by E. J. Levy
“I’m not afraid of talk,” he said.
“I’d be a scandal,” I said.
“You’d be a sensation.”
“I’d be a spectacle.”
“You’d be my wife.”
“I would not be a doctor. I could not practice medicine.”
I could see that Somerton did not understand, and it pained me. I hardly understood myself the dread I felt.
“I love you,” he said. As if it were irrefutable argument, drawing that weapon so often used against women, to yoke them to impossible lives; I love you, that bludgeon.
“There are more important things than love,” I said.
“No,” he said. “There are not.”
“I could be court-martialed for what I’ve done,” I said.
He knew as well as I that impersonating an officer was a crime.
“It did not harm d’Eon’s reputation,” he said, recalling the late French diplomat, “when he was discovered to be a man in women’s clothes.”
“He was French,” I said, as if that explained the matter. “And an aristocrat, and his secret wasn’t discovered until he was dead. Which I do not intend to be any time soon.” I smiled. He did not. He turned away to look out over the gardens.
“When I married Elizabeth, everyone was against us. We didn’t care.”
“You were young—and youngest children. You had less to lose.”
“I don’t want to lose you,” he said. I could not tell if it was anger or sorrow in his voice.
“You won’t. I’m here. Dr. Perry, at your service.” I bowed to his back.
His hand struck the wall with a bang and I stepped back, startled by the sound.
“By God, you’re stubborn,” Lord Somerton said.
I felt light, unmoored.
“I would not be here if I were not,” I said.
Cloete hurried in. “Everything all right, sir?”
“Perfectly,” Lord Somerton said. “We’re done. Thank you, Doctor. That is all.”
I could not explain to him my reasoning. I barely understood myself, why I could not marry the only man I had ever loved or ever would. I could not explain—perhaps I did not grasp myself—that I had to give up the second-greatest love of my life, Lord Charles, to preserve the first: not medicine, but the liberty of my own mind. The right to think and speak and move as I chose, not as others bade me. To experience life on my own terms. The only liberty worth the name. Even if it came at a terrible price. As it would.
It wasn’t money that tempted me to continue in my profession, or even honor. Certainly not comfort or wealth; I knew I’d have had a great deal more of both as Lady Somerton. It was something less tangible, far more valuable. Something akin to the way I’d felt when we rode out onto the Cape Flats together or on our long journey to the Xhosa, or when I’d first put on the clothes of a young boy—free to see with my own eyes, to meet life on my terms. Though my actions might be circumscribed by principle and exigency, by military orders, I was no longer beholden to anyone to dictate my perceptions. Although my life was predicated on a lie, a masquerade, it made possible an honest life: I might have to lie to others, but I did not have to lie to myself. Never to myself.
When I fell ill a few days later, it seemed as if my own spirit had turned against me, doubting my decision. I felt sodden with grief, heavy and ill at ease. My feet swelled in my boots, my breasts and joints ached. The least foul smell—of which there were many in the Heerengracht—left me light-headed and sick to the stomach. When my symptoms worsened, I took to bed for a few days. Which gave me time to think. To consider Somerton’s proposal and my symptoms. To realize what was wrong. To realize what ailed me: I was pregnant.
I wanted to tell Somerton. But I knew I couldn’t. Instead I imagined sending a message asking him to meet at Newlands. How we would meet on the veranda there, in the warm evening, listen to the wind in the trees like distant surf.
I imagined our conversation so often that I began to believe it had transpired. Perhaps it did. Perhaps I only wish it had.
“I’m to have a child,” I might begin.
“Are you quite certain?”
“I am a doctor. It’s not a difficult diagnosis.”
“My God.” He’d walk to the balustrade, brace his arms, look out over the country he governed. He could command troops, stifle a free press, but he could not stop biology.
“What will you do?”
“I can’t have it here, obviously. No one must know.”
“Is there anything to be…done?”
“It’s too late.”
