I have often considered that—with the notable exception of humanity—the male of a species has the showier plumage on account of its lesser appeal; the female is naturally appealing and requires no ornamentation to attract a mate. So it is with certain women and men.
After my death, some will speculate that my reputation for extravagant flirtation had been born of an effort to disguise my true nature, but in truth I simply had an eye for the ladies. But after that first evening together at Roundhouse, it was absurd how Somerton absorbed me.
The next morning we rode out together, down to the sea at Camps Bay, and bathed there, in the frigid salty waters and waves, hidden from view among the stone monoliths that crowded the water’s edge like giant prehistoric eggs, or sentinels.
At night, dining quietly together without servants in attendance, he held my hand as we sat beside each other at table, drinking wine, the sound of the surf coming in the window.
He told me of how, after Elizabeth’s death, he had considered taking his own life, but had not for the sake of the children. He told me, as we lay in the darkness at night, how in my arms he felt he had “come home.” Embarrassed by the declaration (Why is it women are always compared to things they are not?), I nonetheless understood what he meant, for I felt it as well. At home. He said there was nothing I could not say to him, that we could not say to each other. In darkness, in light.
As if Roundhouse were like Prospero’s island, where another logic governed, another air, a different gravity, we lived for those few days without thought of the larger world beyond.
He spoke easily, but I could not. It was not reticence, exactly. I wanted to confide, but I could not. The habit of silence is hard to break, had become a way of life; the words and stories stuck in my throat as I sought to form them. It seemed a lie, that life, a phantom, a ghost story. As if my life were a spell that I might undo by speaking, saying the words. How I came to be who I was, all the lonely years during which I’d tried to forge myself into a useful instrument, a blade without feeling. Like Psyche with Cupid, I could love only as long as I did not examine too closely the body, the past.
I told him what I could: of my training in Edinburgh, of Dryburgh Abbey and Lord Basken’s interventions on my behalf, of my training with Sir Astley Cooper, and of General Mirandus, whom he knew by reputation but had not met. I could not say more.
Save for with my sister and mother, I had never known such pleasure and comfort in the company of another person, company that did not seem to rob me of my solitude but confirmed and enhanced it. I seemed with him more myself, as if he were a mirror in which I appeared more clearly, in both fault and virtue; amplified, as our voices had been in the canyons near Knysna—which returned to us larger, bolder, yet still our own.
I was loath to resume life in Cape Town, afraid of what trouble we might encounter there in the course of our official duties. As Governor Somerton and Doctor Perry. But he assured me nothing would change.
What do I remember of that time? Moments. Our first morning together at Roundhouse, when he pulled back the sheet and looked at me and said, “How beautiful you are,” and laughed when I grabbed at the blanket to cover myself. Later, as I was stepping from the bath, he held a towel open for me, but out of my hands. “No, wait,” he said. “Let me look at you.” I felt a shiver pass through me to be washed in admiration, revealed, released, as I had felt when we rode down through the morning heat to the cold salt waters of Camps Bay or rode out together in the heat rising off the Cape Flats, and I felt it loosening my muscles, lending me a suppleness I had not known before, an ease and confidence and pleasure in my body undisguised. Everyone wants to be seen.
I was surprised by the delight I took in my new role of lover and the power that attended it, one that girls are said to have even when young, but which I hadn’t, although I had faintly sensed the possibility when I saw how General Mirandus watched Sarah Andrews or very occasionally when we sat conversing in his library, a whiff of sensuality faintly discernible between us, as foreign and intriguing as the unexpected flavors of his homeland prepared for dinner in the room below—meat roasted with salt, not boiled; garlic and onions and limes and tomatoes and a frilly green plant called cilantro that he had cultivated from seed.
I had been unsettled by Mirandus’s appreciative glance when he watched me, smiling, as I reported on what I had read or studied or discovered in his library that day or week or month. He smiled at me as he might over a particularly delicious champagne, a connoisseur’s admiration. It was a look that I would later observe in Lord Somerton, when he considered a particularly promising horse—a calculating and appreciative gaze, half pride, half delight, an admixture of pleasure and cold assessment about what might be made of this, how far the beast might go with training and encouragement.
Somerton’s regard for me was different than the general’s, which had often made me feel curiously diminished, less than I was, slighter. This was the opposite: I felt multiplied.
Still, it was ambivalent pleasure to be thought beautiful, an appreciation I’d never known nor sought. Women’s admiration of me had always been solicitous, self-regarding. It was not my looks they noticed when they flirted with me, but their own they wished to have admired, and I did—how could I not? They were lovely. Desiring women—and their desire to be desired—made me feel powerful, expanded, like heated gas. But to be the object of a man’s fierce desire felt intoxicating, bracing and wounding all at once. A power most women know from girlhood, but which I never had, having become a boy before I ever became a woman.
But such pleasure had another face, like Janus. Which I discovered quickly on our return to Cape Town. For a time, all was as it had been between us at Roundhouse, save that we met far less frequently, barred from intimacy by the presence of family and servants and my landlady. But longing has its own savor, and our intimacy together, while rare, was more intense for our having been parted.
Gradually I came to notice a change, like a shift in the direction of the wind. When I strode into his office at Government House after having been away overseeing vaccines at Caledon or attending private patients near Newlands—ignoring Cloete, the officious aide-de-camp who wished to announce me—I increasingly found him distracted by papers (“Oh, it’s you; I was expecting someone else,” he might say) and I felt ashamed, as if my measure were his to take, and I had been found wanting.
