He walks me back to the manor’s ponderous front door and as I shut it behind me, I hear a sound that makes me pause. Water running. The sound of it echoes faintly down the stairs; and in the walls, the corresponding wrenching of the pipes.
“Beth?” I call out, my teeth chattering. I struggle out of my soaked boots, make my way to the kitchen, where the light is on. Beth is not there. “Beth! Are you still up?” I shout, flinching from the glare of the lights, my head thumping. The water running still, drenching my thoughts with nauseating unease. I fight to focus my eyes, because there is something not right in here, in the kitchen. Something that makes the blood beat in my temples, dries my throat. The knife block, knocked roughly over and lying on its side on the worktop, and several of the knives pulled out, discarded beside it. For the second time on this black night, I cannot breathe. I turn, race to the stairs on legs that won’t move fast enough.
Lasting
1904-1905
The stationmaster at Dodge City was most sympathetic. He listened patiently to Caroline’s tale of her lost ticket and allowed her to pay there and then for her whole journey, from Woodward to New York. She spent the long days of the train ride watching out of the window, at gray storm skies and blistering white skies and china-blue skies so pretty they hurt her head. She thought of nothing, but tested the kernel of grief inside herself from time to time, to see if it would diminish with distance when it hadn’t with time. William, still recovering from his fever, slept a great deal, whimpering fretfully when he awoke. But he knew Caroline and allowed her to soothe him. She sacrificed lunch at the Harvey Hotel in Kansas City to shop instead for clean napkins, blankets and a bottle for the baby, hurrying back to the train with her heart fluttering anxiously, in case it left without her. The train was the only home she had at that moment. It was her only plan, the only thing she knew.
“Oh, he is just beautiful! What’s his name?” a woman exclaimed one evening, pausing on her way through the carriage to bend over the carrycot and clasp her hands together over her heart.
“William,” Caroline told her, swallowing; her throat suddenly, painfully, dry.
“That’s a handsome name, too. Such dark hair!”
“Oh, yes, he takes after his father in that respect,” Caroline smiled. She could not keep the sorrow from her voice as she spoke, though, and the woman glanced at her quickly, saw her red-rimmed eyes and the paleness of her face.
“Just you and William now, is it?” the woman asked kindly. Caroline nodded, amazed by how easily the lie came to her.
“I’m taking him to live with my family,” she said, smiling a wan smile. The woman nodded in sympathy.
“My name’s Mary Russell. I’m sitting in the third car and if you need anything-even if it’s just company-you come and find my husband Leslie and me. Agreed?”
“Agreed. Thank you.” Caroline smiled again as Mary moved away, wishing that she could accept the offer, wishing that she could seek out some company. But that could only be in another world, where Corin was not dead and they were just visiting his family in New York, perhaps, and with a baby that Caroline had carried in her womb, not just in her arms. She returned to her quiet study of the landscape, and William returned to sleep.
New York was impossibly loud and huge. The buildings seemed to lean over from their vast heights, casting deep, murky shadows, and the noise was like a tidal wave, crashing and foaming into every corner of every street. Heavy with fatigue, and with her mind wound tight with nerves, Caroline hailed a hansom cab and climbed aboard. Her clothes were travel-stained and smelt stale.
“Where to, madam?” the driver asked. Caroline blinked, and her face grew hot. She had no idea where to go. There were girls whose addresses she knew, whom she would once have called her friends, but she could not think of calling on them after more than two years without a word, with a black-eyed baby and her face dirty with smuts from the train. She thought briefly of Corin’s family, but William squirmed in her arms and she blinked back tears. There was no way she could have carried and borne them a grandson without Corin having written to them about it. And she did not want to be anywhere she might be found. This knowledge came like a sluice of cold water. She could not go anywhere somebody might look to find her.
“A… um, a hotel. The Westchester, thank you,” she answered at length, naming a place where she had once had lunch with Bathilda. The driver flicked the reins and the horse started forward, narrowly missing a motorcar that drew to a halt to let them go ahead, tooting its horn impatiently.
Bathilda. Caroline had not thought of her, had deliberately not thought of her in months and months. She knew what her aunt would have made of her fears, and of the wreck that life had become out in Woodward County. Now Caroline shut her eyes and at once she could see Bathilda’s knowing look, her scathing expression. She could imagine Bathilda hearing of Caroline’s plight and responding with a weighty, sanctimonious Well… She would not have gone to her, even if the woman had remained in New York, Caroline told herself defiantly. She would not have gone to Bathilda even now, now that she knew nobody and had no idea where to go, or what to do. She suppressed the treacherous longing she felt just to see a familiar face, even if it was not a friendly one. For whose faces would remain friendly to her now? She thought of Magpie, waiting in the dugout-but only for a second. The thought was too terrible. She thought of Hutch, of what emotions his face would register when he rode back in from the ranges, found White Cloud dead, maybe others too, and she and William gone without a word. Her insides seemed to burn her, seemed to writhe around themselves, and pain snapped behind her eyes. With a small cry she buried her face in her hands and concentrated hard on staying upright on the cab’s padded bench.
At the Westchester she paid for a respectable room, and enquired after a nursemaid for William, explaining that her own maid had been taken seriously ill and been forced to return to her family’s care. One was found without delay, a pug-faced girl with bright ginger hair, called Luella, who looked nothing but terrified when Caroline handed William to her. William took one look at the strange girl’s frightened eyes and garish hair and began to wail. Holding the child awkwardly, Luella backed out of the room. Caroline went into the bathroom and, realizing in a way she never had before just how miraculous indoor plumbing was, she ran herself a hot bath, sank into it and tried to quiet her mind, which rang with unanswered questions and thoughts and fears, and threatened at any moment to tip her into panic.
In the end she did not stay more than a week in the city where she had been born and raised. It no longer felt any more like home than the ranch house, or Woodward, or the railway car that had brought her back. The oily fumes of the motorcars that had proliferated in her absence stuck in the back of her throat, and the throng of people made her feel every bit as invisible as she had felt out on the prairie. The buildings were too close, too solid, like the cliff walls of some labyrinth from which escape was impossible. There’s nowhere I belong, Caroline thought, as she walked William in his new perambulator down streets she had never seen before, had never heard of before, hoping in this way to reduce the risk of anybody recognizing her. She paused on a corner and looked up, high above, to where a crane was swinging a steel girder that looked like a toothpick into the waiting arms of a gang of workmen. The men stood at the edge of this unfinished tower with nothing to keep them but their balance. Caroline felt a sympathetic clench in her stomach for the danger they were in, for the nearness of the fall. But she soon walked on again, recognizing the feeling as one she had herself, one she’d had for a long time. The creeping knowledge of life’s precariousness, of the transience of it.