“Does the queen know she was meant for slavery? That this is what’s delivered in response to a royal request?”
Jonathan’s eyes dropped. “I got what I could,” he said. “I was told to be quiet about it and I was.”
Philip knew they had two choices. He could turn the girl away, and that would send her back to the slave fields, the lash, rape, and death in childbirth if she could count among the fortunate, followed by burial in a potters’ field. Or take her, and understand Alamayou’s words for the first true time.
“She’ll make a good belly warmer for you both.” Jonathan left them.
“Seely.” She pointed to herself.
“Philip. This is Alamayou. Tell him you’re here to help him speak to us.”
So much needed to be said, Philip thought. They had this girl now, however legal it was, and through her they could learn something of each other at last. The months aboard the Feroze felt suddenly close. Aboard ship, it became so clear how simple and yet miraculous words were when only their hands could speak the crude, basic bits of life. Eat, drink, sleep, shit, and, beneath it all, we’re alone. You’re all there is.
So many words to give each other, but one thing first. In the center of their lives now, holding them still the way the photographer’s plates and chemicals held Alamayou still on glass, was the fire.
“Anat, Alamayou,” Philip said. “Abat.”
“Mamot, Philip. Fire.”
“Yes. Seely, listen carefully and tell him every word I say. Tell him I’m so sorry, and that I know he had nothing to do with their deaths.”
She translated, and Alamayou stared at Philip in utter confusion. He pointed to himself, eyes wide and disbelieving.
Good, Philip thought. He understands he’s being accused.
“The man at the banquet. Naismith.”
“Naismith,” Alamayou said, his expression falling further.
“He’s going to ask you questions about the fire and what happened there. He said you were seen by someone, taking your father to the cottage on Amba Geshen, before the fire started. Before I found you there. He said your mother was whipped. That she was chained to the wall.”
Alamayou watched as Philip spoke. In Philip’s kind face, he saw the way the dream of his life now would end, hurtling him back to the fire. The end would come in language.
“I’m a monster,” he told Philip. “I don’t belong anywhere in the world. My father said so. My mother died saying it. But I didn’t kill them. I shamed them.”
Seely translated his Amharic words to English, and with each word Alamayou felt the new world he lived in unlock and open wide to take him in. That was hard to be brave in the face of. He didn’t know how to be brave, only how to look at Philip and not look away.
“I don’t believe you did anything,” Philip said. “I never will, no matter who saw it. Because I know you.”
“It’s good to hear your words.”
“And yours, Alamayou.”
They smiled at each other, while Seely caught up with her translation.
“Let me tell you where it is we live now,” Philip said. “Who these people are and how important they are to your future.”
Philip told Alamayou about Windsor, the royals, and of the growing calls for him to speak or leave.
“Are you royal?” Alamayou asked him.
“That’s ridiculous. I’m nothing at all.” He smiled slightly.
I missed that, Alamayou thought. “Are you African?”
“No.”
“But you’re black.”
“I was born here in London.”
“You know medicine.”
“Hardly.”
“I saw you. You’re a doctor.”
“There’s so much to say, Alamayou. I’m at a loss.”
They looked at each other and for a moment neither could think of anything to tell the other. It wasn’t for lack of things, but rather because there was far too much.
Alamayou wanted to know one thing that held everything inside of it. But he couldn’t bring himself to ask. Can I hope? Is the worst over?
Instead, he asked about the last thing that he’d painted.
“The fruit,” he said.
“You’re hungry?” Philip asked.
Seely translated. Alamayou shook his head and dotted the air with his fingers.
“Orange,” Seely said.
“Oh-ranj,” Alamayou said.
“Yes. With cinnamon cloves.” Philip made the dotting. “Tell him each clove represents one of the queen’s children.”
“Clove?”
“The black marks.”
Seely looked almost proud, hearing that. They were, after all, three black marks upon the Victoria docks.
“What will happen to us?” Alamayou asked.
Philip thought about how to answer him. With a translator there, he was no longer needed. He knew leaving was the best thing for the both of them.
“Just tell them you’re innocent, and a new life awaits you.”
He didn’t say anything about himself, Alamayou thought. “Will they send you away? “ he asked Philip. “Where will you go? Will you still be near?”
“Don’t worry about me. You’re the one they need to hear from.”
“If they send me back to Abyssinia, I’ll be killed. I’m hated like my father.”
“But you’re not like him.”
“No.”
“Tell them so. Tell them what they need to hear, that you did nothing wrong. Clear yourself and stay.”
Seely drew back when Alamayou spoke. “He say he should go back and die.”
“No. Listen to me, Alamayou. It’s a terrible thing that’s happened and it’s useless to try and make sense of it. We can’t do anything about our lives these past months, maybe ever again. Our pasts don’t matter. What you were, a prince, it’s gone. You’re here now and you need to make the best of it. We both have to. Think of all you’ve lost, every damn day if you want. You can think of me as your friend if you like. I hope for that, but never say that you don’t want to live even if you truly wish it. Even if you’re alone. You mustn’t.
