by E. J. Levy
“The differences are obvious, surely,” Lord Somerton smiled at his daughters. He seemed to enjoy an argument, as if we were pursuing a fox through brush, chasing clarity.
“It’s not obvious at all to me why a daughter should be denied a son’s education,” I said.
“This claim of rights for women would wrong the women it claims to aid,” Lord Somerton said, as if settling the matter. “It would deny them their privileged status, make them no better than men.”
“Is it a privilege to be denied an education, to be denied the liberty to walk freely in the street, to earn one’s way? Is it a privilege that denies them vote and rights?”
“I’d not have taken you for an enfranchiser, Dr. Perry,” said the bishop.
“I’d rather that than be taken for a fool. We disguise all manner of harm in the name of protection—it’s always someone else’s best interests we’re looking out for, when we are looking to our own. The English ‘protected’ the Irish out of their lands. They are doing the same here.”
A silence fell over the table. It was clear I had gone too far.
The Governor cleared his throat, signaled with a graceful hand to the footman to clear the plates. “It is late, Dr. Perry. We mustn’t detain you any longer.”
I thought I saw the bishop smile.
I was miserable that night, walking home and later tossing in my bed in the Heerengracht, writing and rewriting in my mind a letter of apology that I would send to the governor at dawn, knowing I could send none. There was no undoing such words; as if my words had been an incantation, I had worked a spell that cast me out of their charmed circle. He was a Tory, an aristocrat, a defender of everything Mirandus and I stood against. There was nothing I might say to change that. It would be changing history itself.
I did not hear from the governor and did not expect to. I spent the next few weeks in the errands that constituted the better part of my job as an assistant staff surgeon. Dressing wounds. Taking histories. Writing reports. Scrubbing down examination rooms whose filth had most likely done more harm to patients than the physician had done good.
I consoled myself that I was not here to court the good opinion of an aristocratic governor but to cure, or try to. It was a tall order. The military hospital, where I reported the next day, was a catastrophe. The rooms were filthy and overrun with animals of every sort, the windows broken. Birds flew in and flitted among the rafters, dropping their shit. Pigeons roosted in the examining rooms and chickens and pigs ambled down the halls; the hospital wards were ample, but they had been commandeered by a few officers for their private use as apartments, leaving the ill to lie on narrow cots in overcrowded corridors and in a few smaller rooms, shoulder to shoulder in the filth.
A stench of manure and human waste and festering wounds permeated the place, relieved only by the fresh breeze that blew through the broken windowpanes. Flies covered patients too ill to bat them away. To compare it to a stable would be to insult the stable. When I inquired of an orderly where the local people were treated, as this was reserved for the military, I was told they were housed mostly in the tronk—the local jail. I had expected challenging conditions, but I had not anticipated cruelty, bald indifference to the suffering of those in need. A boy of four—a soldier’s son, I assume—died of a diarrheal illness as I stood by his cot. When the surgeon in charge asked what he’d died of, I told him frankly, “Indifference and poverty.”
I wrote to the governor daily with my concerns about the conditions at the hospital. I did not hear back.
I woke one night to the wind howling outside my window overlooking the Heerengracht, the rain like pebbles tossed against the glass, then a pounding on the door, and my landlady’s voice, “Dr. Perry, someone’s come for you!” I opened the door expecting a summons, a gaoler. For a moment, I thought I’d been found out. But it was a boy, saying a ship had sunk. I was needed at Camps Bay.
The call came early, as they always would, urgent as nightmare. Something awful, the boy said, hundreds of bodies on the beach. I pulled on my boots, took my pistol and medical kit, descended the stairs, and together we rode down to the water’s edge, to the beach where they lay heaped like lumber or like seals sunning themselves, the bodies of more than a hundred men, among them women, children, infants. The stench of excrement and decay, bitter rot and brine like a choking fog.
