The Cape Doctor

by E. J. Levy

  “Can’t be moved by every death, doctor.”

  “What have we become, if we’re not?”

  “Men,” he said.

  “God protect me against that.”

  It was midday when we reached the top of Table Mountain. The sun was strong, shadows almost absent. The light was blindingly bright. The views of the Cape Flats to the east and the bay to the west were breathtaking, though a rising wind cautioned us not to linger too long. Storms could come up quickly in the afternoon and cloak the mountain in cold rain, washing out the trail. Hunters had been known not to return from a simple morning’s hunt.

  We sat on a ledge of grey stone, horses tied in the trees below the ridge, our legs dangling over the abyss, where hundreds of feet below us trees stood like tiny weeds. I heard the high-pitched keen of an eagle, and the shadow of enormous wings passed overhead.

  “That’s what he’s after,” Somerton said, nodding to a mountain hyrax not more than two yards from us. The creature on the rock outcropping before us was plump as a loaf of brown bread, its dark eye keen as my own, with a disconcerting glint that might easily be construed as intelligence. We wouldn’t have believed it, had we been told then, that its closest relation was the elephant.

  “I do believe it’s regarding us with disdain, Lord Somerton.”

  He laughed and raised a pistol, but I set my hand on his arm—the first time we’d touched beyond a handshake. I felt the shock. I felt him hesitate. He did not often hesitate. He looked at me, and for a moment it seemed that he saw what everyone had been overlooking for years. Who I was.

  “Mercy,” I said, withdrawing my hand, then running it through my hair, hoping to steady myself, but he seemed to think I meant the hyrax.

  “Mercy’s a mad policy in a wild place.” He raised his pistol once more. But the hyrax had evidently heard us and clambered off, leaving the rock bare. Somerton put aside his gun. “Sentiment will be your undoing, Dr. Perry.”

  I looked out over the curve of the bay, the pale disk of Robben Island like an unblinking eye. For once I had nothing to say.

  As we rode down the steep trail back toward Roundhouse, Somerton shouted back to me, “You can’t spare every life, doctor. You’d starve in a place like this.”

  “What’s the point in killing, when my vocation is to heal?”

  “Surely you’re no match for death?”

  “Perhaps not, but I won’t assist him in his labors any more than I would the bishop.”

  He laughed and said no more of it. We made no more mention of what we had seen on Table Mountain, what life had been saved or spared.

  Chapter Five

  The African King

  Had it not been for the African king, I might never have come to love Lord Somerton. For a long time, I’d not have called it that. Love. We use the word too easily; to mean too many things: tenderness, need, desire, ambition. I admired him, was flattered by his friendship, required his backing if I was to reform medicine in the Cape. But I know now that love’s the wound we don’t recover from. I was not yet wounded.

  As I drank my morning coffee beside the bustling Heerengracht, dust gilding the air beyond the rippled storefront glass, the clatter of cart wheels and horse hooves coming in through the intermittently opened door, I read about myself in the Cape Courant and saw I was a scandal. Cape society was shocked by how quickly I had become an intimate of the governor’s circle in the few months since my arrival. I was no less surprised.

  I was regularly invited to dine with Lord Somerton and his children and their myriad pets; to attend the theater and dances together; learning to ride, if not to hunt. We rode out together often when affairs of state allowed, and often when they did not. Increasingly my meals were taken at Government House, save for breakfast, which was enjoyed in a Heerengracht café with Mrs. Saunders’s sugar buns, a bowl of Dutch coffee, and what passed for the newspaper. Occasionally after a day’s ride we dined together at Roundhouse, his hunting lodge overlooking Camps Bay, or at Newlands, his Palladian villa at the eastern base of Table Mountain. I was absorbed into the governor’s circle like a fish drawn into a net or like one of the peculiar pets they collected; I became part of the household menagerie.

