Chapter Four

The Cape Doctor

There is a spring wind that blows on the southern Cape of Africa, southeasterly up from the Antarctic, that breaks ships against the rocks and blows clear the skies over the settlement of Cape Town, clearing away the soot and fumes, the stench of sewage and men’s sweat, like a great broom sweeping clean the air, carrying the dust and heat and pestilence out to the Cape Flats, leaving the air fresh for those who live to breathe it. It wraps itself around Table Bay and pollinates the silvertrees, swirling through the colony, like a gorgeous Malay twirling at a Rainbow Ball. Fierce and terrible, unsettling and healing, the wind was affectionately known by the Dutch locals as die Kaapse dokter; the English, in the dozen years I lived there long ago, knew it as the Cape Doctor. As I was known.

I arrived in Cape Town in August 1816. In October, die Kaapse dokter did.

It’s hard to describe the effect of Cape Town. The exuberance of it. A riot of life. After the cloistral student years in Edinburgh and London, the cold and clammy damp, Cape Town was like throwing open a window after a long, arduous winter—the kind of winter you find only in the north Atlantic, wet and dank and smoky from fires. Everywhere you turned in Cape Town, your eye was met with marvels, as if in reward for having made the dangerous crossing. The sea was a glistening blue-green, palest jade to lapis lazuli, the steep green mountains rose sharply above bone-white beaches, and presiding over all of it, the grey cliffs of Table Mountain, across which fog rolled each evening like a cloth and withdrew again each morning, like a woman dropping her dress. The mountains surrounding the bay were wreathed with strange, unearthly flowers—the prehistoric protea, which resembled pine cones in brilliant orange and yellow and red; flowering stalks of candelabra lily; trees strange and skeletal and knobbed as a human spine; and brilliant pink Watsonia flowers—made more radiant by the pale blue sky and bluer sea, the shore a marvel of surf-rounded monoliths as if Stonehenge had been arranged by nature here.

The Cape of Good Hope—which I’d later see with Lord Somerton—was like a jewel, a mountain carved out of emerald, a tent of green, color of County Cork; tall as a Salisbury Cathedral draped in green silk, cascading to the gem-blue sea. Steep as the cliffs of Cornwall.

As a girl, I’d heard young women in Cork sing ballads of true love and read novels that made romance sound like meeting one’s destiny. I’d felt that only once before in my life—looking into the landscape of the body in Fyfe’s dissection theater. But I felt it again on arriving in Cape Town. Here was my home, so far from it. I did not feel, as so many Europeans mistakenly would claim to, that this was my land, but rather that I was its—I belonged to this place, without having known it existed.

  

The journey from London had been long and tedious and full of tiresome subterfuge, as I fought to maintain privacy on board ship—tossing out my cabin mate each morning that I might dress—so I was relieved to set foot on firm ground again (the bustling, fish-reeking docks at Table Bay) even as my legs were unsteady and my lodgings unpromising in the extreme. I was to be quartered at the Castle, where all military men were sent, a damp, dim, stone structure in port, whose chill dark corridors could not entirely extinguish the exuberant light of those days. I took comfort in the thought that Mirandus had spent time in a similar circumstance in prison in France. I vowed, as he had, that I’d not linger.

I had failed to find General Mirandus in London, had not heard back from him after my last letter, so when I completed my studies with Sir Astley Cooper, I entered the army as a military surgeon. I had accepted a first post at Plymouth, then Chelsea, now in Cape Town, hoping that I might hear from the general any day with an invitation to join him and his family in Caracas. But I received no word, no news. Except for the little that I read in the press.

It was odd to have no word of him, but I did not flatter myself that I could weigh heavily in his thoughts, when so much else demanded his attention. Still, I scoured the papers for items about him, had asked on board ship whenever we took on new crew, what they might have heard.

The ship’s captain had been full of news, collecting word of other men as some collect coin, as if it were a kind of wealth. From him I’d learned that the Cape Governor, Lord Somerton, was a difficult man—arrogant and autocratic, given to extravagant loyalty and enmity both. Like me, the governor was recently arrived from England, having come two years before with a young family. It was said Lord Somerton had once been an uncommonly handsome man and as vain as a woman about his looks, and was sensitive about his age, now that he had passed two-score and five. I wondered that a man could keep his vanity in so rough a place, so far from fashionable society, but he was said to keep abreast of fashion and to covet the latest news from Paris. He was rumored—though surely this was a joke—to have persuaded the captain of the ship that had borne Napoleon to St. Helena’s the previous year to pause in Cape Town to give a thorough accounting of the latest Paris fashions to Somerton’s wife and daughters. This was considered especially funny, since his sympathies were entirely against Republicanism, and he was rumored to have lost family to the guillotine in France.

He sounded like the model of everything I loathed. A man whose name alone, not merit, had earned him rank, contrary to the meritocratic impulse of the age. Hearing him described aboard ship, I recalled Mirandus’s quip: A gentleman should always be wary of rank, given the word’s rancid concomitant, “decay.”

We were unlikely ever to be friends, Lord Somerton and I, if only by virtue of unequal birth. But he governed the Cape colony in more than politics; I’d heard he was its social arbiter as well, and if I was to successfully enter this society, it was through him that I must do it. Lord Basken had instructed me to introduce myself as soon as possible, and had supplied me with a letter of commendation to that end; he had called it my “ticket to soup,” pleased to know the common idiom, assuring me it would grant me an invitation to dinner at the very least. I’d planned to call on the governor as soon as I was settled, only to find that before I could, I was summoned—the very morning I arrived—to Tunhuys (or Government House, as the English called it), the governor’s palatial residence, to tend to his daughter, who’d fallen ill.

