His physical health improved at the snake farm. By the time the stock boats arrived from Jeffersonville he was able to walk a distance without limping. He thanked Erasmus for his help and offered to ship him Argosy on a regular basis.
“Good idea. That book of Finch’s was a slow read. Maybe National Geographic, too?”
“Sure thing.”
“Science and Invention?”
“Erasmus, you saved my life at the Bodensee. Anything you want.”
“Well — I won’t get greedy. And I doubt I saved your life. Whether you live or die is out of my hands.”
Erasmus had loaded his stock into two flat-bottomed river boats piloted by a Jeffersonville broker. It was Guilford’s ride back to the coast. He offered the snake herder his hand.
Guilford said, “About Evangeline—”
“Don’t worry about Evangeline. She can go wild if she likes. Once people name an animal it’s too late for common sense to prevail.”
“Thank you.”
“We’ll meet again,” Erasmus said. “Think about what I said, Guilford.”
“I will.”
But not now.
The riverboat captain told him there had been trouble with England. A battle at sea, he said, and strictly limited news over the wireless, “though I hear we’re walkin’ all over ’em.”
The snakeboats made good time as the Rhine broadened into the lowlands. The days were warmer now, the Rhinish marshes emerald-green under a bright spring sky.
He took Erasmus’ advice and arrived in Jeffersonville anonymously. The town had grown since Guilford last saw it, more fishermen’s shacks and three new permanent structures on the firm ground by the docks. More boats were anchored in the bay, but nothing military; the Navy had a base fifty miles south. Nothing commercial was sailing for London — nothing legal, anyway.
He looked for Tom Compton, but the frontiersman’s cabin was vacant.
At the Jeffersonville Western Union office he arranged for a bank transfer from his personal account in Boston, hoping Caroline hadn’t closed it out on the assumption he had died. The money arrived without a problem, but he couldn’t get a message through to London. “From what I hear,” the telegraph operator told him, “there’s nobody there to receive it.”
He heard about the shelling from a drunken American sailor at the waterfront dive where he was supposed to meet the man who would take him across the Channel.
Guilford wore a blue pea coat and a woollen watch cap pulled low across his brow. The tavern was crowded and dank with pipe smoke. He took a stool at the end of the bar but couldn’t help overhearing the talk that flowed around him. He paid no particular attention until a fat sailor at the next table said something about London. He heard “fire” and “fucking wasteland.”
He walked to the table where the seaman sat with another man, a lanky Negro. “Excuse me,” Guilford said. “I don’t mean to eavesdrop, but you mentioned London? I’m anxious for news — my wife and daughter are there.”
“I’ve left a few bastards there myself,” the sailor said. His smile faded when he saw Guilford’s expression. “No offense… I only know what I heard.”
“You were there?”
“Not since the shooting started. I met a stoker claims he was up the Thames with a gunboat. But he talks when he drinks, and what he says ain’t all the Christian truth.”
“This man is in Jeffersonville?”
“Shipped out yesterday.”
“What did he tell you about London?”
“That it was shelled. That it burned to the ground. But talk is cheap. You know how people are. Christ, look at you, shaking like that. Have a fuckin’ drink on me.”
“Thanks,” Guilford said. “I’m not thirsty.”
He hired a channel pilot named Hans Kohn, who operated a scabbed but seaworthy fishing trawler and was willing to take Guilford as far as Dover, for a price.
The ship left Jeffersonville after dark, on a gentle swell under a moonless sky. Twice Kohn changed course to avoid Navy patrols, faint silhouettes on the violet horizon. There was no question of navigating the Thames, Kohn told him. “That’s locked up tight. There’s an overland route from Dover, a dirt-track road. Best I can do.”
Guilford went ashore at a crude wooden landing along the Kentish coast. Kohn put back to sea. Guilford sat on the creaking dock for a time, listening to the cry of shore birds as the eastern sky turned a milky vermilion. The air smelled of salt and decay.
English soil at last. The end of a journey, or at least the beginning of the end. He felt the weight of the miles behind him, as deep as this ocean he had crossed. He thought about his wife and little girl.
The overland route from Dover to London consisted of a trail hacked out of the English wilderness, muddy and in places barely wide enough to accommodate a single horse and rider.
Dover was a small but thriving port town cut into the chalky coastal soil, surrounded by windswept hills and endless blue-green miles of star sorrel and a leaf-crowned reed the locals called shag. The town had not been much affected by the war; food was still relatively plentiful, and Guilford was able to buy a saddle-trained mare, not too elderly, that would carry him overland to London. He wasn’t a natural rider but found the horse an immensely more comfortable mount than Evangeline had been.
For a time he was alone on the London road, but as he crossed the highland meadows he began to encounter refugees.
At first it was only a few ragged travelers, some mounted, some hauling mud-crusted carts stacked with blankets and china and tattered wooden tea chests. He spoke to these people briefly. None had encouraging news, and most of them shied at the sound of his accent. Shortly after dusk he came across a crowd of forty families camped on a hillside, their fires glittering like the lights of a mobile city.
His paramount thought was of Caroline and Lily. He questioned the refugees politely but could discover no one who had known or seen them. Discouraged and lonely, Guilford reigned his horse and accepted an invitation to join a circle around one of the campfires. He shared his food freely, explained his situation, and asked what exactly had happened to London.
Answers were short and brutal.
The city had been shelled. The city had burned.
Had many died?
Many — but there was no counting, no toll of the dead.
As he approached the city Guilford began to entertain the troubling suspicion that he was being followed.
There was a face he’d seen, a familiar face, and he seemed to see it repeatedly among the increasing number of refugees, or pacing him along the forest road, or peering at him from the fretwork of mosque trees and pagoda ferns. A man’s face, young but careworn. The man was dressed in khaki, a battered uniform without insignia. The man looked remarkably like the picket from Guilford’s dreams. But that was impossible.
Guilford tried to approach him. Twice, on a lonely stretch of road deep in the twilight of the forest, he shouted at the man from his horse. But no one answered, and Guilford was left feeling foolish and frightened.
Probably there was no one there at all. It was a trick of the weary eye, the anxious mind.
But he rode more cautiously now.
His first sight of London was the blackened but intact dome of the new St. Paul’s, brooding over a field of mist and rubble.
A makeshift rope ferry carried him to the north shore of the Thames. Drizzle fell steadily and pocked the turbulent river.
He found an encampment of refugees in the treeless fields west of town, a vast and stinking clutter of tents and trench latrines in the midst of which a few Red Cross flags drooped listlessly in the rain.