The President's Daughter (48 page)

“Our ship is in, but where's Abraham?”

“Abe's in Africa,” I said, “with Thance.” But she must have seen death written at my temples like Abe's tribal scars. She stopped in her tracks. I saw her feet do a little hop, then a shuffle, as if she danced on hot coals.

“Aw, God. They're not coming back. They ain't ever coming back!”

“Thenia, there's been ... an accident ... a raid on the field camp near Durban. They were killed. Both of them.”

I braced myself for her howl as I heard Thenia's sharp intake of breath.

“We don't know why it happened ... a retaliation for a raid by the Kaffirs ... to steal sugar or the medicines or take the guns ... it could have been anything. There are English raiders, Kaffir raiders, Zulu raiders, Noumie raiders. . . . There's a civil war beginning in South Africa,” the captain continued pointlessly.

Thenia's open mouth never uttered her scream. Instead she turned to Thor.

“Then why did you let them go?”

In one fatal second, the mantle of guilt Thance had worn since the accident with his brother was transferred to the shoulders of Thor. Cain's mark had changed twins.

Thenia reverted to the same silence as after the slave auction. I wondered how much a woman was supposed to bear in this world. She had lost her family somewhere in the South, and she had lost Abraham somewhere in Africa. The only black man we had ever met who had come voluntarily to America would never return again.

“If you're going back to the Cape, I'm going with you,” I told Thor. “I can't leave Thance in Africa. He doesn't belong there.”

“The
Rachel
must recover her cargo—and honor the Wellington Company's obligations,” Thor explained. “I will bring Thance's body back.”

“I must go, Thor. Thenia wants to go, too. She feels guilty about not allowing Abraham to return to Africa years ago. Now he's returned for good —without her. Sinclair should come, too.”

“He's too young.”

“He needs to see his father's grave in order to accept what has happened. He has a right to stand over it and mourn.” I sat down and looked at my blank fingertips.

Our voyage was a pilgrimage, not so much to recover Thance's body as to seek our reason for being alive, and for our unborn being alive, although I hid the fact from Thor that both Thenia and I were with child. He would have forbidden us to make the journey.

When all hands were assembled, we would make sail on our three-masted, six hundred-ton tea clipper carrying a crew of twenty-eight men. The
Rachel,
like her namesake, was stout-hearted, sure, and quick. She would deliver us to the Cape of Good Hope colony in only forty-five days. As preparations went forward for the departure, news of Thance's death spread throughout the medical corps of Philadelphia. We received the condolences of the entire pharmaceutical world. Then, just as we were to set sail, word came from Rheims that my beloved Petit, my guardian angel, my mentor, my Moses, my last link to the past and to my father, was dead. The last person I saw before we left was the indomitable and tender Charlotte.

“I hope to God you're strong enough for the trip,” she said.

“I have to be, Charlotte, or face becoming a cipher for the rest of my life.”

“Oh, Harriet, did we think when we were in school that our lives would cause men's deaths!”

“That's a strange thing to say, Charlotte.”

“Is it? I'm sorry.”

“What is it, Charlotte? I know you well enough to know you have something on your mind.”

“You won't be offended?”

“Well, Charlotte, we have been friends for twenty-three years and we've had our ups and downs, but they have never shaken our love for each other.”

“I'm going to say one more thing, and then I'm never going to raise this subject again.”

“What is that?”

“That perhaps it was Thor, not Thance, that you should have married in the first place.”

I gazed solidly into Charlotte's eyes.

The next day, Thenia, Thor, Sinclair, and I boarded the
Rachel,
each wrapped in our own private grief. But I had found a reason for living in the new life in my womb. This child was the key to my future, as well as a gift of reparation from Thance to his brother, Thor. Perhaps it would allow Thor to accept Thance's death as the will of God.