I went at once, taking time only to change my coat.

I declined the offer of a carriage, preferring to walk after the weeks aboard ship, despite unsteady legs. I walked quickly through the dusty streets, dodging wagons and men on horseback, and dark-skinned men in chains, through the bustle of a major port, which Cape Town had recently become with Napoleon in residence nearby. (I’d heard the traffic in claret alone sustained the Cape economy.) I walked through the shade cast by the Groote Kerk before I reached the pleasant walkways of the Company’s Garden, much discussed on the voyage over for its abundant produce and leaf-shaded paths.

The governor’s residence seemed all the more stately in the midst of the raw colonial town. Its walls were crocus yellow, the columns and portico a brilliant starched white. I had heard that Lord Somerton had spent a king’s ransom on the renovation of the ballroom, an extravagance that secured my dislike of the man I had yet to meet. A fortune on a library I could understand, but redecoration of a ballroom seemed to signify a trivial mind. What I’d heard of him on ship had inclined me to this view. He was a man whose reputation preceded him, as did that of the beauty of his daughters and of his late wife.

  

I don’t know how I looked to him the day we met, but I can guess. There is a portrait of me from the time, painted on ivory when I was in the barracks in Chelsea, in which I have the long, sad face of Botticelli’s Venus; aristocratic cheekbones, high and prominent; and fine, small ears beneath a cap of golden ringlets. My nose is my best feature—long and slender—setting off my dark eyes, my pencil-thin brows; if my mouth is too small, it is a minor fault. It suits well the delicate curve of my chin. I look every inch the young poet, the serious young man, my gaze a contradiction—at once direct and far off; I seem fixed on some distant goal, some great thought. Every inch the Romantic hero; Young Werther himself.

In the final famous photograph taken of me in Kingston, Jamaica, 20 years later, I retain the posture of the dandy I once was, if not the hair. My hair and face are a ruin, as my heart was. Desolate. Despite my turned-up collar, my neat tie, my highly polished boots and well-cut coat, I am a wraith in that final famous image, flanked by the manservant Dantzen and Psyche, the dog. I look altogether too much like a poodle; the dog and I share a face, in fact. My right hand rests gently on her head. My left thumb tucked into my pocket on my vest. My long Ciceronian nose, still my best feature, too large against my shrunken face. My jaw grown long and bony, my mouth a small dark frown; my earlobes hang, framing eyes that seem to squint. As if trying to see what’s coming, what lies ahead. We never do. For better and for worse. I didn’t know what was coming.

  

When I first saw him standing in his offices at Tunhuys, the governor’s back was turned to me, hands clasped behind him, gazing out over the gardens; he struck me as a monumental man by virtue of his height and dress. But when he turned to greet me, the impression changed: I thought he was too pretty to be a man. His features were too delicate, like a young woman’s. There was something self-consciously manly about him, as if he were slightly straining for the effect. Though later I would think that he was straining to cover grief, to offset an impression of melancholy, of which he was conscious and by which he was embarrassed.

“Doctor Perry, good of you to come.” Lord Somerton was polite but curt, his courtesy born of breeding not inclination, bespeaking condescension if not slight, making clear he was indulging in a pretense of social equality where there was none, and that my rank did not merit in his eyes. He could not disguise his dislike of my profession.

He offered me a chair and I sat, noting that he did not. Instead, he began to pace. Like a man whose energies are too little engaged by his work, who would rather be out hunting, riding, shooting things, a man for whom these rooms were too small, too tight a fit.

I’d heard that he was given to guns and dogs and horses, which interested me not at all. But if he was to be my patient, I came prepared to be patient with him. Having heard about Her Ladyship’s death from fever the year before, I had expected to find a man chastened by loss, but on him even grief wore the face of glamour.

“Your uncle commended you most highly,” he said, as if he rather doubted the letter I’d borne with me on my journey, which I’d had the good sense to send ahead with the servant who had summoned me. He held the letter out to me. I took it. My passport to this new world.

“Lord Basken has been most generous,” I said. “Although we are not kin, we are as close as affection can make men; he has graciously treated me as if we were.”

“Your kin are…”

“Far from here, Your Lordship,” I replied, perhaps too quickly, steering him clear of that which I dreaded to discuss, the rocky shoals of personal history. “But yours, I understand, are near at hand and in some distress. Which is why I have come. I am at your service.” I stood. “Might I see the patient?”

Another man of his station might have been affronted by my obvious refusal to reply to a reasonable inquiry—after all, if I was to attend his daughter, he had reason to want to be assured of my quality. But the assurance he sought was not any I could give. I had only my character and skill and Lord Basken’s letter to speak for me.

He stopped his pacing and turned to face me, his hands folded behind his back.

“You’re rather…” He seemed to be grasping for the term as he looked me over. I feared he might say impertinent. “…young for your position, are you not, Dr. Perry?”

“Surely we can agree that age is not the measure of a man,” I said.

He raised his chin, as if trying to discern insolence in my remark.

“Given primogeniture, one’s age often makes and unmakes men,” he said.

“Indeed,” I said. “I am an only child.”

“What then would you say measures a man?”