“So there’s only one thing for it—”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll go away and—”
“We shall marry, after all.” Perhaps he’d smile.
“Don’t be absurd.”
“I eloped with Elizabeth. We were happy for twenty-seven years.”
“The governor cannot elope with his doctor. His male doctor.”
“But you’re not male.”
“Your powers of observation are dazzling. QED.”
“Do not take that tone with me,” he said.
“Forgive me. I take that tone with everyone but you.”
“What will you do?” he said again.
“What women in my condition have done for centuries.”
“I trust there has never been a woman in your condition.”
“Perhaps not. I will…make arrangements.”
“You don’t intend to keep it, then.”
“I don’t appear able to keep anything I love.”
The conversation, when it occurred, did not go as I had imagined. The night I went to see him, nothing went as planned.
To understand that night, it’s important to understand this: a few weeks earlier, I’d been called to treat the wounds of Sanna, the hermaphrodite whose freedom I had purchased the year before. I’d thought to free her from the traffic in flesh that the Dutch slaveholder had put her to, lending her out to local landowners as one might a sow, for the pleasure of the rare experience of her. But my gift had proved a curse. Freedom is useless—worse than useless—where one is merely free to starve. When I was called to treat her wounds, I learned that she’d been beaten by a sailor who’d bought her time at a local tavern in the port, only to be outraged when he found she was not fitted to the form he had expected. Her face was bruised, a rib broken, but she’d survive. I was ashamed to have bought her freedom only to find I’d shackled her in another way.
I’d hoped to help. But freedom is not a virtue if you lack the money to make your way. Freedom was a dirty word for what I’d really offered.
I was grateful when Georgiana agreed to look in on Sanna when I was called away to Hemel-en-Aarde, to consult on the new leper hospital being built there. I worried for Sanna, even though she assured me that selling herself was an improvement over being sold. She would return to work eventually, I knew, but for a time at least she might rest from her labors. That endless labor of women: comforting men.
I was on my way back from Hemel-en-Aarde a week later when I stopped by Newlands to speak with Lord Charles, to tell him the news—that I was pregnant. I had sent word ahead that I would visit, but I could not be sure he’d be free, or even there; I almost hoped he wouldn’t be.
What did I hope he’d say? It was ridiculous. A myth, like that of Cupid and Psyche, that love could overcome all obstacles. I knew better. All around was evidence to the contrary—enslaved women forced into sex with men they loathed; free women forced by penury into the arms of those they did not desire, forced by necessity to marry. Love had little to do with it. The sort of love we had was like the fynbos and proteas that bloomed there—peculiar beauty that could not survive outside this small place. Still, stupidly, I imagined us.
It was approaching eleven or midnight when I arrived, but the library was lit and light spilled onto the veranda; I had tied my horse and was walking toward the steps that rose to the Palladian apron when a figure stepped out from the da
rkness, having evidently just left the house by the servants’ door.
I was startled, then shocked. It was Sanna.
I could think of only one reason that she’d be here at this hour, so late, alone. I felt as unsteady as I had years before when I’d seen the blue skirt of a woman slip behind Somerton’s office door, prompting my duel with Cloete. The air felt thin, breakable. There could be no other explanation. What else would bring Sanna so far from town so late at night, unless a gentleman had sent for her, requested her presence? She’d reconciled herself to the ways of men, made her living as she could, but I was unreconciled. I felt ill at the thought that my friend, my beloved, could be among her patrons, cruel. I’d wondered if he’d known her. It hardly mattered if he hired her for himself or friends, powerful men he sought to impress by providing rare pleasures. I felt sick and sad. I felt revulsion rise, then rage. I heard men’s voices from inside, spilling out into the night.
“Dr. Perry,” Sanna seemed equally surprised to see me. “Are you only just arriving?”
“I might ask the same of you,” I said. “I had news to deliver to the governor, but it can wait. I will see you home. These roads are not safe for a woman alone at night.” I helped Sanna up into my carriage.
