Sleeping Beauty (17 page)

She picked something up off the table. “What is this?”

He glanced. “Ah.” He reached for a hollow reed cut with holes, using the motion to come closer to her. “I wondered where that was. It’s a nose flute.”

“A nose flute?” Her eyes widened.

“Yes.” James put it to his nose and exhaled. The flute made a soft honk, nothing as melodious as the music it could make. “A friend of mine in Africa can play it beautifully,” he told her, “on the exhaled air from his humming nose.”

He and she held the instrument together, with her laughing and frowning, both, unsure what to make of the flute or its function.

James touched the folder she held under her arm, both hands on her indirectly. “And this?” he asked.

“My drawings. I brought them to show you, I promise. Let’s do the tour.”

“You draw?”

“Of sorts. Illustrations for magazines and storybooks. Nothing too artistic, but pleasant occupation.
Your lab, Dr. Stoker. Are you going to show me or not?”

James took her around his cluttered laboratory, then through the other labs in the building. Coco was attentive—no, she was
thrilled
. She tried to hide it, but was wide-eyed over the university, the mechanisms and structure for acquiring knowledge. She very quietly bit her lip when confronted with the shelves of the geology library. “All these books, just for geology?” she said.

Coco read. Somewhere along the way, the kitchen assistant had learned to read in French, English, and Italian. She also, surprisingly, knew people in the university. Sam, for instance. He and she said hello as if they hadn’t seen each other in a long time, not with great enthusiasm, but with respect and acknowledgment. Similarly, she knew several fellows in chemistry and an older petrographical geologist. Out of politeness, James didn’t inquire just how she might have met these men. It seemed indiscreet.

They went from the labs together into town, where they roamed from store to store buying the items for a picnic lunch—bread at a bakery he liked, cheese from a farmer who left fresh goods daily with the local wine merchant, a half-bottle of French wine (Coco knew which one to pick), and apples from a street cart. They took these onto the Backs, where they ate them sitting on the grassy bank of the river Cam. He shucked his coat in the sun and lay back, basking in a glorious spring day, while he watched Coco open up her folder.

“
Et voilà
,” she said.

It was full of line drawings, elaborate renditions
of people and things expressed in fanciful swirls. The women had hair longer than their feet; it covered the pages in curls. The men wore plumed hats, the feathers so detailed that you could see the down coating on each individual barb of the quills, the barbs themselves tendriling like vines.

James sat up onto his elbows, really looking now as she showed him one sketch after another. Her drawings took him aback. They were quite extraordinary: beautiful.

“I used to make drawings for David when he was little,” she explained as she got out a fresh piece of paper. “Last year he encouraged me to take some sketches to a publisher. I did, and my drawings came out in a book of French fairy tales a few months ago. Now a London publisher has asked me to do some for a new English translation of
La Belle au bois dormant. The Sleeping Beauty
.” She laughed, perhaps a little self-consciously, but she moved her pencil across the page and was soon absorbed.

James felt both amazed and a little foolish. What had he been thinking? He had not considered that she would have such a talent. “The Sleeping Beauty,” he repeated. “She was blessed with many talents too, wasn’t she?”

Coco threw him a skeptical look, working all the while with quick stokes of her pencil to line in a shadow. “In different versions of the tale, different blessings.”

“What are some of them?”

“Let’s see. Beauty, of course.” She drew several longer lines that came together rather astonishingly
into the rampart of a castle. “Wit, wisdom, grace, riches—”

“Artistic talent?”

She turned her torso to look fully around at him, her laughter this time quite nearly a guffaw. “No.”

They smiled at one another; he, leaning back on his forearms, she, sitting twisted around. “Charm,” he said. “Lots of charm, of course.”

She raised one eyebrow, a rueful smile.

He tilted his head. He liked teasing her. “And style. And the most beautiful dark eyes I have ever seen. I think you should give her big, dark eyes with thick lashes that lay on her cheeks, black lashes that circle her eyes.”

She clicked her tongue, shaking her head at him, then turned back to her drawing.

Surprisingly, when she showed him the sketch a few minutes later, it was of him—in a handsomer guise with longer hair and a velvet Tudor flat cap, the brim spilling over with ermine tails.

