by E. J. Levy
Throughout the day, I watched Lord Somerton’s mood like weather, vigilant for signs of change. As our progress slowed and the summer heat intensified, I feared the governor’s bad mood would worsen and all of us pay the price. We were already behind schedule, his aide-de-camp Josias de Cloete warned, endangering our meeting with the Xhosa king.
We had been traveling several weeks when one of the oxcarts rolled back down a dry riverbank and broke its axle, halting our already slow progress under the relentless summer sun. Lord Somerton insisted that we pause to repair it rather than load down the porters further in the murderous heat. While men set to repairing the wagon that we could not afford to abandon—piled as it was with supplies—heat shimmered off the horizon.
And in that single day’s respite from travel, Lord Somerton’s black mood lifted. He seemed immeasurably cheered by the opportunity to hunt, which provided both diversion and needed food for our massive retinue. He invited me to join the hunting party, but I declined.
Instead the child agreed to walk the perimeter of camp with me and gather plants.
I had never wanted children, had seen too much of women’s suffering in birth, but I liked the boy who almost made me doubt my conviction. He was like a miniature man, earnest and grave. When I mentioned the child to Lord Somerton that evening, he frowned, not having remarked him. But I felt a tug whenever I saw the boy, especially when he struggled with the ox across the stones; I felt an urge to protect him, to help. Even as I knew I could not help, that it might jeopardize his father’s position, his own, to appear a liability rather than an aid to our progress.
I had to remind myself that no one in the world was mine, or ever could be.
As I lay awake in my tent at night, I listened for footfalls—the crunch of gravel beneath a boot or paw—and my skin would go cold as I reached for my gun, knowing I could not shoot well; sometimes I would see a shadow pass between the fire and my tent. I began to sleep outdoors, where I felt safer; if trouble came, at least I would see its face. I was afraid not of men or lions or even death, but of being caught unawares.
That night I had left my tent behind, pulling my cot into the evening air, despite the bright full moon, which bathed the cot’s blanket in silver light, when I heard sounds nearby and sat up to find Somerton at the end of my cot.
I was glad I’d not bothered to remove my shirt, my chest binding, or my breeches.
“Out for a stroll?” I asked.
“Poor night for sleeping,” he said. The moon was full and bright.
I knew better than to ask if he was worried about the expedition. He would tell me what he wished in his own time.
“Perfect night for a fox hunt,” he looked out over the silvery landscape. “Every creature will be out tonight seeking dinner.”
“Lucky for them, you’re not.”
“Unlucky for me.”
I had expected to find him more at ease in the saddle, riding out across the open landscape. But these open spaces were not soothing without a gun in his hand. Without a target in his sights. I understood then that it was not confinement that made Lord Somerton pace his offices, it was lack of quarry. Still, he seemed happier here than I’d ever seen him, more at ease.
“D’you know, the porters say you are a witch, Doctor Perry?”
“That’s better press than the Cape Courant gives me.”
“My family are said to be descended from the devil, on my father’s side,” he said.
“Melusine,” I said, “the devil’s daughter.”
“You know the story?”
“Every schoolboy in England knows the story, Your Lordship.”
“Do you credit it?”
“Men are capable of devilishness enough on their own. Don’t you think?”
Much as I resisted its glamour, Somerton’s family name was famous, the last of the Plantagenet line that had once ruled England, last of the “warrior kings” descended from Count Geoffrey of Anjou, who married the sole surviving child of Henry I (though it was said he had bedded the devil’s daughter, Melusine). The governor’s forebear had been saved from slaughter at Tudor hands after the War of the Roses by the happy fact of his illegitimacy. His ancestor was a natural son, a bastard; that alone had saved him. Somerton had a healthy openness to the outsider, the displaced, the illegitimate. But that did not temper his arrogance.
“What of your family, Doctor? You do not speak of them.”
“There’s little cause. Mine is not an illustrious line.”
