Читать книгу Prospero's Daughter - Elizabeth Nunez - Страница 10

THREE

THE MIRACLES of the latest research in botany,” Dr. Gardner said and satisfied Mumsford with his logical explanation for the shapes and colors. “I’ve been experimenting.” He had an answer, too, for the plastic-green lawn. “A special fertilizer, and I have a reservoir. I store water in the rainy season and pump it into my garden. I’ve built a generator in the back. We can take a look when we’re done here.”

They were already well inside the house when Mumsford asked his questions about the lawn and the flowers, and only because he was prompted, only because Dr. Gardner said to him, “What do you think about my lawn and my flowers?” Yet as he had walked toward the house no other questions had consumed him more, no other questions had been on the tip of his tongue causing him to lose memory temporarily of his only reason for coming. The green of the grass, the texture, the shapes and colors of the flowers, disturbed him but thrilled him, too. He wanted to know how the Englishman had done it. But when the Englishman appeared, the thrill he had felt subsided and his head spun with confusion and disappointment.

Dr. Gardner had met him on the porch. He had come through the front door tucking a white shirt down the back of his tan cotton pants. He was a tall, thin, wiry man with tiny nuggets of steel blue for eyes and skin tough like leather, burnt to a deep olive brown. His hair fell down in scraggly locks to his shoulders. It was a dark reddish color but the ends were light, bleached by the sun.

“It’s Mumsford, isn’t it?” he asked and he held out his hand. “I mean it’s not Mumford, or Munford, is it?”

“Yes, yes, it is Mumsford.”

He shoved the rest of his shirt down the front of his pants, pulled a blue elastic band off his wrist, and tied back his hair. “Servants,” he said. “Ariana told me an Inspector Munford was here to see me, but I knew she had made a mistake.”

Ariana.

Before Gardner appeared, Mumsford had knocked on the door, and when there was no answer he had peered through the window. He was certain he had seen a naked woman dashing across the drawing room. He had caught a glimpse of her back before she disappeared through another door. A tumble of wild black curls swished across her bare bottom, back and forth like the pendulum of a clock.

“Ariana,” Dr. Gardner called out. “Ariana!”

Perhaps it was another woman.

“Come, come, Inspector,” Dr. Gardner urged him. “Don’t stand there in the sun. Come inside. It’s nicer inside.”

She reappeared hovering behind him. The same tumble of hair. Ariana.

“Don’t stand in the doorway.” Dr. Gardner pushed her aside. “Make way, make way.”

Ariana, Dr. Gardner’s servant. Ariana, naked in Dr. Gardner’s drawing room. Ariana who should not be questioned in the presence of Dr. Gardner. Images collided in Mumsford’s head: the naked woman, the man tucking in his shirt. Did he know she had written a letter to the commissioner?

Dr. Gardner led him into the drawing room. “Drinks for the inspector,” he said as he brushed past Ariana.

Mumsford kept his eyes focused on the room in front of him, too embarrassed to look back at her.

“Bit of a shock, isn’t it, young man?” Gardner was speaking to him.

Yes, but more than a bit of a shock.

“One never gets quite used to it.” Gardner chuckled. “I mean, after the blistering heat outside.”

The muscles on Mumsford’s face tightened.

“Relax, old man.” Gardner gave him a friendly tap on his back. “It’s only air-conditioning.”

It wasn’t that he had not felt the difference the instant he entered the room. Suddenly he could breathe, suddenly the pores on his neck and face contracted pleasantly, and his undershirt, seconds ago damp, sticking uncomfortably to his back, was a cool compress soothing his blistering skin. But it was a sensation he experienced almost unconsciously. His conscious self was preoccupied with sorting out the shock: the certainty that it was Ariana he had seen. He was not wrong about the hair, the lithe body, the liquid flow of brown skin. He was not wrong about the loose shirttails hanging out of Dr. Gardner’s pants, which were unbelted and, he could swear, unbuttoned at the waist.

“So what do you think?” Dr. Gardner’s voice penetrated his brain and Mumsford pulled himself together.

“I didn’t think the technology had been advanced for domestic use,” he said.

Gardner grinned. “Not for everybody, my man.”

She was still standing there, waiting, he supposed, for Dr. Gardner’s order. Dr. Gardner had not said what kind of drinks. Perhaps she was waiting to know exactly what he wanted her to bring.

“But it has advanced, it has advanced,” Dr. Gardner was saying, taking no notice of Ariana.

This was not his business, Mumsford reminded himself. He was not here to discuss her or her dealings with Gardner.

“And my lawn? What do you think about my lawn and my flowers?” Dr. Gardner came closer to him. So Mumsford asked and Gardner replied, “The miracles of the latest research in botany. I’m a scientist, Inspector.”

How logical was his answer, how simple. He was a scientist; he was experimenting with shapes and colors. Mumsford managed a smile. “And all this?” He cast his eyes around the room.

“For my Virginia,” Dr. Gardner said. “A little of England for her.”

Yes, that was what his subconscious mind had registered: England. He fixed his back resolutely toward her so he could not see her. England. There were no wicker and bamboo here, no couches covered in fabric with overlaying patterns of coconut fronds and bright red hibiscus. His eyes took in more: proper English armchairs, proper English love seats. Dr. Gardner had not been snared, as some of his compatriots on the island had, into succumbing to the foolish romantic notion of local color. In the drawing room where he stood, the chairs were upholstered in English fabrics, refined damasks in English floral patterns: sprays of pink, white, and red roses extending off long, leafy green stems against a pale yellow background. The drapes on the windows matched the yellow of the damask. On the mahogany cocktail table that separated the love seats were picture books of English gardens and a bronze sculpture of Don Quixote on his horse. He looked down to the rug on the floor.

“Persian,” Dr. Gardner said before he could inquire. “An original. Handwoven, not one of those modern machine-made imitations.”

No straw mats, either, on the wood floors.

One wall was completely lined with books. Mumsford could not read all the titles, but he was sure they were by English writers. Shakespeare—the name stood out—and then there were others: Milton, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, names he had learned in grammar school. England’s heroes, her geniuses. Racial pride flared through him like a brush fire. Whatever distaste he felt for Gardner when the image of his unbuttoned pants flashed across his brain was replaced now with genuine admiration. Here was an Englishman indeed.

“Sit. Sit.” Dr. Gardner pointed to an armchair. “Give me your hat and baton.”

Mumsford relinquished them with a slight bow, clicking his heels in military fashion. Gardner laughed and laid his hand lightly on his shoulder. “For heaven’s sake, at ease, young man. Don’t be so stuffy. Make yourself comfortable.”

Mumsford blushed. He had not intended the bow and the click, but he was overtaken by an enormous sense of relief. After the bugs, the scorching sun, the stifling scent of sweaty bodies, vegetation that was too green in the wet season, too brown in the dry, but always haphazard, always out of control, he was overjoyed to be in a room that reaffirmed a world he had been taught was his, a world of order and civility, though he did not know it personally, except from pictures his teachers had shown him and in the books he had read in school that reassured him of his heritage.

“I haven’t seen anything like this, sir,” he said. “Not in Trinidad.”

Dr. Gardner was pleased. “It’s all for my daughter,” he said. “So she’ll know. She was three, you understand, when we left.”

