The Cape Doctor

by E. J. Levy

  “And what is this obvious witticism that I have evidently overlooked?” I asked.

  Cloete colored, evidently embarrassed to be drawn into making fun of His Lordship in front of his son.

  Henry put him at his ease, smiling, clearly comfortable with the boat’s rocking, as if the sea were a cradle, and I realized for the first time that he was a young man made for ocean voyages and likely would make many, as I hoped fervently not to do.

  “It’s obvious, is it not?” Lord Somerton’s son said. “Given my father’s well-known affection for animals, is it surprising that he chose a pullet for a wife?”

  Cloete laughed, delighted.

  But I was in no mood for levity. My heart was sick, dark as the sea that late-November day.

  When we pulled alongside the ship, the ladder was let down and we climbed it, arriving on deck to find the couple awaiting us. The fifty-year-old lord and his thirty-five-year-old bride. Somerton smiled, embraced his son, greeted Cloete, then looked to me; coolly, eyes dispassionate as a falcon’s as they met mine, he said, “Dr. Perry, may I present my wife.”

  Chapter Eight

  Heaven and Earth

  Was it cruelty or kindness that prompted Lord Somerton to include me in their party after the arrival of his wife? I do not know, even now. The dead know what happens, not why. I had been prepared, on hearing of his marriage, to be mustered out of my apartments at Newlands to make room for Lady Poulett—that Great Hen—who, I was sure, would wish to make arrangements for companions of her own. But no such order came. To the contrary, every effort was made to maintain our previous intimacy, as if no interruption had taken place, as if they had always been the happy family and I a welcome friend and guest.

  Perhaps Lord Charles feared a sudden change in our domestic arrangements might fuel the rumors that we each still heard, of an unnatural attachment between us. Perhaps his marriage had silenced such talk, or soon would. Was that why he’d married? To quell gossip? I couldn’t ask. We behaved as if nothing had changed. Of course, everything had changed; Lord Somerton and I no longer met after dinner to discuss politics and gossip and retire to bed or a convenient desk. He did not quietly enter my rooms by darkness, as he had. No one spoke of love.

  A week after the couple’s return, a lavish dinner was held to celebrate. Lord Charles told the assembled guests his usual stories of horses and hunts, his eyes never meeting mine, passing over me as if my chair were empty, a slight only I would notice. In manner he was perfectly correct toward me, but appeared utterly indifferent. I felt the change like a drop in barometric pressure, the sudden downdraft of cold, presaging rough weather.

  I recall a piece of parsley rode up and down at the corner of his lip as we dined that night with four dozen of their closest friends to celebrate the couple’s safe return; I watched it as I might a fly. When he smiled, it rose to his cheek. There was a clatter of plates and silver as we sipped soup, tore apart the delicate carcasses of birds shot that same day, chewed.

  I was seated to Lady Somerton’s right, as if I were an honored guest, but I suspected it was perhaps to keep me from being seated nearer to her husband. She need not have worried: physical proximity did nothing to warm him toward me, to counter his implacable froideur. I had stood beside him in the drawing room before dinner and found him distant and chilly as the icebergs of the newly discovered Antarctic.

  It pained me to hear her referred to as Lady Somerton, as if she had become a part of him, shared his skin. I shrank from their company as I might have from a pox, a plague that I knew would leave me scarred. Before dinner I had avoided the happy couple, moved to the far side of the drawing room, to a knot of portly men and women, among whom Georgiana stood like a gazelle among Cape buffalo.

  A hideous epergne stood in the middle of the table, a monstrous trinket that Lady Poulett had brought from London, along with her monstrous entourage; I amused myself by leaning this way and that in such a way as to remove a mouth or an eye from my tablemates, visually beheading the guests; all the while carrying on the required conversation with the lady to my left.

  Gone was the diverting talk of politics, gossip, and pets; now we spoke of the weather.

  “The weather has been strange,” someone was saying.

  “It is not English weather,” Lady Somerton observed with a small frown of dismay. As if weather were a personal affront.