“Oh, fine.” He fell flat on his back, laughing. “Touché.”

“No, no.” She wagged her pencil at him. “This is a very good idea. Mr. Pease complains that my people and castles should look more English. So you have solved one dilemma. Now if only I could fix the problem of my castles all looking like French battlements.”

As it turned out, her castles, actually, were gorgeous. Each rose up out of its forest in a graceful sweep of turrets and crenelations. James sat up to watch over her shoulder. Eventually, he couldn’t help himself. He took her tablet from her so as to page through her designs. Her drawings were re
markably imaginative. She was good; better than good.

Which made him, oddly, annoyed.

How dare anyone dismiss her as a plaything.

As they packed up her drawings and cleaned up their sacks and empty bottle, she mentioned she was on her way from here to meet David, trying again for tea in Grantchester. James volunteered to take her by punt. He hadn’t manned one in years, but the idea appealed more than saying good-bye.

Thus he found himself standing at the rear of a long flat-bottomed boat, himself and Coco afloat on the Cam in the early afternoon. He’d taken his vest off. It lay with his coat folded on the floor of the punt, while James, his sleeves rolled, pushed a punt pole. Coco sat facing him, lounged back at the front of the boat, her fingers drifting in the water or flicking splashes at families of moorhens.

She was a delight upon the eye. The sun was bright. She could have opened her parasol, but she left it folded and lying across his clothes on the boat floor. The moment she’d stepped in, she’d lifted off her hat and set it into her lap. It sat nestled atop her folder of drawings in her skirts, safely dry. She’d unbuttoned her sleeves enough to pull them back so they didn’t get wet. He would have liked for her to dig the pins out of her hair as well and shake it down onto her shoulders, down into the water, if it were long enough. He speculated as to the length of her hair—hip-length, he decided, the stuff of her fantasy drawings, of course. She remained tidy and demure, leaning back, her arms along the gunwales,
her face tilted back to catch the sun on the crown of her head.

“Tell me about your rise to fame,” she said, as he dug the pole into the river bottom. Her eyes were closed. She had a dreamy look on her face. “David says you wrote something that made you very popular in London, while making you gravely suspicious here.”

James let out a wounded snort. “I’ve written a lot of things, I will have you know. I’m a very well-respected scholar.” But he knew what she meant. “When I was twenty-three, though, I did write a general book on the geology of England:
The Englishman’s Illustrated Earth Beneath His Feet
.” He lifted the pole, reached, then stuck the dripping end forward into the water again. “The book found a wide readership in a public terribly keen for the natural sciences.”

His pride couldn’t help but add, “I’ve won prizes since for my more arcane work. And the earlier public notice made men, a number of rich men, aware of me and my work. They have since stepped forward with grants and endowments: even before Africa, Cambridge had been happy to sit me down with possible benefactors at dinners and functions.” He shrugged. “I’m not sure how, but I seem to have a knack for bringing in money.”

She lifted her head, squinting an eye at him—they’d turned slightly eastward in a bend in the river, the overhead sun shifting into her face. “Yes,” she said, “a knack for hard work, risk—not the least of which was offering yourself up to Africa—and more congeniality in one quick smile
than most scholars can muster in a lifetime.” She laid her head back again. “David mentioned you’d parleyed your notoriety into funds and influence for yourself and everyone connected to you, including the Vice-Chancellor.”

“Well.” James puffed a little. Good old David. He liked the lad better and better. He didn’t know what to say for a moment.

She raised up again, looked up at him this time from under her hand, shielding her eyes. “What do you think of the Vice-Chancellor?” she asked.

“Phillip Dunne?”

She nodded.

He answered with a question. “Do you know Phillip Dunne?”

She made one of her barely perceptible French shrugs. “Everyone knows the Viscount Dunne.” Phillip’s formal title. He was a peer of the realm and a relative rarity in that his family name happened to be the same as that of the region from whence his title came.

And, of course, she would know him. She was right; everyone did. “Well,” James began, “I—I suppose I think the world of Phillip. He’s not perfect, but he’s smart and wants the right sort of things.” Without a pause, he asked then, tit for tat, “And Nigel Athers? Do you know the Bishop of Swansbridge?”

