The spirit of the real George Washington had unfortunately prevailed, and the wretched Superintendent had revealed the full truth concerning the spring bleeding. Barry never succeeded in stamping out the practice entirely. But he did drive it back into the remoter corners of the colony. And no one, ever again, dared to demand the service from the hospital.
The doctor sat down in his office, with his senior staff before him, and began asking awkward questions.
All his initial enquiries concerned the general maladies endured by the military and colonial populations and shared by the island’s local inhabitants. Few diseases were common property. In the former case, they proved to be dyspepsia, boredom and sunstroke as a result of imprudent midday military parades. In the latter, the situation varied from general malnutrition, rotten teeth, numerous fevers, pleurisy, colic, diarrhoea, spots on the chest, a fluttering sensation in the lower body, consumption and plague. Barry at once arranged for a regular Friday afternoon clinic and dispensary, to be publicised among the townspeople and throughout the surrounding villages. No fees were to be charged.
Hospitals always attract the destitute and the mad. Barry’s establishment was no exception. But the numbers of retired prostitutes, beggars, orphans, vagrants and thieves who descended upon the clinic, intent on free food and charitable generosity, were slightly smaller than was common, indicating the relative wealth of the colony. The doctor set about dispensing medicines and advice with the brisk and uncompromising humanity for which he was famous. In Cape Town he had indeed been responsible for establishing the leper colony, thus removing the mass of begging wretches from the streets to a clean place where they were well cared for and regularly fed by a noble batch of nuns. Barry made friends with the nuns wherever he went. He counted upon God’s brides, rather than the Lord himself. Here, he found that the disease had not taken root and that, apart from one unfortunate creature whose face was half eaten away, there was no reason to set up another leper colony. But Barry was on the look-out for fresh needs to be met. The Friday clinic was always besieged.
It was Barry’s custom to examine every person who came, even if it was already dusk, before he would depart for his evening’s engagements. He knew that his patients had often walked miles to reach him, and would camp on the hospital steps if he did not see them on that day. Some of the villagers could speak rudimentary English, and within a few weeks Barry was barking advice in fledgling Greek. He had an uncanny aptitude for languages. George Washington Karageorghis sat firmly next to Barry as his assistant and translator. Thus, the Hospital Superintendent learned a great respect for his commanding officer. It was a measure of Barry’s quality that, despite his ruthless and high-handed manner, despite his impeccable standards and sudden tempers, he inspired a passionate loyalty in his servants and inferiors. He was disciplined, but never officious. He was exacting, but never unjust. He had high expectations of his staff and flew into screaming rages if any one of his orders was not fulfilled in every particular. George Washington Karageorghis declared that the Deputy Inspector-General was the first doctor he had ever seen who threw an almost daily tantrum. He was exceptionally savage with all ‘Pedlars, Quacks, and Pretenders to Medicine’. A good many self-styled Volpones found themselves out of a job, for it was Barry’s firm belief that it was better to be without any advice at all than to receive bad advice, ‘whether in Lay or Physic’. His manic cleanliness became an article of faith. The entire staff of the hospital cringed in helpless fright if Dr Barry detected ‘a stench’.
* * *
The English colonists were well satisfied with their fiery red-headed dwarf. He gave them lots to talk about. During that first week in the colony he scandalised – and delighted – the assembled company at the banquet given in his honour by partaking of a very frugal amount and yet downing several bottles of claret single-handed, without any trembling of the hands, reddening of the complexion or glazing of the eye. His reply to the Governor’s polite enquiry as to what, in his opinion, was the most usual source of disease, became legendary, largely because it was delivered across a magnificent decorated edifice of shellfish and lobsters.
‘The most common cause of disease in gentlemen of your class, sir, is lack of exercise and bad diet. Most of what you eat, I may assert with some certainty, is at best rubbish, and at worst poison.’
The sayings of Dr Barry, or at least the varnished truth, were repeated and embellished around tea tables and fireplaces, at picnics and on dance floors. Despite his abrasiveness, and his implied animadversions on the colony’s collective diet, he became a popular dinner guest and was much in demand. Some of the ladies even adopted his régime of fresh vegetables.
One episode on the esplanade was worth several dinner parties. Captain William Boaden of the Royal Worcesters was drilling his men in full dress uniform and in the morning heat. Dr James Miranda Barry, wearing a staw hat with a muslin curtain hanging round the brim, so that his mouth was visible but not his eyes, and wielding a vast parasol like an under-arm cannon, trotted straight up to him. There was a moment’s dreadful pause. Then Barry flourished his whip and screeched forth a volley of threats and attendant inevitable consequences if the parade were to continue in a temperature past ninety degrees. Boaden was about to fling Barry into the moat when some sixth sense intervened. He called off the parade and left the doctor yelling shrilly at the backs of his departing troops, who marched off with expressionless faces. Whenever he was asked to re-tell this episode, Boaden turned brick-red and tight-lipped. He would not be drawn. He avoided the doctor.
