“Isabella?” Bates repeated.
His fair hair was still swept back but was bleached white from sun and age. His face was lined and tanned, his beard gray, and his dark eyes, which had seemed so languid in the photograph, now gazed upon her feverish and wild.
“I am not Isabella,” Ursula said. Face-to-face with this man, she found it hard to hide her contempt. “I am her daughter, Ursula.”
Bates moved toward her, eyes still fixed upon her as if she were an apparition from a long-ago dream. He reached out and touched her cheek, and Ursula flinched from his touch, a terrifyingly intimate gesture for a man who had tried to orchestrate her death.
“Why did you let me leave?” he asked, addressing her once more as if she were her mother. He seemed out of his wits.
Bates grabbed her chin and tilted her head up. Ursula had to close her eyes to block out the sun. She fought his grip and shook her head free till they met eye to eye. Bates was transfixed, his eyes betraying an alarming mixture of excitement, incredulity, and shock.
Ursula backed away. “I told you I am not…” Her voice faded off. There was now such sadness in his eyes that she was confused.
“No!” Ursula cried out desperately. “No!”
“Oh, dearest one, death comes so easily to me. But you, you have brought me hope!” The mad, feverish glint returned in his eyes.
A terrifying look came over Bates, as if he were possessed by some malevolent spirit. He became agitated. His torso jerked violently. His hands shook. An awful sound, like the howl of a rabid dog, broke from his parted lips, and he fell to the ground shaking.
“Oh, my God!” Ursula shouted. “What is it? What is happening?”
His eyes rolled back in their sockets as the convulsion eased.
The woman emerged from the hut carrying a small glass flask and hurried to Bates’s side. She urged him to drink, placed the flask to his lips, and forced him to take a gulp.
The woman then led Bates into the hut and pushed him roughly down onto the floor. She then returned to the corner of the room and resumed her weaving.
Bates lay in the hut for an hour before reviving and walking, unsteadily, back outside.
“I apologize. Sometimes the past comes back to reclaim me.” His voice was behind her.
Ursula turned. “Are you speaking of the Radcliffe expedition?”
“Radcliffe!” Bates spat in disgust. “Radcliffe was a fool!”
“But you were once friends, were you not?”
“No. Not friends. They needed me, that was all. They needed a naturalist to help them identify what they sought. Radcliffe was just along to lead the damn thing, as if he were leading military maneuvers in the Sudan. That’s how he treated it!”
“And how did you treat it?” Ursula asked, her head spinning from the glare and the heat.
“It was my passion,” Bates said simply. He now appeared surprisingly lucid and calm. “After my time in Brazil and Guyana, I knew I had to come back to the Americas, and if we had found what we were looking for, we would have been some of the wealthiest men alive.”
“What was it that you sought?”
“Plants were what we sought, of course. But we needed the help of the Waraos. It was they who knew the secret.”
“The secret?”
Bates eyed her suspiciously, as if he suddenly recalled once more who she was. “Please let us go inside, it isn’t good for a white woman to sit in the sun for so long.”
Ursula nodded gratefully but followed him cautiously as he led her back into the hut. The woman in the corner continued her work and did not bother to look up. Ursula sat down heavily on a wooden crate.
“This is an unfinished land.” Bates started to speak. “One in which we can observe natural selection at work. The constant battle for survival. The need to weather flood or drought. The Waraos know this, they live in harmony with this. To them the world is merely a thin, flat disk, surrounded by water. Beneath that lies the double-headed snake Hahuba that encircles the earth—it is he that causes the tides to ebb and flow. But what we searched for were the Hoanarao or ‘people of the black water,’ who dwell in the deep reaches of the delta, where the water is brackish and still.”
His voice was mesmerizing.
“It was they whose shaman we were told knew of this plant that could control a woman’s cycle. Could hold back conception itself. Think of the possibilities. We could have been the very instrument of natural selection.”
Ursula shivered. “My father would have had no part in anything so monstrous!”
“Monstrous? When England lay in decay? The bloodlines diminished? He saw only possibility, freedom from poverty, the reinvigoration of the English race!” Bates gave a savage laugh, and Ursula drew back, shaking her head.
“That’s why they betrayed me. They wanted all the glory for themselves,” Bates scoffed.
“Tell me,” Ursula urged quietly.