At such times I felt humiliated and said curtly, “I won’t detain you, then,” turned on my heel and walked out, hoping to wound, but he did not appear to notice. Stepping out into the Company’s Garden after one such encounter, some six months after our first night at Camps Bay, the heat raking the trees, the scent of frangipani and lemons, I thought better of my pique and turned back again. We had been apart for some weeks, as I’d had medical matters to attend to and he colonial affairs, and I had missed him. As I entered the cool marble foyer, I heard a rustle of fabric and saw on the landing above a blue silk skirt slip past the wooden door of His Lordship’s office. I assumed it must be Miss Georgiana or her sister, although the perfume—heavy scent of cape jasmine and musk—should have told me otherwise. I knew it well.
When I reached his office door, I found it barred by Cloete.
“I wouldn’t go in there if I were you,” the Dutchman said, stretching out an arm to prevent me.
“Don’t be absurd.” I reached for the door.
“His Lordship is not alone.”
The man’s tone irritated me.
“He is with…” he hesitated, then smiled. “A lady.”
I remembered the woman I’d seen on the landing, her figure as out of place as a field of sea pink or violets would be in the Company’s Garden, an unseasonable bloom.
I let my hand fall from the doorknob; crossed my arms over the chest of my red coat.
“Well,” I said, returning the man’s smirk. “That’s a fine Dutch filly he’s got hold of.”
The man straightened. “That’s a bloody ugly thing to say,” said Cloete.
“Truth is often ugly,” I replied. I knew the kind of man Josias de Cloete was—wellborn, narrowly educated, insecure about his position, sensitive to insult, easily provoked; I was not surprised when he insisted on satisfaction. I’d hoped he would. I agreed to a duel at Constantia the next day at dawn.
I felt in that moment that I wanted to die; I wanted to kill the ache in my chest, this humiliating longing; I knew, as I descended the stairs and stepped out into the Company’s Garden, that I might not survive the encounter. I was a terrible shot, but I wanted to strike something; I wanted to hurt a man, even if this wasn’t the man I had in mind.
The ride to Constantia the next morning was dark and cold; Dantzen accompanied me to bear Psyche and my pistols, and—though we didn’t speak of it—to report news of my death, if necessary. Dantzen had tried to dissuade me, even gallantly proposed to serve as my second; I had declined. The fight was mine, not his.
The cold morning air caught in my throat, burning like smoke as we rode. I could hear the blood pound in my ears as the horse moved beneath me, my mouth dry, the sky a heartbreaking violet blue, as it had been on our journey to the Xhosa king almost two years earlier; above the hulking dark of Table Mountain, the Southern Cross; a scent of grass and horse sweat; somewhere far off the cry of a rooster tolled the morning’s first hour.
When we stopped and dismounted, Psyche barked once, then fell silent. Cloete was already there, waiting.
As the sun began to rise over Alphen estate, we chose our weapons, paced off our positions, then turned at our marker stones to face each other across the field. Cloete and I lowered our pistols to the height of one another’s chests; I felt a curious detachment. For an instant my death became palpable, possible, as it had not been before; time slowed, grew thick as honey, before the signal handkerchief fell.
The barrel of my gun trembled as I started to pull back on the trigger, when I heard the shot and felt something hot—like an ember—across my left arm and saw the Dutchman’s hat fly off like a startled gull.
“By God!” the Dutchman shouted, though the distance between us was not great. “You’re a marksman after all! I’d heard you were a miserable shot.”
“Opinion must always be confirmed by observation,” I shouted back. “Next time I’ll aim for a less-vulnerable part of your anatomy—your heart.” But I knew that I had not aimed at all. I had not even pulled the trigger.
Cloete laughed. “Fair enough.” He stooped to retrieve his injured hat.
“Are you all right, sir?” Dantzen said, appearing at my side. I smelled the faint but unmistakable odor of sulphur on him. “You’re bleeding.” He touched my arm.
“Thank you,” I said with feeling. I reached up and felt the burn at my left shoulder, the sticky warmth that I recognized as blood. “I’m wounded,” I said, “but I’ll recover.”
When news of the duel reached Lord Somerton later that morning, his concern was gratifying. He insisted that I present myself at his office immediately and shouted in rage for some minutes before forbidding me all duels in future, though we both knew he had no power to prevent them. Duels were illegal already—a law that soldiers and gentlemen routinely ignored. I was challenged often by local men, enraged by the attention their women paid me.
“You could have been killed,” Lord Somerton said.
“I was not,” I said.
“Evidently,” he said. He took a seat behind his desk. “It would be difficult to replace the governor’s physician.”
“You need not seek a replacement,” I said.
“I’m glad of it.”
“Is that all?” I asked.
“It is.”
I left his offices, satisfied.
I did change certain of my habits in the months that followed. I was careful not to travel far from Cape Town or stay away too long, so as to be sure Lord Somerton and I had opportunity to meet most evenings. The curtains pulled against the night, the house asleep, no one to disturb us in his library or office, we resumed our happy privacy.
We maintained an unspoken agreement to reveal ourselves only in darkness, like Psyche and Cupid, in case a servant should pass by.
We continued to address one another by our formal titles—Lord Somerton, Doctor Perry—a poignant practice that delighted us, given that we were often naked as we spoke. But we could not afford pet names; we could not afford to forget ourselves.
There were rumors nonetheless. Occasionally a soldier would comment on my womanly figure as I rode (and would find himself summarily reassigned to a regiment at the remote eastern border), but I was unconcerned. I ignored them.
There are always rumors. I felt above them now. As if Lord Somerton’s family crest shielded me as well: Mutare vel timere sperno. I scorn to change or fear. Their armorial motto.