But the ladies sought him out. And the Governor’s daughter simply could not get enough of him. In those years the colony was overseen by Sir Edmund Walden, an amiable epicurean who had been recently widowed. His young wife had been carried off by the same bout of typhus that had almost removed Sir Edmund himself to a better place, some eighteen months before Barry’s arrival on the island. The Governor was unsuccessfully bringing up his seventeen-year-old daughter, Charlotte, and his fifteen-year-old son, Joseph, on his own, aided by much well-meaning and ineffective advice from the colonists’ wives. He was intending to return to England the following year, where he had dozens of useful female relatives, to find a husband for Charlotte and another wife for himself. ‘You must waltz for your supper, my dear,’ he told his daughter cheerfully, making no bones about his purpose in renting a town house for the season.
Charlotte could vaguely remember England and retained unpleasant recollections of muddy gardens, drizzle and draughts. She loved the island’s white rocks, the flaking red earth and the daily promise of cobalt-blue skies. She had no desire to leave the residence with its jasmine walks and Moorish arcades. But she also liked the idea of a husband who would give her status at the dinner table, the family jewels, and all his attention. He must be tall, very tall, but exactly like Dr Barry in every other particular.
Barry was often invited to dinner at the Governor’s residence for the simple reason that he was very good company. He was sharp, but never pompous, and he could read Shakespeare aloud in a manner that was always delightful and sometimes extraordinary. Charlotte’s favourite play was Othello, which, being filled with adult passions, made her feel breathtakingly complicated. Barry leaned against the mantelpiece, pluming up his will, warning against the green-eyed monster, jealousy, and grabbing the uncircumcizèd dog by the throat, night after night, in a variety of thrilling voices. When he became the outraged and abandoned father, he was especially stirring:
Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see:
She hath deceiv’d her father, and may thee.
Charlotte’s one interesting flash of insight was to question Desdemona’s traditional innocence. In the elegant drawing room of the Governor’s residence, which sported some suitably Moorish archways, and fireplaces edged with tiles of pure Mediterranean blue, there was a genuine Venetian grandeur. Sensual possibility appeared to be lodged in the chandeliers. The decor was correct. The stage was set. Betray
al and adultery seemed all too likely, indeed temptingly possible.
‘I wonder if Cassio was exceedingly good-looking?’ Charlotte remarked dreamily. ‘She says he is a very proper man.’
Charlotte’s unspoken thought was that a black man would be daringly exotic as a lover, but not an undertaking for life. Barry regarded her with cynical interest. It would never have occurred to him to give his word and then go back upon a promise. Therefore, adultery was unthinkable. For heroines, at any rate. But Charlotte Walden clearly did not condemn women who organised their marriages according to a different set of rules.
* * *
It was mid-June. Barry had passed almost half a year upon the island. The heat began early that year and there was much talk of a premature departure to the hills. The little company which dined regularly at the Governor’s residence was still recovering from Troilus and Cressida, which had unfortunately been chosen for its Greek connections. One of the colony’s residents was a mad antiquarian, who claimed to have discovered the original site of Troy. Every so often, during the readings, he was seized with the urge to deliver an impassioned discourse on the authenticity of Shakespeare the historian. Charlotte was considered too young and too unchaperoned to read the part of Cressida, but read it she did, with Walter Harris as Troilus, whom he portrayed with such excessive gusto that the rôle ceased to be credible. Barry was slippery and convincing as the perfidious Diomed. When Charlotte proclaimed her lines
Therefore this maxim out of love I teach:
Achievement is command; ungain’d, beseech.
she had looked straight at Barry, and the glance he gave her in return was generally considered to be rather shocking.
But the nights grew warmer and the ladies fanned themselves energetically in the late afternoons, inhaling the seductive scent of jasmine, leaning out over their balconies and watching for the first breath of evening and the sea wind. Shakespeare is well known for inflaming the passions, but this would not do for the sultry nights. And so they broached Macbeth, with their iced fruits and dessert wine, in hope of a change from the torrid aroma of adultery. Macbeth was a great success with the company of ladies, who all took turns at being witches. The events of the play had a military dimension and good battle scenes. This went down very well with the Governor, who had never been in a battle but liked to imagine that he had been.
Harris and Barry were reading the scenes where Macbeth and his lady work themselves into a frenzy, as a prelude to Duncan’s assassination. At last, the sun dissolved peacefully into a mass of molten rose and gold behind them, and the breeze pulled at their sleeves. The ladies sighed with relief. The light turned blue, then purple. Barry’s voice pierced the half-dark, decisive and uncanny, reading the lines quietly, as if they were a prayer.
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here;
And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty.
He paused, then called upon the elements of darkness, in a voice that thrilled the company. Charlotte, who had never taken her eyes off Barry, realised at once, that he was no longer looking at his book. He knew the words by heart.
. . . make thick my blood,
Stop up th’access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
Th’effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry ‘Hold, hold!’
