Sleeping Beauty (18 page)
“You know,” she said. “You’ve figured it out.”
“No.” He blushed. He felt it; his face heated. “I only suspect. I haven’t gone to the books.”
“You know!” she insisted. She laughed, delighted. “You know the latitude from the stars and can figure out the rest.”
It was apparently easier to deceive himself than her, for he realized she was right—the woman was perceptive. Instead of anxiety though, James felt relief. Huge, huge relief. Good, she knew. Someone knew. He could now talk about it to someone he trusted. He thought he might know where the Wakua lived, give or take a few miles.
She went immediately from her conclusion to the pertinent question. “Why don’t you say, then?”
“Because I believe the tribe that saved my life is not so very far, after all, from where we had taken samples.”
“And?”
“And what do you know about the current rush for diamonds in Africa?”
She looked bewildered. “I know some huge diamonds have been found. One, the Star of South Africa, I think, weighed a lot—”
“Eighty-three and one half carats. The earl of Dudley paid twenty-five thousand pounds sterling for it.”
“That’s a lot.”
“Indeed. And between the river diggings and the dry digs of southern Africa, there are tens of thousands of Europeans presently pulling diamonds out of African soil. I’ve seen the holes in the earth. They’re caverns. And the machinery and industry of it, God. Horse whims hauling diamonds up by bucket and windlass, the pits themselves strung with so many wire ropes that they look like giant spiderwebs. And now there’s talk of steam-winding en
gines to replace the horses. Do you have any idea what such an invasion does to a tribe, the people who already live there?”
She frowned. She did; she extrapolated immediately to his worst fears. And his dilemma: “You’ve found gold,” she said, “but you’re afraid to tell anyone.” After a pause, she asked, “What do you intend to do?”
He said immediately, “I intend to do a thorough and honorable scholarly thesis on the geology of the regions we covered.” Then he sighed. “Which, alas, is going to show that there are untold times more gold up the southeastern tip of the African continent that man has yet to find anywhere else on the face of the earth.”
James let go of the tree limb, planted his pole on the river bottom, then poled the full reach of his body, letting his words sink in, before he said, “When I publish the findings, the world will know. But—” He paused. “But I will buy the Wakua what time I can. There’s no point in sending people into their crop lands and hunting grounds with only the vaguest idea of where to look. The place would be dug up everywhere in a matter of weeks.”
He heard her say as he planted the pole again, “You’re considering not telling at all, aren’t you?”
He frowned over at her, then away. “No. That would hardly be the done thing. Disloyal, all that.”
They drifted. The little wood pier came toward them. He was guiding their boat into a gentle bump against the pilings, when she said, as she had once before: “Africa changed you.”
Over his arm, James settled his gaze on Coco Wild. Her bare head shone. Her eyes, too; they were
filled with a kind and worldly light. Her smile was the most beautiful and gentle he’d every known. “So you keep saying.”
What he feared, of course, was that she was right. James worried he had gone to Africa an Englishman, then come back something else. There was no doubt that he was having trouble falling back in step. Try as he might, he couldn’t see men, the world as he once had. Africa. He tried to deny its effect on him, but it was like trying to deny the largest continent of the earth. He had been enchanted by it, changed by it in ways he had yet to fully discern. He never, never wanted to return. Yet his experiences there somehow blocked the way back to his old English life.
He helped Coco up onto the dock. David was waiting at the top of a wind in the road at a little tea house—he saw them arrive from its window, then met them partway down the gravelly carriageway. James had met the young man three days before, an attractive, quiet youth who was oddly both gentle and formidable, very much like his mother.
James waved at the two of them as he left. For the first time he did not press Coco to have dinner with him, as he had at their every other parting. On any night, under any circumstance, he would have canceled all other plans, if he had thought she’d say yes to dining with him, to spending the evening with him. But she always said no, emphatically no.
He called to her from the river. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.
She waved back cheerfully. “Tolly’s!” She smiled across the distance. “At seven!”
But, in fact, they would not meet at Tolly’s, not the next morning, nor ever again.
