“Shall I be freed?”
“I shall call you my queen.”
“The queen of your ‘flat.’”
“The queen of my heart.”
“A continent scarcely large enough for a round-dance.”
“You shall rule there absolutely.”
“Why do I suspect I would first have to visit the antipodes?”
“Mademoiselle, you are delightfully scurrilous.”
“This is no banter, sir. This is no game.” I could hear the fury in her voice. “This is no jest, no frolic, no badinage. I was a princess, once; I am a princess still. Royal blood will mix only with other royal blood. Otherwise, it demeans the line. Tell me what nation you offer me, what alliance, what regal house — or leave.”
Still in a tone of play, he said, “My lady, you know what scepter I offer, and what orbs.”
There was a stunned silence. And then she replied, “Then, sir, look out at the privy. There is my throne. Reach inside, sir, and you shall find the wedding feast. Eat well, My Lord. Eat abundantly.”
I know not who attacked whom; but I heard the struggle, and burst in through the communicating door.
They both were standing, and I could not make out who was striking whom — though both, as I conceive it, had their violent intent — but I imagined that he was first aggressor, and I called out, “Murder! Murder!” as I dragged upon his coat and pummeled him.
I reached up and struck him on the side of the head, and for a moment, his fury with my mother relented, and he turned his attention to me, hissing, “If you touch me again, I’ll see you hang — you and your mother both.”
I backed away, and watched their difficult embrace.
My cries, however, had roused the house, and in no time, the door opened, and Mr. 03-01 was there, and there was confusion all about us.
My Lord Cheldthorpe of the New Creation dropped my mother, and she dropped him, and looked away demurely, and I fell upon a chair.
Lord Cheldthorpe said, “The slut and her bastard . . .” He ceased.
03-01 looked gravely around the chamber and discerned the struggle that had transacted there. He said, “Gone like a vapor. All of it. Nothing.” He turned and walked out.
Lord Cheldthorpe followed. I heard him give an order.
My mother and I stirred not from where we stood.
Some minutes later, Bono came in with the footmen, and bound my mother and me, and took us outside, and we were lashed to the horse-post. The moon was gibbous that evening, and the air cold. There was a chill to the cobbles beneath my bare feet that made them arch.
My mother’s back was bared. They pulled her shift from her shoulders, and for the first time I saw her exposed, as she had been in the engraved figure hung upon the wall.
For an hour, they left us there before coming to inflict their punishment. We were all but nude in the night’s chill. We shivered tremendously, and did not look at one another.
I revolved in my head passages of ancient texts that recalled how Britons had been slaves. Horace, writing of their subjection; or the Venerable Bede, describing how Saint Gregory the Great, pope and punster, had come across some British slave-boys in the market, and had found them so fair he sent a mission to convert their race to the Christian faith.
The gates to the stable-yard where we were bound had been closed to exclude the gaze of the curious. It was early in the morning, perhaps three o’clock, and the city was quiet. The trees rattled in the wind, and then were still. I could hear my mother’s respiration in the silence, and it was rushed, as if she sobbed or had fits, but when I looked, there were no tears upon her face. Perhaps it was the chill of night, which was considerable. We stood there for some time.
The seagulls called in the moonlight above the Charles River.
When the people of the house came out, they came in numbers. Guests and servants standing around us, silent as they witnessed these cruel solemnities, Lord Cheldthorpe’s valet and his footman took turns whipping us with the rod.
We had not been told how many lashes we should receive. After each, we waited to see if there would be another; but they gave no sign.
We felt the eyes of all the house upon us.
The rod fell again. I was aware that, being silent habitually, I was expected to be silent now. I betrayed no grief, save wincing.
The rod fell again upon my mother. Following the stroke, she could not breathe, and gagged upon air.
The rod bit my back. I tried to stand, but could not, my hands were bound so low. I fell to the ground upon one knee.
Lord Cheldthorpe strolled around before us so that he could view our faces and judge the visage of punishment. My mother was vomiting; the issue was thin and yellow. She struggled for breath.
They ceased.
When, trembling, she regained her composure, and her breath came regularly again, Lord Cheldthorpe nodded, and they whipped her one last stroke.
She buckled and fell to her knees.
They came behind me. I would not grimace; I would not flinch; indeed, I would show nothing — considering, as the Stoic Phrygian slave, crippled by his master’s blows, hath writ: “Beyond the last inner tunic of my frail body, no one has authority over me. If I love too much this pitiful flesh, I have sold myself as a slave, for I have shown through pain what can be used to master me.”
So say I now, resolve standing tall in seclusion; but then, the rod cut; and, weakened by agony’s chains, ambushed by astonishment, I could not forbear exclamations of torment.
I barked once, like a dog, then let forth a high whine.
I am ashamed of my weakness.
There is no need to rehearse the pain and the humiliation of spirit in such an act.
I gripped the post.
So we stood for some time. We could hear the household turning away, retiring back inside. Lord Cheldthorpe watched with some satisfaction. Mr. 03-01 liked the whole thing not a bit, and frowned.
