Drums of Autumn (17 page)

“No,” he said in all seriousness. “I shall call him Germaine. Germaine James Ian Aloysius Fraser—James Ian for Milord and Monsieur,” he explained, for so he always referred to Jamie and his brother-in-law, Ian Murray.

“Marsali liked Aloysius,” he added dismissively, making it clear that he had had nothing to do with the choice of so undistinguished a name.

“And what if it’s a girl?” I asked, with a sudden vivid memory. Twenty-odd years before, Jamie had sent me back through the stones, pregnant. And the last thing he had said to me, convinced the child I carried was a boy, was, “Name him Brian, for my father.”

“Oh.” Fergus had clearly not considered this possibility, either, for he looked vaguely disconcerted. Then his features cleared.

“Genevieve,” he said firmly. “For Madame,” by this meaning Jenny Murray, Jamie’s sister. “Genevieve Claire, I think,” he added, with another dazzling smile.

“Oh,” I said, flustered and oddly flattered. “Well. Thank you. Are you sure that you ought not to go back to Jamaica to be with Marsali, Fergus?” I asked, changing the subject.

He shook his head decidedly.

“Milord may have need of me,” he said. “And I am of more use here than I should be there. Babies are women’s work, and who knows what dangers we may encounter in this strange place?”

As though in answer to this rhetorical question, the gulls rose in a squawking cloud, wheeling out over the river and mudflats, revealing the object of their appetite.

A stout pine stake had been driven into the mud of the bank, the top of it a foot below the dark, weedy line that marked the upper reaches of the incoming tide. The tide was still low; it had reached no higher than halfway up the stake. Above the lapping waves of silty water hung the figure of a man, fastened to the stake by a chain around his chest. Or what had once been his chest.

I couldn’t tell how long he had been there, but quite long enough, from the looks of him. A narrow gash of white showed the curve of skull where skin and hair had been stripped off. Impossible to say what he had looked like; the birds had been busy.

Beside me, Fergus said something very obscene in French, softly under his breath.

“Pirate,” said Captain Freeman laconically, coming up beside me and pausing long enough to spit a brown stream of tobacco juice into the river. “If they ain’t taken to Charleston for hangin’, sometimes they stake ’em out at low tide and let the river have ’em.”

“Are—are there a lot of them?” Ian had seen it, too; he was much too old to reach for my hand, but he stood close beside me, his face pale under its tan.

“Not so much, no more. The Navy does a good job keepin’ ’em down. But go back a few years, why, you could see four or five pirates out here at a time. Folk would pay to come out by boat, to sit and watch ’em drown. Real pretty out here when the tide comes in at sunset,” he said, jaws moving in a slow, nostalgic rhythm. “Turns the water red.”

“Look!” Ian, forgetting his dignity, clutched me by the arm. There was a movement near the riverbank, and we saw what had startled the birds away.

It slid into the water, a long, scaly form some five or six feet long, carving a deep groove in the soft mud of the bank. On the far side of the boat, the deckhand muttered something under his breath, but didn’t stop his poling.

“It is a crocodile,” Fergus said, and made the sign of the horns in distaste.

“No, I dinna think so.” Jamie spoke behind me, and I swung around to see him peering over the cabin roof, at the still figure in the water and the V-shaped wake moving toward it. He held a book in his hand, thumb between the pages to hold his place, and now bent his head to consult the volume.

“I believe it is an alligator. They dine upon carrion, it says here, and willna eat fresh meat. When they take a man or a sheep, they pull the victim beneath the water to drown it, but then drag it to their den below ground and leave it there until it has rotted enough to suit their fancy. Of course,” he added, with a bleak glance at the bank, “they’re sometimes fortunate enough to find a meal prepared.”

The figure on the stake seemed to tremble briefly, as something bumped it from below, and Ian made a small choking noise beside me.

“Where did you get that book?” I asked, not taking my eyes off the stake. The top of the wooden pole was vibrating, as though something under the waves was worrying at it. Then the pole was still, and the V-shaped wake could be seen again, traveling back toward the riverbank. I turned away before it could emerge.

Jamie handed me the book, his eyes still fixed on the black mudflat and its cloud of screeching birds.

“The Governor gave it to me. He said he thought it might be of interest on our journey.”

I glanced down at the book. Bound in plain buckram, the title was stamped on the spine in gold leaf—
The Natural History of North Carolina
.