Mumsford put his briefcase on the floor next to the armchair, drew his fingers down the front seams of his pants, and sat down. “It must have been difficult for you, sir,” he said.

“Difficult?” Gardner fastened his eyes on Mumsford.

“What with a three-year-old, sir.”

“My daughter, Inspector, is that for which I live.”

His words sounded strange to Mumsford’s ears, melodramatic, theatrical, but he nodded his head sympathetically. After twelve years in the Land of the Dead, it was to be expected. A man could be excused under those conditions for being melodramatic.

“Quite. Quite,” he said. “And that is understandable, sir.”

But Gardner was not finished. “I have done nothing,” he said, continuing to keep his eyes on Mumsford, “but in care of her.”

Strange words again, but it was clear that Gardner meant exactly what he said. The intensity of emotion in his eyes made Mumsford uncomfortable and he looked away. He did nothing except for her? In care of her? Still, Mumsford managed to say, “You must love your daughter, sir.”

“Immeasurably.”

When Mumsford looked up, he saw that Gardner’s eyes were misty. “I mean it is admirable, sir,” he said, feeling obliged to say something more. “All you have done here.” He extended his arm in a sweeping gesture across the room. “This room, this house. The furniture.”

The praise seemed to snap Gardner out of the sudden morose mood that had come over him. He turned his head, following the arc of Mumsford’s arm, and his lips curved upward in a self-satisfied smile. “I did my best,” he said.

“You should be congratulated, sir.”

“Music?”

Mumsford’s face flushed with pleasure and then he remembered he was on assignment for the commissioner. “If you please, sir, when we are done, sir.”

“Oh, I don’t mean calypso,” Gardner said, assuming there could be no other explanation for Mumsford’s discomfort. “Our music. Mozart’s concerto for oboe and strings. Do you know it? The concerto for oboe and strings?”

Mumsford did not know it. It was not his music; his music was not classical music. His music was popular music. He listened to Tommy Steele, Billy Fury, Cliff Richard. He liked Kenny Weathers and the Emotions, but he lied. It felt good to be in the company of a cultured Englishman, to be considered cultured himself. He was not in a hurry. He had time to ask his questions. “Haven’t heard it in a long time, sir,” he said.

“Then I will play it for you.” Gardner walked toward the console on the other side of the room.

“I’d like that, sir.”

“We have our own world here, you know, Mumsford.” Gardner picked up the record and balanced it between his open palms.

“In spite of the lepers, sir?” Mumsford asked, for it seemed miraculous to him that Gardner should have made a paradise here, in the Land of the Dead.

“The lepers take care of themselves.” Gardner put the record in the record player, raised the arm, and placed the needle carefully in the first groove. “Close your eyes, Mumsford. Listen. Be transported. England.”

He had dismissed his question about the lepers, but Mumsford did not mind. When the music poured out, encasing him in a warm cocoon, he, too, did not want to talk about lepers, he, too, did not want to spoil the moment by raising the specter of deformed flesh. He closed his eyes, as Gardner urged him to do, and let the music take him back across the Atlantic.

But Gardner allowed him only minutes before he pulled him back. “Now you will understand my distress better, Inspector,” he said.

Mumsford opened his eyes to see Gardner conducting, his arm rising and falling rhythmically through the air. “Now that you are here,” he said, still conducting the concerto with an imaginary baton, “you will know why I insisted that the commissioner send an Englishman, not a native.”

“I do, sir,” Mumsford said.

Gardner dropped his arm. “I wanted you to see for yourself. To understand the circumstances. My outrage. The depth of this insult to my person,” he said. He lowered the volume on the record player.

Mumsford sat up. “To your person, sir?” he asked. The music was barely audible now and he was no longer in a cocoon.

“To the person of all honorable Englishmen, Inspector. To the person of my daughter.” He closed the console and recrossed the room. “When you meet her, Inspector, you will find she will outstrip all praise and make it halt behind her.” He hummed a few bars of the concerto and sat down on the armchair next to Mumsford’s. “A piece of England for my daughter,” he said.

He meant Mozart, and at the very least Mumsford knew that Mozart was not English, but it did not matter. He understood.

“Before you get the boy, I will show you my orchids and the rest of my garden.”

Yes, Mumsford thought, he could get the boy when he was done, after he had taken Gardner’s deposition. But Gardner did not wait for his response. “Ariana!” he shouted.

She was still there. She had not left the room. Gardner need not have raised his voice. She stood near the back door, twirling a strand of her long hair between her fingers.

“Ariana, the drinks!” She dropped her hand and swung it behind her back. It was the only acknowledgment she gave that she had heard him.

Mumsford had not been unaware of her presence. From time to time, in spite of his pleasure over the furniture, the crispness in the air, the reassuring music, his eyes had strayed in her direction. A will-o’-the-wisp, he had thought. They flitted over the marshes on hot summer nights. A speck of light too fleeting to be brilliant.

Ethereal. That was the word he had been searching for, yet it was a word that was inconsonant with her deep brown skin, her black wavy hair. Consonant, though, with her slight frame, her small bones, her long arms that dangled from their sockets, her long legs, her bare feet, her long, long hair, her huge eyes, which one noticed next, or first, if one saw her from the front and not from the back. They were round and bright, and made the rest of her face—her satiny smooth cheeks, her flat nose, her tiny mouth—seem inconsequential. She was probably Indian, though something about the curls in her hair and the flattish nose bridge told him that perhaps there was an African parent or grandparent. Doogla. That was what she was. It was the name the native people gave to such mixtures. Yes, she was a doogla.

But a will-o’-the-wisp, too. She could be blown away with a puff of breath. The fabric of her yellow dress, which was tied to the back in a girlish bow, was thin, almost transparent. He glanced at her again. He could make out shadows behind the thin fabric. It struck him that there was no inconsonance between the word that had occurred to him and the person he was seeing, the brilliance of her yellow dress flashing now against her dark skin not unlike the ethereal light flitting across the dark night in the marshes in England.

“Gin and tonic for you, Inspector?”

Mumsford was so deep in his ruminations, unsettled somewhat by the likeness he had made between the slight woman before him and England (though the comparison he had made was not with her and England but with her and a fairy, not a person in England) that he literally jumped when Gardner’s voice cut across his thoughts.

“Something the matter, Inspector?” Gardner asked.

Mumsford patted his hands down his jacket and folded them over his belt buckle. “I was dreaming,” he said hastily. “Of England. All this reminded me.”

Gardner smiled. “It happens to me sometimes. So will it be gin and tonic, or rum punch?”

“Neither, sir. I can’t have alcohol, sir. Not on the job, sir,” Mumsford said.

“Neither?”

“No, sir.”

Gardner considered his answer for a moment and then threw up his hands. “Then so it will be. But none of the formalities, John, okay? Call me Peter.”

“If you don’t mind, sir,” Mumsford said, “I’d prefer to call you by your surname, sir.”

Gardner frowned and crossed his legs. “If that is what you want.”

“And me, sir. I’d prefer if you’d call me Inspector Mumsford, sir.”

“By God, John, we’re in my house.”

“I’m here on an investigation, sir. If you don’t mind, it should be Inspector Mumsford, sir.”

“Then it shall.” Gardner slapped his knees. “Ariana, ask Inspector Mumsford what he’d like to drink.”

