by E. J. Levy
“I would like to have met him,” he said.
“Yes.” I did not say that it had been my first thought on waking every day for the last twelve years. I would like to meet him today. It still is.
“And what have you found?” he asked.
“Nothing yet,” I said. “But hope is something. One can live on less, I’ve found.”
He placed his hand on mine.
“He’d be twelve now, almost thirteen,” I said.
“If he lived.”
“Yes, if he lived.”
“Dying is not such a bad thing. But there is so much I will miss.”
“You’re not dying.”
“Fog,” he said. “A good fire. A good horse between my legs. The last cigar after a successful ball. A clean shot. Bathing with you at Camps Bay.”
“You hated bathing at Camps Bay,” I said.
“Buttered toast,” he continued. “Cold plums. Morning. I will miss you.”
We had passed the point of passion but not of love. When he asked me to stay with him that night, I didn’t hesitate, even as I knew that if we touched, it would not be from desire but from sorrow.
It was not that desire was dead, but it had become tinctured with the foretaste of loss. We did not speak. We undressed, I unbound my chest, and went to bed. Afterward he turned me gently away from him in bed, wrapped his arms around me, his hands cupping my breasts, then snored.
I felt him loosen his embrace in the night and fall away from me; I woke in the early hours of the morning beside him, taut with dread, and knew, before I touched him, that he was gone. Don’t leave me here, I thought, my first prayer in years. Don’t leave me now.
When he turned in his sleep and farted, I laughed and woke him. He was annoyed to be awakened so early. I was delighted.
We trick out our ambitions in better clothes, making of professionalism a point of pride, as if the personal were a minor player, a trifle, a matter for lesser men, those whose fate it is merely to fuck and feed like animals, as if we weren’t all animals, when really what honor do we gain by striving to emulate machine-like efficiency, dishonoring our most human quality: sentiment, feeling, appetite, sympathy, empathy, that which distinguishes us from the machines we were just beginning to love? I loved him, was glad to own it.
That Sunday morning rose pink and pale grey, like the nacreous belly of a mussel shell. I’d hoped for rain to keep us inside, but Lord Somerton was eager to ride, despite his evident exhaustion. The sun was a yellow burr in the mist. By noon, he insisted, the sky overhead would be robin’s-egg blue; as if to oblige him, the sky cleared early, the sea mist burning off by 9 a.m.
It was February 20, the last day of his life; he insisted on riding out onto the Downs, those high chalk cliffs overlooking the sea, despite the mist and chill in the air. He was flushed as we rode and excitable, stronger than he had seemed in years; when we returned to the hotel, it appeared the air had indeed done him good. His face was ruddy with what looked like a return of health. But by evening, he was feverish. I didn’t worry overmuch when he said he was tired, asked to rest. He deserved to rest. He was sixty-three.
We played cards, spoke of the dinner we would host in London and of the hunt, of the past and of the future, of spending the spring in Rome; when he lay down to nap, I read in a chair by the window. I had thought mistakenly that he could not die if I remained with him, as I had failed to stay with my mother. But death doesn’t mind company. Death loves a crowd. Look at any battlefield. I didn’t notice his last breath.
When I went to rouse him for dinner, I found him unbreathing, still warm. I fell to my knees beside the bed, pressed my lips to my friend’s warm hand, and sobbed. I had lost more than a father. I had lost my almost only friend.
The funeral at St. Andrew’s Church, Hove, was intimate and quiet and small, attended only by his closest relations, of which I was honored to be numbered. The only person there who was not blood kin. His brother, the Sixth Duke of Beaufort, his nephew the Marquis of Worcester among them. He had requested that he be buried without pomp or expense, that only family and close friends be in attendance to see him from the world he’d loved. “My funeral may on no account be attended with any parade”—he’d insisted that I record the wish two months prior; I had. Lady Somerton did me the honor of asking me to take her arm as we entered the church, calling me over (“Where is Dr. Perry?”) so that I might sit beside her, in the family pew, among the grieving women.
The coffin bore a simple plate on which was inscribed a single laconic phrase, words I had dictated at Somerton’s request: General the Rt. Honourable Lord Charles Somerton, died February 20th, 1831. It was not nearly enough to say about the man.
After the funeral at St. Andrew’s, we returned to the Bedford Hotel for the night. Georgiana and I found ourselves alone in the hotel parlor late that night, after the others had retired.
“You will miss him,” she said.
“We will,” I said.
“I wonder,” Georgiana said. “Sometimes I think that I have waited all my life for him to die, for his life to end, so I might begin my own.”
“You don’t mean that,” I said.
“Don’t I?” she crossed the room to stand before a picture. “What will you do now, Doctor?” she asked. “Will you stay in London?”
“Return to my work. Your uncle, Lord FitzRoy, has generously arranged for me take up a post in Jamaica,” I said. “And you? Will you marry now?” I had known of her father’s opposition to Captain Glover.
“Is that a proposal, Dr. Perry?” she asked.
“I wish with all my heart that I were in a position to make you one, but—”
“But you are not,” her voice was bitter.
