For those in Cape Town, my transfer to Mauritius must have seemed an exile, a punishment like Dante’s when the Black Guelphs cast him out of Florence. In truth I had put in the request for transfer as soon as Lord Somerton’s plans became clear. As soon as it was clear that I was no longer welcome to join them in England. In September 1828—two and a half years after he left the Cape—I did.
I requested the posting to Mauritius for reasons of my own; I did not dare to say it, even to myself; I didn’t dare to hope, to let myself want what I wanted so very badly: to find our son. I thought that I might recognize him in the street or among my patients’ children—a boy of ten, his features familiar as my own or those of the man I loved—I held out hope that I might recognize his voice, his face, might hear word of him, of a boy adopted into an officer’s family a decade before. Every call to every house I hoped would bring him to me. I prayed it would. Not to God exactly but to whatever principle kindles life, to whatever helped me save lives in the past. I prayed to skill, I suppose, or to the something beyond skill that seemed to overtake me when I worked well.
I told no one of this. Not even Dantzen, who of everyone might have understood, Dantzen whose entire family had been taken from him, his arms prised open, his pregnant wife pulled from his chest along with their two-year-old son. He never saw them again. I knew of it only because he had been close to death a few months after he came into my service; he had fallen ill, delirious with fever, and had relived in terrible hallucinatory dreams the whole ordeal, which I witnessed by his side. I knew it must be true—those nightmares—when I asked about them later, after he’d recovered, and he seemed startled, shocked, then looked away, and said he never spoke of the past and never spoke of it again. I understood.
For a year in Mauritius I worked hard and well and effectively, charged with the singular hope that this day I would find my son. But as the months passed, I began to lose that hope.
By the time the appeal to return to London came that late August day in 1829, I had all but given up hope.
It might have been a breeze through the open window that made the letter tremble in my hand, but I knew better. Outside the day was already ablaze despite the early hour. Sounds of surf and cowbells through the open window as animals moved through the streets of Port Louis and children called out. Wind still cool.
I set my hand on the table to steady it.
“Everything all right, sir?” Dantzen asked. He was standing by the kitchen table, tearing up sugar buns for Psyche’s breakfast. The greedy dog sat on a wooden chair and shivered in anticipation, snorting.
“Lord Somerton is gravely ill.” I did not dare say more. I did not need to. I folded the page back inside the envelope and slipped it inside my coat.
I was grateful for Dantzen’s discretion; he did not say that he was sorry; he did not express condolence of any kind. Mawkish sympathy would have been a curse.
There was no time for me to apply for a leave of absence. The letter had taken months to arrive; my friend was dying, might already be dead; I must go to him. Dantzen understood the risks as well as I. To go absent without leave, without making any official application for leave, was a grave military offense; I could lose my commission as a soldier, lose my license to practice medicine, lose the reputation that I had sacrificed so much to restore; face court-martial, jail; I could lose everything, again. Dantzen understood as I did that there was no choice. I’ve never known a more reasonable man.
The ship that had brought the letter, the brig Rifleman, would sail for England in two days’ time; I would be on it.
Since coming to Mauritius the year prior, I’d hardly thought of the past; I thought of my patients, my work, each day a new oblivion, absorbed in delicious necessity—sutures, surgery, battling the daily insults that wear a body down, not illness but indifference, inattention to the body’s needs.
Now it all came back to me, as I beheld the letter that bore a handwriting familiar as they once were, the Somertons. I’d recognized the hand instantly as Georgiana’s; I would have recognized her hand anywhere, its gentle loops, its reticent, skeptical, backward slant. She had written for her stepmother, as I had written for my own mother more than twenty years before when she could not hold a pen, her hand unsteady with emotion, as mine was now. The letter was not sealed in black wax; I was grateful for that.
It was a small matter to pack; most of my belongings had been sold off in Cape Town, when I’d thought that I would be accompanying Lord Somerton to London. When instead he had abandoned me there, I’d not replaced them.
There are men who go to sea to escape trouble on land and feel freed by the voyage; I’m not one of them. I like trouble, if it’s worth being troubled about. And I loathe the sea, or rather voyaging upon it. It is the worst of all possible modes of transport: little privacy, no solitude, restricted movement, unstable ground. Joachim du Bellay, the French poet, once wrote, Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage. Happy the man who, like Ulysses, has made a good voyage. I never have. I braced myself for misery.
As we rowed out to the brig that evening, I could not help recalling Pliny the Elder, rowing toward Vesuvius as it heaved lava into the sea; his captain proposed they turn back, but Pliny insisted, Fortes fortuna jurat! Fortune favors the brave! He died, of course, on that little boat, singing fortune’s praises. I prayed we would not. Despite the warm evening air, the spray off the bow as we broke through the chop sent a chill through me. My heart sank a little with each stroke of the oars. Psyche shivered in my lap.
From that first fateful journey to London to meet my uncle decades ago, I have detested sea voyages—without respite. I did not expect this would be any different. If I lived to see my friend, if he lived to see me, I would tell him, It is a great love that travels by sea.
It used to be my ambition, among my chief ambitions, that wellborn strangers should know my name. Napoleon knew my name by virtue of my reputation as a surgeon and called for me from his exile on St. Helena. My fame for performing the first successful caesarean is widely known as well. Was it too much to imagine then that my shipmates on the journey to London might be acquainted with my reputation as a surgeon rather than as a scandal? It was.