  I told myself these frequent visits were an opportunity to sound him out on various medical reforms, but I was not indifferent to the charms of luxury and power. To a thirty-year-old Chateau Margaux and intelligent conversation. If I neglected my duties as medical assistant at the hospital, no one dared to reprimand the governor’s favorite physician. And our intimacy afforded me an opportunity to discuss the abysmal conditions at the military hospital, to discuss the urgent need for a public one, the appalling treatment of lepers, women, slaves.

  As my intimacy with the Somerton family grew, I noticed that Miss Georgiana seemed increasingly to single me out for attention—we were inevitably seated together at the theater, at dinner, frequently invitations from Government House came in her hand. And I began to feel a familiar anxiety, that which had ruined my acquaintance with Miss Erskine five years before.

  Despite my lesser rank, I was a rare commodity in the Cape colony—a gentleman bachelor. And I knew Lord Somerton favored such romantic unions, matches that defied society in favor of love. At twenty, he had scandalized society by eloping with the penniless sixteen-year-old daughter of an impoverished English lord. The match had been a happy one, lasting twenty-seven years before her death from fever soon after their arrival in the Cape the autumn before. Our social inequality might even recommend the match in his eyes, proving its sincerity. I could not quit their company, as I had quit Dryburgh Abbey, nor did I wish to do so, but something must be done.

  Had I been in a position to marry a woman, Georgiana would have been an ideal mate—clever and well-educated, she was equally accomplished in those less-common attainments of good sense, generosity, humility, and self-knowledge. She had her father’s delicate features, as they must have appeared in youth—though deepened by recent sorrow, given gravity by grief—and the gentleness of an excellent nature. She was self-contained, even as she was lively and quick to be amused. One felt she could bear almost anything. She was clearly her father’s strength, as her mother once had been. One wanted her approval, or I at least did. But I knew I was in no position to court her good opinion.

  So it was both from curiosity and to tarnish my too-sterling reputation with her that I began to frequent the Rainbow Balls those first months in Cape Town. That, and the rumors I’d heard, drew me there. I loved dances of any kind—relished the opportunity to display my body even as I disguised it. I had heard of them at the Castle my first day there, had heard their music in the night across the Heerengracht, the infamous dances where the city came together in taverns in the harbor, stripped of station—Malay and slave, soldier and freedman, women and men and those between. I relished the chance to wear my pea-green satin vest beneath a red coat, my black boots with their red heels, polished high; to dance and flirt.

  I still refused to be attended by women in my chambers, but delighted in their company socially. I did not have to pretend to admire the beauty of the women at the Rainbow Balls. They were exquisite. The Dutch and the Malay, the African and the English. It would be like being taught to admire the beauty of a sunrise. They caught your breath, or at least they caught mine. No one needs to learn this, the beauty of women.

  At that first Rainbow Ball I stood in the tavern doorway, watching the dancers move around the broad, rough-hewn building, its high wooden beams brightly lit by torches and candlelight, its mud walls seeming to undulate in the unstable light. I leaned in and smelled the appealing musk—sweat and leather, rum and smoke, curry and clove—and laughed at the pleasure of it. Before I stepped in.

  Against one wall, behind a balustrade, sat a small orchestra of remarkably skilled musicians, playing tunes I’d rarely heard played as well in London. Violinists, a pianoforte, flutes, an oboe, and English horn played reels and waltzes, jigs and chanteys. They played from ear
or memory, no written music before them. They wore shirtsleeves and vests, not coats, and they gulped beer between tunes, but otherwise it might have been a ball at Almack’s—save for the fact that all but one were black men. I’d later learn it was a point of pride, among local Dutch and English, to have an accomplished orchestra of slaves and hired freedmen. Occasionally a local stringed instrument or drum was introduced to general delight.

