by E. J. Levy
When Georgiana exclaimed, it was with joy. “You can see the rings,” she said when they returned. “And the red pox on Jupiter.”
Much as I might wish to object, I would only be misunderstood, thought a jealous suitor. I held my tongue and hated the man silently. I hoped Georgiana noticed, as I did, the woman Rex retired to bed with that night, as he would each subsequent evening—a young and comely dark-skinned house slave. Only later in the afterlife, when all is known but nothing can be done, will I learn that Rex would later sleep with that same slave’s daughter, the one who was already growing in her belly that very night. Siring his own daughter’s child.
Of the meeting with the African king there is little to say: like so much of life, the ostensible focus was mere footnote to what truly mattered. The public spectacle paled in comparison with the small private matters—a cup of tea, the smell of smoke, the myriad perceptions in a single day, the rise of love and antipathy among us, that weighty cargo.
The Persian rugs we had brought east were unfurled upon the ground and chairs erected in a semicircle, facing the river on its western bank. Around us, soldiers armed and ready stood at attention as we reposed, waiting for King Ngqika to come to us. Of course, he did not. Imagining ours was a trap, which in a way it was, though I didn’t see it then. A trap of courtesy.
Eventually the king was persuaded to make the crossing, join us. He was given trinkets for his trouble—shawls, shoes, buttons, a looking glass, an excellent grey horse. A translator made the case we’d come to make—the petition for a treaty guaranteeing the safety of the settlers here. I thought the Xhosa king seemed uncomfortable, nodding his head when asked to affirm his commitment to protect settlers against raids, but always concluding with a flurry of words that seemed to contest his agreement.
The translator, a Xhosa man, tried to explain the flurry of speech, but perhaps he lacked sufficient command of English or feared providing a disagreeable translation. Only later would one of the porters, who spoke a little of the tribal tongue, clarify for me: the king would protect the settlers, but he could not command the others, as the English do their peoples. He was one king among many. It was not his to command, as it was not ours to demand it.
But demand we did. We asked what he could not provide. He accepted our gifts as a courtesy, a sign of good intentions, not a guarantee. I understood this but suspected Lord Somerton had not. When I spoke to him of it later back at Knysna, he seemed unconcerned. He had secured the promise. That was all that mattered. That was what he’d come for: the king’s word. Only later, when that brief meeting became the justification for a border war and seizure of Xhosa lands, would I understand it was not the king’s word we’d come for at all. It was the pretense of an agreement that could thus provide the occasion for its breach and a justification for imposing English might. As Lord Somerton would a few years later. The first of many such assaults, which would become the basis for the nation-state.
It was hard to leave Knysna—its lush beauty, its many comforts—for the long hard journey ahead. But I worried for Georgiana there, and what increasingly appeared to be Rex’s effort to attach her affections, despite his obvious attachments elsewhere. If one judged a man by his wealth, he might have seemed a reasonable match, and I was in no position to argue to the contrary. So I was eager to set out, but on the eve of our planned departure, Rex insisted that we linger one more day. He proposed to take us to a nearby canyon, where he said “were things the doctor should see,” before our journey home. No one but I seemed inclined to decline.
So the day before we were to leave to begin the weeks-long journey home, Georgiana, Rex, Somerton, and I rode out with a tracker to a canyon northwest of Knysna, a morning’s ride distant. Our Xhosa tracker had evidently grown fond of me in the course of our journey east from Cape Town (or at least of the goat cheese I had shared), and as we rode to the canyon that morning, he tried to cheer me with names of plants we passed. But my spirit was oppressed by the sound of flirtatious, silly conversation between Georgiana and Rex.
