The Cape Doctor

by E. J. Levy

  “Your kin are…”

  “Far from here, Your Lordship,” I replied, perhaps too quickly, steering him clear of that which I dreaded to discuss, the rocky shoals of personal history. “But yours, I understand, are near at hand and in some distress. Which is why I have come. I am at your service.” I stood. “Might I see the patient?”

  Another man of his station might have been affronted by my obvious refusal to reply to a reasonable inquiry—after all, if I was to attend his daughter, he had reason to want to be assured of my quality. But the assurance he sought was not any I could give. I had only my character and skill and Lord Basken’s letter to speak for me.

  He stopped his pacing and turned to face me, his hands folded behind his back.

  “You’re rather…” He seemed to be grasping for the term as he looked me over. I feared he might say impertinent. “…young for your position, are you not, Dr. Perry?”

  “Surely we can agree that age is not the measure of a man,” I said.

  He raised his chin, as if trying to discern insolence in my remark.

  “Given primogeniture, one’s age often makes and unmakes men,” he said.

  “Indeed,” I said. “I am an only child.”

  “What then would you say measures a man?”

  “Surely that depends on who is taking it: a tailor or an undertaker, a lover or a patient. In the last case, a man’s measure must be his ability to heal.” I quoted again the dramatist, as if it were an incantation conjuring me: “Ne hoc consideres, se junior loquar, Sed si viri prudentir sermones apud te habeo.” I could see that he understood the phrase at once: Do not judge me on my youth but on my knowledge as a man.

  My mother had maintained that land was the source of security, a faith my brother had proved woefully unwarranted. General Mirandus had counseled knowledge as the only lasting treasure. Once more I found that Latin was the key in the lock that opened society to me.

  “Then let us take your measure, doctor,” Lord Somerton said. “The patient, my daughter Georgiana, is upstairs.”

  Sir Astley Cooper at Guy’s in London had taught me that the performance of decisiveness is itself often decisive in the treatment of a patient. As I mounted the stairs beside the governor, I felt his trepidation rise and my courage fail. I held the banister to steady my hand’s shaking. We did not speak as we mounted the staircase to the private rooms above; when we came to the door we were to enter, I stopped him with a hand.

  “You may wait here,” I directed His Lordship at the door. It was a dangerous gambit to give orders to a vain and aristocratic governor, but I sensed that my confidence would encourage his own. He did not protest. I opened the door, stepped in alone.

  Inside the drapes were drawn against the midday sun, the massive sash windows to the balcony fastened closed. All was oppressive heat and the sour smell of sweat and illness. When I approached the bed, a maid I had not noticed stood up from the far corner, curtsied briefly.

  “How is she?” I asked. I’d learned that those overlooked often observed more keenly than those looked to for their observations.

  “Poorly, sir,” the girl replied. “She hardly moves at all, except in pain.”

  The girl in the bed was flushed and seemed unconscious of my entrance; using the Parisian Laennec’s recent invention, I rolled a tube of paper to form what he called a stethoscope and placed one end to her chest, which revealed—as I feared it would—a rattle there; her heartbeat slow. He condition was far worse than I’d imagined.

  “How long’s she been like this?”

  “She’s had the fever for more ’an a day now, two.”

  “And the treatment?”

  “Why, none, sir. None’s seen her afore you.”

  “She has had no treatment at all?” I was incredulous. This was not a debtor’s prison, yet the patient lay as neglected as any there.

  “His Lordship dislikes doctors,” she said. “Begging your pardon, sir. After all that happened with Her Ladyship.”

  “Of course, of course,” I said. I was not interested in personal details. I raised the girl’s wrist and felt her faint and erratic pulse. The room’s conditions were perfect to induce the illness that she fought. I strode to the window and yanked back the curtains, raising the large sash windows so that a cool breeze blew in.

  “Won’t she catch her death, Sir?”