  That first evening I stood inside the doorway, scanning the room as if I might discern the person I sought by dress or face. When a small, very beautiful woman with magnificent teeth approached me and set a hand on my chest—“Are you looking for me?”—I laughed. “I should have been,” I said. In fact I was looking for a local slave, called Sanna, who was rumored to be both woman and man. I had never met such a person, though I had read of hermaphrodites, even autopsied one; the subject fascinated. What was it to stand between worlds—what sort of creature could endure that? I told myself mine was a clinical interest.

  Aristotle believed the heat of the heart, not genitalia, determined a person’s sex; men were thought to be warmer than women. Each of us took our place along the spectrum: masculine women being warmer, feminine men cooler. Hermaphrodites were simply more balanced than most, a blend, as the term itself is a blend of the names Hermes and Aphrodite, who—according to myth—gave birth to Hermaphroditus, their child, a perfect copy of them both in one body. Galen dismissed this sexual spectrum, of course, maintaining that women were merely an inferior copy of men, our sexual organs being the same, but inverted—a poor imitation.

  The hermaphrodite’s renown had reached me my first weeks in the Cape, the way news of an exotic plant or animal might, but I’d not yet made her acquaintance. I did not delude myself into thinking that we might be kindred spirits or even friends, but the case—as a physician—was of great interest to me. And the stories of her mistreatment by her enslaver moved me to pity. It was said she was lent out to friends for their delectation, a rare pleasure for all but her. I did not have the courage to ask if Somerton knew of her. I did not want to know.

  I asked the woman with wonderful teeth if she knew the person I sought, might point her out. She misunderstood my intention. “He is not here,” she said. “Will I do?” I told her she’d do well. I was glad to be seen leaving in her company, quieting the voices that had begun to question my own—which was still too high and shrill, a source of fun and, I feared, of suspicion.

  It became my habit after that to spend a night with one of the local women—always a freedwoman, never a slave, never a woman who could not choose for herself, decline to spend the night with me. At first it was for show—to avoid raising questions among the soldiers—but soon, later, it was for myself. Like anyone, I needed from time to time a laying on of hands. I was not the only one who came to them who preferred to remain clothed in their naked arms, to lay my head upon their breasts, to make love to them without baring myself. We would kiss and stroke and I learned my way around their pleasure the way I’d learned anatomy, listening for my tutor’s approving sighs, her moans, her pleasure giving rise to my own.

  I would come to them like Cupid, by darkness. But I stayed the night with only that one, the woman I met that first night. Liz. Her freedom had been purchased by a man who’d loved her and hoped to marry her, only to be killed in a barroom brawl shortly after her manumission. She had no trade, no education, no skills save for love. So she had turned to that most enduring and profitable work of women—comforting men.

  I craved the comfort of human touch, yearned for it. By the time I arrived in Cape Town, I had been alone so long my body ached; the bandages that bound my chest were the closest I had come to an embrace in years. I’d sworn off brothels while garrisoned in Chelsea—save to treat the rampant disease there—but here I had my reputation to consider and protect.

  I would not love. I could see the harm affection had done my mother; I had taken the lesson to heart. I would work. For me the heart would be just another organ. Sentiment and society became like a cadaver—a thing to be anatomized, dissected, taken apart, understood in its constituent elements, an intellectual matter rather than an emotional one. And as with a corpse, I inspected sentiment, but it could not touch me. Or so I believed.

  It is an arduous matter to cross the terrain of life alone. I was not sure that I was equal to it. I had thought invulnerability to affection a kind of strength, but I was beginning to have my doubts, conscious of its burdens now.

  When I mentioned at dinner having attended the Rainbow Ball, it was clear from Georgiana’s inquiries about the sort of women there—their clothes and the music and hour—that she assumed I was seeking feminine companionship. I did not disabuse her of the misconception.

  I knew that I would miss Georgiana, miss our conversations and our walks, but I knew that after this I must distance myself from her. I might be criticized, dismissed as a flirt, but no real harm would have been done, as it would be if I raised further expectations of what I could not pursue: intimacy with a like mind, which I longed for but could not have. Medicine and the army would be my family.

