Thirty

Idlewyld is not as George remembers it in the days of the Boonstras. Ten years, God, how they pass in the blink of an eye. The orchards are a mess now. The plum trees flanking the long laneway have suffered, too. As they come into the almost blinding sun at the front, west-facing entrance, he tells the driver to stop.

“I won’t be long,” he tells the man. He’s had to borrow Finch’s cart and syce. “Just wait here.”

But the Malay is looking anxiously about him and talking gibberish to the oxen.

“Well, take them to the stables, then,” he says loudly. “Let them have a drink.”

Alone, and looking up at his task, George reconsiders his initial impression. The mansion is just as imposing as ever.

A house girl answers his knock. She is confused by his request to see Hannah.

“What about Mrs. Peterborough?” he tries. “Memsahib? Is she here?”

“No. She no here.”

The girl has a cleft palate and he can hardly understand her speech. He wants to shake her by the neck. “Well then, where on earth are they?”

“Forest,” she says.

“The forest? Is that what you said? Look, can I speak with somebody who knows what’s what?”

Abandoning the useless house girl, he heads around the side of the house, where the syce is still in the process of unhitching the bullock. George walks past him into the cart house. Inside the shelter sits the Peterborough’s ostentatious blacktop carriage as well as his own family bullock cart. So she is here somewhere. Crossing back through the stable his curiosity is further aroused. In one of the stalls a police mount sways its collared head.

George strides back across the lawn, already drenched in sweat. He will not sit and wait for his wife—his goddamned wife!—to emerge from the jungle. “Where is sahib?” he demands of the idiot house girl, having rapped on the front door again. “Tuan? Where is he?”

“Caarrin?” she says.

“Is that an answer, or a question? Do you not know anything? Can you not find out? No! Wait!” he corrects himself, as she starts to shuffle away. If she goes searching he’ll be stuck waiting, and he’s not interested in waiting. He is interested, come to think of it, in seeing firsthand what the precious doctor has in his laboratory. “Take me. Take me to him.”

The house girl looks even more uncertain than before.

“Listen to me.” He grabs her flimsy forearm. “I am Colonel George Inglis, Deputy Resident of the Province of Perak. Take me at once to Dr. Peterborough.”

She leads him through the house—an incredible house—to the back of the property and walks him to the edge of an expansive patio lined with palms. A wooden cabin is just visible where the lawn ends and the orchards begin. Perhaps, in plantation days, it was an overseer’s hut.

“Caarrin,” she says.

“That—? He’s in there?”

“Nnnh,” the girls says emphatically, almost viciously, before turning back to the house.

George puts a hand to the now pulsing pain in his gut and resumes walking. At the cabin he knocks loudly, reminding himself that he has good reason to interrupt the doctor’s work. His administration has made that work possible; he, personally, continues to make it possible. A little due diligence is to be expected given Izrin’s recent protestations.

“Dr. Peterborough?”

There is no answer. George squeezes the catch and pulls. “Hello? Doctor?”

His first impression is of an old wardrobe. The room is heavy with private, worn-in smells, the overlapping odors of bodies and their habits. Shaving ointment, tobacco, and lemongrass mingle with the nutty smells of palm and coconut creams. Underneath these, like a chord being constantly played, is the sour scent of female sweat.

What windows the little building possesses are rectangular gaps left under the eaves. As his eyes adjust, George sees that counters line the room on two sides. Directly opposite him, on the wall facing the door, a bed sheet has been tacked up by its edges and pulled taut, like a blank canvas. A three-legged stool sits in front.

He drifts to a table that holds a tall bottle of green liquid. Two scalpels and a long-handled pair of scissors stand inside the bottle. Next to the antiseptic, laid out meticulously on a checkered cloth, is an arrangement of steel tools. Measuring tape, calipers, a doctor’s hammer, a tongue depressor, various thermometers. Then a series of things he cannot identify: thin metal sticks like cake testers, probes that thicken into paddles, and a double-paddled device that hinges in the middle. He picks up one of the tools—two pointed legs joined by a screw—and twists the pea-sized knob at its middle. The legs spread slightly wider.

