ON THE TRAIN BACK TO BROOKLYN, WE SAT OPPOSITE EACH other in our berth. Dr. Cook might have been returning from what he knew was his last try at the pole, so desolate was his expression. Gone was the kind, indulgent, faintly amused look with which formerly he regarded even a landscape devoid of people.
My mind was reeling. I had for hours been trying to raise his spirits. I would have been happy just to make him angry. But he merely stared out the window, watching as a succession of snow-covered towns went by, looking as if everything we passed was to blame for what had happened. To blame, yet irreproachable, remote, indifferent, oblivious to anything he said or did.
“There is no point denying that what happened changes everything,” said Dr. Cook. “They saw me fall, laid low. They saw me as no man should ever let himself be seen by other men. So vulnerable. So defenceless against scorn and pity. I was completely fooled. I have always, even when all signs pointed to success, prepared myself for failure. ‘There is many a slip / ‘twixt the cup and the lip.’ That has been my motto. Never presume. Never celebrate too openly, lest you seem and feel all the more foolish when your hopes are dashed.
“Yet I left myself open to be jilted in public, so certain did the outcome seem this time. There is something ominous about near triumph, Devlin. It is a rule of the universe that anyone who comes this close and fails will never get a second chance. Everyone in that banquet room sensed it. In the eyes of the money-men, I am tainted with bad luck.
“Even if Peary undertakes but one more expedition and, when he fails, gives up at last, I will not be chosen to succeed him. No one who was there last night will forget the way I looked. That I was in no way to blame for what happened, that I in no way brought it upon myself, will not matter. What will matter is that they saw me brought down from the height to which they had raised me.
“Last night I told myself that I could bear it if someone else makes it to the pole before me or you, as long as that someone else is not Peary. Last night, in my room, I said out loud, over and over, ‘Anyone but Peary.’ How absurd it seems. I have been reduced to bargaining with destiny by a man whose efforts are foredoomed to failure. I know he will not reach the pole, yet I cannot help dreading that he will.”
“It is not over for us,” I said. “If it is not yet over for Peary, think how much remains for us to do.”
He shook his head.
“Not everything is lost,” I insisted, fighting back tears, as I had been doing for hours, though I had let them flow freely in my room the night before. When we met in the morning, my swollen eyes made it so plain to Dr. Cook how I had spent the night that for a moment he took me in his arms. “We may have to do things some other way than we had planned,” I said. “That’s all.”
“I am sorry for what has happened to you because of me,” he said.
“Not because of you,” I said. “Because of … I don’t know who to blame.”
“You should know,” he said. “Who do you think started that rumour? By whom was I misled?”
“You might not have been misled,” I said. “Some people say that the rumour was well founded, that the speech Bridgman showed you was not a forgery, but that Peary changed his mind at the last second, in part because he was urged to do so by the president.”
“When do they say that Peary changed his mind? Are these the same people who started the rumour in the first place?”
“They say that he changed his mind just minutes before he arrived. That even Jo Peary, as she sat there listening, did not know what he planned to say. You heard the speech. Right up to the end, it sounded like he was saying goodbye. Perhaps all he did was change the last few words.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Peary put Bridgman up to it.”
“What if Bridgman didn’t know that Peary had changed his mind? What if Peary didn’t know that you had seen his speech and Bridgman didn’t know that Peary had changed it? It might all have been completely innocent. An accident.”
“It was no accident,” he said.
In my mind, I saw Peary shuffle, slump-shouldered, across the stage towards his chair, where his wife was waiting for him. He had looked as if he had done what everyone expected him to do. He had looked done in. The ovation he received was exactly as I had imagined it would be. A roaring, raucous send-off for a man who, after surviving feat after feat of exploration, had just renounced his ultimate quest, just bequeathed it to a younger man. Minutes before Peary made his intentions known, I had seen Dr. Cook smiling and applauding as if, now that Peary was no longer a rival, there was no need for reserve, no reason not to join the others in this last salute to the grand old man of exploration. How nightmarishly close it had all been to what Bridgman had led us to expect.
