by E. J. Levy
I quickly forgot the incident, absorbed as I was in my studies. Each day I discovered new words and new ideas and new capacities, as if the mind were a house of many rooms, through which I wandered, discovering new doors each day. I learned the pleasures of mathematics reading the Principia, the delight of musical compositions; I pored over anatomy texts. I discovered with delight that whatever I read lingered, so that I had only to read a page of Socrates’s final words after his trial to see them clearly before me, when conversing with the general, as if the book were held open in my hands. I had only to begin speaking of a text to know what I thought about it, which I had not known before I spoke. It came so easily, if not without effort, each day revealing to me new capacities, as if they were not my own. And the pleasure in learning was matched by the pleasure in seeing the general amazed.
Emboldened by the men’s combative talk—and by my own success after three years’ study—I made the mistake of asking the general one evening over dinner why he was in London, if his nation needed him, if its liberation was his goal. “Would it not be better to be there among your people, there to lead them, than to be discussing ideals over dinner half a world away?”
I knew instantly that I’d gone too far.
Mirandus said nothing, only turned the stem of his wineglass on the table. Sarah stared at me before she rose from her chair, hurriedly excusing herself to bundle the children off to bed.
“An idealist acts without sufficient thought for strategy,” the general said finally, as if he’d said it many times before. “A strategist without sufficient thought for ideals.”
“And which are you?”
He did not answer. When I left soon after, no one saw me out.
“He is both,” Sarah would tell me later, clearly pleased to school me in the man we loved. “That rarest thing: an idealistic strategist.”
I believed that the general was pleased with my progress and fond of me, so I was dismayed when he said—shortly after that dinner, in the autumn of 1809—that he would need to speak with my mother. I feared that the argument I’d overhead or perhaps my comment at dinner had damaged his enthusiasm for my presence in their house. I knew how quickly domestic calm could be undone.
“What have you done?” my mother asked when I related his request.
“Nothing,” I said.
“You’ve done nothing? All this time in the library has availed you nothing?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary, Mother; I have done as I always have—I’ve read, and reported to the general on my reading.” I was exhausted by her suspicion, which felt petty, beneath me now. Perhaps she sensed my dismissal, like my father’s before me.
“Heaven help us if that good man turns against us now.”
“He’s not turned against us,” I said, though in truth I wasn’t sure. I’d not told my mother of the row I’d overheard. I’d hardly told myself.
As the days passed, I came to dread the coming meeting. I prayed for some disaster to avert it—hoping I might be struck by a cart or fall ill with some conveniently brief fever, lasting just long enough to garner sympathy and a postponement of the conference. But the day arrived. We sat beside the fire in the parlor with a tea tray and a portion of seed cake, a favorite of mine for which I had no appetite.
At first they spoke of other matters, of his sons, the weather, until the general swung round to his point.
“Your daughter is quite extraordinary, Mrs. Brackley. She has a mind like Mrs. Wollstonecraft’s. It would have been a pleasure to make an introduction.”
It was clear from my mother’s blank expression that she did not know the name, or what it represented, which was to my advantage, as she’d likely have refused to allow me to study further had she better understood his praise.
“She has the potential to do great things,” he said.
“She has always been clever,” my mother allowed.
“She is more than clever.”
“Then you will help her find a position as a governess?” my mother asked.
“I will do more than that,” he said. “She is prodigiously gifted.”
My mother looked at me with what seemed alarm, as if she’d just been told I had two heads, a failing that she’d failed to notice.
“She has expressed a desire to study medicine and literature,” General Mirandus said. “It is my hope that she shall.”
“We cannot afford to pay for training as a midwife.”
“A doctor, Mrs. Brackley. A surgeon.”
“Would they let her in?”
“They would let him in.”
My mother stared at the general, as did I.
“They would admit Jonathan Perry’s nephew.”
“My son, Tom?” It was the first time in months she’d mentioned my brother’s name.
“Your daughter, Margaret.” The general turned to me. “Your nephew.”
I was too shocked to speak. It seemed an impossible plan. A joke.
If my mother’s sense of propriety was offended by the idea of passing off her eldest daughter as a son, practicality eventually won out. While they stayed up late by the fire, discussing my future, I slept to the murmur of their voices. By morning, it was settled. I felt a thrill of dread at the news: I would become a boy, at age fourteen. I was to play the part of Jonathan Perry’s unfortunate nephew, and enroll in medical school in Edinburgh that autumn.
It was my idea to add a middle name in honor of my patron. So we saw the last of Margaret and the immaculate birth of a fortunate son: Jonathan Mirandus Perry.
While the general arranged for a tailor to visit, saying that I was the precise size of an absent nephew for whom the clothes were to be cut, it fell to my mother to sew my linens—half a dozen shirts and cravats. If she resented playing the part of tailor to a newly christened son, she made no mention. (Or perhaps I conveniently forgot her complaints, my debt. It’s convenient to forget what’s painful to recall.) There were bold striped silks of emerald green and a double-breasted red waistcoat with a monstrously high horse collar. In addition to a single pair of breeches, reserved for formal occasions, I was outfitted with a pair of skin-tight pantaloons that came to mid-calf and tied with ribbons, showing off my slender legs with Hessians that came to my knee.