For the first time in years, I let myself feel safe. That was my mistake.
We got away to Roundhouse and Newlands as often as we could, a retreat from town that I prescribed and justified as necessary for his health. It was. He was markedly improved there, hunting, fucking, even bathing in the sea, which I persuaded him to do eventually.
When I’d first proposed the bathing machine, he’d been appalled. Actually shocked. No one bathed in the sea who could afford a bath, he insisted. I extolled the healthful benefits of swimming and of salt water. But he refused, adamant. I suspected he was too vain to don a bathing costume. I told him a bathing machine would allow him to swim nude, if he’d prefer, unseen. Lord Charles was resistant to the idea, said it was unseemly for a governor to be seen frolicking naked as a babe, romping in the bay.
Only the prospect of including a team of his horses in the scheme—they would be necessary to haul the bathing machine into the surf and then out again—won him over. Like everything else, it became an occasion for our intimate meetings, while the horses stood hock deep in the surf.
As we entwined ourselves and fucked in the afternoons at Newlands or at night late in his office at Tunhuys, the poem of the body moved through my mind: scapula, clavicle, coracobrachialis, gluteus maximus, etc. I knew better than to say so, but my thoughts wandered. I thought of the names of the body’s parts as ours were joined. Men must be adored, I’d learned, or it is unbearable. The love of men demands admiration and indulgence both. I was ill-suited to it. Still I loved him.
The morning sky was gaudy with seashell-pink clouds against a radiant aquamarine sky, a painting by Tintoretto or a minor Italian painter. The air was fresh and cool, a breeze coming off the sea. Psyche trotted beside me as we made our way up the Heerengracht to Mrs. Saunders’s coffee shop. The street was already busy—the cheerful clatter of cart wheels against cobblestones, the call of the ragman and the clanging of the tin collector. Mr. Poleman was opening his apothecary shop, unlocking the gate with a rattling sound, the sun a gentle glow through the morning haze, turning the air to gold. It was my favorite hour, even if I rarely rose for it. The click of my bootheels added to the cheerful morning din, a satisfying report. A bell over the door rang, announcing our arrival, and we stepped into the warm bakery.
“Early today, Dr. Perry,” Mrs. Saunders said. “I’ll have your coffee ready in a moment.”
I thanked her and took a seat by the window, where I settled Psyche in my lap before opening the paper. Mrs. Saunders set a plate of two plump sugar buns on the table before me before hurrying off to the counter to prepare my drink. Psyche shook gently beneath my hand, shivering with anticipation. She whined. She was a greedy dog. I lifted one bun to my lips and took a bite, sinking my teeth through the coating of granular sugar—like biting down on sweet sand—into the warm, sweet bread. Satisfied that it was not too hot for Psyche, I prepared her plate, tearing the roll into pieces no larger than a teaspoon, setting them out on the napkin, then setting that onto the table, where she might lift each piece from the cloth and take her breakfast. She looked up at me with gratitude, sugar dusting her lips and fur.
“You spoil that dog,” Mrs. Saunders said, but her tone indicated approval.
“She spoils me,” I said.
“Someone should,” Mrs. Saunders replied.
She was always looking to matchmake. She was the sort of woman others called good-natured, when in fact she was many things but not that. She was steady, dependable, canny, judgmental, observant, an inveterate gossip. She was one of those women vital to the functioning of small communities, on whom others rely to settle feuds and tend the weak, to minister and mend. But it was not from Christian feeling that she did these things, rather from a sense of condescension, practical and impatient. If God was too busy with other matters, she would do her part.
I snapped open the Moniteur Officiel—the news from France long out-of-date but of interest still—when I saw that a woman had been arrested for impersonating a man aboard a naval ship. The item reported that “Madame de Freycinet, who had accompanied her husband to the port of embarkation in Toulon in September, had disappeared thereafter and, dressed as a man, had gone on board the ship that same night, despite the ordinances that prohibit the presence of women in state vessels, without official authorization.…”
It was illegal, of course, to be female on a Navy vessel. It was illegal to be female in so many circumstances—a doctor, a soldier, a university student. Judging by the law, it would seem the female sex was monstrously powerful, in danger of overtaking men at every turn, posing a dire threat—a fearsome force, to necessitate such constraints. One might have thought we were a greater danger to the civic good than opium or gunpowder or the Enclosure Acts combined.
There was “indignation in official circles,” according to the press.
I set the paper down, hoping to disguise the trembling of my hand.
“Is everything all right, Doctor?” Mrs. Saunders asked.
“Perfectly,” I said. But I was restless. I didn’t need the paper to remind me of the risks I ran: impersonating an officer was a crime, as was traveling on military ships, and impersonating a physician. In the possession of a woman, my medical degree would be worthless, my good name a scandal—worse, a joke.
I was rising to leave when my friend Tom Pringle, a poet and publisher, rapped on the glass, having seen me through it, and came in.
He proposed to join me for coffee, but I was just leaving for Government House, I explained.
“How can you stand that autocrat?” he asked.
I smiled. “He has his charms.”
“Charm’s a dangerous thing,” he said. He knocked on the table in farewell.
I stopped into Mr. Poleman’s shop on my way past to inquire about using his laboratory to experiment with the Plat Doom plant, which a local woman had suggested might have value for treating syphilis. Then was off.