The first day aboard ship began well. I woke at break of day to the sound of a fiddle and fife. I dressed quickly and went on deck to watch the proceedings, Psyche bundled beneath my arm. It was not a joyful sound, the music, but it served to unify the sailors in their actions, and that cheered me, even if the prospect of a sea voyage did not.
I lingered on deck to watch the men haul anchor; I watched Mauritius as we left it behind. Each moment presented a different view of the island as we sailed out to sea; the motion soon became a very rocking one. The person at the helm cried out Steady, which word was echoed by another in a lower key, which signified the wind was fair and the ship going as it ought to do.
I did not know if I would ever return to Mauritius. More than a thousand miles off the eastern coast of Africa, ringed by reefs, Mauritius might have been the image of paradise before the fall. The water near shore clear as glass, the beaches beyond it white as bleached cuffs, beyond which rose mountains, sudden and startling as joy, rising two thousand feet into the air, the emerald green of Ireland.
I had battled the local colonial administrators there, seen those I cared for die, but I’d been happy, or at least hopeful; each day I rose charged with a sense of anticipation, an inchoate expectation that today I might meet my fate, change my life. Find him.
Now I scanned the familiar shore and the small figures on the dock come to see the ship off; I scrutinized the crowd as if I might recognize a face there. I was surprised by the ache the departure occasioned. I took it for dread of the sea.
I felt as if I were leaving hope itself behind.
It was at our first dinner together that evening that trouble arose; we had gathered in the captain’s quarters for a celebratory meal—turtle soup, roast pig, cold beef, hot potatoes, a little gin and brandy—when one of our company, a provincial officer, mentioned Lord Somerton and his family, though not the scandal—“You must have known him at the Cape colony, Dr. Perry,” the officer said. The man had been in India for some years, so it was possible, I suppose, that he had not heard of us, of the scandal. But from the hush that settled over the table, it was clear that if so he was the only one who hadn’t.
“Does any man truly know another?” I replied, returning to my soup.
Lady Barnard insisted that I was indeed well acquainted with His Lordship. “Dr. Perry knew him very well, did you not?” she said, evidently affronted by the man’s ignorance; she believed, as too many do, that the measure of a man is gauged by the fame of his acquaintance.
It might have been an innocent assertion. But I felt accused.
“I knew both Lord and Lady Somerton, yes,” I said, quieting any insinuation with a cold stare. But I felt the falseness of the claim as I uttered it; despite the letter in my coat, it felt a lie.
“What sort of man is he?” asked Captain Brine.
I knew what they wanted to know, just as I knew they wouldn’t dream of asking. For once I was grateful for the curse of English propriety.
“Lord Somerton is a most remarkable man,” I said, as I pushed back from the table. “Now, you must excuse me. I have some correspondence to attend to.”
After dinner I walked on deck, needing air, the night uncommonly mild, the sky smeared with stars, the very heavens rearranged here, as if rewriting our fates. The stars recalled those we’d seen on the long trek east from Cape Town. It seemed I had not noticed stars in years.
When the quartermaster greeted me, I inquired about our position, learned that we were 1,200 miles off the African coast, two weeks sailing to Cape Town, then another twelve, if we were lucky, to reach London. Eight-thousand nautical miles at five knots: we’d arrive in four months’ time, if the weather held, by mid-December.
I hoped my friend would live so long.
I stared west into the darkness, as if I might make out the coastline there, the edge of Africa. I could picture it in the dark, a terrain as familiar as my own body or a lover’s, a beloved body. But I knew the dangers as well. The treacherous currents and unpredictable winds, especially at this time of year. I recalled the seasonal storms known as die Kaapse dokter, as I once had been.
We had come through just such a storm when I first arrived in the Cape colony a dozen years before. On that ship, Lord Somerton had been the subject of conversation as well, although it was others who spoke of him then; the captain had described him as a vain and petty man, arrogant and officious, who cared more for his horses and dogs, for his hunting than for the people he governed. I’d wondered then what sort of man he was.
I declined to disembark in Cape Town when we arrived there, claiming urgent reports to complete. I could not face it. Dantzen went in my stead, our emissary, leaving Psyche and me to rest aboard the anchored ship, rocked as in a cradle. I could not bear to return to Cape Town only to leave again, that place that had once seemed my true home. Dantzen retrieved the newspapers—no word of Lord Somerton’s death. There was a grim report of another kind, of the hanging and public dissection in Edinburgh of William Burke. My old teacher Doctor Monro had presided, cutting open Burke’s corpse after he was executed for having murdered men, women, even a child to sell their bodies to anatomists. It was said Monro had dipped his pen in the hanged man’s blood to sign the death certificate. It was Machiavelli’s trick: to decry what one practiced as a means to evade blame. As if we’d never bought a body dug from a Christian grave. The hypocrites. We’d not killed for corpses, of course, but neither had we asked questions. Still, I’d not be the surgeon I was without the dead. The theft. The lie.
After we left Cape Town I stayed in my cabin, avoiding conversation and company. If my companions did not know of our scandal before, surely they knew now, after our stop in Cape Town. Here where it began. I should have seen it coming, I suppose, but I was battling other storms then. Did not imagine there could be any storm worse than to see the person I loved married to someone else, indifferent to me.
