As soon as Sarita gets one problem resolved, another takes its place. Perhaps this is just existence. At least she does not want for food, and she says that actually having been hungry, although hunger—want in general—is buried in such a remote room of memory as to seem up for debate. She is grateful for all she has, but being wealthy presents its own peculiar challenges, for example, managing the education of your children. For the boys, it’s pretty straightforward—bite the bullet and send them off to school. For girls, however . . .
Miss Bass, the governess, is English. Both Sarita and Herbert had thought it a good idea as it seems likely that the girls are going to marry Englishmen, and Miss Bass could prepare them for the London season. Someone needs to, although it’s still a long way away. Cricket is only eleven, but so recently she was only six. Sarita can impart her common sense, but what’s wanted from girls is something else entirely. She doesn’t know what this is, and neither does Herbert. When Sarita had relayed Miss Bass’s concern over graceless Cricket’s coordination, Herbert had pointed out that Cricket’s hand/eye was spot on. The girl is a magnificent shot, the best of the Ward children. Charlie isn’t bad, but he hesitates. Herbie finds winning overrated and is thus crippled by contentment. Has Dimples ever even held a gun? Who knows? But Cricket—she should be a sniper. Clay pigeons explode. Grouse fall to the ground. Rabbits speeding through the parting grass are hit, trip, expire. Unfortunately, such skills don’t win one a husband, unless, perhaps, Cricket manages to bag some man in the same way Herbert used to bag elephants.
And there’s Cricket, finally, standing at the door.
“Mama, you wanted to see me?”
“Come sit down.” Sarita pushes the chair beside her at the small, marble-topped table. “Would you like some tea? I can ring for another cup.”
“No, thank you.” Cricket takes the seat and maintains an unusually correct posture.
“Cricket, could you please—”
“Miss Bass hates me. She does. She only likes Dimples. It’s always, ‘Frances, can you read out that passage?’ ‘Frances, what nice embroidery.’ ‘Frances, why are you so much better than your sister?’”
Sarita gives her daughter a cautioning look. “You were assigned to write an essay on Jane Eyre.”
“I did.”
“Cricket, it’s obvious that you didn’t touch the book. Unless by accident. Or to kill a fly with it.”
“That’s not true—”
Sarita raises her hand. She brandishes the essay and quotes, “If Jane Eyre had just been more fun, she wouldn’t have had to be a governess.” Sarita stifles a smile.
Cricket is, a rare occurrence, silent.
“What I can’t figure out”—Sarita waves the paper at her daughter—“is how your work can be so full of extra scribbles and crossings out when it’s obvious that no improvements have been made at all.”
“I won’t read it.”
“You will.”
“It’s a stupid book.”
“Sarita Enriqueta Ward, you are reading Jane Eyre by Friday, and completing a proper essay, or there’s no tennis weekend for you. I have no problem telling the Loutins that you failed to do your work and, as a result, have to decline the invitation.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Actually, that defines fair.”
Cricket rolls her eyes from one side to the other, involved in some hard thinking.
Sarita exhales dramatically and levels her most reasonable look at her daughter. “Don’t you have some reading to do?”
Cricket pushes away from the table, grinding the chair legs across the floor. She walks to the door, dragging her feet, her shoulders dramatically slumped. She turns at the transom, forefinger raised. “That’s one for Miss Bass, but next time . . .”
“Next time you’ll do your reading when asked.”
Sarita taps her papers together into a neat stack. The room has grown cold and she wonders what Herbert is up to, probably reading a magazine, or sketching—which he sometimes does in bed.
In the girls’ room, Frances is sound asleep with her arms crossed over her, like a vampire, as Cricket likes to say. At least the girl is reading something, even if it is Stoker. Cricket too is asleep. Sarita goes over to the nightstand and picks up Jane Eyre. If the bookmark is accurate, Cricket has read five pages.