The canyon we rode into was radiant in the late-morning light, the sandstone walls tinting gold. Ahead of us, visible above the cliffs, were the high peaks of mountains. At a signal from the tracker, we dismounted and tethered the horses and walked a few dozen yards farther on until the tracker led us beneath a stone outcropping, which jutted out from a cave wall like a long low roof, barely high enough to accommodate Lord Somerton. The dim light beneath the outcropping left me dazzled while my eyes adjusted to the shadow there, and then, as my vision cleared, to my amazement the wall before me shifted from gold to red, from a solid to something liquid, moving, a pulsating skin of dappled color—for a moment I did not understand what I was seeing. And then, it came clear: human handprints, red as blood, covered the wall in front of us and the ceiling above. I shivered at the sight of it. Although none of us spoke, I felt a rising hum in my ears, as if the palm prints covering the stone wall before us were not images but sounds, each a voice, a note, speaking from some time out of time. As if we had slipped inside a living body here, its thundering heart before us.
When we stepped out into the sun again, the heat was a comfort, and we began to talk rapidly of the beauty of the petroglyphs; Rex held forth on who might have made them and why. The sun was high overhead now, and we agreed to take lunch before riding back. Georgiana saw to laying out a cloth on a large flat rock, around which we each took a seat to dine on smoked meats and fruits and fresh baked rolls and wine.
We were lingering in a delicious haze of gustatory contentment when I heard Georgiana exclaim in what sounded like delight.
I opened my eyes to see on the rocks above us a half dozen tiny tawny-colored deer, small as dogs, much smaller than Lord Somerton’s hounds. Each one was no taller than my knee, with tiny horns, enormous black eyes and lips, standing on the tips of their hooves, like ungulate ballerinas.
“What darlings!” she whispered.
“Klipspringer,” said Rex with a yawn, lying back against the rock.
The tracker smiled. “Umvundla,” he said to Georgiana, nodding to the creatures. He waved his hands over his head to indicate the ears of a rabbit. And laughed.
“The Xhosa call them rabbits,” Rex explained, not deigning to open his eyes again.
“Oh, Father, might we take one home?” Georgiana said. “Please?”
“Of course,” said Rex, answering before Lord Somerton could. “A beautiful woman should have everything she desires.”
Georgiana smiled at the blatant flattery.
“I don’t see why not,” Lord Somerton said.
I thought the tracker looked unsettled by the proposal, but he said nothing. There was talk of how we might capture the tiny antelope and transport it back with us, until I inquired of the tracker what mode he thought best and he explained that the animal wouldn’t last the journey.
“It would break the heart to separate them,” he said. “They mate for life and once.”
Rex was undaunted. “Then we’ll capture two.”
“And how will you know which two are mated?” I asked. “Or are you indifferent to questions of fidelity?”
Rex opened one eye and looked at me. “What of you, Doctor? Have you a little wife hidden away somewhere?”
“I’m not a man to marry,” I said.
“Surely if you found a suitable match…”
“No woman would suit a man like me,” I said. “Some men are unsuited for marriage.”
Rex glanced at Georgiana, whose eyes were downcast and whose hands shook as she packed up our luncheon. “I’m not sure every woman would agree.”
“If she knew me well,” I said. “She would.”
That night at Knysa, as we sat up late on the veranda after dinner, talking and watching stars, I heard a mournful singing through the forest, an unearthly sound, as if the trees themselves were lamenting.
“What in God’s name is that?” Lord Somerton asked.
“The field slaves sing
,” Rex said, as if it were a tribute, a performance given for his delight. “No one can convince me slaves suffer when they sing so well and often.”
“It sounds like a dirge,” I said.
“So do Gregorian chants,” Rex replied.
A woman’s shriek from the house brought me to my feet. I ran toward the sound, ignoring Rex’s voice behind me (“It’s nothing, Doctor!”). I was not brave, as Georgiana would say later; I simply feared what I might face were I slow to act. I had heard stories of domestic catastrophes that attended these estates: a toddler fallen into a vast pot of soup, scalded beyond recovery; a cleaver-wielding cook who lost a digit to the blade or worse.
When I reached the house I pushed through the wooden door from beyond which the shouts came, and froze on the threshold of the kitchen. It was an unearthly sight: A woman suspended in midair, dark against the darker dim-lit room, hung from a rafter beam, her wrists bound by rope, shoulders wet where a lash had cut her.
