The Cape Doctor

by E. J. Levy

  “You’re an advocate for the rights of women, then?”

  “I am,” I said.

  “More like the wrongs,” Lord Somerton said.

  “Are they so different?” I asked.

  “Right and wrong?” Somerton said.

  “Men and women, Lord Somerton.”

  “Surely in your profession, you’ve noticed a few differences.”

  There was a general ripple of laughter.

  “Fewer than are generally claimed,” I said.

  “Your powers of discrimination appear to have been impaired by our tropical sun.”

  “Perhaps my sight’s grown keener. Do you not observe that in some persons there’s hardly any difference at all? The hermaphrodite’s existence suggests the differences are fewer than meet the eye.”

  A quiet fell as I raised the indelicate subject. Sanna.

  “Surely you don’t mistake the exception for the rule, Dr. Perry?”

  “The exception proves the rule: tests and affirms it.”

  Lord Somerton dismissed me with a turn of his head as he began to converse with Captain Glover on his left, ending the general conversation. I felt the rebuke, resented it.

  I looked directly at the governor, speaking of what we’d never spoken, my voice loud over the general murmur of polite conversation: “The manumitted Malay slave Sanna, for example—.” I was straying into dangerous terrain, but I waited for him to stop me, to change our course. “Surely you are acquainted with her, Your Lordship? She is said to be a favorite—how shall we say—topic among Cape gentlemen.”

  It was an open secret: the pleasure Cape gentlemen took in sex with Sanna, when it suited them, forced or paid. I’d never spoken of the night that I had found her outside Newlands. The night I’d gone to tell him I was pregnant, a year ago, the night I’d made my choice to leave instead, to go to Mauritius. I suspected he knew her well.

  Now he looked at me as if I were a stranger, coldly, as if wondering how I’d come to be in this room. I braced for outrage. I had not anticipated the practiced indifference of the men present.

  The men laughed, considered it a joke. Only Somerton, Pringle, and I did not.

  It must have been clear that Lord Somerton and I were arguing about something more than politics, our private battle increasingly a public affair. A risk to us both.

  I was relieved when the evening drew to a close, to be free to hurry out into the night. I stepped into the garden and found my way along the gravel paths to the lemon grove where Georgiana and I had often met in the past to sit on a bench and talk; I sat down to wait for her. The air was thick with the sharp floral fug of ripening fruit. Perhaps half an hour passed beneath the field of stars before I accepted that she would not come. I was rising to leave when I heard footfalls, looked up and saw Lord Somerton walking slowly past the rosebushes beyond the trees. I nearly called out to my friend, when I saw him pause, cut a flower, trim its stem, and turn around to give it to his lady, who emerged from the dark to stand beside him. They turned together and began walking back the way they’d come, her head gently resting on his shoulder. An unhurried, tender pace.

  I stood stock-still, hoping—as I rarely did—to go unseen. They passed on and I stepped out alone into the dark.

  After that celebratory dinner, I saw little of my former friend.

  I waited for his card to arrive, half hoping none would, so painful had our reunion been. It was customary here as in London for a newly married man to send out calling cards to those friends respectable enough to be retained now that his bachelorhood was at an end. None came. I was not surprised.

  We would continue to meet on official business, but it was clear I did not rank among his intimates. I missed him keenly. Worse than lonely, I felt erased. I seemed a ghost, unseen, without a mirror in which to recognize myself. Except in work. Work my mirror.

  But as often is the case, the poison proved the cure: what I dreaded most—separation—revived me. Thrown back onto my work, my few friends (the journalist, the pharmacist), I returned to meaningful pursuits, to the steady effort to understand, to efforts whose outcome might matter and last, unlike dinner banter.

  I wondered at all the time I’d wasted in idleness.

  It was late December, approaching Christmas, when I arrived home from the hospital one evening to see in the bowl on the table in the hall a calling card—Lord Somerton’s. I was surprised at the relief I felt—no, the joy—until I lifted it and found beneath it, like a matched glove, another from his wife. I tore them up and tossed them on the fire.

  After I received his card, I again joined Lord Somerton’s family for the theater or a lecture on occasion; we dined together once more; these were invitations I could not refuse. But our meetings were strained. Lady Somerton’s subtle wit seemed at times to betray an understanding of my true identity. I thought sometimes—by the irritated flutter of her fan, the frequency of sighs and coughs—that she was displeased by my presence in their box at the theater or at table, but if she was, she did not prevent it.

  Our evenings were diluted now by other visitors in any case, as if I were part of society, not family as I had been. I didn’t need to wonder if this was Lady Somerton’s doing. But I wondered what she knew of our relationship. What she guessed.

  My conversations with her were a careful pas de deux, as I parried inquiries about my family and my origins. In the past Lord Somerton would have protected me, deflected imprudent questions, ended such talk with a glance, but now he hardly seemed to notice I was there. I sensed in my private conversations with Lady Somerton that she guessed that her husband and I were—or had been—intimates. But she said nothing. The unacknowledged hung over us. We dined under Damocles’s sword.

  The strain of countering Lady Somerton’s inquiries grew daily more wearisome. And by the following January, without having made the decision, I found myself in their company less and less, more and more frequently engaged in overseeing vaccinations in Simon’s Town and Rondebosch, checking on private patients in Caledon, experimenting with botanicals at Mr. Poleman’s lab, writing reports, and battling the poisoners who passed themselves off as apothecaries.

  My work absorbed and consoled me.

  Increasingly I contrived to spend my time away from Newlands and Government House, to linger in the Heerengracht over my bowl of coffee and the sugar buns that Psyche admired; it was not only Lady Somerton’s presence that inclined me to more solitary pursuits but the rumors that found their way to me through Cloete. (Even Dantzen acknowledged, when pressed, that he still heard them.) The whispers of an unnatural attachment between the governor and me circulated still, even now when we were no more than distant acquaintances. I suspected that Bishop Burnett or the pharmacists (who had become my enemies) were behind the rumors, but I had no proof. It became yet another reason to leave town, throw myself into my work, shun society as increasingly it shunned me. I kept my apartment at Newlands, but I was rarely there.

  Although Lord Somerton and I rarely met privately, our public collaboration grew stronger as our personal bond ebbed. I sent reports and requests but rarely did I confer with him in person, as I had. My list of private patients increased, thanks to his endorsement of my skill, keeping me away from town to see to their care. I grew wealthy and busy. I wondered if his enthusiastic promotion of my expertise was apology or if it was an attempt to keep me away from Cape Town, inspecting medical conditions far afield. It hardly mattered the reason. My work consumed me. To my relief. Days apart became weeks, then a month.

  I returned to my apartment at Newlands one summer night in late February, too weary to continue on to town, expecting to find myself alone; I was surprised to find the house lit, a carriage out front. The new family enjoying a quiet evening together in the country; if I had not been so tired, I might have ridden on. As it was, I hoped I might retreat quietly to my rooms, but I met Miss Georgiana in the foyer. “Do join us, Doctor,” she said. I could not decline.

  We were seated in the
library at Newlands that evening, Psyche in my lap, the women at their needlepoint, as I read. Our first evening alone since their return, three months before.

  “Does it have a name, your dog?” Lady Somerton inquired as she pulled her needle through its frame.

  “Psyche, Your Ladyship.”

  “Peculiar name for a dog,” Lord Somerton said, as if the name had not been his idea. I wondered if he could have forgotten.

  “You know the story, darling,” his wife said. “Psyche was the most beautiful of mortal women, even the gods were envious; so Venus sent her son, Cupid, to poison her. But Cupid fell in love instead. They married…” She rested a hand on her husband’s arm.

  “All love should end in marriage,” said Georgiana.

  I wondered where Captain Glover was these days.

  “Of course,” I said, “the story doesn’t end there.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Lady Somerton looked at me.

  “How does it end?” Georgiana asked.

  “Well, because Cupid was a god and Psyche mortal, it was agreed among the gods that she must never look on him,” I said. “Lest his identity be revealed and all lost. The pair lived happily enough, until envious women convinced Psyche that the man she loved was a monster. So one night as Cupid slept beside her, she lit a candle, saw his true form, and lost him forever.”

  “How sad,” Georgiana said.

  “Psyche became a goddess,” I said. “And immortal for her trouble.”

  “But she was alone,” said Lady Somerton.

  “Is that such a terrible price?” I asked.

  “Perhaps we should consult Psyche,” Lord Charles said, looking to the dog in my arms, then me.

  “I fear she won’t answer you, my Lord. She’s most discreet.”

  “A virtue in a dog, as in a man,” Lord Somerton said. It was the first time he’d met my eyes since their return, the faintest warming.

  “Indeed,” I said.

  Outside the windows, night had settled over the bay, the breeze fragrant with gardenia, gone the day’s lazy hum of flies and bees and birdcalls, in the distance the sound of the beautiful dangerous surf.

  When a few days later we entered the African Theater together for a performance of Much Ado About Nothing, I sensed that whatever Lady Somerton might have imagined or guessed, she had come to a decision. It was settled. As we three ascended the theater stairs, she took Lord Charles’s arm in hers and then my own, a gesture I understood perfectly. She had won and she knew it; whatever she knew about me, she would accept me in their house—perhaps recognizing, as I did now, that whatever our past, I had no claim on her husband’s affections.

  When the letter arrived from Governor Somerton several weeks later, on March 18, 1822, announcing my appointment to the post of Colonial Medical Inspector—the highest rank a physician could attain in the colony—I knew that I had been forgiven, even if I did not know what I’d been forgiven for, what there was to forgive. I was grateful for the authority it granted, the faith in me it betokened. The chance to save lives.

  Increasingly I focused on the patent-medicine merchants, whose profitable poisoning of the public they passed off as medical help.

  Reading the local paper had become a trial. More advert than news, the Cape Courant and the new, independent South African Commercial Advertiser advertised “remedies” sold by local shops even as they reported the untimely deaths of those I suspected had been poisoned by the very remedies they took as cure. The papers made no mention of the recent riot at the leper colony; the papers hardly qualified as news at all, but it was a civilizing sign—a sure mark of progress—to have a free press in which citizens could exchange ideas and views, unencumbered, un-harassed by government.