I couldn’t help thinking how different things would be now if I had been a fraction of a second slower grabbing out for Peary when he fell. He would already be forgotten. Dr. Cook would long ago have been chosen to replace him. He—we—might have made it to the pole and back by now. Dr. Cook would have been president of the congress and guest of honour at the banquet. He, not Peary, would have won the first Hubbard Medal. He, not Peary, would have walked into the banquet room with Roosevelt.
I felt ashamed of myself for thinking such things. For Dr. Cook, I foresaw unhappiness that I felt helpless to prevent. I wondered what would become of him and me if he had to face up to the certainty of failure—what would sustain us through all the secrecy, all the pretence and collusion, if we ceased to be explorers. What would he feel for me once he put aside the hope of redeeming his betrayal of my mother?
But how unfair of me it was to doubt him now.
“What must I do, Devlin?” Dr. Cook said. “We were to have undertaken polar expeditions together. I was to have taught you, prepared you to lead expeditions of your own. I can see no way now that this can happen. Marie cannot help us. Underwriting the cost of climbing Mt. McKinley is one thing, but a series of polar expeditions, even one expedition, is beyond her means. Perhaps you should apply for a place on other expeditions. I’m sure that Amundsen would take you with him on his next try for the South Pole if we asked him to.”
“I will not take part in any expeditions without you,” I said. “Perhaps both of us could go with Amundsen. You would greatly increase his chances of success. And if you were part of a successful try for the South Pole, the backers here would be impressed. You would be keeping your hand in the game. And I could learn from both of you.”
“I cannot go back to serving under someone else,” he said. “Not even Amundsen. Besides, if I was part of a Norwegian expedition that made it to the pole, I would be persona non grata in New York. My participation in the Belgian expedition did not win me any friends here.”
“Nothing has happened from which you cannot recover,” I said.
“We may never get there, Devlin,” he said. “In spite of what I promised you—”
“No one could be certain of keeping such a promise,” I said.
“Then you doubt me, too?” he said.
“No,” I said. “No, I just meant … it would not be as though you had broken your promise wilfully.”
“You mean,” he said, “it would not be as though I had betrayed you?”
“I was not thinking of betrayal.”
“I have devoted my life to fulfilling that promise.”
“Perhaps you have invested too much of yourself in me,” I said. “Your wife and … and your other children—”
He shook his head and winced, as if to say, “If you only understood, you would not mention them.”
“I am meant to be destroyed by this,” he said. “As important as it is to Peary that he succeed, it is just as important to him that I fail.”
“Why?” I said. Then I added, when he did not answer, “Is his failure as important to you as your success?”
“Our success,” he said. “Yours and mine together. Never forget that. But no, I am not like him. I do not share his motives. He has done things I would never do.”
Eyes closed, he was silent for a long time. I thought he had fallen asleep.
“Devlin, there is something I must tell you. Perhaps I should have done so before, but I had hoped to spare you. Perhaps there is no other way, however, of making you understand why Peary must not be allowed to reach his goal.”
I felt the same dread as I had when we first met in the drawing room.
“I told you that on the North Greenland expedition, Francis Stead took me aside one morning and told me his story, including what Peary had told him: that I was the man with whom his wife betrayed him, the father of her son. But he also told me something else.
“We sat on the ‘bench,’ the ledge on the back of the tolt of rock some distance from Redcliffe House. As we spoke, he puffed on his cigars. It all happened just as I described to you before. He told me that when he and his wife had been married nearly two years, he had abandoned her and gone to Brooklyn.”
Under a pseudonym, Francis Stead booked passage on a steamer to St. John’s. He wore a disguise that he bought at an auction. The props of a play that had closed were being sold off: muttonchop whiskers, thick eyebrows, a florid moustache and heavy burnsides, and a suit of clothing of a style that had been in fashion twenty years earlier. He had no need of makeup, for his face, even then, was leathered from the time he’d spent up north.
This was in late March. There was a channel through the ice, barely enough for the steamer to make it to the Narrows, just inside of which it docked, for all the berths in the harbour were either occupied or crammed with ice. It was not far from where the ship docked to Devon Row.
Francis Stead tipped his hat to the one or two people he passed along the way to the nearest hotel. St. John’s is a seaport. There are always strangers, strange-looking strangers, on the street. No one paid him much attention.