Government House was in a flurry of preparations that morning when I arrived, still agitated from what I’d read in the paper. Hearing a commotion from the ballroom, I glanced in as I crossed the foyer and saw it was filled with what looked to be bags of cloth, but which in an instant I recognized as maids, curled on the floor like turtles on the beach, rounded backs, heads drawn into their necks, vigorously rubbing beeswax into the floorboards, bringing the wood to the high shine that boots would destroy that night. One was crouched down beside me in the foyer; I stepped around her as she tilted a beeswax candle over the parquet floor to drip wax before she rubbed the spot; I headed into the governor’s office.
I had forgotten entirely about that evening’s ball.
I went to wait for Lord Somerton more for the pleasure of his company than from any necessity. I would see him tonight at the ball, after all, but I would have to share him then, and I enjoyed being able to claim his company when I chose. To command his attention.
I was seated, waiting for Lord Charles in his office, reviewing my proposal for reforms to the local leper colony, when my dueling partner Cloete stormed in, waving something in his hand in a fury, insisting that the blackguards should be hanged.
“That’s a bit extreme, don’t you think?” I said, lifting the broadsheet from his hand to read it. It was another bit of doggerel about Lord Charles and me, lampooning my devotion. The sort of thing we saw often posted around town of late.
With courteous devotion inspired
Dr. Perry went to the temple of prayer
But turned on his heel and retired
When he saw that HIS Lord was not there.
“Perhaps the blackguards might be inked instead,” I said. I handed it back.
“It’s the most infernal insult,” Cloete continued.
“Far worse is said in those regions, surely,” I said, returning to my papers.
“How can you be so blithe, Dr. Perry?” he asked.
“It’s only words.”
“At your expense,” he said. “And the governor’s.”
It occurred to me to destroy the thing before Lord Charles had a chance to see it, not simply to avoid causing him anxiety but to curb his impulse to stifle the press. He was a man who loved a good joke, but not at his expense.
When Lord Charles came in and read the quatrain, he paled, pursed his lips, and dropped the sheet onto his desk, turning from it as from an unclean thing.
“It’s doggerel,” I said.
“The implication is clear, Dr. Perry,” he said. “Men don’t deserve a free press who don’t have the good sense to use it wisely.”
“Who’s to say what’s worth saying—”
“I am,” he said.
I did not argue the point.
I left with the excuse that I must dress for the evening’s festivities. Everyone knew I was the best-dressed young man—a dandy—now that I was the governor’s physician. Now that I could afford to be.
One of the chief charms of the very rich is that they needn’t concern themselves with money, as others must, at least not overtly, as a daily matter. They can afford to pretend it doesn’t matter, that its contemplation and discussion are a failing—moral, social, aesthetic. It was as if the table had been set by fairies, the art provided by the gods, a heady and Olympian indifference that made it easy to forgive the great crimes on which our comfort rested, from which it derived. Slavery, theft. Or worse, not to forgive but to forget all about them, those crimes. I’m ashamed to say I did, with the Somertons.
In their company such considerations seemed base, as if I’d dragged in something dead and fetid as I entered their glistening rooms. The ugliness seemed to adhere to he who noticed it; it was a relief—in their company—to pretend that I did not. I became, in a word, comfortable.
Money was like air, or like water to fish—a medium so pervasive, so essential to life that we could hardly perceive it; like time itself, we recognized it only by its passing. So with wealth. It did not occur to Lord Charles that his wealth was unearned, unmerited; it simply was. As he was. But its absence had taught me that nothing was as important—not self-possession, not wit, not even name.
Money absolved all failings: it purchased forgiveness, indulgence, love, friendship, beauty, forgetfulness. The only thing it could not buy off was death itself, at least not yet, though perhaps some future medicine would make it so. I could hardly argue against it: it was only possible to consider larger matters—liberty, justice, love—if one had the leisure that money bought.
I felt I should disapprove, but like General Mirandus I didn’t. I loved this world—superficial, gaudy, petty, insular, extravagant. I understood why Mirandus had delayed his departure from London, his return to Venezuela. This. This was the reason—the social equivalent of tea cakes. The inessential marvelous.
The governor had made me his personal physician (as well as vaccine inspector) after his recovery from typhus, appointments that came with my own apartment at Newlands and a salary of 1,800 rix-dollars. I was at ease among his circle, now that I had money.
When I returned to Government House for the ball that evening, I went upstairs to leave Psyche in the care of a maid; I recall descending the familiar staircase, when I looked out across the guests gathered for the ball, spilling out into the foyer—in their wigs, their satin and jewels, the servants dressed in their best livery, the lamps lit and crystal dappling all of it with brightness. I felt my spirit rise and expand, felt what another man less self-scrutinizing might have mistaken for happiness, though in truth it was relief; I had arrived, had entered the enchanted circle to which it seemed no harm could come. Harm happened to others, outside our rooms, beyond this bright, illumined company. After years of struggling for a foothold, for the rung of security my mother had given her life for, I was here.
I reached out for the banister and went down to join the others.
I made my way to Lord Charles and his younger daughter, Miss Charlotte.
“Who is that tin soldier pestering Miss Georgiana?” I asked, noting the focus of their gaze.
“Captain Stirling Freeman Glover,” Lord Charles said, “but the rank’s inapt. The man can hardly captain himself. Can’t ride, can’t shoot. Appalling at cards. Giggles when he’s drunk.”
“Monstrous,” I said. “Shall I rescue the damsel in distress?”
“Oh, don’t; do stop, Doctor,” Charlotte said. “She’s very fond of him—quite fond, I think. It’s been a long time since she has been fond of anyone new.”
We all knew that she referred to my arrival two years earlier.
In truth I had worried for Georgiana since our return from the Fish River a year ago; since then she had become solemn, devoted to good works. That vice.
