Helen was the first of them to hear the station changing around them.
Another call came from beyond the gates, the railwayman's voice carrying clearly for the first few words before the iron-and-glass roof caught it and broke the rest among the hiss of steam, the scrape of luggage and the answering calls of men farther down the train shed. Until then the people gathered beneath the great clock had been permitted the small fiction that there was still plenty of time. They had stood in loose groups that other travellers could walk around, finishing conversations that had probably already been finished twice, fathers keeping their hands in their pockets, mothers finding last reasons to straighten collars, wives asking questions whose answers they already knew. The call changed that. Hats went back onto heads. Newspapers disappeared beneath arms. Bags were lifted from the floor. A man who had spent several minutes speaking quietly to his son in uniform suddenly took the young soldier by both shoulders and continued talking from much closer, his thumbs pressing into the cloth as though whatever advice remained might be made more durable by force. Near the ticket windows a woman counted three children, went abruptly pale, counted them again and discovered the fourth almost entirely hidden behind her husband's coat, whereupon she seized the child's hand without interrupting the argument she was having about their tickets. A porter who had been leaning beside an empty baggage cart put his shoulder into its handle and swung it towards the gates, the front wheel rattling hard over a seam in the floor before settling onto the smoother boards beyond.
Helen turned at the first call, and Joseph felt the change in her before she looked back at him because her fingers tightened around his. She watched the movement gathering beneath the clock, followed it towards the gates and finally let her eyes rise to the great face overhead. Whatever she read there occupied her for no more than a second. Her gaze dropped again, and her free hand came across to cover the back of Joseph's, enclosing it between both of hers while another family hurried past close enough to brush her sleeve.
Joseph's attention followed hers down. Their hands had been joined for so much of the walk from the lake that neither had seemed to make a decision about it after the first few streets, and now, with the station beginning to pull people apart around them, the sight of their fingers fitted together acquired an importance it had not needed ten minutes earlier. Helen's thumb moved once over his knuckle. She drew her lower lip briefly between her teeth, released it before Joseph could say anything and turned towards Nathan.
"I hope Kansas gives you what you're looking for, Professor," she said, keeping one hand in Joseph's while the other settled over their joined fingers. The flow of passengers around the pillar repeatedly narrowed the space available to them, until the blue wool of her sleeve was pressed partly behind Joseph's black coat and she had to lean a little to keep Nathan in view. "Joseph told me about the earlier cases. Not everything," she added when Joseph's eyebrows lifted, and the quick glance she gave him carried enough amusement to make clear that she knew exactly why he had reacted. "Only that there were cases before Chicago and that you think they may help."
Nathan looked from Helen to Joseph, not because he seriously suspected Joseph of discussing anything he should not have, but because the habit of checking was too deeply rooted to disappear merely because they were standing beneath a railway clock rather than inside the Institute. Joseph answered with a minute lift of one shoulder. Nothing about Peter. Nothing about Daniel's tissue. Nothing about the comparison Nathan had made where no ordinary microscope could follow him. Only France, Chicago and Kansas—the pieces anyone travelling with Professor Drake could reasonably have heard.
A baggage cart came through behind Helen before Nathan answered. The porter pushing it was bent forward into the handle, using his weight to keep the overloaded thing moving, and the upper cases swayed whenever its wheels struck the joins in the floor. Joseph caught the brass corner of one case moving towards Helen before she noticed the cart at all. He released her hand, put his palm around her far elbow and drew her across the few inches between them, turning his own shoulder into the space the luggage would otherwise have occupied. The cart rattled past close enough for Helen to feel the air move beside her coat. She barely interrupted her attention to Nathan; by the time the porter had worked the load into the crowd, Joseph's hand had travelled from her elbow down her sleeve and found her fingers again.
Nathan waited until the cart's wheels had become one rattle among dozens before answering. "Earlier enough that they may be useful," he said, nudging his medical case nearer the pillar with the side of his shoe after seeing what the baggage cart had nearly done to Helen. A few yards beyond her, a woman on her way towards the gate was kissing her relatives in succession while one of them held her travelling bag; she reached an elderly aunt, embraced her, then had to double back because somebody farther along the line protested at having been missed. Nathan watched the small confusion for a moment before returning to Helen. "I would prefer Kansas to disagree with me usefully rather than agree with me for the wrong reasons. At present either would be an improvement over having too little evidence."
Helen did not answer merely because he had stopped speaking. Her brow drew together while she worked through what he had said, and Nathan recognised the same patience he had noticed when she first sat opposite Joseph on the train from New York. Silence did not seem to embarrass her into filling it. She could leave a question alone until she knew what she thought of it. Joseph's thumb moved once along the side of her forefinger while she considered Nathan's answer, and Helen turned her hand slightly farther into his without appearing to notice she had done so.
"Then I hope you find the right questions," she said at last. A fresh bank of steam rolled beneath the train-shed roof beyond Nathan, whitening the lower half of the gates and swallowing several passengers from the waist down as they crossed towards the platform. Helen watched one man's upper body appear to move unsupported through it until the vapour thinned around his legs. "Answers probably aren't much good if they're answering the wrong ones."
Nathan's fingers, which had been turning the handle of his medical case back into place, stopped.
He had heard wishes for success from men who meant several different things by the word. Ministers wanted expenditure justified before another minister asked why it had been authorised. Officers wanted something they could use before the enemy found something worse. Physicians generally wanted an answer because there were few things more irritating to a physician than being obliged to admit that the body had done something he could not explain. Helen Harcourt, who had known Nathan for one railway journey and a handful of days in Chicago, had somehow avoided wishing him success at all and wished instead that he ask the right question.
