The Cape Doctor

by E. J. Levy

  As I approached the door, I saw the yard itself was strewn with the skeletons of small animals, a dog’s skull, marrowbones, wastepaper, fragments of boys’ hoops and other playthings, and with various other missiles, which had been hurled against the premises. A dead cat lay upon the projecting stone of the parlor window, reeking a sickening sweet.

  I hesitated on the doorstep before tapping on the door. It was mud spattered, with a feather plastered there, perhaps with dung. No one answered, so I rapped harder. I was startled when it opened, like a crypt from a gothic novel by Walpole or a maw.

  “Is Mr. Perry expecting you, Miss?” The girl who answered the door was hardly older than I, but her skin was thin and loose, which lent her a fragile, anxious aspect, as if she were lacking more than food.

  “I am his niece,” I said, reciting what my mother had taught me to say.

  She didn’t offer to take a card. “I’ll tell him you been round.”

  “Do you know where I might find him?” I set my gloved palm against the door, preventing its closing.

  “He’s gone out.”

  “The matter is one of considerable urgency.”

  The girl squinted at the street, and then at me. “You’re his relation, you say?”

  I nodded.

  She seemed uncertain whether to let me in but disinclined to argue, acquiescing to bullying, even a child’s, as those beaten down will do. Or perhaps she took pity on me. She pulled back the door to let me by.

  “Can’t see the harm in your waiting in the parlor. You can wait, if it suits you.”

  “I will wait.”

  And so I did. I was delighted by his rooms, though chill and dim, smelling of dust and turpentine, and not as fine or comfortable as ours in Cork had once been, before father had sold the better things at auction; my uncle’s parlor was filled with surprising objects—paintings were everywhere leaned in stacks and hung to the ceiling, dimly visible, and curiosities that invited touch: an animal’s skull, a plaster cast of a horse head and of a human arm and leg, canvases on which he had begun to sketch in charcoal. The figures in his paintings had a twisting, tortured look, the way I had imagined the tormented in hell when my mother took us to church.

  I waited perhaps a quarter hour, perhaps an hour or two; I must have dozed after the long travel, for I did not hear the charwoman depart and woke to a storm of sound.

  He blew in like a northern gale, his voice booming from the foyer, resonant in the parlor, where I sat waiting.

  “Damn it all to hell. Where is that catastrophe of a girl? Sibyl! Where in Christ’s name has she put my things? Every time she cleans, she hides my things. Last week it took me two days to find a sketch I was on. Two days.”

  I heard another voice, a rhythm I did not recognize, the words rounded and warm, like the farmers who spoke the old tongue in the villages outside Cork, though this sounded more like a sort of French, like the baker’s wife, who’d come from Calais. “—true revolution is born not of a change in government but in the way men think and feel.”

  “You needn’t lecture me; I’ve lectured at the academy on that very point. For all the good it did.”

  “It must have done some, surely. Lord Basken is eager to establish a subscription on your behalf.”

  “Is he? Well, he need be quick about it before I starve.”

  I had rehearsed on the journey to London the speech my mother would have me say by way of introduction, as none was there to make one for me. But when the two men entered the parlor, I was startled into silence. I recognized my uncle immediately from the self-portrait I had seen. He had my mother’s face, my own.

  It took them a moment to notice I was there, my uncle going through his letters. The taller man saw me first.

  “A gift from your charwoman?” the tall man asked. His hair was thick and white; muttonchop sideburns framed a broad and pleasant face. He was dark, as were his eyes. Child that I was, even I could recognize that he was uncommonly handsome.

  “How in Christ’s name did that get in here?” my uncle said.

  “Your maid, sir,” I replied, standing.

  “You are her relation?” he asked.

  “No, sir. I am yours.”

  The handsome man laughed. Clapped my uncle on the shoulder. “Congratulations, Jonathan. You appear to be a father.”

  “I am no such thing. What are you?” my uncle demanded. “Explain yourself before I call the constable.”