“Surely that depends on who is taking it: a tailor or an undertaker, a lover or a patient. In the last case, a man’s measure must be his ability to heal.” I quoted again the dramatist, as if it were an incantation conjuring me: “Ne hoc consideres, se junior loquar, Sed si viri prudentir sermones apud te habeo.” I could see that he understood the phrase at once: Do not judge me on my youth but on my knowledge as a man.

My mother had maintained that land was the source of security, a faith my brother had proved woefully unwarranted. General Mirandus had counseled knowledge as the only lasting treasure. Once more I found that Latin was the key in the lock that opened society to me.

“Then let us take your measure, doctor,” Lord Somerton said. “The patient, my daughter Georgiana, is upstairs.”

  

Sir Astley Cooper at Guy’s in London had taught me that the performance of decisiveness is itself often decisive in the treatment of a patient. As I mounted the stairs beside the governor, I felt his trepidation rise and my courage fail. I held the banister to steady my hand’s shaking. We did not speak as we mounted the staircase to the private rooms above; when we came to the door we were to enter, I stopped him with a hand.

“You may wait here,” I directed His Lordship at the door. It was a dangerous gambit to give orders to a vain and aristocratic governor, but I sensed that my confidence would encourage his own. He did not protest. I opened the door, stepped in alone.

Inside the drapes were drawn against the midday sun, the massive sash windows to the balcony fastened closed. All was oppressive heat and the sour smell of sweat and illness. When I approached the bed, a maid I had not noticed stood up from the far corner, curtsied briefly.

“How is she?” I asked. I’d learned that those overlooked often observed more keenly than those looked to for their observations.

“Poorly, sir,” the girl replied. “She hardly moves at all, except in pain.”

The girl in the bed was flushed and seemed unconscious of my entrance; using the Parisian Laennec’s recent invention, I rolled a tube of paper to form what he called a stethoscope and placed one end to her chest, which revealed—as I feared it would—a rattle there; her heartbeat slow. He condition was far worse than I’d imagined.

“How long’s she been like this?”

“She’s had the fever for more ’an a day now, two.”

“And the treatment?”

“Why, none, sir. None’s seen her afore you.”

“She has had no treatment at all?” I was incredulous. This was not a debtor’s prison, yet the patient lay as neglected as any there.

“His Lordship dislikes doctors,” she said. “Begging your pardon, sir. After all that happened with Her Ladyship.”

“Of course, of course,” I said. I was not interested in personal details. I raised the girl’s wrist and felt her faint and erratic pulse. The room’s conditions were perfect to induce the illness that she fought. I strode to the window and yanked back the curtains, raising the large sash windows so that a cool breeze blew in.

“Won’t she catch her death, Sir?”

“With luck, she will catch her life,” I said. “Here’s what you will do…”

I ordered her to run a bath, as hot as could be withstood, and to fill it with herbs from the Company’s Garden—ginger, eucalyptus, peppermint, camphor, if they had it—so that it steamed the room, and to bathe Miss Somerton there twice daily to clear her lungs and raise her blood. She was to scrub the room with bleach to clear contagion; I ordered clean linens and fresh air. Prescribed hot beef broth with garlic hourly and warmed wine to induce a sweat and break the fever. The truth of principles must be confirmed by observation, Sir Astley Cooper had said; the best I could do was prescribe from sound principles and observe the consequences, then adjust.

I was jotting down instructions when I noticed a bottle of tonic on the bedside table; I took it up and read the label, though I hardly needed to—here as in London, apothecaries made fortunes poisoning patients. I knew what it contained.

“And throw this out, for God’s sake. She’s to have no more of it, or any like it—is that clear?”

I told the girl to send for me as soon as Miss Somerton woke. When I stepped out of the room, I spoke to the governor only briefly to say that his daughter was quite ill but would recover with proper treatment as I’d prescribed.

“No need to see me out,” I said. Then I descended the stairs alone. As I departed through the gleaming monumental columns, I hoped that what I’d promised the governor proved true.

  

I spent the rest of that afternoon seeking new lodgings and quickly secured rooms in the Heerengracht, a fashionable and trafficked thoroughfare despite the open sewer that ran down its center. Cafés, shops, and trees lined the street, and each morning it would become my habit to walk to the bakery run by Mrs. Saunders for Dutch coffee and sugar buns, to sit and read the news from here and abroad to the delightful crunch of cane sugar between my teeth, delighted to have word of the larger world, even if it was months old.

In Edinburgh, I had read with joy of the liberation of Venezuela from Spain, which Mirandus had long dreamed of and fought for; in London I had read with fear of the terrible earthquake in March that had killed thousands in Caracas and given ammunition to those who questioned the new revolutionary government’s justice in the eyes of god. Now I searched the pages for any mention of my friend. Found few. None that told me what I longed to know: how he was.

  

The following day, Miss Somerton awakened from her stupor (which confirmed my suspicion that it was not induced by fever but by the laudanum-laced “medicine” she’d been prescribed). I visited daily during her convalescence, which happily was brief—far briefer than I’d thought possible. Attending to the governor’s family, I was excused from my duties as a medical assistant at the hospital. Soon enough she was well enough to descend to dine with her family, and I was invited to dine with them as well.