"Thank you," he said, and the answer came without the small joke he might ordinarily have put behind it. A strand of Helen's brown hair had escaped beneath her hat and moved whenever the station doors opened, lifting away from her cheek in the cold draught before settling again. Nathan remembered it pinned much more neatly when she had first joined Joseph in the dining car on the Twentieth Century Limited, when she had been simply a schoolteacher travelling home to Chicago and Joseph had been a very large Englishman in an unnecessarily formal suit. Neither of them had known enough then to be unhappy about a departure several days later. "And thank you for improving Chicago for at least one member of this expedition. My own acquaintance with the city has been rather more intimate with hospital corridors than I would have chosen."
Helen's mouth curved, and Nathan saw Joseph's eyes narrow before he had added anything else. That alone made continuing difficult to resist.
"There have also been a considerable number of sputum basins."
"Nathan," Joseph said, turning his head slowly towards him while Helen's smile widened. He still held her hand, but his free one had disappeared into his coat pocket, where Nathan imagined it was considerably less likely to do something discourteous to his employer. "She did not need the sputum basins."
"I didn't describe their contents," Nathan replied, raising one hand in his own defence just as the station doors opened behind him and let a blade of colder air beneath his collar. It carried coal smoke with it and lifted the bottom of his coat before the doors closed again. Helen had begun laughing now, which Nathan considered sufficient vindication. "There was a possibility I might have."
Joseph's eyelids lowered, but Helen had turned partly into his shoulder with her laughter and whatever response he had been preparing disappeared when he looked down at her. She laughed for another few seconds, trying to recover enough to tell Nathan that she was grateful for his restraint, and then the laughter itself betrayed her. When she raised her face again, the skin beneath her eyes had flushed and moisture lay along the lower lashes, bright enough to catch the station light whenever she blinked.
She blinked again, more deliberately this time, and busied her hands before Joseph could comment on it.
His lapel became the first victim. Helen flattened it beneath her palm, followed its edge down with two fingers and pulled it outward by perhaps half an inch before studying what she had done. It had been straight when she began. She put it almost exactly where it had been and moved to his tie instead, pinching the knot gently between finger and thumb while Joseph lifted his chin to accommodate her. The tie needed no help either, which did not prevent her from centring it with great care and smoothing the cloth immediately beneath it.
Nathan lowered his attention to the medical case at his feet and ran a thumb over the brass clasp. It was already fastened. He pressed it anyway, heard the small metal click and gave Helen enough time to finish whatever work she had invented for herself before looking up again.
She had moved to Joseph's other lapel.
Her breaths were quieter now, drawn slowly through her nose while her fingertips worked at the wool. Joseph had ceased trying to assist. His hands hung at his sides, his chin still slightly raised, and Nathan was struck by the absurd contrast with almost every other circumstance in which he had seen the man use them. Joseph could strip and reassemble a weapon by touch. He had secured climbing equipment in darkness, dressed wounds while artillery shook dirt from overhead timbers and worked the complicated fastenings of his armour with gloved hands in conditions where a mistake mattered considerably more than a crooked tie. Yet Helen moved his lapel another fraction of an inch and he stood as obediently as one of her pupils being made presentable before a school photograph.
"You'll write to me," she said, and the request came while she was still looking at his coat. Her fingertips reached the upper button, found a fleck of lint beside it and brushed it away, but remained against the wool after the lint was gone.
Joseph's right hand rose over hers. He did not pull it away. His palm covered her fingers where they rested against his chest, and his thumb moved slowly across the back of her hand. "I will. As soon as we're settled," he said, bending his head enough that he was speaking more to the top of her hat than to the rest of the station. Another whistle sounded beneath the roof and several people near the gates turned towards it, but Helen did not. Her forehead had come close enough to his coat that the brim of her hat nearly touched him.
"Properly," she said.
Joseph's mouth lifted at one corner while his thumb continued its slow movement over her hand. "Properly."
Helen raised her face then. The moisture she had blinked back had collected again at the inner corner of her left eye, and she blinked quickly before it could travel farther, fixing Joseph with a look that would have been much sterner had the skin beneath both eyes not already begun to redden.
"Not three sentences."
"No," Joseph said, and rather than leaving the answer sitting alone between them, he turned her hand beneath his until their palms met and held it there against the front of his coat.
"And not just telling me you're alive."
"No."
"And not two pages complaining about Professor Drake."
Nathan looked up from the clasp he had now inspected far more thoroughly than any clasp deserved. "I object to the assumption that complaints about me would not constitute a proper letter," he said, and Helen turned towards him at exactly the wrong moment for the tear she had been holding to finally slip from her left eye. She caught it quickly with the side of one finger and laughed at herself as though her own face had committed some minor social error. Nathan's smile lost some of its mischief when he saw it. "Although I concede that two pages would be insufficient."
Helen tried to laugh again, but the sound caught halfway through and became a breath she had to swallow. Her lips pressed together. Joseph's fingers closed more firmly around hers, and Nathan, having got what little humour he could from the moment, turned towards the gates and left them the privacy of not being watched without insulting either of them by walking away.
The young soldier he had noticed earlier had not yet gone through. His mother had both arms around him now, one hand spread against the back of his tunic, while the boy held his cap in his right hand and slowly crushed the crown between his fingers without seeming aware of it. His father stood close enough to touch him but had put both hands deep into his coat pockets, his jaw shifting every few seconds as he listened to his wife say something into their son's shoulder. The younger brother who had been pretending to study the locomotive had abandoned the performance entirely. He faced away from his family and rubbed beneath one eye with the heel of his palm, then examined his hand as though dust rather than grief had been responsible.
Everywhere Nathan looked, departure was beginning to expose the little methods people had invented for surviving it. Some talked too much. Some fussed with collars and bags. Some found urgent interest in locomotives, clocks or ticket stubs. Others simply held on until somebody in uniform told them they could not any longer.
Behind him Helen drew a breath that trembled near the end.