Once we arrived in Cape Town, Thor threw himself into the unfinished work of his twin, as if to avenge his brother's every second. He retraced his steps, redid his experiments, regathered his specimens, and completed his expedition. We had more than a hundred bearers, gunmen, cooks, guides, interpreters, and African apothecaries. The expedition moved slowly and ponderously through a landscape of such variety, beauty, and power that I began to wish I could draw or paint. Sinclair, on the other hand, took to sketching plants and specimens, as well as landscapes and even portraits of various members of the crew. Thenia kept her Bible with her at all times; sometimes she held it almost as a shield. Her Western clothes and manner were a puzzle for many of the men in the expedition, and they finally relegated her to the status reserved for white women, whether nuns, female missionaries, or Queen Victoria—sexless. But Thenia was a handsome woman at thirty-two, and Thor received quite a few marriage offers for her, the most extravagant being a dozen white shorthorn cattle and a rifle. He had also received several offers for me, but not in the class of those for Thenia, he laughingly told us. Nevertheless, he teased, he was considering several of them.

Chalk was the color of mourning in eastern South Africa, so I shed my black Philadelphia mourning for white. Every morning I'd watch Sinclair draw for a while, then listen to Thenia read aloud from the Bible. I'd then follow Thor on his rounds. I seemed to be the only person on the expedition who had no work, no passion, only grief. I didn't capture the myriad butterflies or pluck flower specimens. Yet the land spoke to me and the landscape gripped me in a powerful embrace, and all the lament of the voyage could not dislodge my feeling of expectation.

For two weeks we traveled under armed escort, a patrol of British soldiers leading the way. When we arrived at the place where Thance and Abraham had been ambushed, the luxuriant vegetation had already begun to erase every trace of the two lonely graves, marked with rough crosses. We watched
silently while the two bodies, wrapped in canvas and oilcloth, were dug up by the soldiers and placed in the palanquin that would take Abraham to his village and Thance to the English cemetery at Ladysmith. After much discussion, Thor and I decided we would not take Thance back to Philadelphia after all, but leave him in Africa with Abraham.

Abraham had a consecrated grave in his village of Nobamba, facing Mecca. The ceremony performed by the elders was simple and brief. I drew back at the burial, unable to propel myself any closer. The small swelling of earth and the rounded clay headstone imprinted with verses from the Koran reminded me that I had never seen my mother's grave. I watched as Thenia knelt and gathered a fistful of yellow earth in her hand and transferred it gently into her handkerchief. Then she took small pieces of all the offerings that had been laid at the head of the grave.

“I'm satisfied,” she said as she returned to my side. “I'm leaving him here, and I'm never coming back. I'm glad you're leaving Thance here, too. He does belong in Africa.”

Ladysmith was only a day's travel from where we were, and the white cemetery was on a small knoll outside the city gates, which faced westward, toward home. The Lutheran minister improvised a simple ceremony, but Thor's eulogy was stupendous. Brigadier General Tarleton bestowed full military honors, and to my surprise, Thenia lifted her voice and sang a cappella. The rich tones drifted over the valley into the hills and vanished like the mist that rose from them. Like Thenia, I gathered a handful of the same earth to which I had committed my beloved husband, buried it in my handkerchief, and placed it deep in my pocket next to James's dagger.

There are landscapes and there is one landscape. Sinclair sketched the knoll for me and then executed a watercolor of it from his sketches. He didn't draw in his father's grave or the others, but left the knoll smooth and empty. I thought of Maria Cosway's empty corner of the world at Lodi. And I knew this African knoll would always occupy a corner of my heart, peopled as it was with Thance's body and Thance's soul and Thance's ghost.

I knelt finally in a gesture I hardly understood myself, and whispered
my
name into the sown earth. How many absolutions did I need, after all?

I was happier for Sinclair than for any of us, knowing it meant everything to an eighteen-year-old heart to kneel at his father's grave. We ordered a new headstone but left the old cross at the foot and bade Thance good-bye. He would be apart from us, but not from the earth that bore him and the sky that covered him.

As Thor and I stood at the foot of Thance's grave, I thought of our first meeting, when I had mistaken the mysterious African twin for my future husband.