The dining room at Government House was of pleasing proportions, the floors polished to a high shine, the walls a pale hue that lent warmth to the pleasantly cool chamber, a balance of elegance and simplicity. Candelabras down the table illuminated the family’s faces in a soft glow. At table were His Lordship, his two daughters, and his youngest son, as well as the local bishop. I was not surprised to learn that the governor himself had commissioned the room’s redecoration in addition to the renovation of the ballroom. He was a man who clearly enjoyed worldly pleasures. Which made it odder still to find that the bishop dined regularly with them. At first I thought this a sign of piety, then of respect for his late wife; only later, when I knew them better, would I understand that the bishop was present to provide a figure of fun.

Showing me over the house before dinner, the governor had told me of how he had added wings for a ballroom, updated it to its sleek Georgian style; he told me the house had originally been a storage shed, and hardly better than that by the time they’d arrived two years before, “not fit for hounds.” I’d heard on board ship as we’d sailed here that he was extravagant, self-indulgent. Perhaps he didn’t care to govern well. The Cape, after all, was said to be a place where reputations came to die; I intended to be sure mine did not.

Now as we sat down to dine, Lord Somerton announced, “The doctor approves of our ballroom.” In point of fact, I didn’t—but I appreciated that he spoke as if my opinion might matter.

“It is impressive,” I said.

“More than you might guess,” Lord Somerton said. “The house was hardly better than a dog’s kennel when we arrived.”

“Lucky dogs,” I said.

Bishop Burnett smiled at me from across the table with gorgeous teeth, and I felt myself recoil. Beautiful dentures were to be seen all around London before I’d sailed for the Cape—the Waterloo ivory, as it was called, plucked from corpses on the battlefield. In truth most came from common graves, from bodies disinterred for sale. Seeing such ivory in the mouths of men in the Strand or Piccadilly, my nostrils filled with the sick-sweet stench of battle and the dissection theater—rotted flesh, gunpowder, offal, mud.

“That suited the hounds, of course,” Lord Somerton said, “but not us, so we’ve made improvements.”

It was hard to tell if the governor was praising or mocking me when he spoke of my miraculous powers. “You’re a magician, Doctor,” he said. “We suspect you of alchemy.”

“I’d hate to think that reason is so rare in these parts as to seem supernatural.”

“How did you do it?” He reached for Georgiana’s hand, seated to his right, covered hers with his and then raised it to his lips, kissed it. I disliked his politics, but it was hard not to admire the man’s tenderness toward his family.

“Medicine is often a matter of optimizing the body’s ability to heal. As with a ship, one must avoid overburdening it.” I feared I was dull, pedantic; I must charm. “As in life, success often depends on the judicious application of wine.”

“I will quote you on that,” said the governor. He signaled a servant to fill our glasses. “Doctor’s orders.”

It was clear that he was trying to win me over, a fact that disconcerted me. He had no need of my good opinion, although I was relieved to have stumbled on his. Still, I was wary, watchful.

What I noticed that night was how Lord Somerton seemed transformed in the presence of his family, with the constraints of office cut, leaving him to gentle, mocking exchanges of admirable tenderness and wit. He treated his children as equals, although only Georgiana had reached an age—at 23, two years my senior—that might qualify as adult; he indulged them with most tender affection. Conversation was like a sporting match, each in turn offering a topic that was struck about like a badminton shuttlecock. They discussed local fashion, hunting prospects, the antics of their pets—among which numbered two lizards, four dogs, two monkeys, and a snake.

We were halfway through the soup course when a monstrous creature, scaly and pale with small shining eyes, rose up from behind the soup tureen and began to make its way down the long oak table, striding like a boxer entering a ring, head down, shoulders raised, occasionally stopping to lift and lower its head like a Mohammedan at prayer, prompting the bishop to drop his spoon into his dish, which caused a clatter and a mess, before His Lordship directed the man at table to serve the lizard its dinner elsewhere, which delighted the youngest girl, Charlotte, no end.

“Do use the Wedgwood,” she whispered to the manservant as he left.

“As you wish, Miss,” he replied.

The child looked at me earnestly, without a trace of mirth, and said, confidingly, “He won’t eat from anything else.”

“Ah,” I said. “Nor would I. He has good taste. And has he a name?”

The child looked at me as if I were daft. “But of course.”

Georgiana came to my rescue, “She calls him Mr. Franklin.”

I nearly spit my soup. “For the American ambassador?”

“Because he has an enormous appetite, a bit of a belly, poor eyesight, and appears to want nothing more than his own liberty.”

“I hadn’t realized one named lizards,” I said.

“One names one’s dogs,” Miss Georgiana said, as if that explained it.

“Didn’t Napoleon have a dachshund named Grenouille?” asked the bishop.

“The American president John Adams is said to have a hound named Satan,” said Lord Somerton.

“Cerberus would be more fitting,” Miss Somerton replied.

“Not all the colonies are Hell,” I said.

“Not all the colonies are colonies,” said Lord Somerton. “The Americans have seen to that. And now, God help us, the South Americans have taken it up.”

“It will be their undoing,” said the bishop. “Mark my words.”

“Or their making,” said I. “I understand that Adams also has a horse named Cleopatra. But perhaps that’s more understandable—what man would not want to mount Cleopatra?”

The bishop stared at me and the table was silent. I was accustomed to dining with soldiers and sailors and fashionable London society, for whom wit might take any subject. I feared I’d overstepped the bounds, given the presence of young ladies, but Miss Somerton smiled and Lord Somerton laughed.

“By God, I’ll name my next mare that,” he said.

Night had settled over the bay, and through the windows came the scent of the salt water, the breeze fragrant with jasmine, the lazy hum of flies and bees and birdcalls, and in the distance the sound of drums or surf. Candlelight twitched in the breeze.

