The Cape Doctor

by E. J. Levy

  The first night that he proposed we visit Almack’s, I was alarmed. For myself and for my friend. It was proof of his improving health, which I could only celebrate, but I had no wish, no desire to appear in public. The scandal was just five years behind us, and still discussed in the London press; I had no desire to test society’s memory or generosity. I hoped that Lady Somerton would object to the proposal. Instead she merely declined to join us, saying she preferred a quiet evening at home by the fire. I would have preferred it as well. But I could not refuse my friend’s request or decline to accompany him. We all behaved as if it were the most ordinary thing, two friends reunited, spending an evening at the club, as if there were nothing extraordinary in my presence there among them.

  I dressed with trepidation, annoyed by Dantzen, whose opinion of my waistcoat I solicited, only to reject; he advised me against wearing my out-of-fashion inexpressibles, the form-fitted leggings I favored; I fretted over the polish on my boots.

  It was to be our first time in fashionable London society together since the scandal. He had been welcomed back into society on his return from Cape Town; we were another matter. Our names had been joined only in calumny. I had never been to Almack’s, would never have received a coveted invitation to that club. I had reason to fear the subtle or overt humiliation that I might endure. But I could find no means to decline the invitation. And in truth, I was curious. Almack’s was famous—and famously exclusive. The matrons who governed its guest list were known to stop arrivals at the door and turn them back. I dreaded the coming evening, even as I was curious to see the place that General Mirandus had frequented and I never had.

  When Lady Somerton urged us to go and enjoy ourselves, saying we deserved some diversion, I wondered if she sensed my dismay, delighted in it. Georgiana said nothing at all.

  Lord Somerton was weary, as we went out that evening, and I feared, as we stepped down from the coach outside Almack’s, that the outing was already too much. Unsteady still from illness, he took my arm, leaning on it as we entered.

  I heard the hush as we stepped inside the club. I felt the seasick dread of humiliation as we were announced on entering the ballroom; a silence fell—like that aboard ship that first night at dinner months ago—hundreds of faces staring at us before the crowd broke into applause. They applauded His Lordship’s return to health, of course, not the two of us, but then he stood aside, palm open to indicate that I was the one to be congratulated for the return of his good health. He nodded to me; I bowed with a flourish to the crowd, like the actor I was. The remarkable Doctor Perry.

  After that evening we frequented the club often, and Lord Charles hosted dinners in their home in Piccadilly. Through it all, I wondered what Lady Somerton knew of our past; then one evening at dinner—as he told a raucous story from the Cape Town days—she placed her hand on mine and said quietly, “My husband is transformed by your presence, Doctor; he is a different man entirely with you. Not my husband at all.” And I knew that she knew. I did not know if she knew my secret, but she knew ours.

  Lady Somerton had never been beautiful, but with age she had grown handsome, impressive, lovely; she possessed the calm of certain successful men who no longer need to prove their mettle. Like certain features of the landscape—the cliffs of Cornwall, the waves at Ballycotton—she had endured. And with time she seemed to have grown stronger, as my friend had not.

  So many people remain children their whole lives—I’d seen men die who had never become men, who remained the boys they’d been, bewildered as death came over them, as if refusing to mature might be some inoculation against mortality. Women, too, still cleaving to their youth, coquettes at 65. Lady Somerton, it was clear, in the midst of her small family, had become herself. It was hard not to wonder what I’d have been now, become, had I kept my child. Ours.

  Those fourteen months together were the happiest of my life, I see now. At home again in London, among those I best loved. We rode in Hyde Park, went to lectures and the theater and balls and hosted dinners. Visited his family’s estate in Badminton. We dined together weekly at Brook’s, as if no scandal had ever touched our names.

  One late night, after an evening spent singing and drinking, when we’d opted to walk home from the club under a springtime moon, he pulled me suddenly into a doorway, so abruptly that for a moment I thought we had been set upon by thieves, a risk in London in those days at night. “What is it?” I asked, but he didn’t answer, only put his lips gently to mine and for a moment we were back in Africa. Young again. If I wept, it was from happiness.