For a fortnight, while clothes were arranged, I practiced before the mirror. Elbows in, then out, wide swaggering steps, chin down as if deep in thought; I knew our lives depended upon my striking the right calculus of character and impersonation. As a girl, no one would admit me to university. And the generous support of my uncle’s friends was as unreliable as memory—who knew how long they would think of us? Jonathan Perry’s poor relations.
It was Sarah Andrews’s idea to cut off my long hair. My sole faint claim to beauty. When she took the scissors in her hands, a cloth across my shoulders, my red-gold hair braided down my back, I sensed that it was not simply for the sake of my education that she took up the shearing. I felt the scissors against the curtain of my hair; the pressure tugged my head back.
“Hold still,” she said, tilting my chin down.
My scalp tingled and then I heard a tearing as of cloth being rent and a weight lifted from me. My head felt strangely buoyant, too light.
She might have left my hair long, to the shoulders, as General Mirandus’s was, but she opted for the French style à la victime—first worn in defiance of the Revolution, but now reduced to mere fashion and called the Titus coiffure—with the nape cut close and the top and sides combed forward into a tousled fringe, as on a head straight from the guillotine. My mother was aghast when she saw me—“Your hair,” she exclaimed, her eyes moist. “Your beautiful hair.” She had not wept to lose her home or eldest daughter, but she wept now, holding my braid in her hands like a corpse.
That night, as I lay my head against the pillowcase, I reveled in the altogether new and startling sensations, the direct contact of skin and scalp with linen and air.
But despite the haircut and new clothes, I
remained unconvincingly male. My mother took me to Hyde Park to watch the dandies on parade, to no avail. I spent weeks practicing manliness and failing, until I began to despair of ever mastering the lesson.
One afternoon as I stood in the window overlooking Charles Street, despairing of ever playing the part well, I watched a coach arrive and saw a gentleman step down, then turn to help a lady to the curb. I imitated the gestures, and in impersonating that small courtesy there in my room, I felt something happen in my spine, faint as the tap of teeth together, or a key in a lock, or knuckles cracking. I felt the shift—how I settled back into my body as one might into a comfortable chair. Condescension was the key. Authority like a scarf settled on my shoulders. I felt the confidence I’d had as a child running the green hills of Cork. I knew I could play my part.
After a solid month’s preparation, practicing in our rooms, my mother sent me on an errand one morning early. Pressing a coin into my palm, she proposed I go buy sausages in a neighboring street. When a night-soil cart nearly ran me down, I was shocked, then delighted—not for the splash of muck on my breeches and boots, but for the epithet hurled at my head: “Boy, have you no sense? Get out of the street!” For the first time I knew that we are what we say; that people see what we tell them to. We are our own canvases, as my uncle said.
Nevertheless, I walked a good ways from the shops we knew, to a district we had not frequented before; I steeled myself and stepped into a shop.
“Help you, lad?” the butcher asked.
I glanced over my shoulder, looking for the boy he addressed.
“What’ll it be, boy?”
My voice sounded faint and far away, entirely too high as I asked for the length of sausage for my mother, but if the butcher noticed, he didn’t show it.
And that was what amazed me: no one noticed. Later, when I was accustomed to being addressed as sir or Doctor, I’d realize it was not sartorial sleight of hand that changed my fate that day, as I’d imagined. Diminutive as my stature might be, I carried myself as free men do, as if I belonged in the world, or rather as if the world belonged to me. It was not my clothes that convinced them, it was my carriage: I walked as if my body were mine. I walked as if the world were my inheritance, as if I were a fortunate son.
I had not realized before how I’d held myself back when in the street or entering a shop, shrinking from attention—having been handled on occasion by a merchant in Cork who pretended to steady a sack of oats in my arms or by a carriage man helping me down from a seat and taking hold of other parts; even my brother had pressed himself on me before he’d left for Dublin, claiming the education would do me good. “You don’t want your husband to find you ignorant, do you? Keep quiet, and I won’t tell our father what you’ve done.” It was unthinkable that I should speak of it, he knew—knowing the shame would be mine alone.
After that first voyage out, matters progressed rapidly. School was organized, and lodging, instruments, and books. General Mirandus arranged for our financial support through a friend he trusted to be discreet, a Dr. Fryer. As I prepared to enter the university at Edinburgh in December 1809 at age fourteen—five years after I’d first made my uncle’s acquaintance, three years since his death—life seemed a present waiting to be opened; briefly my future seemed clear: I would train as a doctor for three years, and if I excelled I would go on to serve as a Medical Dresser in London, then travel on to Venezuela, where I would join General Mirandus as his physician and with luck take charge of health policy for the new revolutionary government he intended to establish there. It was a prospect I considered with an admixture of dread and joy.
