War, peace, Hapsburg, Hanover, décolleté bodices and cotton chemisettes, the fall of an empire, the restoration of a dynasty, Metternich, Byron, Beethoven, Keats — all of it passed Ailie by. She might as well have been living in another world. From the moment she succumbed to Georgie Gleg and had her hellish vision on the breast of Loch Ness, she was a changed woman. The vision — was it a vision? — had come as a warning, as a castigation. She had gone too far. Jealous and bitter, rebelling against the terrible emptiness of the camp follower’s life, she had turned her back on Mungo in his time of need. She was an adulteress, an apostate, she was a sinner.
She spent the rest of her life making up for it. When she got home to Selkirk she set up the shrine in the parlor and gathered the children around to inculcate the legend of the father they hardly knew. He was a hero, she told them, one of the greatest men Scotland had ever seen, a man who faced danger in the way ordinary people sat down to breakfast. Where was he? they asked. In Africa, she told them. When will he be coming home? Soon, she said.
This was her penance. The shrine, the legend, the burden of raising the children alone. Gifts would come for her from Edinburgh: combs, dresses, perfumes, toys for the children. She returned them unused. Gleg sent letter after letter. She never answered them. And when he came to the door, the hurt and anguish ironed into his face, the servant girl turned him away. What have I done? he shouted at the windows, over and over. What have I done? he shouted, till her father threatened to call the constable.
The children grew. Her father died. She spent hours at the window, looking out across the hills, waiting, hoping. And when she felt blackest, when she knew in her heart she’d never see either Mungo or Zander again, that’s when the fresh rumor would whisper in her ear, that’s when some trader would appear in Edinburgh with a story he had from a factor on the Gambia who had it from a native slaver who had it from a Mandingo priest: there was a white man in the Sahel, humble, saintly, living like a black. And it would start all over again. He was out there, she knew it.
Meanwhile, there were the children. Thomas, child of the century, was both a curse and a consolation. Like his father he was physically precocious, an athlete, the best footballer in Selkirkshire by the time he was fourteen. Tall, heavy in the chest and shoulders, hair like sand, he was the image of Mungo. She looked at him, and the past rose to haunt her like some sad unmentionable thing risen from the depths of a cold, dark loch. Mungo junior and Archie were like their father too — especially in the cast of their eyes — but Thomas was an exact replica, the hammered shape, the cast die. And more than any of the others he nurtured the legend of his father, pored over the books and maps in the explorer’s library, repeated the litany of the rumors until the words were cut like glass.
By 1827 Ailie was in her early fifties, a tiny woman, prematurely aged, worn down by the accumulation of fruitless hours and the futility of her life: it was twenty-two years since she’d laid eyes on her husband. Her daughter was married, Archibald was off in the army, Mungo junior had succumbed to the wanderlust — dead of the fever in India, where he’d been sent with his regiment. Thomas never married. He lived on in Selkirk, close to his mother, sharing with her the onus of his father’s disappearance, fostering the hope that he would one day return, hoary and triumphant, from the windswept hills, from the dunes and the jungles.
It was a cold clear morning in early autumn when he left. He had made his plans in secret, seeing no reason to alarm his mother. When she found him gone, she knew precisely what had happened: husband, brother, son. He wrote her from Accra, on the Gold Coast. It was simple, he had it all figured out. He would travel alone, as his father had done on the first expedition, living like the natives, making his way northeast through Ashanti-land and Ibo, striking the Niger at Boussa. The harmattans were blowing. Conditions were perfect. As soon as he could engage a guide he’d be on his way.
She studied the seal of the letter before she opened it. There was hardly any reason to read it: she knew what it said, could have written it herself. She was fifty-three. Mrs. Mungo Park. It was almost funny.
She sat by the window a long while, the envelope heavy in her hand, a pale alien light blanching the shrubs, the rooftops, the trees, until even the distant hills were drained of color and life. On the shelf behind her, oiled and black, sat the ebony figurine: gravid, obscene, another artifact.
There were no more letters.
[1] A sort of tobacco made from the cured leaves of the hemp plant. Cannabis sativa, which the natives smoke in order to enhance sexual performance and induce dreams.
[2] Chief magistrate of a town or province, responsible for overseeing the communal granary. He is instantly recognizable as the fat man in a cluster of ambulatory sticks.
[3] Land of the hon-kees.
[4] Free Mandingoes, generally Muslim converts, whose stockin-trade is human flesh.
[5] The transcript of the official proceedings against the former colonel charged him with eighteen counts of conduct unbecoming an officer, including “the serving of tea to his staff while dressed in a lady’s taffeta gown” and “the compelling of eight privates, under penalty of court-martial, to rub down his naked body with dustmops while continuously rehearsing the phrase: ‘O, I am a lowly snake in the grass, depraved and despicable.’ “