  We live like kings. That’s how it seemed as I popped another fat, fragrant raspberry into my mouth, as we sat on the terrace of his family estate at Badminton, having breakfast that morning in May 1830. Lord Charles had told me how his father, the Fifth Duke of Beaufort, had hosted hundreds of guests each weekend there. He seemed nostalgic for those days. But I preferred these quiet family times. Lazy, warm days together, alone. Plump bumblebees in their furry jackets clambered over the blooming lavender. There will be rain.

  To see my friend each morning at breakfast was an incomparable pleasure. Like looking in the mirror on a good day, he returned me to myself, kinder, wiser, wittier than anyone else mistook me for. I was beyond grateful that we had remained friends, after everything, friendship being the greater part of love; we had each been unsteadied by the break we’d had. Like carts with three wheels we had wobbled along, missing an essential part. Whole now. Again.

  Somerton’s younger brother, Lord FitzRoy, had arranged a post for me in Jamaica to justify having left my own in Mauritius, but I delayed my departure, putting off from month to month the prospect of separation from my friend. The proposed post had the dual virtue of keeping me within three months’ distance of my friend and providing an excuse to cover my blatant breach of duty, which might now be construed as responding to an order to report to London en route to a new post in the West Indies. But I rebuffed every attempt to draw me away.

  It was late December 1830, approaching the winter solstice, as we sat together by the fire when the rest of the house had gone to bed, that Lord Charles raised the subject of his will. Perhaps it was the anniversary of his illness, or the foreshortened days, that made him withdraw into himself that winter, almost exactly a year after I’d arrived back in London. Though our habits continued unchanged, he spoke less of the future.

  “When I am gone, I would be grateful if you might see to certain things.”

  “If you like,” I said. “But as your physician, I must warn you that I’ve begun to suspect that you will live forever.”

  “It’s odd,” he said. “Our days are always numbered, but the prospect has a different weight when you know the date, within six months or so.”

  “Rubbish. You never know. You have many years yet.”

  “I will die soon,” he said.

  His tone unsettled me, but I put it down to the grim weather, the bleak time of year, recollection of the prior year’s illness; I hoped his mood might lift if I agreed to his wishes, so we discussed the funeral, the will, the execution of his estate. I agreed to look after Georgiana. I went to bed that night heavy of heart.

  But for all his dire prognostications, he flourished, as I did in his company.

  It’s such a small thing, death. You see people stumble across its threshold all the time, as if startled to find it there in their bedroom or on a battlefield or an infirmary cot, its door held open, almost welcoming. Some rage and die, some welcome it, some beg for death, some weep, others shout loved ones away (“Let me go!”). I recall one wealthy young woman, down with fever, who seemed simply baffled: “I thought there would be more.”

  Lord Somerton wanted me to help him plan for his. I would. I did.

  When death comes for me, I asked only that my body be spared undignified inspection. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but I would have an unexamined death. That small dignity. Dantzen had promised me this: that I would be spared postmortem
examination. Some insist their papers be burned, letters of a personal or private nature destroyed. My body was my diary, my only private text. For all my daily official correspondence and voluminous notes on the medical practice, I’d written only a handful of personal letters, almost all before the age of thirteen. I’d made my private inscriptions of my life here, on my body, the sole place I recorded a private life. I’d not have it read by strangers.

  I had loved fashion and fancy dress, a dandy peacock in my silk and broadcloth, my high-polished boots, but in death I wanted the simplicity of birth, to be wrapped in the bed linens in which I die, buried in Kensal Green Cemetery. (Though sometimes I thought I should like to be buried with my broadsword and a lock of Psyche’s hair, with my red military coat and Hessian boots polished to a high shine, accompanied by them as I’ve been in life.)