“The heart has its reasons, which reason knows nothing of, isn’t that right, Doctor?” Miss Charlotte said, repeating my line from a previous dinner.
“Damn the heart,” I said. “My stomach has its reasons, and I am convinced by them.”
I wondered if what I felt was jealousy; I was possessive of the family but of Georgiana and Somerton most of all. Irrationally, I felt they were mine.
As I made my way through the crowd toward the banquet room, I scanned the room. I frowned to see Bishop Burnett chatting with George Greig, the publisher. Among the many gathered were the hateful merchants who passed themselves off as medical men with their poisonous patent medicines; they were the true impostors here. I could be hanged for my disguise, but theirs was the true imposture, the greater lie. People died for it.
“You disapprove of the extravagance, Dr. Perry?” said a woman I recognized from other balls, the fiancée of an officer, as I recall, misreading my expression.
“How could anyone disapprove of anything so delightful?”
“And yet you disdain those in possession of it.”
“I disdain good instruments turned to bad ends.”
“Is beauty not an end in itself?”
“For many.”
“But not for you.”
“I admire beauty, and enjoy it, but I cannot help thinking of the stain.”
“Admit it. You are a man of good works, Doctor.”
“You make it sound like an affliction,” I said.
“You must admit, there’s hardly anyone duller than those devoted to the vice of good works. God preserve me from good men.”
I wondered if this was a way to sound out my feelings on Miss Georgiana, who’d become conspicuously devoted to good works since our return from the Eastern Cape.
“You would keep bad company?” I smiled. It was dangerous to flirt with another man’s fiancée, but it was hard to avoid, here where flirtation was as popular as whist.
“I would keep interesting company,” she said.
“Ah, well. Then I won’t keep you,” I said.
The line got a laugh, as I hoped it would; I bowed and moved off into the crowd.
I was crossing the foyer on my way to the banquet hall when I heard my name and looked up, thinking I’d been called. A small knot of men stood at the base of the staircase, evidently discussing me.
“Is there anything the doctor doesn’t inspect?”
There was a reply I couldn’t hear and a laugh. I paused beside a column to listen.
“It’s said he’s the natural son of the Earl of Basken…” one said.
“Or Lord Somerton,” another added.
“Certainly, the doctor appears young enough to be His Lordship’s son.”
“No one knows.”
“He’s like Athena, sprung from the head of Zeus.”
“Perhaps he’s like Athena in more ways than one?”
“His brilliance?”
“He is an uncommonly delicate man.”
“Gentlemen,” I said, as I stepped out from the column and passed near their circle. I was alarmed to realize that I recognized only one of them. My reputation extended beyond my ken; I was widely known and evidently envied.
I left the ball soon after, claiming that a medical emergency called me away. In truth I had lost my taste for the intrigues of society. I had begun to hate public dances, where I had to share my friend. I was jealous, fearful, a distasteful possessiveness had taken possession of me, visiting me in dreams of betrayal, dreams of being mocked by my love.
When there was nothing to lose, I had feared nothing. But now Lord Somerton’s friendship, the esteem of his family, our intimate dinners and the sunlit apartment at Newlands, my brace of grey horses and a red carriage, my good name—it was a lot to lose. And it should have made me cautious, but it made me belligerent instead in the face of any threat, quick to parry danger. The lesson learned too well in youth: to overcome an adversary, seize the offensive. I had not yet learned the limits of this. Though I would.
What is it men see in a fuck out of doors? Something agricultural in the whole affair. I understand a preference for open windows, the scent of the sea, the sound of the surf coming through; fearful as I was of observation, that was a pleasure. Flesh on flesh in the cool of the evening. The sound of rain against the flagstones or steps.
But I never understood his predilection for a fuck outside; Lord Charles showed a decided preference for it. I did not. As I lay on my back looking up into the treetops silhouetted against the cloudless sky, I recall saying (politely, I thought), “Could you finish,” breathless. He grunted in reply. Back aching as he pressed me against the ground, back and forth, up and down against the packed earth until I burst out laughing, begging him to stop, finding the whole too hilarious for words, and he stood, straightened, yanked up his breeches. It was a while before he wanted to have sex again. Nevertheless we met daily, spoke late into the night. Our days and nights settling into sweet routine. Indifferent to the consequences, to the possibility we might be observed.
It was many months—perhaps a year—before he summoned me to Government House one afternoon, calling me away from my hospital rounds; I found him in his office, agitated, pacing.
“I’ve had a letter,” Somerton said, holding out to me a page that I did not take. “From the colonial administrator in London.”
“Bad news,” I said. It had not occurred to me he might be offered a commission elsewhere.
He turned toward the window, his back to me, and said, “He urges me to marry.”
I felt the air go out of me. I reached out a hand to steady myself against a chair. “I see. And will you?”
“I told him it’s impossible.”
I was embarrassed by my relief. “Is it?”
“There’s only one woman I could marry.”
“Elizabeth,” I said. Absurdly, I felt wounded, even as I knew his statement was just.
“Only one woman living.” He turned to me.
It seemed an unkind joke. “Do you mock me?” I asked.
“I would marry you.”
“Ask anything but that.”
“I am offering you my love,” he said. I noticed he did not pace. He did not move from the window. His stillness unnerved me.
“I believed I was already in possession of it,” I said.
“Then,” he smiled, “I am offering you my good name.”
“It’s a very good name, but it would be a poor bargain for me, surely.”
“Must you speak of marriage as if it were a trade in horseflesh?”