The sea was high, but the wind blew well; I was cheered by the prospect of fast progress, at least. London by Christmas, Captain Brine said.
The oppressive chill of an English winter met us at the London docks. As familiar as it was unwelcome. I hired a coach and set off immediately for the Somertons’ home, through the city shrouded in coal soot and fog; I arrived at their townhouse in Piccadilly as evening was coming on—the streets glossy with mist, the air thick and cold, an aching damp seeping through my heavy greatcoat, the sounds of horses and smell of coal ash as far from the clear African air as could be found; in an instant I was a student again, a dresser, 21, with life before me like a banquet. I knocked at the black enamel door, a servant showed me in; I found Lady Somerton grown thin and grave; a lemon-yellow satin dress made her skin glow pink; despite her grief, she seemed to have flourished here as my friend had not.
“Thank you for coming, Dr. Perry.”
She welcomed me and led me into the first-floor drawing room that had been converted to a bedroom, so my friend needn’t mount the stairs and might look out over the street at the world he loved. The dim lights, the high fire, the heaps of blankets and the faint sweet reek of laudanum left no doubt that he was here to die; they were in waiting merely. I had been summoned not as a physician, to heal, but to grieve as a family friend.
I was filled with fury, a rage to throw them out, call for light, fresh air, hot wine for my friend, my skin vibrating with rage, but I had learned in the intervening years to temper impulse. Still, I was impatient with their gloom, the city being gloomy enough on its own that bleak winter night in mid-December 1829. It seemed a luxury to give in to grief, to absolve oneself of the responsibility to cure, or try. “The man’s not dead yet,” I wanted to say, “though this sepulchre of a room could kill anyone.” But I was silent.
Calm but grieving, clearly preparing herself for her husband’s imminent death, Lady Somerton had developed the habit of sleeping on a couch beside his bed, so she could wake with him in the night, should he need her. Georgiana, who had arrived only the week before, kept vigil in that room as well. She rose from her father’s bedside when I entered. She did not speak when she crossed to me, merely took my hand in hers and brought me to her father.
I heard in his labored breathing evidence of a failing heart, lips tinged blue, cyanic; his limp right hand betrayed scars from a lancet—bloodletting that had no doubt weakened him, compounded whatever ailed him. I had never seen him so ill, save when I’d treated him for typhus a dozen years before.
I had little hope of cure, but I chose hope. Hope is a choice.
I bent over my friend, his face ashen, immobile in sleep. He seemed already to have left this world. Seemed glad of it. I pulled up a chair close by the bed, only to think better of it; I sat down on the bed instead, beside my friend, taking his hand in mine, feeling for the faint pulse, unable to ignore the signs—his pallor, his gaunt features—aged beyond the toll of years, fearing he might fail to recognize me, even if he were to wake. I try to remember the moment now. Bring his face close to mine again.
“Dr. Perry—”
I startled to hear the rasping voice from a body that seemed beyond speech.
“Dr. Perry,” he said again, “good of you to come,” repeating the words he’d said to me a dozen years before, when we’d first met at Tunhuys under the radiant Cape sun. “The case must be truly dire to bring you back to England.”
I had sworn never to return.
“Not dire,” I lied. “I was homesick.”
“As am I,” he said. “Home, sick.”
“Evidently.”
“I have missed my home from the moment I left it.” Did he recall that he had once called me home? I could not know; I could not ask.
“What ails you?” I asked, as if he might have the answer.
“Nothing, now that you are here.”
Although I could make no certain diagnosis in the days and weeks that followed, his fast and erratic pulse, the terrible cough that often left him speechless, his pallor and cyanic lips inclined me to treat him as I would a pregnant woman suffering from anxious torpor—I sought to strengthen the heart and circulation. (I know now that it was congestive heart failure that he suffered from, but such belated knowledge is useless knowledge.) I tossed out the poisonous sedatives he’d been given, prescribed diuretics and mild stimulants instead to regulate the heart—vinegar, digitalis, warm wine, hot and hearty foods, beef, broth, garlic, warming spices. As he strengthened, I counseled fresh air, mild exercise, even if it was only to walk to his library or to the garden and back inside. To my amazement, his condition improved. As if my presence were itself tonic.
After a month of treatment, the initial crisis had passed; after two, he recovered his health enough to host a lavish dinner in my honor, like the ones he used to preside over in Cape Town; the following months in London passed quickly, happily. Together.
I thought it might be gratitude for having saved her husband’s life that prompted Lady Somerton to countenance our late evenings and long solitary afternoons together, our rides and dinners at his club, from which she and the children were excluded.
The first night that he proposed we visit Almack’s, I was alarmed. For myself and for my friend. It was proof of his improving health, which I could only celebrate, but I had no wish, no desire to appear in public. The scandal was just five years behind us, and still discussed in the London press; I had no desire to test society’s memory or generosity. I hoped that Lady Somerton would object to the proposal. Instead she merely declined to join us, saying she preferred a quiet evening at home by the fire. I would have preferred it as well. But I could not refuse my friend’s request or decline to accompany him. We all behaved as if it were the most ordinary thing, two friends reunited, spending an evening at the club, as if there were nothing extraordinary in my presence there among them.
