The Cape Doctor

by E. J. Levy

  I did not know, would not know for years, what I’d helped to birth that day.

  Chapter Ten

  The End of the Affair

  For those in Cape Town, my transfer to Mauritius must have seemed an exile, a punishment like Dante’s when the Black Guelphs cast him out of Florence. In truth I had put in the request for transfer as soon as Lord Somerton’s plans became clear. As soon as it was clear that I was no longer welcome to join them in England. In September 1828—two and a half years after he left the Cape—I did.

  I requested the posting to Mauritius for reasons of my own; I did not dare to say it, even to myself; I didn’t dare to hope, to let myself want what I wanted so very badly: to find our son. I thought that I might recognize him in the street or among my patients’ children—a boy of ten, his features familiar as my own or those of the man I loved—I held out hope that I might recognize his voice, his face, might hear word of him, of a boy adopted into an officer’s family a decade before. Every call to every house I hoped would bring him to me. I prayed it would. Not to God exactly but to whatever principle kindles life, to whatever helped me save lives in the past. I prayed to skill, I suppose, or to the something beyond skill that seemed to overtake me when I worked well.

  I told no one of this. Not even Dantzen, who of everyone might have understood, Dantzen whose entire family had been taken from him, his arms prised open, his pregnant wife pulled from his chest along with their two-year-old son. He never saw them again. I knew of it only because he had been close to death a few months after he came into my service; he had fallen ill, delirious with fever, and had relived in terrible hallucinatory dreams the whole ordeal, which I witnessed by his side. I knew it must be true—those nightmares—when I asked about them later, after he’d recovered, and he seemed startled, shocked, then looked away, and said he never spoke of the past and never spoke of it again. I understood.

  For a year in Mauritius I worked hard and well and effectively, charged with the singular hope that this day I would find my son. But as the months passed, I began to lose that hope.

  By the time the appeal to return to London came that late August day in 1829, I had all but given up hope.

  It might have been a breeze through the open window that made the letter tremble in my hand, but I knew better. Outside the day was already ablaze despite the early hour. Sounds of surf and cowbells through the open window as animals moved through the streets of Port Louis and children called out. Wind still cool.

  I set my hand on the table to steady it.

  “Everything all right, sir?” Dantzen asked. He was standing by the kitchen table, tearing up sugar buns for Psyche’s breakfast. The greedy dog sat on a wooden chair and shivered in anticipation, snorting.

  “Lord Somerton is gravely ill.” I did not dare say more. I did not need to. I folded the page back inside the envelope and slipped it inside my coat.

  I was grateful for Dantzen’s discretion; he did not say that he was sorry; he did not express condolence of any kind. Mawkish sympathy would have been a curse.

  There was no time for me to apply for a leave of absence. The letter had taken months to arrive; my friend was dying, might already be dead; I must go to him. Dantzen understood the risks as well as I. To go absent without leave, without making any official application for leave, was a grave military offense; I could lose my commission as a soldier, lose my license to practice medicine, lose the reputation that I had sacrificed so much to restore; face court-martial, jail; I could lose everything, again. Dantzen understood as I did that there was no choice. I’ve never known a more reasonable man.

  The ship that had brought the letter, the brig Rifleman, would sail for England in two days’ time; I would be on it.

  Since coming to Mauritius the year prior, I’d hardly thought of the past; I thought of my patients, my work, each day a new oblivion, absorbed in delicious necessity—sutures, surgery, battling the daily insults that wear a body down, not illness but indifference, inattention to the body’s needs.

  Now it all came back to me, as I beheld the letter that bore a handwriting familiar as they once were, the Somertons. I’d recognized the hand instantly as Georgiana’s; I would have recognized her hand anywhere, its gentle loops, its reticent, skeptical, backward slant. She had written for her stepmother, as I had written for my own mother more than twenty years before when she could not hold a pen, her hand unsteady with emotion, as mine was now. The letter was not sealed in black wax; I was grateful for that.