We were untied and taken back into the orchard. I knew not what further retribution they should demand; death was not too grave a punishment for the assault of a Negro upon a nobleman, though I did not think that such extremity would be called for in this case, when trumpeting abroad the facts would invite the scrutiny of idleness and public censure, fascinated by the midnight transgressions of nobility.
We waited upon the grass. Crickets sang all about us, as they had in the glade beside Champlain. Figures were carrying a sofa.
Bono stood guard beside us; His Lordship’s valet behind.
Bono reached up to wipe the slobber from my mother’s chin. She turned her head away sharply, and when he seemed likely to persist, raised her bound hands to foil his assist.
He dropped his hand, and faced away from us.
Mr. 03-01 came out of the gloom, misery in his countenance. He gestured, and we were led into the ice-house. It was a door into a hill. We went in, and the cold surrounded us.
They had a lantern burning, so we could see. My mother’s sofa had been deposited upon the stone floor. The ice was somewhat diminished, but still stood in blocks and shards all about the vault.
Lord Cheldthorpe was there. His arms were crossed.
Our shifts, which had been torn, were removed. We were naked in the room. We covered ourselves with our hands.
Lord Cheldthorpe said simply, “Here is your salon, Princess.” He walked out; and the others followed him with lugubrious mien. The door shut, and locked.
There was no light when they were gone.
We sat upon the sofa. My back clamored with the lashes to so great an extent that well could I believe that, though my spine was wet with blood, it burned.
We each could hear the other’s breath in the silence of the ice-house. Each motion across the embroidered stuff of the sofa sounded a great rasping.
I rested my elbows upon my knees, and my hands dangled. Casting about with my limbs, I could find no posture that did not scald, and returned, therefore, to my slump.
My
mother’s breathing had now fallen into rhythm.
For a long space of time, which may have been hours, we were silent.
Then, “I would embrace you,” my mother said, “but for our nudity.”
I nodded, which she could not hear.
She shifted her body upon the sofa; I felt the padding warp. She said, “When you were small, you grew affectionate for a dragon’s skull. Do you recall?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You played an infant game and crawled within it. Do you recall this? I, jesting, asked you whether you were not apprehensive that it might bite you. You answered me, ‘Do not be afraid, Mother. Know you whose skull this is? Mine. I would not bite my own self.’”
Her voice echoed curiously around the chamber. The cold insinuated itself from every quarter; it unfurled itself throughout our skins.
I lifted my feet from the floor and jammed the heels into the cushion, teetering there upon the sofa.
My mother asked, “Do you understand why I acted as I did?”
I revolved the scene before me. At length, I answered, “No.”
She ran her fingernail along a seam. I could hear the mutter of the stitch.
I asked, “Did you love him?”
“Or?” she asked.
“Did you play for gain?”
She considered my question. She answered: “When you wish to lay your head upon someone’s breast . . . When . . . If one pictures a scene for oneself of sitting by a fire in one’s own home, in a dress of the latest fashion, of the latest Parisian cut, and having someone enter the house and be announced; and before the maid can fetch him up . . . he runs into the room and catches you up in his arms to . . . I know not . . . vent wit about the day. . . . If one hushes him with a hand upon his lips . . . a hand asparkle with rings . . . lovely, for one is loved . . . and he laughs by one’s hearth, which he has afforded one . . . and there one’s son . . . is . . . Tell me . . . I have been most . . .”
I waited.
“What is love,” she asked, “if not —,” but said no more.
After a time, I glared into the gloom as if I could pierce it with my gaze, and felt it almost part into its constituent blacknesses, so that I could see the beetles there.
“Octavian?” she said.
I did not answer.
“If I had inclined my head some few degrees . . . ,” she said. I did not know of what she spake, whether of that night or another night; whether of a kiss, a touch, or a blow.
“Mother?” I said, and she answered, “What?” We could barely speak, our jaws were so hardened with the cold and the pain of our backs. She reached out and found my hand and placed her wooden fingers around it.
Again, I said, “Mother. I . . .”
I had no insight; no sense of what to say; was sensible of nothing but the darkness, which was parted, which had resolved itself so that objects there were defined, though they were not objects that could be seen by light, but properties of unbeing; the furniture of negation; and so I sat, perched upon the sofa in our frigid salon; I watched unbeing in the ebon room; and together, our teeth chattered; and outside in the city, the sun rose, and it was morning.
In the morning, we were taken inside, because it was known we would die of cold if exposed for any longer.
We were shivering. They left us tied in the kitchen, our wrists and ankles lashed together.
We sat against the wall while the cook stoked the welcome flames of the breakfast fire. We watched them make the morning meal for the house. The servants did not wish to look at us, and so regarded us not.
That morning, My Lord Cheldthorpe of the New Creation left for South Carolina upon the sloop Rarity. We were released from our bonds and bathed, and I do believe that if 03-01 was not preoccupied with his own ruination through this episode, he would have apologized for how cruelly we had been used.
But instead, he sat in his chair, undressed, in his robe and cap, and dug a compass into the table.
That week, the first of the philosophical apparati was sold.
With no hope of funds, an age was ended; the Novanglian College of Lucidity was to change forever.
The day after my whipping, I sat upon my bed, half dressed; Bono stood by the window.
