The Lazarus Curse (3 page)

T
he Negro girl picked her way through the dank streets toward the river. It was the end of a day that had not seen light and the lamps had been lit awhile. With a shawl covering her head, she threaded in and out of alleys and under arches as easily as black silk through cotton. Her eyes were kept to the ground, not so much as to sidestep the slushy ruts or frozen pools of waste, but to avoid eye contact. She had no wish to be noticed, no desire to be singled out.

A sudden squall blew up as she ventured down one of the side streets off the Strand. It sent the trade signs creaking on their hinges. The few citizens who were abroad hurried to shelter in shop doorways from the sudden icy rain. The street women on the corners feared they were in for a lean night, a night when the sleet would douse all but the most fervent ardor. Still the girl carried on, all the while clutching a small drawstring bag under her shawl.

It was almost nine o’clock when she reached the tavern near the waterside. The windowpanes were frosted over, but she could see the warm glow of lanterns from within. It was as cold a November as anyone could remember and it was not yet the time Christian men called Advent. Even she, who’d only heard stories of English winters from the older household slaves, knew that this weather was out of the ordinary.

She paused for a moment, nervously fingering the silver collar about her neck while listening to the music coming from inside the tavern. There were voices raised in a sad song, an old lament from the plantations. A lone baritone made a sound as rich as hot chocolate. He was answered by a chorus of notes as sweet as sugarcane itself. The girl smiled, not through happiness or nostalgia, but to reaffirm her resolve. She patted the bag and as soon as the voices had died down and given way to applause, she entered the inn.

The place was full of her own kind: Gold Coast Negroes, Coromantees, sold to the white traders by the Ashanti at the great slave market at Mansu. They were the best sort, the noblest, prized above others for their superior physique and courage. These were the men and women who had been wrenched away from their African homeland and doomed to a life in chains. Under their thick frockcoats or their shifts most of them still carried the scars of the lashes or the marks where the manacles cut their flesh. Some still walked with the stoop of slaves kept in a yoke so long that their spines bowed.

On benches and pews, they sat around tables drinking rum and ale and listening to the songs. Tobacco smoke curled in the air; tobacco from the very plants that profited their white masters. A parrot, its feathers red and gold and blue, perched on one man’s shoulder as a girl fed it scraps. And there was a man sporting a hat modeled on a ship. These were the fortunate ones, the ones who had bought their own freedom or fought for King George against America in the war and been given passage to London to forge new lives for themselves. They could not learn a trade—a Lord Mayor’s edict had put paid to that fifty years before—but at least those present had all broken their slave bonds. She could join them. She could run away. But not tonight.

In this strange country that was colder than stone, slavery was not permitted. All Englishmen were free and yet because she was only staying a short while, she still had to wear her collar. Her master regarded her as little more than a trinket and certainly of less value than his thoroughbred horse. So, for now, she would content herself with slipping out of his mansion after dark, unseen.

Amid the cheering that night, as the singers returned to their seats, nobody noticed the girl, no one apart from the landlord at the pump, a mulatto, a large hoop piercing his ear lobe and a gold front tooth in his mouth. She caught his eye and, with a wordless greeting, he gestured her to a low door at the back of the bar. She felt a flutter in her stomach when it opened, as if a trapped bird was stirring inside her. The room was dimly lit with a single lantern dangling from the ceiling. The shutters were closed and the smell was earthy and damp. In the darkness she could make out bunches of dried herbs hanging from the beams. She narrowed her eyes and shivered, not with cold but fear. There were other objects, too; what looked like a snake was draped around a rafter and something round and white, a small skull, perhaps, sat next to it. On one wall there were shelves crammed with an assortment of oddities; lumps of coral, twisted animal horns, and jars of teeth.

From over in one corner came an odd cackling sound, then a sudden flurry. Startled, she let out a faint cry as her eyes followed the movement. In the darkness she could make out two white cockerels pecking among the rushes on the floor.

An old man sat at a table in the centre of the room, his head bowed. Around his bony shoulders he wore a goatskin, and a necklace of sharp teeth hung from his neck. His hair was grizzled and gray as pumice stone, but when he lifted his gaze a faint yelp escaped from her lips. Even in the half light she could make out his twisted features. She had heard this obeah-man was hideous, that his face looked as though it had been mauled by a lion—but still she could not hide her shock. One of his eyes was completely closed and where his nose should have been there was a small hole encrusted with pus. She had seen men like him before, blighted by the yaws. The disease had eaten into his flesh. He would have been banished from the plantation so that he could not infect the other slaves.

He lifted his hand—she noticed it was crabbed—and gestured to the chair in front of him. A strange grunt issued from his mouth. Part of his lips had been eaten away, too, so that the black stumps of his teeth showed. He seemed unable to form words properly, as if the disease had eaten into his soft palate, making his tongue flap loosely in his mouth.