I dressed with trepidation, annoyed by Dantzen, whose opinion of my waistcoat I solicited, only to reject; he advised me against wearing my out-of-fashion inexpressibles, the form-fitted leggings I favored; I fretted over the polish on my boots.
It was to be our first time in fashionable London society together since the scandal. He had been welcomed back into society on his return from Cape Town; we were another matter. Our names had been joined only in calumny. I had never been to Almack’s, would never have received a coveted invitation to that club. I had reason to fear the subtle or overt humiliation that I might endure. But I could find no means to decline the invitation. And in truth, I was curious. Almack’s was famous—and famously exclusive. The matrons who governed its guest list were known to stop arrivals at the door and turn them back. I dreaded the coming evening, even as I was curious to see the place that General Mirandus had frequented and I never had.
When Lady Somerton urged us to go and enjoy ourselves, saying we deserved some diversion, I wondered if she sensed my dismay, delighted in it. Georgiana said nothing at all.
Lord Somerton was weary, as we went out that evening, and I feared, as we stepped down from the coach outside Almack’s, that the outing was already too much. Unsteady still from illness, he took my arm, leaning on it as we entered.
I heard the hush as we stepped inside the club. I felt the seasick dread of humiliation as we were announced on entering the ballroom; a silence fell—like that aboard ship that first night at dinner months ago—hundreds of faces staring at us before the crowd broke into applause. They applauded His Lordship’s return to health, of course, not the two of us, but then he stood aside, palm open to indicate that I was the one to be congratulated for the return of his good health. He nodded to me; I bowed with a flourish to the crowd, like the actor I was. The remarkable Doctor Perry.
After that evening we frequented the club often, and Lord Charles hosted dinners in their home in Piccadilly. Through it all, I wondered what Lady Somerton knew of our past; then one evening at dinner—as he told a raucous story from the Cape Town days—she placed her hand on mine and said quietly, “My husband is transformed by your presence, Doctor; he is a different man entirely with you. Not my husband at all.” And I knew that she knew. I did not know if she knew my secret, but she knew ours.
Lady Somerton had never been beautiful, but with age she had grown handsome, impressive, lovely; she possessed the calm of certain successful men who no longer need to prove their mettle. Like certain features of the landscape—the cliffs of Cornwall, the waves at Ballycotton—she had endured. And with time she seemed to have grown stronger, as my friend had not.
So many people remain children their whole lives—I’d seen men die who had never become men, who remained the boys they’d been, bewildered as death came over them, as if refusing to mature might be some inoculation against mortality. Women, too, still cleaving to their youth, coquettes at 65. Lady Somerton, it was clear, in the midst of her small family, had become herself. It was hard not to wonder what I’d have been now, become, had I kept my child. Ours.
Those fourteen months together were the happiest of my life, I see now. At home again in London, among those I best loved. We rode in Hyde Park, went to lectures and the theater and balls and hosted dinners. Visited his family’s estate in Badminton. We dined together weekly at Brook’s, as if no scandal had ever touched our names.
One late night, after an evening spent singing and drinking, when we’d opted to walk home from the club under a springtime moon, he pulled me suddenly into a doorway, so abruptly that for a moment I thought we had been set upon by thieves, a risk in London in those days at night. “What is it?” I asked, but he didn’t answer, only put his lips gently to mine and for a moment we were back in Africa. Young again. If I wept, it was from happiness.
We live like kings. That’s how it seemed as I popped another fat, fragrant raspberry into my mouth, as we sat on the terrace of his family estate at Badminton, having breakfast that morning in May 1830. Lord Charles had told me how his father, the Fifth Duke of Beaufort, had hosted hundreds of guests each weekend there. He seemed nostalgic for those days. But I preferred these quiet family times. Lazy, warm days together, alone. Plump bumblebees in their furry jackets clambered over the blooming lavender. There will be rain.
To see my friend each morning at breakfast was an incomparable pleasure. Like looking in the mirror on a good day, he returned me to myself, kinder, wiser, wittier than anyone else mistook me for. I was beyond grateful that we had remained friends, after everything, friendship being the greater part of love; we had each been unsteadied by the break we’d had. Like carts with three wheels we had wobbled along, missing an essential part. Whole now. Again.
Somerton’s younger brother, Lord FitzRoy, had arranged a post for me in Jamaica to justify having left my own in Mauritius, but I delayed my departure, putting off from month to month the prospect of separation from my friend. The proposed post had the dual virtue of keeping me within three months’ distance of my friend and providing an excuse to cover my blatant breach of duty, which might now be construed as responding to an order to report to London en route to a new post in the West Indies. But I rebuffed every attempt to draw me away.
It was late December 1830, approaching the winter solstice, as we sat together by the fire when the rest of the house had gone to bed, that Lord Charles raised the subject of his will. Perhaps it was the anniversary of his illness, or the foreshortened days, that made him withdraw into himself that winter, almost exactly a year after I’d arrived back in London. Though our habits continued unchanged, he spoke less of the future.
“When I am gone, I would be grateful if you might see to certain things.”
“If you like,” I said. “But as your physician, I must warn you that I’ve begun to suspect that you will live forever.”
“It’s odd,” he said. “Our days are always numbered, but the prospect has a different weight when you know the date, within six months or so.”