“He came for me,” Bates began. “He came for me before the Indians even started. I heard him coming toward the tent—Radcliffe always was such a clumsy bastard. I thought he was with fever, but when I saw his eyes, I knew, I knew that it was all of them…. They had planned it all along. Oh, yes, I had seen the communiqués Radcliffe sent back to them. I saw what he thought of me. A liability. A risk. A traitor. He thought the jungle had taken me already…hah!”
Ursula clasped her knees to her chest as Bates continued.
“So Radcliffe comes to me, and I see the knife, I see the flash of the knife, and then it starts. The camp is attacked. There are gunshots, I hear men being thrown into the river. No doubt the piranhas were already feasting. Radcliffe stabs me in the confusion. Oh, the sweet sensation of the blood! He plunges it into my stomach, and then as I fall, he slashes at my chest. I fall and I fall, I hear only the screams…but I know that if I lie still, if I keep so very still, they will think me dead already.”
Ursula’s breath caught in her throat.
“They wanted me dead.” His voice was no more than a whisper now.
“They?” Ursula prompted.
“All of them. Anderson. Abbott. Even Dobbs…and Marlow, of course, always Marlow. And to think Radcliffe even survived.” Bates started to laugh again. This time, though, it was hollow and sobering.
“But you survived, too.”
“Barely! The Indians who had attacked were mostly Carib traders. They had heard that we carried many provisions with us—rum, salt, that kind of thing. They were opportunists, and I suspect that if our guides had not been armed, the attack would not have been so deadly. I can only assume Radcliffe surrendered in order to live.”
“So how did you survive?” Ursula continued to press the issue.
“As I say, I played dead, and once everyone had gone, I struggled to walk. They had taken everything—the canoes, the food, even the water. So I lay down and prepared to die. Do you have any idea what that is like, Ursula? Preparing yourself for death?”
Ursula shivered despite the heat.
“I was saved by the Warao people. They came in their canoes to see what had happened. My memories of that time are hazy, but I spent nearly six months in one of their villages near the mouth of the Río Grande tributary.”
“And then?”
Bates cast her a sidelong glance. “I went to Caracas. I was told that my wife and two sons were dead. That they had died of yellow fever in Trinidad. I went mad with anguish. For ten years I waited, and then I found him.”
“Who? Who did you find?”
“My eldest son. He had been moved to an orphanage in Caracas during the epidemic on Trinidad. The Hospital of San Stephano, where my wife and other son died, had been looted and burned—all records had been lost. They merely assumed the boy had died alongside his brother. But I found him…I raised him…until he was grown. Then he went to sea. It wasn’t hard to find him an apprenticeship aboard one of Dobbs’s ships. That was where he met Dobbs’s young son Christopher. It was like a revelation—the means for our deliverance was before us. My own son became the instrument of my revenge.”
Ursula’s heart nearly stopped beating. The truth now exceeded her wildest comprehension. It wasn’t just Bates she was after. From the looks of it, this decrepit creature hadn’t left this jungle in years. There was someone else, some lost son doing his bidding.
“Given that you are here,” he continued, “I can only assume he has been arrested or is dead.” Bates suddenly looked up, a gleam in his eyes. Ursula thought maybe the madness was returning but instead he gave her a sly, cunning look. Like a sandy, bushy haired fox. “No,” he said, stroking his beard. “Perhaps he hasn’t failed me after all….”
Ursula frowned.
“He wrote to me you know,” Bates said, “about them all. Laura Radcliffe. Cecilia Abbott. Even Marlow…”
Bates disappeared into the dark recesses of the hut and emerged carrying a tin box packed with tattered envelopes. “Don’t look so surprised. Even here, at the ends of the earth, the Royal Mail Steam Company brings me news from England.”
Ursula reached out her hand to take one of the letters but Bates snatched the tin away and shuffled into the back of the hut once more, mumbling and cursing to himself.
“Tell me about my mother,” Ursula demanded. The thought that her mother could have ever loved this man was too terrible to ignore. “Tell me about Isabella.”
His eyes glinted. “Isabella was an angel. We were so young, you see. She always knew me. She brought out the good within me, and when I was with her, I could forget all else. ‘Isabella the angel,’ I would call her, and she would have been mine should I have returned and Marlow not. I knew her long before she met Marlow, you see. She was standing at a summer party, her dark hair falling behind her beneath a large white hat. She was all in white, and as she turned, I knew. This one had to be mine.”
“Then why did she marry another—”
Bates’s eyes narrowed and his body jerked. Ursula drew in a breath, waiting for another attack, but instead his eyes took on a glazed, faraway look, and he spoke in soft, pleading tones.