Mirandus and his family accompanied my mother and me to the docks south of London Bridge on the late-November morning we set out from Wapping on the Thames. He had arranged for the five-day passage on one of the Leith smacks bound for Edinburgh, having secured me a place in the medical school there through the offices of his friend Lord Basken, whom I was to visit later that year. I did not know it would be the last time I would see the general, that my mother would not last three years; I did not know that my education would equip me to save my patients and bring new lives into the world, even as it would take from me everyone I loved. I would gain an education but lose everyone I loved.
Mirandus bent over my hand, only to stop himself. He straightened and pulled me into a manly embrace, then released me.
“The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways,” Mirandus said.
“You would quote Socrates?” I said, recognizing the philosopher’s parting words to his protégé after being condemned to death.
“I would quote anyone who suits this sad occasion,” he smiled. “But don’t worry, I do not go to my death. I go to Venezuela. Where I will await you.”
“It is Venezuela that awaits you, General.”
“Let us hope I prove worth waiting for,” he said.
“I’ve no doubt of it.” I looked up to see Sarah watching me, and I blushed, before she looked away, over the green-brown water.
“Ah,” Mirandus said. “I’d almost forgotten.” He lifted from Sarah’s arms a package wrapped in paper and twine and placed it in my hands. “For your library.”
He knew that I had none, as I knew he cared for his books as if they were children. A gift from his library would be like parting with a child. I fingered the corners, enjoying the weight in my hands.
“From yours?” I asked.
He inclined his head in assent.
“You’re too generous,” I said.
“I am,” he said. “You can return it to me when you come to Caracas.”
It’s possible that the general had other plans for me in Venezuela—he had plans for everyone, above all for his beloved country, which he hoped to free from the bootheel of Spain; it’s possible that he thought to make a mistress of me or to marry me to some brilliant young man; I would have followed whatever direction he had given. I owed him my life, my very name.
He had shown me what my parents could not—that a life can be forged by will, that we can invent ourselves and our histories and shape history itself to our vision. Most everyone else I knew seemed a sleepwalker by comparison. I was not the only one to discern his virtues—the Emperor Napoleon himself called Mirandus “a Don Quixote with the difference that he is not mad.” But unlike Napoleon, Mirandus did not live for power alone; he was thoroughly democratic, honoring equally politics and pleasure.
On board the ship, settled out of the icy wind, I unwrapped the package and saw that it was Smellie’s atlas, of which only some few dozen had been printed—I fingered the gilt spine, the marbled boards, the Italian paper like tortoiseshell, turning over the pages heavy with copper engraved plates depicting images of a fetus in utero, the delicate cavity smooth as a carved bowl, in which lay a perfect infant curled like a rabbit in its den, an image that might have been an image of myself, beneath my boy’s clothes, a portrait of a new life at its start.
Chapter Two
An Education
Edinburgh was gloomy and wet when my mother and I arrived there in December 1809. A cold drizzle fell perpetually under what seemed perpetually dark skies. The rooms we rented in Old Town at 6 Lothian Street were modest but comfortable, without being in the least bit delightful, a short walk from the Royal Infirmary and the neoclassical colonnades and massive portals of the university’s New College. Our building was one of many such tenements along the street, tall and narrow, inhabited by intellectuals and aspiring artists, drawn by the glamour of what was widely held to be the seat of Scottish genius, where just half a century before, David Hume and Adam Smith and Robert Burns had walked the cobbled streets, as now the greatest minds of medicine did.
My first day at university, I walked along the corridors, aware of those who had walked here before—now I, among them; I could hear the voices of students ringing out along the hallways, the sound of a door closed, another opened. The chill of the stone archways seemed like time distilled, stopped; I paused benea
th an arch and leaned my back against a dark stone column simply to observe the place, amazed by what men are capable of. What I was. When I heard bootheels against the stone of the corridor, I hurried on to class.
The medical school at Edinburgh was almost 85 years old by the time I enrolled there and was renowned throughout the English-speaking world. Our classmates came from all corners of the globe—India and the West Indies, North America, and throughout the British Isles. We were the younger sons of landed gentry, the children of squires and prosperous merchants, the sort of men my brother might have been had he applied himself, cared to learn.
Our decision to move to Scotland was not purely intellectual. I could not attend Oxford or Cambridge nor hold public office given the Test Act, which barred Catholics from all those things, restricting such privileges to members of the Church of England—a standard that happily did not apply here.
In Edinburgh, our religion was intellection.
I arrived at the university timid and awkward, despite the general’s careful preparations. I realized quickly that my language was unsuitable, too grave, too cultured, too careful; the cultivated talk of dinner tables and drawing-room debates that I had developed in my conversations with General Mirandus was out of place here among boys my own age, absurd. Whatever the subject under discussion—a body part, a brothel, beer—I seemed to strike the wrong note. Pedantic. Humorless. Elderly. Still I forced myself to join the knots of young men who gathered outside the lecture halls, to insert myself into their company, struggling to belong.