by Claire North
I tried bartering, when dawn came.
“Can I quit?”
A shrug, slow and mighty as an earthquake through shallow, dusty earth. “Whenever you feel you wish to.”
“Will I be paid?”
“Of course. Generously.”
“These people… these spies you work for – who do they answer to?”
“Britain. The Empire. What is best.”
“You make that sound simple.”
“For them it is.”
“How much do they know? About my condition, about this… How much do they know?”
“More than you, I think.”
“Is there a cure?”
Another mighty shrug. Kalberloh knew this battle was won long before I shuffled sleepless and sweating down to the breakfast table. All this talk is wasting his time; time that could be spent on a hearty constitutional, or eating beef. “Ask them.”
“I’m… I’m just a doctor. I’m not a spy.”
His eyebrows rose and fell like the gates of a bridge, and I looked away, shame and sweat mixing on my skin. A little sigh; a little patience. He leant forward and patted me on the shoulder like a puppy. “What do you want, Dr Abbey? What do you want?”
“To make this right.”
“Is that the same as a cure?”
I opened my mouth to blurt some obvious reply, to snap at him, to bat his hand away from my skin like a fly, to rage and bark like the white men of Baker, you dolt, you idiot, you…
I said nothing at all, and he smiled again, leant back in his chair, folded his fingers in his lap, stared up at the ceiling and mused, “Something to think about on your way home.”
I sailed for England on the next day’s tide.
Chapter 20
Weeks at sea, and a man may get to a little thinking.
Somewhere off the tip of Gibraltar, I fancied I tasted the burnt truth of Langa, marching stoically towards me even as I headed home. Like a comet, his course bent towards me as if pulled by the gravity of the sun, curling across the world unerringly to find my heart.
During the first few days at sea: sickness, the universal malady of the boat from the top deck to the lowest bilges, every class of passenger united in groaning despair.
On the fourth and fifth days: pure lethargy, which only the stink of my cabin and the churning stench of the tiny wooden bathroom I shared with the compartment next door could drive me from.
On the sixth day: pacing the deck, watching the ocean, face pressed away from the sun, back of my neck burning red and raw.
On the seventh: excessive drinking, followed by another solid day of nausea.
On the ninth, my next-door neighbour, Ms Colette Maury, finally burst into my cabin through the shared bathroom door with a cry of “Are you dead?!”
For several days, she, as bored of the voyage as anyone else for whom a deck of cards held limited appeal, had entertained herself by observing her fellow passengers, and, observing me, had been struck by my pallor, melancholy and finally hermetic, if alcoholic, retreat. The combination of boredom, heat and a reasonably excitable Christian spirit had finally convinced her that I was, if not dead, then probably well on the path.
Finding me not dead, she tutted and flapped and bullied me into shoes and exclaimed, “Fresh air and—”
“A healthy walk around deck,” I groaned, licking acid off my teeth. “Just what the doctor ordered.”
Colette Maury was a preacher’s daughter. Her father was white, her mother was black; she had inherited her mother’s skin and her father’s nose, but society didn’t care about the details of the thing. She spoke French, Afrikaans, Greek, English and German, discoursed at great length on Darwin (“could have kept his argument more succinct”) and Faraday (“apt to make significant leaps without filling in the details”), and in the Cape had been told that the best she could hope for was to be a housekeeper. In Paris she had been offered employment at a grocer’s run by her aunt, keeping books and selling cabbages.
She made me walk back and forth along the second-class deck, and on finding I was a doctor demanded that I talk to her about Koch, Bernard, Virchow, Galton, Lister and Behring, before pronouncing, “Who would have thought so much could be achieved just by washing one’s hands?”
In the evening, we listened to out-of-tune singing and the plink-plonk of a storm-tuned piano in the lounge, and at night we closed the door between us with a cordial “good night”. The next day I took my constitutional on the deck and so did she, and I didn’t bother to pretend I wasn’t pleased to see her.