I didn’t need to ask what sort of ship had gone down; only one kind has a human cargo. Word of a slaver rounding the Cape was always news, as the bounty offered on the illegal ships had become nearly as valuable as the sale of the enslaved once was.
It was rare to have the bodies wash ashore; when the slavers went down in storms, chains usually pulled their human cargo down, the crime swallowed by the sea. Not now. I walked among them, picking my way carefully over the corpses, turning them gently to see if any hint of life or breath remained. If any might be saved.
Most were swollen; some few appeared sleeping save for a skin of sand over their own, which they did not bother to wipe away, proof of their state. There was no knowing what had happened aboard ship that they were free of chains when the vessel sank, but I guessed the captain had freed them, hoping to save some lives for later sale. Here was the body of a child not more than five, hair fanned out like Caribbean coral or a lady’s silk fan. I bent down to brush the sand from her cheek, raised her thin wrist in my pale fingers, felt for a pulse, found none.
The following day, the town would talk of it in a pantomime of compassion, which was really just an excuse to revel in the death that was not yet one’s own. I was gripped by a hatred of the frontier town, of its people, the merchants and landowners, the slaveholders and petty bureaucrats, the sailors and soldiers; they seemed an infestation, an overgrowth or tumor upon the skin of Africa, a lesion, suppurating us.
It was while walking through the Company’s Garden my first day in Cape Town that the idea came to me to take notes on local flora. I’d make a study of Cape plants and their possible medicinal uses. It seemed only sensible, given the remarkable richness that arose here in the margin of the world, where the unexpected and unlike collide—mountains and sea, two oceans. Nature itself seemed denser here, richer, more vivid, where life in all its variety mixed.
I disliked the English habit of turning every place into England; I preferred to consider where I was. Although I had little time to explore the hills outside town, I took notes on the native plants in town where I found them, making small sketches, inquiring of locals about the uses to which they put each. My landlady noticed my interest and recommended that I speak with a pharmacist she knew, a Mr. Poleman. An amateur botanist.
It was a week before I managed to find time to pay a visit to his shop, one afternoon after I had finished my hospital rounds. I found him unassuming to the point of near invisibility. Rumpled, pale haired, though hardly older than myself, he had a touching wariness, a modesty and anxiety that one rarely found in men here or anywhere; his eyes avoided mine, seemed fearful when ours met; it made me feel almost gallant, but it was the shop that most impressed me; it was spotless, orderly in appearance as the man was not. He seemed absent of vanity. I liked him immediately.
He was more like a bird than a man. Later I would realize what seemed curious and comforting about him: he was a man seemingly without sex. Mild, slender, he had almost no physicality. He smelled of bleach and lavender.
I asked about the source of his remedies, whether all were imported, which, if any, were from local plants. He answered with a completeness uncharacteristic of local merchants—he did not boast of the quality of his products, but spoke of the unreliable shipping, the damage done in transit, the loss of efficacy due to cold or heat, of the excessive reliance on opium and mercury, both of which he considered to be more poison than tonic.
“Often what kills can cure, if administered in a proper dosage,” I said.
“That is the principle,” he said. “But dosage is often wrong.”
That was true.
We spoke of local plants and their possible uses.
“Are you a botanist, Dr. Perry?”
I wasn’t, I said, but I was eager to learn. Especially here where there was so much to study. When he invited me to come out for a collecting trip the following Saturday, when an assistant could watch the shop, I was delighted to accept. He proposed we gather samples from Table Mountain to evaluate later in the small lab he kept for his private use behind the shop.
There was a kind of greed in me for learning, a passion that seemed to have taken the place of the erotic desire others claimed to feel. At night I would lie in bed and see before me the leaves I’d collected, recall the scent of a fresh-picked stalk and the taste, imagining what might be compounded, what cures might be discerned. The green fug, the bitter leaf. Curiosity has its sexual side.
The following Saturday morning, Mr. Poleman and I hiked out into the hills at the base of Table Mountain, gathering samples, especially plants that local peoples used in cures. As we walked, he spoke with reverence of the “sacred beauty” of the place.