“I always think of this landscape,” Thor said tentatively, “as being biblical somehow ... I know it's unreasonable, but I've always felt a kind of closeness to creation in its serenity and vastness; its purity, its mystery ... as well as its violence, its unmercifulness. The pristine dawns, rains, and storms, the foliage and Edenlike vegetation, the feeling that the whole universe is in one leaf here, although I'm not a religious man, as you know. The Bible is sublime literature, not gospel for me, and I'm even less of a Unitarian than Thance. Yet, as a scientist, I cannot collect, study, and behold all that exists in nature and therefore in creation, without a sense of awe. To gaze into the African constellations and deny that a Creator intended those distances, that infinity is impossible. Sometimes at night, instead of stargazing, I'll take out the Bible and read a chapter or two to calm myself, to . . . situate myself... in the midst of all this frightful and indifferent wilderness. And the other night I read a tale in the Old Testament of Tobias, the son of Tobit, who asks to marry his kinswoman, Sarah, and her father Raquel agrees because it is the precept of Moses.” He paused and looked at me.

“According to Moses,” Thor continued, “a Hebrew is commanded by God to marry his brother's widow as her nearest kin so that her children shall not be fatherless and so she shall not pass out of her husband's clan into the hands of strangers. In the Bible story, Raquel sends for Sarah, takes her hand, and gives her to Tobias, saying, ‘Take her to be your wedded wife in accordance with the law and the ordinance written in the book of Moses.' ”

There was only the silence of the forest and the light flutter of butterfly wings. The sheet of paper Thor was holding in his hand was trembling violently.

“And you think,” I said, “that this is what we should do? Adopt the law of Moses?”

“That's a question that I wouldn't dare answer, Harriet.”

“Then it's I who should answer?”

“Perhaps you should consider it in the light of where we are standing and for whom we are grieving . . . and the love I have always borne you ... in time . . .”

“The biblical tale is a lovely story, but it's only a story,” I said.
An old slave story,
I thought,
a way to keep the scattered, enslaved tribes of Israel together.

Sinclair and his brothers and sisters were now fatherless, just as I had been in name fatherless, and my mother before me. It was even against the law for
my mother, or my mother's mother, to reveal the identity of their children's father. How ironic to have run away from fatherlessness only to have my children returned to that bitter prison.

“I already love you.” Thor continued, “as much as I loved my twin.”

“I don't know if I would love you the way I loved your twin,” I said.

“It will never be the same, I know. It would be wrong if it were the same, or if we tried to imitate another's love. But I do love you, Harriet.”

“And this is sufficient for you?”

“More than sufficient, Sister.”

We looked down at Thance's grave. A giant eucalyptus tree shaded him, and a shallow brook ran through the landscape nearby. The English had a knack for choosing cemeteries, as well as gardens. And so, with the African midwinter, which was like our Spring, we began the long march home. We were not particularly aware of danger, but it was all around us. Drums had announced our coming and drums would announce our going. The white man, too, had his drums—the first telegraph line had been established between the colony military command and Fort Monroe, more than fifty miles away.

We sailed from Durban around the horn of Africa in a Dutch frigate to the Cape colony, where our own ship, loaded with Thance's specimens, his whole movable laboratory, awaited us.

As we left Africa, I could not find the words to express the complexity of my feelings. But in my dreams, over which I had no power, my feelings burst upon me in all their starkness. I dreamed I was the wife of both twins and loved them both, and that both men visited me and lavished their caresses upon me and divided me between themselves. One kissed my blank fingers while the other embraced my deceitful lips, identical sexes pressed upon me and into me, the twins' bodies moved like a double-edged dagger, entering from opposite sides as I was lifted by hands, mouths, identical chests, downy flanks, foreheads, double ears and collarbones, tiny folds along identical necks, noses, eyes. Tenaciously, I clung to them both in ecstasy and happiness, contorting my contraband body against them both in exultation because there was no other way. I always awoke from this erotic fantasy as from a nightmare, devoured by heartsickness and fire.

Seven weeks after the
Rachel
dropped anchor in the Philadelphia harbor, seven months after her father's death, and a year before I married Thor, the baby girl I carried, and whom I called Maria, was born. Thenia's baby came a week later, and she named him Willy. From the first, I considered Maria
Thor's child. The circle was closed, and on the rock of Maria, Thor and I built our house and our happiness. A new happiness. Not the same happiness as with Thance, or its shadow or imitation. From Africa, there would be new fingerprints.