It would appear from the scene, and evidence of bleeding at his desk, that Mr. Maslingen fired a pistol into his abdomen and paused for a time before finishing himself in the window. Though a pen and paper were ready, he did not write a note; though a shot to the head would have seemed sensible, all attest to Mr. Maslingen’s vanity.
She wondered if they’d only met for a drink, before Henning handed Lewis the key to the study, or if they’d had dinner and talked for a while. She imagined the sound of the elevator rising, the civilized world’s version of a man engine; maybe Victor had been too drunk to hear it, or maybe he’d thought Henning was returning early.
She wondered how long Lewis had watched Victor bleed before he threw him out the window, and she wondered what had been said.
Back on the porch steps, she sat and watched the hammock, willing it to move. She imagined Lewis’s chest rising with each breath, the speckled cheekbone, the long-lidded sleeping eyes opening and looking at her and his lips moving to say I wanted to see him fall .
When the hammock finally swayed she walked down to the burned greenhouse. She carried a trowel and a sieve and her old dirty gloves, and pulled away a few larger charred pieces until she found what had been the trunk, and what had been Walton’s notebooks. She dug through the ash, dumping it into the sieve, sorting out diamonds from the charred notebooks that had kept them safe. Burn me , boil me; a note to a daughter, a secret recipe to release the gems from the bindings.
In the last few months, she’d tried to leave Walton untouched, to take him in small doses so that he wouldn’t shrink. She was afraid of forever losing the sweet, blistering sense of him alive and curious and wandering, all over the map in all sorts of ways; she didn’t want him to be reduced to his end. But now she let him come again as she picked through the ash, saving some small bright wisps of fabric along with the stones: she saw him moving through the bright sunlight of Cape Town, his elegant, deceiving frame in crumpled linen, his mind shifting from whatever woman he’d spent the night with to the task at hand, the meeting with the bookbinder and the redemption of his partnership with a bad man. He would have been happy, hiding something, making a beautiful, touchable puzzle, a gift to his daughter to make up for introducing her to the man who’d almost ruined her life.
In the kitchen, Dulcy rinsed the diamonds, retrieved the ones from the green book’s binding, still hidden under the sink, and dropped all of them in the brocade bag with the keys. She’d have to share them with Henning; it was only fair. She pulled out her own valise, and she made a list of things to retrieve from the hotel, and all the places they might go.
Then she went down to wake Lewis, to pack with him for another train.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is fiction; beyond being a woman who has sometimes wanted to run away, I’m not an expert about anything I describe, and while I did a great deal of research, I also put it away for the actual writing. Although my great–great–grandfather William Ludlow was a mining engineer from Cornwall whose notebooks edged me into the idea of this book, none of my characters are real, and I fictionalized my settings a bit, and I sometimes cheated on timing. There was an Elite Hotel in Livingston, Montana (now the Murray Hotel), but in 1905 the building was two stories shorter; the first transcontinental phone call wasn’t made until 1915; and while many people have erred in judging the temperature of Yellowstone Park’s waters, none to my knowledge did so due to an earthquake.
I owe thanks to many people, but I would especially like to mention Sabrina Crewe, Melissa Atkinson, and Maryanne Vollers for constructive and witty criticism; the people at Grove, for caring and helping; Dara Hyde and Dan Smetanka and the great humans of Counterpoint for turning this into a real book; and Steve, Will, and John Potenberg for their constant love and patience.
The Widow Nash: A Novel Page 36