“Why must you pretend it’s not? When a man marries, he gains a wife and her estate. From his perspective, it naturally appears a romantic proposition. A woman loses her name and her property. I’d lose far more than that.”
“I’m not afraid of talk,” he said.
“I’d be a scandal,” I said.
“You’d be a sensation.”
“I’d be a spectacle.”
“You’d be my wife.”
“I would not be a doctor. I could not practice medicine.”
I could see that Somerton did not understand, and it pained me. I hardly understood myself the dread I felt.
“I love you,” he said. As if it were irrefutable argument, drawing that weapon so often used against women, to yoke them to impossible lives; I love you, that bludgeon.
“There are more important things than love,” I said.
“No,” he said. “There are not.”
“I could be court-martialed for what I’ve done,” I said.
He knew as well as I that impersonating an officer was a crime.
“It did not harm d’Eon’s reputation,” he said, recalling the late French diplomat, “when he was discovered to be a man in women’s clothes.”
“He was French,” I said, as if that explained the matter. “And an aristocrat, and his secret wasn’t discovered until he was dead. Which I do not intend to be any time soon.” I smiled. He did not. He turned away to look out over the gardens.
“When I married Elizabeth, everyone was against us. We didn’t care.”
“You were young—and youngest children. You had less to lose.”
“I don’t want to lose you,” he said. I could not tell if it was anger or sorrow in his voice.
“You won’t. I’m here. Dr. Perry, at your service.” I bowed to his back.
His hand struck the wall with a bang and I stepped back, startled by the sound.
“By God, you’re stubborn,” Lord Somerton said.
I felt light, unmoored.
“I would not be here if I were not,” I said.
Cloete hurried in. “Everything all right, sir?”
“Perfectly,” Lord Somerton said. “We’re done. Thank you, Doctor. That is all.”
I could not explain to him my reasoning. I barely understood myself, why I could not marry the only man I had ever loved or ever would. I could not explain—perhaps I did not grasp myself—that I had to give up the second-greatest love of my life, Lord Charles, to preserve the first: not medicine, but the liberty of my own mind. The right to think and speak and move as I chose, not as others bade me. To experience life on my own terms. The only liberty worth the name. Even if it came at a terrible price. As it would.
It wasn’t money that tempted me to continue in my profession, or even honor. Certainly not comfort or wealth; I knew I’d have had a great deal more of both as Lady Somerton. It was something less tangible, far more valuable. Something akin to the way I’d felt when we rode out onto the Cape Flats together or on our long journey to the Xhosa, or when I’d first put on the clothes of a young boy—free to see with my own eyes, to meet life on my terms. Though my actions might be circumscribed by principle and exigency, by military orders, I was no longer beholden to anyone to dictate my perceptions. Although my life was predicated on a lie, a masquerade, it made possible an honest life: I might have to lie to others, but I did not have to lie to myself. Never to myself.
When I fell ill a few days later, it seemed as if my own spirit had turned against me, doubting my decision. I felt sodden with grief, heavy and ill at ease. My feet swelled in my boots, my breasts and joints ached. The least foul smell—of which there were many in the Heerengracht—left me light-headed and sick to the stomach. When my symptoms worsened, I took to bed for a few days. Which gave me time to think. To consider Somerton’s proposal and my symptoms. To realize what was wrong. To realize what ailed me: I was pregnant.
I wanted to tell Somerton. But I knew I couldn’t. Instead I imagined sending a message asking him to meet at Newlands. How we would meet on the veranda there, in the warm evening, listen to the wind in the trees like distant surf.
I imagined our conversation so often that I began to believe it had transpired. Perhaps it did. Perhaps I only wish it had.
“I’m to have a child,” I might begin.
“Are you quite certain?”
“I am a doctor. It’s not a difficult diagnosis.”
“My God.” He’d walk to the balustrade, brace his arms, look out over the country he governed. He could command troops, stifle a free press, but he could not stop biology.
“What will you do?”
“I can’t have it here, obviously. No one must know.”
“Is there anything to be…done?”
“It’s too late.”
“So there’s only one thing for it—”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll go away and—”
“We shall marry, after all.” Perhaps he’d smile.
“Don’t be absurd.”
“I eloped with Elizabeth. We were happy for twenty-seven years.”
“The governor cannot elope with his doctor. His male doctor.”
“But you’re not male.”
“Your powers of observation are dazzling. QED.”
“Do not take that tone with me,” he said.
“Forgive me. I take that tone with everyone but you.”
“What will you do?” he said again.
“What women in my condition have done for centuries.”
“I trust there has never been a woman in your condition.”
“Perhaps not. I will…make arrangements.”
“You don’t intend to keep it, then.”
“I don’t appear able to keep anything I love.”
The conversation, when it occurred, did not go as I had imagined. The night I went to see him, nothing went as planned.
To understand that night, it’s important to understand this: a few weeks earlier, I’d been called to treat the wounds of Sanna, the hermaphrodite whose freedom I had purchased the year before. I’d thought to free her from the traffic in flesh that the Dutch slaveholder had put her to, lending her out to local landowners as one might a sow, for the pleasure of the rare experience of her. But my gift had proved a curse. Freedom is useless—worse than useless—where one is merely free to starve. When I was called to treat her wounds, I learned that she’d been beaten by a sailor who’d bought her time at a local tavern in the port, only to be outraged when he found she was not fitted to the form he had expected. Her face was bruised, a rib broken, but she’d survive. I was ashamed to have bought her freedom only to find I’d shackled her in another way.
