by E. J. Levy
“We’ve paid to import medicine,” one merchant shouted from the crowd. “On the faith of being allowed to sell what’s been sanctioned by His Majesty’s Letters Patent and by custom and immemorial usage.”
It did not help when I pointed out that theirs was not an “immemorial usage” but a very recent right, granted after British assumption of the colony less than two decades before.
“If my memory serves, gentlemen,” I said, “poisoning patients for profit has been a privilege afforded you by the Crown for just eighteen years. Poor as your memories may be, that’s hardly time immemorial.”
It was a frightening mob, slow to be dispersed, but I was gratified to be united with Lord Charles again. At the time, for a time, we seemed victorious, invincible.
Chapter Nine
Cape of Storms
The morning of June 1, 1824, dawned like any other misty autumn morning on the Cape. It was a Tuesday, that most undistinguished day of the week, neither a starting point nor a conclusion, unremarkable in every way. Only later would we understand how our lives would be changed.
I was still asleep when Captain John Findlay of the Alacrity rose early, as was his custom, to check on ships approaching the port in hopes of claiming a bounty on illegal slavers. Dressed in his gown and stockings, he pushed open the window and looked out over the quiet street, where two boys—one black, one yellow, he said—stood before a placard posted there. Captain Findlay called out to them but they slipped into the morning fog, so he dressed and walked to the sign himself to read the news there and saw the scurrilous placard, claiming to have been penned by a member of the Newlands staff and accusing Lord Somerton and me of unnatural acts. Some say the captain tore it down and tossed it in the street. Others that a cloaked horseman carried it off.
By the time he reported it, the placard was gone.
By the time I reached Mrs. Saunders’s café that morning with Psyche tucked under my arm, it was already a scandal.
The placard was never found. No copy survived. Perhaps it never existed.
But the story did, and it grew.
In the official investigation conducted later that year, Captain Findlay would recall the placard’s wording thus (words I try but fail to forget):
A person living at Newlands makes it known…to the Public authorities of this Colony that on the 5th instant he detected Lord Charles buggering Dr. Perry; Lady Charles…had her suspicions…which had caused a general quarrel and which was the reason of the Marchioness’s going home—the person is ready to come and make oath to the above.
Had I not known that Lord Charles and I never met alone at Newlands now, that we rarely spoke in private (and only then to discuss matters related to the medical affairs of the Cape), that our relations had become purely professional in the three years since he and Lady Somerton returned from England, I might have credited the account myself. As others did. It had the tang of truth, which pained me. I had often wondered what Lady Somerton knew of our past relations; now I wondered who else knew.
I wondered briefly if Lady Somerton was behind it, hoping to separate us, but it was clear she could not have wished for this. To destroy the man she loved. As the placard threatened to do. I wondered if Bishop Burnett was behind it, or the patent-medicine peddlers.
Despite our estrangement, I went directly to his offices at Government House when I heard the news, hoping to strategize and to be reassured. Years before, Lord Somerton had said he was not a man to fear a scandal, that his family motto was his own: Mutare vel timere sperno. I scorn to change or fear. I reminded him of it when we met that morning to discuss the placard.
“This is not a scandal, Dr. Perry,” he said. “It is a death sentence.”
Sodomy between men was a capital crime, we both knew. The obvious solution was to reveal myself, my sex, to make it known that I was a woman. Putting an end to the scandal, replacing it with a new one, which any rogue knows is the way to stop a story you don’t like.
Neither of us mentioned it. I was grateful he did not ask it of me.
We had made our choices. I would live and die a man. We would fight this libel as men together. Or hang for it.
I did not witness the court proceedings, where the charges against us were aired; I did not need to: they were spoken of everywhere in the dusty streets, in the chill Castle, in the too-bright Company’s Garden, the Burgher Senate, the prison, and of course in The Sun, a disreputable public house near the barracks. Not even Mrs. Saunders’s shop was safe from talk of it. Kind Mr. Saunders, husband of the baker of sugar buns, commiserated when I stepped into the café: “Why, Dr. Perry,” he began, “it’s a most diabolical accusation.” There was no escaping it, the slander. So many years had passed since we were intimates, it seemed fantastic to suggest we ever were.
Dantzen kept me up-to-date on the Fiscal’s inquiry, so I might remain informed without having to suffer through the depositions: he told me of the poor clerk who fumbled while recording the repetitive statements, asking the speaker to stop in order to accurately record the charge against us, confused about the correct spelling of “buggery.”
“Not ‘buggeruery,’” he was told, “B-U-G-G-E-R-Y.” It drew a laugh, I was told.
Over and over witnesses were brought forward to repeat the slander made against us, the placard’s accusation, until, lie that it was, it took on a life of its own.
Some witnesses—friends or citizens wary of speaking ill of powerful men—made strenuous efforts to avoid repeating the charge, asking if they might “suggest the particulars delicately”; others tried to cloak it in ambiguity, speaking of our “unnatural practices.”