After checking in under his pseudonym, he went straight to the house. It was about one-thirty in the afternoon. He knew that the boy was of school age and would not yet be home. They had never had servants. It was likely that his wife had none now. There were no vehicles about except the cabriolet, which he recognized as hers, and that meant she was unlikely to be having visitors. Either she was alone in the house or it was empty. If someone other than her answered the door, he would pretend he had the wrong address and leave to find some other way of contacting her.
He struck the knocker several times. The door opened, and there she was. It seemed to him that she looked exactly the same as she had when he left, that she was even dressed the same. She did not recognize him, not even when he said her name. “It’s me,” he said. She looked at him for a long time, then walked backwards, holding the door with both hands as if to keep it between them, to shield herself with it. It seemed that for a few seconds, she did not realize he was wearing a disguise. She seemed to take his appearance as the measure of how long they had been apart.
She said nothing at first, only sat on the edge of a chair in the front room, looking at the fire. He wondered what she thought, his showing up like this on the doorstep after all this time. Done up like this.
“Devlin will soon be coming home from his aunt’s house,” she said.
He asked her if they might make their separate ways to Signal Hill, where they would have some privacy. “I believe you are as anxious as I am that no one know I came to visit you,” he said. She said nothing. He assured her that she would not keep the boy and his aunt waiting long.
“What is it that you want to speak to me about?” she said.
He asked her if he might wait to explain himself until they met on Signal Hill.
She went upstairs, changed for the outdoors, came back down. He told her to wait for twenty minutes, then take the cabriolet to the top of the hill. He asked her to pretend, if they were approached by anyone on the hill or if someone later asked her who he was, that he was a visiting relative or an acquaintance of her husband’s from New York. He took her silence for agreement.
He went outside and strode briskly up the road. A raw cutting wind was blowing from the west, but his exertions kept him warm. She passed him when he was near the top of the hill. She looked at him, but he looked straight ahead.
She had been waiting perhaps five minutes in the cab by the time he reached the crest. There was no one else about. They could not be seen from the blockhouse, though he could tell by the smoke that spewed out along the ridge that it was occupied.
He joined her in the cab.
“Even Pete does not remember you,” she said. It was true. The horse, had he recognized his voice or scent, would have been tossing his head about by now, in greeting or in protest. “What do you want, Francis?” she said. “Obviously you do not mean to stay or you would not be dressed the way you are.”
For a trace of a second, she smiled in a way that infuriated him. “Dressed the way you are.” On the occasion of seeing him for the first time in years, she was trying not to laugh at how he looked.
They were sheltered from the wind and the noise it made by the hood of the cab. He told her about Peary, said that Peary had given him the name of the boy’s father. At this she gave a start and looked at him, but then she turned away again, as if she thought he might be trying to fool her into revealing the man’s identity. As he continued, she listened, her face expressionless, he thought, until he realized that she was mute with fear, realized that he was shouting, screaming at her.
He tried to calm himself.
“If you will just admit that you lied to me,” he said, “if you will just admit that much, that would be enough. I will not insist on your telling me his name or how you met, or anything else. If you will admit that you lied, I will not even ask you why.” If she had spoken up then … But it seemed to him that despite her fear, she could not bring herself to take him seriously.
“I told you the truth,” she said, “and I will not speak of it again.” She said it with such finality he knew that further questions would be pointless. He took her by the upper arm, put his face close to hers and tried to kiss her.
She pulled away from him and jumped from the carriage, began to run towards the road that led down to the city. He ran after her, blocked her way. She turned again and ran towards the blockhouse. Again he caught her, blocked her path, though he did not touch her.
“What are you doing?” he said.
She screamed something, but the wind carried the sound away from the hill.
Seeming to know just what she was doing, seeming to think it led to safety, she began to run down the hill towards the sea. She must have misremembered, miscalculated something, thought she knew of a path but, in her panic, was unable to find it. It was a very great distance to the bottom, but the grassy slope was so steep that he could run no faster than she could. On this, the side of the hill that in the spring faced the wind and rain, there was no snow left. When she could go no farther without plunging off the grassy ledge above the ice, she ran a little to the side, then stopped. She shouted something, seeming to have realized what a blunder she had made by running down the hill.