I’d hoped to help. But freedom is not a virtue if you lack the money to make your way. Freedom was a dirty word for what I’d really offered.
I was grateful when Georgiana agreed to look in on Sanna when I was called away to Hemel-en-Aarde, to consult on the new leper hospital being built there. I worried for Sanna, even though she assured me that selling herself was an improvement over being sold. She would return to work eventually, I knew, but for a time at least she might rest from her labors. That endless labor of women: comforting men.
I was on my way back from Hemel-en-Aarde a week later when I stopped by Newlands to speak with Lord Charles, to tell him the news—that I was pregnant. I had sent word ahead that I would visit, but I could not be sure he’d be free, or even there; I almost hoped he wouldn’t be.
What did I hope he’d say? It was ridiculous. A myth, like that of Cupid and Psyche, that love could overcome all obstacles. I knew better. All around was evidence to the contrary—enslaved women forced into sex with men they loathed; free women forced by penury into the arms of those they did not desire, forced by necessity to marry. Love had little to do with it. The sort of love we had was like the fynbos and proteas that bloomed there—peculiar beauty that could not survive outside this small place. Still, stupidly, I imagined us.
It was approaching eleven or midnight when I arrived, but the library was lit and light spilled onto the veranda; I had tied my horse and was walking toward the steps that rose to the Palladian apron when a figure stepped out from the darkness, having evidently just left the house by the servants’ door.
I was startled, then shocked. It was Sanna.
I could think of only one reason that she’d be here at this hour, so late, alone. I felt as unsteady as I had years before when I’d seen the blue skirt of a woman slip behind Somerton’s office door, prompting my duel with Cloete. The air felt thin, breakable. There could be no other explanation. What else would bring Sanna so far from town so late at night, unless a gentleman had sent for her, requested her presence? She’d reconciled herself to the ways of men, made her living as she could, but I was unreconciled. I felt ill at the thought that my friend, my beloved, could be among her patrons, cruel. I’d wondered if he’d known her. It hardly mattered if he hired her for himself or friends, powerful men he sought to impress by providing rare pleasures. I felt sick and sad. I felt revulsion rise, then rage. I heard men’s voices from inside, spilling out into the night.
“Dr. Perry,” Sanna seemed equally surprised to see me. “Are you only just arriving?”
“I might ask the same of you,” I said. “I had news to deliver to the governor, but it can wait. I will see you home. These roads are not safe for a woman alone at night.” I helped Sanna up into my carriage.
“How gallant,” she said.
“No. How ungallant.”
When Somerton inquired the next day about my failure to appear at Newlands, I said that I was sorry, that I had been detained by a patient in urgent need of care, had had no time to send on word.
“I am sorry,” I said, and I was.
Lord Charles seemed unconcerned, even cheerful. “I was wrong the other day,” he said, “about the letter; there is no need to alter our current arrangement. For the present, in any case.”
“No,” I said, “no need at all.”
Because I could not explain to Somerton my urgent need to depart the Cape, I did not request a leave to travel. I simply left. Knowing it might cost me my commission, that I could be court-martialed, jailed, hanged. One of the Malay women I knew from the Rainbow Balls had family on the island of Mauritius and spoke with admiration of the midwives and local healers there. I told her I was eager to make a study of the local techniques.
It was hard to tell on the crossing if I was sick from the sea’s raging or from the child within me, but I spent the entirety of the journey to Mauritius in my cabin, grateful to Dantzen for making my excuses to the captain (whose dinner invitations I declined each night), still more grateful for the cool cloths he brought and fresh linens, and for his gentle care of Psyche. Who, like me, detested sea voyages. The creaking of the ship’s timbers, the howling of the wind, the whump of water on the hull left me longing for land, for sunshine, for steady earth beneath my feet. So often taken for granted.
Once we arrived, I dispatched Dantzen to a house in the capital of Port Louis to care for Psyche, while I visited midwives in the countryside; I explained it was no place for man or dog, as cholera was said to be taking hold in the mountain villages in what was soon to become an epidemic. I said I might be gone six months. I depended on him to forward messages and any mail, but to reveal to no one my location. If I did not return in seven months’ time, he was to voyage back to Cape Town with Psyche without me. I left ample funds at his disposal. If Dantzen was afraid for himself or for me, he had the decency not to express it.
On the solitary ride to the village, I shed my uniform for a woman’s loose cotton frock. Once there, I let my hair grow long, my body plump; I no longer bound my breasts and my belly swelled like a spinnaker. As I grew heavy and stupefied with the child, my body ached. My breasts swelled so much they pained me when I turned in bed, as if sandbags lurched beneath my skin. The Mauritian midwife who attended me massaged oils infused with eucalyptus and wintergreen and rosemary (brought from the Company’s Garden) into my hands and arms and thighs and belly to relieve the swelling and restore the circulation, but still I was weak. I could not keep down food, and when eventually I gave birth on the mud floor of the hut where I had lived for months, I was near delirium. Despite all my training, I was of no use. Nearly fainting with fatigue despite the painful spasms, I squatted on the floor, held up by a nurse on either arm; leaking water and piss, then shit and blood, I expelled the child and lost consciousness. When I came to, I had soaked the sheets I’d brought. Despite the fever raging in the village, the midwife was true to her reputation and vocation and did not abandon me, when reasonably she might have.