"You promised."
Nathan heard the faint movement of cloth before Joseph answered and glanced back to find that he had turned Helen's hand fully into his. Their fingers fitted together again between their coats.
"I know," Joseph said, closing his hand around hers. "You won't have to chase me across the Atlantic for it."
Helen's nose wrinkled, and the expression displaced some of the effort she had been putting into not crying. "I might."
"I believe you."
The next boarding call came through the station with their destination buried in it.
Joseph heard it immediately. Nathan saw his eyes move towards the gates before his head followed, the old habit doing its work without permission: distance, time, number of passengers still moving through, luggage already aboard, no equipment remaining with him that needed checking. His weight shifted onto the foot nearest the platform before the rest of him had decided to go.
Helen felt the change through their joined hands.
Her gaze followed his. Beyond the barrier a conductor stood with his watch open in one palm while another railway employee spoke close to his ear. Steam moved behind them and temporarily erased the lower windows of the nearest carriage. Somewhere farther beneath the shed, metal struck metal with a blow heavy enough to be felt faintly through the station floor.
Helen swallowed. She opened her mouth, closed it again and looked down at Joseph's hand around hers before making another attempt.
"I suppose that's you," she said. Her thumb pressed into the side of his finger until the skin beneath it paled. She looked towards the conductor as though he might be persuaded by disapproval alone. "They seem rather determined."
Joseph followed her eyes to the gate and then returned to her without taking a step. "Yes," he said, but his hand stayed where it was, and while a man carrying two cases went around them, followed by a woman pulling a little girl who wanted to look back at the locomotive and an elderly couple still disagreeing over which of them had the tickets, Joseph remained beneath the clock as though the boarding call had applied to everybody else first.
Helen looked up at him. Her lower lip trembled once; she caught it between her teeth, released it and drew enough air to rebuild the smile she had been trying to preserve all morning.
Joseph lifted his free hand towards her face.
He stopped short of touching her.
The hesitation occupied only inches, but Helen saw it. She closed them herself, leaning into his hand until his palm settled against her cheek. His thumb came to rest beneath the dampness under her eye, warm against skin cooled by the station draught. For a moment he left the tear where it was. Helen's eyes closed and her hand tightened around his.
When she opened them again, another tear had gathered.
Joseph's thumb brushed the first away.
Helen gave a quiet laugh through her nose. "Now you've ruined all my effort," she said, keeping hold of his wrist when he might otherwise have lowered his hand.
"You were doing very well," Joseph replied, and his thumb stopped near her cheekbone while another tear escaped the opposite eye.
"Was I?"
"No."
The answer made her laugh properly, though the laugh brought another tear with it. Joseph wiped that one away too, and Helen caught his wrist with both hands and held his palm against her face for one more second before whatever argument she had been conducting with herself ended.
She stepped into him.
Her arms went around his middle quickly enough to knock his hand from her cheek. She pressed her face into the black wool below his lapel, her hat catching against his chest and tilting backward until several more strands of brown hair escaped beneath it. Joseph's arms came around her with the same care he had shown every time he touched her since New York, one forearm settling across the middle of her back while his other hand found her waist. Then Helen's fingers tightened in the cloth behind him, bunching his coat beneath both fists, and his hold changed. His hand spread between her shoulder blades and drew her closer; he bent until his cheek rested against the top of her hat and the difference in their height no longer forced her to stretch upward simply to hold him.
Helen's shoulders moved beneath his arms with a breath she could not quite keep steady. The next one did the same. She made no sound.
Joseph closed his eyes.
Nathan turned away and, for once, resisted the temptation to look at the clock.
The train was easier to look at.
Beyond the gate the platform extended beneath ironwork and great panes of glass stained by years of smoke, the waiting coaches stretching away behind a locomotive Nathan could see only in portions between passengers and drifting steam. The lower panels of the cars carried a film of soot from the journey into Chicago. Brass handles had been polished by thousands of hands without ever becoming quite clean. Each time a carriage door opened, warm yellow light appeared briefly inside before another passenger climbed through and blocked it. Porters had lost the unhurried manner of men with time to spare; they moved now with shoulders lowered into carts and trunks, calling to one another over the hiss from the engine while one man walked beside an overloaded trolley with his palm braced against the uppermost case to stop it shifting.
Nathan found Joseph's equipment trunk farther down among the luggage, dull and deliberately ordinary, giving no suggestion of the armour, weapons and field equipment hidden inside. Two porters were dealing with it rather than one.
It remained upright.
That was sufficient.
Between two moving groups of passengers Nathan caught sight of Isaiah Carter farther along the platform. Isaiah had his smaller valise beside him and one of his suitcases near his feet while a railway employee checked his ticket. The brown suit Nathan had noticed earlier stood out less among the coats and uniforms now, though Nathan could still pick him out by the careful way he kept his luggage close. Somebody carrying a rolled blanket crossed between them. By the time Nathan had a clear view again, Isaiah and the valise were gone inside his assigned car.
Behind Nathan, Helen's breath left slowly against Joseph's coat.
He waited until he heard the small movement of her shoes before turning.
They had separated only enough to look at one another. Helen's hat was crooked now, and a loose strand of hair had adhered to the damp skin beneath her left eye. She tried to move it back and discovered that her fingers were trembling too badly to catch it properly on the first attempt. Her hands closed briefly, opened again, and instead of trying the hair a second time she returned to Joseph's coat, smoothing the wool she herself had crushed behind him during the embrace.
Joseph looked down at the creases.
His gaze rose to her face.
Neither mentioned them.
"Goodbye, Joseph," Helen said, her fingertips stopping against the centre of his chest. Goodbye came cleanly enough. His name caught near the end and forced her to close her mouth for a moment before she could meet his eyes again.