Ariana stepped toward them.

“Orange juice will be fine,” Mumsford said.

“Orange juice and my drink,” Dr. Gardner said to Ariana. She lifted her eyes to his and then quickly lowered them. “So go now,” Gardner said and fluttered his fingers in an exaggerated gesture of irritation. She hesitated. “Go,” Gardner said softly. Her lips parted in a brief smile, and then she turned and walked to the door, her hair swinging behind her, thick and dark, the two tiny globes of her backside clearly outlined under her thin dress.

“And pin up your hair, for God’s sake.”

Yes, Mumsford had no doubt; it was she he had seen dashing across the room without a stitch of clothing on her body. There was no mistaking that, nor the desire palpable in Gardner’s voice.

“They are all the same,” Gardner said and tugged his lower lip. “She, a little better than the others, but for the most part, they have such natures that nurture can never stick.”

“Nurture, sir?”

“Upbringing, Inspector.” His head was still turned in the direction of the door that had closed behind Ariana. “They have no upbringing. And it is a waste of time to educate them.” He dropped his hand and settled back in his chair.

Mumsford reached for his briefcase on the floor. “Well, to the matter in question, sir.”

“The matter in question?” Gardner looked at him, the furrows tightening on his brow as if he didn’t understand.

“The reason I am here, sir,” Mumsford said. “The boy.”

“Ah, the boy.” The furrows smoothened, then tightened again.

“Carlos Codrington, sir.” Mumsford brought the briefcase to his lap and opened it.

“He is the one on whom nurture can least stick,” Gardner said. He sat up and flicked off a piece of lint from the leg of his trousers. “You can have no idea of the pains I took to help him. Did you know I taught him to read?”

“You taught him?”

But Gardner was not listening to him. “Ariana!” he shouted, and when she did not answer him, he called her again. “Ariana, the inspector didn’t ask you to pick the oranges. How long does it take to pour orange juice in a glass?”

The sound of glass clinking against glass filtered into the drawing room.

“Ariana!” Gardner raised his voice for the third time. This time there was silence behind the door, a quiet so complete that though Gardner had set the record player to its lowest volume, the music seemed suddenly loud, the mournful sighs of violin and piano as the needle moved to another track on the record framing the tension in the room.

“I’m not very thirsty,” Mumsford said.

Gardner looked from him to the door and back again at him.

“You were telling me you taught the boy.” Mumsford tried again, hoping to refocus him.

“I taught him to speak properly,” Gardner said.

Mumsford took his notebook and pen from his briefcase. From the corner of his eye, he could see the door crack open, a slight sliver of a crack, a line, but enough to reveal yellow flickering in the narrow space between the door frame and the door.

“Now he speaks like an Englishman,” Gardner was saying.

“He, sir?” It was Mumsford’s turn to be distracted.

“Carlos. We are speaking about Carlos, Inspector.”

“Yes, yes. Carlos.” When he looked again, the yellow was gone.

“He was speaking like the rest of them when I came here,” Gardner said. “Dat and dis and dey, as if there were no th’s in the English language. He used to say, I ’as instead of I do. Now, you wouldn’t believe it. Like a proper Englishman.”

Mumsford opened his notebook. He must have made a mistake. There was no yellow near the door. “So you would say, sir,” he said, writing determinedly, “that in some instances nurture stuck.”

“Stuck?”

“What you were saying, sir, about nature,” Mumsford said.

“Yes, I know what I was saying, Mumsford.”

“That will be Inspector Mumsford, sir. If you don’t mind, sir.”

“Yes, I know what I said, Inspector Mumsford, but if you had waited a while you would have heard the rest. Carlos speaks like an Englishman only when he is sober. The rest of the time, which is most of the time, he speaks like a common sailor.”

“An English sailor, sir?” Mumsford scribbled more notes in his notebook.

“Yes, yes, by God, an English sailor, Inspector. And he curses as one, too.”

“So you’d say on the night in question . . .”

“It wasn’t night.”

“Then day, sir?”

“Yes, day.”

“Well, you’d say on the day in question he was drunk?”

Gardner became agitated. He bent his head and picked nervously at the loose threads on the pocket of his shirt. Mumsford could see the roots of his hair. Red, English red, he was certain that was the color of Gardner’s hair before the sun had stripped it. Dirty color rust, he scribbled in his notebook.

“What are you writing now, Inspector?” Gardner snapped back his head and glared at him.

“The details of the case,” Mumsford said. And at that moment he felt a surge of pity for him. He had been sun-dried, bleached like a piece of driftwood.

“I haven’t given you the details of the case, Inspector,” Gardner said gruffly.

“About the event happening in the day, not the night, sir.”

Gardner sighed and sat back in his chair. “He was not drunk on the day in question,” he said. He looked tired, a wrinkled old man, though he was not much past fifty.

Not for me, Mumsford thought. I will not turn into a leathery old man before my time. After this matter has ended, the perpetrator put in jail, I will submit my resignation, return to England, marry a young English girl, settle down in some quiet English countryside. Next year will not find me here.

“Yes. That would have been quite another matter, indeed,” he said to Gardner, the picture he had formed in his head softening his tone.

“Another matter?” Gardner asked.

“One can never tell what a man is capable of doing when he is drunk,” Mumsford said.

“Well, he wasn’t.” Gardner sat up. “Not that day.”

“Other days then?” Mumsford asked. He did not want to agitate him again, but the deposition had to be precise.

Gardner smoothed back the wrinkles on his cheeks. “Other days,” he said. “Other days.” His voice trailed.

He must have been handsome once, Mumsford thought. In England his skin would not have turned to leather. In England his red hair would have been streaked with bronze, not rust, the detestable sun would not have hardened his eyes, and there would have been muscles, not wires in his arms.

“When?” he asked. “Which other days?”

But Gardner’s mind was on Ariana again. He turned toward the door through which she had exited moments ago.

“Ariana!” He was calling her again. “Ariana!”

This time Mumsford was certain of the yellow. He saw it move. She had been standing there all along, behind the door, listening to them.

“Ariana!”

The sliver of yellow widened and she was in the room, smiling, balancing a tray with two glasses on it, one the color of orange juice, the other a disturbing blue.

“I come to answer your best pleasure, Dr. Gardner. Whether you want me to fly, to swim, to dive into the fire, to ride on the clouds. I come to do your bidding task.” She batted her eyes and swung her hips.

Mumsford strangled a gasp. He could not believe the change in her. Minutes before she was surly, pouting, refusing to answer him.

“Moody today, aren’t you, Ariana?” Gardner got up and took the glasses from the tray.

“Your thoughts are mine,” she said.

“And so they should be, Ariana.” Gardner stood close to her, so close that he would only have to lean forward slightly and their lips would meet.

“Tell me your pleasure, my commander. Is there more toil?”

Mumsford had to strain his ears to hear her.

“No,” Gardner said softly, his voice a caress. “There is no more toil.”

Their whispered intimacy embarrassed Mumsford. He flipped through the pages of his notebook, busying himself. The whispering continued, Ariana’s voice gliding seductively across the room, Gardner’s at once gruff and plaintive but so low Mumsford could not discern the words.