The members of the tribe in which I seem to be stranded eat their enemies. That is correct:
eat
them, as in butcher them, cook them up in a pot, and serve them at a feast. The old woman who told me about this quaint custom confided that, if they should be so lucky as to catch a member of an enemy tribe, I should have a go at the knuckles because they are the best part
.
James Stoker
RGS expedition diaries, 1872–1876
J
ames returned to his lab to wrestle the African crates. When he heard approaching steps, he thought it was Coco returned for her parasol, which she’d left in the bottom of the boat.
But the person who entered was a different surprise altogether.
“Phillip!” James cried, astonished, delighted.
Phillip Dunne walked in slowly, staring at the far wall of trunks, the spoils of James’s trip to Africa. His eyes ran over the height and width of the stacks, then drifted through the room, lingering over all the new equipment—the toys, as it were, of their mutual profession. Phillip didn’t have much time anymore for the actual work of a geologist.
The Vice-Chancellory was supposed to be a parttime position, but it was in fact an on-going, everyday sort of responsibility. Moreover, to become Vice-Chancellor, a man already had to be the head of a college; Phillip had duties at All Souls as well. James helped as he could, but Phillip was not a man to completely relinquish control, even to someone he trusted. Add to this the fact of some family troubles, and it was no wonder Phillip looked soft these days: overworked and overwrought.
He smiled tentatively at James, then pointed toward the trunks and baskets, saying, “All that?”
James smiled. “I didn’t leave a thing behind. If someone on the expedition packed it up, it came home.”
Phillip stared at the wall of Africa, blinked, then frowned down at a calibration rock on the table beside him. He picked the rock up. Apatite, a medium hardness, the benchmark of a number five. He tapped his fingers on it once, then set it down again.
“What?” James asked. “Something’s wrong.”
Phillip immediately pressed his lower lip out and shook his head in denial. Then stopped, thought better of it. “Nothing’s wrong, exactly. Just a little inconvenience is all.” He scratched his forehead, pressed it once, a sure sign of distress. Distractedly,
he said, “But I might have to leave it all in your hands. It’s Willy”—what he called his wife, Wilhelmina. “Might have to take her to Bath for a few days, the cure. Might, might not. Haven’t decided.” He waved his hand.
Wilhelmina Dunne “took the cure” at some private spa in Bath periodically, which meant that the laudanum she lived on had gotten so overpowering her husband had to lock her up somewhere just to see if she was alive or merely a twitching body, an electrified puppet. It was one of the saddest pieces of information James possessed about the Dunnes. He hated that he knew of it, that he could do nothing to help, while the best privacy he could give Phillip was to pretend he knew as little as possible.
James frowned down at his microscope. “Sorry,” he murmured.
“Right.”
The two men were silent.
Then Phillip delivered what, James realized, he’d taken time away from a family crisis to deliver in person: “It’s Athers,” he said. “He’s asked for all the notes and diaries of his own people. I’m hard-pressed to deny him, Jamie.”
James glared sharply. “He can have them when I’m finished. There’s not that much. But his people orient some of the samples, verify location. I need every observation written, since I have nothing else to go on.”
Phillip was shaking his head, before James even had the full explanation out.
Leaving James to bargain with himself. “I’ll go over his people’s notes first,” he said. “Or Sam could get some undergraduates to copy them.”
When Phillip’s head-shaking didn’t stop, James said, “Phillip, for God’s sake, I want to put a whole picture together. I can’t do it if people start moving around the pieces before I’ve had a chance to go over everything.”
Phillip’s expression remained fixed; no leeway, no negotiation. “He wants them now. And two or three Members of Parliament think he should have them. He’s preparing what I understand to be an impassioned speech for the House of Lords.”
James let out a bitter breath. “Well, I can speak, too—”
“He’d mop the floor with you. Besides being eloquent, Athers has found the moral high ground here. The Church and the families want the diaries of their dead, the last, consoling words about all the souls they were trying to save.”
James snorted. He was fairly certain about Nigel’s motives. “Athers wants the diaries to look for notes on the whereabouts of the Wakua. He’s looking for gold, not notes on African souls.”