She turned to face him. Both of them were gasping for breath. “It crossed my mind,” she said, “down at the house. Just for a second, it crossed my mind that this was your intention. But I told myself you would never do such a thing. Yet it was only that you could not bring yourself to do it in that house. Francis, please think about the boy. The boy has no one else but me.”
“What do you mean?” he said. “What is it that you think I have brought you here to do?”
He had never seen such fear in a person’s eyes before. Behind her, perhaps fifteen feet below her, wave after wave of slushy water shrugged itself ashore from the edge of the ice.
“If you tell me his name, I will let you go,” he said.
She tried to get past him, but he caught her around the waist and dragged her to the edge. “Tell me his name,” he said, “or it will be your son’s turn next.”
“All right,” she said. “All right.”
“Do not lie to me,” he said. “If I find that you have lied to me, I will come back for the boy.”
She spoke the name.
“Let me go,” she said.
He could not believe how strong, how wild she was. She got loose from him two or three times, punching, biting, clawing at his face. A smaller man would have been no match for her. He believed that if she got by him, he could not have caught her going up that hill.
He grabbed her around the waist from behind and threw her over. She made no sound. She disappeared beneath the water and did not come up. Not once.
He climbed the slope, then descended the other side of the hill on foot. He met no one on the road. He did not really expect to get away with it. Though he had taken pains to avoid detection, he felt almost certain they would fail. He felt as though he didn’t care one way or the other.
He went back to his hotel and stayed there, waiting for the knock on the door that never came. He read in the paper the next day that her empty horse and carriage had been found on Signal Hill and her body in the water at the bottom. He was startled when he saw his name, thinking that he had been found out: “Wife of the explorer Francis Stead, who for the past few years has lived in Brooklyn, New York.” That was all it said about him, the words seeming to imply that, deserted by her husband, abandoned, she had died by her own hand. “Cause of death as yet unknown,” it said.
He booked passage out on a ship that would make port in two days. By the time the ship arrived, the whole city was talking about “poor Mrs. Stead who drowned herself,” though the official cause of death was accidental drowning. It had never occurred to him that suicide would be suspected. More than suspected—assumed. Apparently, she had long been regarded as “odd,” “peculiar,” something of a hermit, people said.
Her reputation was his alibi. It seemed to him that he was meant to get away undetected.
His ship made port, and he went back to Brooklyn.
“I have known of this for so long,” Dr. Cook said. “I did not think it would pain me so much to speak of it.”
He covered his face with his hands and sobbed. I, too, was crying, looking out the window of the train at my reflection.
“I cannot bear to think that she died that way because of me,” Dr. Cook sobbed. “Alone, at the bottom of that hill, at the hands of a man driven mad by what I did. I turned away from her, Devlin. Three weeks. Three weeks I knew her, and every day I think of her and wish that I had had the courage to answer her last letter, to say yes.
“Nothing in her life was undone by the manner of her death. I tell myself that over and over.”
I could speak no words of comfort to him, nor even feel anything for him. I had never really felt my mother’s presence, her absence, until now. For the first time in my life, I felt sorrow for her, which was so much heavier, so much more gravid, than mere sadness. Had I been standing, I would have fallen to the floor beneath its weight.
I thought of that unremembered afternoon when I had sat in the house, wondering until it got dark where my mother was, why she was not there to meet me at the door as she always was.
“She told him my name, Devlin, in the hope of saving you. For all she knew, he would go straight to the house anyway when he was done with her. But there was at least a chance he would not. I’m sure it was not just in the hope of escaping that she struggled with him. She tried to throw him from the ledge or pull him over with her.”
A shudder of revulsion passed through me. Francis Stead, while I sat alone in my mother’s house as it grew dark, had sat in his hotel room less than a hundred yards away, also waiting, wondering when they would come for him.
Dr. Cook looked at me.
“When Francis finished his story, I asked him what he meant to do with me. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I joined this expedition with the intention of killing you. But I have changed my mind. I mean to do nothing at all.’ He turned and began to walk back to Redcliffe House. Then he faced me again. ‘I have told Peary everything,’ he said. ‘Just a few hours ago. I also told him that I would confess to you.’
“That night, he walked away from Redcliffe House and was never seen again.”