  I was sitting in Mrs. Saunders’s coffee shop, taking in the morning papers and the companionable bustle of the street outside that April morning, when I read about the death of a young mother; the month before, it had been a child. I threw the paper down onto the table, enraged, then stood and gathered up Psyche. “Everything all right, Dr. Perry?” Mrs. Saunders called across the room. I shoved in my chair and pushed through the crowded café toward the door. “No,” I shouted back, as I set out for Tunhuys. “It is not right.”

  The reforms I had in mind will strike any reasonable person as common sense; I sought only to ensure that those who presented themselves in the garb of medical men were what they claimed. Which is to say, I proposed—in my new role as Colonial Medical Inspector—to license only those who could demonstrate that they had in fact been trained in the medical arts. (One would not think this an undue standard.) But where there is profit there will be outrage at being asked to prove oneself worthy of payment.

  As is common amongst those driven primarily by greed, bullying and insults were their principal weapons; where reason failed to argue their case, threat of violence would.

  Cloete showed me into the governor’s office. I waited in the once-familiar room, noticing once-familiar things—the desk on which we’d entwined our limbs; the window against which I’d braced my hands, the Governor behind me; a marvelously firm, striped settee that accommodated two bodies perfectly. The room and its furnishings loud with the past.

  When the governor entered, I was startled, stood, glad that I’d worn my highest red-heeled boots; my best coat. I rested one hand on the hilt of my sword, the other on the chairback. If Lord Somerton was unsettled to see me, he hid it well.

  I got straight to the point. As Medical Inspector, I wished to license only those who could prove they had been trained in medicine.

  “Demonstrate by what means?” the governor asked, settling into his chair behind his desk.

  “The usual standard—a diploma or other writ from a European institution will suffice. It’s hardly extravagant to require—”

  “Is it really necessary, Doctor?” He’d no doubt heard from the pharmacists on the matter. “It is a business.”

  “It is an outrage,” I said.

  “Men must be free to make a living—”

  “At the cost of others’ lives? If mountebanks, scoundrels, and all manner of quack are free to practice their pretense of medicine in the Cape, I might as well toss out my own degree.”

  “Dr. Perry—” His conciliatory tone enraged me, a tone one takes with a child.

  “The weight of learning may well hold little weight here, but I caution you that the cost of countenancing such ignorance is high—as you well know, having paid the price yourself.”

  I saw instantly that I’d said too much. I’d not meant to be cruel in reminding him of his first wife’s death, only convincing, but I saw my friend flinch, if evident only in the slight lift of his chin, then the sudden interest he took in a brass button on his cuff.

  “You need not tutor me in costs or Cape governance, Doctor,” he said.

  “I meant only—”

  He did not allow me to finish, holding up his hand, palm forward. He did not meet my eye. “I know what you meant,” he said. “I know that you mean well, but there are other interests to balance. It is my job to balance them.” He lifted his eyes from his cuff. “Will that be all, Doctor?”

  “Yes, thank you,” I said. It would have to be.

  I imagined myself acting on principle, but there was vanity in my proposal too. Personal interest. When he had ratified my plans in the past, his approval had seemed to betoken an allegiance between us akin to the love we shared, but better in that it was public, not private—no possible occasion for shame. I hoped that such public collaboration might continue, despite our estrangement, bear fruit, grow into some good enduring thing. As love had not.

  I left uncertain if my recommendation would carry, whether I’d made my case. What I’d proposed seemed so sensible a solution, but I knew that good sense did not always win out—or even weigh heavily in the balance where there was profit to be made.

  The following day, I sent the governor a formal proposal for patent-medicine reform and awaited his reply, knowing
the measures would have weight only with his support. The proposal was simple—a matter of common sense: the Cape colony’s medical code should be amended to require all those who wished to practice as a Physician, Surgeon, or Apothecary first to present the necessary professional documents from the established universities or colleges in Europe. Those suitably qualified would be licensed. The rest would not, and could not practice medicine, poisoning patients for profit. As Medical Inspector, I would review the applications myself.

  I waited to hear from him.

  I was not surprised when I did not.

  You can judge a culture by its medicine, by how it treats its most vulnerable—the ill. In Cape Town there were the leprotic slaves and indentured servants, freed of their obligations only when they could no longer work. There was rampant venereal disease, riots at the leper colony, cholera that was really poverty by another name. There was the slave accused of stealing sugar and tried by the local police by means of a drunken game of Russian roulette, shot dead as punishment without even the pretense of a trial.

  We treat the body in isolation; that is our first mistake. From its entry into the world, a body is not alone—singular, but decisively linked, forged by the body that encloses and expels it. Only in death. Only then. Is the body alone. Health depends on treating not simply the body but the bodies that surround it: a system, you might say, a congregation of a sort. The only faith I had.

  In the years following Lord Somerton’s marriage I had ample reason to wish myself free of Cape Town, away from the chill civility of the governor’s house, free of the whole Somerton family, which once had seemed my own. Given my duties as Colonial Medical Inspector and Inspector of Vaccines, and despite being the Governor’s Physician, I had ample occasion to leave; I took it.