Joseph's chest rose beneath her palm. "Goodbye, Helen," he said, and his hand returned to her waist with such familiarity that neither seemed to notice it had done so. His fingers curved into the side of her coat while he drew breath for something more.
Helen waited.
Joseph's lips parted.
Nothing came.
He looked over her face instead—the crooked hat, the damp lashes, the hair she had failed to put back into place—and drew another breath as though the correct words might arrive with it.
They did not.
Helen's mouth trembled into a small smile. She put her hand over his where it rested at her waist, and Joseph looked down before taking her fingers and squeezing them between his own.
The conductor called again.
Nathan gave them another few seconds before lifting his medical case.
"Come along," he said, turning towards the gate but not yet forcing either of them to follow. Joseph looked at him while keeping Helen's hand in his. Nathan let his eyes travel deliberately from the man's shoes to the top of his head. "Unless you intend to remain in Chicago, in which case I shall have to explain to Hale that I crossed the Atlantic with a security operator and somehow returned without him."
Joseph drew a slow breath through his nose. "You couldn't misplace me," he said, and although the familiar dryness had returned to his voice, his fingers shifted against Helen's as though beginning to release her before closing again instead. He looked down his own considerable length and then back at Nathan. "I'm six foot four."
Nathan continued his inspection until he reached Joseph's face. "Admittedly difficult."
Helen laughed, though the sound shook halfway through and made her lower her head until the brim of her crooked hat concealed her eyes. Joseph's fingers tightened around hers once more before he finally began to let go.
Their palms separated first. Their fingers remained hooked together while Joseph took the first step towards the gate, stretching the contact between them until only their fingertips remained. Helen's slid across his before distance pulled the last two apart, and her hand stayed suspended between them after his had fallen away.
Joseph managed one full pace.
He stopped.
Helen looked up and found him still there. The smile returned immediately.
He came half the distance back.
Nathan looked towards the roof.
"Not a word," Joseph said.
Nathan lowered his gaze. "I said nothing."
"You were about to."
"I was thinking."
"That's usually worse."
Helen wiped quickly beneath one eye and laughed again, and by the time Joseph looked back to her the moment had done what Nathan intended: not erased anything, merely given them enough room to move.
They started towards the gate.
Nathan went several paces ahead, close enough that he remained part of their party but far enough that Helen and Joseph no longer had to conduct the last of their conversation around him. The crowd narrowed near the barrier, loose groups becoming uneven lines between brass rails as railway employees inspected tickets. Sounds from the train shed came more clearly with every step—steam exhausting beneath the roof, carriage doors shutting, a porter calling for somebody to move a trunk, the metallic clatter of another train moving somewhere beyond the one they were about to board.
Behind him Helen's voice carried through a gap in the noise.
"You'll eat?"
Joseph's stride shortened. "Yes," he answered, though the hesitation before it was sufficient to make Helen's shoes quicken until she was beside him again.
"Joseph."
"I'll eat."
"And sleep."
This time the pause lasted long enough that Nathan, standing behind a man fumbling through three pockets for his ticket, smiled at the back of the man's hat.
"I'll sleep."
"Properly."
Joseph made a low sound that committed him to nothing.
Helen apparently recognised it.
"Joseph."
"I said I will," he replied, and he put his hand briefly at the small of her back when the line moved forward, guiding her around a suitcase somebody had left too far into the passage.
Nathan thought of Mrs Hargreaves and decided that introducing the two women properly might prove dangerous.
The railway employee at the gate finally held out a hand for his ticket. Nathan produced it, watched the man inspect and clip it and stepped through into air that was immediately colder and dirtier than the station proper. Coal smoke caught at the back of his throat. Steam moved low across the platform, carrying with it the oily smell of machinery that had been running for hours, and the noise of the waiting train seemed larger without the station walls between them.
Joseph reached the barrier behind him and surrendered his own ticket.
Helen moved with him until the brass rail stopped her.
She had seen it coming. Nathan knew that because she had been looking directly at it for the last several steps. Knowing did nothing to make the separation less abrupt. Joseph passed through when the employee returned his ticket; Helen took one more step automatically and met the rail with the front of her coat. Her hand lifted after him, fingers closing once on empty air before she caught herself and rested them on the polished brass instead.
Joseph turned.
For the first time since the lake there was nothing left for Helen's hands to fix, straighten or hold.
The smile she had maintained through the walk to the gate was simply absent. Her lips remained slightly parted while she looked at Joseph through the people filing between them, and dampness shone beneath both eyes. Then his gaze found hers and Helen drew a careful breath, pressed her lips together and brought the smile back—not all at once, but by degrees, until it was almost the one she had given him before.
Joseph did not move.
A family came through between them and briefly erased Helen from his view. When they passed she had shifted sideways to see around a woman carrying a hatbox. Somebody behind her complained that the gate was being blocked. The railway employee asked for the next ticket without interest in anybody's farewell.
Nathan began walking towards the carriage.
He did not need to tell Joseph to follow yet.
Steam rolled around his shoes as he moved beneath the shed. The train beside him showed the station back to itself in broken reflections, dark varnished panels catching fragments of coats, luggage and passing faces before distorting them along the curved surfaces. Nathan passed a porter leaning into a cart, another standing on the carriage step to take a valise from an elderly passenger, and a young soldier already seated inside with his forehead against the glass while a woman on the platform talked to him through it.
He found their car and climbed the iron step.
Warmth reached his face before he had fully crossed the doorway. After the platform air it felt almost stale, carrying tobacco worked into wool coats, leather upholstery, polished timber and the coal smoke every passenger had brought in on their clothes. Nathan turned sideways when his medical case caught the brass edge of the entrance, lifted it free and entered an aisle considerably narrower once occupied by knees, luggage and people than it had appeared through the window.
A newspaper opened near his elbow.