“The Cape matrons say you’re a natural son of the Prince Regent.”
A chill ran through my belly. I had not known that my origins were a subject of discussion here. Had hoped, absurdly, to have left all that behind.
I did not reply.
“Don’t worry, Doctor. I like bastards. Our family was—”
There is hardly any sound as unsettling as a death wail in the night. The sound that ended our conversation that night was no animal’s cry, but eerily human. The shots that followed confirmed it.
By the time we reached the site of the commotion, the boy was in his father’s arms, a ruin of blood and dust, a massive lioness bleeding by his side. We heard in the jumbled half-phrases of the men’s reports how the child had wandered off to check on my pet goat, how the lioness was on him before the dogs even caught its scent, how a single shot had taken the cat while the boy still was in its jaws. Only his arms drawn across his chest and face had saved him to suffer this long. A blow to the head had rendered him unconscious, which was a mercy. His arms were pierced like Saint Sebastian’s, his face bruised and bloodied from being struck against the ground, but to my amazement the child lived. Breathed.
There was no knowing how long he might yet. If he would recover. The puncture wounds could be treated, but internal damage would reveal itself only in time; there was nothing to be done for it but wait.
“He must not be moved,” I said.
Lord Somerton ordered a fire built on the spot, blankets, guards posted.
While two guards built a fire, the boy’s father crouched with his son on a blanket. He seemed catatonic with grief. Staring, not making a sound. I feared he might not release the child from his arms, even as his embrace might be doing harm at that very moment. I was loath to separate them. The boy might last the night, I thought, but not the next day’s journey over uneven ground. I knew our mission could not wait on a child. I administered a vial of laudanum to minimize the pain. The child’s eyes were open; I did not dare to close them, as if the imitation of death would invite it.
“How is he?” Lord Somerton asked.
“Hard to know.” I had treated the obvious wounds, the lacerated arms and head. It was impossible to know what internal injuries he had sustained.
“Movement now could kill him,” I said. Rest was required. But I knew the mission could not afford further delay.
“We shall remain here, then,” Lord Somerton said.
I was too shocked to speak.
Cloete was not: “Your Lordship, we are already well behind schedule—“
“We will remain,” Lord Somerton said. “Until the boy recovers.”
We all knew it might be its opposite that we awaited. I was grateful that he did not say so. For the father’s sake, for the child’s, for my own.
All men are hypocrites, the powerful simply more obviously so. But Somerton’s hypocrisy was of the better sort: he betrayed his hauteur with unexpected tenderness. For all his froideur, he was a man of deep feeling. Men are praised for their reserves of strength, but I admired his reserves of feeling, the governor’s capacity to be moved by the suffering of others—and changed by it. His enemies considered him high-handed and self-indulgent for his love of luxury, horses, races, and hunting, but he felt deeply, was unashamed of it. That woman’s strength and saints’. He was moved and grieved that night, when there was no benefit in it for him, and I allowed myself the risk of liking him for it.
When the boy was settled, I return
ed to the main camp and its larger fire to allow the father privacy with his son; I would sit up in case I was needed. I was grateful when the governor joined me. Grateful he did not ask the boy’s chances of surviving the night.
Instead Lord Somerton spoke of his childhood at Badminton. The daily dinners for two hundred guests. The foxhunts his family held there.
“They say your family invented the sport,” I said.
He frowned, declining the flattery. “We merely popularized it.”
We fell silent, each in his own thoughts, until the moon began to set, waiting for a change in the boy’s condition.
“Do you never think of marriage, Doctor Perry?” he asked toward dawn.
The question unsettled me. Surely he knew I’d be a poor match for his daughter. “Of course,” I said. “Everyone thinks of marriage. I have the good sense not to act on it.” He did not laugh.
“Are you not lonely?”
“What man is not? Marriage rarely seems a cure for loneliness from what I’ve seen,” I said.
“If one marries well, it can be.”
I did not reply.