I was startled by how bitter, how harsh her tone was. And I was saddened to realize all at once and fully how thwarted longing had ruined her, made her vivacity into something fragile, hard, turned her delicacy into cold strength. As if yearning had calcified, become a carapace—
“Do you know, I used to admire your frankness,” Georgiana said. “Almost no one was, save for you. It was such a relief, so delightfully shocking. To hear somebody say what they meant.”
I smiled.
“But you’re not, are you, Doctor? Honest. Not at all. It’s always the most dishonest who make a show of their honesty. Politicians. Thieves. They’re the ones who offer assurances that you can trust them. You’ve been lying to us all along, perhaps to yourself most of all.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“I think you do.”
It had not occurred to me before that the placard with its revelation of our secret life might have been Georgiana’s work. It hardly mattered now.
“You’re tired, Georgiana,” I said. “You’ve suffered a terrible loss. We can talk in the morning.”
“I have suffered,” she said. “We have. And I am tired. But we’ll talk now.”
I might have left then, I suppose, walked out—perhaps I should have done. But I was a guest here, and after Lord Somerton, Georgiana had been the person I was fondest of in the world. I could not bear to lose another person I loved. There were so few.
“All right,” I said. I took a seat.
“Did you know the word passion comes from the Greek word meaning to suffer? Of course you do. That is the word I would have applied to you in the past. Passionate. Such a passionate man, Dr. Perry; it seemed so odd that he never married, never took a wife. I used to imagine you had a woman somewhere—someone lowborn, perhaps, someone you’d met at the Rainbow Balls, someone inconvenient if you were to keep your good name; that perhaps that was why you’d left for Mauritius so abruptly. To marry or to dispense with an inconvenient child.”
If I paled at the suggestion, she did not appear to notice.
“It was years later, not until the scandal broke, that awful business with the placard at the Heerengracht bridge, that I realized the truth,” she said.
My expression must h
ave betrayed my distaste, my shock.
“Oh, I don’t mean that I believed the scandal,” she said. “You were too cautious of your good name for that, as was my father.” She turned to look out the window. “I used to think you were the only person alive who loved my father as much as I did,” she said. “I wondered sometimes if I loved you simply to be loved by him, who loved you more than anyone. I blamed him that you kept your distance from me, imagining he kept you away, as he did Colonel Glover. My father had many virtues, but among his vices was his need to be loved above all others. It withers the heart, that sort of love. But then you know that, don’t you? It’s like a scorching African sun. It kills everything it does not sustain.”
“It’s very late,” I said.
But she continued as if I’d not spoken: “I used to imagine that he was what stood between us; that if it weren’t for his opposition, you’d propose. How silly. It wasn’t me you loved at all. Was it?” She turned, looked directly at me.
“Really, Georgiana,” I rose and began to pace as her father might have done. I caught myself and stopped.
“It wasn’t even him. It was yourself, your good name. Above everything.” She paused as if waiting for my reply. I had none.
“And now my father is dead, and I have waited all this time for someone who’s not really there, who doesn’t really exist at all. Dr. Perry is a ghost. Not really a person at all. Just a part you’ve played. The dashing doctor. Is there anyone there beneath your red coat, Doctor? Is there anyone there at all? What would you be if you ceased to be the esteemed Dr. Perry? Did you ever wonder that?”
“All the time.”
“And the answer?”
I found it hard to speak. The answer was so simple, obvious.
“Nothing,” I said. “I would be nothing.”
She turned away, toward the window again, as if disgusted, unsatisfied. She touched a vase on the table beside her, absently.
“Don’t you regret not having a family, a home?”
“Regret? No,” I said. Then, because we had once been friends: “Of course I do.”
“My father was not as clever as you, but he lived his life; he was alive while he lived. Can you say the same?” She turned toward me, the vase in her hands, and for a moment I thought she might throw it at my head. “I can’t. I have waited half my life for someone who doesn’t even exist. How is that possible?”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“That’s not enough.”
“I know.” She turned her face aside; her shoulders shook. I crossed to her and took her in my arms, not as lovers do but as siblings might, children frightened by a storm, bereft. Each of us grieving for the man we’d loved and lost. “I know,” I said. “I know.”
Two weeks later, when I left London to sail for Jamaica—having been cleared of charges of abandoning my post, thanks to Lord FitzRoy’s intercession—Georgiana did not come to see me off. Lady Somerton made excuses on her behalf (the constraints of mourning, etcetera), but I understood. I was not surprised to read a few months later in the London press of her marriage to Colonel Glover at Christ Church, Marylebone.
I hoped they would be happy. Together. I hoped they might have a child. Love each other well. What could possibly matter more than that?
I looked forward to my new post in Jamaica, if not to sailing there. The place had the unfortunate distinction of having the highest mortality rate in the military service. I would battle it, as I had battled death my whole life. I looked forward to the fight. Even as I knew now that battling death is different from life, from living.
I wonder what will be remembered? What I will recall, what others will say of us? Is that the measure, or is it something simpler, closer to the bone, to the body? I had held another life inside me once, whatever happened to that child; for a time we had shared a skin, were one and the same, under the tent of flesh, under the same sky—he and I. Strange to think I sacrificed everything for the sake of a name that was not even mine.