  “With luck, she will catch her life,” I said. “Here’s what you will do…”

  I ordered her to run a bath, as hot as could be withstood, and to fill it with herbs from the Company’s Garden—ginger, eucalyptus, peppermint, camphor, if they had it—so that it steamed the room, and to bathe Miss Somerton there twice daily to clear her lungs and raise her blood. She was to scrub the room with bleach to clear contagion; I ordered clean linens and fresh air. Prescribed hot beef broth with garlic hourly and warmed wine to induce a sweat and break the fever. The truth of principles must be confirmed by observation, Sir Astley Cooper had said; the best I could do was prescribe from sound principles and observe the consequences, then adjust.

  I was jotting down instructions when I noticed a bottle of tonic on the bedside table; I took it up and read the label, though I hardly needed to—here as in London, apothecaries made fortunes poisoning patients. I knew what it contained.

  “And throw this out, for God’s sake. She’s to have no more of it, or any like it—is that clear?”

  I told the girl to send for me as soon as Miss Somerton woke. When I stepped out of the room, I spoke to the governor only briefly to say that his daughter was quite ill but would recover with proper treatment as I’d prescribed.

  “No need to see me out,” I said. Then I descended the stairs alone. As I departed through the gleaming monumental columns, I hoped that what I’d promised the governor proved true.

  I spent the rest of that afternoon seeking new lodgings and quickly secured rooms in the Heerengracht, a fashionable and trafficked thoroughfare despite the open sewer that ran down its center. Cafés, shops, and trees lined the street, and each morning it would become my habit to walk to the bakery run by Mrs. Saunders for Dutch coffee and sugar buns, to sit and read the news from here and abroad to the delightful crunch of cane sugar between my teeth, delighted to have word of the larger world, even if it was months old.

  In Edinburgh, I had read with joy of the liberation of Venezuela from Spain, which Mirandus had long dreamed of and fought for; in London I had read with fear of the terrible earthquake in March that had killed thousands in Caracas and given ammunition to those who questioned the new revolutionary government’s justice in the eyes of god. Now I searched the pages for any mention of my friend. Found few. None that told me what I longed to know: how he was.

  The following day, Miss Somerton awakened from her stupor (which confirmed my suspicion that it was not induced by fever but by the laudanum-laced “medicine” she’d been prescribed). I visited daily during her convalescence, which happily was brief—far briefer than I’d thought possible. Attending to the governor’s family, I was excused from my duties as a medical assistant at the hospital. Soon enough she was well enough to descend to dine with her family, and I was invited to dine with them as well.

  The dining room at Government House was of pleasing proportions, the floors polished to a high shine, the walls a pale hue that lent warmth to the pleasantly cool chamber, a balance of elegance and simplicity. Candelabras down the table illuminated the family’s faces in a soft glow. At table were His Lordship, his two daughters, and his youngest son, as well as the local bishop. I was not surprised to learn that the governor himself had commissioned the room’s redecoration in addition to the renovation of the ballroom. He was a man who clearly enjoyed worldly pleasures. Which made it odder still to find that the bishop dined regularly with them. At first I thought this a sign of piety, then of respect for his late wife; only later, when I knew them better, would I understand that the bishop was present to provide a figure of fun.

  Showing me o
ver the house before dinner, the governor had told me of how he had added wings for a ballroom, updated it to its sleek Georgian style; he told me the house had originally been a storage shed, and hardly better than that by the time they’d arrived two years before, “not fit for hounds.” I’d heard on board ship as we’d sailed here that he was extravagant, self-indulgent. Perhaps he didn’t care to govern well. The Cape, after all, was said to be a place where reputations came to die; I intended to be sure mine did not.

  Now as we sat down to dine, Lord Somerton announced, “The doctor approves of our ballroom.” In point of fact, I didn’t—but I appreciated that he spoke as if my opinion might matter.

  “It is impressive,” I said.

  “More than you might guess,” Lord Somerton said. “The house was hardly better than a dog’s kennel when we arrived.”

  “Lucky dogs,” I said.