It was Georgiana who turned the conversation from Cleopatra to Shakespeare’s plays.

“Aren’t they mounting Cleopatra at the African Theater next month?” she said, smiling.

“Now that’s a performance I’d be glad to observe,” I said.

The bishop cleared his throat. “I fear you may be disappointed, Dr. Perry, coming from London. Our theatricals are in a sorry state.”

“Indeed?” I had seen the glorious African Theater, was surprised to hear it was in disrepair.

“It is most regrettable,” Bishop Burnett said. “The enlisted men are in great need of salubrious recreations.”

Miss Georgiana coughed into her napkin, evidently to cover a laugh.

The bishop was a man who would always choose an obscure term over a modest one, not for precision’s sake but vanity’s; he tortured his phrases on the rack of egoism. I’d later learn Miss Georgiana took great pleasure in imitating him behind his back; hearing the bishop speak, I was seized with the absurd sense that he was parodying obfuscation instead of indulging it.

From our first meeting, I disliked him. The bishop combined the worst aspects of religion: false piety and true pomposity, which in my experience were lethal for both good conversation and good sense. He was a man who took great pains to dictate liberality to others, as if to balance the little generosity he himself possessed. He was thoroughly benevolent in word, if not in deed. He complained bitterly of the local matrons, who refused to give alms to the poor and the lepers, but when asked of his work among them, sniffed and said that of course he wished he had the luxury of time for such pursuits but that his official obligations prevented him. I thought I noticed Miss Georgiana smile at this—as I did.

“I only wish I could be more useful, Doctor; I am not one of those who spare their own trouble. My sole desire is to be of use to His Lordship and all Cape Christians.…Regrettably, my health and spirits put travel to Robben Island quite out of the question.”

It did not appear to impede his theatergoing. He held forth on the splendors of Shakespeare and the African Theater and rapturously described having seen an absolutely marvelous production of The Tempest the previous year.

“Quite apt for our circumstance,” he said, “stranded as we are.”

I thought the bishop seemed rather worldly for his post.

“You see, doctor, there is a paucity of soldiers to perform the female roles. Our soldiers are not amenable to having female parts.”

I could not help quipping, “As a physician, I must say it would be most distressing to discover that the soldiers here had female parts.”

Lord Somerton laughed his curious laugh—“Ah, ah!”—as if breathing in joy.

The bishop looked distressed, gave his pursed little disapproving smile. “I meant, of course, female roles.”

“Ah.”

The bishop continued, warming to his subject. “At first I had found it rather alarming to see soldiers dressed as women, but I understand it was the tradition in Shakespeare’s time.”

“Women weren’t allowed on stage.” I tried to keep any hint of bitterness from my voice.

“And what of Viola?” Georgiana asked of the heroine of Twelfth Night.

“An interesting case: Viola was of course played by a man, pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man.”

“How very confusing,” Georgiana said.

“Impersonation often is,” I said.

“Of course, the reverse is not true,” said the bishop. “It’s an absolute delight to see a female perform in a male role, but it is far too rare. Women make such fine men.”

“Of course,” I said. “No impersonation is required.” An edge in my voice.

“What can you mean?” the bishop asked.

“Only that women needn’t impersonate men; they need simply cease impersonating women.”

“That’s quite true, Doctor,” Georgiana said. “But you’re the first man I’ve heard own it.”

“The doctor is a rare man,” Lord Somerton said, looking at me over his raised glass.

“His sort of man is rare indeed,” the bishop said, with what I sensed was not admiration.

“In an age of taxonomy, you’d think our classifications would be more meaningful,” I said, encouraged by the governor’s evident approval. “We make too much of the distinction between men and women; the differences are less than they appear.”

“The differences are obvious, surely,” Lord Somerton smiled at his daughters. He seemed to enjoy an argument, as if we were pursuing a fox through brush, chasing clarity.

“It’s not obvious at all to me why a daughter should be denied a son’s education,” I said.

“This claim of rights for women would wrong the women it claims to aid,” Lord Somerton said, as if settling the matter. “It would deny them their privileged status, make them no better than men.”

“Is it a privilege to be denied an education, to be denied the liberty to walk freely in the street, to earn one’s way? Is it a privilege that denies them vote and rights?”

“I’d not have taken you for an enfranchiser, Dr. Perry,” said the bishop.

“I’d rather that than be taken for a fool. We disguise all manner of harm in the name of protection—it’s always someone else’s best interests we’re looking out for, when we are looking to our own. The English ‘protected’ the Irish out of their lands. They are doing the same here.”

A silence fell over the table. It was clear I had gone too far.

The Governor cleared his throat, signaled with a graceful hand to the footman to clear the plates. “It is late, Dr. Perry. We mustn’t detain you any longer.”

I thought I saw the bishop smile.

  

I was miserable that night, walking home and later tossing in my bed in the Heerengracht, writing and rewriting in my mind a letter of apology that I would send to the governor at dawn, knowing I could send none. There was no undoing such words; as if my words had been an incantation, I had worked a spell that cast me out of their charmed circle. He was a Tory, an aristocrat, a defender of everything Mirandus and I stood against. There was nothing I might say to change that. It would be changing history itself.

I did not hear from the governor and did not expect to. I spent the next few weeks in the errands that constituted the better part of my job as an assistant staff surgeon. Dressing wounds. Taking histories. Writing reports. Scrubbing down examination rooms whose filth had most likely done more harm to patients than the physician had done good.