Its owner had spread himself across the seat with the unconscious confidence of a man who expected the available space to negotiate around him. One knee occupied the aisle, while a folded overcoat lay on the neighbouring seat and the newspaper extended into what little remained between them. Nathan stopped.
The paper continued rustling for another second.
Its upper edge lowered.
The man found Nathan standing over his knee.
Nathan looked down at the obstruction, then back at him.
The knee disappeared beneath the seat.
"Thank you," Nathan said, and stepped past while the newspaper was refolded with a degree of violence usually reserved for political disagreements.
Farther along, an elderly gentleman had both hands raised above his head, trying to force a hard-sided case into a luggage rack already occupied by two hats, a rolled blanket and something wrapped in brown paper. His wife sat beneath the threatened avalanche and removed her gloves one finger at a time.
"Arthur," she said without looking up.
"It fits."
The case struck the brass rail again.
"It has not fitted the last six times."
"It nearly fits."
A porter coming up behind Nathan reached over Arthur's shoulder, turned the case sideways and slid it into the available space with one push.
Arthur remained standing beneath it.
His wife pulled the final glove free and folded the pair into her lap.
Nathan moved on before either could involve him.
Two soldiers sat farther down with their caps on their knees. One spoke quietly while the other rolled an unlit cigarette between thumb and forefinger, flattening it slightly and then correcting the shape without ever putting it to his mouth. Across the aisle a mother was trying to persuade a boy of perhaps six to sit like a human being rather than kneel on the upholstery. The boy had both knees buried in the seat and his palms against the window, following a porter outside with his face close enough to fog a small patch of glass whenever he breathed.
Nathan found the seats reserved for himself and Joseph and put the medical case between his shoes.
The brass clasp faced him.
His fingers reached it.
He heard the carriage door open behind him and turned before touching it.
Not Joseph.
The man with the large suitcase came through instead, breathing harder than the short climb justified. Nathan looked past him towards the platform and saw Joseph still near the gate, his entire body turned towards Helen.
The suitcase traveller had apparently discovered the same problem. He approached Joseph from behind, slowed and examined the narrow space left between the large Englishman and the rail. His eyes travelled up Joseph's back. His mouth opened, remained that way for a moment and closed again.
Nathan rested one hand on the brass rail beside the carriage entrance.
"Joseph," he called when a lull in the escaping steam gave him the opportunity.
Joseph turned his head but not his shoulders.
Nathan indicated the traveller. "You are blocking the gentleman."
Joseph looked behind him.
The man produced an immediate, conciliatory smile.
"Sorry," Joseph said, stepping aside.
The traveller squeezed through with his suitcase scraping close to the rail and hurried towards the carriage. Joseph had already turned back before the man reached Nathan.
Helen raised one hand.
Joseph answered.
She held the smile while he finally began walking.
One step.
Then another.
Nathan watched Joseph rather than counting, and in doing so saw Helen change only after Joseph had turned far enough that he could no longer see her. Her hand remained raised for several seconds after his back was towards her. The fingers curled first, slowly drawing into her palm; then her wrist softened and the hand came down until her fingertips touched the front of her coat, finding the place where Joseph's hand had rested before the barrier separated them. She let out a breath long enough to lower her shoulders with it and bowed her head, looking at the platform between her shoes while people passed through the space he had occupied.
A porter crossed in front of her.
Then a couple with matching cases.
Helen stayed where she was.
Joseph reached the carriage.
His hand closed around the brass rail and one foot found the first iron tread, but his arm did not pull. His weight remained on the leg below, leaving the passenger behind him to stop abruptly with a suitcase in each hand.
Joseph turned.
Helen looked up at almost the same instant.
Nathan saw the moment she realised he was looking back. Her shoulders lifted on a quick breath. The hand against her coat dropped, and she straightened her hat without actually correcting its crooked angle, brushed both palms down the front of her coat and found the smile again before Joseph had fully faced her.
The passenger behind him shifted one suitcase into the other hand and looked towards Nathan as if wondering whether the professor had any authority over the obstruction.
Nathan pretended not to notice.
Helen shook her head at Joseph, the movement small enough to disturb only the loose strand beside her cheek, and nodded towards the carriage.
Go.
Joseph's grip tightened around the rail.
Then he climbed.
At the top step he looked back once more. Helen remained by the gate, smiling with wet eyes, one hand raised again.
Joseph entered the car.
The doorway forced him to turn slightly sideways. His shoulder came close enough to the frame to brush it, and he ducked his head from habit rather than necessity as the warmer air reached him. The businessman with the newspaper lowered it. Arthur stopped examining the luggage rack. One of the soldiers looked up from his cigarette.
Joseph saw none of them.
He was already looking for the windows.
The boy was still kneeling at the nearest one. Joseph stopped behind the seat, and the child became aware of him first as a dark shape reflected in the glass. He turned, looked at Joseph's waist, lifted his chin, then lifted it farther.
His mouth opened slightly.
His mother followed the direction of his stare and caught the back of his jacket.
"Thomas, sit down," she said, pulling him away from the window while rescuing a scarf that had become trapped beneath his knees. She looked up at Joseph. "I'm sorry."
"No need," Joseph replied, waiting until the boy had been moved before stepping into the space beside the glass. Thomas continued watching him from beneath his mother's arm until Joseph leaned towards the window, whereupon curiosity defeated manners and the child followed his gaze outside.
Helen had left the gate.
She was walking along the platform looking through the carriage windows as she came, slowing whenever somebody inside blocked her view and quickening again when the next pane opened. Joseph put one hand against the wooden frame. Helen found him two windows later.
She stopped.
Glass stood between them now.
When the carriage door behind Joseph opened, the platform rushed briefly back into the car—voices, steam, a porter's call, the clatter of something dropped farther down. When it closed, all of it dulled again, leaving Helen only several feet away and impossibly quieter.
