“No need to get huffy about it. Just thought you’d like to see what I’d been scratching away at the last mile or so, that’s all.”
After this exchange, a raw nagging silence sets in, full of bitter sniffing and aggressive flyswatting, as the two jostle along the weed-choked path in growing darkness. Soon a dreary insistent rain begins to fall, as if the hunger, discomfort and general irritation weren’t enough. They plod on, the silence rankling. Trees drift by, trees upon trees, as they work their way deeper into the green maw of the forest. Up ahead a towering vine-draped ciboa looms in the mist, and the explorer is just about to suggest that they take shelter beneath it when suddenly a violent blow catches him under the chin and he is catapulted from his horse into a sodden welter of leaves.
He lies there a moment, taking stock of the situation, while predatory insects scoot up his pantleg and down his collar. Then he hears Johnson’s cry. It begins as a screech that could curdle milk, modulates down through six or eight octaves and ends in an abrupt gasp. At this point, the explorer is not overly anxious to discover what it was that hit him, but he stands up anyway, fumbling in a vague way for the knife he sometimes keeps at his belt. What he sees is this: a clutch of six-and-a-half or seven-foot giants pounding away at Johnson’s inert form with cudgels the size of railway ties, while another of their party drops the nag with a single bone-crunching blow. There is a surprised, interrogatory whinny, and then the thundering crash of the animal’s fall.
Then one of the cudgel wielders suddenly looks up, points a finger at the explorer and shouts: ‘‘Tobaubo!” At this, the man who’d dispatched the horse starts up violently from the carcass (where he’d been plundering the saddlebags). Mungo is no more than ten feet from him. He can see the sweat on the man’s upper lip, the points of his filed teeth, the black leather sack of cowries clenched in his fist. Almost as a reflex the explorer draws his knife, and the man is on him like a great leaping mastiff, a blow to the solar plexus, another to the crotch and then a stunning crack just beneath the left ear, and now there are hands under his armpits, on his boots, hands tugging at the buttons of his trousers. .
♦ ♦ ♦
It is dark and still. Rain sifts through the trees with a whisper. The horse is dead, the ass gone. There is no sound from Johnson. Mungo is lying supine in the ooze of the forest floor, naked as the day he was born, broken it seems in any number of places, and feeling very weary indeed. Very weary of exploring, very weary of Africa. And very weary of being alone here in the dark, defenseless and afraid. He props himself on his elbows, wincing with the effort, and looks around. Nothing. The dark is so absolute and impenetrable it’s as if the earth has been turned inside out. But what was that? A movement in the bush, a rustle of leaves. “Johnson?”
No answer.
He tries again. “Johnson — is that you?”
This time he gets a response, but not what he’d hoped for. A snarl, low and ominous, punctuates the night. A snarl as savage and arbitrary as the forest itself, rasping and harsh as the birth of evil.
♦ FANNY BRUNCH ♦
One grim afternoon, as the rain slashed across the panes at No. 32, Soho Square, and Sir Joseph Banks, his spine still leaping from the thrashing he’d taken at the Swedish baths, wearily ascended the front steps, the upper house parlormaid — a thick-ankled old bird of a woman who had been in his employ for twenty-seven years — succumbed to a swift and sudden attack of brain fever. She was serving tea to Lady Banks and Miss Sarah Sophia in the drawing room. The tea had been brewed in a silver pot, which rested on a silver salver. The cups and saucers were of Sèvres china. As poor Betty Smoot bent over her mistress with the teapot, she suddenly jerked up as if she’d been bitten in the rear, sang two verses of a filthy drinking song at the top of her lungs, and keeled over dead.
Two days later Lady Banks was well enough to discuss the situation with her husband. “Jos,” she said, “what we need is a new upper house parlormaid.”
Sir Joseph was scanning the newspaper for word of the Portuguese expedition in the Bight of Benin.
“Cook has a cousin in Hertfordshire. Or a sister or something. They’ve got a girl there who’s anxious for a place. I believe she’s Cook’s cousin’s daughter. Or sister’s. Well, she’s young. Seventeen. But as I said to Cook, a little youth wouldn’t hurt around here.“
Sir Joseph glanced up. “The girl’s name?”
“Brunch,” said Lady B. “Fanny Brunch.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Fanny Brunch was fresh from the creamery. Her breath was hot with the smell of milk, and it whispered of cribs and nipples and the darkness of the womb. Her skin was cream, her breasts cheeses, there was butter in her smile. When she was fifteen two country louts hacked one another to death over her. With hoes. The following year the local squire abducted her and bound her to his bed. They found him in his nightshirt, the bed a sea of feathers, red welts stippling Fanny’s buttocks. It was then that her parents, hardworking paupers who believed in the goodness of man and the kingdom of God on earth, decided that she should be put into service for her own protection. The death of Betty Smoot was a godsend.
Fanny was good-natured and ingenuous. She grinned like wheatfields in the sun, stole round the house on soft celestial feet. Lady Banks, after twenty-seven years of Smoot, called her a breath of springtime. Sir Joseph, occupied as he was with the African Association and the latest of his vanished explorers, hardly noticed her. Which was just as well — the last thing she needed was to have to do battle with an old satyr in his lair. Cook worshipped her. The butler, Byron Bount, tried to lick her forearm one afternoon when she had her sleeves rolled up, but Cook cured him by saltpetering his fried tomatoes. There was one unfortunate incident: a houseguest of the Banks’, a melancholy young poet with black circles round his eyes, threw himself from the third-story window for love of her. He broke nine ribs, both legs and lost an ear. But aside from that, things had been quiet, and Fanny Brunch was well on her way to becoming an institution at No. 32, Soho Square.
Then she met Ned Rise.
♦ THE SEVEN CITIES OF GOLD ♦
It was fated. Or so she thought looking back on it. How else explain the combination of circumstances that found her strolling up Soho Square on the very June afternoon that Ned Rise was peddling his caviar? As it happened, Sir Joseph was expecting a luncheon visit from one of his African associates, Sir Reginald Durfeys. On his previous visit to No. 32, Soho Square, Durfeys had been so taken with Fanny that he’d torn her dress in three places, destroyed a pair of Ming vases and suffered a mild dropsical fit that left him speechless for the better part of a week. Sir Joseph, a man known in Parliament for his good cigars, sound judgment and foresight, felt that on the present occasion it might be prudent to remove the source of temptation. “Fanny,” he said, pressing a coin into her palm, “why don’t you take the afternoon off and enjoy yourself?”
She was thrilled. Her first half day in better than three months with Sir Joseph and Lady B. She looked in at shop windows, bought herself a tart, watched a man juggle half a dozen hedgehogs while his sidekick, a ginger-headed dwarf in short pants and turban, played nose flute, contrabassoon and ‘cello in unison. She ate saltwater taffy, tumbled into a cellar, narrowly avoided a mad dog and sat in the park brooding about the lack of poignancy and sweet surrender in her life. When the sun dipped into the trees, she headed home.