or better yet a roseate spoonbill, but there’s no good translation, naturally. Skedstork. Spoonbillen .”
He rattled on: owl was uggla, crow was kraka, bluebird was blasangare, curlew was spov. Gull was gratrut, which sent him spinning off to Gertrude, and Shakespeare. He summoned Henning for a copy of the plays and, dithering over which to read first, flipped the volume open to The Merchant of Venice . Dulcy, who was curled in the chair by the window and had fallen into her own fascination with Swedish bird names, knew the volume would be too heavy for Walton to hold, but Henning was so transparently happy she said nothing.
“It’s an ugly play,” said Henning. “And not fair. Have The Tempest or Much Ado.”
“Ah, but it’s the way our world works,” said Walton. “Cunning, dunning, haunting, hunting, Henning, lending, lemming.”
Henning sounded the last word out, and his face burned.
“I’m sorry,” said Walton, suddenly sane. “My mind goes at its own pace. Please accept my apologies. You will outthink us all by the end. Tell Dulcy the word for hawk.”
“Falk ,” said Henning.
???
Two weeks after Dulcy arrived, Walton demanded a dressing gown, insisted that they all dine together, and took Henning’s seat at the end of the table facing Victor. He lifted an empty wineglass with an arched eyebrow. The staff hustled; Dulcy began to daydream of her own disappearance and tried not to watch her father talk and eat at the same time. Walton’s newest topic was the Rift Valley, which would surely be the site of the next great hard-rock rush after Namaqualand. They should buy now, before the fucking Germans figured out the fucking truth . Victor, who hated swearing, chose his battles. “I have nothing left,” he said. “You have lost my money.”
“Don’t fret,” said Walton. “Your money is in New York, practically speaking. I had it wired.”
“To which bank?” asked Victor.
“The bank you told me to use.” Walton dabbed his mouth, lurched upright, and left the room.
Dulcy started to follow, but Henning stopped her: he’d hired an agency to search for a wire, but so much money traveled into and out of the Rand that the task had proved impossible.
“If he kept the profit as cash or a check,” said Victor, “if he did not deposit it in some forgotten bank, it may have been taken from him on his way home. He talked of diamonds, but we can find no evidence he changed out the money. While I recognize his love of the symbolic, gold is hardly portable. He said something about a friend, a man named Penlawy who advised him, but our detectives haven’t managed to find him. Have you met this man?”
Dulcy stared down at Emil’s spongy fish. “Penlawy?”
“Yes. Charles, I think.”
“Penlawy was his childhood friend. He was sliced in half by a rock fall when Dad was a boy. A fall of quartz, before he even went to Ireland.”
She watched Victor’s mind go dark. In the corner, Henning hummed. It sounded like a lullaby, and she tried to imagine his mother, singing to her little boy. “He’d have said if it was stolen,” said Dulcy. “He’s never shied away from assigning blame before.”
Later, after Emil had tottered off to bed, she gave Walton a whiskey and made potatoes poached in cream, with a little sharp cheese. He ate like an ardent man for the first time since she’d arrived, and when he’d wiped the plate, he said, “Ah, well, I found out that someone from the bank had contacted wreckers, and they would have been lying in wait. I changed my plans.”
“Lying in wait where?” If he had wreckers on his mind, land wreckers rather than the people in his childhood who’d raided foundering ships, he was back in Cornwall.
“Jeppestown,” he said. “A man named Brahn oversees these grabs, and he kills.”
She telegrammed Robert Woolcock again and learned that he’d heard of a highwayman named Brahn, but when Brahn was found, he didn’t have a fortune, and when he was beaten, he didn’t produce an answer.
The next day, Walton said, “The Hindu had seen everything in terms of hiding and thieving money. Wonderful stories.”
The Hindu was the bookbinder named Iyer; he and Walton had become friends over the course of the expensive rebinding of the notebooks. Dulcy said she imagined Iyer must have plenty of his own money to hide, given his fees; she said the journals looked like pillows at an Indian wedding, gaudy wrapped gifts.
“You must be back to loving Mr. Maslingen’s subtle high-society style,” Walton said.
Vague to vicious in seconds. He complained of shooting pains in his eyes, and the next day the doctor visited and whispered that the right eye was bulging. Dulcy sent Carrie a telegram:
Afraid you need to come. Dad quite ill . Don’t tell boys yet.
And Carrie wrote back: