by E. J. Levy
I begged a moment to dress, just enough time to pull on breeches and boots and a coat over my nightshirt, which I tucked into the pants and without delay or thought before I hurried forth into the night.
When I arrived at Tunhuys, the house was lit as for a party and filled with voices, which carried onto the veranda as I crossed it, passing horses and carriages held at the door. The foyer, when I entered, was crowded with local functionaries—among them I recognized the bishop; Somerton’s aide-de-camp; the Colonial Medical Inspector; and Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Bird, the Deputy Colonial Secretary.
“Dr. Perry,” one called out to me as I began to ascend the stairs. “A word with you.”
Miss Georgiana nodded her assent, so I crossed to the assembled men. I learned quickly that I would not be the first to see the governor, who had arrived home earlier that day in a fever; in my absence he had been attended by the director of hospital, who had declared his case foregone. Colonel Bird held in his hands a letter, which he was prepared to send forth to London, to notify Lord Bathurst of the governor’s dire condition, so the authorities might prepare for his replacement, should that prove necessary. They awaited my corroboration as a formality.
The Deputy Secretary held out the letter to me. I refused to touch it, only scanned its few lines as if I were reading a warrant for my own death. My skin went cold. I knew the power of such official documents—that once the paper was signed, the news of his imminent demise dispatched to England, it would be as fact. My own life had been transformed by so simple and miraculous an act—I could not allow the letter to be sent. He would die of the news, I thought, by its reporting.
“Gentlemen,” I said, defying them to contradict me. “He will live.”
“Your sentiment is admirable, Doctor, but your optimism seems unwarranted. You’ve yet to see the patient…”
“I will see to the patient as soon as your departure allows it, but I must have your word that no mention will be made of this until I have made a determination in the case.”
“I’m afraid his fate has been determined already,” said the bishop. “By higher authority than ours.”
“He will live,” I said again. “Unless you condemn him to death with your words.”
The men glanced at one another, understanding the threat I intended this to be. If the governor lived, their letter would serve as warrant for their own political demise.
“How much time do you need?” the medical inspector asked.
“A week,” I said. “Perhaps two, depending on how I find him.”
“You have two days,” Colonel Bird said.
“That’s hardly time enough to determine a cause, let alone provide cure.”
“Two days, Doctor. That is all. Then we must notify the authorities or be remiss in our duty.”
“Not a word of this until then,” I said, knowing I would do no better, no matter the soundness of my argument; reason is no match for cowardice. “I have your word, gentlemen.”
They looked to each other, then to me; they nodded. I did not wait to see them go; I took the stairs two at a time and found Georgiana waiting on the landing above. I asked her how he was and what had happened, and she told me of how the fever had come on shortly after they’d arrived at Roundhouse, after he’d returned from inspecting the local prison, but her father had ignored it—ridden out anyway.
When I asked after his symptoms, fearing he might be beyond giving a clear account of same, she spoke of headache, high fever, a rash on his chest that was spreading; when he’d grown intolerant of the bright sunlight that flooded Roundhouse and began to ask after his dead wife, they had returned home at once, hoping to find me.
She gestured to a room at the end of the hall. “He’s in there.”
I stepped toward the door, when she took my arm. “He may not recognize you, Doctor. He has not recognized me today.”
I entered the room and found what I’d most feared—the stench of typhus unmistakable as a stable’s or the sea’s. A reek of urine and grain. Not Behier’s odor of blood but a mouselike scent, quite unlike the smell of death; it is closer to that of baked bread, attracting flies before the dying are even dead. I knew it instantly.
The light was dim, despite an oil lamp lit beside the bed—the smell flooded my senses. On his face, the sheen of sweat and glow of fever. Red spots were visible on his arms and where his gown lay open on his chest.
I had heard how typhus wiped out whole armies on the field before battle ever began; I’d heard much about the disease but never treated it, nor heard of it successfully cured. The cure, it seemed, was death.
I sank into a chair beside the bed and took his hand in mine, feeling for the pulse. He groaned and turned toward me, but his eyes had the moist brightness of delirium. When I reached for a cloth—from a basin beside the bed—to sponge his brow, his teeth chattered from the chill, despite the room’s oppressive heat, the blanket-heaped bed. He grasped my hand and held it, pressed it to his lips, and for a moment I thought he knew me.
“Don’t go,” he said.
I was startled by his voice. “I won’t.”
“My love,” he said.
I hesitated before bending to the edge of his bed, my head leaned close to his.
“Yes,” I said. “What is it?”
“Elizabeth.” His late wife’s name.
I told myself it didn’t matter if he mistook me for someone else; everyone did; everyone believed I was someone I was not.
Curiously, the error recalled me to myself; I stood and went to the door, ordered hot wine brought, garlic, gauze, scalding water, fresh linens, the house awakened as if it were midday.
Although this was my first case of typhus, it was a disease that I knew well by reputation; it had ravaged soldiers, laid waste whole regiments. I was afraid both for the governor and for myself in its presence, but I knew no one must sense my fear. Above all, I wondered, What to do? I recalled first principles, as a child recalling catechism. His body was fighting the fever; there was little to do against the disease itself, save for help him in the fight. So I set to cleaning the sores, ordered the bedding changed and linens burned, the governor stripped; I dabbed each open wound, each new red spot, with wine and hot water to lessen the contagion. To lend him strength I fed him spoonfuls of hot beef broth with crushed garlic, applied milk poultices to draw the fever, warm wine to strengthen the blood.
We had two days to prove the others wrong, to prove history itself wrong. It was true that a few men survived typhus, but the reasons were not clear—such survival seemed miraculous. I could not plan a miracle. Instead we sat together that first night shuttered in the room, which reeked now of bleach and garlic and hot wine, the curtains pulled closed against the coming morning light, which disease made painful to him; it was as if we shared a perpetual night, lengthened just for us. There was no treatment known for typhus; I knew it to be a painful and an undignified way to die, swaddled, oozing pus and shit, and though I’d long ago given up on gods, I prayed to whatever principle of life that there might be to save this man I loved, my friend.
When at dawn that first morning Colonel Bird returned to check on the governor’s progress, I threw him out; I sent away even Lord Somerton’s daughters.
“He is our father,” Georgiana said. “It’s only right that we be with him.”
“And I am his physician, and I tell you that if you want to help him—and help me save him—you will get out. This is no place for women.”
When there was a knock on the door a few moments later, I couldn’t help it—I shouted. “What now, in God’s name? This is a sickroom, not a society ball.”
I flung open the door and found my servant Dantzen there, elegant as always in his red coat, cut exactly as my own. “I thought you might like some refreshment, sir,” he said. He held out a pitcher of goat’s milk, and a glass, upon his tray.
I could not see if it was wit or pity in his eyes. “I would, I would indeed. Thank you.”
“Shall I set it down?” he started to enter the room.
“No,” I said. “Safer not to. I’ll take it. Could you ask them to send up more hot wine?”
As that first dawn waned into day, Lord Charles grew weaker, his teeth chattering despite the feather coverlet and blankets heaped on the bed, his face pale, slick with sweat, his fingers raking the sores that appeared on his arms and chest. Despite the gloves I had placed on his hands to lessen the damage done by his feverish scratching, his skin opened where he rubbed. I should have had him tied down, but I could not bear to have him restrained like Gulliver among the Lilliputians.
I did not sleep for two nights; I watched him as he wrestled with the devil of disease, invisible as spirits. Grateful that he had been and was a robust man, temperate in his habits, except when it came to women and horses and dogs.
As that first full day wore on into darkness, he stilled, grew quiet, his inactivity more chilling than his feverish movements had previously been the night before. I knew then that I would lose him; that he would die. And I knew that I loved him more than I had known, more than I had loved anyone. More than Mirandus. Perhaps even more than my mother and sister. And that his loss would matter more to me than even their loss had. It would be like losing myself. The prospect of life without my friend was as black and featureless as the moonless night outside.
I made a child’s bargain with the night: that if I staved off sleep, Lord Somerton would live. I paced the room, as he’d have done; I read, watched him sleep, wiped his brow. Sometime toward daybreak I must have taken a seat in the chair beside the bed again and slept, for I woke there with a start, heart pounding. Alarmed. Sure that I would find him, as I had my mother, dead at dawn.
The room was dark; I heard no sound from the bed, no breath, no movement. I could not bear to light another lamp. Instead I sat beside him, waiting. As dawn came on that second morning, the light slowly filled the room, grey as water rising around us; I looked to the bed and saw the gentle rise and fall of the coverlet. He had survived the night. Might yet live. It was my last thought before I fell asleep again, exhausted.
A few hours before the colonel and his entourage were to arrive to make their final determination, I threw open the curtains on the now fading day and saw familiar stars—Canopus, Sirius—rising in the east, the same stars we’d lain under together months before, when I thought them lucky. I loosened my shirt, tugged open the collar, discarded my coat, raised the window to air out the stench of sour sweat and loose bowels.
When I heard a sound from the bed, a moan, I turned and went to him. I leaned over him, the soft cloth of my shirt falling forward, loose to graze his chest.
I looked into his tired eyes, clear now of fever, clasped his hand; he smiled as he met my eyes, recognizing me at last, then he looked down and his expression changed. Like wind shifting on a sea or lake. First troubled, then amused. I reached up my hand to close my collar, but it was too late. I’d revealed what I had spent a dozen years disguising.
“It’s not as it appears,” I said, straightening, one hand on the bed to steady me.
“Evidently,” he said.
“I can explain,” I began.
“I believe, Doctor, you could explain away anything.” He set his hand on mine. “But the truth of principles must be confirmed by observation.”
And then he laughed—a crushed, croaking version of his usual laugh. And I knew that he would live. I didn’t know if I’d survive all he knew. And all I did.