“I’m going to go to America,” she confided as we sat beneath the stars, huddled close against the Atlantic wind. “My family doesn’t know, but I’ll save everything I have, then go to America and meet a man who’ll marry me.”
“I’m going to be a spy,” I replied. “I have no idea what this means, but I couldn’t see any other way. I tried. I tried to find something that was different, a way out, but there was nothing. Nothing I could see. Nothing except… So I said yes. I think I may have made a terrible mistake. I don’t think I could have done anything else.”
“You will be,” she announced after a judicious silence, “a terrible spy.”
“That’s what I think.”
“Who are you going to spy for?”
“The British.”
“Are you a patriot?”
“I don’t think so. My brothers are.”
“Older brothers?”
“Yes.”
“Ah – then you definitely can’t be; that’s how siblings work. Will you have to hurt people?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I think… what I have seen of the Empire, all we do is hurt people. I think you can’t be part of something like that without ripping something else apart.”
“Why did you agree to do it?”
I closed my eyes, pressed a little closer to her. Too close, and she didn’t pull away. “I’m afraid,” I replied. “I thought I was someone I’m not. I thought my life was big enough to fill a world. Now all I know is that I am tiny, and the world is vast, and full of things I do not understand, and I am very, very afraid.”
She was silent a long while, staring into the sea. Then she asked, curious only, “Would you marry me?”
“Would it help?” I asked.
“I am brave, and clever. You are white. In America, we could make something with that. What do you think?”
I thought, for a moment, of saying yes. I had no idea of the truth of her heart, and that was fine. I was not yet an addict to the knowing. Her conviction was the inverse of my broken, flailing soul, a lighthouse shining above raging seas. I could picture the two of us, in a house in some far-flung land: the respectable doctor and his clever, confident wife. The sky is blue, the path to our door is neat and tended, and along it, Langa comes.
He comes, even to an American dream he comes.
I squeezed her tight, pressed my cheek against her head. “It sounds like a nice idea. You will do much, much better than me.”
She sighed, and a little too high and a little too easy: “I know. In time.”
The next day, we walked our separate ways along the deck, and in Liverpool she paused only for a moment to turn when she reached the gangplank, and wave goodbye.
Chapter 21
I came to Liverpool at the beginning of February 1885, and was met by Mrs Nellie Parr. Five foot two, made a little less diminutive by her absurd lavender bonnet and heavy, clumping heels on brown leather shoes, she bobbed up and down by the medical officer at the arrivals shed, waving earnestly a piece of paper on which she’d written my name, hollering for my attention to the outrage of all assembled.
Weary, my legs wobbling from the strange stability of land after weeks at sea, I approached, and she, recognising my intent if not my face, at once hollered, “Dr Abbey! Dr Abbey, here, I say!” People blushed the blushes that she seemed too oblivious to shed, horrified at her lack of deportment. I, summoned like a puppy, wondered whether t
his was the kind of red-faced nanny who always fed the children sweeties, or who secretly whipped her charges when the parents were away, and promised another beating if they ever confessed.
“Dr Abbey, good, yes, well come quickly, do you have any more baggage than this – doesn’t matter, we can get it sent on. Now, at once!”
So I returned to the country of my birth. Grey-black snow had frozen around the manure and filth of the dockers’ yards, a cold I was entirely unprepared for after the blazing summer of the Cape. Red-brick chimneys belched into the sky above the tight, curling streets that ran away from the sea, and everywhere there was noise, noise, noise. Crates and iron and coal and steel, the clanker-clatter of the world’s goods coming into port, the barks of the dock men, the belch of the furnace, arguments about the loading of cotton and the handling of pepper, clusters of Indian men and beaten Malays pressed to sea, curled up into the darkest places where fires burnt in low black stoves, cowering from the bitter wind; a surge of hats and caps, a thump thump thump of the piston and clang clang clang of the master’s bell.