The hallway offers up its stillness, the clock the silence between ticks. Is this day already finished? The weeks seem carved to nothing with Herbert’s travels and sculpting and all the back and forth, and the children, who, yes, have a decent staff to manage them. A staff that needs decent management. Along with the other staff. The move to the country, whenever that happens, will need even more—gardeners, handymen, housemaids. Maybe even a night watchman.
She sits at her dresser and undoes the clasp on an earring—nice diamond studs, purchased by Ward in Buenos Aires, although the diamonds are from South Africa. She sends it pinging on the silver tray, and then its mate. She looks back at herself, her reflection keeping company.
Joubert had sent a card over last week to say that a rather charming painting had shown up and would she care to see it? And of course this is one of the benefits of being shockingly rich: people send cards over when paintings become available. This particular dealer has a good eye for what she likes. He is one of those men who—how does one put it?—has a sympathetic connection with women. The first time she’d entered his gallery, there’d been a Renoir sitting at the back, waiting to be packed up and shipped off, and she’d been drawn to it. Her presence in the gallery was something of an accident. She’d scheduled a meeting with the real estate agent and had the time wrong. When she showed up at two in the afternoon, the agent was still with another client in some fancy part of the city, probably standing in his pointed pumps with his nervous fingers tapping at some well-executed architectural detail. Sarita seldom had an unplanned hour out of the house and she took it as an opportunity to stick her head into a few galleries—places that she hadn’t been into since she was in Paris with her father more than a decade earlier.
Boy with Cat was an odd painting, particularly for Renoir. The boy, naked, is standing angled away from the viewer, arms languidly embracing a cat. The cat is up on some sort of bureau, although it might be the back of a piano, but it was impossible to tell because the whole of it was draped in a floral patterned silk. The cat’s face is pure pleasure, the boy’s inscrutable. One of his legs is crossed in front the other, resting on the ball of the foot, causing a spiraling of the form. Sarita guessed the boy to be about twelve years old.
“Madame, that one has been purchased,” said Joubert. “But we will enjoy it while we can, before it again disappears into someone’s drawing room for twenty or thirty years.” He smiled. “Do you like it?”
“I find it interesting.”
“It is a mysterious painting.”
“Mysterious?” Sarita stepped back. “It’s about loss of innocence. The boy’s ambivalent about growing up, about leaving the world of women. That’s why his legs are crossed, why he’s hugging the cat.”
“You are a critic?”
“I am a mother.”
Joubert had served her tea and together they had looked at the various oils and watercolors, not with an eye to sales or purchases, but rather to merely enjoy. And yes, Joubert remembered her father. “He bought every new thing, even if he did not like it, just because it was new.”
Her father still favored Romantic landscapes and he might have had a good selection of contemporary works, but they were usually assigned to places such as a guest bedroom or above eye level on the wall by the staircase.
The picture about which Joubert had written to her was a smallish oil in the Impressionist style. The woman in the painting was at her dresser, her right arm raised to unpin hair, presenting her back, and her reflection was so murky—shattered by angle and ro
ugh brushstroke—as to reveal nothing. Her white dress and black choker were in dynamic, choppy stroke, but the woman’s skin was a soft pink, glowing and smooth, as if lifted from Boucher or Fragonard.
“What do you think?” Joubert had asked.
“Don’t know where I’d put it,” she replied.
“You are in the market for a new house.”
“True.” She leaned in close, then stepped back. “All these women in front of the mirror. You must have at least five such paintings just in your gallery.”
“I have twelve, but this is the best, a contemporary putica.”
“It’s not a putica, Joubert. There’s nothing titillating about it.” Surely even Joubert could see that. “Men are always painting women at the mirror because they want to catch what we’re thinking. The mirror doesn’t mimic Venus’s pond but presents woman’s innermost being.”
“Would it surprise you to know, Mrs. Ward, that the painter is a woman?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Because she reveals nothing. Look at the mirror—completely obscured. You’ll never know anything about women, that’s what the painting says.”