Mumsford coughed again and shifted his body nosily in his chair, but nothing worked. Then, when he least expected it, Gardner’s voice changed from an anxious drone to a harsh whisper and then to a command. “Well, be off with you,” Mumsford heard him say. He caught Ariana’s eyes. There was something curiously submissive in her expression. He had seen that look before—many times it seemed lately—when he apprehended a native: a shading over the eyes that did little to mask fear, feelings of powerlessness, of defeat, and yet somehow beneath the fear, defiance.

Gardner raised his voice again and ordered Ariana to leave. She threw her head back and walked slowly and deliberately out of the room, tossing her hair over her shoulders and swaying her hips seductively from side to side as if she knew, as indeed it was true, that Gardner’s eyes would be glued on her.

When the door clicked shut, Gardner explained: “She wants something. They are childish that way. They pout, and when that doesn’t work, they turn on the charm. Soon she’ll sulk.”

What was it she wanted? The question formed in Mumsford’s mind, but he knew better than to ask it. The commissioner’s instructions were explicit. He was not to arouse suspicions in Dr. Gardner that Ariana had betrayed him, that the day before she had sent a letter by a boatman with an accusation of her own: He tell a lie. Mr. Prospero lie.

“I taught her those words.” Gardner handed Mumsford the glass with the drink the color of orange juice. “Quite an actress, wouldn’t you say?”

Mumsford brought his glass quickly to his lips to hide his consternation. A performance, perhaps, but more natural than artificial, Gardner’s words about nature and nurture still lingering in his head.

“Mine is special,” Gardner said, holding up the drink with the bluish hue and regarding it from the distance of his arm. “It’s something I’ve concocted. It builds the mind.” He pointed to his right temple.

It looked like poison, Mumsford thought, but that was none of his business. Nor was Gardner’s relationship with Ariana. Whether Gardner was putting on his clothes when he came to the door, whether Ariana had been naked and had run to the back of the house to dress, whether she and Gardner had been fucking like pigs, none of that mattered. That was not why he was here. He took two more sips from his orange juice, put down the glass, reached into his pocket for his handkerchief, dabbed his lips dry, and began. “So, sir, back to the business that brings me here.” He sat forward on his chair, his pen poised over his notebook. “Can you tell me, sir, what happened exactly on that day? I am assuming, of course, we are speaking in privacy.”

“Ariana is in the kitchen.” Gardner continued to regard his drink.

“Can’t she hear us, sir?”

Gardner swirled the blue liquid in his glass. “It’s no matter,” he said vacantly.

“And the young man . . .”

“As I wrote to the commissioner, the young man, as you call him, is safely locked up in the back of the house.”

“Yes, yes. But your daughter, sir?”

“My daughter has gone to Trinidad for a few days.”

The commissioner had not told him that, and Mumsford wondered whether he knew.

Gardner seemed to read the puzzlement on his face. “It so happens that her intended . . .”

“Her intended? Is she engaged, sir?”

“I didn’t say so, Inspector. Her intended, the man who intends to marry her . . . It so happens he is here on holiday.”

“She is fifteen, isn’t she, sir?”

“She is fifteen, Inspector.” Gardner stated the fact bluntly, his eyes challenging Mumsford to make more of his statement.

Mumsford looked away. “A bit young, don’t you think, sir?” he asked. He softened the inflection at the end so his question would not sound as harsh as the thoughts that ran through his head: Fifteen?

“I am her father,” Gardner said. “I will be the judge of that.”

“I was just saying, sir . . .”

“You said it. You think she is too young, but let me tell you, Inspector.” Gardner put his glass down on the table. His movements were measured, as were the next words that came out of his mouth. “If . . .” His hand was still on the glass and he twirled it between his thumb and middle finger. “If you don’t direct the hormones when they start jumping . . .” He left the sentence hanging in the air, unfinished.

“Jumping, sir?” Mumsford pushed him to complete his thought.

“Have you forgotten when you were fifteen, Inspector?” He picked up the glass. “Yes, jumping. I can’t have her hormones going in the wrong direction, toward the wrong person, can I, Inspector?”

Mumsford did not like the coarse reference to hormones, but he shrugged off his discomfort. “And I take it, Dr. Gardner, the young man here on a holiday is the right person?” There were no traces of sarcasm in his question. He was simply seeking clarification.

“A medical student,” Gardner said.

“Studying to be a doctor, like you, sir?”

Gardner swallowed a mouthful of the blue liquid. “Yes. Like me, Inspector.”

Mumsford came closer to the edge of his seat. “This may seem an impertinence, sir, but I assure you none is intended. Is she alone with him, sir?”

Gardner reddened. “It is an impertinence, Inspector Mumsford.”

“He is in Trinidad, is he not, sir?”

“The young man comes from a good family, Inspector. From Boston. They have kept the old ways in Boston.” Gardner spoke in clipped tones.

“American?”

“From New England. You’ve heard of New England, haven’t you, Inspector? It is as it says. New England.”

“And your daughter, sir, is with this American from New England?” Mumsford’s pen moved rapidly across his notebook.

“Not by herself, as you seem to want to imply, Inspector. She’s well chaperoned. By Mrs. Burton.”

“Mrs. Burton?” Mumsford raised his head.

“An Englishwoman. And the young man is not here alone. He is with his father.”

“With his mother, too, I take it, sir?”

“No. Not with his mother, Inspector. His mother is dead.”

Mumsford pursed his lips.

“The young man is quite respectable,” Gardner said.

Mumsford scratched the side of his head.

“Quite respectable. Father and son are staying in a hotel and my daughter is staying with Mrs. Burton.”

“Indeed, sir.”

“They would all be here if that devil had not attacked her.” Gardner threw back his head and drained his glass.

Attacked was a specific word. Mumsford prided himself on being thorough. He had been properly trained. Attacked indicated action. Violence to a person.

“Attacked, sir?” he asked.

“Attempted, Inspector.” Dr. Gardner corrected himself and put the empty glass on the table. “As I said to you before, that beast Carlos attempted to put a stain on my daughter’s honor.”

After Daughter in hotel with boyfriend, Mumsford wrote in his notebook No violence with the colored boy.

“Still writing, Inspector?” Gardner stretched his neck in Mumsford’s direction.

“Just notes, sir.”

“The inspector on duty,” Gardner said drily. He glanced once more at Mumsford’s notebook and then closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them again, he was still fixed on the point of establishing the propriety of his daughter’s trip to Trinidad. “The young man would be here,” he said, “if it had not been for the present situation. You understand? The attempt.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And he and my daughter will be here as soon as you remove that savage from my premises. Don’t you think I know about fire i’ th’ blood?” His eyes bored into Mumsford’s.

“Fire in the blood, sir?”

“Sexual passion. Carnal lust. You understand passion and lust, don’t you, Inspector?”

And in truth Inspector Mumsford did not understand, not in the way he felt Dr. Gardner implied. He had read books about carnal lust, dirty books he still stuffed under his mattress, for he lived with his mother, though it was the other way around now that she had followed him to Trinidad. But he had no experience with carnal lust. He had never been to a brothel.