I had found the chittering of the African plains frightening when I first lay down to sleep on the road to Kimberley, but now, this! This teeth-jangling, sense-shuddering shock, the air turned to tar, every man’s face and hands blackened by being, the press of people crowding into the streets, the shoving hollering of the costermongers plying their wares at the edges of the alleys that ran down to the tenements where the workers slept, five to a room, nine to a privy; I had not thought it might overwhelm me, and yet I was overwhelmed. As a man struck dumb, lifted here and there like a seed never allowed to grow to a shrub, I permitted myself to be swept along by Parr as she constantly checked a great silver fob watch and muttered, “Leaving it tight, well yes, hum…”
Her destination, I belatedly realised, was the railway station. An expansive half-moon of glass and steel set above open pillars of yellow brick turned ashen by the city’s belching, it was no less loud and even more smoky than the docks. I had only a few seconds to glance at the black-tiled spires and dirty windows of the more expansive buildings that had sprung up around it before, whoosh, I was grabbed by the arm and pulled towards a platform, and smack, the door was shut behind us as we piled into a second-class carriage, and with a high whistle and a jerk we were off, heading south, towards London.
“So,” exhaled Parr, reaching into a bag the size and texture of a small sofa for a folded map that turned out to be of the world at large. “Welcome to Her Majesty’s service.”
My induction into the world of espionage was, to say the least, erratic.
Mrs Parr said almost nothing from Liverpool to London, unless prodded by questions, when her answers were professionally bland remarks concerning the Whigs’ latest arguments on Irish Home Rule, how unimpressed she was with the recent serialisations in the Times, the problem with Pinkerton’s and their ongoing rivalries with the officers of Scotland Yard, and how little she liked the latest trends in ladies’ hats, which were, she felt, entirely over the top if mildly pleasing on a plum-faced girl of the brighter sort.
I mumbled some half-words somewhere in between the rattle, but in truth I felt now as little accustomed to my home country as I had felt in the Cape, where no self-respecting Boer would be caught dead pronouncing any sort of views on women’s hats, unless perhaps to denounce them to the Devil. In the end I gave up asking, which was precisely what she wished to achieve, and for a few minutes I may even have slept.
Then it was rattling and shouting and the whistle and the station, the roaring heart of Empire, straight into a cab at Euston to a small office at the less fashionable end of Westminster. There was no plaque on the door to declare the purpose of the red-brick building into which I was propelled, and the one man who guarded a small counter within seemed more interested in warming his hands at a tiny iron stove than in checking on our identities. But up up up, up to the topmost floor, where the roof sloped in tight beneath soot-smeared tiles, where in a small office it was sign sign sign the paperwork and here, a travel allowance of some twenty pounds and a new passport that looked fairly indistinguishable from my old and which was handed over to me as if I had received the Crown Jewels.
“Keep it safe; we have such a problem with paperwork these days.”
“I don’t have lodgings for the night,” I blathered incoherently as Parr rolled out more papers, more maps across the table between us. “My family are in Highgate, but I…”
Here my words died, for what could I possibly say to my family? Good evening, Father, I am unexpectedly returned having gone mad in the exile to which you confined me, sorry to hear that my sister is dead, even more so that I killed her.
Mrs Parr had no time to care for this social nicety. “We will put you in the Strand tonight and you will breakfast with the colonel and the professor in the morning, and then it is to the tailor for a suit, bustle bustle bustle, yes indeed, more haste less speed!”
A night alone in a hotel off the Strand. This city is at once strange and familiar to me. The noise, the smoke, the boys sweeping horse dung from the cobbled streets, the girls selling flowers and watercress on the corners, the women selling something more. Not two streets back from my hotel window, the rookery of St Giles, black as a raven’s eye, where the thieves scamper between rooms of cloth and the bodies of the dead are flung into the necropolis train without name or merit. If a medical man may know a place by its diseases, then it is cholera, tuberculosis, smallpox, dysentery and the eroded, flesh-eaten, jaw-bright smile of the matchstick girls, or the cotton man’s flaking cough.