  I forgot my speech almost entirely in my fear, stammering out that I’d come from Cork, hurriedly explaining who I was and how I’d come. I did not say why.

  I was a slight thing then, a sprite of a child, undersized and pale.

  “What wood nymph is this?” the tall man asked, stepping closer. “Have you brought us one of the famed little people of your land, Jonathan?”

  “I am not a little person,” I said, piqued by his condescension. “I am a child.”

  He smiled. “And how old are you, child?” The tall man squatted before me to look me in the eye.

  “Ten.”

  He raised an eyebrow at this. My size must have suggested otherwise.

  “Nine and a quarter,” I admitted. (Later, historians will debate the point, of course, whether I was nine that afternoon in London or fourteen, whether I was born in 1790 or 1795. Does it matter? As Menander wrote, “Judge me not by my age but by the wisdom I display among you.”)

  “I am General Fernando de Mirandus,” the man said, bowing his head. He spoke as if I should know the name, or as if he were pleased that it was his. “It is a great pleasure.” He stood again.

  “Wonderful,” I said.

  General Mirandus looked bemused. “A wonderful pleasure?”

  “Your name,” I said. “In Latin. General Wonderful.”

  He laughed. “Do you know Latin, child?”

  I knew only a little, what my father had taught us on Sunday afternoons, so what I said surprised us both: “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.”

  I’ve no idea why the Roman playwright’s words came to mind. Only that they did, and that the general appeared delighted. He laughed to hear me quote Terence: “I am a man, so nothing human is foreign to me.”

  “Why, she’s a prodigy, Jonathan,” he said, turning to my uncle. “Your little niece is a prodigy.”

  “I was a prodigy,” my uncle said, turning to a cabinet behind him on a far wall. “Burke called me so himself. Will you have a glass of port?” My uncle filled two glasses.

  “But she’s a marvel,” Mirandus said, looking me over as if I were indeed a fairy. I sensed he was not referring simply to my modest attainments in Latin.

  “She has had a little learning. That is all. It’s the rage to educate even girls.”

  “As it should be,” Mirandus said.

  My uncle drank off his glass, poured another.

  Mirandus crouched down before me again. “What brings you here, child?”

  My mother’s words came back to me then: “I have come to speak with my uncle,” I said. “In. Private.”

  “Speak,” my uncle said, dropping into a chair, not offering me one. The general gallantly pulled up an ottoman for me, inclining his head to indicate that I might sit. I stood facing my uncle instead, preferring to meet him eye to eye. He propped his feet on the ottoman, so I faced his bootheels, the soles dirty from the street.

  I had expected that a man concerned for and capable of producing such beauty would be beautiful himself; I was shocked to find him coarse, vain, belligerent, as if all the loveliness in him had been transferred to the canvases hung to the rafters, propped against the walls. Leaving him none.

  But it made it easier. Had he been kind, I’d have felt obliged by his kindness; showing none, he liberated me to feel what I truly felt: dislike of him and my own need.

  At the time I did not comprehend my uncle’s distress and mistook it for dislike of me; I didn’t know that he’d recently been dismissed from the Royal Academy—for criticizing the pro
fessors there, making “improper digressions” in his lectures, which is to say, picking fights with the powerful, which one rarely wins—the only Academy artist to whom this had ever happened (and the last to whom it would, for more than two hundred years).

  More than his pride had been wounded. The academy had paid his salary and commissioned his murals for years. Now his income was in question. He was desperate for money, as we were. Harried by fear. But in that first interview I would learn an important lesson: that one could disguise vulnerability with arrogance and disdain. My mother’s gentility had availed us little since my brother’s calamity; my uncle offered another possibility, and a lesson: one might mask fear with belligerence. I might, too.