Everyone gasped. Walter Harris gripped the cornice of the fireplace masterfully, to indicate his presence. He thundered his lines with bravado and panache, but Barry’s lowered, serpent tones were the more telling,
Only look up clear;
To alter favour ever is to fear.
Leave all the rest to me.
While they were waiting for iced sherbet and apricots in cooled liqueurs, the company dispersed into several rooms and scattered along the verandah. Charlotte cornered Barry and suggested a turn in the gardens. The Governor’s gardens were famous for their Arab fountains, constructed in the twelfth century and decorated with the original tiles. The strange blue and cream patterns shimmered beneath the broken surface of the falling water. Oranges gleamed like lanterns in the dark. They strolled down one of the shaded paths by the fish ponds and Charlotte insisted on taking Barry’s arm.
‘Miss Haughton admires you tremendously, you know’ was her opening salvo.
‘We shared a very uncomfortable voyage from Portsmouth,’ Barry replied, noncommittal. He was already questioning the wisdom of allowing himself to be carried off through darkened gardens by a silly girl with a pretty figure.
‘And you must know that I do too.’
Barry bowed in acknowledgement of the compliment, but said nothing.
‘When you were reading Lady Macbeth, I said to myself – it was very thrilling – but what understanding you bring to our Shakespeare! It is not only the excitement of the poetry. You know, just as he does, what it is like to be driven by ambition. To endure the frustration of your desires . . .’
Barry felt the ground cracking beneath him. Charlotte was rapidly departing from the high road of cliché. Her remarks, which should have been directed towards the coolness of the fountains and the beauty of the night, were about to become personal. He took evasive action.
‘I have no idea, however, what it is like to murder someone in cold blood. Or even to desire another man’s death, Miss Walden. I am a doctor.’
For a moment she was checked.
‘But you understood Lady Macbeth. You know what it is to be a woman.’
For one terrible second Barry feared that Cape Town gossip concerning his identity and origins had followed him east with the steady accuracy of a carrier pigeon returning home. But Charlotte Walden flung herself unhesitatingly into a speech not about his sex, but her feelings.
‘You must know how I feel – what I yearn for above all else. I cannot bear being a girl and having to wait, when I must speak.’
Shakespeare’s heroines were much given to speaking. Barry’s relief caused his mind to wander for a moment. He did not notice that Charlotte had tightened her grip on his arm and was clearly working up to something. He re-assumed his professional tone.
‘The reason why I can so well comprehend Shakespeare’s women, Miss Walden, is that those parts were written for boys to speak. Women’s lives were as limited then as they are now. Except, I imagine, among the higher classes, who have always enjoyed greater freedom of movement and had more opportunities to manage their property.’
‘I can bear it no longer. Forgive my frankness, Dr Barry. I beg you to kiss me.’
Barry stopped dead beneath a fig tree. Charlotte could not see his face, as the lights from the house were behind him. She bounced in front of him and seized both of his cold hands. With great presence of mind Dr James Miranda Barry raised her importunate fingers to his lips and gently kissed them all.
Then he said very firmly, ‘We shall return to the house at once, Miss Walden, and rejoin the company.’
Charlotte had no idea whether she had conquered or entirely missed the mark. But she knew that Barry was not to be crossed with whims or petulance. She took his arm again and they marched back past the pattering fountains.
‘You won’t tell Father that I asked you, will you?’ she whispered like a schoolgirl, not at all embarrassed, but anxious not to be caught out.
‘I am not in the habit of repeating private conversations’ was the frosty reply, with which Charlotte had to be content.
James Miranda Barry had a very conventional, masculine notion of
honour. Charlotte Walden was engagingly pretty, plump and pink, with dimples in all the right places. Barry was charming to her in company, but took good care never again to be left alone with her upon the verandah or to accept her invitations to wander down the jasmine walks, to admire the Chinese carp, drifting in green water, and to listen to the fountains.
* * *
But Miss Charlotte Walden did get Dr James Miranda Barry into trouble, and this is how it happened.
The Governor’s daughter caught the eye of Captain James Loughlin while she was singing a duet by Rossini with one of his closest friends and fellow officers, Captain William Boaden of the Royal Worcesters.
Loughlin had been absent on leave in England for nearly a year, following his father’s death. He was a young man with a substantial inheritance. The estate was duly divided and settled, his sisters provided for and his mother comforted. Rather than buy himself out of the army, or resign his commission, as his mother had urged him to do, Captain Loughlin decided to continue his life of pleasure, adventure and fine clothes, on a significantly larger budget. And so he prepared to re-launch himself upon the social scene with all the éclat befitting a young man of twenty-two, who, all other things being equal, could hold his liquor with the best of them, and amply filled his trousers. He caught sight of Charlotte, singing away in a manner that was damnably attractive. It was not the singing itself that proved so irresistible, for her voice was middling indifferent and her style affected. No, it was the fact that she put her all into the high notes, which she just about managed to reach, and when she did reach them her bosom shook and trembled in a fashion that caught the eye and engaged the heart.
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