  “It is not England,” I said, more curtly than I intended. “But it has its compensations.”

  “And what might they be, Doctor? Do illuminate us.” Some member of her coterie spoke out of the gloom of faces.

  “The beauty of morning fog on Table Mountain,” I began, selecting a small green apple from the bowl in front of me and commencing to pare it with a knife as I spoke. “Covers the mountaintop modestly by morning, like a lady wrapped in her shawl, but as the day progresses and grows warm, she drops it”—I let the peel collapse onto my plate—“to reveal her lovely décolletage.”

  There was a grunt of disapproval from somewhere down the table. Lord Somerton signaled for more wine. Georgiana did not meet my eyes.

  Was I trying to shock? Perhaps. Increasingly I was not sure why I acted as I did, compelled by some obscure desire to disrupt the placid surface, the suffocating complacency, the provincial spell that seemed to have been cast since the Lady Hen’s arrival the prior week. I, who had been so careful with my words, so strategic, now sought any ardent response. Even outrage. Provocative for the sake of provoking.

  If she was shocked, Lady Somerton did not reveal it. She reached for my hand and pressed it gently beneath her own, as if offering comfort for a loss. A gesture of solicitude more stinging than any rebuke. Her fingers almost perfectly covered my own. She looked down at our hands.

  “You have uncommonly delicate hands, Dr. Perry.”

  “A surgeon’s hands, Your Ladyship.”

  “They have almost a woman’s grace.”

  I wondered whether this was flirtation or accusation; I could not know. Miss Georgiana had said much the same thing years ago; I wondered what she might have told the new Lady Somerton.

  “That’s most curious,” I said, more loudly than our proximity required, “as they haven’t touched a woman outside a surgery in years.” I meant this as a joke, but it sounded like regret.

  She raised her eyebrows. “Indeed, sir? Is there no remedy?”

  “Beautiful women are always tonic,” I replied. “But in my experience, love’s the one disease without a hope of cure. In my professional opinion, Lord Somerton is quite beyond the reach of medical assistance.”

  Encouraging laughter from a few of our dining companions relaxed me.

  “And you?” Lady Somerton inquired.

  “I am working on a vaccine,” I said. “Physician, heal thyself.”

  “I’d not have thought you were a man”—Bishop Burnett paused long over the word—“to quote scripture, Dr. Perry.”

  I ignored the remark, keeping my eyes on the new Lady Somerton. But I wondered what the bishop knew, what he guessed. I was relieved when a servant’s arm came between us, lifting my plate and breaking the spell.

  “You’d be surprised the things men will do when inspired by the presence of a beautiful woman.” I smiled at Lady Somerton.

  “Ignore Dr. Perry, darling,” Lord Charles called down the table to his wife, for all to hear. “He’s a most remarkable physician, but in everything else he is perfectly absurd.”

  I hoped the heat in my face was not obvious to others.

  I had seen this side of Somerton before—superior, dismissive. But I had not had to suffer it. Now I would. It’s curious that in contrast to war, in society the direct assault is harder to parry than the indirect; blunt insult left me no recourse but to leave or to laugh. I could not afford to leave.

  Bishop Burnett rose and touched his glass with a knife to propose a toast to the couple’s happiness and good health. I wished them misery.

  At dinner that night, I was struck that L
ord Somerton’s good cheer seemed forced, fragile, and I was surprised and gratified. Throughout the evening, I observed the couple; Lord Somerton was courteous to a fault, smiling, deferential, admiring of his wife’s good taste, but they betrayed no hint of intimacy, neither with teasing nor with pet names, their relations utterly absent of the easy, sporting affection that had defined our own and those with his children, His Lordship’s intimate relations. I tried to take comfort in this, but I knew that I’d not seen him with the first Lady Somerton—that this alteration might simply be the man in love.

  At dinner, talk was of a new sonata by Beethoven. The death of Napoleon, the scandal of the waltz—though by now it could hardly be considered scandalous anywhere but in the colonies, where change came slowly, where conventions were honored as cant.