“We eloped, Elizabeth and I. She was sixteen; I was not yet twenty. Terrible scandal. It was the best decision I ever made.”
“You must miss her terribly.”
“The hardest thing is to cure oneself of hope. I imagine sometimes that if I am simply patient enough, she will return. As if this were a test. The hardest part is the fact that she will never return. Have you ever lost anyone, Doctor?”
I wanted to tell him the truth, wanted to tell someone, ached with all that went unsaid; it swelled my skin, straining as my flesh strained against the bandages with which I bound my chest each morning.
“No,” I said.
He nodded. “Georgiana’s so like her. Sometimes I turn and see her and think it’s my Elizabeth. But then I realize, of course, it’s not. You can love like that only once in a life.”
“Most never know such love.”
“And you?”
“I’ve spent more time opening bodies than embracing them.”
“By choice.”
“And necessity.”
“Surely a man needs both work—and someone to work for?”
“There was someone, once,” I said, thinking of General Mirandus, of my mother and sister. “But. I’m hardly an easy man to live with.”
“Few men are. Women seem to manage.”
“So they do.”
He set his hand on my shoulder and I felt again a charge pass between us, subtle as scent; for a moment I thought again that he knew. But he merely patted my back before he stood.
“Get some rest,” he said. “Or you’ll fall out of the saddle when we ride again. You are aware, Doctor, that the porters have a wager on when you’ll drop.”
“Have you put money on it?”
“I’m a betting man,” he said. “I never miss a sure thing.”
Looking back, it seems that was the night I began to love Somerton. It was not the love of ballads or novels, but something less common, more particular to that place. Like the plants I gathered. There is a love greater than that of physical desire, not that of monks or saints, but tender and extreme in its restraint. I loved him as if he were my father, or my brother. My almost only friend.
I loved in him that rarest quality between men, rarer still between men and women—equality. He treated me, despite the difference in rank, as a confidant, with the open, frank, uncalculating manner with which he hunted. Buoyant and direct, he allowed me to be so as well. I had loved Mirandus, but he possessed the hard arrogance of a man who knew he was meant to shape history to his will; everything for him was calculation—every conversation, every kindness was part of a larger strategy. Even my education had been; I knew that now; perhaps I’d known it even then. I was to be his instrument. I had been lucky to escape that fate, although losing his company was the first great loss of my life. My first great grief.
But with Somerton there was no calculation; he was a great man, the way mountains are, or surf—it was a natural grace, born to be a force without willing it so. He would shape history not from personal ambition but because it was a pleasure to be in the world and of it. Perhaps title could not matter overmuch, because he was a second son. But I think it was something else. He was the rare man of title who judged men by their quality, by their character, not by their rank or stature or reputation or wealth or what use they might be to him.
He could be cutting, dismissive, casually cruel to those he deemed unworthy of courtesy. He was a terrible snob. I had seen him dispatch fools and flatterers. And he was vain. A gossip. Clung overlong to stupid opinions because he’d held them dear, or because someone he’d respected had. But he loved his children, his horses and dogs, his friends. And he had a natural authority, a sense of himself in history, as part of a human chain reaching back and going forward, aware of his own mortality as few men—even soldiers—are. In short he was a man worthy of the name. And for a time we were friends. Until the world came between us.
For two nights I did not sleep; I sat up with the Khoikhoi boy and his father, waiting for a change in his condition. To my amazement and no credit of my own, Pearl recovered his senses at the end of the second day; he was able to walk in three. Badly bruised, he showed no sign of the internal rupture of organs I had feared—he neither coughed blood nor passed it. The guard’s quick action and keen shooting had saved the child’s life. After four days’ rest, we resumed our trek eastward. Now the boy rode in a wagon, the ox and goat tethered behind. I walked slowly behind them.
The relief we felt on reaching Knysna moved like a fresh sea breeze through our group, after the six-week ride. One could hear laughter among the porters, singing; even Lord Somerton’s mood seemed to lift. Riding down into Knysna toward the lagoon, I had the strange impression once again that I was in an English countryside—the ivy-green hills and indigo water might have belonged to some Cornish seaside village.