  

I consoled myself that I was not here to court the good opinion of an aristocratic governor but to cure, or try to. It was a tall order. The military hospital, where I reported the next day, was a catastrophe. The rooms were filthy and overrun with animals of every sort, the windows broken. Birds flew in and flitted among the rafters, dropping their shit. Pigeons roosted in the examining rooms and chickens and pigs ambled down the halls; the hospital wards were ample, but they had been commandeered by a few officers for their private use as apartments, leaving the ill to lie on narrow cots in overcrowded corridors and in a few smaller rooms, shoulder to shoulder in the filth.

A stench of manure and human waste and festering wounds permeated the place, relieved only by the fresh breeze that blew through the broken windowpanes. Flies covered patients too ill to bat them away. To compare it to a stable would be to insult the stable. When I inquired of an orderly where the local people were treated, as this was reserved for the military, I was told they were housed mostly in the tronk—the local jail. I had expected challenging conditions, but I had not anticipated cruelty, bald indifference to the suffering of those in need. A boy of four—a soldier’s son, I assume—died of a diarrheal illness as I stood by his cot. When the surgeon in charge asked what he’d died of, I told him frankly, “Indifference and poverty.”

I wrote to the governor daily with my concerns about the conditions at the hospital. I did not hear back.

  

I woke one night to the wind howling outside my window overlooking the Heerengracht, the rain like pebbles tossed against the glass, then a pounding on the door, and my landlady’s voice, “Dr. Perry, someone’s come for you!” I opened the door expecting a summons, a gaoler. For a moment, I thought I’d been found out. But it was a boy, saying a ship had sunk. I was needed at Camps Bay.

The call came early, as they always would, urgent as nightmare. Something awful, the boy said, hundreds of bodies on the beach. I pulled on my boots, took my pistol and medical kit, descended the stairs, and together we rode down to the water’s edge, to the beach where they lay heaped like lumber or like seals sunning themselves, the bodies of more than a hundred men, among them women, children, infants. The stench of excrement and decay, bitter rot and brine like a choking fog.

I didn’t need to ask what sort of ship had gone down; only one kind has a human cargo. Word of a slaver rounding the Cape was always news, as the bounty offered on the illegal ships had become nearly as valuable as the sale of the enslaved once was.

It was rare to have the bodies wash ashore; when the slavers went down in storms, chains usually pulled their human cargo down, the crime swallowed by the sea. Not now. I walked among them, picking my way carefully over the corpses, turning them gently to see if any hint of life or breath remained. If any might be saved.

Most were swollen; some few appeared sleeping save for a skin of sand over their own, which they did not bother to wipe away, proof of their state. There was no knowing what had happened aboard ship that they were free of chains when the vessel sank, but I guessed the captain had freed them, hoping to save some lives for later sale. Here was the body of a child not more than five, hair fanned out like Caribbean coral or a lady’s silk fan. I bent down to brush the sand from her cheek, raised her thin wrist in my pale fingers, felt for a pulse, found none.

The following day, the town would talk of it in a pantomime of compassion, which was really just an excuse to revel in the death that was not yet one’s own. I was gripped by a hatred of the frontier town, of its people, the merchants and landowners, the slaveholders and petty bureaucrats, the sailors and soldiers; they seemed an infestation, an overgrowth or tumor upon the skin of Africa, a lesion, suppurating us.

  

It was while walking through the Company’s Garden my first day in Cape Town that the idea came to me to take notes on local flora. I’d make a study of Cape plants and their possible medicinal uses. It seemed only sensible, given the remarkable richness that arose here in the margin of the world, where the unexpected and unlike collide—mountains and sea, two oceans. Nature itself seemed denser here, richer, more vivid, where life in all its variety mixed.

I disliked the English habit of turning every place into England; I preferred to consider where I was. Although I had little time to explore the hills outside town, I took notes on the native plants in town where I found them, making small sketches, inquiring of locals about the uses to which they put each. My landlady noticed my interest and recommended that I speak with a pharmacist she knew, a Mr. Poleman. An amateur botanist.

It was a week before I managed to find time to pay a visit to his shop, one afternoon after I had finished my hospital rounds. I found him unassuming to the point of near invisibility. Rumpled, pale haired, though hardly older than myself, he had a touching wariness, a modesty and anxiety that one rarely found in men here or anywhere; his eyes avoided mine, seemed fearful when ours met; it made me feel almost gallant, but it was the shop that most impressed me; it was spotless, orderly in appearance as the man was not. He seemed absent of vanity. I liked him immediately.

He was more like a bird than a man. Later I would realize what seemed curious and comforting about him: he was a man seemingly without sex. Mild, slender, he had almost no physicality. He smelled of bleach and lavender.

I asked about the source of his remedies, whether all were imported, which, if any, were from local plants. He answered with a completeness uncharacteristic of local merchants—he did not boast of the quality of his products, but spoke of the unreliable shipping, the damage done in transit, the loss of efficacy due to cold or heat, of the excessive reliance on opium and mercury, both of which he considered to be more poison than tonic.

“Often what kills can cure, if administered in a proper dosage,” I said.

“That is the principle,” he said. “But dosage is often wrong.”

That was true.

We spoke of local plants and their possible uses.

“Are you a botanist, Dr. Perry?”