They fed me meat broth and marrow, venison and pork that I was too weak to refuse. I was delirious for a time—for what seems now like months but must have been only a few days—while I lay bathed in sweat and dazed with a fever. I heard a baby wail and had a brief bolt of memory—as if a window had been flung open on a familiar landscape—of an infant swaddled tight, skin webbed blue with veins, red with the exertion of crying, crooked in my arm, its mouth fastening finally on my breast with an ache of pleasure and pain, and then a sense of drowning and wetness at my waist, then blankness. I dreamt that Somerton came to me and held my hand; I dreamt that we were on a ship together, sailing back across some broad blue swells under a tranquil sky, sails filled, my body wet with sea spray.
By the time I recovered my senses, the child was gone. The nurse simply shook her head when I asked about the baby. I was not surprised, but I felt the news like a bludgeon blow to the chest.
“Dead,” I said, laying my head back against the pillows.
“Oh, no, is a healthy boy, screaming with life.”
I laughed. A boy. Dr. Perry had given birth to a son. “Bring him to me. I wish to see him.”
She shook her head again.
“Where is he now?”
“It’s best not to think on it.”
“Where is my son?”
“He’s gone to good Christian family.”
“By God, I will see my child or there’ll be hell to pay.”
Had I had the strength then, I might have caught up with them, tracked down the adoptive parents and explained the mistake. That I wanted my child as I had not wanted anyone or anything ever except to learn, an urgency like that of the waves of contractions that had swept me like a rough tide. I sat up, pushed aside the bedclothes, stood up, and fainted to the dirt floor.
When I came to, the room was dark, the air cool, the sound of crickets or frogs, the hum of life renewing itself. Somewhere out there my son was sleeping or perhaps crying out for me, the mother he would never know. Limbs leaden. Mind numb. I felt I should never rise. Days passed. I took no care or notice of my soiled clothes, my matted hair, the sour stench of my own skin. Had the nurse not come to change my gown, to wipe my skin down with lemon and water, I’d not have washed for weeks. I saw no point. Time hung still as a noonday sun on the equator. Still as the air over a becalmed sea. Heavy and threatening.
I let myself drift dangerously into reverie, fantasy. Like the women in the new Waverly novels, I allowed myself to imagine our future: Somerton’s relief at my return, my confession, our reconciliation, private vows. It would be odd to have Georgiana for my daughter but not impossible. I imagined that I might yet find my son, our son, that I would tell Somerton I had changed my mind and we would marry. Ambition no longer seemed my anchor, but affection. It seemed possible, in the sunny delirious days that followed my confinement, that I might have other children, might be the mother of lords.
As days passed, my breasts ached with milk, grew heavy, then hard with what felt like pebbles shoved beneath my tender skin until I wept, grew feverish, vomited, dazzled with pain: the midwife pressed warm cloths to my breasts until the ache passed and the fever broke. When it did, my heart was dead, dried up, hard. As the milk in my breasts.
When I was reunited with Dantzen in the capital three weeks later—nearly seven months after I’d left him and Psyche in Port Louis—he seemed startled by my transformation, although I had resumed my uniform and boots. He remarked on my loss of a full stone’s weight, expressed concern that I’d been ill with fever. I was glad to find him and Psyche in fine form, robust and relaxed after their half-year sojourn. But I was unsettled by Dantzen’s report that he’d had no replies to my letters to Lord Somerton. I knew Lord Charles must be angry—at my refusal of his proposal, at my disappearance—but to have replied to none of my letters since our arrival alarmed me. I had expected a reprimand, perhaps a threat. But there had been no word at all.
The journey back was rough—the Indian Ocean unruly that time of year—and my imagination unruly as well. I became convinced that Lord Somerton had fallen ill again in my absence, which would explain the lack of correspondence. I grew panicked by anxiety for my friend’s health. As soon as I stepped up onto the dock at Table Bay, I hired a carriage and went directly to the Government House, only to find him gone. I feared the worst. But Cloete clarified the matter quickly: the governor had sailed for England the month after I’d left for Mauritius; there was nothing to fear; he would be returning shortly with a wife. Lady Poulett.
When the invitation came months later, I could not refuse it; I agreed to join Cloete and Lord Somerton’s son Henry to row out and greet the returning couple.
The day of Somerton’s return, we met at the docks at dawn and rowed out in grim silence; the oars pulled through the light chop toward the ship anchored in the bay. The splash and draw and patter of water on the gunnels the only sound beside the water breaking on the bow. I was silent, watching the waves and the ship ahead of us.
“Are you unwell, Doctor?” Cloete asked.
“Should I be?” I said.
“I have been waiting all morning for you to make a witticism about the governor’s new wife.”
“Is matrimony a matter of levity?” I asked.
“Well, no,” Cloete said. “Perhaps not.”
“Never stopped you before, Dr. Perry,” said Somerton’s son.
“And what is this obvious witticism that I have evidently overlooked?” I asked.
Cloete colored, evidently embarrassed to be drawn into making fun of His Lordship in front of his son.
Henry put him at his ease, smiling, clearly comfortable with the boat’s rocking, as if the sea were a cradle, and I realized for the first time that he was a young man made for ocean voyages and likely would make many, as I hoped fervently not to do.
“It’s obvious, is it not?” Lord Somerton’s son said. “Given my father’s well-known affection for animals, is it surprising that he chose a pullet for a wife?”
Cloete laughed, delighted.
But I was in no mood for levity. My heart was sick, dark as the sea that late-November day.
When we pulled alongside the ship, the ladder was let down and we climbed it, arriving on deck to find the couple awaiting us. The fifty-year-old lord and his thirty-five-year-old bride. Somerton smiled, embraced his son, greeted Cloete, then looked to me; coolly, eyes dispassionate as a falcon’s as they met mine, he said, “Dr. Perry, may I present my wife.”