  The body is a record of our lives—the most intimate accounting. If a man eats to excess or drinks, it is recorded there in the joints, in the belly. If a woman has had children or none, has suffered a pox or leaned an arm against a heated pot, it is written in the body’s ledger. Only death clears the account, and sometimes not even death. If you disinter a body, you can read in its bones the death blow to a skull or a shattered sternum and read the life—or at least its end—there.

  I would remain unread, an obscure volume, a palimpsest, a secret among friends.

  Perhaps it was gratitude that made Lady Somerton acquiesce to the proposal of a holiday in Brighton the following February, just the two of us at the Bedford Hotel. Lord Charles wanted to ride along the shore beneath the chalk cliffs and on the Downs overlooking the sea, where he’d ridden with the Prince of Wales when young; he claimed the ocean air would do him good, be tonic. “Sea air’s the best cure a man can have—even better than you, Doctor.”

  I hoped Lady Somerton might dissuade him, but to my surprise she raised no objection at all when he raised the subject at breakfast.

  “A trip would do you good, Charles,” she said.

  When he proposed that he and I go alone on the holiday, she did not protest. He claimed he did not wish to take her away from London at the height of the social season.

  There seemed no alternative but to accompany my friend, despite my fears for him and for us.

  The Bedford Hotel on the Brighton seafront was a great layer cake—pale stone and glass, a pastry of a place—over which the Union Jack snapped in the breeze in every sort of weather. The most distinguished building in town, after the Prince Regent’s extravagant Royal Pavilion. Ionic porticoes facing south and west flanked the entrances of the grand five-story structure. The interior was no less grand, with its massive Grecian hall and Ionic columns and a glazed dome overhead. As our carriage pulled up in front that February morning, I admired the shimmering salt-bright stone and the colonnade that rose three stories in the air, fringed by awnings, over which rose another two stories; I felt we were entering a wedding cake.

  Even in grim February, when we arrived, the sky was promisingly blue, pale, high, threaded with thin banners of clouds that festooned the air. It was hard to be uncheerful there, easy to overlook the danger.

  We arrived on a Monday, St. Valentine’s Day, 1831. The lengthening of the days almost imperceptible. Although Lord Charles denied it, dismissing my concern as meddling fit for a wife, my friend was clearly fatigued. He stumbled slightly, nearly fell, when descending from the carriage and required my assistance to mount the hotel stairs. He refused dinner that evening, would not take wine or even tea to warm him and went straight to bed, alone.

  He had insisted on making the sixty-mile journey from London in a single trip, refused to rest on our journey south from London, despite my cautions. (“If I must die, Doctor, please God don’t let it be in Lewes.”) That night in the sitting room of our suite I imagined the worst, listening to his labored breathing through the door that joined our rooms; by the time the clock chimed midnight I was exhausted, queasy with fear. Panicked by memory. But by the following dawn he banged on my door, waking me, having emerged rested, bright, eager to ride out on the Downs, if uncustomarily cautious. He joked that he should like to ride a pony like the one Georgiana had brought to me at the Cape stables years ago.

  To my relief, that first afternoon proved too rainy to ride, so we returned early from the stables and strolled through town, past the Royal Pavilion, that hallucination of a palace of minarets and domes, where he’d spent many happy evenings in his youth with his friend, the Prince Regent; he described its design to me, its grand banquet hall like a peacock turned inside out—teal-green leaves painted on the domed ceiling, red and indigo walls, set off by gold gilding and crystal chandeliers—the strike of our bootheels the only noise in the quiet streets, like horse hooves striking stones. A lonely but somehow comforting sound. We seemed to be alone in the world. The only survivors of a shipwreck, stranded here in beauty.

  “Do you know the story of this place?” he asked.

  “I feel sure that you will tell me,” I replied. He did.

  He told me how some forty years earlier, the Prince of Wales had been in disgrace when he first came here in 1786. He had a taste for horses and games, had acquired massive debts, become a scandal, needed to leave town. Brighton was little known then, far from London, out of the way, so he bought a modest farmhouse here, “fixed it up” (it seemed a vast understatement), so that he might meet with the woman he loved but could not marry.