She continued to smile at him from under her hand, direct, unflinching, calm. “Yes.”

Yes. He wished, with equal directness, she would tell him things—what the Bishop had to hide, his weaknesses, his faults, how his mind worked, if she knew.

When her lips remained a closed, faintly curved smile, he said, “He’s giving Phillip a hard time, I think, though Phillip won’t tell me the specifics. He says, ‘Just carry on with your work.’ But Athers has several times now confronted me over some sort of bible fund, once that night at the ball and two or three times since. I don’t know what he wants exactly, but something.” He waited, looking at her over the punt pole. “Do you have any ideas?”

She watched him from under her hand, while leaning back on one elbow. “Do you mean, Has Nigel talked to me about this?”

“Am I that transparent?”

“Yes.”

“Would you tell me anyway?”

“Tell you what?”

“Whatever Athers has said. What is he thinking?”

There was a long pause, before she spoke. “No,” she said, “I wouldn’t tell you. If I knew.” Another pause. “But I don’t.”

He scowled, picked the pole up and, reaching forward, plunged it into the river bottom again. “A fine friend
you
are,” he muttered.

“Don’t be angry.” She let out a troubled sound, a distressed
tsk
of her tongue, then said, “James, you yourself have told me things you don’t want others to know. Doesn’t it relieve you to think that I keep my mouth shut?”

Yes, it did. He counted on it. But he said anyway, “No.” He smiled—with boyish charm, he hoped. “I expect you to keep my confidences, while you reveal everyone else’s to me.”

She laughed, treating his words fully as a joke.
When of course he had meant them half-seriously.

James was suddenly, keenly curious about what Coco might know about Athers. Though, all right, ultimately he liked that she was tight-lipped. It meant, as she said, that he didn’t have to worry; he could speak freely.

And he did. Perhaps too freely, he would think later. “Nigel has a very different idea from mine as to England’s right to anything and everything in Africa. Including the very souls of the people themselves. And the gold I brought back to the Queen, well, he just can’t let it go, can’t let it rest.”

They floated around a bend under a tree. James had to duck and let the boat drift.

She said, “I saw it. Quite a lot of gold, as I recall.”

“Yes, when people stare at it these days, they say, ‘How amazing there is so much.’ Though I feel a kind of—oh, I don’t know—a tension with some people, Athers especially, as if he means to ask, ‘Where is the rest?’ I expect, any day, to have to fend off Athers and others as to where exactly all that gold came from, where the Wakua live.”

“I thought you were lost till the natives sorted you out.”

“Very true,” he said.

They silently drifted for the duration of one of his pushes. Then she asked, “Do you know?” She wore an amused look on her face.

A low overhanging branch came toward them. James caught it, using it and a spread-legged stance to stop the boat. He held them there against the flow of the river, the little mooring at Grantchester visible in the distance. He lifted the punt pole up, let
ting its end drip into the water, and looked down at Coco Wild. He said, “When I woke up after weeks of being ill, my watch had stopped.”

She stared up at him from her shady bower under the branch, her expression full of interest but no understanding.

He explained, “I lost Greenwich time.” When her face remained blank, he said, “I could no longer compute my longitude.” He laughed as, for the first time, he found what he next said funny: “And the mirror, object-glass, and other various pieces of my sextant, as well as parts from our new altazimuth theodolite, were hanging from the ears, necks, and belts of various members of the tribe. I’d lost the ability to compute where I was.”

After a moment, she said what everyone, he suspected, was thinking: “But you must have had some idea where you were.”

“Yes. Somewhere in the central part of the African continent, with no sense of time and no sense of direction.” He let out a snort. “Honestly, I was lost, and for the life of me, could not figure out where I was.” He sighed before he added, “Though lately I remember the sky.”

“The sky?”

“The stars. The night sky was often clear. It was different and beautiful.” He looked at her. Her face waited. He told her, “It comes to me now in flashes, like a chess board of positions and movements, sequences that haunt me. And there are books I could look in….” James let the thought trail off.