But she was running out of time, and when she finally rose, she stripped off her clothes quickly, ripped lace from the sleeve of her black dress and tore more strands from her thin shawl, then wound the dress and shawl around the brick blanket warmer she’d hidden the night before and tied the bundle tight with her stockings. She’d hidden a canvas bag within her other luggage, and she changed into the warm navy stockings and sturdier boots, the dress and wool coat she’d bought on the last Seattle morning while Victor hid in his room, things Carrie had never seen. She waited at the window, swaying as the train caught up with the map. When it curled and lowered its head somewhere after Whitehall, she tugged the pane down, and when the sound echoed and she could almost smell the cold water below, she guessed at a trestle and threw the bundle—the things Leda Cordelia Dulcinea Remfrey would have been wearing when she killed herself—into the dark. She stuffed the scrap bits of lace and wool in the corner of the window and pulled it up an inch to trap them. Then she waited again, holding on to the frame—open just wide enough for a woman’s body—until her fingers froze.
The brightly lit Bozeman platform came as a shock: it was filled with men and women in ball gowns and furs, half of them carrying champagne bottles. It took a moment to recover, and Dulcy was about to leave the window for the corridor when the crowd parted for the two-fingered man, her own very tired veteran, who vaulted down from the still-moving train with such youth and grace that he was almost unrecognizable. As people pushed past, he reached down to change his grip on his bag and looked back up at the train, straight at the stunned woman in the window, who wore a red hat after days in mourning black. He smiled, the kind of glowing, frank smile he would never have given if he thought he’d see her again, and then he walked away.
Dulcy stepped back into the shadows of the cabin and listened to the fancy-dress drunks invade the corridor—Kiss me, howled a man—as the train creaked away from the station. She dug out the guide. These idiots were getting off in Livingston or Big Timber, but it was a long, long ride after that, a bleak world of small towns where people—people who weren’t drunk—would notice anyone new. She thought of the emptiness she’d seen to the east on the earlier trip with Walton, and she began to panic. As the train rose and fell over another pass, she tilted the guide toward the moonlight, and when it slowed again, she pushed into the corridor, leaving the quiet sign on the door behind her. She launched herself down the metal steps to the cold half—lit bricks of a platform and paused, shocked by the size of the grand brick depot, before blending into the opera crowd as it invaded the building, looking for warmth until their rides arrived. A woman in a feather boa ran by singing a solo from Aida , and a man scrambling after her fell on the wet marble. The eastbound train began to roll again, and through the depot’s tall windows, Dulcy watched Carrie and Walton disappear.
She was second in the ticket line, behind a confused old man who spoke only Norwegian, and she booked a ticket for a cabin on the next westbound train, due through at ten. She walked toward a wooden bench to wait, a little surprised by the sound of her steps in the emptying depot, by the first subtle sounds after days of listening to an engine, a track, movement.
Dulce:
Know that I do blame myself, that I can only assume my very poor example has somehow infected your mind. But for the same reason, I am aware that you know better, and I hope you will understand you cannot treat people of fine intention like shit on your pretty shoes. If, as you state, you do not even love the poor fellow, I must assume you did this thing out of sheer perversity, perverse curiosity. Was it meant as some sort of test? You have harmed your body, you have harmed his heart, and I can only imagine what I will need to do to redeem the business relationship. You must learn not to drag people back and forth on a chain, the direction according to mood and no rational notion whatsoever.
If you will not reconsider, you and I will leave tomorrow, to do what we can to repair the problem. I suggest you send a letter of apology to Mr. Maslingen before we sail.
—Your loving father, WR
chapter 6
Miss Remfrey is Lost
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A woman gets off one train and onto another, and no one human sees both moments. Of the people who notice her at all, the men remember thick dark hair (worn up: a married woman), her shape and nervousness, and the women see the red hat, the hint of the blue dress. She was pale, not so pretty as to be worth long study, and her good taste might have been accidental. They remember that she did not wear mourning, and that she was alone, and self-possessed. They assume she was well traveled, and married, and not a crazy girl who’d fling her body out of a train window.
???
Walton liked to introduce Dulcy as “a child of my dotage,” which was annoying, given that the dotage was of his own making. Every trip began with a virtuous air—a promising mine to be checked, a surprising earthquake to be researched—and then the relief of having done his duty would light Walton like a firework, and he would slide off to fuck himself to death. He never, truly, saw it coming. While different hues of doctors treated him with mostly identical means—mercury and iodine enemas, purple potions and electric therapy—Dulcy learned to be anonymous. By the time she disappeared, she knew how to move, and how to be alone.
The only true anomaly was the trip to London in early 1902 after the engagement. This time, she was the patient: the best clinic in the world, but things went badly, and painfully; the pregnancy had been tubal, in the wrong place all along, and would have killed her in a month or two. The doctors sewed her up and told her she would now never bear a child.
She wondered sometimes if her aversion hadn’t just been to Victor, but to fate. She liked children; she liked being alive. Despite any number of horror stories, she’d assumed these two things would go together.
After she seemed to recover, Walton took her to Cornwall. In Redruth, she met her great-uncle Edmund, who was elongated and dark like Walton, religious like Walton’s brother, Christopher, bitter like neither of them. She saw her grandparents’ graves in the pretty seaside town of Perranuthnoe. Away from the coast, Cornwall was a raw, sad place, boarded-up adits and slag piles, but when she pointed this out, Walton forgot his own disdain for his birthplace. Weeks of anger at having to deal with someone else’s drama burbled out: Dulcy knew nothing about grubbing underground from infancy on to an early death, about her relative good fortune. He’d shown her tragic childhoods, everywhere they’d gone.
In early March, they sailed on to Lisbon and saw the damage still evident from the earthquake of 1755: fifty thousand dead, many in churches that collapsed during the All Saints’ service, most in the tidal surge, some in the final fire. Walton said one hundred thousand, and that the same wave drowned the Azores and cracked the Galway city wall. Edmund, the sour uncle, had been told as a child that a wave had hit Penzance after this event. Walton claimed to be dubious, but she knew he was thrilled. He loved the notion of waves.