“We cannot put you in a shirt,” he said. “You will ruin it.”
I stared down at my knees. Bono cast a shirt upon the floor.
He said, “The blood will ruin it.”
It was the rawness, the mess upon my back, its suppuration, more than simply the excruciation of the pain, which disturbed me; previous to this, all pain had been enveloped neatly within the confines of the human shell, as within a doctor’s bag the spiny instruments, the gouges and tongs, are strapped compactly, an arrangement of agonies. These wounds, however — these stripes bit into the world, and spillt.
At every motion, I could feel the incisions chafe and the crawling of pus.
I began to cry.
Bono picked up the shirt and put it in my hands. “You can slip it on,” he said. “You want, you can slip it on.”
I shook my head. I cried. I could feel my teeth showing.
“Don’t,” he said. “Crying ain’t something to do.”
“In the ice-house,” I sobbed, “in the ice-house, I defecated.” I could not stop from crying. I said, holding up my hands and weeping, “I had to.”
“That’s fine,” he said. He did not know what to do.
“It wasn’t weighed. Tell Mr. 03-01. It’s not accounted for.”
Bono came and he put his hand upon my cheek. He pressed my cheek so my skull was against his palm; and he said, “Prince, he don’t care today. There ain’t any measuring happening today. No samples.”
“What will happen to it?” I said.
He took the shirt from me and folded it over his arm. “Same thing as happens to the rest of us,” he said. “After a while, it just goes into the ground.”
My mother was found, later that day, down in the cellar of the main house. She had gone there alone. She had curled herself up tightly, her arms around her knees, and sat in the complete darkness, blood spangling the silk of her dress like the gloaming stars first bleeding into evening.
Following these dire scenes of correction, the house was grim. At meals, few spake; none came to dine; Mr. 03-01 surveyed the paintings on the walls, determining in what order they should be sold to discharge his debts.
My mother did not issue forth from her chamber for any but the most necessary engagements in the rest of the house. She chose, instead, to closet herself in her room, where she acted the tyrant with the servants.
The first few nights, heart moved with sympathy, the cook sent up in secret soothing delicates and stews, supplemented with heavy spirits to draw off the pain, and whispered comfortably things such as, “Tell the dear to rest well, and that we know her woes”; my mother returned the dishes peremptorily as being too cold, too liquid, too morose, too dry. She demanded other dishes, special preparations, sauces glacées, a blanquette of veal seasoned with oysters, chapon Flandrois in white wine, pluck and numbles rubbed with Ceylon herbs.
After two meals of this, the cook frowned and sent up half a loaf of salt bread, as instructed.
I did not return to my studies for several days following the altercation. I lurked around corners, and stood in the dark crevasses by the stairs, and could meet no one’s eyes; this shrinking and secretive manner being the product not just of the extremity of my physical discomfort, which discouraged conversation, but also of the greater stinging and biting inwardly; for within me, the flagellation had not yet ceased.
I do not know that for four or five days I spake at all, after that first interview with Bono. My reserve was greater and more obdurate than ever before. Often, I was Observant for hours at a time, and would respond to none, but instead sat motionless and noted the minute stitching of brocade, or the ingenuity of wood.
When I was taken to Dr. 09-01’s rooms upstairs for our lessons to be resumed, I d
readed the interview. He had, since the whipping, seemed in a perpetual irritation, glowering around the rooms, leaving company often, saying he wished to ascertain whether matter still subsisted in his chamber.
He was kind, however, when I went to him. He spake gently to me.
Still, surveying the page, I felt I knew no language. I would answer nothing. That day I did not speak.
Nor the next day. He returned me to my room.
On the third day when I went to him, he had a stack of books by his side.
“Sit down, Octavian,” he said. “We begin a new lesson today.”
I sat.
He handed me a book, open in the middle. It was some history I had never before read, written in the Latin tongue.
“One. Read the passage,” he demanded. “Two. Construe.”
I mumbled half a sentence of the Latin; he tapped his foot. “That is all?” he said. “Is it a day for sotto voce?”
I stared at him.
“Good God, boy, stop gawking.” He snatched the book from me. He stood above me, held the book aloft, and in a loud, even piercing tenor, declaimed: “Hoc anno, servus nomine Eunis qui a paucis esse magus dicebatur in dominos suos coortus est.” He looked down at me; and I began to translate —“In this year, a freeborn slave named Eunus, reputed a magician, rose against his masters . . .”— while he continued his bellowing over me —“et, manu conservorum comitante, hos contra urbes in Siciliae finibus duxit”— until my voice was as loud as his —“. . . gathering a force of fellow slaves and leading them against cities in the region of Sicily . . .”— and together, we shouted of servitude, arms, and Rome.
One morning, we were summoned to the dining-room — the servants, the family, the dependents — and told that there the sole hope of our College awaited us. Thus it was with considerable anticipation that we gathered to see this most interesting individual.
We found before us a small, gray man in a gray silk coat who surveyed us as we entered, clearly assessing even the academicians among us for resale. We hung together — me at my mother’s arm. He was a compact gentleman, and one could easily imagine that, in his earlier years, he had been adept at springing and vaulting.
The Pox Party Page 8