Below us, as we descended to George Rex’s estate where we would stay, the lagoon was encircled by gentle slopes, richly forested, which gently curved around the water like arms in an embrace—two sandstone cliffs guarded the entrance to the Indian Ocean. I thought I’d never seen anything as lovely.
George Rex was the sort of man who goes to a remote place to reinvent himself. A man rather too much like me. And I disliked him. Even as we enjoyed his hospitality. Rumor had it he was an illegitimate son of King George III, a rumor that I suspected he encouraged in his ambition to acquire a kingly estate. He claimed to have made his fortune in timber, but I sensed there was truth in the stories that held he was among those who still profited by the recently outlawed trade in human beings. Nonetheless, we luxuriated in long hot baths and later in cool drinks on the veranda, overlooking the bay. Dined on fresh fruit and game and fish and cheeses imported—some said pilfered—from France. A braggart, a liar, and a thief, Rex’s sole aim was to win, his only concern his own wealth. He was a man devoid of principle, a small piece of a person pretending to be a whole man. Shocking, repulsive, fascinating.
As we smoked after dinner, figures seemed to flit through the trees overhead, and when I looked up, I saw a Vervet monkey staring down at me, his thoughtful eyes unsettling, its dark face crowned by a corona of grey fur. He tossed a twig at me, leapt to another branch. I turned back to the conversation when I heard a shriek; Miss Somerton was batting at her hair and looking up into the tree that a moment before she had been leaning against.
“The thief,” she said. “The little thief.”
“What happened?” shouted her father. He stood and drew his pistol.
“The beastly monkey stole my grapes!”
George Rex gave a generous laugh. “There are plenty more,” he said. He clapped hands for a servant.
I wondered if Rex identified with the thieving monkey. I disliked him, but it was impossible not to watch him. He had the generosity of one accustomed to losing heavily on the way to a
still-greater win, a gambler’s showy extravagance. It was hard to like such a man, even harder to trust him. The feeling, I suspected, was mutual.
“And you, Dr. Perry. What brings a man like you to the Cape? You seem more suited to…”
“I did,” said Somerton. Ending the speculation. “I cannot do without him.”
I was surprised by the declaration, touched.
“Indeed,” Rex leaned back in his chair. “I have heard you have miraculous powers.”
“Sound reason is hardly deemed miraculous in civilized parts of the world,” I said.
He laughed at the obvious insult. “You must find us remarkably rustic.”
“Rather unremarkably,” I said. “No more so than the barracks at Chelsea.”
I appeared to be the only one who disliked Rex. Lord Somerton seemed delighted to learn that evening that there were five kinds of antelope and bush pigs to hunt on the massive estate, as well as cheetah. Georgiana was taken by the forest elephants.
Having seen strange and magnificent birds on the ride in (including one that was an iridescent blue with a green chest and crest and head, red rings around its eyes, and a beak bright as my bootheels), I looked forward to exploring the forest the next day—until Rex told me there were more than twenty varieties of snake out there as well. My expression must have betrayed my dismay.
“Don’t worry, Doctor,” Rex said, speaking as he chewed a cigar. “Only five or six are venomous.” He winked at Miss Georgiana; I thought I saw her blush in the lamplight.
When Rex proposed to show her the garden the next day, or to row her out to the cliffs for a picnic, I was not sure if he was seeking to seduce her or nettle me.
Rex offered to show her the planets that night, leading her by the arm to a telescope mounted on a wooden platform built for the purpose. I could hear them speaking quietly, saw Rex circle Miss Somerton in his arms to steady the scope before her, direct its gaze. I hoped Lord Somerton might object, but he seemed becalmed in the thickening darkness, lingering over eighteen-year-old whiskey, which tasted to me of the sea and smoke, like a sodden cigar.