by E. J. Levy
“Doctor’s here to see you,” the guard said.
De Las Cases stood with evident effort, bracing a hand on the desk. “You are the doctor?”
“I am,” I said, stepping into the cell. “It’s an honor to meet you, sir.”
He smiled. “The pleasure is mine. But I’d have taken you for the governor’s niece, not his doctor. Forgive me.”
A chill rose along my neck. I had been disguised so long—seven years—that I had almost forgotten the mask I wore. Now, it slipped.
“Youth can be misleading,” I said.
I sent the guard away and we sat together, conversing in French—I on the pitiful cot, he on his narrow chair. Had I not found his conditions so appalling, my sympathies would have been with him nonetheless, for all he had done in the service of liberty. I told him of my friendship with General Mirandus, and we spoke of him and of the past and of de Las Cases’s present circumstance, which I promised to have remedied immediately.
“The governor would be appalled to know of your treatment,” I said. “I assure you, he will see it corrected.” I rose to leave.
“Such a pity about General Mirandus,” de Las Cases said, to himself as much as to me. “I liked him, even if he did seduce my mistress. Such a good dancer, so charming, especially to the women…”
The floor tilted beneath me. I sat again on the cot, chilled to the core.
“Oh, dear,” de Las Cases said, “you had not known of it…I am so sorry.”
“He is dead,” I said. “How did he die?”
De Las Cases did not know the details, only that Mirandus had been betrayed into Spanish hands in 1812, after the successful revolt in Venezuela; he’d languished in prison in Cádiz, where he had died on 14 July 1816, just weeks before I’d arrived here on the Cape. It was said that Simón Bolívar had betrayed him.
It took effort to rise from the cot, but I was eager to be out of the place.
“You need not fear a similar fate,” I said, as I stood. “The governor will see to it.”
“You were close?” he asked me.
“He treated me as a son,” I said.
“I have a son,” de las Cases said. “I would be most grateful if you might look in on him, Doctor. While you are here.”
His 15-year-old son was held in an adjoining cell and broke my heart when I saw him. Prison is no place for a child. The boy, when I went to him, was pale and thin and near collapse from the combination of constraint, unsanitary conditions, and nervous exhaustion from his indefinite confinement and the daily effort to transcribe his father’s notes on the emperor. I examined him and found his skin and breath had an unhealthy sour smell, his breathing shallow and too quick. I shouted for the gaoler and inquired about their rations, sanitation, and exercise. I found the conditions shockingly remiss.
“Have you been charged with detaining these prisoners,” I asked, “or killing them? You are quite close to accomplishing the latter with dispatch.”
I ordered a change in diet, including a ration of good red wine and daily meat and vegetables from the Company’s Garden, fresh linens weekly, hot baths, and blankets, as well as access to the yard for daily exercise. If these conditions were not improved immediately, the governor—I said—would hear of it.
He did. I reported to Government House directly after to confer with Lord Somerton, who was as outraged as I by the prisoners’ conditions; he proposed to have them moved to rooms at Newlands, his Palladian villa in the mountains, where they might recover their health in the fresh air. Guards could be posted there, but they would be comfortable. I suggested that perhaps I should stay on at Newlands as well, to look after them in the coming weeks, but the governor only smiled and insisted that he could not spare me; I was needed, he said—he needed me—on the journey east. There was no escaping it.
When I returned to the Castle the following day, I found father and son much improved, as were their chambers—now clean and well lit, with ample blankets and wine. De Las Cases was overjoyed by the governor’s proposal to relocate them to the mountain villa outside town. But the boy’s spirits still seemed dangerously low. Unlike his father, he was not cheered by the ongoing effort to document Napoleon’s life but was weighed down by the tedious task and lack of company.
He had a young man’s impatient sense of time, which is especially burdensome in difficulty, when one cannot imagine that circumstances will ever alter from what they are. So before my next visit I arranged to borrow a carriage from His Lordship’s stable; after arriving in the young man’s cell and asking about his health, I urged him to look down from his window to the street below, where friends of mine were eager to make his acquaintance; as he bent over the stone sill, the two lovely Miss Somertons were there to send up their greeting. When the young man drew his head back into the chamber, his cheeks were pink with health. It was better medicine than any other I might have prescribed. For all of us.
Miss Georgiana’s inquiries afterward into the handsome youth’s health cheered me. I endeavored to interest her in the case, hoping he might engage her heart as I could not. But even my care of Napoleon’s adviser could not provide an excuse for me to avoid the eastward trek, now firmly set to begin on January 27, 1817.
If this were a novel, our journey to the Xhosa king should consume a sprawling chapter, replete with romantic adventure—but in truth the journey was dusty, hot, and exhausting, despite the magnificence of the terrain we traversed.
The day of our departure dawned and we set out from Newlands at the head of a vast army of trackers, servants, soldiers, porters, and guides. Georgiana had taken great pains to ensure our party’s comfort—there would be china, crystal goblets, silver, linens, silk rugs, abundant parasols, an armada of porters and servants bearing wicker baskets of fresh herbs, greens, fruits, and wines. It was only with great exertion that we managed to argue her out of transporting a four-poster bed and canopy, which she felt was an absolute necessity for a good night’s rest.