Despite Sarita’s confident analysis of the painting, she’d been unsure if she liked it. By the time she came around, the work had already been purchased by another, as a gift for his wife.
Joubert’s shop is a far cry from Herbert’s studio. Herbert has unpacked all of his spears and skins and heads and juju masks—crates of them—and arranged them all around his studio as if it were an exhibit at the Exposition. Into this, he sets his sculpture, perhaps to assist in the full imagining of the Congo in the middle of Montmartre. How bizarre. And he has enlisted the help of several of the area’s negroes to help him do it. Ostensibly the dearth of black people in London is one of the biggest motivators to living in Paris and sure enough, there is François, and there is Martine. Sarita had been present when Herbert had explained what African savagery looked like to François, who was more than a little skeptical. Ward had explained what the idol was for, what sorts of spells witch doctors cast, and the kind of ceremony that he was trying to bring to life.
“That was a long time ago,” François had responded with his face composed in tremendous patience.
And Herbert has to tolerate François because of all the men who had shown up for the modeling work, it is François who had the best physique. He is a laborer and as a result has the sort of diet and level of physical activity that translates well into a naked witch doctor. The piece is coming together well—nice molding of the legs and torso, a feat of bronze muscle. Herbert could call the piece “Parisian Laborer Connecting with His Ancient Past,” which would at least explain the statue’s resigned and pleasureless expression. The thought of this is making her smile as Herbert, done with his late evening brandy, enters the room.
X
The Anversille
March 1903
Casement boarded the Anversille in Lisbon. The last port of call was Tenerife and it is only a matter of days before he reaches Boma. At least he is now reunited with his dog. Poor old John. He pants in the heat, making the most of the draft that comes in beneath the cabin door. His smile is always affable, even as it shows off his powerful jaws.
There is such an odd assortment of people going to the Congo these days, or perhaps they are the same people as in the past and his changed perspective is what alters the composition. The adventurers seem more mercenary, the missionaries more naïve, and he less robust. Although the work is important and he will have to find strength. He’s writing a report for the Foreign Office on the use of slavery in the region, and the possible ramifications of such a document, should he execute it well, weigh heavily. He could save a lot of people. Or he could exert great effort and manage nothing. How are these things decided?
Casement has been under the weather since Lisbon. Despite this, he managed some gambling there and even met a young man—Aghostino—who still flickers in his mind’s eye. Casement gave him money, said that he would be back through Lisbon and that they would meet again. After all, it was possible. Casement would be finished with the Congo after this report was done. His best and most likely posting is, at this stage, Lisbon.
It’s late, but sleep is not coming. He has a book in his second suitcase, O’Grady’s History of Ireland: The Heroic Period, and, as he’s read it several times, maybe that will send him off. He pulls the case out from under the bed. The rusted clasps on this one had crumbled as he boarded at Tenerife and the case has been tied shut with a rope. Although he knows for a fact that a sailor is responsible for this knot—Casement watched him do it—this is definitely no “sailor’s knot.” Much as he prods at it, even poking into the seams with a pencil point, the knot holds fast. Perhaps it is a Gordian knot and everyone knows what that needs: a blade. Unfortunately, Casement’s pocketknife too has fallen victim to the same rust as the clasps and it is only now, as he finds himself in need, that he remembers his intention of purchasing a new one at the last port of call.
“Move, John,” says Casement and John, who is lying to block the door, pulls himself up on his bowed front legs, gets the hind legs under, presents his great head to be patted and scratched. Casement shuts the door behind him. Outside the cabin, a breeze worries the damp air. All is quiet. Down the deck, he can see two Kroo boys leaned up on the rails, one gesturing through some funny story with loose, sweeping hands, the other slighter, more reserved in his movements, laughing and shaking his head in disbelief. As Casement approaches, the boys quiet themselves, but they relax as he is recognized.