“I have given the young man strict instructions,” Gardner said, when Mumsford did not answer him. “He is never to ask her to his room. They can go for walks, meet in the hotel lobby, that sort of thing. Public places only. Oh, he swore to me that he would respect her. That he would not touch her before they were married. But you know, Inspector,” he lowered his voice, “the strongest oaths are straw to fire i’ th’ blood. I told him so.” He examined his fingernails. “One must avoid all situations where the temptation may be too great or it is good night your vow,” he said.

Did he imagine it, Mumsford wondered, or had he not detected a trace of sadness in Gardner’s voice? “Yes,” Mumsford said, “it is always best to avoid temptation.”

“It’s her greatest treasure, you know.” Gardner raised his eyes to him again.

“Her treasure, sir?”

“I speak of her virginity, Inspector. It is the jewel in her dower.”

Mumsford’s neck felt hot. It throbbed with the rush of blood that rose from his chest.

“Yes, yes, no need for double-talk, Inspector. I will be plain. It is her jewel. I said so to Alfred. That is the young man who wants to marry her. Break her virgin knot, and it is all over. Nothing can follow but disdain after that. I told her that, too. A man may promise you the stars, but if you surrender to him, that which made you so special will be tarnished. Light winning makes the prize light. You understand? We are hunters, Inspector.” He leaned forward conspiratorially, the nuggets he had for eyes hard and shining.

Every instinct in Mumsford urged him to recoil—the man was making him uneasy—but he held his ground. He was here on police business. He was a professional. He would remember that.

“I would agree with you,” he said to Gardner. “Anthropologically speaking, sir.”

Gardner slapped his thighs and let out a loud guffaw. “ ‘Anthropologically speaking, sir?’ ” he mimicked him. “ ‘Anthropologically speaking, sir?’ ”

How had he allowed himself to feel pity for this man? Why did he think he seemed sad minutes ago when he talked of oaths and temptation? “Are you making fun of me, sir?” Mumsford asked.

“Did they teach you to speak like that in police school?”

“Am I amusing you, sir?”

“No, no, Inspector. It was a good word. Anthropologically speaking. Those are good words. Precise.” Gardner wiped his eyes on the shoulder of his shirt. “And anthropologically speaking, Mumsford, as you know as well as I do, there is no sport after the kill.” Gardner was no longer smiling. The hardness had returned in his eyes. “Yes, it is her jewel. They will both hate each other if it loses its sheen. Discord will come between them when they marry. Barren hate. He would know it was spoilt meat he got when he married her, and she would hate him for spoiling her before she had taken her vows.”

Mumsford felt he could not take much more of this talk of virgin knot, sexual passion, jumping hormones, carnal lust, spoilt meat. It was talk better for the pub among like-minded companions, or in a sleazy motel, perhaps with a prostitute. He was her father, for God’s sake. Dr. Gardner had called him stuffy, and perhaps he was. He was not a city man. He did not have city ways. He was raised in the country, in England, where it was improper for a father to speak this way about his daughter. His stomach felt queasy. They were inappropriate, Dr. Gardner’s intimate references to his daughter’s sexuality, not normal for a decent father.

“So you see, Inspector, that born devil would have destroyed all that if he had succeeded,” Gardner was saying, and in a flash Mumsford saw his mistake. Good detective as he thought he was, he had missed the point of Gardner’s tirade: first, to establish that there had been no assault, but, rather, an attempt to assault, thus leaving no doubt of his daughter’s purity. Then (his real purpose) to lay the foundation that would seal his argument that that very attempt had threatened her future, the plans he had in place for her.

“A good boy from New England would not marry a slut,” Gardner concluded.

Yes. Yes, it was clear now. He should have known.

“A woman who had been broken into. Used. You understand me, Mumsford?”

He understood him now. He turned to a clean page in his notebook. “I would need to know the beginning,” he said.

“The beginning?” Gardner’s eyes drifted across to the record player.

“Can we start from the beginning, sir?” Mumsford asked quietly.

“The adagio.” Gardner was not listening to him. “Mozart’s clarinet concerto in A.” He was conducting again, lifting his hand when the music arced, lowering it when it descended.

“Sir?” Mumsford tried to rouse him. It was mournful, the music, though he could barely hear it.

“She was a piece of virtue,” he said.

“She?”

“My wife.” His hand fell to his side. “Faithful to me. Pure as driven snow. She died shortly after Virginia was born. Twelve years we are here.”

“A long time,” Mumsord said.

“There is no doubt Virginia . . .”

“Tell me about her, sir.”

“No doubt my daughter. Her mother said she was my daughter.” He glanced at Mumsford as if daring him to contradict him.

Not missing the challenge in the glance, Mumsford said quickly, “Indeed, sir. The commissioner said there is a great resemblance between you two, sir.”

“A virgin when I married her, Inspector. Never been touched. A piece of virtue.”

Afraid he was about to launch into another lecture about virginity, Mumsford interrupted him, but not unkindly. “If you don’t mind, sir, could we start at the other beginning, the time immediately before the incident, sir?”

Gardner rubbed his eyes. The edges of his mouth had hardened, and nothing remained of the slackness that moments ago had caused the skin there to droop so that the lines along his chin had deepened. “They had a cure for the disease when we arrived,” he said abruptly.

It was not the beginning Mumsford wanted, but it was a beginning closer to the present.

“The nuns had left,” Gardner said, “but there were still a few patients. The doctor here was old and tired.”

“Is that why you came, sir?” Mumsford encouraged him.

“What?” Gardner seemed momentarily perplexed.

“Why you came, sir?”

“Yes. It was why I came.”

“And why you stayed, sir?”

“Yes, yes. I came for the lepers and I stayed for the ones who were still here.”

“But I understand, sir, you no longer take care of them.”

“And your understanding is accurate, Inspector,” he said angrily.

The glare from the cold light that shone from Gardner’s eyes forced Mumsford to look down. His remark to Gardner had not been benign. He wanted to know why Gardner was still on the island; why, since he no longer took care of the lepers.

“When you came here,” he began, trying another approach, “did you find Carlos here, sir?”

Gardner pushed back a thin lock of hair that had gotten loose from the elastic band on his ponytail. “He was six,” he said without emotion. “His mother had just died.”

“And his father?” Mumsford fumbled through his notes. “She was a blue-eyed hag.”

“Sir?”

“His mother. Sylvia. Carlos’s mother. She was a blue-eyed hag,” he repeated.

“Blue-eyed?”

“And that whelp she gave birth to was freckled.”

“She was white, his mother?”

“I said blue-eyed, Inspector.”

“So Carlos is white?”

“Freckled,” Gardner said.

“Half white?” Mumsford asked, straining forward in his chair.

“She didn’t know the father, that hag. But he was a black man.”

“There was more than one?” Mumsford fought the anger rising in him. Damn mixing of the bloods—the impurities.

“She screwed them all on the island,” Gardner said.

“The lepers?”

Gardner narrowed his eyes. “She birthed a misshapen bastard,” he said.

“Because of the disease?”

“Because of his father’s black blood,” Gardner said.

“So he is deformed?”

“Freckled,” Gardner said again.

Mumsford looked puzzled and then, as if finally making sense of what Gardner had said, he drew in his breath. “Ah,” he said knowingly.

“Freckles all over his body,” Gardner said.

“I’ve heard that happens,” Mumsford said.

Gardner raised his eyebrows.

“When the two bloods meet.”

Gardner’s eyebrows arched higher.

