station waiting room — no blackout here — was a bright bulb of honey-blonde hair. And then he heard the voice and knew instantly that it was Dorothy Lake.
She saw him at the same moment and broke into an athlete’s sprint, running towards him with no restraint. She began shouting long before she had reached him. ‘You must get on that train! Quick! Get on that train!’ She pointed across the tracks at the small locomotive, drawing no more than three carriages, now slowing to a halt, hissing with steam.
James could hardly hear her. ‘What? That’s going the wrong way.’
‘No,’ she panted, catching up with him at last. ‘No, that’s the right way. That’s where you need to go. Take that train to Greenwich. Get off there and ask for Hope Farm. Harry and Florence are there.’
James felt his heart stop. For a second, he and everything around him froze. He stared at Dorothy Lake and knew in an instant — from the earnest, pleading urgency of her face — that she was telling the truth.
‘I don’t und-’ he started, but she cut him off.
‘Don’t say anything!’ she said, the glow of her cheeks visible even in the half-light. ‘Just get on that train. I can’t tell you how I know, but I know. Your wife is waiting for you. Your son is waiting for you. Go!’
‘I… I can’t.’
‘Yes, you can. The train’s right here.’
‘I have to get to Washington. There’s something I have to do before it’s-’
On the opposite platform the guard was marching through clouds of steam, inspecting both ends for any passengers still getting on or off. He had a flag in his hand.
Dorothy turned back to him, her eyes afire. ‘You must go now. I don’t know how much longer they’ll be there. Now’s your chance!’
‘Dorothy-’
‘You said that all you wanted was to see them again.’ Her eyes were both pleading and baffled. On the other platform, the guard was raising his whistle to his lips. ‘Or were you just lying?’
‘I want to see them more than anything in the world. But there’s more at stake here than me and my family.’
The guard bellowed, ‘Last call! All aboard!’
Dorothy’s eyes were now two wells of tears. ‘I wanted to help you.’
He gripped her by her shoulders. ‘I know you did. And I will never forget what you’ve done.’ A piercing sound cut through the air: the guard’s whistle. ‘I love my wife and I love my child. Very much. But I also love my country.’
They were suddenly engulfed in a fresh cloud of white steam, their voices swallowed up in a loud hiss as the pistons of the locomotive cranked back into motion.
‘There’s still time,’ Dorothy cried as the train inched slowly forwards. ‘You could jump on. Florence and Harry are less than an hour away.’
James did not answer. Instead he watched the train gather speed and move away, its tail-lamps becoming smaller and smaller until they were a mere pinprick of light, no bigger than a distant star. He did not know what to say to this young woman but at last, when the train had disappeared from view, he turned to her.
‘Dorothy, I know what this looks like. And I know what you’re thinking: that men like me, maybe all men, are snakes and that we can’t be trusted. But it’s not true. There are some bad ones, I can’t deny it. But the rest of us try to do our best, we really do. Even when it doesn’t look like it, we try to do what’s decent and what’s right.’ He wasn’t making any sense.
Now she looked at him. ‘What is it my uncle is doing in Washington that would make you sacrifice your own family?’
‘I don’t know yet and I don’t want to say until I’m certain.’ He gazed at her damp, flushed face, her distraught expression. ‘And it’s nothing you’re responsible for.’
‘I could telephone him and tell him you’re coming after him.’
‘You could, Dorothy. But I’m taking the chance that you won’t. Because you’re a good person and you have your whole life ahead of you. And look what you were prepared to do to save just one family.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
‘No, nor do I. Not completely. But we will. And you will have done the right thing.’ They stood in silence for a moment until he spoke again. ‘Besides. You don’t know where in Washington he is.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Because if you did you would have told me.’
The stationmaster was back, checking his pocket watch. He called over to them, the only passengers on the platform. ‘The Federal to Washington, DC, this track. Federal to Washington, arriving this track.’
James looked at Dorothy Lake, and as he did so her face crumpled, the sophisticated veneer completely gone now. Impulsively, he hugged her for just a moment. ‘Thank you, for what you’ve done.’ He pulled away from her to give her an exhausted smile. ‘Wish me luck.’
Chapter Forty
James spent the first minutes of the train journey staring into the dark, thinking of Harry and Florence. He could see nothing outside as the train headed into what he imagined to be vast acres of American farmland, empty and endless. Instead he saw Harry’s face, his wide eyes looking into his father’s, asking him where he had been, and why he had not come for him when he had the chance.
Alone in that rattling carriage, James tried to formulate an answer. He imagined himself perching his son on his knee, explaining how there were moments in life when you had to do things you did not want to do. How sometimes your own needs, your own desperate hunger to see the two people you love most in the world, had to come second because of an even greater need. He heard himself saying these words to his son; and then he heard his son’s husky voice answer him back with a single word, repeated over and over again: why?
James closed his eyes and pictured Hope Farm. As the train clattered over the tracks at a pedestrian nocturnal speed, he saw it in bright summer sunlight, a place of white fences and orchards teeming with shiny apples, of yellows and ambers and the golden colours of American plenty. And the next moment in sharp contrast he imagined Harry and Florence huddled together on two bare wooden chairs in a tiny freezing kitchen, the whole scene bathed in blue-grey light. He knew it made no sense; that if they were just an hour away, as Dorothy had said, then their weather was no different from his. But he pictured it that way all the same.
What was Hope Farm? Why were they there? Dorothy had insisted she would not tell him how she knew — but he had not even asked, pressing her for no details. He had not wanted to hear anything specific, anything too real, because he knew that would make it harder to resist. His choice was hard enough already.
At intervals, as the night-time minutes turned to hours, he would be gripped by panic, becoming convinced he had made a grotesque mistake. What, after all, did he have to go on? The text of a lecture and a few casual remarks by McAndrew to his impressionable young niece. It was quite possible that the Dean had been thinking aloud in that Darwin anniversary lecture; that he was heading to Washington merely to boost his career. The most important meeting of my entire life. Perhaps the President had summoned him to serve in his cabinet, the way British politicians were always wooing Bernard Grey.
But James’s gut said otherwise. He knew what he had read; McAndrew could not have made his intentions much clearer. And surely only Lund’s discovery of a plan this ambitious could explain the poor man’s agitation — and indeed his murder by the Dean.
He thought back to those final moments at the station with Dorothy. The train had taken time to leave, as they shunted on new rolling stock. The delay had been awkward; neither knowing what to say to the other. To fill the silence, James had asked a question that had popped unannounced into his head. It came in the voice of William Curtis, the lecturer at the American Eugenics Society. The subjects in such a study will, of course, have to be photographed without clothing
…
‘This will sound strange and rude, but tell me something. Have you ever heard anything about students at Yale being photographed without-’ He hesitated. How to put this delicately?