  Bishop Burnett smiled at me from across the table with gorgeous teeth, and I felt myself recoil. Beautiful dentures were to be seen all around London before I’d sailed for the Cape—the Waterloo ivory, as it was called, plucked from corpses on the battlefield. In truth most came from common graves, from bodies disinterred for sale. Seeing such ivory in the mouths of men in the Strand or Piccadilly, my nostrils filled with the sick-sweet stench of battle and the dissection theater—rotted flesh, gunpowder, offal, mud.

  “That suited the hounds, of course,” Lord Somerton said, “but not us, so we’ve made improvements.”

  It was hard to tell if the governor was praising or mocking me when he spoke of my miraculous powers. “You’re a magician, Doctor,” he said. “We suspect you of alchemy.”

  “I’d hate to think that reason is so rare in these parts as to seem supernatural.”

  “How did you do it?” He reached for Georgiana’s hand, seated to his right, covered hers with his and then raised it to his lips, kissed it. I disliked his politics, but it was hard not to admire the man’s tenderness toward his family.

  “Medicine is often a matter of optimizing the body’s ability to heal. As with a ship, one must avoid overburdening it.” I feared I was dull, pedantic; I must charm. “As in life, success often depends on the judicious application of wine.”

  “I will quote you on that,” said the governor. He signaled a servant to fill our glasses. “Doctor’s orders.”

  It was clear that he was trying to win me over, a fact that disconcerted me. He had no need of my good opinion, although I was relieved to have stumbled on his. Still, I was wary, watchful.

  What I noticed that night was how Lord Somerton seemed transformed in the presence of his family, with the constraints of office cut, leaving him to gentle, mocking exchanges of admirable tenderness and wit. He treated his children as equals, although only Georgiana had reached an age—at 23, two years my senior—that might qualify as adult; he indulged them with most tender affection. Conversation was like a sporting match, each in turn offering a topic that was struck about like a badminton shuttlecock. They discussed local fashion, hunting prospects, the antics of their pets—among which numbered two lizards, four dogs, two monkeys, and a snake.

  We were halfway through the soup course when a monstrous creature, scaly and pale with small shining eyes, rose up from behind the soup tureen and began to make its way down the long oak table, striding like a boxer entering a ring, head down, shoulders raised, occasionally stopping to lift and lower its head like a Mohammedan at prayer, prompting the bishop to drop his spoon into his dish, which caused a clatter and a mess, before His Lordship directed the man at table to serve the lizard its dinner elsewhere, which delighted the youngest girl, Charlotte, no end.

  “Do use the Wedgwood,” she whispered to the manservant as he left.

  “As you wish, Miss,” he replied.

  The child looked at me earnestly, without a trace of mirth, and said, confidingly, “He won’t eat from anything else.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Nor would I. He has good taste. And has he a name?”

  The child looked at me as if I were daft. “But of course.”

  Georgiana came to my rescue, “She calls him Mr. Franklin.”

  I nearly spit my soup. “For the American ambassador?”

  “Because he has an enormous appetite, a bit of a belly, poor eyesight, and appears to want nothing more than his own liberty.”

  “I hadn’t realized one named lizards,” I said.

  “One names one’s dogs,” Miss Georgiana said, as if that explained it.

  “Didn’t Napoleon have a dachshund named Grenouille?” asked the bishop.

  “The American president John Adams is said to have a hound named Satan,” said Lord Somerton.

  “Cerberus would be more fitting,” Miss Somerton replied.

  “Not all the colonies are Hell,” I said.

  “Not all the colonies are colonies,” said Lord Somerton. “The Americans have seen to that. And now, God help us, the South Americans have taken it up.”

  “It will be their undoing,” said the bishop. “Mark my words.”

  “Or their making,” said I. “I understand that Adams also has a horse named Cleopatra. But perhaps that’s more understandable—what man would not want to mount Cleopatra?”

  The bishop stared at me and the table was silent. I was accustomed to dining with soldiers and sailors and fashionable London society, for whom wit might take any subject. I feared I’d overstepped the bounds, given the presence of young ladies, but Miss Somerton smiled and Lord Somerton laughed.

  “By God, I’ll name my next mare that,” he said.

