Dulcy looked down on the city from her hotel and wondered at how arbitrary Lisbon’s hell had been—death by water while the city burned above, burning alive while water was visible. The blue-black harbor was still and deep and inviting, and the urge to drop into the sea stayed with her to Cape Town. She was seasick for the first time in years, and as she dangled over the edge she tried to come up with an equation to balance the cold and violence of the drop with the nausea and hopelessness of the deck. She worried about what she’d see before she died, as she sank. She didn’t want to panic; she didn’t want to see a beast rise up to meet her.
The plan in 1902 had been for Dulcy to stay with Walton all the way to the Transvaal, but by the time they landed in Cape Town she was ill, not seasick. Africa was a long hallucination. She’d read an account of the Siege of Mafeking (a dizzy blend of bicycle races and decapitations), and she was braced for starving blacks and Boer children in camps, but her fever kept her in a coastal villa so Cornish that it might have been in St. Ives, if it weren’t for the plants and the bird calls, the servants with gold-ringed toes. She sat on a veranda above the ocean, imagining shark fins cutting through the surf while dozens of Cornish engineers trouped in and out, talking diamonds and gold, copper and silver. Smoke and voices spooled through the shutters of Walton’s office, every man and thing smelling of tobacco and saddle soap and curry, scents that clashed with the heat and the cloying flowers from the garden. These men looked and sounded the same in Chile, Keweenaw, Butte, as they had in Cornwall; they all tended to look like Walton, Celtic instead of Anglo-Saxon, lean and dark instead of rosy and blond. They looked like the Irish, though you couldn’t say that to either group. Only Robert Woolcock was distinctive: he had a great knob of a nose and tiny happy blue eyes; he used a deep bass voice on a huge repertoire of dirty song lyrics, all set to church melodies, and his was the only voice Dulcy enjoyed as her fever worsened. Walton said they drank more because she was in the next room and sick, but she could mark the moment each night when they forgot she was there, a half-dozen men cackling and crooning and passing a decanter. Not a bottle—that would have been Irish.
Then she worsened, Victor’s child killing her again. Walton found a turbaned doctor who sliced her open for a second time and fed her iridescent medicines with an ivory spoon, while Walton lurked around the room. The doctor thought Walton was beside himself with worry, and he probably was, but Dulcy knew he was circling the doctor’s medicines, looking for the exotic, for a cure, for orange pearls of tropical wisdom, liquid green marvel.
Walton and Woolcock disappeared for the mines to the north and left her in a world of ceiling fans and tropical flowers, days spent with little memory of anything between vanilla ices served by dark servants. She remembered watching the ice melt. Where had they found it? She couldn’t imagine. Great ships waiting in the harbor, blocks sunk in sawdust in the hull—still, nothing could have lasted so long in that heat. But she really did remember ice, and seeds from a vanilla pod, and Indian mangos that were as sweet as Martha’s peaches.
Toward the end of the trip to Africa, she’d listened to the men blather deep into a night, more talk of gold and copper and cunny, claustrophobic glory dreams echoing down the hall to her hot room. Walton laughed about an adept English colonel’s wife, and Dulcy, trapped with these voices and the probable fate of the woman, left her bed for his room, where she drank most of his last half bottle of Armagnac and broke his seven thermometers one by one, pouring their contents out in a shimmery puddle on the top of his nicest shirt. He could take his mercury pure; he had to stop spreading the doom. She arranged the broken glass on the shirt, too, and walked across the compound to the nurse’s quiet, airy cottage, where she was given another vanilla ice (never as cold or delicious as the first) and put into a cot.
Walton was attentive for the next two days, but by the time they left, he was back on himself, fretting about a relapse and muttering as the ship pulled away from the dunes about the copper he’d helped wrench out of the place, the diamonds and gold he was sure were under the sand of Namaqualand. This was his story, and he could only comprehend someone else’s life for an hour or two at a time. His mood sweetened when they landed in Sicily. He sent off a salvo of triumphant telegrams to Victor and trolled for beauty through the narrow alleys of Palermo, while Dulcy sketched Etna and ate through the menu of the Hotel du France.
In June, in Salonica, they were greeted by Mehmet Akif, a banker Walton had met at a spa in Austria (Mr. Akif had suffered from a far more innocent disease) and done business with in Africa. Salonica was a perfect destination: earthquakes, ancient mines, and equally ancient medicinal springs. Mr. Akif’s family—D?nmeh with the huge brown eyes of Coptic mummy paintings—served cherry juice and sweet wine, lamb and octopus and olives. Dulcy tried to learn the Greek alphabet and swam badly—despite growing up a mile from the lake, no one had ever really taught her—while wearing a balloon-like muslin shift. She visited an open-air cinema with Akif’s daughters and avoided his sons’ stares during table tennis and billiards.
The clinic was in the foothills. They shared a balcony, and when Walton wasn’t being dosed or plumbed, she usually found him forgetting the book in his hand, watching one of the maids cross the tile below. “What are you doing?” she asked one evening.
“Well, Dulce, she’s quite lovely.”
The maid had long cherry-colored hair and a tiny waist. “And all of sixteen.”
“Twenty, and widowed.” The girl disappeared into a doorway. Walton waited for her to reemerge, a dog on point. It took years off his face.
“You must be fair to others. You mustn’t ruin their lives.”
“It’s important not to be judgmental, Dulcy.” His expression dared her to say more; she didn’t usually bother, since she’d given up her high moral stance. “I have my ways.”
Walton’s ways—some of the time—were expensive sheaths; he liked to pretend she didn’t know about them, despite the fact that he’d instructed doctors to speak to her directly, despite the fact that she handled his affairs and paid all his accounts. He went inside to dress for the evening. Two joined dogs lay in the courtyard under an apricot tree. She watched them pant and avoid each other’s eyes, and her mood grew bleaker. Maybe she would run away.