“Rubbish. You never know. You have many years yet.”
“I will die soon,” he said.
His tone unsettled me, but I put it down to the grim weather, the bleak time of year, recollection of the prior year’s illness; I hoped his mood might lift if I agreed to his wishes, so we discussed the funeral, the will, the execution of his estate. I agreed to look after Georgiana. I went to bed that night heavy of heart.
But for all his dire prognostications, he flourished, as I did in his company.
It’s such a small thing, death. You see people stumble across its threshold all the time, as if startled to find it there in their bedroom or on a battlefield or an infirmary cot, its door held open, almost welcoming. Some rage and die, some welcome it, some beg for death, some weep, others shout loved ones away (“Let me go!”). I recall one wealthy young woman, down with fever, who seemed simply baffled: “I thought there would be more.”
Lord Somerton wanted me to help him plan for his. I would. I did.
When death comes for me, I asked only that my body be spared undignified inspection. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but I would have an unexamined death. That small dignity. Dantzen had promised me this: that I would be spared postmortem examination. Some insist their papers be burned, letters of a personal or private nature destroyed. My body was my diary, my only private text. For all my daily official correspondence and voluminous notes on the medical practice, I’d written only a handful of personal letters, almost all before the age of thirteen. I’d made my private inscriptions of my life here, on my body, the sole place I recorded a private life. I’d not have it read by strangers.
I had loved fashion and fancy dress, a dandy peacock in my silk and broadcloth, my high-polished boots, but in death I wanted the simplicity of birth, to be wrapped in the bed linens in which I die, buried in Kensal Green Cemetery. (Though sometimes I thought I should like to be buried with my broadsword and a lock of Psyche’s hair, with my red military coat and Hessian boots polished to a high shine, accompanied by them as I’ve been in life.)
The body is a record of our lives—the most intimate accounting. If a man eats to excess or drinks, it is recorded there in the joints, in the belly. If a woman has had children or none, has suffered a pox or leaned an arm against a heated pot, it is written in the body’s ledger. Only death clears the account, and sometimes not even death. If you disinter a body, you can read in its bones the death blow to a skull or a shattered sternum and read the life—or at least its end—there.
I would remain unread, an obscure volume, a palimpsest, a secret among friends.
Perhaps it was gratitude that made Lady Somerton acquiesce to the proposal of a holiday in Brighton the following February, just the two of us at the Bedford Hotel. Lord Charles wanted to ride along the shore beneath the chalk cliffs and on the Downs overlooking the sea, where he’d ridden with the Prince of Wales when young; he claimed the ocean air would do him good, be tonic. “Sea air’s the best cure a man can have—even better than you, Doctor.”
I hoped Lady Somerton might dissuade him, but to my surprise she raised no objection at all when he raised the subject at breakfast.
“A trip would do you good, Charles,” she said.
When he proposed that he and I go alone on the holiday, she did not protest. He claimed he did not wish to take her away from London at the height of the social season.
There seemed no alternative but to accompany my friend, despite my fears for him and for us.
The Bedford Hotel on the Brighton seafront was a great layer cake—pale stone and glass, a pastry of a place—over which the Union Jack snapped in the breeze in every sort of weather. The most distinguished building in town, after the Prince Regent’s extravagant Royal Pavilion. Ionic porticoes facing south and west flanked the entrances of the grand five-story structure. The interior was no less grand, with its massive Grecian hall and Ionic columns and a glazed dome overhead. As our carriage pulled up in front that February morning, I admired the shimmering salt-bright stone and the colonnade that rose three stories in the air, fringed by awnings, over which rose another two stories; I felt we were entering a wedding cake.
Even in grim February, when we arrived, the sky was promisingly blue, pale, high, threaded with thin banners of clouds that festooned the air. It was hard to be uncheerful there, easy to overlook the danger.
We arrived on a Monday, St. Valentine’s Day, 1831. The lengthening of the days almost imperceptible. Although Lord Charles denied it, dismissing my concern as meddling fit for a wife, my friend was clearly fatigued. He stumbled slightly, nearly fell, when descending from the carriage and required my assistance to mount the hotel stairs. He refused dinner that evening, would not take wine or even tea to warm him and went straight to bed, alone.
He had insisted on making the sixty-mile journey from London in a single trip, refused to rest on our journey south from London, despite my cautions. (“If I must die, Doctor, please God don’t let it be in Lewes.”) That night in the sitting room of our suite I imagined the worst, listening to his labored breathing through the door that joined our rooms; by the time the clock chimed midnight I was exhausted, queasy with fear. Panicked by memory. But by the following dawn he banged on my door, waking me, having emerged rested, bright, eager to ride out on the Downs, if uncustomarily cautious. He joked that he should like to ride a pony like the one Georgiana had brought to me at the Cape stables years ago.
To my relief, that first afternoon proved too rainy to ride, so we returned early from the stables and strolled through town, past the Royal Pavilion, that hallucination of a palace of minarets and domes, where he’d spent many happy evenings in his youth with his friend, the Prince Regent; he described its design to me, its grand banquet hall like a peacock turned inside out—teal-green leaves painted on the domed ceiling, red and indigo walls, set off by gold gilding and crystal chandeliers—the strike of our bootheels the only noise in the quiet streets, like horse hooves striking stones. A lonely but somehow comforting sound. We seemed to be alone in the world. The only survivors of a shipwreck, stranded here in beauty.