For a few days after Lord Somerton’s recovery I stayed in town with Liz, the woman I’d met at the Rainbow Ball, avoiding my rooms in the Heerengracht, so as to dodge the governor’s messengers, who came daily—my landlady said—most probably to summon me to Tunhuys. I took the occasion to make the long journey to Caledon to oversee vaccinations there. I visited the prison at Rondebosch to do the same. I visited my private patients, and the soldiers at the hospital and sailors at Simon’s Town, claiming I’d been too much absent from these, remiss in my duty, but in truth I was afraid.
He had been amused, even tender, it’s true, when he’d made the discovery, but he was still quite ill then, I knew. Having recovered his strength, his masculine egoism, the authority of his office and its prejudices, he might respond in ways I could not guess. I knew that he was a gossip, and on a whim might undo me. He was fond of jokes, but not when they were played on him.
So I busied myself with work. In Rondebosch I tried to get the warden to answer my questions on the prisoners’ conditions—diet, exercise, ventilation—but I was met with silence and claims that no such records were kept. So I asked to see the prisoners themselves to inquire of them; their memories seemed far better than the warden’s, who objected to the interviews.
“Why ask blacks, while Christians are present to answer?” the warden bellowed.
“Given the prisoners’ conditions, sir, I’d hardly call you a Christian. Now, if you’ll allow me to finish my interviews, we’ll both be eager of my departure, I’m sure.”
I sent a detailed report with my recommendations regarding improvement of sanitation, exercise, and diet, as well as the immediate replacement of the warden, to the governor’s office. I did not go myself. I labored both to fill the hours and to find pretext to be far from Cape Town, but also to prove my worth as a physician, should Lord Somerton have occasion now to doubt it.
My fate was quite literally in his hands. If he chose to reveal my secret, it would mean more than public embarrassment, more than scandal, more than the loss of my position as the governor’s physician. It would mean infamy, penury, court-martial, jail, very possibly death. At the very least, it would mean the loss of what I held most dear: my position as an officer and gentleman, my friendship with Lord Somerton, and Africa. I had made enemies enough in Cape Town to birth an eager audience to see me hanged.
It was our longest separation since we’d journeyed east to see King Ngqika, and I missed my friend, but I kept myself busy with the crises an outpost hospital will present. The wind blew hot and dusty in the day. Cool nights followed, littered with stars.
Twice, in the month after his recovery, Lord Somerton had summoned me to Government House, and twice I had declined on account of medical commitments. The third request threatened to send the next by armed guard. The notes he sent came in his hand and were curt, absent the warmth of his usual correspondence. He proposed that we meet at Roundhouse, where—though he was not yet fit to hunt—he intended to spend a few days convalescing, free of the cares of state and the dust and stench of town. Roundhouse was en route to Simon’s Town, where I’d gone to attend to sailors; I could stop on my way back to town, he noted; it would not delay me in my duties to spare an hour there for luncheon. His daughters, he said, would have to remain in town for a ball; we would be alone, undisturbed, save for servants. Whatever was said, we would be the only ones to hear it.
I had no choice but to accept. So after early-morning rounds among the patients, I rode out for the hunting lodge where Somerton had taught me to shoot and ride a year before.
When I arrived at Roundhouse approaching noon, an unfamiliar servant showed me into the library, which overlooked the garden and the sea below.
“His Lordship will be with you presently,” he said and left me there alone.
Beyond the window, the ocean boomed like a cannon. The strange monoliths arrayed like Stonehenge made me miss England. The sky was radiant aquamarine, the sea indigo, like a sheet of sapphire. The beauty of the day was in stark contrast to the darkness in my spirit. My mind raced. I imagined him enraged; I pictured him contemptuous and distant. I could not imagine how we might go forward from here.
Despite my trepidation, when he entered and I turned to see him there, I was flooded with relief to see my friend so well, restored to health, although his face was thin, clearly lighter by a full stone. He was followed by a manservant who bore a wicker hamper, such as we had used on our trip to the Xhosa king. For a moment I wondered if he
intended for us to dine in the garden al fresco, as we had then, or if he had come to buy me off and send me packing.
His face was unreadable, a formal friendliness. Quite unlike the last time we’d met.
I hardened my face too, glad to have worn my dress uniform, my thigh-high boots with the polished red heels; if I was to be dismissed, I would receive the news in style. I touched the hilt of my sword.
“I am gratified to see Your Lordship looking so well.”
“It is thanks to your ministrations, Dr. Perry.” He turned to the servant. “You may leave the case there. We do not wish to be disturbed.”
“As you wish, my Lord.”
The doors clicked shut, leaving us alone.
“It’s good of you to have come,” he said.
“I was unaware that I had a choice.”
“You didn’t,” he said. “But I’m nonetheless delighted to see you.” I noticed that he did not pace. His stillness made me uneasy.
“I’d have thought you’d seen altogether too much of me,” I said.
He laughed.
I blushed. “I did not mean,” I began. “I meant, with your illness. You’ve seen too much of doctors.”
“You’re far more to me than that,” he said. “I could never see too much of you.”
I listened for irony, for dismissal, heard none.
“I owe you my life,” he said.
“In this, then, we are equals,” I said.
He frowned, as if considering the remark. He was vain of rank. I feared I had offended.