“What in God’s name?!” I shouted, though it was clearly another master served.
The man standing below her paused in his exertions, turned, saw me, then spoke, almost under his breath: “None of your concern, sir.” I heard a child’s sob and saw by the stove a small boy of no more than three crouched there. The man appeared not to hear or to be indifferent to the sound. He raised the lash again, drawing it back across the packed dirt floor, slithering toward me, until it came within a handsbreadth of my red bootheel. I stood on it, preventing him from raising it again. His stalled arm pulled him round to face me.
Perhaps I should have been afraid for myself then, for the man moved toward me with a speed and violence in the set of his shoulders that was truly frightening. But I was distracted from my fear by his face.
You would expect a violent man to have a violent face, to appear a monster. But he was not, and it shocked me to see him: handsome, young, unshaven, light-eyed and fair-haired, a hero out of a storybook. I was so distracted by his uncanny appearance that I didn’t move. He crossed to me and shoved me in the chest, then jerked the whip from under my foot, sending me to the floor. I watched him snap back the lash and strike the woman again. Heard her shout, and then another woman’s scream behind me. I turned to the doorway to see Miss Somerton.
No doubt the poor woman’s assailant would have killed her there in plain view of her own child and me had not Georgiana arrived just then, and after her, Rex. Had not her plain horror forced his hand, counseled a pretense of humanity, forcing Rex to remedy the situation.
“Cut her down,” Rex said, as if it were a horse to be untied. The brute began to explain the situation—something about a loaf of bread—but was cut short. “Now,” Rex said.
Rex turned to Miss Georgiana to offer his apology but she pushed away, holding up her hand as if against a blow. I offered to accompany her to her room but she shook her head, and her maid said, “I’ll see to her, sir.” Then I went to see to the wounds of the young woman, who sat curled now in the middle of the floor. The child’s hand on her shoulder.
When we returned to the veranda half an hour later, Rex spoke as if nothing unusual had happened. Perhaps nothing unusual had.
“Everything all right?” Lord Charles asked when we resumed our seats.
“Perfectly,” Rex said.
“An overseer was beating a female slave,” I explained. “To death, from the looks of it, had we not interrupted.”
“Ah,” Somerton said. I wondered at his equanimity, how he had remained seated here despite the commotion. I hated him then for his calm, his discretion, as if questioning his host were more unseemly than countenancing murder.
I asked if this was a common occurrence.
Rex’s cigar ember glowed in the dark then died, then glowed red again. “Discipline is essential to the safe operation of a large estate,” he said.
“You mean to the holding of slaves,” I said.
“I have six hundred men working for me here,” he said.
“Enslaved men,” I said.
“They would not work if they did not fear the consequences.”
“There are other ways to inspire men to labor.”
“Spare me your speeches, Doctor. Morality is an easy pastime for a man whose life does not depend on the land. Pardon me for being blunt, but you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know that it’s immoral to hold a man as property.”
“Life is an immoral business, Doctor. Morality is a superstition.” He paused, then added, “You benefit from slaves, as I do. You just have the luxury to pretend you don’t.”
He was right in one way. My morality was a luxury—one the woman I’d hoped to help that night could not afford. My intervention comforted me that night, but likely not her. To humiliate the man who would humiliate her must only have increased his rage, her punishment. The rage of the overseer would only grow for having been interrupted, corrected; in private, later, once we left, when there was nothing to be done, he would have his way—as men did with women—in private. It was the way of the world and on estates like this, where power was unchecked by justice, by shame, by rule of law. Then as now there were those who suffered daily so that people half a world away might be comfortable—and comfortably ignore them.
There was slavery in Cape Town, of course, brutality its handmaiden. But there at least slaveholders took some pride in the condition of the persons they enslaved. A contented family, a healthy servant, was the mark of a gentleman. As significant, as meaningful as a well-curried horse, a fine carriage, a large and well-kept house. It was part of the domestic tableau. In the city, men took personally the condition of their slaves and women and dogs.
