Darwinia

Chapter Nineteen

Spring came early to London. The thawing marshes to the east and west gave the air an earthy scent, and Thames Street, freshly paved from the docks to Tower Hill, rattled with commerce. To the west, work had begun again on the dome of the new St. Paul’s.

Caroline dodged a herd of sheep headed for market, feeling as if she were bound for slaughter herself. For weeks she had refused to see Colin Watson, refused to accept his invitations or even read his notes. She was not sure why she had agreed to see him now — to meet him at a coffee shop on Candlewick Street — except for the persistent feeling that she owed him something, if only an explanation, before she left for America.

After all, he was a soldier. He followed orders. He wasn’t Kitchener; he wasn’t even the Royal Navy. Just one man.

She found the place easily enough. The shop was dressed in Tudor woodwork. Its leaded windows dripped with condensation, the interior heated by the steam from a huge silver samovar. The crowd in side was rough, working-class, largely male. She gazed across a sea of woollen caps until she spotted Colin at a table at the rear, his coat collar turned up and his long face apprehensive.

“Well,” he said. “We meet again.” He raised his cup in a sort of mock-toast.

But Caroline didn’t want to spar with him. She sat down and came to the point. “I want you to know, I’m going home.”

“You just got here.”

“I mean to Boston.”

“Boston! Is that why you wouldn’t see me?”

“No.”

“Then won’t you at least tell me why you’re leaving?” He lowered his voice and opened his blue eyes wide. “Caroline, please. I know I must have offended you. I don’t know how, but if it’s an apology you want, you can have it.”

This was harder than she had expected. He was bewildered, genuinely contrite. She bit her lip.

“Your aunt Alice found out about us, is that it?”

Caroline dipped her head. “It wasn’t the best-kept secret.”

“Ah. I suspected as much. I doubt Jered would have put up a fuss, but Alice — well, I assume she was angry.”

“Yes. But that doesn’t matter.”

“Then why leave?”

“They won’t have me any longer.”

“Stay with me, then.”

“I can’t!”

“Don’t be shocked, Caroline. We needn’t live in sin, you know.”

Dear God, in a moment he’d be proposing! “You know why I can’t do that! Colin — she told me.”

“Told you what?”

Two seamen at the nearest table were smirking at her. She lowered her voice to match Colin’s. “That you murdered Guilford.”

The Lieutenant sat back in his chair, goggling. “God almighty! Murdered him? She said that?” He blinked. “But, Caroline, it’s absurd!”

“By sending guns across the Cha

He put down his cup. He blinked again. “Guns to the — ah. I see.”

“Then it’s true?”

He looked at her steadily. “That I murdered Guilford? Certainly not. About the weapons?” He hesitated. “Up to a point, it may be. We aren’t supposed to discuss these things even among ourselves.”

“It is true!”

“It may be. Honestly, I don’t know! I’m not a senior officer. I do what I’m told, and I don’t ask questions.”

“But guns are involved?”

“Yes, a number of weapons have passed through London.”

That was nearly an admission. Caroline thought she ought to be angry. She wondered why her anger was suddenly so elusive.

Maybe anger was like grief. It took its own sweet time. It waited in ambush.

Colin was thoughtful, concerned. “I suppose Alice might have heard something through Jered… and he probably knows more about it than I do, come to that. The Navy employs his warehouse and his dray teams from time to time, with his consent. He might well have done other work for the Admiralty. Fancies himself a patriot, after all.”

Alice and Jered arguing in the night, keeping Lily awake: was this what they had been fighting about? Jered admitting that guns had gone through his warehouse on the way to the Partisans, Alice afraid that Guilford would be hurt…

“But even if weapons went across the Cha

She was ashamed to feel her defenses crumbling. The issue had seemed icily clear when Alice explained it. But what if Jered was as guilty as Colin?

She shouldn’t be having this conversation… but there was nothing to stop it now, no moral or practical obstacle. This man, whatever he might have done, was being honest with her.

And she had missed him. She might as well admit it.

The seamen in their striped jerseys gri

Colin reached for her hand. “Walk with me,” he said. “Somewhere away from the noise.”

She let him talk all the way along Candlewick and up Fenchurch to the end of the pavement, let herself be soothed by the sound of his voice and the seductive idea of his i

The mosque trees had been a dull green all winter, but sudden sun and melting snow had coaxed new blades from the tree crowns. The air was almost warm.

He was a soldier, she told herself again. Of course he did what he was told; what choice did he have?

Jered was another matter. Jered was a civilian; he didn’t have to cooperate with the Admiralty. And Alice knew that. How the knowledge must have burned! Bitter, her voice had been, arguing with her husband in the dark. Of course she blamed Jered, but she couldn’t leave him; she was chained to him by marriage.

So Alice hated Colin instead. Blind, displaced, unthinking hatred. Because she couldn’t afford the luxury of hating her own husband.

“See me again,” Colin begged. “At least once more. Before you leave.”

Caroline said she would try.

“I hate to think of you at sea. There have been threats to shipping, you know. They say the American fleet is massed in the North Atlantic.”

“I don’t care about that.”

“Perhaps you should.”

Mrs. de Koenig passed her a note from Colin later that week. There was a general mobilization, he said; he might be shipped out; he wanted to see her as soon as possible.

War, Caroline thought bitterly. Everyone was talking about war. Only ten years since the world was shaken to its foundations, and now they want to fight over the scraps. Over a wilderness!

The Times, a six-page daily pressed on fibrous mosque-pulp paper, had devoted most of its recent editorials to chastening the Americans: for administering the Continent as if it were an American protectorate, for “imposing boundaries” on the British Isles, for various sins of arrogance or complacency. Caroline’s accent provoked raised eyebrows at the stores and market stalls. Today Lily had asked her why it was so bad to be an American.

“It isn’t,” Caroline told her. “That’s all just talk. People are upset, but they’ll calm down sooner or later.”

“We’re riding a ship soon,” Lily said.

“Probably.”

She had stopped taking meals with Alice and Jered. She would have rented a room for herself and Lily at the Empire if her stipend from home had been more generous. But even pub meals were an ordeal now, with all this talk of war. Her aunt and uncle were stiffly formal with Caroline when they couldn’t avoid her altogether, though they still fawned over Lily. Caroline found this easier to bear since her talk with Colin. She found herself nearly pitying Alice — poor staunchly moral Alice, locked into a network of guilt as tight as those curls she wove into her graying hair.