Darwinia

We march in the morning if weather is at all reasonable. Home seems farther away than ever, the land grows stranger by the day.

Chapter Nine

Caroline adjusted to the rhythms of her uncle Jered’s household, strange as those rhythms were. Like London, or most of the world these days, there was something provisional about her uncle’s home. He kept odd hours. Often it was left to Alice (and more often now, Caroline herself) to mind the store. She found herself learning the uses of nuts and bolts, of winches and pe

Lily had adjusted easily enough to her new environment, less easily to the absence of her father. She still asked from time to time where Daddy was. “Across the English Cha

“Is he safe?”

“Very safe. And very brave.”

Lily asked about her father most often at bedtime. It was Guilford who had always read to her, a ritual that left Caroline feeling faintly and unreasonably jealous. Guilford read to Lily with a wholeheartedness Caroline couldn’t match, distrustful as she was of the books Lily liked, their unwholesome preoccupation with fairies and monsters. But Caroline took up the task in his absence, mustering as much enthusiasm as she could. Lily needed the reassurance of a story before she could wholly relax, abandon vigilance, sleep.

Caroline envied the simplicity of the ritual. Too often, she carried her own burden of doubt well into the morning hours.

Still, the summer nights were warm and the air rich with a fragrance that was, though strange, not entirely unpleasant. Certain native plants, Jered said, blossomed only at night. Caroline imagined alien poppies, heavy-headed, narcotic. She learned to leave her bedroom window open and let the flowered breezes play over her face. She learned, as the summer progressed, to sleep more easily.

It was Lily’s sleeplessness, as July waned, that served as notice that something had changed in Jered’s house.

Lily with dark bands beneath her eyes. Lily picking dazedly at breakfast. Lily silent and grim at the di

Caroline found herself unwilling to ask what was wrong — wanting nothing to be wrong, hating the idea of yet another crisis. She summoned her courage one warm night after another chapter of “Dorothy,” as Lily called these repetitious fables, when Lily was still restless.

The little girl drew her blanket above her chin. “It wakes me up when they fight.”

“When who fight, Lily?”

“Aunt Alice and Uncle Jered.”

Caroline didn’t want to believe it. Lily must be hearing other voices, perhaps from the street.

But Lily’s room had only a postage stamp of a window, and it looked out on the back alley, not the busy market street. Lily’s room was in fact a reconstructed closet off the rear hall, a closet Jered had converted into a tiny but comfortable bedchamber for his niece. Enough space for a girl, her bear, her book, and for her mother to sit a while and read.

But the closet shared a wall with Jered and Alice’s bedroom, and these walls weren’t especially thick. Did Jered and Alice argue, late at night, when they thought no one could hear? They seemed happy enough to Caroline… a little aloof, perhaps, moving in separate spheres the way older couples often do, but fundamentally content. They couldn’t have argued often before or Lily would have complained or at least showed symptoms.

The arguments must have started after Colin Watson arrived.

Caroline told Lily to ignore the sounds. Aunt Alice and Uncle Jered weren’t really angry, they were only having disagreements. They really loved each other very much. Lily seemed to accept this, nodded and closed her eyes. Her demeanor improved a little over the next few days, though she was still shy of her uncle. Caroline put the matter out of her mind and didn’t think of it again until the night she fell asleep halfway through a chapter of Dorothy and woke, well after midnight, cramped and uncomfortable, next to Lily.

Jered had been out. It was the sound of the door that woke her. Lieutenant Watson had been with him; Jered said a few inaudible words before the Lieutenant retired to his cellar. Then came Jered’s heavy tread in the corridor, and Caroline, afraid for no reason she could define, pulled Lily’s door closed.

She felt a little absurd, and more than a little claustrophobic sitting cross-legged in this lightless chamber in her nightgown. She listened to the unbroken rhythm of her daughter’s breath, gentle as a sigh. Jered rumbled down the hallway on his way to bed, trailing a steam-engine reek of tobacco and beer.

Now she heard Alice’s low voice greet him, almost as deep as a man’s, and Jered’s, all chest and belly. At first Caroline couldn’t distinguish the words, and she couldn’t hear more than a phrase even when they began to raise their voices. But what she did hear was chilling.

… don’t know how you could get involved… (Alice’s voice.)

… doing my Goddamned duty… (Jered.)

Then Lily woke and needed comforting, and Caroline stroked her golden hair and soothed her.

… you know he might be killed…

… nothing of the kind!

… Caroline’s husband! Lily’s father!

… I don’t rule the world… I didn’t… wouldn’t…

And then quite suddenly the voices lapsed into silence. She imagined Jered and Alice dividing the big bed into territory, marking borders with shoulders and hips, as she and Guilford had sometimes done, after an argument.

They know something, she thought. Something about Guilford, something they don’t want to tell me.

Something bad. Something frightening.

But she was too tired, too shocked to make sense of it. She kissed Lily mechanically and retreated to her own room, to her open window and lazily twining curtains and the odd perfume of the English night. She doubted she could sleep, but slept in spite of herself; she didn’t want to dream but dreamed incoherently of Jered, of Alice, of the sad-eyed young Lieutenant.