  “She was a commoner?” I asked.

  “Worse—Catholic.” We both knew the Act of Settlement had banned marriage between faiths.

  “What became of her?” I was reluctant to ask. Was not sure I wanted to know.

  “She became his wife,” he said. “In secret.”

  “Love conquers all.”

  “Sometimes, it does,” he said.

  We had returned to the hotel and sat looking out over the promenade as the waters grew rough. Outside a rain began to fall, a steady thrum like a finger tapping on the glass, building as the storm grew to a susurrus like a rushing river over falls. A comforting, blanketing sound. The sky a muffled grey, undifferentiated. We seemed wrapped, protected, far from any harm. He set a hand on my arm.

  “Thank you for coming back.”

  “I never left you,” I said.

  “I wish we…” he began.

  “No.” I did not want to hear his regrets, I didn’t believe in regret, as if it were a religion, which for some it is, melancholy held close as a mistress. I couldn’t afford regret. I lived in a world of facts and what I could do about them. Sitting beside the man I loved near that extravagant pavilion built to house another hidden love, I wondered if we might have made another choice, if I might have, if we might have made a space large enough to shelter us as well. If we might yet.

  Although the days were short and brisk—five hours of sun at best and cold—they were not without charm.

  Each morning we took our breakfast in the terrace room overlooking the parade and beyond it the waterfront, the seascape soft and blurred with silvery mist, catching the morning light, the air so bright it seemed itself the source of light. Each morning I pressed food on my friend, urging on him hot tea, ham, scotch eggs, buttered toast and marmalade, a draught of rum, as if to weight him to the world. As soon as the hour allowed, we were out of doors at his insistence, up and moving, walking the parade or traveling to the stables to get our mounts and ride on the high green cliffs of the Downs. In the afternoon, even before the light began to fade, my friend napped while I read the papers or caught up on correspondence.

  He seemed revived by the ocean breeze, the sea air; as we took our breakfast in the terrace sunroom overlooking the promenade, he admired the winter light and shimmering sea, like poured silver in the sunlight, the scream of ravenous gulls.

  “How can that not cure a man?” he asked as we stepped outside to walk along the water. I pulled my greatcoat tight, raised its collar to my ears, but he turned his face to the wind off the sea. Pleased to be in t
he open air, despite the cold. At his insistence we arranged to ride out on each of three successive mornings that first week—Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And we did. I began to think that he might indeed be well, might be improving, my caution misplaced. He mounted his horse and as usual I accompanied him.

  On Saturday he visited the King and Queen, who were staying at the Royal Pavilion, and that night we stayed out late as had become our habit in London, reaching our rooms at the Bedford well past midnight, drunken and content, singing and laughing like schoolboys, hushing each other, then bursting into song or laughter again, whenever one or the other of us mentioned the donkey’s tooth (a prank I’d played on Bishop Burnett), telling stories of the past, talking of a future in which we would never again be separated, apart.

  “I shall speak to my brother,” he said, his words blurry at the edges, as he dropped into a chair, “about a transfer. You should be in London, not some godforsaken island in the middle of all fuck-all, the West Indies or Indian Ocean.”

  “That’s debatable,” I said.

  “You can’t prefer it, surely.”

  “It has its compensations.”

  He raised himself drunkenly on one elbow. Stared at me, or perhaps several of me, given how much he’d had to drink.

  “Who?” he asked. Absurd jealousy. Then, dropping back into the chair, “Oh.”

  For a while we said nothing; there was nothing to say. Outside the surf whispered against the sand. Inside a fire crackled in the grate. I went in to change out of my clothes and pulled on a dressing gown he’d given me and joined him, resuming my place beside the fire, beside him.

  “I tried to find him,” I said, “that last year. Sometimes I thought I had.”