The Housekeepers(21)
“Don’t mess me about, Danny,” she said.
He shrugged. “The risk’s on you. Take it or leave it.”
He called a spade a spade, did Danny. Or at least he did when it pleased him. When it suited the story. But she understood that, too, didn’t she? She gave him what he needed in the end. Enough to buy his ticket all the way across the world, to the Cape Colony.
I’m on the make, she told herself, reading his letters, racing through the newspapers, waiting for him to buy his first claim, purchase his first stones, start making returns. It was very wonderful, that heart-stopping, breathless feeling. That certainty that she was sorted, that this was it, this was her made, forever. It lasted until the letters stopped. Till Danny dropped her. Vanished altogether.
At first she couldn’t credit it. She went up to town, waited outside the offices of the only mining company she knew, doorstepped a clerk on his way home for dinner. There were a whole host of women on the pavement, waving billets and ticket stubs and blurry photographs, asking for news of husbands and brothers and cousins who’d gone off to the mines.
“It’s about my brother,” she said. “Daniel O’Flynn.”
The clerk was a young man, but he had silvery threads in his hair. He smoothed them now, irritation written all across his face. “Madam. I get inquiries such as these nearly every week. There are as many as fifty thousand men out there. You understand? I would have—we have—simply no way of knowing all their movements.”
She squared up to him, pressed a letter into his hand. “Put out an inquiry. That’s all I’m asking.”
The clerk clicked his tongue in impatience. “I see I must be frank with you. It is a hard life out there. It’s been a long, taxing summer. Even when they take the greatest care in the world, men put their lives in the hands of their Maker every day.” He frowned. “Is this an insurance matter?” he asked. “If so, I really must reserve my counsel.”
This notion, that Danny could be dead, carried no credence with her. She turned her back on that clerk and marched home. There was no circumstance on earth in which Danny would have got himself killed. He was too hard-shell, too wily, for that. He would have negotiated with the boulder before it fell on his head. She pictured him in a shack office somewhere on the other side of the globe, heat raging down on him through a slatted window. Signing contracts, pondering his signature. He never respected his name. He hated being an O’Flynn, being one of a multitude, cousins crawling all over the neighborhood.
“I’d like to live forever, Scarecrow,” he used to say, lying awake at night, bouncing a rubber ball off the beams. “Forever.”
He’d return—she’d always been certain of that. The rest of the family wore black armbands and the priest came and Ma expired with grief, but she never went into mourning. “You wait,” she said grimly. “Just you wait.”
There was no satisfaction in being right. Trust Danny to return with a horde of newspapermen in his slipstream, a milksop merchant’s daughter on one arm: renamed, transformed, richer than the devil. Wilhelm de Vries, he called himself. They were ablaze with it, in the old neighborhood. Danny sent a gentleman, a young clerk with silvery hair, from house to house, making arrangements. Everybody needed a little something to keep their mouths closed and their opinions to themselves. Danny—Wilhelm—was extravagant in his generosity. He gave a good deal more than was necessary. He could afford to, of course.
That day at the house, she’d trod carefully across the grass, stopping at the edge of the picnic blanket. He didn’t get up.
She understood why he was smiling. This must have been everything he’d ever dreamed of. To lie there, basking in the ferocious heat of a London summer afternoon, his mansion springing up behind him. His own sister staring at him, goggle-eyed. He wanted her to feast her eyes on him. To see how well he’d done. To marvel. She understood that impulse: she felt it herself. It wasn’t easy to make a name for yourself in the lanes and back alleys of Devil’s Acre. You had to roar as loud as a lion if you wanted anyone to pay attention to you.
His curls had faded and he looked thinner around the cheeks—sunken, as if his back teeth were rotting. But he’d done something to the surface of his skin, rubbed it with oils or creams, made it shiny and expensive looking. He was wearing a wedding ring. He was always wearing wedding rings, she remembered. Every time he knocked up a girl he used to wear one, for the sake of appearances, to appease the neighbors. He’d yank it off five minutes later, of course.
“We hear you’re not dead, then,” she said tartly, trying to hide the shake in her voice.
“I’m not dead,” he said, grin stretching, arms stretching too.
She loathed him for that. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow at that. “Don’t be so pious, Scarecrow. You’d have done the same yourself.” He paused. “If you could.”
In the end he gave Mrs. Bone two checks. The first was a neat repayment of that original loan, plus a very fair rate of interest. Everybody in the old neighborhood heard about it. He made sure that they did. It was signed in his new name, with the most beautiful flourish, that whip-crack W slicing right across the paper: “Wilhelm de Vries.”
She didn’t cash it. She knifed it to the wall instead, to make the point.