Taking a piece of flint and a spill, he lit a candle in front of him. It cast a sickly light across the table. The girl sat down, but kept her eyes away from his face. They darted up to the rafters, or along the shelves, anywhere but on the old man’s grotesque features.

Sensing her unease he sought to allay her fears. He knew he was a hideous sight. For many years now he had been reviled. In his makeshift hut on the edge of the cane fields he had managed as best he could, fending for himself, grubbing for worms in the red earth, living on plantains and coconuts. Even the fierce Maroons who dwelt in the mountains and raided the plantations carrying off women and livestock had left him alone. They feared he would bring misfortune on them. He would have died alone in the humid heat, his own flesh becoming food for the leeches and mosquitoes, had not the great snake god, Ob, looked kindly upon him. One day news came that he had been sold, along with all the other slaves on the estate, and he was eventually given his freedom. In London, just as in Jamaica, he was forced to hide himself away. But his power had not faded with the strength of the sun. It may be cold and gray and damp in the white man’s land, but his special gifts had not deserted him.

The expressions of horror that his disfigured face prompted were the same, too, but he took no pleasure in frightening the young and vulnerable.

“You want?” he asked her, lifting up the bottle of rum from the table. There were two cups next to it. He filled one and pushed it toward her but she shook her head.

“Have na fear,” he said in a hoarse whisper. If he had been able to smile, he would have done so, but he could not, relying on his red-rimmed eye to reassure the girl. He guessed she was no more than fourteen full suns old and she was as nervous as a bride. They always were, those who sought him out. He downed his rum in one.

“You come for obeah?” he asked, his eye resting on the collar around her neck that bore her slave name, Phibbah.

Still unable to bring herself to look at the man’s face, the girl nodded. “Yes,” she replied, twisting her shawl between her fingers.

“Who has wronged you, child? Your massa?”

“My missa,” she hissed, a look of contempt tugging the corners of her mouth.

She shifted on her chair and straightened her back. As she did so, a silver scar above her right breast glinted like a fish in the candlelight. He could make out the letters of a white man’s brand: S. C.

“What she do? She hurt you?” They always did, he thought to himself. In England most Africans were no longer slaves in name, but many were treated as if they were still in shackles.

Slowly the girl turned, as if steeling herself to look at him. Her eyes lifted to meet his. “She kill my child.”

The obeah-man nodded sagely, as if he already knew what pained her. “She beat it out your womb?”

The girl’s gaze was steady now and he saw her eyes were weeping like juice from fresh-cut cane. “She was mad at me and threw a jug and I fell down de stairs.” Her breath juddered into a sob. “That night I was taken bad and de baby came away.”

The obeah-man paused a moment. It was a story he had heard before. “It was your massa’s child?”

She nodded, feeling the blood rushing to her face. The obeah-man understood. Not a month went by without he had a visit from a girl with a similar sad tale to tell. They all overcame their revulsion of him as their stories unfolded.

He tapped the table with his wizened hand. “You got money?” His tone seemed to bring her back from her dark place.

“Yes. Yes,” she replied. Delving into her apron pocket, she brought out two sixpences she had stolen, together with the drawstring bag.

The obeah-man swooped on the coins like an eagle and scooped them across the table and into a drawer. Satisfied he could do business with the girl, he poured rum into the other glass. This time she did not refuse it, but drank it in one gulp. Leaning back in his chair he watched her cough and splutter for a moment before eyeing the bag. It was made of sacking and was the width of a man’s foot. He lifted a gnarled finger and pointed at it.

“Your obeah?”

She stretched the neck of the bag and put her hand inside. First she brought out a small square of paper and unfolded it to reveal three or four fingernail clippings. The obeah-man inspected them, lightly touching the half-moon fragments with his own grubby stumps.

“Good,” he said. But it was the next object that seemed to lift his wizened face. From the bag the girl pulled out a length of kersey, a coarse woollen band of cloth stained dark brown with blood. Slowly she pushed it across the table and the obeah-man gave her a knowing look as he opened out the folds.

“You have done well,” he nodded.

The girl turned her head away, unable to look at the bloodied rag.

The man folded the linen, but laid his hand upon it.

“So, you want it quick or slow?” he asked. His words were rasping, as if his mouth were full of ashes, but he spoke with all the confidence of a priest.

She, however, was unable to answer. Her voice had deserted her, choked by her tears. Her hands flew up to her face and her shoulders heaved in sobs.

The obeah-man drew the cloth closer and nodded. “Either way,” he told her, “your missa be dead afore winter is out.”