He looked as drained as if he had just heard of her death for the first time.
For ten minutes, as the train jostled about on the tracks, we both looked out the window.
“Over the next few months,” he said, “some parts of Francis Stead’s story kept coming back to me. Such as his account of how ferociously your mother struggled for her life. There should have been bruises on her body that gave evidence of such a struggle, bruises that even someone predisposed to think that she had killed herself would have noticed. Her forearms, especially her wrists, would have been bruised from where he held her to keep her from striking him. She would have had bruises on her face, especially around her mouth, from having tried to bite him. Her clothing would have been in a telltale state of dishevelment, certainly torn and probably with pieces missing. Yet her death had so quickly been ruled an accident and the rumours of suicide had been allowed to flourish.
“I was so puzzled that about a year after the expedition I visited St. John’s to conduct an investigation of my own. I discovered that there was no coroner, as such, in St. John’s at the time of your mother’s death. Post-mortems were conducted, at the request of the police, by whatever physicians were available. I looked up your mother’s death certificate. Accidental drowning, it said. It was signed by your uncle. I am not suggesting that he was in any way involved in your mother’s death. He might have guessed, however, or considered it a possibility, that Francis was responsible. Without ever having communicated with Francis, he might have done what he could to cover it up, but it does not seem very likely. I think something like this happened: The police allowed him to do the post-mortem as a favour to one of their own, so to speak, a favour to a doctor they had often worked with in the past. Given your mother’s circumstances, the police would have presumed suicide, as would your uncle. A matter to be handled delicately, everyone would have agreed. Your uncle might have asked if he, a family member, could do the post-mortem just to keep gossip to a minimum. Then, to his surprise, he finds evidence of murder, which he withholds from the police, not to protect Francis, but to minimize the scandal, to keep it from getting out that his brother’s wife was murdered. People are almost never murdered by strangers. There had, I discovered from talking to some people when I was in St. John’s, been rumours about your mother. Unfounded rumours, I have no doubt whatsoever, though your uncle might have believed them. Even if he was certain or thought it likely that the rumours were unfounded, he would have known that people would draw their own conclusions: that she was killed by one of the many men she supposedly consorted with, disreputable men. In the public mind, her having been murdered would, perversely, confirm the rumours, especially if the murder went unsolved, which he would have known was likely, given the absence of any suspects. Better to cover it up for the sake of the family name, for his and his brother’s sake, and even, I supposed, not yet knowing your uncle, for Amelia’s sake.
“When I wrote to him, I told him that Francis had confessed to the murder of Amelia. I did not, of course, tell him that I was your father. I made no explicit threats, no mention of the death certificate. I was fairly certain that he would co-operate. Francis spoke often about your uncle. I think he was the only man that Francis Stead understood. He understood his brother much better than he understood himself, even though the two of them were very much alike.
“If accusations that Amelia had been murdered came out—if I made public the story I was told by Francis Stead and it was revealed that your uncle had signed her death certificate, citing accidental drowning as the cause of death—he would have been suspected of having covered up the murder of his brother’s wife. It would have ruined his reputation.
“So he complied with my every suggestion. I asked him to forward my letters to you unopened—that is, with the seal unbroken. I let him assume that I had instructed you to tell me when a seal was broken, and that I had devised some system whereby you would know if he had withheld a letter from you. I’m sure he never read the letters. You may think of what I did as blackmail. But I enlisted his help without harming him or extracting from him anything he valued. I felt I had to. Corresponding secretly with a grown-up is difficult enough. To do so with a child impossible without some such arrangement as I devised.”
So Uncle Edward, as I had suspected, did not know that Dr. Cook was my father.
“I should have told you before how she died. But imagine my dilemma. You had for so long believed that your mother had taken her life. Should I now break your heart a second time and tell you she was murdered by her husband?”
“Why have you told me now?” I said.
“So you would know that Peary is in part to blame for your mother’s death. Because he, for the pettiest of reasons, gave Francis Stead my name. Peary knows that I blame him, though we have never talked about it. He knows that he is to blame—he and I and Francis Stead. He despises me. How I regard him, he is well aware. It has never been more important to me that you understand his nature. That you understand why his failure is as important to me as our success.”