A clerk named Thwaite was mortified to be brought forward to testify against the governor: “I cannot exactly say the identical words,” he demurred, “but it conveyed to my mind, that it represented His Excellency and Dr. Perry as being caught in that situation as was unnatural. It had that impression on my mind.”
“It is an outrage,” I told His Lordship.
“Outrage only fuels the fire,” said Lord Charles. “Bishop Burnett claims it is evidence of guilt.”
But I knew he felt it keenly. Warmth drained from him, as did color; he left the door to his office open when we met. Calm as he appeared, he was not indifferent to the slander. He found other ways to punish his critics, stop their tongues: he ordered sealed the presses of publisher George Greig, whose South African Commercial Advertiser was the first independent newspaper in the colony; then he threatened to have Greig jailed. When Bishop Burnett suggested Lord Somerton might have arranged the placard himself to gain public sympathy for his campaign to crush a nascent free press, he threatened to arrest the bishop, too.
I was hesitant to visit with the governor after the scandal broke, afraid to feed the gossip that engulfed us, but I was more fearful of what my friend might do to suppress such talk. So I went each day to see him, as if nothing had happened.
“We are greatly wronged,” I said, speaking loudly in case we should be overheard, in case servants were listening, spies for Burnett or Greig. “But it is a greater wrong to stifle the press.”
“Slander does not deserve protection,” he said.
“Free speech does.”
“Mockery is not meaningful speech, Doctor.”
“If men lack peaceful means of expressing their concerns, they will find other means less peaceful.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It is an observation merely, Your Lordship.”
“I will not have the Crown ridiculed nor its representative; it sows the seeds of chaos and revolution.”
If Lord Somerton knew who in his household at Newlands had observed us years ago, who had spied on our intimacy or claimed to have done, he did not reveal it to me, he did not speak of it. We did not speak of it. It had been so long ago.
He punished the powerful who mocked him, but he took no steps to uncover the servant who was said to have observed us. Perhaps there was none. Perhaps he considered it be
neath his dignity to punish the weak. His enemies did not recognize the virtue in this, but I did.
A kind of integrity.
There was much to admire in him; I tried to ignore what I did not.
It was Lady Somerton who proposed that we carry on as if nothing had happened, nothing changed, she who insisted we enter the African Theater that night after the scandal broke, attending together as we had planned, Lady Somerton, Lord Somerton, and I. When the audience looked up and saw us enter the governor’s box I could hear their collective gasp, their intake of breath abrupt as my own, and my eyes moved to hers. She looked at me and then looked away. She stood at the front of the box as if to make an announcement. What did she know? What had she seen? A fixed smile on her slender lips. If she wished to expose me, this would be the moment, the stage on which to do it. I waited for her to speak, to expose us. She inclined her head graciously to the hall. And took her seat. Before the curtain rose and the drama began.
The eccentricities of a powerful man become peculiarities in the weak. A passion for expensive racehorses can seem romantic in a man who can afford to own them; the same penchant appears frivolous, absurd, even corrupt in one who cannot. That, at least, was how Lord Charles’s enemies would soon portray it in the London press, his importation of breeding horses, the great mares and stallions, his habit of scheduling meetings around hunts, his plans to build a racetrack. What once had seemed insouciant now seemed irresponsible. And it pained me. I did not want to see him this way, diminished. I did not want to feel I must protect him, to know he could not protect me.
Now when I came to speak of medical reforms, Lord Somerton spoke of his plans to make improvements to the ballroom; his whims seemed a distraction, delusional, no longer charming. His refusal to see things as they were enraged me. His high-handedness with the press was the act of a desperate man, not a decisive one. But his wounded pride made him sensitive to any slight; any advice I offered was dismissed, debated, or met with silence.
In public we battled the scandal together, the news of which had quickly spread to London. Somerton set to finding the author of the placard and to shutting down the local press, as if speech itself were the culprit, the cause of our trouble. When George Greig was found to have an insulting cartoon of Lord Somerton in his possession—depicting His Lordship as “the Devil flying away with the Fiscal”—the governor had him arrested and ordered out of the Cape colony posthaste.
For my part, I focused on battling a known enemy: the apothecaries with their faux cures, who—despite the governor’s proclamation the year before—were daily killing my patients on the Cape, peddling poison for profit. The killers had turned to the courts for relief from regulation. Strength had been my salvation in the past. Challenged, I went on the offensive. But I tried to avoid the battle brewing between my friend and free-press advocates, of which I was one.
“How you can you be loyal to a man disloyal to the principles you hold dear?” Tom Pringle asked me one evening at The Sun, the awful pub in the port that I frequented now to avoid meeting those I knew, a place to hide.
“I am loyal to reason,” I said.
“You are loyal to Lord Somerton.”
“I am a man of science,” I said. “I have no politics.”
Neither of us believed me.
But as my friend’s actions daily grew less reasonable, I began to have doubts.