“Certainly well-outfitted,” he remarks.

Looking up, George notices two anatomical maps tacked to the wall in front of him. The first is a hand-drawn profile of a headless, naked woman. He shivers. In firm, looping penmanship, someone has written all over her body. Elongated dorsal muscle slender calves narrow hips… Dozens of phrases tattoo the skin; others are attached to the body’s contours with ruler-straight threads. Good grief. This business is uglier than he imagined.

The next map is titled “External Genitalia.” And there it is, fully and completely exposed, split open and pricked with dozens of needle-fine lines affixed to labels. Words frame the margins of the chart paper: outer labia aubergine pigment anus downy hairs Mons Veneris hair thick straight Clitoris swollen overdeveloped Vagina often freckled.

George checks behind him. If Charles Peterborough were to return? The thought makes his knees buckle and he steadies himself against the counter. He should not be here. He should never have entered. What was that house girl thinking of, leading him here?

Map of the Secondary Characteristics: (i) the Breasts small. Aureola light burgundy to burnished black, of varying size (largest at 3 and 1/4 inches d.). Secondary Characteristics: (ii) the Face. Eyebrows fine to none. Lips: protruding…

An uncomfortable stiffness is slowly spreading inside his chest. He turns away, kneading his forehead with his hand. This is the man’s science?

Scanning the outer walls more carefully, he finds a second door he had not noticed, on the other side of the tall cabinet. This door, he realizes, faces away from the main house. Could it be that the doctor exited as George knocked? Is Charles Peterborough hiding in the fucking forest too? George remembers their formal introduction in his office, how the man had looked askance at the furniture before he’d deigned to sit in it. How he’d pressed George about Izrin’s reliability. Yet the man isn’t ashamed of this, this wreckage. Blue-blooded scum.

A logbook is open on the desk, a pen resting next to its inkpot. George bends over the page …remarkably similar sexual characteristics. Her musculature is slender and she presents with sleek dark hair, which though nearly absent on the body is yet abundant on the Mons Veneris. Together with her flattened pelvic contour, this elegant structure suggests a racial typography well-suited to sexual pursuit. Observations of the permanently engorged state of the clitoris confirm… On the page facing, the even, looping penmanship comes to an end. Stratz has characterized the Javanese type as indolent, fearful, and without initiative. I have as yet been unable to corroborate his findings in the case of the Malay female.

So Charles is making the maps, not just consulting them. Probing these girls’ bodies with those steel tools. Testing their flesh. As the scents of skin and anxiety intensify around him, he feels his bile rising and some shame over his squeamishness. For others might call him that, squeamish. No better than a woman.

Yet he has objections, hasn’t he? Logical, grounded objections, and it seemed he’d always had them. Finch should bloody well materialize this instant. Like a fat genie from a bottle. Let him see if he can stand for it. “I don’t want this to become a problem for Peterborough,” Finch grumbled, when some of the natives began complaining to Izrin. George looks around. Some problems are not so easily put right. Should he take something with him to show the Resident? Some sort of evidence?

His fumbling fingers locate the catch for the desk drawer and it releases. A jumble of dark-skinned, straight-mouthed women stare back at him, every one of them stark naked. Photographs. He was hoping for a mickey of whiskey. A girl barely older than Peterborough’s own daughter, cupping her budding breasts. A grandmother with her wrists crossed behind her head. Another woman stands with her brown back and naked pinkish rear to the camera, peering quizzically over one shoulder. Yet another woman is obviously pregnant. Legs splayed, her hands rest at her side.

George stirs the cards in the drawer. He pauses when he recognizes the house girl who greeted him at the front door, the hare-lipped dolt. In the image, she is sitting on the three-legged stool, her work-worn hands pushing her knees wide apart. Dark eyes glistening with the same dumb certainty. George pockets the photo card and shoves the drawer shut.

Fat drops of rain have begun striking the tin roof. He fights his way free from the cabin and jogs toward the big house as the heavens open.