  Lady Charles had brought with her an entourage of maids and servants, relatives and friends. Among them was her niece, a pretty, slight thing with a fixed compressed smile and the heart of a general. In another century, another sex, she might have arranged battle plans rather than dinner parties or written laws or commanded a steamship to cross the Atlantic. She seemed hard in the way of those for whom the material world is all. As if she were indulging us in our airy talk about art and morality and books, baffled by complexities she didn’t recognize or acknowledge.

  I could not help noting the dull companions the new Lady Somerton attracted—but the Somerton girls seemed to adore her, asking her about fashion and dances at Almack’s; they admired that she had a standing invitation there—where, we learned, she had first met their father one evening last March.

  But it was her niece’s fiancé who most fascinated me; he was almost fashionable, his clothes of a modish cut but oddly disarrayed—his cravat tied more like a noose, his buttons misaligned by one, one cuff displayed, the other tucked up a sleeve. He seemed oblivious of all but his good fortune in being engaged to the delicate general beside him. She was, it seems, a distant cousin, whom he claimed to have known and loved for a dozen years—nearly his whole lifetime!—a fact he stated as if it were fate, as if it had the power to amaze him, his great good luck. (She claimed to have known him only three years, a fact she repeated with equal persistence.)

  He was that breed of young man who is a tame pet for powerful women—quick with tasteful gossip and to confirm the prejudices that passed for opinions among the matrons he attended—kept around to fetch things and to marry their younger relations. A perfect specimen.

  The most interesting bit of news came from him, that unlikeliest source. He claimed to have met an American sailor in port, who had told him of a bachelor tax in the new American state of Missouri.

  “Would it were enough to induce you to take a wife, Dr. Perry,” Lady Somerton said. “I understand you are a confirmed bachelor.”

  I wondered what she’d heard of me.

  “One hears you have broken many hearts,” said the niece.

  I glanced at Georgiana, who thankfully was absorbed by her own young man, Captain Glover, whom I recognized from the ball the previous year. A lifetime ago. A dull but harmless fellow, from what I’d gathered since.

  “I fear that I’m the one who is brokenhearted,” I said. Lord Somerton did not appear to hear the remark, but Bishop Burnett watched me openly.

  I was saved from further discussion of heartbreak by Lady Somerton’s niece, who was now holding forth on novels and plays being entirely unsuitable for young ladies, filling their heads with notions of romantic tragedy, which could only do them harm when life itself is not romantic in the least. When I suggested that Shakespeare’s plays might perhaps be granted an exemption from her censure, she compressed her lips into a smile of frank condescension.

  “They’re so uneven, and coarse,” she said. “A queen falls in love with an ass.”

  “Bottom.”

  “My point exactly,” she said.

  “And does not the beauty of the language redeem it?”

  “It’s far worse that the language is appealing, disguising a thousand sins against good sense. I consider them entirely unsuitable for young ladies.”

  “They were suitable for a queen,” I could not help noting.

  “A queen is a general in skirts,” she said, making an observation I’d often heard Lord Somerton make. She surprised me.

  She was an odd-looking girl, almost pretty but not quite; her features too soft; she had qualities one wanted to call pretty but somehow weren’t; it was as if they were only partly formed, slightly blurred like an infant’s. She had an unfinished look, which might have been becoming were she not so dull, her opinions ugly. I tried to discern in her some of Lady Somerton’s qualities, but whatever Lady Somerton thought of all this, she did not say.

  Only as dinner concluded did Lady Somerton lean near me and whisper, “I hope my niece did not distress you unduly, Dr. Perry. You do seem a person of uncommon sensibility. I had a cousin once who claimed that hearing bad poetry made her physically ill. I hope you are quite well.”

  I came close to liking her then.

  As the ladies excused themselves from the dining room that night, I risked indiscretion by detaining Miss Georgiana as she passed and inviting her for a walk in the Company’s Garden. Meet me in an hour among the lemon trees, I whispered. She frowned as she moved on. I did not know if she had heard me, if she would come. I longed to slip away from the crowded room to have a thoroughly sensible talk with her in fresh air; I longed to know what she thought of her father’s bride.