As we began our long ride home to Cape Town the next morning, Georgiana kept her distance, riding ahead of us in a cart with the guide, silent now.
Somerton rode up beside me, so close that our knees nearly touched. “She’s young,” he said. “She’ll recover. Remarkably, we do.”
I hoped that he was right—that we would all of us recover from this.
Chapter Six
The Lady with
the Pet Dog
After our return from the Fish River, Lord Somerton and I grew inseparable; we were together every day, save for when he sent me to attend his friends or their families. He seemed inclined to make me out to be some sort of alchemist or magician, my reputation for incomparable skill augmenting his own. He would have the best horses, the best rifles, the most beautiful women and balls, the best physician. I was glad to play my part. To have any part at all.
The governor took pains to show his favor toward me; he made me a gift of the horse I’d first ridden to Table Mountain and a carriage, and put at my disposal the services of a manumitted slave named Dantzen, whom he provided with a livery matching my own distinctive dress, down to the red parasol and cardinal-red coat and red bootheels. He issued proclamations protecting bontebok, establishing a leper colony at Hemel-en-Aarde, and provided land for a hospital for the public. He made me the physician to his household, with an increase in pay and an offer of an apartment at Government House, where his family resided, which I declined for obvious reasons. He appointed me Vaccinating Physician to the Vaccine Institution, which carried a salary as well. I was gratified. But even this did not quell my fears and jealousy in regard to the governor. Favor among the powerful is a precarious perch.
Pleasure though his constant companionship was, it was painful at times, when I had to witness his intimacies with others, which I feared might someday rival our own. Lord Somerton shone at the balls that Miss Georgina arranged for his amusement, but to watch him clap another man on the shoulder or waltz with some local beauty in his arms gave me a most acute pain, even as I was gaining notoriety as a flirt and a favorite among local ladies, prompting more than one young blade to storm out with his intended dragged behind. It was not Lord Somerton’s romantic interest that I coveted, but his attention. Above all, his love. In that I brooked no rivals, beyond thos
e to whom greater love was owed by bond of blood.
So I was both sorry and relieved to lose his company when he set out for a week’s foxhunting at Roundhouse; I set off for the Castle to attend to my neglected duties there, which the hospital administrator noted had been unduly ignored of late. Even the governor’s protection could not protect me from that charge. I set to work at once—first seeing to the soldiers’ complaints, then attending to a few private patients, writing up instructions for the proper care of the ill at home, taking notes on what might be improved.
Toward the end of our week’s separation, I visited Simon’s Town to tend to a ship’s captain who had anchored there and come down with an inflammation of the eyes, which he had managed to severely aggravate by application of what passed for medicine in these parts; by the time I reached him he was all but blinded, a state that happily was not permanent. I prescribed a saline rinse and cleansing regimen, the suspension of all prior treatment, and good Cape wine to calm his nerves and pass the time; in return, I asked only traveling expenses back to Cape Town. He seemed so grateful I feared he might offer me a swordfish to bear home.
On the long ride back to Cape Town, the exhaustion of the last few days settled into my bones and I felt the ache to sleep, despite the exquisite scenery that I rode through—the green mountains, the shimmering blue-green bay, the polished stone monoliths; I thought to stop at Roundhouse to visit with the governor, but when I arrived near sunset, I learned that he had already returned to town, so I rode on, despite exhaustion.
I arrived back in the Heerengracht late that night deeply weary, so I eschewed my usual precautions; failing to bolt my bedroom door, I disrobed, unbound my chest, and slipped on a nightshirt. No sooner had I put head to pillow than I slept, only to wake in a confusion shortly after when there came a knock on my bedroom door and my landlady entered, followed by a frightened servant familiar to me from Government House but whose name I did not know, and whose face I would ever after remember as one who bore the message from Miss Georgiana that the governor had taken ill and was not expected to last the week. Would I come quickly, please?