In his fury over the ongoing scandal, Somerton sought to punish those he could. He banished Georgiana’s suitor, Captain Glover, from the house. He threatened to have the Cape newspapers permanently closed. In the guise of principle. And all of that I might have withstood, accepted, almost forgiven, had he not failed me when I needed him most. In my battle with the faux pharmacists. It was a lucrative business—poisoning patients with false remedies—so naturally we had ended up in court.
“What is it you want, Dr. Perry?” the apothecary Friedrich Liesching demanded when we met before Chief Justice Truter to adjudicate the complaint.
I had begun to wonder myself.
“I would save lives,” I said. Aware that daily I was thwarted in the effort. Every day it seemed increasingly unlikely that I would manage to save my own.
“The doctor would deprive us of our livelihood!” another of them shouted.
“Surely that’s better than allow you to deprive men of their lives,” I said.
“You have no right to interfere with our business, Doctor.”
“And you’ve no right to kill a man for profit, though I grant it’s done all the time.”
Justice Truter sided with the poisoners, claiming I’d overstepped my authority. But the matter did not end there. When the colonial office overturned Truter’s decision, my critics were enraged. They held a grudge. When I refused to license Liesching’s untrained son as an apothecary, he complained to the governor. When I reported the unconscionable sadism of prison guards, my confidential report to Lord Somerton was leaked and I was hauled before another judge, as if reporting the crime were the criminal act. I refused the summons, was threatened with jail. I should not have been surprised when I was notified that I was to be removed from my post as Colonial Medical Inspector for having interfered unduly with the business of the Cape, stripped of my offices and salaries, a mere Assistant Surgeon once more. I turned to Lord Somerton for help.
“The commission found your official correspondence intemperate,” Lord Somerton said.
“Had I been temperate,” I replied, “nothing would have been accomplished, nothing changed.”
“It was a unanimous decision, Doctor,” he said, as if that settled the matter.
“That doesn’t make it right,” I said.
“And who’s to determine what is right? You?”
It was useless to petition him. Lord Somerton was not a man to concern himself with right or wrong, unless he was the one wronged.
If there was any good to come out of the dreadful placard affair, which dragged on in different form for years, it was that our common enemy served to remind us that we once were friends. We were infamous from the Cape to Coventry; word of our unnatural relations had been debated on the floor of Parliament, published in the Times. Wounded as I was by Lord Somerton’s refusal to protect me from the Fiscal’s wrongful judgment, I was glad to be in daily conversation again with my friend. When society abandoned us, we retreated into the familiar company of one another.
The summer after the placard appeared—in December 1825—Lord Somerton made plans to leave for England to face the charges against him—to face the accusations before Parliament, which had grown from the sodomy scandal to encompass questions about his management of the Cape colony’s finances, profligacy, and fiscal irresponsibility—and to retire from public life. I was gratified to be invited to join him, to return to London as the family physician, where we might all of us begin again. I had not finished my investigations into the efficacy of local botanicals; I had only just begun to make the reforms necessary to improve health on the Cape, but I knew that my days here would be hollow without my friend and that my enemies here were now too numerous to ignore.
So on December 23, 1825, three months before Lord Somerton and his family were to set sail for London, I placed a small ad in the Cape Courant for the sale of all my “furniture and effects.”
I was 30. I would begin again.
I was ready at last to go home.
As we prepared to return to London, I noted how plain the lines of strain had become in my friend’s face. He’d aged a decade in two years’ time and I worried for him. His unhappiness was stark—too obvious to ignore. He continued to ride and to hunt, but even these pursuits could only temporarily raise his spirits. He returned from his trips to Newlands and Roundhouse weary.
One February night a few weeks before we were to sail for England, we shared a quiet dinner alone at Newlands, he and I; we could allow ourselves this now. There was nothing more anyone could say against us that had not already been said.
I
almost never think of it, that night. Our last together in Cape Town.
We were reminiscing about the past, talking of people we’d known, when he mentioned Sanna. “You remember her—” he said.
“The hermaphrodite,” I said. “Of course.” I’d not seen her in years.
“Georgiana adopted her right before you left us, insisted that we hire her on here as a maid. I had the mad idea she’d driven you away from us. As if by spell.” He laughed.
“She works here, Sanna?” I asked, sickened by sudden understanding of that night seven years ago. Before I’d sailed for Mauritius.
He shook his head. “Went back to her people in Port Louis, or a village outside.”
“I know it,” I said.
“I suppose you do,” he said.
For a moment we sat in silence. Almost peaceful, although my heart pounded as if it might burst, as if I had run a great distance.
“Why did you leave?” he asked.
“I never left you,” I said. “I never would have.”
“But you did. That summer you went to Mauritius. Without so much as a note. I could have had you court-martialed for abandoning your post. I could have brought you back in chains.”
“Why didn’t you?” I asked.
“Would it have mattered?”
I didn’t know what to say. “I had good reason to go.”
“A woman in trouble, you said.”
“That’s right.”
“Did I know her?”
“You knew her well.”
He frowned, as if I might mean Georgiana.
“I couldn’t bear to give Burnett the satisfaction—”
“Of what?”