  It was a small matter to pack; most of my belongings had been sold off in Cape Town, when I’d thought that I would be accompanying Lord Somerton to London. When instead he had abandoned me there, I’d not replaced them.

  There are men who go to sea to escape trouble on land and feel freed by the voyage; I’m not one of them. I like trouble, if it’s worth being troubled about. And I loathe the sea, or rather voyaging upon it. It is the worst of all possible modes of transport: little privacy, no solitude, restricted movement, unstable ground. Joachim du Bellay, the French poet, once wrote, Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage. Happy the man who, like Ulysses, has made a good voyage. I never have. I braced myself for misery.

  As we rowed out to the brig that evening, I could not help recalling Pliny the Elder, rowing toward Vesuvius as it heaved lava into the sea; his captain proposed they turn back, but Pliny insisted, Fortes fortuna jurat! Fortune favors the brave! He died, of course, on that little boat, singing fortune’s praises. I prayed we would not. Despite the warm evening air, the spray off the bow as we broke through the chop sent a chill through me. My heart sank a little with each stroke of the oars. Psyche shivered in my lap.

  From that first fateful journey to London to meet my uncle decades ago, I have detested sea voyages—without respite. I did not expect this would be any different. If I lived to see my friend, if he lived to see me, I would tell him, It is a great love that travels by sea.

  It used to be my ambition, among my chief ambitions, that wellborn strangers should know my name. Napoleon knew my name by virtue of my reputation as a surgeon and called for me from his exile on St. Helena. My fame for performing the first successful caesarean is widely known as well. Was it too much to imagine then that my shipmates on the journey to London might be acquainted with my reputation as a surgeon rather than as a scandal? It was.

  The first day aboard ship began well. I woke at break of day to the sound of a fiddle and fife. I dressed quickly and went on deck to watch the proceedings, Psyche bundled beneath my arm. It was not a joyful sound, the music, but it served to unify the sailors in their actions, and that cheered me, even if the prospect of a sea voyage did not.

  I lingered on deck to watch the men haul anchor; I watched Mauritius as we left it behind. Each moment presented a different view of the island as we sailed out to sea; the motion soon became a very rocking one. The person at the helm cried out Steady, which word was echoed by another in a lower key, which signified the wind was fair and the ship going as it ought to do.

  I did not know if I would ever return to Mauritius. More than a thousand miles off the eastern coast of Africa, ringed by reefs, Mauritius might have been the image of paradise before the fall. The water near shore clear as glass, the beaches beyond it white as bleached cuffs, beyond which rose mountains, sudden and startling as joy, rising two thousand feet into the air, the emerald green of Ireland.

  I had battled the local colonial administrators there, seen those I cared for die, but I’d been happy, or at least hopeful; each day I rose charged with a sense of anticipation, an inchoate expectation that today I might meet my fate, change my life. Find him.

  Now I scanned the familiar shore and the small figures on the dock come to see the ship off; I scrutinized the crowd as if I might recognize a face there. I was surprised by the ache the departure occasioned. I took it for dread of the sea.

  I felt as if I were leaving hope itself behind.

  It was at our first dinner t
ogether that evening that trouble arose; we had gathered in the captain’s quarters for a celebratory meal—turtle soup, roast pig, cold beef, hot potatoes, a little gin and brandy—when one of our company, a provincial officer, mentioned Lord Somerton and his family, though not the scandal—“You must have known him at the Cape colony, Dr. Perry,” the officer said. The man had been in India for some years, so it was possible, I suppose, that he had not heard of us, of the scandal. But from the hush that settled over the table, it was clear that if so he was the only one who hadn’t.

  “Does any man truly know another?” I replied, returning to my soup.

  Lady Barnard insisted that I was indeed well acquainted with His Lordship. “Dr. Perry knew him very well, did you not?” she said, evidently affronted by the man’s ignorance; she believed, as too many do, that the measure of a man is gauged by the fame of his acquaintance.