  Night had settled over the bay, and through the windows came the scent of the salt water, the breeze fragrant with jasmine, the lazy hum of flies and bees and birdcalls, and in the distance the sound of drums or surf. Candlelight twitched in the breeze.

  It was Georgiana who turned the conversation from Cleopatra to Shakespeare’s plays.

  “Aren’t they mounting Cleopatra at the African Theater next month?” she said, smiling.

  “Now that’s a performance I’d be glad to observe,” I said.

  The bishop cleared his throat. “I fear you may be disappointed, Dr. Perry, coming from London. Our theatricals are in a sorry state.”

  “Indeed?” I had seen the glorious African Theater, was surprised to hear it was in disrepair.

  “It is most regrettable,” Bishop Burnett said. “The enlisted men are in great need of salubrious recreations.”

  Miss Georgiana coughed into her napkin, evidently to cover a laugh.

  The bishop was a man who would always choose an obscure term over a modest one, not for precision’s sake but vanity’s; he tortured his phrases on the rack of egoism. I’d later learn Miss Georgiana took great pleasure in imitating him behind his back; hearing the bishop speak, I was seized with the absurd sense that he was parodying obfuscation instead of indulging it.

  From our first meeting, I disliked him. The bishop combined the worst aspects of religion: false piety and true pomposity, which in my experience were lethal for both good conversation and good sense. He was a man who took great pains to dictate liberality to others, as if to balance the little generosity he himself possessed. He was thoroughly benevolent in word, if not in deed. He complained bitterly of the local matrons, who refused to give alms to the poor and the lepers, but when asked of his work among them, sniffed and said that of course he wished he had the luxury of time for such pursuits but that his official obligations prevented him. I thought I noticed Miss Georgiana smile at this—as I did.

  “I only wish I could be more useful, Doctor; I am not one of those who spare their own trouble. My sole desire is to be of use to His Lordship and all Cape Christians.…Regrettably, my health and spirits put travel to Robben Island quite out of the question.”

  It did not appear to impede his theatergoing. He held forth on the splendors of Shakespeare and the African Theater and rapturously described having seen an absolutely marvelous production of The Tempest the previous year.<
br />
  “Quite apt for our circumstance,” he said, “stranded as we are.”

  I thought the bishop seemed rather worldly for his post.

  “You see, doctor, there is a paucity of soldiers to perform the female roles. Our soldiers are not amenable to having female parts.”

  I could not help quipping, “As a physician, I must say it would be most distressing to discover that the soldiers here had female parts.”

  Lord Somerton laughed his curious laugh—“Ah, ah!”—as if breathing in joy.

  The bishop looked distressed, gave his pursed little disapproving smile. “I meant, of course, female roles.”

  “Ah.”

  The bishop continued, warming to his subject. “At first I had found it rather alarming to see soldiers dressed as women, but I understand it was the tradition in Shakespeare’s time.”

  “Women weren’t allowed on stage.” I tried to keep any hint of bitterness from my voice.

  “And what of Viola?” Georgiana asked of the heroine of Twelfth Night.

  “An interesting case: Viola was of course played by a man, pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man.”

  “How very confusing,” Georgiana said.

  “Impersonation often is,” I said.

  “Of course, the reverse is not true,” said the bishop. “It’s an absolute delight to see a female perform in a male role, but it is far too rare. Women make such fine men.”

  “Of course,” I said. “No impersonation is required.” An edge in my voice.

  “What can you mean?” the bishop asked.

  “Only that women needn’t impersonate men; they need simply cease impersonating women.”

  “That’s quite true, Doctor,” Georgiana said. “But you’re the first man I’ve heard own it.”

  “The doctor is a rare man,” Lord Somerton said, looking at me over his raised glass.

  “His sort of man is rare indeed,” the bishop said, with what I sensed was not admiration.

  “In an age of taxonomy, you’d think our classifications would be more meaningful,” I said, encouraged by the governor’s evident approval. “We make too much of the distinction between men and women; the differences are less than they appear.”