“Oh, Isabella, do not say it is over. Do not say you must be with that man. When I return—yes, when I return—we can be together again at last…. Oh, Isabella…” Bates moaned, and his head dropped, and he wept.
Ursula instinctively started to extend a hand to comfort him, but before she could stop herself, Bates reached out and grabbed it.
“You wretch!” he cried before his eyes rolled back and his body convulsed backward, dancing and jerking, the palms of his hands violently smashing up and down against the floor.
Ursula got up quickly and backed away. Now was her chance. She thought, I must escape.
She looked desperately to the river, but there were no canoes and only the forlorn skeleton of a boat on the shore. Behind, in the small clearing, was the other makeshift hut, but beyond that the jungle rose up as a green dark curtain on either side. Ursula yelled for the woman, but she remained hidden in the back corner as if she had disappeared into the very heart of the darkness itself.
Ursula had only one option, and she began running. She got as far as the jetty, and when she gathered up her skirt and began to climb down, her head was violently jerked back by an unseen force.
A voice snarled in her ear, “I will never let you leave me again!”
“No!” Ursula cried out. “No! Let me go! I do not love you! I never did!” She hoped desperately that pretending to be her mother would placate him.
“Do not lie to me!” Bates spat at her. “You know you loved me, and I would have come for you when I returned. That was why your husband wanted to be rid of me!”
Another voice in her ear, and this one sounded quite different from the last. It was silkily warm against her neck. “You don’t want to leave, do you, Isabella, my love?”
“I am not Isabella!” Ursula screamed, but Bates was now incapable of listening. He tried to drag her back by her hair, seizing her with a strength that took Ursula by surprise. Bates then forcibly carried her out along the path to the hut in the grass. Ursula’s struggles were futile; try as she might, she could not release herself from his grasp.
Bates opened the door to the hut and threw Ursula inside. She hit the ground hard. Winded, she tried to sit up and breathe, but her body seemed rigid with fear. She heard Bates shifting something in front of the hut, and from the sound and the smell of it, it was an old kerosene drum. Ursula nearly fainted with the combination of fumes and heat, for inside, the closeness of the air was stifling. This hut was also wooden, but unlike the ones on the jetty, these planks and slats were firmly affixed to the frame. Barely any light at all entered through the spaces between them. The little that could filter inside did so through the space between the tin roof and the walls. Ursula tried to look about her for some means of escape, but there were no windows or patches of rotten wood. She then searched for some instrument she could use, but there was nothing aside from sacks of flour and maize stacked up in the corner.
“Bates!” she cried. “Let me out!”
There was no reply. If he was still afflicted by whatever madness had overtaken him, Ursula needed to remain calm. Tears pricked her eyes, and she scrubbed them away with her sleeve. She took a deep breath and tried to erase the anguish from her voice.
“Bates, my love. It’s Isabella. Please, let me out. How can we be together if you won’t let me out?”
Still no reply. Ursula banged her fists against the door, trying to dislodge it, but to no avail. Her knuckles were red and raw.
“Please!” she cried out again. “It’s Isabella! Isabella…”
Ursula wasn’t sure how many hours had passed. She wasn’t entirely sure that the day itself had not passed until night came. She watched the crack of light as it faded to gray, and then, as twilight descended, she curled up on one of the sacks, anything to be above the ground when total darkness fell. She wasn’t sure what terrified her the most, the thought of what might come in from the outside—the cause of all the scuffling and slithering she heard around her—or whether it was the man himself and the thought that he might enter in the darkness to violate her. Both terrors kept her from sleeping.
Deep into the night, Bates came and stood outside the hut. Ursula heard the rasp of his breath and smelled the distinctive musky odor of rum and sweat.
“Have you come to free me?” she asked, her voice cracked and dry.
Bates laughed. “Ah, Isabella, no…Why do you want to be free of me? You never used to. You wanted nothing else but me.”
“It’s true,” she replied. “I want only you now.” It was a dangerous game, Ursula thought, but maybe if she could lure him to open the door, she would have some chance of fighting her way free. “I know, I know how hard it has been for you. All these years…”
Bates kicked the door and spat again, “You know nothing!”
He descended into a moody silence. Ursula heard him pacing around the hut, his feet crushing the grass. Then there was nothing but the screech of monkeys in the trees and the call of tree frogs, deep-throated in the depths of the jungle.