  Perhaps my uncle would have answered my mother’s letter if he’d been doing well, despite their decades-long estrangement, if only for the pleasure that siblings take in showing the other up; he might have been generous to us to underscore her need. But he couldn’t afford such a slight. Like us, he was hungry. But unlike us, as a man, he had honorable means by which to make his way in the world.

  Though I thought his townhouse grand, filled as it was with all manner of fascinating things, it lacked even the modest elegance of our home in Cork. I noticed now that the lamps and fire went unlit, and that a pane of glass was covered with a panel of oilcloth to mask a hole in the glass. I was not alone in noticing.

  “What’s this?” Mirandus asked, crossing to the oilcloth pane.

  “One of the local urchins,” my uncle said.

  “Covered your window?”

  “Broke the pane. Put a rock through it.”

  “They are Tories?” the general asked.

  “They are monsters,” my uncle said. “They take me for a necromancer. Loathsome things, children.”

  The general turned to me. “Present company excepted, of course.”

  My uncle took no further notice of me that day, once his initial fury had subsided. Though I would return to his home half a dozen times that summer, my uncle would take no more interest in me than he did on that first meeting. If anything, he grew less fond as the general appeared to grow more.

  “Do let the girl dine with us, Jonathan,” the general proposed toward the end of that first meeting. “The poor child looks half starved.”

  “Had I proposed we dine?” my uncle asked, absently. “I suppose we must. Why don’t we go round to Wardour Street or Brook’s?”

  “That’s no place for the child.”

  “Precisely,” my uncle replied.

  My uncle turned to me, as if perhaps I hadn’t understood. “So good of you to pay a visit. But your mother must be quite beside herself with worry. I’m sure you really must be going.”

  I was conscious that he did not invite me to dine, conscious too of the ache of hunger in my stomach. Need is an ugly thing. Though I didn’t realize it then, it had made my handsome uncle ugly, too.

  I looked to the general, but he was paging through a book on the table, careful not to interfere, as if noticing rudeness were a kind of rudeness in itself.

  “Of course, Uncle,” I said. I thought I saw him flinch. “I will not forget your courtesy.” When I glanced over, the general was watching me with an expression I could not read.

  “Let us call you a hackney coach,” the general said.

  “Thank you for the offer, sir, but I cannot afford it.”

  “Surely your mother would not object to your accepting such small courtesy,” the general replied.

  My uncle looked shocked. “Accepting? Who’s offering?”

  The general said coldly, “I am.”

  “The girl plainly walked here,” my uncle said, nodding at my boots. “She can plainly walk back.”

  “My uncle is correct, sir,” I said.

  “The streets are no place for a child at this hour,” said the general.

  “The streets are overrun with children at this hour,” said my uncle.

  “If she walks,” the general said, “I shall accompany her.”

  Neither my uncle nor I had foreseen this: I could not imagine the mortification of being walked through the streets like an errant child.

  “It’s good of you to offer, sir, but unnecessary, truly…”

  “Fine,” my uncle said. “Fine.” And off he went to find a coach.

  Although in time my uncle would prove my greatest benefactor—giving me my name, my very life—that coach would be the only courtesy he would ever knowingly offer.

  It’s tempting to say that this was the moment that set me on my course to the Cape, to becoming a surgeon, a soldier, a scandal, to meeting Lord Somerton, to all that would follow. But is there ever such a moment? What makes a man, a life? How much is name and parentage, education or the accident of birth? How much is choice? How much of our lives’ making is in our hands and how much is forged by fate, the intersection of trajectories as mysterious as electricity’s conduction once seemed? It’s easy to look back now and say, That was the meeting that changed all that followed, that would end Margaret’s life and give rise to Jonathan’s.

  But I’m skeptical of retrospection, even as I indulge in it now; it seems poor policy, given that time itself does not run back and recollection is often self-flattering fantasy more than fact. I prefer a scientific method. Observation, hypothesis, evidence weighed. That is my aim now, to weigh the evidence.