“Sometimes it makes black and brown dots on the white,” Mumsford said.

At first Gardner’s jaw simply dropped and his mouth gaped open. No sound came out of it, and then he was choking, laughing uproariously, kicking up his feet and making scissorlike movements with his legs in the air. “I say, I say . . .” The words came sputtering out of his mouth. “Black and brown dots on the white.” He was fighting for breath. “When the two bloods meet.” Tears streamed down his face. “When the . . .”

Mumsford fiddled with his collar, adjusted the buckle on his belt, and tried to look dignified.

“I mean . . .” Gardner swallowed the cough rising in his throat. “I mean, didn’t they teach you anything about biology in police school, Inspector?” He dried his eyes with the back of his hand.

“We were not training to be doctors, sir,” Mumsford said stiffly.

“The fundamentals. Just the fundamentals, Inspector.”

“I didn’t intend to entertain you, sir.”

“I mean, colored people don’t leave dots on white people. Or stripes, for that matter. A black and a white horse don’t make a zebra, Mumsford.”

“I’m sorry you should find me amusing, sir.”

“No. I suppose it’s not your fault. I suppose I shouldn’t have laughed.” Gardner patted his cheeks dry. “I should beg your pardon. I should apologize.”

“No apology is needed, sir.”

“I suppose you shouldn’t be blamed.”

“A misunderstanding, sir.”

“But one would have thought the colonial office would have prepared you men better before they let you come out here.”

“They prepared me, sir.”

“But surely, you’ve seen a freckled white person?”

Mumsford’s face hardened. “He lived here in the house with you?” His voice was loaded with exaggerated formality.

“Carlos?” Gardner seemed surprised by the question.

“I am here to discuss Carlos, sir. Did he live here?” Mumsford crossed off misshapen in his notes.

“Here?” Gardner looked around him.

“Yes. Did he live here?”

“From the first day,” Gardner said.

“With you and your daughter? Twelve years?” Mumsford pressed his questions.

“I thought he would be someone to amuse her. I let them play together.” Gardner stroked the legs of his pants.

“Them?”

“Carlos and my daughter. Then, when I started teaching her to read—she was four, he was six at the time—he stood nearby listening. He picked up what I was saying to her. Later he would take her little books and try to read on his own. Sometimes I would see him reading to her. Many times I was busy in my garden.” He paused, and checked the buttons on his shirt. The top one was undone. He buttoned it. “My orchids, you know, Mumsford. They are the rarest in the world. If we have time, before you leave . . .”

But Mumsford would not let him change the subject so easily. Biology might not be his expertise, he might know nothing about botany, he might not be able to grow grass that looked like plastic or make polka dots appear on the petals of bougainvillea, but he was an expert in detective work. He could keep his focus in a deposition. “So he read to her?” Mumsford cut him off in mid-sentence.

“I gave him my books. I taught my daughter and he listened,” Gardner said.

“Your daughter did not go to school?”

“We don’t have school here, Inspector. It’s a leper colony. Or haven’t you noticed?”

“Surely her education?”

“Fire i’ th’ blood, Inspector. These tropical climes arouse a man’s sexual desires. We men are old goats. I could not put her at risk sending her to school in Trinidad.”

“Surely in a boarding school?” Mumsford asked, malice curling around the edges of his question.

“There are never sufficient protections. Besides, Inspector, she could do no better than to have me as a schoolmaster. Others might not have been so careful.”

“Careful?”

“To teach her what she needed to know.”

Mumsford was struck by his emphasis on needed but he stuck to his objective, which now was not merely to gather information, but to make Gardner pay for humiliating him. “But Carlos?” he asked, taking no little satisfaction in noticing that his line of questioning was agitating Gardner.

“If she were a princess in a castle, she could not have had a better tutor,” Gardner said.

Mumsford made himself clearer. “Was Carlos there all the time when you were teaching her?”

“I’m not sure what you are implying, Inspector, but yes, he was there sometimes. I took interest in him when I saw how quickly he learned. He had some aptitude for science. I gave him my books.”

“Was he a help to you, sir?”

“A help?”

“When you were working with the lepers, sir.”

“I was not needed to work with the lepers. I thought I made that clear, Inspector.”

“Ah, yes. Then in the garden, sir?”

“The garden?”

“Did he help you in the garden? With your orchids, sir?”

“Ah, my orchids.” A grim smile cut across Gardner’s face. “He excelled there. He learned quickly about crossbreeding, cross-pollination. He was a bastard, you see. A crossbreed himself.”

“And you think it was that he wanted to do?”

“That?”

“With your daughter, sir. Was it crossbreeding he was thinking of, sir?”

Gardner got up abruptly and paced the room. He ran his hand over the top of his head down to his neck. The elastic band that held his ponytail slid off and his hair hung in limp locks above his shoulders. “None of this. None of what I say to you must leave here.” He came close to Mumsford. The muscles in his face were taut as wires.

“Only to the commissioner,” Mumsford said. “Only between us.”

“He came to me and said he wanted to have children with her.” Gardner was breathing hard. A vein popped out along the length of his forehead, slight at first and then thick, blue, hard, ugly, pushing against his leathery skin.

“He said that? Those words exactly?” Mumsford was taking notes.

“No. He used an ancient language from one of my books.”

“Which book?”

“Never mind.” Gardner massaged the back of his neck. “He said he wanted to people the island with little Carloses.”

“People?”

“Make babies.”

“But his exact words, sir? Do you remember his exact words?”

“He said he wanted to people the island with Calibans.”

“Calibans?”

“He meant himself.”

“But he didn’t give you any indication to suggest . . .”

Gardner did not let him finish. “Do you take me for an idiot, Inspector? I know how to guard my daughter’s honor.”

“But when you were in the garden, sir. Were there times they could have been alone?”

“I resent these insinuations, Inspector.”

“I am sorry, sir. It’s my job, sir. I must ask. The commissioner will expect me to ask.”

Gardner’s hand tightened around the back of his neck, and his head fell on his shoulders. With infinite patience, as if he were speaking to a child, he said, “When I was not with them, Inspector, Ariana was always there. She was my spy.”

* * *

From the moment Gardner opened the back door in the kitchen, Mumsford was accosted by the stench. It came on the first wave of heat that, after the cool of the interior, felt like a blast from a blowtorch on his face. The combination of heat and foul odor almost knocked him off of his feet. His knees buckled and his head felt light. It was shit: cow shit, dog shit, pig shit. It stank as if the sun had vaporized all the shit in the world into the very particles of the air he breathed. He put his handkerchief to his nose, but even the cologne he had dampened it with that morning could not mask the stench. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck, and goose bumps ran down the length of his arms.

“Stink, isn’t it?” Gardner said, smirking.

In front of them it was green, an immaculate plastic lawn that had recently been cut, or, as the discomforting thought snaked its way into Mumsford’s consciousness, had never needed cutting, stretching out to a chain-link fence behind which the bush grew tall and wild. There was no animal in sight, no mound of shit anywhere.

“Where?” Mumsford looked over the handkerchief he held plastered to his nose and mouth.

Gardner grinned and motioned him to follow him.