  Miss Georgiana was not present at dinner the December night at Roundhouse when I first heard about the trouble on the eastern border of the Cape colony, along the Fish River, some 500 miles east of where we were. In general the governor avoided politics at table, but that evening he was agitated by recent news. There were armed forts along the river’s western bank, but despite their presence, raids on settlers’ cattle had grown more frequent and the settlers were increasingly wary. There was talk of desertions among soldiers and Khoikhoi farm laborers as well as among slaves, who fled to the Xhosa—where they were granted wives and land in exchange for guns and information.

  Some years before, Lord Somerton explained, an agreement had been struck between colonial authorities and the Xhosa king, Ngqika, to respect the settlements and protect them against attack, but the king was rumored to be among the chief benefactors of the raids. The situation had to be stabilized or settlers would pull up stakes, leaving the eastern frontier unprotected.

  “Ngqika must be made fully responsible,” Somerton said.

  “But what if he’s not?” I asked. I was not seeking to be perverse, but practical.

  “Not what?”

  “Responsible,” I said. “What if he cannot command his people?” It seemed to me possible that the Xhosa chief might not have the authority to speak for his tribe. But men in power do not like to admit the limits of authority, or perhaps his was greater cunning than I knew then.

  “Then we shall make him command them, or command them ourselves.”

  I knew better than to argue the point. It is the privilege and pitfall of power that it allows us to pretend our wishes are shared, that what is done for our own good is done for the good of others.

  “I would like to have you with us, Doctor. If the hospital can spare you.” This last was irony. I rarely went, absorbed as I was in my unofficial duties as the Somerton mascot.

  It was a sensitive mission—part diplomacy, part martial display—and I knew that I should consider it an honor to be named among those few invited to join the expedition, but all I felt was dread. Dread of the three months of travel in exposed country, dread of discovery.

  But the governor was as stubborn as he was charming. His invitation was not to be declined. When he proposed to include Miss Somerton in the expedition as far as the estate of Knysna, where she would serve as hostess, I could not refuse to ride along to ensure her safe return.

  That night at Roundhouse, I woke in a cold sweat, panic rising. I lay awake listening to the booming surf like distant cannon fire and the susurrus of wind in the trees outside my bedroom window. Roundhouse itself was quiet. Occasionally I heard a cough or a servant’s footfall in the hall. I spent hours trying to imagine some way to graciously bow out, refuse, but any obstacle I might imagine was one the governor might as easily remove: duties at the hospital, obligations at the Castle.

&nbs
p; It was hopeless; I would have to make the three-month ride across open plains without a place to hide my monthly linens, with hardly any hope of solitude, except late at night within my tent. Even a tent could not offer much relief or privacy, given our shared resting and rising and meals, given how close they would be pitched together to protect against lions and rhinos.

  We would move as one body across the land; it was hard to imagine I could successfully continue to disguise my own in such a circumstance.

  A week before we were to embark on our long journey east to meet the African king, I was called to the Castle to tend to Emmanuel de Las Cases, Napoleon’s trusted adviser—and I thought I’d escaped the noose. It was mid-January, early summer. I dressed carefully for the occasion, polishing my boots and wearing my red wig, as if dressing for a ball. I was honored to be attending him. I was not often overawed by men, but Napoleon’s name would last a thousand years; he was almost a god and here was his counselor and confidant. But I also hoped that treating de Las Cases might provide an excuse to avoid the journey east.

  When I was shown to his cell in the Castle, the chill was bone-deep despite the summer heat. De Las Cases was bent over a small wooden desk in a room hardly larger than an oxcart; a cot with a mattress of hay and a thin sheet was shoved against one wall. The stench of night soil and spoiled food thickened the air. Not wishing to give offense, I resisted the instinct to cover my nose with a handkerchief.

  When de Las Cases looked up at the sound of the door opening, he seemed for a moment confused. He looked to me, then the guard, then back.