She raised her hand.
Joseph's fingers moved against the wooden frame.
Her smile trembled at one corner. Helen pressed her lips together until it steadied, then tipped her face towards him.
Thomas looked from Joseph to Helen and back again.
His mother followed his attention. This time she said nothing. She put a hand on the boy's shoulder and turned him gently towards the opposite window, where another locomotive was moving beyond the adjoining track.
Nathan sat down.
The medical case settled between his shoes. He rested his fingers on its clasp and left them there.
Across the aisle, the businessman folded his newspaper lengthwise and found a column that apparently required less room to read. Arthur had finally accepted the porter's arrangement of the overhead case, though every few moments his eyes returned to it as if he expected it to prove the porter wrong through sudden collapse. One of the soldiers reached inside his tunic and took out a letter folded small enough to have been opened many times. He read only the first few lines before folding it again along creases already worn almost white.
Steam moved between Joseph and Helen.
The window filled with white.
Joseph leaned closer, searching through his own faint reflection until the vapour thinned and the blue of Helen's coat returned on the other side.
She had not moved.
Her hand was still raised.
Nathan took his fingers from the clasp.
Kansas could wait.
The first warning that the railway had exhausted its patience came through the floor rather than from any voice outside. Somewhere ahead of them a coupling took strain with a heavy metallic knock, then another answered farther back, the pull travelling beneath carriage after carriage until it reached theirs and sent a small shudder through the seat beneath Nathan. The brass latch beside Joseph's hand rattled in its frame. Arthur's troublesome case shifted against the luggage rail with a wooden scrape that brought his head up immediately; his wife caught his sleeve before he could rise and, without interrupting her inspection of a loose thread in one glove, tightened her fingers until he sat back down.
Outside, Helen's eyes left Joseph long enough to glance along the train.
Steam had thickened around her ankles. It folded over her shoes, cleared, then returned in another low bank while a porter farther along hurried a final case towards an open luggage door. When Helen looked back, Joseph placed his palm against the window.
She looked at his hand.
Then she stepped closer and put hers opposite it.
The glass held them several inches apart. Joseph spread his fingers slightly against the cold pane and Helen adjusted her own until they almost matched, her fingertips ending well inside the span of his.
Neither pretended it was the same as touching.
The whistle sounded.
Conversation beneath the shed broke around it. A porter entering the carriage brought another wash of cold air and coal smoke through the open door, worked sideways along the aisle with two small cases and apologised when one brushed the newspaper man's shoulder. Farther back, the woman with the overfilled travelling bag had reopened it and was attempting to fit a paper-wrapped parcel between the sandwiches and the apples her husband had already suggested carrying separately.
Helen said something.
Joseph bent towards the glass.
The whistle and the pane took it from him.
"What?" he mouthed.
She shook her head, and this time when she repeated herself she shaped each word more carefully.
Joseph watched her lips.
The tension between his brows eased.
His answer was short, though nathan could not hear that either.
Helen did.
Her eyes dropped for a moment to the place where their palms met without meeting, and when she looked back the smile she gave him had become smaller but steadier.
The whistle died.
For a few seconds all the sounds it had covered returned at once: steam venting somewhere ahead, a porter calling to another, luggage wheels striking the platform boards, somebody laughing too loudly near the gate.
Then the locomotive took the train.
The movement was not dramatic. The carriage merely pulled beneath their bodies, enough to shift Nathan's case against his shoe and make the newspaper opposite slide across its owner's knee. Outside, the nearest iron column seemed to move first, travelling slowly behind Helen before the edge of a baggage cart began to drift across the window as well.
Helen looked down.
When she raised her face again, the train had moved another foot.
She began walking.
At first she could stay beside Joseph without effort. Her steps fell into the same unhurried pace they had kept beside the lake that morning, and for several yards she simply walked with him, one hand holding the front of her hat when air moved beneath the shed while the other lifted towards the glass. Joseph took his palm from the pane and gave her a small wave.
Helen exaggerated hers in answer.
Joseph's mouth curved.
She waved more insistently.
He surrendered and gave her a proper one.
Helen laughed.
Nathan saw it through the window even though the glass denied him the sound.
The train continued to gather speed, not enough for the change to be felt in any single moment but enough that Helen's stride lengthened. A porter pushing an empty baggage cart crossed her path and she had to pass behind him; by the time she came out on the other side Joseph's window had gained several yards. She hurried to recover them, one hand now fixed to her hat, the other lifting when she found him again.
Joseph had moved as far along the window as the partition allowed.
Helen drew level for another few seconds.
Her mouth moved.
Joseph leaned closer.
She repeated herself.
He shook his head.
The carriage was moving too quickly now for her to watch his face and the platform ahead at the same time. She tried once more, shaping the words slowly, and nearly walked into the corner of a baggage trolley that had been left beside a porter. Her hand caught the wooden edge as she turned around it, shoes scraping briefly across the boards. The porter said something sharp. Helen gave him an apologetic lift of her fingers and kept moving.
Joseph's hand tightened around the window frame.
She found him again.
This time she made the words larger.
Joseph understood.
His face did not transform so much as release something it had been holding. His jaw loosened. The line beside his mouth softened. He answered through the glass.
Helen's next step landed badly enough that she had to shorten the one after it.
Whatever he had said had reached her.
She kept moving, but the tears she had been holding since the clock were no longer confined to her lashes. One travelled down beside her nose; another crossed the cheek where Joseph's thumb had wiped the first away. She did not spend a hand on them now. One was needed for her hat and the other for him.
For several yards she almost ran.