What registered first in Mumsford’s brain when they turned the corner was color, a mirage of color. He saw color first because the sun dazzled him, because here, on this side of the house, there was not a sliver of green, no grass, no trees, just dry, brown dirt and beds of gray pebbles; because when he squinted to protect his eyes from the glare, it was the macabre shimmering of color that arrested him; because though he could not have missed the chain-link fence enclosing a tiny area behind the color and the outlines of the man inside, it was easier, less painful, to focus on the color.

“My orchids,” Gardner said.

Never in all his years of police work had Mumsford seen a sight more terrible. Never had he smelled a stench more foul.

“They are my pride and joy,” Gardner said.

The mirage cleared and the outlines took shape. A young man—Mumsford guessed he was about seventeen; seventeen it would be exactly, for Carlos Codrington was two years older than the girl—was sitting on a rock in the scorching sun, penned in an area hardly more than six feet by six. In front of him were Gardner’s orchids, a blaze of purple, pink, and white flowers springing out from a maze of brown roots clinging crablike to gray stumps of coconut tree trunks cut in half and sunk into beds of gravel.

“My prizewinners.” Gardner was beaming.

Mumsford’s throat burned, nausea mounted his upper chest. Except for black boxer shorts, the man was naked, his torso, his arms, thighs, and legs bare and blanketed with red bumps. Some of the bumps had turned into sores, and Mumsford could see blood seeping slowly out of them. Some were already pustulant. At his feet, on one side of the base of the rock, was a pool of putrid water, on the other mounds of foul-smelling brown dirt Mumsford was certain was excrement. Mosquitoes buzzed around the water, in and out of the excrement, and lit upon the young man in clusters on his face and over his body. The young man did not move. He did not swat them away. He sat still as a statue, his hands clutched to his knees, his head bent. Only when Gardner approached did he give any sign of life. He must have heard the gravel crunch and when the sounds stopped, he raised his head.

“I’ve brought the police,” Gardner said.

The young man looked at him with hatred in his eyes purer than any Mumsford could ever have imagined.

“He is filth,” Gardner said.

Mumsford turned away in horror. “Get him out of here! Now!” he shouted at Gardner.

Gardner smiled cruelly. “A lying slave whom stripes may move, not kindness.”

“You have not beaten him?” Mumsford glanced quickly at the young man.

“The cat-o’-nine-tails for what he did to my daughter.”

“You have not struck him?” Mumsford asked again.

“No, I have been kind to him, filth that he is.”

“Clean him up,” Mumsford said. Nausea clogged his throat.

“He deserves worse than a prison.”

“Now, Dr. Gardner! I say now! Take him out of there!”

“I put him there on that rock for endangering the honor of my child.” Gardner curled his lips.

“Clean him up, I say, Dr. Gardner!”

“People the island with Carloses, eh?” Gardner taunted Carlos. “Let’s see you people now.”

“Enough, Dr. Gardner. Get him ready. I will take him now.”

Gardner came closer to the fence. “Filth,” he shouted.

“For God’s sake, Dr. Gardner, he is harmless now. Leave him be.”

Gardner curled his fingers around the loops at the top of the fence. His chest was pumping up and down. “Worse than filth,” he shouted.

“The commissioner will handle the situation,” Mumsford said. “I will take him to Trinidad.”

“To jail,” Gardner said.

“The commissioner will know what to do.” Mumsford tugged Gardner’s arm.

“You’re a lucky boy.” Gardner shook his finger at Carlos. “If the inspector had not come . . .”

Mumsford pulled his arm harder and with a parting curse to Carlos, Gardner let go of the fence.

At least, Mumsford thought, Carlos had not been beaten. At least he had seen no evidence of stripes on his body, only sores.

Inside the house, Gardner shouted orders at Ariana. “Clean him up! See he takes his things with him. I want nothing of his left here.”

He invited Mumsford to wait in the drawing room, but Mumsford declined. He was not prepared to call Gardner a torturer, but he could not bear to stay a minute more in his presence, tempting though it was to sit in the cool of the air-conditioned room. He mumbled something about needing to get on his way and said he would wait on the porch.

The boy had been tortured. When he replayed Gardner’s words, he thought tortured for nothing. His better self, his English self, his more noble self, told him that. For nothing. For expressing a wish, a desire.

Did intent warrant such torture? Consummation—there was no question—consummation would have been repulsive to him, but Dr. Gardner had given him no proof of consummation. Attempted was the word he used, and the accusation was a garble of words about peopling the island.

Male concupiscence. Lust. Lascivious intent. Mumsford could find the young man guilty of no more than these. Contemptible, yes. The boy, like the rest of his kind, was prone to carnal lechery, but he had done nothing more than reveal his dirty longings to Gardner.

But why? Mumsford’s detective mind churned. What was his motive for exposing filthy thoughts to Gardner? Only a fool would be so stupid as to make his intentions known to the very person he intended to hurt. Only a predator gone daft in the head would warn his prey, and yet the boy did not look like a fool. No one capable of sustaining such control over his expression while he was being taunted was a fool.

Surely the boy knew that Gardner would not have welcomed his crude overtures toward his daughter. But were his overtures crude? People, Gardner said Carlos wanted to do. People as in make babies with his daughter.

Crude overtures, yes, because she was an English girl; crude because he was a colored man. But Mumsford had seen the chief medical officer get away with this sort of crudeness. He and the chief justice had married Englishwomen and had brown babies with them. These were indecencies to him, and he presumed to all red-blooded Englishmen—to Gardner—but one did not imprison a man for these indecencies.

Was there more? Was Gardner hiding more? Was it possible that his daughter’s jewel, her virgin knot as he called it, had been broken? Had the boy done more than reveal his dark desires, his criminal intent?

Was it shame, embarrassment, that caused Gardner to hide the crime? He said, he intimated, that his daughter’s chances for marriage with the American from Boston had been in jeopardy. The man from New England would not marry a slut, he said. Yet Mumsford was certain that Gardner would not have let Carlos off so lightly had he done this, had he raped his daughter. He would have told the commissioner, he would have secured Carlos’s punishment—his death possibly—discreetly, in secret. No, it was not likely that Carlos had raped Dr. Gardner’s daughter.

Mumsford had already arrived at this conclusion when Carlos appeared from the back of the house, alone. There were no restraints whatsoever on his body. There would have been restraints if he were wrong, Mumsford thought. If the boy had committed such a crime, Gardner would not have let him leave without at least manacling his wrists. He wanted him off the island, that was all, Mumsford decided. He wanted him out of the way when his daughter returned, out of the way in case desire turned into actuality, in case the next time the boy would not declare, but would do what he so foolhardily confessed to be his intention.

Now cleaned up, dressed in beige pants and a pink long-sleeved cotton shirt, the boy seemed harmless to Mumsford, incapable of that kind of barbarity.

Misshapen? He had seen him bare-chested. His shoulders were broad, his torso muscular, his hips slim. Was it the shape of his backside that had caused Gardner to tell that lie? Mumsford had heard the snickering in the Country Club. Tails. No one believed it, but it made for raucous laughter when the blacks left and they had the billiard room to themselves.

Mumsford blushed remembering how his eyes had strayed there, but he had felt compelled to examine the boy as he walked toward the house in front of him. His torso was shorter, his buttocks more pronounced than the average Englishman’s. High, but not misshapen.