“I’ve learned not to expect anything. I’ve no right to think I can live how I want or give voice to what I feel like other men. I’m not like other men and I’ve accepted my lot. That’s further than I ever thought I’d be.
“I remember White working over one of your countrymen in the war. He opened that man even further than his wounds had. There was smoke and scraps of hot metal inside, and he took out all that he could find. But before he could sew the man up again, he died. White saw the look on my face. I’d seen the dead before, mind you, but all the blood, and the way that man fought just to hang onto what little life he had left. I’d never seen the knowing up close like that.
“White told me the body had a rule. If it hurts bad enough, leave. The heart gets wise and stops.
“I’ve thought about that a lot. There’ve been times for me, for what I know I am, and I wake up and I can’t believe I’m this. I feel this. I want this. And I’ve wondered, is this the line? Over here, live with what I am. Over there, decide it hurts bad enough to leave. I’m not saying it right and that’s on purpose, Alamayou. Whether you understand me or not, I won’t admit it out loud, that I’ve thought about dying as something to choose, not something that happens. I’ll never give in to it no matter how hard this life becomes because I’m a stubborn son of a bitch. No one takes what’s mine. Maybe no one gives me anything, but I’ll be Goddamned if anyone takes. The world’s a furnace and I’ll not tell you otherwise. But there are reasons to live if you just look. The best reason? Spite them all. Tell him.”
In her patchwork Amharic, she did the best she could to make Alamayou know those words.
“Do you believe what you say to me, Philip?”
“I’m trying.”
“Believe it for you, not me. You don’t know me.”
“You said you didn’t kill them.”
“I didn’t.”
“Then what is it?”
Alamayou walked away, following the edge of the waterline. Anchored ships keened to and fro in the bay. The sway of their masts put him in mind of the winds at sea, and how much more violent they were than on land.
By then the crowd at Wapping had dispersed. The stage was empty, the auction over. Wheelbarrows full of Abyssinian trinkets trundled by to waiting coaches.
“Gone,” Alamayou said. “So much is gone, Philip.”
“Yes. I know.”
Men labored to dismantle all that had been built upon the dock. The great sign that greeted visitors with the Sooroo Pass, the Devil’s Staircase, had already been cut into sections and tossed onto piles of refuse.
“There’s something I need to know,” Philip said. “I want to know why you were at the rail that night on the Feroze. Were you going to jump, Alamayou?”
“I don’t know. I thought I saw things. Heard things. The fever… I don’t know what I wanted to do. Live, die. Jump. Maybe I was thinking about it.”
“And the fire—”
“I’d started to burn. I wanted to.”
“Bloody Christ. Why?”
“Because there’s no home for me anywhere.”
“Why didn’t you, then, if that’s what you think? Why take my hand?”
Philip’s words were heated and furious. They surprised even him. Why come back with me? Why take me this far only to tell me you’d rather die?
Alamayou didn’t know what might happen when they got back to Windsor, or with Naismith, or with any of them. Right now, he only knew that he could finally hear Philip’s words, hear them inside of himself, and make them a part of him. He didn’t have to imagine anymore.
The sound of them made him smile.
The world wasn’t promised to any of them. It could slip away or be taken by force at any time. He’d learned that. All I have, he thought, is what I felt, and I want to give it to Philip. I think he needs it as much as I do.
“Because at the rail,” he said to Philip, “I saw you and I thought, what if I’m wrong?”
§
On the walk to the carriage that would take them back to Windsor, Alamayou spoke. “I want to know all that’s happened since Abyssinia. What happened in the war and at sea. What people say. Louise. Leopold. The queen. All of it.”
“You were there for all of it,” Philip told him. “You don’t need to hear such things again. To look so closely at it doesn’t do a bit of good.”
“I want to hear you say the words. What it means, the things I didn’t see or didn’t know. The things you think about.”
“For what? It’s gone. Remember, Alamayou? Remember the room at night, your painting, the queen? You said it yourself. Gone.”
“One thing, remember? You told me on the ship to take one thing.”
“Yes.”
Alamayou held out what he’d stolen from the auction stage while building the pillow throne. Smashed beyond recognition, his father’s pistol resembled a twisted metal sculpture.
“Some things remain,” Alamayou said. “Not everything’s gone.”
Seely translated while Alamayou spoke. “My father had slaves. The first thing he said to them was, ‘You have no family. No home. No past. You have no name. No life before me. Only this, the chain.’ There was one slave, the same age as us. My father killed him twice. He took away his name, all he had, and then he strangled him. After the slave was dead, my father told me, ‘This is how you kill a man. Take away who he is and make it yours.’ But I knew the slave. I knew his name. I remember him. We need to give each other everything we can. Our names and our lives. Then we need to keep it all safe. We need to remember.”
From the direction of the sea, a whistle came, followed by a groan so loud and elemental that Philip would have believed it if one of the seamen told him it was the voice of the water itself, or a god stirring to life just offshore.
The Keally Star pulled up its anchor, sending another groan trembling through its hull.