  I had tried to engage her in private conversation in the drawing room before dinner but failed. I was not sure if she was observing form or rebuffing me when she’d smiled politely and moved off to greet another guest. I had hoped to be seated next to her at dinner, as had been our custom in the past, but Georgiana was paired with Captain Glover that night, which—to judge by Lord Somerton’s expression as we assembled before coming in to dine—seemed to surprise and displease him as much as it did me.

  She had been chilly since my return from Mauritius. I suspected it was Dantzen who had inadvertently turned her against me, meaning no harm. I was grateful for the rumor he had spread that I’d gone to Mauritius in pursuit of a lady, only to return brokenhearted, pretending to reveal more than he’d intended to a few inveterate gossips such as Mrs. Saunders and Cloete. I’d read about it in the local papers. Of my mysterious travel and mysterious return. Now, when I told people that I had traveled to Mauritius for reasons of health, they nodded knowingly. Because mine was a forthright answer, of course no one believed me.

  Talk among colonial Englishmen in December 1821 was of the discovery of electromagnetism and the collapse of the Spanish colonies in the Americas; “a contagion of independence,” Somerton called it, as we took our glasses and drew nearer the fire, and of the dangerous and untoward influence of the radical Simón Bolívar. I didn’t mention that I’d known him when I was a child.

  “There will be chaos,” one man said.

  “They are not fit for self-rule,” said another.

  “Do men learn to rule themselves by being ruled by others?” I asked.

  Only the publisher Tom Pringle agreed with me, but he said nothing, merely raised his eyebrows from across the room as he drew on his cigar. I was surprised to see Pringle there—a hopeful rapprochement. Although perhaps Lord Somerton was simply wishing to win over the local press for the sake of his new bride.

  No one spoke of the hangings in Constantinople. Our eyes were trained on the American steamship that had crossed the Atlantic two years earlier, the Savannah. And on the first sighting of the new continent at the end of the world, Antarctica. And on the growing unrest in the Americas—the battles for independence and to abolish slavery. Some spoke with fear of the Cape economy’s decline since Napoleon’s recent death, which was proving catastrophic for the price of port and claret and Cape wine.

  I became—as I do when threatened—argumentative.

  I brought up the importance of a free press, to which Lord S
omerton quoted—as he often did—the American Franklin:

  “Even the Americans understand this, Doctor. It’s not democracy one wants but the semblance of democracy, as Dr. Franklin has said.”

  “Perhaps had the Americans had more than a semblance of democracy theirs would not be fraying now,” Tom Pringle said. “It looks like war.”

  “One might say the same of the Massacre at Peterloo,” I replied.

  “Restraining a fractious mob is hardly a massacre, Doctor,” Lord Somerton said. He didn’t look at me.

  “They say hundreds were injured, some dozen killed.”

  “I can admire a soft heart, Dr. Perry, but a soft head—”

  A few men laughed.

  “It’s not softness that drives sixty thousand men into a field to demand representation in Parliament, Lord Charles. And it won’t be by soft petitions that they’ll seek justice, I assure you.”

  “Oh, justice. The French have given the word a bad name, wouldn’t you say?”

  “It’s said, Dr. Perry, that you were a friend of Napoleon’s minister?”

  “He was my patient, sir.”

  “Your sympathies are republican?”

  “My sympathies are with what is right, whatever the name.”

  “Hear! Hear!” said Captain Glover, not realizing that standing up for rights was wrong in this company. He coughed into his hand. Perhaps he was right to worry. Perhaps I should have worried more.

  “You are an abolitionist, sir?” said one of Lady Somerton’s circle.

  “I am an advocate for the rights of all men.”

  “And women,” Lord Somerton said, as if it were a joke.

  “Lord Charles tells me you were acquainted with Mrs. Wollstonecraft,” the fiancé said.

  I was surprised he knew the name, the work.

  “Not acquainted, I’m afraid. But I am a great admirer of her writings.”