it from scavenging animals, while she crawled back to the estate for help.
Lomax finds more buckets hanging not far away, and follows their trail to a well-hidden clapboard shack that skulks amid some hawthorn bushes, walled in by a copse of ash. Outside the shack a goat lies dead in its pen, its protruding tongue as pink as candy floss. Inside, Lomax discovers little human imprint: a hefty woodstove—cold; some greasy cooking utensils. An archaic flintlock rifle. Rabbit snares. Sacks of cornmeal. No journal.
Despite its poverty, Lomax feels a stitch of envy at the hermit’s spare existence. Often, on days when his fatherly duties are particularly taxing, he’s imagined himself disappearing into just such a quiet, wooded place, free from both debt and responsibility. No wonder Greenwood is scrambling to rid himself of the infant. Anyone living this well has no need to spoil it with parenthood. Still, the absence of clothing and money suggests he’s left for good. Surely he’s running by instinct, too ignorant to grasp that he hasn’t done anything illegal.
Knowing he can no longer keep his employer in the dark, Lomax trudges back through the woods and drives to Mr. Holt’s mansion in the city, where he finds him in his drawing room, drinking brandy and frowning at the financial papers. When Lomax tells him about a baby found in the woods by a hermit who has now very likely skipped town, Mr. Holt leaps to his feet.
“And you think this baby could be my child?”
“It could, sir. It was found on your property the morning after Euphemia went missing.”
“And the journal? Does he have it?”
“That has yet to be determined. But it’s been reported he does.”
Now Mr. Holt reaches up to rest both of his fine-smelling hands squarely on Lomax’s shoulders. “If you return them to me—my child and this journal—then the entirety of your mortgage on that nice little brick bungalow of yours will be wiped clean, Mr. Lomax. You have my word. Every penny.
“But if you fail to do so,” Mr. Holt adds, brushing some invisible lint from Lomax’s shoulder, “and this louse makes off with both my daughter and the material sufficient to ruin me with, then your house will be the least of what you’ll lose. In fact, you’d be better off not returning to Saint John at all.”
To shore up his employer’s confidence, Lomax describes his plan to check train stations and flophouses down the line. The task will be made easier because he’ll be seeking a single derelict with a child, surely an unusual sight. “After I locate him,” Lomax says, “I’ll offer a reasonable sum in exchange for the child and the journal. No need for theatrics. And certainly no need to involve the Mounties in such a sensitive matter.”
Just as Lomax is preparing to leave, Mr. Holt turns to him with a frosty smile and says, “Mr. Lomax? If at any point you are faced with the choice of which to recover, the child or the book, choose the book. Is that clear?”
As the father of seven, Lomax knows that while a child’s memory is an impermanent, malleable thing, paper is another story.
“Perfectly clear, sir,” he says.
NO BUSINESS
SINCE HE’S STUCK with the baby—at least until he can find a semi-respectable place to rid himself of her—Everett has vowed not to speak to her directly. He applied a similar rule on his sugarbush: no talking to trees. He’d seen it in the War, men talking to things that couldn’t answer back: guns, trucks, trenches, mud, even their boots—and it was always their first step down into the root cellar of madness. In Europe, with his brother—who’d always been their spokesman—absent from his side for the first time in his life, Everett found conversing with his fellow soldiers arduous, and managed to avoid them by taking odd jobs. When his superiors discovered he’d been a woodcutter, he was tasked with replacing the rotting trench planks that kept the men raised above the fetid mud. Everett preferred this to regular soldiering, though it felt bizarre to work with wood in such a wasted, treeless landscape, with planks brought in from Scandinavia, or even Canada, because there wasn’t a single living tree around for fifty miles.
After his carpentry was done, Everett volunteered as a stretcher-bearer, for which his youthful footspeed served him well. As bullets tore through the air, he’d dash out into the corpse-strewn patch that lay between them and the enemy to drag the wounded back, travois-style. After a