I wasn’t, I said, but I was eager to learn. Especially here where there was so much to study. When he invited me to come out for a collecting trip the following Saturday, when an assistant could watch the shop, I was delighted to accept. He proposed we gather samples from Table Mountain to evaluate later in the small lab he kept for his private use behind the shop.

There was a kind of greed in me for learning, a passion that seemed to have taken the place of the erotic desire others claimed to feel. At night I would lie in bed and see before me the leaves I’d collected, recall the scent of a fresh-picked stalk and the taste, imagining what might be compounded, what cures might be discerned. The green fug, the bitter leaf. Curiosity has its sexual side.

The following Saturday morning, Mr. Poleman and I hiked out into the hills at the base of Table Mountain, gathering samples, especially plants that local peoples used in cures. As we walked, he spoke with reverence of the “sacred beauty” of the place.

“Nature is a mystery, Mr. Poleman,” I said, “not a psalm.”

“Can’t it be both, Dr. Perry?”

“No,” I said. “Reverence is fatal to understanding. We don’t question what we revere.” Men always spoke of land and women thus.

I filled a satchel for later examination in his lab; when we returned to town we deposited our samples there, then parted, agreeing to meet in an hour to dine and discuss the day’s collection. I would join him for dinner at his home, where he promised a stew seasoned with some of what we’d gathered; he admonished me to come promptly at six.

An hour later, having washed up and changed, I was standing outside the door of Mr. Poleman’s house, a few minutes before the hour, when a horse galloped toward me at an alarming rate and pulled up short, before the governor swung down from it.

“A word, Dr. Perry.”

I feared that my insistent correspondence had incurred the governor’s wrath, which was a topic of local discussion (he was said to have broken a cane over someone in a dispute). But to my surprise he was courteous, if not cordial. He said that he had read my reports with interest and wished to clarify several points. He might have summoned me to Government House for a discussion, of course, but I imagined I was not welcome there.

So I stood in the dusty street and explained what I had made perfectly clear in my reports. I appreciated his interest, despite the redundancy; nonetheless, I was relieved when Poleman came to the door and opened it impatiently—“Perry, where have you been; you’re late”—only to see the governor. “Your Excellency,” he said. “I did not mean to interrupt.” He began to withdraw into his home, like a hermit crab, but I stopped him and made an introduction. The governor said, “It is I who is interrupting, Mr. Poleman. I’ll detain you no further, Dr. Perry. Thank you for your report. Good evening, gentlemen,” he said, though clearly we were not.

  

When a letter arrived the following morning as I took coffee in Mrs. Saunders’s café, I thought it was at last word from my friend in Venezuela, summoning me. I longed for news of Mirandus; I longed for London and my few friends. I turned the envelope over and saw the governor’s seal; my heart sank. I opened it and read:

Forgive me, Doctor, although I cannot forgive myself, from having kept you from your dinner. You were too polite to tell me it was cooling as I kept you gossiping beside the door, so please do me the courtesy of joining my family for what I promise will be a thoroughly hot meal.

I was charmed despite myself. Not simply by the promise of a good dinner, but by the governor’s self-deprecation. It is a rare man who wears his power lightly. I was startled by how the invitation pleased me. To be welcomed again into their charmed circle. But I knew better than to trust him, or anyone.

That evening at Government House was enchanting, as were the many evenings that followed there, or at least I was enchanted. I delighted in the governor and his children, not yet grown, save for Miss Georgiana; they possessed an unaffected grace and curiosity, high spirits combined with gentleness and natural manners. They seemed—the word that came to mind surprised me—uncorrupted. Something from another age, before the fall.

  

It was Georgiana who proposed—one evening after dinner—that Lord Somerton teach me to ride.

“Don’t be absurd, the good doctor knows well enough how to hold his mount.”

The truth was, I didn’t. Nor could I shoot straight. I had managed in my brief time as an army doctor always to ride in the supply wagon, never needing to keep my own mount. It was both more economical, since I needn’t pay for the purchase and upkeep of a horse, and avoided the awkwardness that would surely follow should I fall and require examination on the field.

“In fact,” I admitted. “I do not.”

“Good God,” said Lord Somerton. “You call yourself a soldier?”

“I call myself many things, Your Lordship. I am called still more by others.”

The governor smiled; he appreciated a joke, as long as it was not at his expense.

“Oh, do let us teach him,” Georgiana spoke in the same tone I’d heard her apply to her pet monkey, when petitioning that it be allowed to sit at table or join a game of whist.

“I warn you,” I said. “I may fall more than ride. You cannot judge a doctor by his grace in the saddle.”

“We’ll arrange a hunt,” said Lord Somerton.

“You’ve imported foxes, as well as hounds?” I was amazed at how far a sportsman’s devotion could go.

“An African hunt,” he said. “On the Cape Flats, a jackal’s as good as a fox.”

“From the fox’s perspective, considerably better, I’m sure,” I said. I had always pitied the fox, another reason I’d declined to ride out with the others at Dryburgh Abbey. “Perhaps we might arrange something a bit less vigorous?”

After some considerable discussion, I managed to persuade Lord Somerton to commence our lesson with something less arduous than a hunt; I proposed a trip to Table Mountain, a small hunting party of two, having heard from Miss Georgiana how he loved to hunt up there.

On the appointed day, Lord Somerton met me at his stables near Roundhouse above Camps Bay; he proposed to match me to a majestic monster, a splendid beast of seventeen hands, a dappled Andalusian named Zeus, easily twice my height, but Georgiana came to my rescue and drew forth from the dark barn stalls a charming little roan filly hardly taller than myself. She stepped drowsily into the light, her coat gleaming, her eyes half-open.