T
homas felt a mounting sense of excitement as his carriage swept into the great courtyard at Somerset House. It was an emotion that he rarely experienced. By nature he was a calm and reasoned man, not prone to mood swings. He liked to think that he handled the blows that life dealt him in a logical and ordered way and that if fortune smiled on him, he would be equally sanguine. Indeed, it seemed that after several months of hardship, providence might be a little more inclined to favor him. The Great Fogg that had covered the eastern half of the country over the summer had loosened its grip. The foul air had, however, been replaced by icy blasts that could prove almost as deadly to the poor and those of a weak constitution. His mentor, Dr. William Carruthers, had returned to rude health after a nasty bout of bronchitis brought on by the noxious haze, and then there was Lydia. Despite their enforced separation, they remained in touch.

Lady Lydia Farrell wrote to him twice a week, detailing her routine with her newfound young son. The child had been rescued from a terrible fate and found to have a crippled arm. Yet, under Thomas’s supervision, his muscles had strengthened and now seemed fully restored. At Boughton Hall, the Cricks’ country seat in Oxfordshire, each day brought a new discovery or achievement: “Richard tied a bow today” or “Richard went riding,” Lydia would write. Her mother’s pride was evident in every phrase. There were words for him, of course. She told him she loved him and missed him and her sweetness buoyed his spirits, but they were poor compensation for her absence. By making Lydia’s son a ward of court, the law had forbidden their longed-for marriage on the grounds that Thomas, as an American citizen, was a foreign enemy. His countrymen had triumphed in the revolutionary war, and hostilities had long ceased, but, until the Treaty of Paris was ratified, he would technically remain so.

Never one to wallow in his own misfortune, however, Thomas Silkstone had thrown himself into his work, teaching anatomy to eager students and operating on patients for whom surgery was the very last resort. All the while, however, he had been anticipating a call, a summons that would give his career a new impetus and his intellect a new challenge. That call had come the day before yesterday from the lips of one of the most revered living scientists and adventurers, Sir Joseph Banks.

The great man, who had accompanied Captain Cook on his famous voyages to the Pacific Ocean, was now president of the Royal Society. The aim of the august body was to push the limits of scientific knowledge and last year they had funded an expedition to the West Indies. Its aim was to collect flora and fauna and to catalogue it. There would undoubtedly be some specimens that would have medicinal uses. Tragically, the expedition’s leader, Dr. Frederick Welton, had been struck down by yellow fever and died two days before his ship, the
Elizabeth,
set sail for England. The expedition’s second in command, Dr. John Perrick, had succumbed the following day. Of the original scientific team of three, only the botanical artist, Matthew Bartlett, remained alive.

In the absence of any senior scientists to continue the team’s important work, the Royal Society needed to enlist the expertise of someone knowledgeable and reliable, someone who would work diligently and without conceit, someone committed and well-respected. There were many who put their names forward: after all, the work carried with it a generous fee, not to mention the prestige and a possible membership, subject to the usual terms, of the Royal Society itself. It was Sir Joseph himself who put forward Thomas’s name. And that is how the young American anatomist, surgeon, physician, and pioneer in the field of science came to be alighting from a rather grand carriage, helped down by a liveried footman and escorted by a clerk, into the inner sanctum of the Royal Society.

The room, vast and wood paneled, smelled of linseed oil. On its walls hung portraits of the great and the good, members of the Royal Society both alive and dead. Newton, Herschel, Pepys, and Sloane glared down at the young American from their gilded frames. Thomas noted there was no likeness of Benjamin Franklin, who had demonstrated the electrical nature of lightning using a kite and key some thirty years before. Perhaps, he considered, the Society felt it impolitic, at this delicate time before the ratification of the Treaty of Paris, to include a portrait of a former enemy.

Sir Joseph sat alone behind a large desk. He rose when Thomas was ushered in. Tall, trim, and wigless, he exuded an air of calm authority. He held out a hand. Thomas shook it. The two men looked each other in the eye. The handshake was firm.

“I have heard good reports about you, Silkstone,” said Sir Joseph, motioning Thomas to a chair. “Sir Tobias Charlesworth and Sir Peregrine Crisp both spoke highly of you. God rest their souls.”

There was a brief pause as both men acknowledged that Thomas’s supporters had been taken in untimely ways.

“I am most grateful for their confidence in me, sir,” replied the young doctor. He was feeling slightly less anxious, but nonetheless he remained on edge. As Thomas sat down, Sir Joseph walked over to a window where a large globe stood on a stand. He spun it playfully.

“The world is a vast place, Silkstone,” he mused. “And it is growing with every expedition on which we embark.”

“Thanks to men such as yourself, sir,” replied Thomas quickly, only to cringe immediately at his own sycophancy.

Sir Joseph brushed his remark aside with a smile. “I have been fortunate,” he said, gazing out of the window and onto the River Thames. “There are many who have sacrificed their lives in the pursuit of knowledge. Good men. Men of great intellect and determination,” he said. He switched his gaze to Thomas. “Men such as yourself, Silkstone.”

