Zander is sifting pebbles through his fingers. He answers without looking up. “She does. She went through an awful lot when you were lost in Africa and nobody’d heard from you — a hell of an awful lot. But then when you came back to London and never made it up to see her. . well, she felt you didn’t care.”
“But I had no choice in the matter — surely she can see that?”
“She’s not a man, Mungo. What does she know of duty and commitment?
But listen, give her time — she’ll come around. She loves you.”
The explorer looks up glumly at the ruined walls of the castle. He knows every chink and crevice. As boys, he and Adam refought the Border Wars there, capturing the battlements, putting the invisible enemy to flight, dreaming dreams of glory. “I went through alot too, Zander. Death and disease, starvation, imprisonment. I watched my guide die before my eyes and I was powerless to do a thing.”
“We know it, Mungo. And it’s only natural you should have a period of readjustment. But she told me if you want her you’ve got to start at the beginning.”
“Court her all over again?”
Zander nods. Then he turns to the explorer, his face suddenly animated. “But listen. Tell me what it was like over there.”
♦ ♦ ♦
That afternoon, head splitting, throat dry and stomach broiling with acid, the explorer again mounts the front steps of the Anderson house. He is wearing a freshly starched cravat and a new sergdusoy jacket, his boots are polished and he carries a clumsily wrapped package under his arm. A maid in apron and clogs answers his knock and shows him in. She must be new, he is thinking, when Douce Davie comes bounding up the hallway.
The explorer goes down on one knee and holds his hand out. “Here Davie,” he calls, clucking his tongue, “good boy.” The dog pulls up short, inhales a snarl or two and shows his teeth. Slam, the maid is gone. Mungo rises awkwardly. The dog begins to bark.
There is the sound of hurried footsteps, then a door opening at the far end of the hallway. It is Dr. Anderson, big, wide-nostriled, a new beard appended to his face like some lush species of aquatic growth. He wraps his arms around the explorer like a lover and presses him to his body. “Mungo!” he whispers, his voice quavering, “ye’ve come back to us then.”
The explorer is embarrassed. When the doctor loosens his grip, Mungo backs off a pace and nods his head. “Aye,” he mumbles. This sets off a renewed paroxysm of hugging, patting and hand pumping on the doctor’s part, while the terrier paws at the explorer’s legs, yipping in protest. Mungo feels as if he’s just taken the ball downfield and drilled the winning goal into the net. “Well, well,” the doctor booms, “step into the parior and let’s have a look at ye.”
Mungo follows him into the famihar room, a wave of warmth and nostalgia washing over him, and then stops short. What is this? The walls are cluttered with odd black-and-white drawings — squares and rectangles in a beehive arrangement, oblate spheroids, circles within circles — drawings that approach a crude geometry, as if the artist has intended something that falls midway between the aesthetically pleasing and the mathematically precise. Then he notices the cherrywood desk in the corner. A new Cuff microscope stands in its center, gleaming like an icon. Mungo is about to ask his old friend and mentor if he’s taken up microscopy when the doctor turns to hand him a glass of claret. “Bon santé!” he barks, “and me hearty congratulations. Ye’ve brung fame and glory to Selkirkshire and I’m damned proud of ye for it.”
And then the doctor is off, flitting round the room, refilling the glasses, offering cigars, oatcakes, kippered herring, jars of preserves, jerking books from the shelves and all the while jabbering about a case of impetigo he’s been treating in an Abbotsford lady. “Horseradish!” he shouts. “Five parts. Put that against two parts menstrual blood and three parts bezoar stone and the sores’ll disappear as if ye’d touched ‘em with a wand. Blast homeotherapy. I say stick with the tried and true.” The doctor pauses and turns round to look at the explorer as if he were seeing him for the first time. “But I guess ye’ve heard enough out of me. It’s me daughter ye’ve come about, isn’t it?”
Mungo takes the doctor’s hand. “I want to marry her.”
“Marry her?” Dr. Anderson shouts. “Of course ye want to marry her. Did ye not ask the gull to wait for ye while ye was off riskin’ life and limb amongst the niggers and Hottentots? And don’t ye call that an engagement — even if ye never give her no ring?”
“I–I’ve got a ring right—” the explorer stammers, fumbling through his pockets, “right—”
“And don’t an engagement mean a holy troth to be married before the eyes of the Laird and man?” Somehow the doctor has worked himself up into a sort of stentorian rage. His last words echo through the room like the voice of judgment, setting up sympathetic vibrations in the glassware on the shelves.
The explorer is no less puzzled at the excess of emotion than at the line of questioning. “Well, yes—”
“Ye’re deuced right, lad,” the doctors bawls, red to the eyes. “Marry her then,” he roars, then lowers his voice abruptly — is he winking or is there something caught in his eye? — ”but treat her right, lad, treat her right.” And then he’s gone, the door engaging the frame like distant thunder.
♦ ♦ ♦
Ten minutes later the door swings open with a whisper. The explorer has been sitting in the big armchair by the window trying to make sense of the esoteric drawings that paper the walls. Is it some new craze of Zander’s? he wonders, when the soft click of the latch strikes at his nervous system like a sudden ferment of churchbells. He leaps up from the chair as Ailie slips into the room and gently closes the door behind her. He doesn’t know what to say. Awkward, harried by his emotions, his confidence shattered by yesterday’s debacle, he can only gape at her.
She too is silent. But her lower lip is unsteady and her eyes are gorged with green, the pupils drawn in on themselves, pinpoints, hard and cold with resentment, determination, anger. Aside from those eyes and lips and the tumed-up nose, he hardly recognizes her. She’s been transformed. The country girl in a white cotton dress and clogs is standing before him looking like a London socialite, turned out à la mode in a free-flowing gown of English velvet with gold brocade scrawled across the bodice, the velvet a shade of green so rich and dark it could carpet a forest floor. Her clipped black hair is swept back beneath a matching green cap, her face is powdered, feet elegantly slippered. Perched on her forearm, as cool and gray as rainclouds, are the turtle doves.
“Well,” she says finally, “father says you wanted to see me.”
“I did. I do,” he answers, starting toward her and then hesitating, the package held out before him like an offering. “I want—” he begins, the words marshaling themselves at the tip of his tongue, words to express simple emotions and expectations, love, marriage, family — but something interferes, some sudden and stunning mindblock, a function of his debilitated condition, the night of drinking, nerves at a pitch, the quick rise from the chair. He’d had six or seven attacks while in London, the malarial curse reaching a long arm from the coast of Africa to muddle his thoughts and rock his knees. Once he’d lost his train of thought while addressing the Ladies’ Equestrian and Geopolitical Society of Chelsea, and Sir Joseph had had to step in and finish for him. Another time he blacked out at the Baroness’ after a single glass of champagne. Now he inexplicably finds himself on his knees, a good twenty feet from Ailie, wondering what he was about to say.