“You can’t be serious,” Lord Somerton said to his daughter. “The doctor needs a proper horse, not a child’s pony.”

Miss Georgiana ignored her father, affectionately stroking the horse’s neck. “She’s very docile,” she said. “But she’s not afraid of anything. She won’t rear at a snake, or a leopard.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that we might encounter either, but I did not say this.

Evidently weary of delay, Lord Somerton swung up onto his mount, a stallion of magnificent proportions. It was instantly clear why Somerton bred horses; he was a man who seemed more at ease on a horse than off one. As if he were a centaur—half man, half beast. When I’d arrived at Roundhouse that morning, he’d toured me through his stables as another man might display his gardens or his pictures. Many covet wealth, but few—it seemed to me—truly enjoyed it. Somerton clearly did. He relished beautiful things, unapologetically: beautiful horses, beautiful guns, ballrooms and houses and clothes. Wealth bought him beauty; it gave him pleasure and time to enjoy it.

He seemed to take the delight that animals take in life. I could not imagine him in London. For all his studied social graces, he had a wild heart. A lonely or perhaps solitary spirit. Standing between us in the morning cool, he stood apart. He was utterly unlike the general. Not simply because he was more delicate, an aesthete rather than a commander of men. The general belonged to Venezuela; Somerton seemed to belong nowhere. He seemed a man between worlds, which is perhaps what had brought him here, as it had me. Strange creatures suited to no place but here, like the king protea, the sugarbird, the silver trees. Strange and peculiar fauna and flora of the Cape.

Despite my dread of horses, I was surprised to find myself at ease in the saddle beside (or more accurately below) Lord Somerton and his enormous mount. Although my horse was tiny by comparison, I seemed to tower over the fynbos as we rode up into the hills, my heels skimming the tops of the sugarbushes as we rode higher, as the blue expanse of the Atlantic Ocean spread out below us.

The morning was cool and windless and bright, and we rode without speaking for what seemed hours. Occasionally steenbok burst from the bushes or a bontebok raised its masked face and twisted horns. I was relieved that Somerton left his rifle in its saddle holster. We paused for lunch near the top of Table Mountain. In the distance a small herd of zebra scattered at the sound of our voices—

“Do you often hunt, Doctor Perry?” the governor asked.

“Only for a good book at night,” I replied.

He was not amused.

“When you take a shot,” Lord Somerton told me, watching them, “remember, heart first, then head.”

“What makes you think I’ll take a shot?”

Somerton laughed.

The hound that had accompanied us shivered, straining against the leash that held it, silent as its master, until Somerton released it and it shot forward as if sprung from a trap.

When the dog returned he was carrying a small soft body in his mouth, which he dutifully dropped before us. The caracal kitten lay there, limp, paws stretched forward on the ground as if it were in mid-pounce. Its ears large as its head, no longer than two phalanges of my first finger. An ache overtook me that never did when human corpses were involved. I felt ill and stood. Then I leaned over and was sick beside a silver tree.

“Can’t be moved by every death, doctor.”

“What have we become, if we’re not?”

“Men,” he said.

“God protect me against that.”

It was midday when we reached the top of Table Mountain. The sun was strong, shadows almost absent. The light was blindingly bright. The views of the Cape Flats to the east and the bay to the west were breathtaking, though a rising wind cautioned us not to linger too long. Storms could come up quickly in the afternoon and cloak the mountain in cold rain, washing out the trail. Hunters had been known not to return from a simple morning’s hunt.

We sat on a ledge of grey stone, horses tied in the trees below the ridge, our legs dangling over the abyss, where hundreds of feet below us trees stood like tiny weeds. I heard the high-pitched keen of an eagle, and the shadow of enormous wings passed overhead.

“That’s what he’s after,” Somerton said, nodding to a mountain hyrax not more than two yards from us. The creature on the rock outcropping before us was plump as a loaf of brown bread, its dark eye keen as my own, with a disconcerting glint that might easily be construed as intelligence. We wouldn’t have believed it, had we been told then, that its closest relation was the elephant.

“I do believe it’s regarding us with disdain, Lord Somerton.”

He laughed and raised a pistol, but I set my hand on his arm—the first time we’d touched beyond a handshake. I felt the shock. I felt him hesitate. He did not often hesitate. He looked at me, and for a moment it seemed that he saw what everyone had been overlooking for years. Who I was.

“Mercy,” I said, withdrawing my hand, then running it through my hair, hoping to steady myself, but he seemed to think I meant the hyrax.

“Mercy’s a mad policy in a wild place.” He raised his pistol once more. But the hyrax had evidently heard us and clambered off, leaving the rock bare. Somerton put aside his gun. “Sentiment will be your undoing, Dr. Perry.”

I looked out over the curve of the bay, the pale disk of Robben Island like an unblinking eye. For once I had nothing to say.

As we rode down the steep trail back toward Roundhouse, Somerton shouted back to me, “You can’t spare every life, doctor. You’d starve in a place like this.”

“What’s the point in killing, when my vocation is to heal?”

“Surely you’re no match for death?”

“Perhaps not, but I won’t assist him in his labors any more than I would the bishop.”

He laughed and said no more of it. We made no more mention of what we had seen on Table Mountain, what life had been saved or spared.