Phillip shrugged, unimpressed; it was all one to him. Then he said, “It gets worse, James.”
James stepped around the table to face his friend, his advisor and superior. What could possibly be worse?
“He wants your notes, too.”
“What?”
“He’s claiming foul play over that blasted Bible Fund. He says an honest man has nothing to fear. He wants the Crown to impound everything”—he waved his hand behind him—“and your notes in particular. He wants to look into the deaths.”
“What—” James felt his face run cold. “The goddamned son-of-a—”
Phillip held up his hand. “I don’t want to hear it. He’s wrong. He’s way out of line. But you’re being too possessive, and that’s a fact. What you’ve brought back doesn’t belong only to you.”
“Someone has to regulate it, or information will be lost. And I was there, damn it. If what I brought back is anyone’s, it’s mine.”
“Too possessive,” Phillip muttered again. He shook his head some more. “It’s scholarly material. Samples and data, nothing more.”
“I could have left it there, saved my own skin, and been home in half the time—” James stopped himself. In what he hoped was a more rational tone, he pleaded, “Phillip, I want to make sense of everything.” He held out his arm, toward the trunks and baskets along the wall. “I want to make all the deaths count for something. Many of those men were my friends—”
“I know that. Mine, too.” A sincerely compassionate look crossed Phillip’s face. “Look, James, I know he’s wrong, but the Crown is going to support him, at least on the diaries of his own people. Beat him to it. I want you magnanimously to take all his people’s bloody little diaries and notes and dump them on his doorstep.”
“No—”
“Yes. I’m telling you to.”
“Phillip—”
“Do it. Don’t argue.” It was the implacable voice of the Vice-Chancellor.
James stood there, frustrated, trying to master his temper.
“Oh, and Sam,” Phillip said.
James’s assistant at the back looked up with sudden alarm for being included. “Yes, sir?”
“Would you do me a huge favor?” Sam waited. “Run across Silver Street to the florist on Talwadder and send Willy some roses. Those big, pretty ones. Don’t put anything fancy on the card. Just say, ‘Be well. Love, Phillip.’”
“Yes, sir.”
James tried not to balk at seeing his assistant go out the door. It was petty to mind that he should be sent on an errand that Phillip could have done himself on the way home. Should have done himself.
Phillip gave James another moment of his attention, a glimpse of the old astuteness, the old crafty bugger James used to love. He said, “I’m protecting your notes to the end, fella’, eh?” He used a rhythm of speech James’s father used to use, an old joke between them. Phillip delivered it with a half-smile, as close as he could come these days to a real one. “Athers has no right to those. I’m behind you all the way.”
Splendid, James thought, and so effectively, too. He tried to settle himself down, make himself more generous. His friend indeed looked strained. “Phillip,” he said.
The Vice-Chancellor looked at him.
“Is there anything I can do?”
He shook his head and muttered, “She’s just…just not well, you know?”
“I’m really sorry.”
“I know.” He nodded.
Phillip Dunne turned and wandered out—there was no other word for it. He looked lost. James was
suddenly glad Sam had gone for the flowers. Phillip was so preoccupied he couldn’t have safely crossed a street.
James watched him leave, then thought, Good. If Phillip was leaving him in charge, well, it was for the best. He’d give Athers the diaries Phillip said he had to give him. Then God help Nigel Athers if he pressed for anything more. Because, unlike Phillip, James would fight him. He would fight them all, if he had to.
I find that I do not think as I once did. For instance, we came upon a company of ostriches today, a cock and four bens. Mtzuba insisted I try to ride one, which eventually I could—hilariously. It was an afternoon’s entertainment. When I tried to explain to him about horses in terms of the zebras he has seen, be laughed and laughed for trying to imagine the various national styles of riding zebras. French manège, Spanish saddle, these terms were meaningless to him. He is free in a way I can’t explain. He rides his ostriches without the aid of books or lessons, no equitation or dressage. And, oddly, I discover I admire him for it
.