The young doctor shifted in his chair, uncomfortable with such praise, but before he could reply, Sir Joseph continued. “I’ll be plain with you. There were those in the Society who were a little reluctant to employ an American in the light of recent”—he searched for an appropriate word—“er . . . circumstances. However, I don’t hold with such stuff and nonsense. Knowledge needs to be shared. It has no borders or boundaries; no politics or prejudice. And we need the best men. That is why I have decided”—he paused briefly to correct himself—“the Royal Society has decided, to ask you, Dr. Silkstone, to take charge of cataloguing the manifest of the West Indies expedition.”

Thomas had, unconsciously, been holding his breath as he listened to Sir Joseph. Now he breathed deeply with relief and his face broke into a smile.

“You honor me, sir.”

“It was not easy, mind.” Sir Joseph wagged his finger. “The applicants were falling over themselves for the post. But I believe you show such promise.” He nodded his head, as if to reassure himself as much as Thomas that he had made the right decision, before he went on. “There are many great discoveries to be made,” he said. “The expedition’s collections will no doubt contain treasures beyond compare; new flora, new fauna, new cures, new treatments.”

Thomas pictured the array of exotic specimens in his mind’s eye as the
Elizabeth
breasted the waves on her homeward voyage, a sort of Noah’s Ark of all the weird and wonderful creations that the Lord had bestowed upon the islands of the Caribbean Sea. It would be his task to classify them all, from the tiniest seed to the tallest tree fern, from the humblest insect to the most magnificent reptile. He was well aware that Sir Joseph and the late botanist Daniel Solander had invented a new method of plant classification while on the
Endeavour
expedition with Captain Cook. The learning curve would not merely be steep, but strewn with many unexpected hazards. There would be unavoidable errors, misidentifications, and false dawns. His face betrayed his anxiety at the enormity of the venture.

“I see you have doubts, Dr. Silkstone,” remarked Sir Joseph, settling back behind his desk.

“I . . .” Thomas found himself fumbling awkwardly. “I am sure your trust in me will not be misplaced, sir.”

Sir Joseph’s dark brows dipped slightly. “Your humility is a good thing. I cannot abide arrogance in a man, but you are right to feel burdened by the weight we are placing on your shoulders.”

Thomas frowned. He anticipated there was more.

Sir Joseph’s lips curled into a smile. “Have no fear, Silkstone. I have arranged assistance.”

A look of puzzlement slid across Thomas’s face.

“Mr. Bartlett will be helping you,” continued the great man. “He is the excellent botanical artist who accompanied the expedition. I trained him personally in the new method of classification. He will be invaluable to you.”

Thomas nodded. “I am most grateful to you, sir.”

“It is Mr. Bartlett who is deserving of your gratitude,” came the reply. “He has endured great torments in the name of science. In the last dispatch I had from Dr. Welton before he died, he informed me they spent an uncomfortable few days in the company of the Maroons.”

Thomas was unfamiliar with the term. He frowned.

“Runaway slaves,” explained Sir Joseph. “At one point the expedition members feared for their lives; however, by some means they managed to befriend the natives and, I believe, became privy to some of their cures. The Maroons even assisted them in their collection. As a result almost two hundred specimens were gathered.” He was nodding enthusiastically as he spoke. “Welton instructed Bartlett in how they should be drawn and which parts were to be depicted. He knew it was imperative to capture the plants’ forms while they were still fresh, so Bartlett made brief outline drawings, coloring specific areas so they could be finished later.” Sir Joseph’s long fingers held an imaginary paintbrush which he flourished in the air.

Thomas recalled the botanical drawings of Sydney Parkinson from the
Endeavour.
He had fallen prey to the bloody flux on the return voyage, but his superbly detailed sketches were as brilliant in their execution as Leonardo’s anatomical images. He managed a nervous smile across the desk.

“Then, sir, I accept your gracious commission,” Thomas replied.

Sir Joseph leaned forward, slapping the palms of both his hands on the desk. “I know you will not disappoint, Silkstone.”

Thomas gave an elegant nod. “And when does the
Elizabeth
arrive?”

“She was spotted five days ago off The Lizard, so by the latest accounts she should be here on tomorrow’s afternoon tide.”

The young doctor had not expected such an early arrival. There was so much to do to prepare to take delivery of the hundreds of specimens. But as if Sir Joseph had read his mind he interjected, “I have arranged for the storage of the items at kew, so that you can work on them in batches in your own premises.”

Thomas felt immense relief. “I am most grateful, sir,” he replied as Sir Joseph rose.

“I know you are the man for the job, Silkstone,” he said, extending his hand. “I have great faith in you. Play your cards right and you will go far.”

Thomas smiled, broadly this time, as he shook the great man’s hand. “I will not disappoint, Sir Joseph.”