“Nature is a mystery, Mr. Poleman,” I said, “not a psalm.”
“Can’t it be both, Dr. Perry?”
“No,” I said. “Reverence is fatal to understanding. We don’t question what we revere.” Men always spoke of land and women thus.
I filled a satchel for later examination in his lab; when we returned to town we deposited our samples there, then parted, agreeing to meet in an hour to dine and discuss the day’s collection. I would join him for dinner at his home, where he promised a stew seasoned with some of what we’d gathered; he admonished me to come promptly at six.
An hour later, having washed up and changed, I was standing outside the door of Mr. Poleman’s house, a few minutes before the hour, when a horse galloped toward me at an alarming rate and pulled up short, before the governor swung down from it.
“A word, Dr. Perry.”
I feared that my insistent correspondence had incurred the governor’s wrath, which was a topic of local discussion (he was said to have broken a cane over someone in a dispute). But to my surprise he was courteous, if not cordial. He said that he had read my reports with interest and wished to clarify several points. He might have summoned me to Government House for a discussion, of course, but I imagined I was not welcome there.
So I stood in the dusty street and explained what I had made perfectly clear in my reports. I appreciated his interest, despite the redundancy; nonetheless, I was relieved when Poleman came to the door and opened it impatiently—“Perry, where have you been; you’re late”—only to see the governor. “Your Excellency,” he said. “I did not mean to interrupt.” He began to withdraw into his home, like a hermit crab, but I stopped him and made an introduction. The governor said, “It is I who is interrupting, Mr. Poleman. I’ll detain you no further, Dr. Perry. Thank you for your report. Good evening, gentlemen,” he said, though clearly we were not.
When a letter arrived the following morning as I took coffee in Mrs. Saunders’s café, I thought it was at last word from my friend in Venezuela, summoning me. I longed for news of Mirandus; I longed for London and my few friends. I turned the envelope over and saw the governor’s seal; my heart sank. I opened it and read:
Forgive me, Doctor, although I cannot forgive myself, from having kept you from your dinner. You were too polite to tell me it was cooling as I kept you gossiping beside the door, so please do me the courtesy of joining my family for what I promise will be a thoroughly hot meal.
I was charmed despite myself. Not simply by the promise of a good dinner, but by the governor’s self-deprecation. It is a rare man who wears his power lightly. I was startled by how the invitation pleased me. To be welcomed again into their charmed circle. But I knew better than to trust him, or anyone.
That evening at Government House was enchanting, as were the many evenings that followed there, or at least I was enchanted. I delighted in the governor and his children, not yet grown, save for Miss Georgiana; they possessed an unaffected grace and curiosity, high spirits combined with gentleness and natural manners. They seemed—the word that came to mind surprised me—uncorrupted. Something from another age, before the fall.
It was Georgiana who proposed—one evening after dinner—that Lord Somerton teach me to ride.
“Don’t be absurd, the good doctor knows well enough how to hold his mount.”
The truth was, I didn’t. Nor could I shoot straight. I had managed in my brief time as an army doctor always to ride in the supply wagon, never needing to keep my own mount. It was both more economical, since I needn’t pay for the purchase and upkeep of a horse, and avoided the awkwardness that would surely follow should I fall and require examination on the field.
“In fact,” I admitted. “I do not.”
“Good God,” said Lord Somerton. “You call yourself a soldier?”
“I call myself many things, Your Lordship. I am called still more by others.”
The governor smiled; he appreciated a joke, as long as it was not at his expense.
“Oh, do let us teach him,” Georgiana spoke in the same tone I’d heard her apply to her pet monkey, when petitioning that it be allowed to sit at table or join a game of whist.
“I warn you,” I said. “I may fall more than ride. You cannot judge a doctor by his grace in the saddle.”
“We’ll arrange a hunt,” said Lord Somerton.
“You’ve imported foxes, as well as hounds?” I was amazed at how far a sportsman’s devotion could go.