I was grateful for her excesses, which made my own appear less extreme: Lord Somerton balked at my proposal to bring along my pet goat for the milk that was a staple of my diet, until I assured him we could eat her, if necessity required. In truth, I’d have let them eat me first.
I was not a man for early rising, a fact I regretted whenever I had occasion to rise early and see the world wake; everything seemed softer by first light, tender, more alive; the sky to the east was a radiant rose behind an archipelago of slate-blue clouds. I remembered the sailor’s rhyme: Red sky at morning, sailor take warning. But it looked like a benediction, not a warning. We took breakfast silently, then mounted our horses—or in the case of Miss Georgiana, stepped up into an ox-wagon seat—to begin the long journey over what Georgiana would later call “more rock than road.”
We rode out first along the coast, the water like a field of shattered jewels—sapphire, emerald, palest jade, tourmaline, and lapis lazuli. Glittering. The land we crossed recalled the landscape I had left—the gorse and lichen-colored rocks of Scotland, the verdant green-topped cliffs of Ireland that fell away abruptly to the sea. But instead of the falcons and foxes, rabbits and deer familiar from those northern places, here antelope and white-faced bontebok (with their curious outcurved horns and incurving ears) and mountain zebra confronted us, broke from cover at the sound of our wagons.
As we rode I remarked on the beautiful bontebok, which burst up, balletic, from the brush; Lord Somerton noted, as our trackers had, how few there were relative to years past. Overhunting, he thought. “You could protect them, surely,” I said. “So I can,” he replied. He said that he would and did, dictating that evening a proclamation to his secretary. A man whose word could change the world.
For the first few days we traveled as if on holiday, or as if out for a picnic, eager to sit together in the evening and dine on the wine and cured meats and fresh fruits and vegetables brought from the Company’s Garden and to talk over the things we’d seen that day—the shifting terrain, the l
ush beauty of Constantia’s vineyards, the light on the mountains, the birds and beasts and unfamiliar flowers. We ate speared fish and fire-roasted crayfish, salted and buttered or oiled. Springbok. Then we turned northeast to ride straight across the rocky open plains that stretched east to the Fish River.
By the end of the first week we spoke little in the evenings, exhausted by each day’s long ride, knowing many more lay ahead. We settled into a more intimate silence by the fire, while guards stood armed and ready to fire on hyenas or lions drawn by the smell of roasting meat. Occasionally we fell to the old arguments, the differences between men and women, the European and the African. I tried to engage the governor on the question of strategy, concerned that he placed too much faith in the African king’s ability to command his people. Where once I had held that men and women were less different than they appeared, here I argued the opposite: that British military order might well not obtain among tribesmen.
Hierarchies that he took for granted, I maintained, were not a fact of nature but an artifact of culture. A point he was not eager to concede.
Like all men, Lord Somerton liked the sound of his own voice. He held forth even by a campfire. One of the principal pleasures of living as a man is not having to listen to men mutely. Rare is the man who likes the sound of another’s opinion as much as his own; I did not hesitate to offer mine.
One evening as we argued about the rights of women, he said, “By God, Perry, next you’ll be saying they should have the vote.”
“Should they not?”
“Their emotions would unsuit them,” he said, tossing a twig onto the fire.
“More than a man’s?”
“Of course.”
“Emotion did not unsuit Elizabeth to be queen.”
“She was a son in daughter’s clothing.”
“Aren’t all daughters thus?”
Somerton looked at me with an expression between incredulity and amusement.
“You’re that most dangerous sort of person, Doctor: an idealist.”
“Surely the most dangerous is the ambitious man without ideals?”
“There you are mistaken: an idealist’s fervor burns first in his own breast but ends by scorching others.”
“The strategist is no less pyromaniacal, surely,” I said. “Just with less good cause.”
“Spoken like an idealist,” Lord Somerton said.
I suspected that his cynicism was only skin-deep—the habit of hauteur, rank, and grief. I knew that he’d issued a proclamation the previous year to halt the spread of slavery in the Cape. He could not abolish the loathsome practice, but he did the next best thing: created a registry of all enslaved persons, so that none who were free or freed or had bought their freedom could ever be enslaved again, as many sought to do. And he created a school to educate enslaved children and free them when their studies were done. He was a man of principle, however much he sought to disguise it.
I thought I knew the sort of man he was: one who believed that the protection of the vulnerable was an obligation of the powerful, too often neglected. Noblesse oblige. He thought arguments for enfranchisement would cause harm where they claimed to help; that women, children, natives, the enslaved required assistance and protection, not the burden of rights they were ill-prepared to shoulder; that they’d be harmed by those who wished to help them. Just as I knew that he was wrong. I was the proof. Quod erat demonstrandum. QED.
By day I rode alongside the governor and his aide-de-camp at the front of the group. We spoke less and less, lulled by the routine and the heat, as we crossed the sandy karoo; I found myself increasingly aware of the bodies around me—their weight and scent, the horseflesh and the human. Time lengthened and eddied.