“Do you know the story of this place?” he asked.
“I feel sure that you will tell me,” I replied. He did.
He told me how some forty years earlier, the Prince of Wales had been in disgrace when he first came here in 1786. He had a taste for horses and games, had acquired massive debts, become a scandal, needed to leave town. Brighton was little known then, far from London, out of the way, so he bought a modest farmhouse here, “fixed it up” (it seemed a vast understatement), so that he might meet with the woman he loved but could not marry.
“She was a commoner?” I asked.
“Worse—Catholic.” We both knew the Act of Settlement had banned marriage between faiths.
“What became of her?” I was reluctant to ask. Was not sure I wanted to know.
“She became his wife,” he said. “In secret.”
“Love conquers all.”
“Sometimes, it does,” he said.
We had returned to the hotel and sat looking out over the promenade as the waters grew rough. Outside a rain began to fall, a steady thrum like a finger tapping on the glass, building as the storm grew to a susurrus like a rushing river over falls. A comforting, blanketing sound. The sky a muffled grey, undifferentiated. We seemed wrapped, protected, far from any harm. He set a hand on my arm.
“Thank you for coming back.”
“I never left you,” I said.
“I wish we…” he began.
“No.” I did not want to hear his regrets, I didn’t believe in regret, as if it were a religion, which for some it is, melancholy held close as a mistress. I couldn’t afford regret. I lived in a world of facts and what I could do about them. Sitting beside the man I loved near that extravagant pavilion built to house another hidden love, I wondered if we might have made another choice, if I might have, if we might have made a space large enough to shelter us as well. If we might yet.
Although the days were short and brisk—five hours of sun at best and cold—they were not without charm.
Each morning we took our breakfast in the terrace room overlooking the parade and beyond it the waterfront, the seascape soft and blurred with silvery mist, catching the morning light, the air so bright it seemed itself the source of light. Each morning I pressed food on my friend, urging on him hot tea, ham, scotch eggs, buttered toast and marmalade, a draught of rum, as if to weight him to the world. As soon as the hour allowed, we were out of doors at his insistence, up and moving, walking the parade or traveling to the stables to get our mounts and ride on the high green cliffs of the Downs. In the afternoon, even before the light began to fade, my friend napped while I read the papers or caught up on correspondence.
He seemed revived by the ocean breeze, the sea air; as we took our breakfast in the terrace sunroom overlooking the promenade, he admired the winter light and shimmering sea, like poured silver in the sunlight, the scream of ravenous gulls.
“How can that not cure a man?” he asked as we stepped outside to walk along the water. I pulled my greatcoat tight, raised its collar to my ears, but he turned his face to the wind off the sea. Pleased to be in the open air, despite the cold. At his insistence we arranged to ride out on each of three successive mornings that first week—Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And we did. I began to think that he might indeed be well, might be improving, my caution misplaced. He mounted his horse and as usual I accompanied him.
On Saturday he visited the King and Queen, who were staying at the Royal Pavilion, and that night we stayed out late as had become our habit in London, reaching our rooms at the Bedford well past midnight, drunken and content, singing and laughing like schoolboys, hushing each other, then bursting into song or laughter again, whenever one or the other of us mentioned the donkey’s tooth (a prank I’d played on Bishop Burnett), telling stories of the past, talking of a future in which we would never again be separated, apart.
“I shall speak to my brother,” he said, his words blurry at the edges, as he dropped into a chair, “about a transfer. You should be in London, not some godforsaken island in the middle of all fuck-all, the West Indies or Indian Ocean.”
“That’s debatable,” I said.
“You can’t prefer it, surely.”
“It has its compensations.”
He raised himself drunkenly on one elbow. Stared at me, or perhaps several of me, given how much he’d had to drink.
“Who?” he asked. Absurd jealousy. Then, dropping back into the chair, “Oh.”
For a while we said nothing; there was nothing to say. Outside the surf whispered against the sand. Inside a fire crackled in the grate. I went in to change out of my clothes and pulled on a dressing gown he’d given me and joined him, resuming my place beside the fire, beside him.
“I tried to find him,” I said, “that last year. Sometimes I thought I had.”
“I would like to have met him,” he said.
“Yes.” I did not say that it had been my first thought on waking every day for the last twelve years. I would like to meet him today. It still is.
“And what have you found?” he asked.
“Nothing yet,” I said. “But hope is something. One can live on less, I’ve found.”
He placed his hand on mine.
“He’d be twelve now, almost thirteen,” I said.
“If he lived.”
“Yes, if he lived.”
“Dying is not such a bad thing. But there is so much I will miss.”
“You’re not dying.”
“Fog,” he said. “A good fire. A good horse between my legs. The last cigar after a successful ball. A clean shot. Bathing with you at Camps Bay.”
“You hated bathing at Camps Bay,” I said.
“Buttered toast,” he continued. “Cold plums. Morning. I will miss you.”
We had passed the point of passion but not of love. When he asked me to stay with him that night, I didn’t hesitate, even as I knew that if we touched, it would not be from desire but from sorrow.