He was facing him now and the blood and pus had been washed off. He had to admit he was handsome; even the freckles were not unattractive. There were pink blotches on his face for sure, and around his ears and neck where the skin was broken, but the freckles spread across his cheekbones seemed to him like chocolate dust sprinkled over a butterscotch brown cake.

It bothered Mumsford that this pleasant image should come to him at this moment, dredged from a happy time in his childhood. Yet something about Carlos’s face, his skin—butterscotch brown was indeed how he would describe his color—reminded him of toffee and chocolate, and the brown cake he loved as a child.

And perhaps his gaffe with Gardner had its source from these times, too, when he was a boy, in the early years after the war. He had known better, of course. He had seen freckles on many an Englishman’s face. But the talk in those years in the streets where he lived in England was about the coloreds, the flood of immigrants from the colonies, coming to England now that the country had been battered. “Reverse colonization,” his father called it. “They come to take what we have worked for.”

Signs warned dark-skinned immigrants that they were not welcome. No dogs. No coloreds. Some were more humiliating: Pets. No coloreds. But nothing stopped these sons and daughters of the Commonwealth. They came in droves from India, Pakistan, China, Africa, the West Indies, from every corner of the world where the sun set on lands the British had colonized, trusting in the propaganda of the Mother Country, believing in her gospel of fair play and justice. When asked, their response was naïve. Their oil, tobacco, cotton, sugar, bananas had made the Mother Country rich. Surely it was their turn.

The fear among the men was, naturally, the vulnerability of the women. What would happen if a colored man fucked a white woman? Mumsford and his school chums spent many an amusing hour making up answers—Stripes like a zebra, spots like a leopard. Freckles—all the time trying to smother hysteria.

Say something enough times and myth becomes fact, lies truth, Mumsford now admitted to himself. Carlos had freckles and the skin color of a colored man, but, as he grudgingly had to accede, the facial features of many an Englishman he knew: broad brow; thin lips; a wide, substantial chin; blue eyes undoubtedly inherited from his mother.

The blue eyes made Mumsford uneasy. They were disconcerting, strange to him on a brown face.

“Have you taken all you’ll need?” Carlos was standing in front of him, obviously ready to leave, but he had not uttered a single word. “Ready?” Mumsford jerked his head toward the black duffel bag he was holding.

The young man nodded, but his lips remained sealed.

He could not figure him out. He could not tell if he was afraid or relieved to be going with him. His eyes told him nothing. They were blank, empty of any expression Mumsford could discern. “Well then,” Mumsford said, when it was clear that Carlos would not answer him, “I’ll let Dr. Gardner know we are leaving.”

But before he could step forward, the front door opened and Gardner came running out, his shirttails flapping behind him. “See that he rots in jail,” he shouted to Mumsford.

Carlos made a gurgling sound and puckered his lips.

“Until his flesh rots.” Gardner had reached where they were standing.

What happened next so paralyzed both Mumsford and Gardner that neither man moved, stunned by the audacity of it, shocked by the intensity of the rage that had produced it. Had Mumsford been looking at Carlos at the time and seen his eyes narrow to slits and the venom pooled there, he might have anticipated it when he heard the gurgling coming from Carlos’s direction. But he was facing Gardner, and he saw what happened after it happened, after Carlos had done it.

He saw the stream of spit jetting forward, he saw it land with absolute accuracy on the tip of Gardner’s nose; he saw it slide and drain onto his top lip, and his feet, like Gardner’s, froze to the ground.

Carlos came close to Gardner. He was breathing hard; his nostrils flared. “You taught me your language well and I use it now to curse you. May you burn in hell, motherfucker!”

Gardner’s face lost color, and then his body thawed, and like a dog tucking its tail between its legs, he turned and walked away.

* * *

Mumsford had brought handcuffs, but he did not use them. After Carlos spat on Gardner’s face and cursed him, he seemed ready to leave, anxious even. “Can we go now?” he asked Mumsford. His voice was as cool as ice.

Why had Gardner not retaliated? Why hadn’t he struck him or insisted that Mumsford beat him with his baton? Why, when they faced each other, was Gardner the first to turn away? The conclusion Mumsford came to was the same one he had arrived at minutes before: Carlos had committed no real crime. The expression of his desire to have babies with Virginia was an insult to Gardner, no more. Still, to spit in the face of an Englishman!

“That was disrespectful.” He said so to Carlos.

“He deserved it.” Carlos’s breathing had slowed. He spoke without emotion, as if merely stating an obvious fact.

And perhaps it was an obvious fact. The boy had been tortured. It had irked Mumsford when the commissioner had told him to take Carlos to the monks. Jail, he thought, would have been more appropriate for the perpetrator of a crime against an English girl. But he was grateful now for the commissioner’s insistence, now after he had witnessed Gardner’s cruelty.

“I’m not taking you to jail,” he said, wanting to put the boy at ease. “The commissioner has asked me to bring you to the monks at St. Benedict’s.”

The young man remained stubbornly silent, but Mumsford saw the muscles on the side of his face loosen and his jaw relax.

“There will be no more punishment, Codrington.”

He wanted to say more to him, but decided it would be imprudent. The fact remained that the investigation was not yet over. He had yet to speak to Virginia, to get her side of the story.

The boatman was waiting at the spot where he said he would be. The moment he saw Carlos, he came quickly toward him. “Is good you leaving, Mister Carlos,” he said. He grabbed his hand and shook it vigorously.

Mumsford frowned at him, unsettled by the honorific. Mister?

The boatman paid no attention to his frown. “You lead the way, Mister Carlos,” he said.

Carlos smiled and walked in front of him. Mumsford had no choice but to follow, and the boatman picked up the rear.

No one spoke on the brief walk to the water, the silence broken only by the swish of branches, the call of birds, the occasional pebble rolling downhill. Once a twig snapped and then another, rapidly, behind it. Mumsford turned around sharply. “Iguana,” the boatman said. “Plenty in the bush.” But when they neared the clearing, Mumsford saw the unmistakable flicker of yellow between the greens and browns in the bushes.

Ariana!

He told the boatman to wait in the boat with Carlos and he went to the place where he had seen the yellow. Ariana parted the branches and appeared before him.

“I tell you a lot about Carlos and Miss Virginia but not now. I can’t stay.” She held up her hand.

Mumsford brushed aside the flicker of irritation that flashed through him and concentrated. “Can you come to the station?” he asked.

“I come tomorrow. Tomorrow is Friday. He study on Friday; read he books all day. I come ten o’clock.”

“Ten o’clock is fine. But won’t he miss you?”

“Prospero miss nobody when he read his books.”

It was not the time to ask the question, but Mumsford could not help himself. “Why do you call him Prospero?” he asked.

She shrugged. “He prosperous. He rich.”

“So that is it?”

“Ask Carlos. If it have another reason, Carlos know. Is he who give him the name.”

But it made no sense to ask Carlos then or during the sea crossing to Trinidad. It was clear he was determined not to speak, to remain in stony silence no matter what was said to him. When he did speak, as he was getting off the boat in Trinidad, it was to utter only four short sentences. He said them not to Mumsford and not to the boatman, either. It was as if he were speaking to himself, having felt a need to hear his own voice.

“My mother,” he said, “was blue-eyed, but she was not a hag. She was beautiful. The house was hers. He stole it from me.”