She struggled against sleep, trying to keep her eyes open, but the night seemed as if it would last forever, and soon the exhaustion was too much. She dreamed of the graveyard in which her father lay buried. She was lying curled up on the wet grass by his grave, inhaling the scent of the earth. She watched, fascinated by the whiteness of her skin on her arm outstretched on the black mound of stone and dirt. A light rain fell and shrouded her in mist. There was the faint pealing of church bells in the distance, followed by a hushed stillness. Ursula rolled over and faced the sky. It was dark and stormy, and as the rain fell harder, the raindrops stung sharp and cold on her face. She looked downward to see the trickle not of water but of blood pouring now from the sky and running off her body into the hard and flinty ground beneath her.
Ursula awoke. She was still in darkness, but the heat had stilled. She thought she heard the sound of an animal padding across the grass, a snarl, then the sound of paws soft on the muddy ground. She drew her knees in close and shut her eyes. The fears in her dreams were more tolerable than the fears that surrounded her when she was awake.
When the light began to return, the heat inside the hut was already intense. The combined smell of fuel and her own sweat made her gag more than once. But when the morning came, she nevertheless started to beat her fists against the door again, crying and screaming to be released.
She ceased all activity as the heat took its toll. She was finding it hard to breathe, and her head swam whenever she tried to raise it. She had not had anything to drink in nearly a day, and her throat felt as though it had been scraped with a knife. Ursula lay slumped in the corner of her cell.
Suddenly there was a crash, and the sound of shouting in a Spanish tongue. Ursula struggled to her feet. There were more shouts and then gunshots. A woman screamed. Ursula fell against the door of the hut, summoning all her strength to yell and plead for help. There was only confusion. Ursula could smell smoke and hear the roar of flames ignited. Abruptly the fuel drum blocking the door came crashing down, and when the door opened, she was pulled outside into the glare of the light. A dark-haired man in a blue and gold uniform spoke to her in urgent Spanish, but she could not understand. She saw only smoke and confusion. Despite this, a strong and determined voice inside her head reminded her what she had to do. Ursula pushed the man away and ran toward Bates’s hut. She could think of nothing else but the letters. She struggled inside, as mayhem rained around her. She saw the tin box, grabbed it, and rushed outside.
A blow to the head sent her reeling. Then Bates kicked over another drum, sending kerosene flooding down toward the river. Ursula could see him standing before her, a tower of flames and smoke behind him. He grabbed her and pulled her to the ground. The stench of fuel was unbearable, and then the horrific truth started to sink in: He was going to set her on fire. She could hear the shouting as men tried to maneuver around the flames, and random shots rang out, but Ursula could not tell from which direction they came. Bates stood over her, black against the orange fury of the sky. Her dress was soaked in kerosene, and he needed only to wait for the fire to spread for her to be engulfed.
“If I can’t have you, no one else will!” he cried out.
Ursula kicked him in the groin as hard as she could, and he crumpled to his knees in pain. Seizing her chance, she got to her feet, grabbed the tin box, and started to run with the blind energy of fear driving her, toward the jungle. The fire raged behind her. There was a sound of air rushing backward, and a draft hit her in the back. She stumbled and turned to see Bates ablaze and screaming. Horrified, she averted her eyes. The heat of the fire was intense now, the canopy of the jungle caught alight. Ursula looked down at her skirt, stained with kerosene. Time seemed to stop. She watched a line of flame traveling toward her before she instinctively ripped off her skirt, turned, and ran.
She tried to make it through the thick undergrowth, tried to head toward the river, but the thick vines strangled the trees, squeezing the light into tiny chinks, barely visible against the twisted darkness of the jungle canopy. The air was thick with heat. She kept moving ahead out of sheer willpower. She knew that if she stopped, even for a moment, all would be lost. The river was silent—it offered no guidance—but she knew she must find it. The river was her only salvation. She had never felt so alone.
So she now knew the truth. She knew that Bates had been left not for dead but partly alive, yet it was a dead kind of living—darkness had eaten him from within. So this was the truth. Could she really be so sure? In this place all reality seemed unreal. Her dreams made more sense. Her senses deceived her. She heard voices. She saw faces in the shadows. The heat was unbearable. Her clothes were leaden weights. She was drowning even as she placed one foot in front of the other. She stumbled over tree roots and fell deep into the mud. She felt hands upon her, just as a voice inside her started to say, Death would be a relief. You could just stop, catch your breath, let the air enter your lungs one last time. Let your hands stretch out in the darkness. Let the earth consume you.
Just as this voice spoke, another, so calm, like water flowing over her, made itself heard:
“You can stop running now. You’re safe. I have you.”