It was not that desire was dead, but it had become tinctured with the foretaste of loss. We did not speak. We undressed, I unbound my chest, and went to bed. Afterward he turned me gently away from him in bed, wrapped his arms around me, his hands cupping my breasts, then snored.
I felt him loosen his embrace in the night and fall away from me; I woke in the early hours of the morning beside him, taut with dread, and knew, before I touched him, that he was gone. Don’t leave me here, I thought, my first prayer in years. Don’t leave me now.
When he turned in his sleep and farted, I laughed and woke him. He was annoyed to be awakened so early. I was delighted.
We trick out our ambitions in better clothes, making of professionalism a point of pride, as if the personal were a minor player, a trifle, a matter for lesser men, those whose fate it is merely to fuck and feed like animals, as if we weren’t all animals, when really what honor do we gain by striving to emulate machine-like efficiency, dishonoring our most human quality: sentiment, feeling, appetite, sympathy, empathy, that which distinguishes us from the machines we were just beginning to love? I loved him, was glad to own it.
That Sunday morning rose pink and pale grey, like the nacreous belly of a mussel shell. I’d hoped for rain to keep us inside, but Lord Somerton was eager to ride, despite his evident exhaustion. The sun was a yellow burr in the mist. By noon, he insisted, the sky overhead would be robin’s-egg blue; as if to oblige him, the sky cleared early, the sea mist burning off by 9 a.m.
It was February 20, the last day of his life; he insisted on riding out onto the Downs, those high chalk cliffs overlooking the sea, despite the mist and chill in the air. He was flushed as we rode and excitable, stronger than he had seemed in years; when we returned to the hotel, it appeared the air had indeed done him good. His face was ruddy with what looked like a return of health. But by evening, he was feverish. I didn’t worry overmuch when he said he was tired, asked to rest. He deserved to rest. He was sixty-three.
We played cards, spoke of the dinner we would host in London and of the hunt, of the past and of the future, of spending the spring in Rome; when he lay down to nap, I read in a chair by the window. I had thought mistakenly that he could not die if I remained with him, as I had failed to stay with my mother. But death doesn’t mind company. Death loves a crowd. Look at any battlefield. I didn’t notice his last breath.
When I went to rouse him for dinner, I found him unbreathing, still warm. I fell to my knees beside the bed, pressed my lips to my friend’s warm hand, and sobbed. I had lost more than a father. I had lost my almost only friend.
The funeral at St. Andrew’s Church, Hove, was intimate and quiet and small, attended only by his closest relations, of which I was honored to be numbered. The only person there who was not blood kin. His brother, the Sixth Duke of Beaufort, his nephew the Marquis of Worcester among them. He had requested that he be buried without pomp or expense, that only family and close friends be in attendance to see him from the world he’d loved. “My funeral may on no account be attended with any parade”—he’d insisted that I record the wish two months prior; I had. Lady Somerton did me the honor of asking me to take her arm as we entered the church, calling me over (“Where is Dr. Perry?”) so that I might sit beside her, in the family pew, among the grieving women.
The coffin bore a simple plate on which was inscribed a single laconic phrase, words I had dictated at Somerton’s request: General the Rt. Honourable Lord Charles Somerton, died February 20th, 1831. It was not nearly enough to say about the man.
After the funeral at St. Andrew’s, we returned to the Bedford Hotel for the night. Georgiana and I found ourselves alone in the hotel parlor late that night, after the others had retired.
“You will miss him,” she said.
“We will,” I said.
“I wonder,” Georgiana said. “Sometimes I think that I have waited all my life for him to die, for his life to end, so I might begin my own.”
“You don’t mean that,” I said.
“Don’t I?” she crossed the room to stand before a picture. “What will you do now, Doctor?” she asked. “Will you stay in London?”
“Return to my work. Your uncle, Lord FitzRoy, has generously arranged for me take up a post in Jamaica,” I said. “And you? Will you marry now?” I had known of her father’s opposition to Captain Glover.
“Is that a proposal, Dr. Perry?” she asked.
“I wish with all my heart that I were in a position to make you one, but—”
“But you are not,” her voice was bitter.
I was startled by how bitter, how harsh her tone was. And I was saddened to realize all at once and fully how thwarted longing had ruined her, made her vivacity into something fragile, hard, turned her delicacy into cold strength. As if yearning had calcified, become a carapace—
“Do you know, I used to admire your frankness,” Georgiana said. “Almost no one was, save for you. It was such a relief, so delightfully shocking. To hear somebody say what they meant.”
I smiled.
“But you’re not, are you, Doctor? Honest. Not at all. It’s always the most dishonest who make a show of their honesty. Politicians. Thieves. They’re the ones who offer assurances that you can trust them. You’ve been lying to us all along, perhaps to yourself most of all.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“I think you do.”
It had not occurred to me before that the placard with its revelation of our secret life might have been Georgiana’s work. It hardly mattered now.
“You’re tired, Georgiana,” I said. “You’ve suffered a terrible loss. We can talk in the morning.”
“I have suffered,” she said. “We have. And I am tired. But we’ll talk now.”
I might have left then, I suppose, walked out—perhaps I should have done. But I was a guest here, and after Lord Somerton, Georgiana had been the person I was fondest of in the world. I could not bear to lose another person I loved. There were so few.
“All right,” I said. I took a seat.
