“I don’t understand how this money could simply have been lost,” said Dulcy. “If it was a check, never cashed—”
Another wave of the hand, but Victor’s voice had a hint of a whistle. “Didn’t he write you? Why didn’t you go on this trip? Perhaps there’s a code in this book,” he said. “This particular one, filled with numbers. You would know, wouldn’t you?”
He pointed to the black book. He only thought that because he couldn’t comprehend the notebook’s topic. Henning, who plainly could, stretched again in his chair.
“My grandmother was ill,” said Dulcy. “He sent one message in three months.” Thieves everywhere, but I’ve outwitted them, and have found a safe way in strange winds. Curries everywhere, too—I’ve begun to like them! Seattle by the end of October, New York on the ides of November. Even for Walton, who was fond of words like ides , this had been theatrical. She’d read the telegram on the porch steps in Westfield, bees zipping through the apple trees in the sticky September heat. Martha had died a week earlier, and Carrie was crying upstairs. Dulcy had tucked the message in her apron and gone back to planting bulbs—she was happy to hear he’d been eating, but she had no patience for imaginary thieves.
Now she opened her bag and held the telegram out to Victor. He didn’t move—Henning had to bring it to him. The handsome cheek twitched while he read, and the brain on the far side of the dainty ear churned through a variety of unacceptable thoughts; she knew he was suffering. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“I’m sure he hid the money. He loves to hide things, even in the best of times.”
A commotion overhead, and the nurses’ voices piped. Henning reached for the notebooks. “We need to replace them before he returns to his room,” he said. “Or he’ll be upset.”
Dulcy finished her wine. “I think you’re missing his accounts book,” she said. “It used to be plain brown leather. It might help; I’ll give a look.”
???
Since 1867, Walton had traveled thousands of miles each year. Once he established himself financially—and once he fell ill—each grand tour had four legs, four purposes: the acquisition and tending of mines, research into an earthquake (preferably recent and deadly), pleasure, and bodily recovery from task number three. Mining and earthquakes determined the itinerary, though the order might vary, and pleasure was possible anywhere, but a clinic was inevitably the last stop.
Why Victor needed Dulcy, beyond the fact her father was crazy: she had been his companion on half of these trips since she was fifteen, and she knew he’d hidden treasure everywhere, because she had been the keeper of most of the keys. She had six in a jewelry pouch for different bank boxes across this country, and she knew where others were hidden in the Manhattan apartment. Some of this urge to hide money came from his workhouse days, and some was a matter of control: he didn’t want his sons, Dulcy’s half-brothers, both beginning bankers who’d already been given plenty, to tell him what to do.
Victor knew about the trips, but not the tendency to hide; he thought he needed her simply because the Cornish stuck together. Henning had tried telegramming the men Walton worked with in Africa and had learned nothing. Walton’s greatest asset had been this birthright: he’d given Victor a whole network of men who knew what rock was profitable, promising, played out. Those men wouldn’t talk to a civilian, but they would talk to Walton’s daughter. People bitched about the Irish and tribalism, but they had no idea of how far it went with other Celts. Cornishmen were so white and so Protestant and sober, so competent and buttoned-down, that Good People in the States, who assumed they were actually English, never doubted them. The Cornish mining captains all had good educations, careful accents, well-built suits. They asked no favors, and kept their voices down, and no one recognized that they had successfully achieved one form of world domination.
On the other hand, Walton and his oldest friend, Robert Woolcock, had been particularly successful because they chose their tribal moments carefully in Africa. When most Uitlanders—either English or Cornish—were expelled in 1899, Walton learned to selectively shed his English accent and flaunt German bank accounts. Woolcock, with a Boer wife and a Swahili mistress, stayed in southern Africa throughout the war, funneling Victor’s American money into devalued mines. By the time the war wound down to guerilla attacks, and other Uitlanders flooded back into the Rand, they’d purchased the right mines. Walton and Victor stuck to the partnership despite the broken engagement and made a fantastic, now missing, profit.
Dulcy usually knew so much about what Walton owned and leased that her dawning sense of ignorance about this last trip was hard to accept. He’d had no chance to stash a cent since he reached Seattle. Henning had vetted the nurses, and had his four brothers follow them on off-hours. He’d brought the brothers over from Sweden one by one, dotting them throughout the Northwest, all doing small chores for Victor while they studied trades—tailor, printer, carpenter, detective. Now, in Victor’s time of need, they were in Seattle. The morning after she arrived, she watched all five Falks from her window, fascinated enough to get close to the pane. From this distance, she couldn’t tell the difference between the men until they began to move, and Henning’s wolfy lope gave him away.