“Eeugh!” said Ian beside me, watching the scene on shore in horror. “That’s the most awful thing I’ve ever—”

“Of interest,” I echoed, eyes fixed firmly on the book. “Yes, I expect it will be.”

Fergus, impervious to squeamishness of any kind, was watching the reptile’s progress up the mudbank with interest.

“An alligator, you say. Still, it is much the same thing as a crocodile, is it not?”

“Yes,” I said, shuddering despite the heat. I turned my back on the shore. I had met a crocodile at close range in the Indies, and wasn’t anxious to improve my acquaintance with any of its relatives.

Fergus wiped sweat from his upper lip, dark eyes intent on the gruesome thing.

“Dr. Stern once told Milord and myself about the travels of a Frenchman named Sonnini, who visited Egypt and wrote much of the sights he had witnessed and the customs he was told of. He said that in that country, the crocodiles copulate upon the muddy banks of the rivers, the female being laid upon her back, and in that position, incapable of rising without the assistance of the male.”

“Oh, aye?” Ian was all ears.

“Indeed. He said that some men there, hurried on by the impulses of depravity, would take advantage of this forced situation of the female, and hunt away the male, whereupon they would take his place and enjoy the inhuman embrace of the reptile, which is said to be a most powerful charm for the procurement of rank and riches.”

Ian’s mouth sagged open.

“You’re no serious, man?” he demanded of Fergus, incredulous. He turned to Jamie. “Uncle?”

Jamie shrugged, amused.

“I should rather live poor but virtuous, myself.” He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Besides, I think your auntie wouldna like it much if I was to forsake her embraces for a reptile’s.”

The black man, listening to this from his position in the bow, shook his head and spoke without looking round.

“Any man what gone frig with an alligator to get rich, he’s done earnt it, you ask me.”

“I rather think you’re right,” I said, with a vivid memory of the Governor’s charming, toothy smile. I glanced at Jamie, but he was no longer paying attention. His eyes were fixed upriver, intent on possibility, both book and alligator forgotten for the moment. At least he’d forgotten to be sick.

The tidal surge caught us a mile above Wilmington, allaying Ian’s fears for our speed. The Cape Fear was a tidal river, whose daily surge carried up two-thirds of its length, nearly as far as Cross Creek.

I felt the river quicken under us, the boat rising an inch or two, then beginning slowly to pick up speed as the power of the incoming tide was funneled up the harbor and into the river’s narrow channel. The slave sighed with relief and hoisted the dripping pole free of the water.

There would be no need for poling until the surge ran out, in five or six hours. Then we would either anchor for the night and catch the fresh surge of the next incoming tide, or use the sail for further progress, wind allowing. Poling, I was given to understand, was necessary only in case of sandbars or windless days.

A sense of peaceful somnolence settled over the craft. Fergus and Ian curled up in the bow to sleep, while Rollo kept guard on the roof above, tongue dripping as he panted, eyes half closed against the sun. The Captain and his hand—commonly addressed as “you, Troklus,” but whose name was actually Eutroclus—disappeared into the tiny cabin, from which I could hear the musical sound of liquid being poured.

Jamie was in the cabin, too, having gone to fetch something from his mysterious crate. I hoped it was drinkable; even sitting still on the stern transom with my feet dangling in the water, and with the small breeze of movement stirring the hair on my neck, I could feel sweat forming wherever skin touched skin.

There were indistinct murmurs in the cabin, and laughter. Jamie came out and turned toward the stern, stepping delicately through the piles of goods like a Clydesdale stallion in a field of frogs, a large wooden box held in his arms.

He set this gently on my lap, shucked off his shoes and stockings, and sat down beside me, putting his feet in the water with a sigh of pleasure at the coolness.

“What’s this?” I ran my hand curiously over the box.

“Oh, only a wee present.” He didn’t look at me, but the tips of his ears were pink. “Open it, hm?”

It was a heavy box, both wide and deep. Carved of a dense, fine-grained dark wood, it bore the marks of heavy use—nicks and dents that had seasoned but not impaired its polished beauty. It was hasped for a lock, but there was none; the lid rose easily on oiled brass hinges, and a whiff of camphor floated out, vaporous as a jinn.

The instruments gleamed under the smoky sun, bright despite a hazing of disuse. Each had its own pocket, carefully fitted and lined in green velvet.

