“Dead serious. Give me just a moment to unbutton this fly.”
“No, no, no. That won’t be necessary. Does Carrie — does my daughter know this?”
Scott nodded. “Her love for me far exceeds her desire to bear her own children. We have already taken the first steps toward adopting the child my father sired. We intend to love her as if she were our very own daughter.”
“I regret, Goodhue, that I grossly misjudged you.”
“It is water under the bridge, sir. Shall we shake hands on a pledge to put all of it behind us?”
The men shook hands with a hardy pump and Mr. Wilmer opened the door. His wife was standing on the other side. Taking Ada into his arms, he said, “All is well, and I will explain everything to you after the ceremony.”
“But all isn’t well with Carrie. She’s decided that she doesn’t want her father to give her away.”
“Though I have only been looking after her best interests?”
“She sees only antipathy to the man she loves. Will you talk to her?”
It was fifteen minutes past the time that the ceremony had been scheduled to begin. The wedding guests, comprised of members of both the Goodhue and Wilmer families, along with friends, business colleagues, and employees of the various businesses owned by those families, were growing restless in their boxes. The groomsmen were playing mumblety-peg again despite flustered interdictions by the rector, and Miss Sarah Fuller, famed teacher of the deaf, was allowing her own impatience to reinvigorate her defense of her friend Alexander Graham Bell, her peroration being ill-received by those associates of Wilmer’s who sided with Mr. Gray in the historic controversy regarding the invention of the telephone. “And for the record,” Miss Fuller held forth, “Mr. Bell did not famously say, ‘Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.’ What he said, in point of fact, was, ‘Mr. Watson, come here. And bring Miss Fuller with you!’”
Roland Wilmer sat with his daughter in the little bedroom in the rectory. Carrie was weeping upon his shoulder. “I have asked for your forgiveness, my darling daughter. Will you give it to me?”
“You are quick to find imperfection in others, Father. I agree that no man or woman who has ever walked this planet is without some blemish—”
“Save our blessed Lord Jesus,” interjected the rector, who had stepped into the room to offer religious counsel as needed, but more pertinently to remind the bride and her father of the time.
“But my dear Scotty’s blemish is in his nether region and it was a bullet put there by a Spaniard in the heat of battle.”
Mr. Wilmer nodded as the rector tapped upon his pocket watch.
“You will then accept the fact that your own father is also merely human. Your mother as well.”
“I will.”
As the bride and her father were waiting in the vestibule, Roland Wilmer leaned over to whisper a question into Carrie’s ear: “Have you any idea who sent the anonymous letter aspersing the character of your fiancé?”
“We may never know it, Father,” replied Carrie, “but Scott wonders if it may not be one of his Harvard Porcellian Club brothers to whom he owes a great sum of money. Scott is indebted to a large number of gentlemen and to some men who could not be characterized as gentlemen at all.”
“Whatever is the reason for the debt, my darling girl?”
“My fiancé gambles, Father. Poker, baccarat, faro, fan-tan, hazard. It is a mania with him. When he wins, all is happiness and joy between us, but when he loses — especially when he loses quite dramatically — I must soothe his troubles with loving kindness and tender mercies, the poor, poor dear.”
The bride came down the aisle, followed by a six-foot train, her expression incandescent, rapturous. The man who accompanied her looked deathly pale, and the smile upon his lips seemed hardly sincere at all.
1908 Volant in North Carolina
“I’m too damned old for this,” said the first man.
“Quit your belly-aching, Jimmy,” said the second.
“Belly-aching is the very thing,” said the third. “Are we belly-crawling all the rest of the way, Salley? If I’d known this would be a possibility, I’d have packed my truss.” The third man then took out a handkerchief and blotted his sweating forehead.
“It isn’t much farther,” said the young man named Salley. “Look up and you’ll see the tree I climbed to make my first observation.”
Salley’s four male companions, three of them newspaper and magazine correspondents, the fourth a fifty-one-year-old news photographer from Great Britain named Jimmy Hare, looked up.
Although it was a tree of average height, the imposing sand dunes that surrounded it seemed to dwarf it by proximity. Upon this isolated, narrow strip of seashore the sand hills swallowed up the entire landscape — both figuratively and literally. The men chanced upon large clusters of pines that all but disappeared under the glistening white mounds. Reaching this spot had been an adventure for the group, four of whose members had come all the way from New York City. Only Bruce Salley could claim a local connection and that was putting it broadly, this “string-man’s” beat stretching all the way up and down the Virginia and North Carolina coastlines.
Upon assignment by their respective editors — each of them skeptical men who refused to take Salley’s word on what he had seen with even the smallest grain of Atlantic Ocean salt — the newsmen had made their way over from Elizabeth City, and then by one-lung motorboat had chugged across the Pamlico, Albemarle, and Roanoke sounds, finally reaching the quiet village of Manteo on the island of Roanoke — an island which, for over three hundred years, had been haunted by the tragically unresolved fate of Sir Walter Raleigh’s lost colony. These intrepid reporters set out from the village the next morning to discover for themselves if what Salley said he had seen was true and verifiable.
At the break of dawn they had climbed into the open launch that would take them to the Outer Banks. There they hiked ten miles over sand dunes that exacted an enervating toll with each sunken step. They established their day camp about a half mile from that which they had each come to see on behalf of their respective employers.
“I don’t get the reason for all the cloak-and-dagger, Salley,” said a reporter named Hoster, who wrote for the New York American. “You said yourself that you didn’t stay hidden. You said that it wasn’t any time at all before you were chin-chinning with them just like old friends.”
Salley nodded from behind his field glasses.
“Then they had to have known that others would come after you. Men with more impressive credentials. Men with cameras that don’t lie.”
“Unless, of course, you’re taking pictures for Hearst,” interjected a reporter named Ruhl, with Collier’s Weekly.
All the men laughed except for Hoster, who had a habit of never disparaging his employer, even when that employer was six hundred miles away.
Salley handed the binoculars to Hare, who was happy to take up something lighter than his bulky press camera. The thickly mustached Brit enjoyed a private laugh. As a young man, he’d walked away from an apprenticeship with his father, a successful camera manufacturer, because of a frustrating reluctance on his father’s part to make smaller, handier cameras. This one was small — but it wasn’t small enough. He also worried that his fragile lenses were becoming scratched from all the blowing sand. When it came time to take the photograph that would make history, he wanted a perfect print.
If that time ever came.
“They don’t want the press around,” explained Salley. “They haven’t removed all the bugs from the new model. You remember what happened to Langley’s aerodrome back in ’03.”