“I don’t even know where to start,” Philip said. “But I’ll try to tell you everything I know.”
Waves washing in from the wake of the Keally Star lapped at the shoreline. Seely’s once-home set sail and soon dwindled to a shadow at the horizon.
For hours they remained at Wapping, speaking the past back into existence. Three dark figures, considering what the sea could do.
Chapter Eleven
They enjoyed a quiet dinner together in the apartment. Seely wore a new frock, blue and heavy. She glanced around her surroundings while anxiously pushing her food around her plate.
Alamayou and Philip were both spent from telling each other all that had happened, all they’d thought and felt, beginning aboard the Feroze and continuing through the very moment they stood on the docks at Wapping.
Philip left any further talk of the fire alone. It had been enough to see how stricken Alamayou was that anyone could think he’d held his own parents in the flames. He didn’t want to press the issue, though he felt he had enough to back up his insistence that Alamayou had done nothing wrong. He could tell the royals now, I was right and Naismith was wrong. “When I say I believe him because I’ve been with him and I know him, you ought to listen.”
The idea that Alamayou was a killer seemed far-fetched from the start, but Alamayou had confirmed his suspicions about the fire and the rail. Whatever darkness Alamayou communed with, it wasn’t the murderous kind Naismith suspected, but a darker impulse to look out at the world and see no reason to live in it.
He hoped Alamayou was past that feeling now that he had a place in the world. Now that he had a friend.
He put down his fork. “I’m too bloody knackered to speak, and what strength I’ve got left I’ll spend on this good food. But of everything we gave each other today, hold onto this if nothing else. Be who they want you to be, and then live the life they give you.”
“I will,” Alamayou said. He was too exhausted to say any more, as well.
Over the remains of their meal—rabbit stew brimming with chunks of dark meat, carrots, and turnips—Seely described her own life. “I was a child, Egbado village. My people, attacked by Dahomian warriors. Homes on fire.”
Alamayou looked up from his meal at a word he understood. Fire.
“Drums,” Seely said. “Screams. Men fight but no, they fell to sword. Food, our flock, all gone. We walk before their spears. All night we walk. Women, babies. Some die. We leave, to Whydah. They sell us to Abomey, to Gezo. I too so many, so many years. Last time, sell to white man. Blackbird.”
“Blackbirder,” Philip told her. “A slave runner.”
“He has ship. HMS Seely. He name me for ship. I cook and clean. Sew. I lay with him. Gave daughter but he throw her to sea.”
She grew quiet.
“How old are you?” Alamayou asked her, and in Amharic she told him. Then she said it in English for Philip.
“Fifteen year.”
“But you’re free now,” Philip assured her.
There was such confusion on her face. “Free,” she said. “Go where? Be what? Free mean no place to stay. No food.”
“True enough,” Philip said.
Their dinner was done, the hall outside the apartment quiet. For a while, they were content to listen as the castle settled in on itself for the night. After an hour, a maid brought dresses that had been gathered for donation to missionaries, and Seely selected a few that reasonably fit her small frame. Simon found quarters for her among the service and provided a cot, a desk and chair, and an oil lamp which she was too afraid to operate.
She didn’t want to be alone, so they brought her back to the ap
artment.
“Who will they make me lay with?” she asked.
“No one,” Philip told her. “It’s not like that.”
“Always like that.”
“All I’ve ever known,” Alamayou said as she translated, “is people forced to be with others. No one chooses who they feel must be theirs. You were told who to be with. It was the same with my mother. They tried to force me once, and I said no. One of the only times I ever defied my father.”
“Why did you say no?” Philip asked.
“I didn’t love her.” He thought of how to say it right, but realized it didn’t matter. Philip understood.
“I couldn’t love her,” he finally added. “What about you?”
“Love is a thankless thing in my life,” Philip said. “Better not to care.”
“There are no words for some things,” Alamayou said. “Or they’re terrible words. Words that can kill us.”
Us, Philip thought.
“But for some things, there aren’t words to hold them. We try. That’s all we can do. Try to find,” and he smiled, “the language.”
“A poet and a painter. I knew there was a reason I saved you.”
They laughed together, an easy thing that had never come to them before. It was just a little simpler to imagine a path ahead.
Maybe I could stay awhile, Philip thought. See where matters lead. Like the wise prince said, what if I’m wrong?
Their laughter was interrupted by loud knocking at the apartment door. When Seely opened it, she found Simon there with a grim expression.
“She’s set a month from today as the time for him to speak,” he said. “I suggest you each cease your grinning and prepare.”
§
Seely and Philip worked with Alamayou for hours upon hours, every day. Alamayou acquired words, then phrases, and by the seventh of December, 1868, Alamayou was able to find the meaning in far more sentences than any of them expected. He still relied on Seely, and when at a loss occasionally lapsed into their old language of hands, but he could carry on a rudimentary conversation with the service and follow Philip’s instructions.
As a test, Philip told him that the day had come to speak to the queen, and that he ought to wear the suit hanging in their armoire. Alamayou rose from his chair and dressed.
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