  That first summer in London, I had only one true conversation with my uncle. I don’t recall the occasion, though no doubt it was occasioned—as they all were—by my mother’s insistence that I petition him to sign over to me the deed to our home in Cork. The house had been left to my mother, but it was held by my uncle, since my mother—as a Catholic—could not own it herself. She wanted it safe from my father. So each week I went to my uncle, humiliated, to ask what he would not grant—that he sign the deed over to me. I remember the angle of light through the windows, the dust in the air fanning into faint bars like a lady’s fan, a tannic haze; I was looking at a book of paintings open on his heaped table in the drawing room when my uncle came in. “What are you looking at?” he shouted. I stepped back, expecting to be reprimanded or struck, but instead he crossed to me and began to talk about the pictures. He did not explain as my mother might—telling me about the Biblical tale depicted—he spoke of the artist’s work. “Notice the muscles here, in Mary’s forearm? How the light comes from the right? How it changes on the child?” He explained that the model for Mary had been a man, not a woman, possibly a corpse, stripped of its flesh. He might have been trying to shock me, but I was gripped. “See how he lingers,” he said. He sounded almost tender as he spoke. My uncle with the beautiful searching eyes so like my mother’s.

  “Genius,” he said at last, “is a long patience.” It was then he told me what Michelangelo had told his student—a beautiful boy whom he drew again and again, immortalized, as my uncle hoped to be, by paint and canvas—“Work, Antonio, work, Antonio, work, Antonio, and don’t waste time.” He shut the book. As if the exhortation had been to himself. “You know your way out.” He turned without a glance and went upstairs to his studio.

  When my mother and I left London three months later, having run through all our funds, having failed to secure the deed to our house or any financial help, she insisted that we leave a calling card at my uncle’s home on our way to the docks, as le bon ton would do, a card on which she had written PPC neatly on the back—an abbreviation, she explained, for pour prendre congé (I’m leaving)—as if my uncle were a gentleman, as if he would care.

  It was on our return to Ireland that matters grew desperate, though at first it seemed the tide had turned in our favor.

  My father was in uncommonly good spirits when we returned to Cork, and the reunion was surprisingly tender. To be met by my little sister, Juliana, and our father at the door of the cottage in Water Lane was a sweet thing after the months in London’s stench, where rain came down black and turned white cloaks grey after a morning’s stroll, and the very air bur
ned in our nostrils.

  After hurried embraces and a few inquiries about our travel and expressions of delight at our safe return, we stepped into the parlor; my father pressed my mother’s hands in his and said, “We’re saved.”

  “I fear not,” my mother said, gently retracting her hands to loosen her traveling cloak. “Jonathan will not help us. Even the sight of his own poor, unprotected niece could not soften his hard heart.” My mother set a hand on my shoulder. “The man is stone.”

  “It’s no matter,” my father said. “The answer is beneath our feet. All around us.” He spread his palms as the parish priest did on Sundays, when he spoke of God’s grace just before asking for alms.

  For a moment I thought my father had got religion in our absence. Our world had been turned upside down; anything seemed possible. My mother looked at my father as if he’d lost his wits.

  “You would sell the house?” she said. “The roof over our heads.”

  “Not sell, not sell, merely offer as collateral, until Tom regains his footing.”

  “He will not do it,” my mother said, throwing down her gloves onto a table, leaving unclear if she referred to my brother or my uncle. “I will not do it.”

  My mother moved toward the fire, as if the conversation were done.

  “I will write to him,” my father continued, “or go to London myself. I can sign a promissory for the house over to the creditors before I leave, as security.”

  “The house is all we have,” she said.

  “Which is precisely why we must offer it against our debts.” My father’s voice was strange and soothing, petitioning, a voice I’d never heard him use before.

  “I will not sacrifice my home to…”

  “Your home?” My father’s familiar tone returned, cudgel blunt.

  “The house is in my brother’s keeping,” my mother said. “It was willed to me.”

  “Which makes it mine. Or have you forgotten you’re my wife?”