  It might have been an innocent assertion. But I felt accused.

  “I knew both Lord and Lady Somerton, yes,” I said, quieting any insinuation with a cold stare. But I felt the falseness of the claim as I uttered it; despite the letter in my coat, it felt a lie.

  “What sort of man is he?” asked Captain Brine.

  I knew what they wanted to know, just as I knew they wouldn’t dream of asking. For once I was grateful for the curse of English propriety.

  “Lord Somerton is a most remarkable man,” I said, as I pushed back from the table. “Now, you must excuse me. I have some correspondence to attend to.”

  After dinner I walked on deck, needing air, the night uncommonly mild, the sky smeared with stars, the very heavens rearranged here, as if rewriting our fates. The stars recalled those we’d seen on the long trek east from Cape Town. It seemed I had not noticed stars in years.

  When the quartermaster greeted me, I inquired about our position, learned that we were 1,200 miles off the African coast, two weeks sailing to Cape Town, then another twelve, if we were lucky, to reach London. Eight-thousand nautical miles at five knots: we’d arrive in four months’ time, if the weather held, by mid-December.

  I hoped my friend would live so long.

  I stared west into the darkness, as if I might make out the coastline there, the edge of Africa. I could picture it in the dark, a terrain as familiar as my own body or a lover’s, a beloved body. But I knew the dangers as well. The treacherous currents and unpredictable winds, especially at this time of year. I recalled the seasonal storms known as die Kaapse dokter, as I once had been.

  We had come through just such a storm when I first arrived in the Cape colony a dozen years before. On that ship, Lord Somerton had been the subject of conversation as well, although it was others who spoke of him then; the captain had described him as a vain and petty man, arrogant and officious, who cared more for his horses and dogs, for his hunting than for the people he governed. I’d wondered then what sort of man he was.

  I declined to disembark in Cape Town when we arrived there, claiming urgent reports to complete. I could not face it. Dantzen went in my stead, our emissary, leaving Psyche and me to rest aboard the anchored ship, rocked as in a cradle. I could not bear to return to Cape Town only to leave again, that place that had once seemed my true home. Dantzen retrieved the newspapers—no word of Lord Somerton’s death. There was a grim report of another kind, of the hanging and public dissection in Edinburgh of William Burke. My old teacher Doctor Monro had presided, cutting open Burke’s corpse after he was executed for having murdered men, women, even a child to sell their bodies to anatomists. It was said Monro had dipped his pen in the hanged man’s blood to sign the death certificate. It was Machiavelli’s trick: to decry what one practiced as a means to evade blame. As if we’d never bought a body dug from a Christian grave. The hypocrites. We’d not killed for corpses, of course, but neither had we asked questions. Still, I’d not be the surgeon I was without the dead. The theft. The lie.

  After we left Cape Town I stayed in my cabin, avoiding conversation and company. If my companions did not know of our scandal before, surely they knew now, after our stop in Cape Town. Here where it began. I should have seen it coming, I suppose, but I was battling other storms then. Did not imagine there could be any storm worse than to see the person I loved married to someone else, indifferent to me.

  The sea was high, but the wind blew well; I was cheered by the prospect of fast progress, at least. London by Christmas, Captain Brine said.

  The oppressive chill of an English winter met us at the London docks. As familiar as it was unwelcome. I hired a coach and set off immediately for the Somertons’ home, through the city shrouded in coal soot and fog; I arrived at their townhouse in Piccadilly as evening was coming on—the streets glossy with mist, the air thick and cold, an aching damp seeping through my heavy greatcoat, the sounds of horses and smell of coal ash as far from the clear African air as could be found; in an instant I was a student again, a dresser, 21, with life before me like a banquet. I knocked at the black enamel door, a servant showed me in; I found Lady Somerton grown thin and grave; a lemon-yellow satin dress made her skin glow pink; despite her grief, she seemed to have flourished here as my friend had not.