Towards the river, lights – some beginning to turn electric as the revolution came, orange filaments strung inside dirty, soot-smeared globes. Theatres, top hats, stiff canes, white shirts, and women laughing at unexpressed understandings. The diseases here are gout, syphilis, arthritis among the elderly and hysteria among the locked-up wives tended to by men who have heard of the female orgasm and know it to be a kind of plague.
I wrote a letter to Plender, my old medical friend, and didn’t know that he was dead, and it would never reach him.
I started a letter to my father, and never finished it.
I started a letter Isabella, and never finished that either.
I fell asleep in my clothes, and was woken the next morning by a thirteen-year-old boy in a red flat hat who was too well trained to hold out his hand for an extra shilling for his diligence, and invited downstairs.
Colonel Ferrall met me first. He had already eaten breakfast, insisting that it was important for a man to be up by six a.m. and have taken a constitutional by seven. He was a doctor’s dream patient, for before anyone could even suggest that fresh air was the solution to all the world’s medical ills, he would book himself an ice bath, a hearty rubbing, and shooting in the New Forest, where he would kill more than his fair share of game and make himself by his skill highly unpopular at parties.
He was everything I could have expected or hoped for from a spymaster. Born to a military family, he had been sent to Cambridge before joining the army in time to serve in the Crimea, in China with General Gordon, in India after the mutiny, in Canada against the Fenian raids and in the Cape against the Boers, by which time his genius for calling out nonsense when he saw it had pushed him into military intelligence.
“That’s all it is, really,” he declaimed as I tucked into a soft-boiled egg and cold, salty ham. “If a thing seems too good to be true, it probably is. Two hundred buggers just waiting to be ambushed? I’ll believe it when I see it. King ready to capitulate? Doesn’t mean anything until the ink is dry, and even then what’s that worth? Just paper; paper is cheap these days.”
Among the many, many things he didn’t believe in, I suspected, was me.
“Truth-speakers; they’re real. Met one in China, woman in a Daoist temple. Tried to have her nabbed, shipped off to Hong Kong, but the second she saw me she knew what I was about and fled before I could get the people in. Americans had one, for a w
hile. Indian fellow, grabbed him from the Chickasaw just before they marched the bastards out west. But they wasted him, as Americans will. Got him shot during the Civil War, dissected his brain after, couldn’t see anything special about it. We think the Russians have one, maybe the Turks too. Had Kalberloh out in the Cape trying to pick up someone from the sangomas, and then he telegrams saying he’s found a British man, a white man, all shadowed up and, well, I can tell you. I can tell you.”
What can he tell me?
Very little, it seems.
He has come to watch me, to judge, and to be unimpressed. Things that are too good to be true always are. Perhaps my brain will end up being dissected too. Maybe when the British cut open my skull, they’ll do a better job than the Americans would.
His eyes are the green of summer algae on a still pond, his face is as long as his spaniel’s. His whiskers are already going grey; he has a bald patch that he hides beneath an array of increasingly severe hats and caps. He likes to wear a high Chinese collar as a reminder of his service in far-flung places, and carries a lucky glass eye given to him by a man in Nepal who died three days later in a mudslide.
“We’ll be sending you to Berlin first. Ever since Bismarck put a Prussian on the German throne, everyone’s been spoiling for a fight. The French can’t forgive the Germans for ransacking Paris. The Austrians can’t forgive the Russians for antagonising the Serbs, the Russians can’t forgive the French and the British for supporting the Turks. The Belgians think the French want the Congo, the Germans think we want Uganda, we suspect the Italians are eyeing up Abyssinia, the French hate us for putting troops into Egypt, everyone’s waiting for the Sudan to explode again, and now there are German warships on the west coast of Africa. You’ll have a wonderful time. Berlin is a model of fine leadership. Mrs Parr will handle the logistics of the thing. Her husband used to run Burma, you know? Just do whatever you do, and we’ll see how it goes.”