“How gallant,” she said.
“No. How ungallant.”
When Somerton inquired the next day about my failure to appear at Newlands, I said that I was sorry, that I had been detained by a patient in urgent need of care, had had no time to send on word.
“I am sorry,” I said, and I was.
Lord Charles seemed unconcerned, even cheerful. “I was wrong the other day,” he said, “about the letter; there is no need to alter our current arrangement. For the present, in any case.”
“No,” I said, “no need at all.”
Because I could not explain to Somerton my urgent need to depart the Cape, I did not request a leave to travel. I simply left. Knowing it might cost me my commission, that I could be court-martialed, jailed, hanged. One of the Malay women I knew from the Rainbow Balls had family on the island of Mauritius and spoke with admiration of the midwives and local healers there. I told her I was eager to make a study of the local techniques.
It was hard to tell on the crossing if I was sick from the sea’s raging or from the child within me, but I spent the entirety of the journey to Mauritius in my cabin, grateful to Dantzen for making my excuses to the captain (whose dinner invitations I declined each night), still more grateful for the cool cloths he brought and fresh linens, and for his gentle care of Psyche. Who, like me, detested sea voyages. The creaking of the ship’s timbers, the howling of the wind, the whump of water on the hull left me longing for land, for sunshine, for steady earth beneath my feet. So often taken for granted.
Once we arrived, I dispatched Dantzen to a house in the capital of Port Louis to care for Psyche, while I visited midwives in the countryside; I explained it was no place for man or dog, as cholera was said to be taking hold in the mountain villages in what was soon to become an epidemic. I said I might be gone six months. I depended on him to forward messages and any mail, but to reveal to no one my location. If I did not return in seven months’ time, he was to voyage back to Cape Town with Psyche without me. I left ample funds at his disposal. If Dantzen was afraid for himself or for me, he had the decency not to express it.
On the solitary ride to the village, I shed my uniform for a woman’s loose cotton frock. Once there, I let my hair grow long, my body plump; I no longer bound my breasts and my belly swelled like a spinnaker. As I grew heavy and stupefied with the child, my body ached. My breasts swelled so much they pained me when I turned in bed, as if sandbags lurched beneath my skin. The Mauritian midwife who attended me massaged oils infused with eucalyptus and wintergreen and rosemary (brought from the Company’s Garden) into my hands and arms and thighs and belly to relieve the swelling and restore the circulation, but still I was weak. I could not keep down food, and when eventually I gave birth on the mud floor of the hut where I had lived for months, I was near delirium. Despite all my training, I was of no use. Nearly fainting with fatigue despite the painful spasms, I squatted on the floor, held up by a nurse on either arm; leaking water and piss, then shit and blood, I expelled the child and lost consciousness. When I came to, I had soaked the sheets I’d brought. Despite the fever raging in the village, the midwife was true to her reputation and vocation and did not abandon me, when reasonably she might have.
They fed me meat broth and marrow, venison and pork that I was too weak to refuse. I was delirious for a time—for what seems now like months but must have been only a few days—while I lay bathed in sweat and dazed with a fever. I heard a baby wail and had a brief bolt of memory—as if a window had been flung open on a familiar landscape—of an infant swaddled tight, skin webbed blue with veins, red with the exertion of crying, crooked in my arm, its mouth fastening finally on my breast with an ache of pleasure and pain, and then a sense of drowning and wetness at my waist, then blankness. I dreamt that Somerton came to me and held my hand; I dreamt that we were on a ship together, sailing back across some broad blue swells under a tranquil sky, sails filled, my body wet with sea spray.
By the time I recovered my senses, the child was gone. The nurse simply shook her head when I asked about the baby. I was not surprised, but I felt the news like a bludgeon blow to the chest.
“Dead,” I said, laying my head back against the pillows.
“Oh, no, is a healthy boy, screaming with life.”