“An African hunt,” he said. “On the Cape Flats, a jackal’s as good as a fox.”
“From the fox’s perspective, considerably better, I’m sure,” I said. I had always pitied the fox, another reason I’d declined to ride out with the others at Dryburgh Abbey. “Perhaps we might arrange something a bit less vigorous?”
After some considerable discussion, I managed to persuade Lord Somerton to commence our lesson with something less arduous than a hunt; I proposed a trip to Table Mountain, a small hunting party of two, having heard from Miss Georgiana how he loved to hunt up there.
On the appointed day, Lord Somerton met me at his stables near Roundhouse above Camps Bay; he proposed to match me to a majestic monster, a splendid beast of seventeen hands, a dappled Andalusian named Zeus, easily twice my height, but Georgiana came to my rescue and drew forth from the dark barn stalls a charming little roan filly hardly taller than myself. She stepped drowsily into the light, her coat gleaming, her eyes half-open.
“You can’t be serious,” Lord Somerton said to his daughter. “The doctor needs a proper horse, not a child’s pony.”
Miss Georgiana ignored her father, affectionately stroking the horse’s neck. “She’s very docile,” she said. “But she’s not afraid of anything. She won’t rear at a snake, or a leopard.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that we might encounter either, but I did not say this.
Evidently weary of delay, Lord Somerton swung up onto his mount, a stallion of magnificent proportions. It was instantly clear why Somerton bred horses; he was a man who seemed more at ease on a horse than off one. As if he were a centaur—half man, half beast. When I’d arrived at Roundhouse that morning, he’d toured me through his stables as another man might display his gardens or his pictures. Many covet wealth, but few—it seemed to me—truly enjoyed it. Somerton clearly did. He relished beautiful things, unapologetically: beautiful horses, beautiful guns, ballrooms and houses and clothes. Wealth bought him beauty; it gave him pleasure and time to enjoy it.
He seemed to take the delight that animals take in life. I could not imagine him in London. For all his studied social graces, he had a wild heart. A lonely or perhaps solitary spirit. Standing between us in the morning cool, he stood apart. He was utterly unlike the general. Not simply because he was more delicate, an aesthete rather than a commander of men. The general belonged to Venezuela; Somerton seemed to belong nowhere. He seemed a man between worlds, which is per
haps what had brought him here, as it had me. Strange creatures suited to no place but here, like the king protea, the sugarbird, the silver trees. Strange and peculiar fauna and flora of the Cape.
Despite my dread of horses, I was surprised to find myself at ease in the saddle beside (or more accurately below) Lord Somerton and his enormous mount. Although my horse was tiny by comparison, I seemed to tower over the fynbos as we rode up into the hills, my heels skimming the tops of the sugarbushes as we rode higher, as the blue expanse of the Atlantic Ocean spread out below us.
The morning was cool and windless and bright, and we rode without speaking for what seemed hours. Occasionally steenbok burst from the bushes or a bontebok raised its masked face and twisted horns. I was relieved that Somerton left his rifle in its saddle holster. We paused for lunch near the top of Table Mountain. In the distance a small herd of zebra scattered at the sound of our voices—
“Do you often hunt, Doctor Perry?” the governor asked.
“Only for a good book at night,” I replied.
He was not amused.
“When you take a shot,” Lord Somerton told me, watching them, “remember, heart first, then head.”
“What makes you think I’ll take a shot?”
Somerton laughed.
The hound that had accompanied us shivered, straining against the leash that held it, silent as its master, until Somerton released it and it shot forward as if sprung from a trap.
When the dog returned he was carrying a small soft body in his mouth, which he dutifully dropped before us. The caracal kitten lay there, limp, paws stretched forward on the ground as if it were in mid-pounce. Its ears large as its head, no longer than two phalanges of my first finger. An ache overtook me that never did when human corpses were involved. I felt ill and stood. Then I leaned over and was sick beside a silver tree.