The February sun high and scalding overhead, shadows pooled beneath us, the horizon a ripple of heat; lulled by the rhythm of the horse’s slow steps, my mind sought the shade of other times and other places. An early morning, stocking the shelves of my father’s shop in Cork, where dust motes caught the sunlight and the cool damp of the wooden stockroom was as lovely as a walled garden in its privacy; reading supine upon a leather couch in Lord Basken’s library, a cool July breeze coming in through open windows. Increasingly my thoughts turned to Lord Somerton himself; things he’d said, how his back arched over a basin as he bathed; how he swung up onto his horse in the morning, calves taut.
To avoid such thoughts, I began to walk a portion each day, to collect botanical samples for study. Soon I fell behind the others, as my interest overtook my caution. I felt an almost gluttonous desire to know and identify the local plants and understand their qualities—the way others seemed eager for acquaintance.
Lord Somerton joked that I couldn’t keep my mount. The guides seemed amused by my interest, but soon they began to confide.
The naming of things was a passion for me then—as I had rechristened myself and in so doing been remade. Names had an incantatory quality, seemed a species of magic. Only later, much later, would I recognize the horror of this, how names can fix and contain, diminish and delimit: call a person a woman or a man and we think we know what we are seeing, but do we? Name the boundary of a land—put the terms in a treaty—and what pretends to make peace becomes occasion for seizure and war.
A new name had given me my life, but a name had obscured me as well. Hidden the truth. Cost me. I had not yet grasped the truth of the warning: as soon as we can call it paradise, it is lost to us. As soon as we give it a name, we are separate, apart from that which we once were. When later I learned of a tribal tradition of delaying the naming of a child until it had reached its first year, it seemed wise—not simply because an infant might die and naming is a kind of claiming, making it harder to let go, but because, unnamed, a child remains part of us, inseparable.
I asked the porters many questions and took still more notes. “Don’t touch,” they might say of a thorned or toxic plant, or “Good for fever, and tea.” Eventually they seemed to lose interest in my presence altogether, ignoring me as one of their own. A blissful obscurity.
But Lord Somerton did not grow accustomed to my delays. He grew irritated by my obsessive collecting and cataloguing en route. He took to harassing me with questions, riding up beside me, raising a choking cloud of dust, as I walked behind the entourage.
“What in the world are you looking for, Doctor? Have you become a gardener now?”
“Medicinal plants could be invaluable in treating the local population,” I replied, not looking up from the specimens of leaves and roots I was collecting. “The tropical climes are a veritable pharmacopoeia.”
He suggested that if I wanted to know about local plants, I’d do better to consult with a local farmer. “They know all there is to know about the local plants and their uses. Perhaps you would prefer to consult a witch doctor?”
He tried to disguise his irritation as amusement, his chiding as a joke, but he resented the disorder, rebellion, the refusal to fall into line.
I smiled, refusing to be baited into argument. “I’ve found it best not to credit others’ opinions, but to form my own,” I said, repeating Sir Astley Cooper’s phrase. “The truth of principles must be confirmed by observation,” my watchword.
“And what opinion have you formed of me?” he asked.
“It’s a very complicated case. I’m still deliberating.”
He laughed. “Let me know when you arrive at a diagnosis.” He spurred his horse, cantered ahead despite the uneven ground.
Gradually I fell in with a young Khoikhoi boy, who was charged with leading an ox by its tether to ensure it kept pace. The child could not have been more than six, but he had an unnervingly adult expression, large, thoughtful eyes, which watched me with a disconcerting attentiveness that I sought to deflect with questions about the plants we passed.
“Why you want know?” he asked.
“Some may prove helpful,” I said.
“They help already.”
“Will you show me?”
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sp; The child did not answer, but as we walked he would nod to plants and seemed amused to see me hurrying to gather a sample. “Cures fever.” “Good tea.” “Stops heat.” “Brings up stomach.”
Later when we had stopped, I brought goat’s milk and dried fruit to the boy, wine for his father who was a porter; we talked by the porters’ fire of my pet goat, of London, of medicine. I showed them my sword; they laughed at my high red bootheels.
The child—whose name I learned was Pearl—reached up to touch my cheek, said something in a language I did not understand.
“He says, ‘You have no beard,’” the father translated.
“It is fashionable to have a smooth cheek,” I said.
The father translated.
The boy squinted at me, skeptically, and said something else.
No one translated that, and I didn’t inquire.
At night in my tent, I loosened my bindings. A sour smell arose from my skin. The skin around my ribs and breasts was painful to the touch—bloody, blistered, slick with pus where the bandages rubbed. In the past I’d felt my chest bindings to be almost an embrace, a securing, as if I were lashed to the world or my good name as Odysseus was to the mast, but in the tropical heat of that three-month journey, my bindings became stifling. I developed open sores where my bindings chafed as we rode, a bloody line of demarcation across my sternum and beneath my ribs. At least the horses’ girths were removed at night; mine rarely were. I could not be sure when I might be called into the cold night, discovered by lamplight.
I tried binding tighter to prevent the bandages from shifting as I rode or walked, but the result was blinding headaches, a permanent ache in my chest and neck; I feared that I might faint. I added another layer in hope that the blood would not stain my shirt, seep through the fabric to the surface.