“Did you know the word passion comes from the Greek word meaning to suffer? Of course you do. That is the word I would have applied to you in the past. Passionate. Such a passionate man, Dr. Perry; it seemed so odd that he never married, never took a wife. I used to imagine you had a woman somewhere—someone lowborn, perhaps, someone you’d met at the Rainbow Balls, someone inconvenient if you were to keep your good name; that perhaps that was why you’d left for Mauritius so abruptly. To marry or to dispense with an inconvenient child.”
If I paled at the suggestion, she did not appear to notice.
“It was years later, not until the scandal broke, that awful business with the placard at the Heerengracht bridge, that I realized the truth,” she said.
My expression must have betrayed my distaste, my shock.
“Oh, I don’t mean that I believed the scandal,” she said. “You were too cautious of your good name for that, as was my father.” She turned to look out the window. “I used to think you were the only person alive who loved my father as much as I did,” she said. “I wondered sometimes if I loved you simply to be loved by him, who loved you more than anyone. I blamed him that you kept your distance from me, imagining he kept you away, as he did Colonel Glover. My father had many virtues, but among his vices was his need to be loved above all others. It withers the heart, that sort of love. But then you know that, don’t you? It’s like a scorching African sun. It kills everything it does not sustain.”
“It’s very late,” I said.
But she continued as if I’d not spoken: “I used to imagine that he was what stood between us; that if it weren’t for his opposition, you’d propose. How silly. It wasn’t me you loved at all. Was it?” She turned, looked directly at me.
“Really, Georgiana,” I rose and began to pace as her father might have done. I caught myself and stopped.
“It wasn’t even him. It was yourself, your good name. Above everything.” She paused as if waiting for my reply. I had none.
“And now my father is dead, and I have waited all this time for someone who’s not really there, who doesn’t really exist at all. Dr. Perry is a ghost. Not really a person at all. Just a part you’ve played. The dashing doctor. Is there anyone there beneath your red coat, Doctor? Is there anyone there at all? What would you be if you ceased to be the esteemed Dr. Perry? Did you ever wonder that?”
“All the time.”
“And the answer?”
I found it hard to speak. The answer was so simple, obvious.
“Nothing,” I said. “I would be nothing.”
She turned away, toward the window again, as if disgusted, unsatisfied. She touched a vase on the table beside her, absently.
“Don’t you regret not having a family, a home?”
“Regret? No,” I said. Then, because we had once been friends: “Of course I do.”
“My father was not as clever as you, but he lived his life; he was alive while he lived. Can you say the same?” She turned toward me, the vase in her hands, and for a moment I thought she might throw it at my head. “I can’t. I have waited half my life for someone who doesn’t even exist. How is that possible?”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“That’s not enough.”
“I know.” She turned her face aside; her shoulders shook. I crossed to her and took her in my arms, not as lovers do but as siblings might, children frightened by a storm, bereft. Each of us grieving for the man we’d loved and lost. “I know,” I said. “I know.”
Two weeks later, when I left London to sail for Jamaica—having been cleared of charges of abandoning my post, thanks to Lord FitzRoy’s intercession—Georgiana did not come to see me off. Lady Somerton made excuses on her behalf (the constraints of mourning, etcetera), but I understood. I was not surprised to read a few months later in the London press of her marriage to Colonel Glover at Christ Church, Marylebone.
I hoped they would be happy. Together. I hoped they might have a child. Love each other well. What could possibly matter more than that?
I looked forward to my new post in Jamaica, if not to sailing there. The place had the unfortunate distinction of having the highest mortality rate in the military service. I would battle it, as I had battled death my whole life. I looked forward to the fight. Even as I knew now that battling death is different from life, from living.
I wonder what will be remembered? What I will recall, what others will say of us? Is that the measure, or is it something simpler, closer to the bone, to the body? I had held another life inside me once, whatever happened to that child; for a time we had shared a skin, were one and the same, under the tent of flesh, under the same sky—he and I. Strange to think I sacrificed everything for the sake of a name that was not even mine.
Was it worth it? Do we ever know? What I know is what remains constant. That old brag of the heart, I am I am I am, until one day we’re not, until one day it stops. Until then there is the pleasure of solving the puzzle, the possibility of understanding. Like holding the missing piece in your hand, looking for the connection, where it fits. The pleasure of solving the riddle remains—the body’s, the heart’s.
Dantzen had settled my things into the quarters below. The room with its wooden walls, footsteps overhead, seemed too like a coffin, so I lingered on deck to watch the well-wishers on the dock wish others well. The Somertons had not come to see me off. Lord FitzRoy sent a note. Only Dantzen stood on the dock, holding up Psyche for me to see; she barked, again and again. I raised a hand, held it there. I could not bear to make either of them journey with me. I would make this journey alone.
I heard the boys on deck raising the sails, unleashing them, the hiss of ropes and the great clanging of irons as the anchor was hauled free, then the flap of the sail sheets in the wind like some enormous bird beating its wings nearby overhead and then one felt it, the catch in the sails and the lurch into the waves, the pull and the pitch and the rock as we pulled free of the dock, of shore and the waves gathered beneath us and dispersed, gathered and dispersed, taking us once more out to sea. I wiped the moisture from my cheeks—sea spray, nothing more.