Her coat pulled around her knees. Her shoes struck the boards quickly enough that her body rose and fell with each step, and the strand of hair she had failed to put back after their embrace came completely loose and blew across her cheek. She moved around one returning passenger, then another, losing a little ground each time. A railwayman warned her back from the edge and Helen shifted inward without argument, still looking through Joseph's window whenever the moving bodies and iron supports allowed it.
The train continued.
There came a point at which she knew she could not keep pace without truly running, and running would buy her only seconds.
Helen slowed.
She took several more quick steps, each one shorter than the last, before stopping between two iron supports. Her hand remained on her hat while she caught her breath. The other rose.
Joseph raised his.
The carriage carried him away.
For the first time the station began to absorb Helen rather than merely surround her. A support crossed the window and removed her from sight. When she returned beyond it there were passengers between them, a porter pushing an empty cart back towards the concourse and the family of the young soldier still gathered near the gate. Joseph searched through them until the blue coat appeared again.
Helen had not moved.
Her arm was still raised.
The distance increased.
Another piece of ironwork passed.
Then a hanging sign.
By the time the view opened again, Nathan could no longer see the tears on her face or the strand of hair across it. He could still see the blue coat and the pale shape of her hand.
Joseph continued waving.
Brick entered the window.
Helen was gone.
His hand remained raised for a little longer, even after the only thing before it was his own reflection laid faintly over a soot-darkened wall. His fingers gradually closed and the hand came down to the wooden frame, where he left it while the train passed a service doorway, another wall and then a narrow opening filled with tracks.
Nathan drew the Kansas reports from his medical case.
He left the string tied.
Daylight reached the carriage by degrees as they moved out from beneath Dearborn's roof. It came first in narrow bands between the ironwork, travelling across Joseph's coat and Nathan's knees, then widened until the polished timber and worn brass inside the car lost the yellow cast of the station lamps. Outside, the platform gave way to a confusion of sidings, freight cars, sheds and timber stacks. Men in caps moved between stationary wagons and vanished behind them; smoke from several chimneys hung low enough to blur the upper floors of buildings beyond.
Joseph remained standing.
The rest of the carriage had already begun forgetting the departure. The woman with the overfilled bag finally surrendered one of the apples to her husband, who ate it quickly enough to suggest he had engineered the entire difficulty for that purpose. Arthur's wife produced knitting from a smaller bag and began working while the case above her developed a faint squeak every time the coach swayed. Across the aisle, the businessman refolded his newspaper into a narrower shape after the broad pages twice tried to invade the passage.
A vendor came through from the next car with newspapers and magazines stacked against his chest.
"Tribune. Daily News."
The businessman raised two fingers without lowering the paper he already held.
The vendor stopped. "You've got one."
"I want the later edition."
The vendor looked at the newspaper, then at the man, accepted a coin and handed over another without pursuing the mystery.
Joseph heard none of it closely enough to react.
The train crossed above a street where a horse waited before a delivery wagon at the lowered barrier. Its driver sat sideways on the box with one elbow on his knee, watching the train with no particular interest. Two boys beside a fence had abandoned their bicycles and were waving at the passing windows.
Joseph noticed them.
He raised one hand.
Both boys waved harder, one nearly losing his cap when he forgot to hold it.
The road passed beneath them.
Joseph's hand returned to the window ledge.
He stayed there while the rail yards opened and closed outside, standing long enough that his body eventually objected where his mind had not. He shifted his weight from one leg to the other, rolled one shoulder and finally looked behind him at the seat he had not yet used.
Nathan had loosened the string around the reports but still had not begun reading.
Joseph picked up his hat, discovered the gloves partly beneath it and lowered himself opposite Nathan. His knees immediately met the available space and forced Nathan to draw his own legs back while Joseph angled one towards the aisle.
Neither dignified the problem with comment.
Nathan unfolded the first Kansas report across his knee. Dates he already knew occupied the top of the page, followed by figures he had read often enough that he should not have needed to look at them again. He put his pencil between two fingers and began anyway.
The conductor came through before he reached the bottom of the first paragraph, using the seat backs to steady himself against the sway.
"Tickets, gentlemen."
Nathan produced his.
Joseph reached into his coat and found the pocket empty. His fingers remained there for a moment before moving to the other side, where they encountered the small card.
Helen had moved it when she was straightening his coat.
Joseph drew the ticket out and looked at it before handing it over. The conductor clipped both, returned them and continued down the aisle without noticing anything beyond two passengers going west.
Joseph put his ticket back into the pocket where Helen had left it.
Nathan returned to the first paragraph.
He reached the end and realised he had retained almost none of it.
A warehouse wall filled the window behind Joseph, painted lettering passing too close to resolve into anything but individual enormous shapes before the building ended and exposed a lumber yard beyond. Nathan began again. He made it several lines farther before the figures lost their hold on him and his eyes rose over the page.
Joseph had his hat on his thigh, one hand resting over the crown while his thumb moved slowly along the brim. He was no longer searching every opening outside for the station, but each time the buildings gave way to a longer view his eyes followed it until something else blocked the distance.
Nathan lowered the report a little.
"I'm glad you met her," he said, and after the words he ran his thumb along a corner of the page that had begun curling upward rather than watching Joseph for an answer.
The warehouse district opened briefly onto a row of small back gardens. Washing pulled at a line behind one house, and a woman in an apron stood on the steps shaking crumbs from a cloth. Farther along a dog ran beside a fence barking at the train until the fence ended abruptly; it stopped there with its forelegs planted and watched the carriages continue without it.
Joseph's thumb stopped against the brim.
"So am I," he said, and his hand rested more loosely over the hat afterward.
Nathan nodded and raised the report.
The wheels had settled into a steadier rhythm now, one that could be felt through the seat and heard beneath every conversation in the carriage. Joseph sat quietly through another page before moving the hat from his lap to the place beside him.
"I'll write to her."