“Pleasant evening,” says Casement.
“Yes,” the boys pleasantly concur.
“Would either of you have a knife?”
“A knife?” one says. “Yes, I have knife.”
Suddenly Casement isn’t sure what they’re talking about. “There is a rope I need to cut.”
“Yes. A rope you need to cut.”
Although Casement assumes that his words are being repeated out of a sort misplaced politeness, something in the exchange feels comic, or possibly erotic—but the harmless eroticism of schoolboys.
“Shall I cut your rope for you?” asks the reserved, slight boy. A boy, certainly, but maybe nearing twenty.
“Yes, please do,” says Casement. “That would be much appreciated.” Cut my rope.
The two head back to his cabin. Belowdecks, he hears an expletive ejected into the night and in response, an avalanche of drunken laughing.
“Someone has lost at cards?” suggests Casement.
“Yes. I think maybe that is what happened.”
Casement opens the door and John slips out, trotting past and down the deck, retracing their steps. His nails tick on the boards. “He won’t go far,” says Casement.
“Unless he can swim,” says the boy.
Is this logic or a joke? Casement smiles—a response appropriate to either. “There is the knot,” says Casement, indicating the suitcase, which is on the bed.
The boy takes the knife from his pocket. He slips it loose from the leather sheath and slices at the rope in two places so that it falls from the suitcase. The boy opens the suitcase, not to invade privacy but to be helpful—to finish a task.
“Thank you very much,” says Casement. “Can I offer you a drink?”
The boy’s eyes flicker to the doorway and he smiles sweetly.
“Or will your friend be missing you?”
“He will not miss me,” says the boy, “if I am not too long.”
So they’ll have a drink and whatever else because he’s heading upriver again. And even if this is just a drink with a pleasant boy with beautiful, coffee-colored eyes and a gentle manner so sensitive and light that it almost dizzies him with its unassuming power, it will be cherished. Because things are no doubt about to get very dicey. He’s going upriver in search of
atrocity, butchery, horror. The boy picks up Casement’s compass. He presses the top, which flips the lid open.
“Do you know what that is?”
“A watch?” The boy looks, not understanding the device’s language.
“It’s a compass. It lets you know where you’re going.”
“You don’t know?”
“Don’t know what?” asks Casement.
“Don’t you know where you are going?” More gentle teasing. This boy might easily be nineteen, the age that Casement was when he first traveled to the Congo. Who was that young man—that boy—encased within him, ringed in as trees ring in their younger selves?
“Know where I’m going? Not always,” says Casement. “What’s the fun in that?”
Sometimes he wakes up weeping. As he quiets himself, John panting at the bedside, he’ll feel his heart pounding away—a muscle slick with something not quite wholesome. He’ll calm himself by remembering that he is not the infamous Sir Hector MacDonald, dead in his Paris hotel room, that it is not he who is being court-martialed for indecent acts. He thinks over MacDonald’s horror of loneliness, of that brave man—revered for his courage as a soldier—holding the gun, considering his options. Did MacDonald’s mind wander back to his days in Ceylon with the warm breeze shaking the tops of the palms, the sand like scented powder beneath his feet, the spices afloat giving even the air one breathed a potent charge? MacDonald is rumored to have interfered with a number of the native boys. He is also rumored to have had no tolerance for the colonials, who went for the easy kill when they saw their interests compromised.
And you, Roger Casement, are now taking on the King of the Belgians and all of his supporters. He thinks of Sarita Ward’s admonition, “The truly brave are often the truly stupid. They just don’t understand danger.” This was a mother’s common sense after Herbie broke his arm trying to climb down from a tree that the much-taunted Roddie had been unwilling to follow him into. And there is Casement, going up the Congo alone, while other clever chaps are patting him on the back, wishing him luck. Here’s a drink for you, brave Roddie, and we do hope we see you again, that when you make your way downriver you’re not in a box.
Valiant Gentlemen Page 27