  “Thank you for coming, Dr. Perry.”

  She welcomed me and led me into the first-floor drawing room that had been converted to a bedroom, so my friend needn’t mount the stairs and might look out over the street at the world he loved. The dim lights, the high fire, the heaps of blankets and the faint sweet reek of laudanum left no doubt that he was here to die; they were in waiting merely. I had been summoned not as a physician, to heal, but to grieve as a family friend.

  I was filled with fury, a rage to throw them out, call for light, fresh air, hot wine for my friend, my skin vibrating with rage, but I had learned in the intervening years to temper impulse. Still, I was impatient with their gloom, the city being gloomy enough on its own that bleak winter night in mid-December 1829. It seemed a luxury to give in to grief, to absolve oneself of the responsibility to cure, or try. “The man’s not dead yet,” I wanted to say, “though this sepulchre of a room could kill anyone.” But I was silent.

  Calm but grieving, clearly preparing herself for her husband’s imminent death, Lady Somerton had developed the habit of sleeping on a couch beside his bed, so she could wake with him in the night, should he need her. Georgiana, who had arrived only the week before, kept vigil in that room as well. She rose from her father’s bedside when I entered. She did not speak when she crossed to me, merely took my hand in hers and brought me to her father.

  I heard in his labored breathing evidence of a failing heart, lips tinged blue, cyanic; his limp right hand betrayed scars from a lancet—bloodletting that had no doubt weakened him, compounded whatever ailed him. I had never seen him so ill, save when I’d treated him for typhus a dozen years before.

  I had little hope of cure, but I chose hope. Hope is a choice.

  I bent over my friend, his face ashen, immobile in sleep. He seemed already to have left this world. Seemed glad of it. I pulled up a chair close by the bed, only to think better of it; I sat down on the bed instead, beside my friend, taking his hand in mine, feeling for the faint pulse, unable to ignore the signs—his pallor, his gaunt features—aged beyond the toll of years, fearing he might fail to recognize me, even if he were to wake. I try to remember the moment now. Bring his face close to mine again.

  “Dr. Perry—”

  I startled to hear the rasping voice from a body that seemed beyond speech.

  “Dr. Perry,” he said again, “good of you to come,” repeating the words he’d said to me a dozen years before, when we’d first met at Tunhuys under the radiant Cape sun. “The case must be truly dire to bring you back to England.”

  I had sworn never to return.

  “Not dire,” I lied. “I was homesick.”

  “As am I,” he said. “Home, sick.”

  “Evidently.”

  “I have missed my home from the moment I left it.” Did he recall that he h
ad once called me home? I could not know; I could not ask.

  “What ails you?” I asked, as if he might have the answer.

  “Nothing, now that you are here.”

  Although I could make no certain diagnosis in the days and weeks that followed, his fast and erratic pulse, the terrible cough that often left him speechless, his pallor and cyanic lips inclined me to treat him as I would a pregnant woman suffering from anxious torpor—I sought to strengthen the heart and circulation. (I know now that it was congestive heart failure that he suffered from, but such belated knowledge is useless knowledge.) I tossed out the poisonous sedatives he’d been given, prescribed diuretics and mild stimulants instead to regulate the heart—vinegar, digitalis, warm wine, hot and hearty foods, beef, broth, garlic, warming spices. As he strengthened, I counseled fresh air, mild exercise, even if it was only to walk to his library or to the garden and back inside. To my amazement, his condition improved. As if my presence were itself tonic.

  After a month of treatment, the initial crisis had passed; after two, he recovered his health enough to host a lavish dinner in my honor, like the ones he used to preside over in Cape Town; the following months in London passed quickly, happily. Together.

  I thought it might be gratitude for having saved her husband’s life that prompted Lady Somerton to countenance our late evenings and long solitary afternoons together, our rides and dinners at his club, from which she and the children were excluded.