I laughed. A boy. Dr. Perry had given birth to a son. “Bring him to me. I wish to see him.”
She shook her head again.
“Where is he now?”
“It’s best not to think on it.”
“Where is my son?”
“He’s gone to good Christian family.”
“By God, I will see my child or there’ll be hell to pay.”
Had I had the strength then, I might have caught up with them, tracked down the adoptive parents and explained the mistake. That I wanted my child as I had not wanted anyone or anything ever except to learn, an urgency like that of the waves of contractions that had swept me like a rough tide. I sat up, pushed aside the bedclothes, stood up, and fainted to the dirt floor.
When I came to, the room was dark, the air cool, the sound of crickets or frogs, the hum of life renewing itself. Somewhere out there my son was sleeping or perhaps crying out for me, the mother he would never know. Limbs leaden. Mind numb. I felt I should never rise. Days passed. I took no care or notice of my soiled clothes, my matted hair, the sour stench of my own skin. Had the nurse not come to change my gown, to wipe my skin down with lemon and water, I’d not have washed for weeks. I saw no point. Time hung still as a noonday sun on the equator. Still as the air over a becalmed sea. Heavy and threatening.
I let myself drift dangerously into reverie, fantasy. Like the women in the new Waverly novels, I allowed myself to imagine our future: Somerton’s relief at my return, my confession, our reconciliation, private vows. It would be odd to have Georgiana for my daughter but not impossible. I imagined that I might yet find my son, our son, that I would tell Somerton I had changed my mind and we would marry. Ambition no longer seemed my anchor, but affection. It seemed possible, in the sunny delirious days that followed my confinement, that I might have other children, might be the mother of lords.
As days passed, my breasts ached with milk, grew heavy, then hard with what felt like pebbles shoved beneath my tender skin until I wept, grew feverish, vomited, dazzled with pain: the midwife pressed warm cloths to my breasts until the ache passed and the fever broke. When it did, my heart was dead, dried up, hard. As the milk in my breasts.
When I was reunited with Dantzen in the capital three weeks later—nearly seven months after I’d left him and Psyche in Port Louis—he seemed startled by my transformation, although I had resumed my uniform and boots. He remarked on my loss of a full stone’s weight, expressed concern that I’d been i
ll with fever. I was glad to find him and Psyche in fine form, robust and relaxed after their half-year sojourn. But I was unsettled by Dantzen’s report that he’d had no replies to my letters to Lord Somerton. I knew Lord Charles must be angry—at my refusal of his proposal, at my disappearance—but to have replied to none of my letters since our arrival alarmed me. I had expected a reprimand, perhaps a threat. But there had been no word at all.
The journey back was rough—the Indian Ocean unruly that time of year—and my imagination unruly as well. I became convinced that Lord Somerton had fallen ill again in my absence, which would explain the lack of correspondence. I grew panicked by anxiety for my friend’s health. As soon as I stepped up onto the dock at Table Bay, I hired a carriage and went directly to the Government House, only to find him gone. I feared the worst. But Cloete clarified the matter quickly: the governor had sailed for England the month after I’d left for Mauritius; there was nothing to fear; he would be returning shortly with a wife. Lady Poulett.
When the invitation came months later, I could not refuse it; I agreed to join Cloete and Lord Somerton’s son Henry to row out and greet the returning couple.
The day of Somerton’s return, we met at the docks at dawn and rowed out in grim silence; the oars pulled through the light chop toward the ship anchored in the bay. The splash and draw and patter of water on the gunnels the only sound beside the water breaking on the bow. I was silent, watching the waves and the ship ahead of us.
“Are you unwell, Doctor?” Cloete asked.
“Should I be?” I said.
“I have been waiting all morning for you to make a witticism about the governor’s new wife.”
“Is matrimony a matter of levity?” I asked.
“Well, no,” Cloete said. “Perhaps not.”
“Never stopped you before, Dr. Perry,” said Somerton’s son.