Was it worth it? Do we ever know? What I know is what remains constant. That old brag of the heart, I am I am I am, until one day we’re not, until one day it stops. Until then there is the pleasure of solving the puzzle, the possibility of understanding. Like holding the missing piece in your hand, looking for the connection, where it fits. The pleasure of solving the riddle remains—the body’s, the heart’s.
Dantzen had settled my things into the quarters below. The room with its wooden walls, footsteps overhead, seemed too like a coffin, so I lingered on deck to watch the well-wishers on the dock wish others well. The Somertons had not come to see me off. Lord FitzRoy sent a note. Only Dantzen stood on the dock, holding up Psyche for me to see; she barked, again and again. I raised a hand, held it there. I could not bear to make either of them journey with me. I would make this journey alone.
I heard the boys on deck raising the sails, unleashing them, the hiss of ropes and the great clanging of irons as the anchor was hauled free, then the flap of the sail sheets in the wind like some enormous bird beating its wings nearby overhead and then one felt it, the catch in the sails and the lurch into the waves, the pull and the pitch and the rock as we pulled free of the dock, of shore and the waves gathered beneath us and dispersed, gathered and dispersed, taking us once more out to sea. I wiped the moisture from my cheeks—sea spray, nothing more.
Epilogue
I know how the story ends now—mine, ours, our child’s. Though this last remains too painful to relate. Some things are unspeakable, like the forced separation of a parent and child.
I will live another thirty years after Lord Charles Somerton’s death, exercising that great gift that the living too often overlook: the power to change things. I will find a cure for syphilis, decocted from the Plat Doom plant, which I’d collected on the Cape; I will save thousands by containing cholera in Jamaica; while there I will be reunited with my friend Josias de Cloete. I will rise to prominence again, make enemies again, be posted to Canada, where I will obtain the highest rank a military surgeon can, equivalent of a general: Inspector General for Military Hospitals.
I will dye my short curls red again, as in my youth, and ride through the wintry streets of Montreal in a red horse-drawn sleigh, burrowed under beaver pelts, bear skins, and heavy Hudson blankets, Psyche at my side (my third poodle so named). I will live to see the coronation of Queen Victoria, the return of corsets, the first openly female graduate of medical school, the death of Goethe and the birth of Freud, the publication of On the Origin of Species, the American nation torn asunder by war and made whole again, miraculous as the body’s own healing.
The child who bore my name—my godson, Jonathan Perry Munnick—will be my loyal correspondent for years, until he confides that he’s heard I much resemble a woman; I will never write to him again. He will grow up to have children of his own, who will have children of their own, who will have children too, one of whom will become an architect of apartheid—that abomination, that outrage against justice and every principle I held dear, that Lord Somerton did. How do we measure a life? By how it’s lived or by what we leave behind for those to come?
What makes a life a failure or success? What makes a hero or a heroine? Is it good works or great deeds, riches or respect, renown or liberty of mind, acclaim in one’s own time or centuries later? Does a life matter more for being recalled than those whose names are not? Does it make a bad king good to be remembered a thousand years after he died? Ethelred remains unready for eternity, after all. I honored history, lived for it. Was I wrong? Was I betrayed? Did I betray myself?
If sacrifice is the measure of a life, mine was great. For I sacrificed greatly. I sacrificed everyone I loved.
I will die in London, at 14 Margaret Street, my body buried at Kensal Green Cemetery. My restless spirit traveling still.
How do I know how the story ends? How mine did? The body is a story we tell ourselves, as love is; mine continues, it seems, as long as there are those who care to hear it, who
listen.
Death is always a revelation; mine was no exception: although history will demote her to a chambermaid, as history is inclined to diminish women’s stature, the woman who attended me after my death from dysentery on July 25, 1865 was in fact a nurse; she is the one who discovered my secret, made public what so many had overlooked for years.
What she discovered that day was simply this, what should have been obvious all along: The hero was a woman. The heroic life—all along—was hers.
Acknowledgments
This is a work of fiction: while the principal events described are inspired by actual events and persons, my descriptions are, of course, inventions. Margaret Bulkely’s origins and the occasion for her transformation into James Barry in order to gain an education unavailable to women at the time, the place and time of Barry’s schooling and the faculty/curriculum of the period, the friendship with Jobson, the doctor’s work in Cape Town and remarkable achievements there, the close bond with Lord Somerset, the journey to the Xhosa, the duel, the sodomy scandal, a pregnancy, and Barry’s subsequent return to Mauritius and later England to save Lord Somerset’s life—these are historical facts. As novelist Lily King has written: “I have borrowed from the lives and experiences of these persons, but I have told a different story.”
On occasion, I have tampered with the timeline for the sake of dramatic economy. For example, I have detained General Miranda in London so as to involve him more deeply in James’s early education, when in fact the general sailed for Venezuela on February 2, 1806, twenty days before the death of Margaret’s uncle. I have conflated certain figures: Dantzen is a composite of a man who bore that name and a longstanding companion/manservant whom Dickens dubbed “Black John.” First person is an unreliable point of view; I chose it for that reason.