Nathan's pencil stopped beside a date. "I should hope so," he said, and he marked the figure before continuing down the line rather than looking up. "She was quite explicit on the matter."
"She was."
"Proper letters."
Joseph's mouth moved slightly. "Yes."
"Not merely confirmation that you're alive."
"I remember."
Nathan turned the page. "And apparently only a limited quantity of complaints about me."
The breath Joseph let out carried the beginning of a laugh with it. Nathan looked over the top of the report long enough to see him glance down at his hands, then let the humour go rather than piling another joke onto it.
"I hope you're content, Joseph," he said, quieter now, his finger remaining against the place he had stopped reading.
Joseph looked up.
For several seconds he did not answer. Outside, a line of freight cars gave way to another cluster of houses and a yard where men were unloading crates beside a siding. His eyes followed them briefly before coming back to Nathan.
"I am."
Nathan waited.
Joseph looked through the window once more, not searching this time so much as allowing the moving city somewhere to put his attention.
"I think I am."
"Good," Nathan said, and the simplicity of it left Joseph nothing he had to answer. Nathan moved his finger down to the next line and read until the carriage had carried them past the houses and into another freight yard before speaking again. "You have until Kansas City before I require you for anything."
Joseph turned from the window.
Nathan was comparing a handwritten note in the margin with one of the dates in the report. "That includes lunch, which you will eat whether or not you decide to spend the journey sitting there pretending not to think about Chicago. Sleep would be sensible at some point. Read if you like. Walk the train. Write to Miss Harcourt when you feel like writing to her." His pencil moved beneath the line and stopped at another figure. "Until Kansas City, your time is your own."
"And you?"
Nathan looked at the report across his knees, the additional bundle beneath it and the open medical case between his shoes.
"I have made several regrettable decisions."
Joseph waited.
Nathan lifted the bundle a little.
"These are most of them."
A small smile returned to Joseph's face. "You're going through all of that?"
"Not all at once."
Joseph looked into the case.
Nathan followed his gaze and reconsidered.
"Most of it at once."
The train leaned into a gentle curve. One loose sheet began slipping from beneath the bundle and Nathan caught it against his knee before it reached the floor, tucked it back among the others and returned to the report.
Outside, Chicago thinned without ever providing a clean boundary at which either man could have said the city was finished. Factories surrendered ground to rows of houses only for another freight yard to appear beyond them. Open lots cluttered with timber and discarded iron gave way to warehouses, then to small shops facing streets the train crossed too quickly for Nathan to read their signs. Telegraph wires accompanied them throughout, dipping between poles and rising again in long dark curves against the pale sky.
Nathan worked while the city changed around him. A paragraph sent him back two pages to check a date; a note from Chicago made him open another bundle and compare it with something copied from France. He wrote a question in the margin, sat with the pencil resting against the paper while an eastbound freight train filled the windows with a succession of dark cars, and resumed only after daylight returned.
Across from him Joseph eventually took off his coat.
The warmth inside the carriage had been building against the coolness trapped in his clothes since the platform. He shrugged one shoulder free, then the other, folded the coat once and placed it beside him rather than overhead. His dark waistcoat remained immaculate. His tie was still almost perfectly centred where Helen had adjusted it, although one side of his collar had risen slightly.
Nathan's eyes paused there.
Joseph caught him.
"What?"
Nathan returned to the page. "Nothing."
Joseph touched his tie.
His fingers reached the knot and stopped.
He knew exactly what Nathan had noticed.
Nathan turned the page without comment.
Around them the carriage continued on with concerns that had nothing to do with Chicago farewells. The sleeping passenger farther down woke when his forehead struck the window, glanced around quickly to see whether anyone had witnessed it and resettled himself several inches farther from the glass. Arthur eventually tired of the squeak above his head, stood and wedged a folded handkerchief between the case and the rack while his wife continued knitting without offering assistance. When he sat again and the next sway produced silence, he looked at her with quiet triumph.
"There."
She did not stop counting stitches. "Very good, Arthur."
The newspaper purchaser spent several minutes comparing his two editions before folding the older one with evident disappointment and putting it beneath the newer.
Joseph had turned back towards the window, but the openings between buildings no longer drew him forward in his seat. He watched what was actually passing now: men unloading crates beside a siding, laundry yards behind narrow houses, children playing near a fence, stretches of unused ground interrupted by another factory.
Nathan shifted the Kansas reports higher on his knee.
"Funston?" Joseph asked.
"The earliest useful concentration I have in front of me," Nathan replied, keeping his eyes on the figures while his pencil moved down the margin.
"Useful?"
The pencil stopped.
Nathan reread the line before answering. "Potentially useful."
Joseph waited.
Nathan gave the number another look. "Which is an irritating amount of certainty."
Joseph's quiet breath through his nose was almost a laugh, and Nathan continued before it could become another conversation.
Several minutes passed before Joseph reached inside his waistcoat.
Nathan noticed only because the movement differed from the long stillness opposite him. Joseph's hand returned with a folded envelope and several sheets of hotel stationery, the paper still crisp where it had been taken from the writing desk that morning.
He held them for a moment.
Nathan kept his attention on Kansas.
Joseph placed the stationery beside his hat.
The envelope went on top.
He did not reach for a pencil.
The train swayed and a corner of the upper sheet lifted. Joseph caught it beneath two fingers and tucked it under the envelope. A few minutes later the draught from the corridor disturbed it again, and this time he moved the entire little stack nearer his thigh.
Nathan saw the movement over the top edge of his report.
He said nothing.
The paper could wait beside Joseph until he knew what he wanted to put on it, just as the Kansas reports could occupy Nathan one page at a time rather than all at once. Outside, the last dense stretches of Chicago continued to loosen around the railway, and inside the carriage the wheels kept their steady rhythm beneath conversation, turning pages and the occasional clink of something in the dining car farther ahead.