A small, heavy-toothed saw; scissors, three scalpels—round-bladed, straight-bladed, scoop-bladed; the silver blade of a tongue depressor, a tenaculum…

“Jamie!” Delighted, I lifted out a short ebony rod, to the end of which was affixed a ball of worsted, wrapped in rather moth-eaten velvet. I’d seen one before, at Versailles; the eighteenth-century version of a reflex hammer. “Oh, Jamie! How wonderful!”

He wiggled his feet, pleased.

“Oh, ye like it?”

“I love it! Oh, look—there’s more in the lid, under this flap—” I stared for a moment at the disjointed tubes, screws, platforms and mirrors, until my mind’s eye shuffled them and presented me with the neatly assembled vision. “A microscope!” I touched it reverently. “My God, a microscope.”

“There’s more,” he pointed out, eager to show me. “The front opens and there are wee drawers inside.”

There were—containing, among other things, a miniature balance and set of brass weights, a tile for rolling pills, and a stained marble mortar, its pestle wrapped in cloth to prevent its being cracked in transit. Inside the front, above the drawers, were row upon row of small, corked bottles made of stone or glass.

“Oh, they’re beautiful!” I said, handling the small scalpel with reverence. The polished wood of the handle fit my hand as though it had been made for me, the blade weighted to an exquisite balance. “Oh, Jamie, thank you!”

“Ye like them, then?” His ears had gone bright red with pleasure. “I thought they’d maybe do. I’ve no notion what they’re meant for, but I could see they were finely made.”

I
had no notion what some of the pieces were meant for, but all of them were beautiful in themselves; made by or for a man who loved his tools and what they did.

“Who did they belong to, I wonder?” I breathed heavily on the rounded surface of a lenticular and brought it to a soft gleam with a fold of my skirt.

“The woman who sold it to me didna ken; he left behind his doctor’s book, though, and I took that, as well—perhaps it will give his name.”

Lifting the top tray of instruments, he revealed another, shallower tray, from which he drew out a fat square-bound book, some eight inches wide, covered in scuffed black leather.

“I thought ye might be wanting a book, too, like the one ye kept in France,” he explained. “The one where ye kept the pictures and the notes of the people ye saw at L’Hôpital. He’s written a bit in this one, but there’s a deal of blank pages left at the back.”

Perhaps a quarter of the book had been used; the pages were covered with a closely written, fine black script, interspersed with drawings that took my eye with their clinical familiarity: an ulcerated toe, a shattered kneecap, the skin neatly peeled aside; the grotesque swelling of advanced goiter, and a dissection of the calf muscles, each neatly labeled.

I turned back to the inside cover; sure enough, his name was written on the first page, adorned with a small, gentlemanly flourish:
Dr. Daniel Rawlings, Esq
.

“What happened to Dr. Rawlings, I wonder? Did the woman who had the box say?”

Jamie nodded, his brow slightly creased.

“The Doctor lodged with her for a night. He said he’d come from Virginia, where his home was, bound upon some errand, and his case with him. He was looking for a man named Garver—she thought that was the name, at least. But that night after supper he went out—and never came back.”

I stared at him.

“Never came back? Did she find out what happened to him?”

Jamie shook his head, batting away a small cloud of midges. The sun was sinking, painting the surface of the water gold and orange, and bugs were beginning to gather as the afternoon cooled into evening.

“No. She went to the sheriff, and to the justice, and the constable searched high and low—but there was nay sign of the man. They looked for a week, and then gave up. He had never told his landlady which town it was in Virginia, so they couldna trace him further.”

“How very odd.” I wiped a droplet of moisture off my chin. “When did the Doctor disappear?”

“A year past, she said.” He looked at me, a little anxious. “Ye dinna mind? Using his things, I mean?”

“No.” I closed the lid and stroked it gently, the dark wood warm and smooth under my fingers. “If it were me—I’d want someone to use them.”

I remembered vividly the feel of my own doctor’s bag—cordovan leather, with my initials stamped in gilt on the handle. Originally stamped in gilt on the handle, that is; they had long since worn off, the leather gone smooth and shiny, rich with handling. Frank had given me the bag when I graduated from medical school; I had given it to my friend Joe Abernathy, wanting it to be used by someone who would treasure it as I had.