“Yes?” she prompts, her face softening in anticipation.
“I uh. . uh. . I. .”
“Yes?” She moves a step or two closer, alarmed at the expression on her lover’s face — has she been too hard on him? “Is it the package you want to give me?” she whispers, as if talking to a child. “Is the package for me?”
Mungo shakes his head to clear it, down on all fours now like a dog come in from the rain. He looks down at the package as if he’s never seen it before. “I want. . want. . uh. . I want to. . uh. .”
Good God, what have they done to him? Mortified, she drops her arm and the startled doves take wing, careening into the walls, flapping against the ceiling in a panic. . and then she’s on the floor beside him, cupping his face in her hands and trying desperately to make sense of his eyes.
“Mungo? Mungo: are you all right?”
He turns his head to kiss her hand and then stretches out prone on the floor, the package at his side. “Uh-uh-uh-uh,” he says, and suddenly she’s on her feet and out the door shouting for her father.
An instant later Dr. Anderson bursts into the room, white-faced, the new apprentice at his side. “Quick boy: salts! And bring me my bag — we’re going to have to bleed him!”
The salts bring the explorer around — enough so that doctor and assistant can prop him up in the chair and make an incision in his forearm. Ailie is there, equal to the occasion, gritting her teeth and holding the gleaming porcelain bowl while her fiance’s blood runs fresh and wet between her hands and leaps to spatter her dress. The apprentice, a boy of sixteen with a wandering eye, turns his head and then excuses himself to vomit in the fireplace while the old man thunders and the doves coo from the mantel.
♦ ♦ ♦
Later, much later, Ailie stands before the mirror in her room, unfastening her earrings, releasing the clasp of her necklace. It is past three in the morning. Mungo is sleeping soundly in the guest room, a bit pale from loss of blood and running a slight fever, but over the worst of it. She and Zander have been sitting up with him through the night. When she left for bed Zander was nodding in a straight-backed chair, a glass of brandy jammed between his legs.
She pulls the dress up over her head and lays it across the bed, smoothing back the creases. The blood has dried black against the green, hardly noticeable, and yet she runs her hand over the spatters thinking how stubborn they are and at the same time wondering what they’d look like under the microscope. She pictures herself by the window, pinning down a section of the dress and screwing it into focus, a patch of something organic freckling the material, fibers that clot and draw a wound together like fingers, fibers inextricably bound up in the calculated weave of the fabric. Dried blood. Frangible, no more than dust — and yet the stain will persist through half a dozen washings.
On the edge of the bed now, in her underthings, she waits a long tired moment before reaching to remove her shoes and stockings. She’s exhausted and exhilarated, empty and fulfilled. No more games, no more waiting. She’d been acting like a schoolgirl. Her man is back, and he needs her — that’s all that matters. The shoes drop to the floor, first the left, then the right, when suddenly the package on the dressing table catches her attention. Bulky, crudely wrapped. He’d been trying to give it to her when the attack came on. Something from London?
Moths bat round the oil lamp. A cricket rubs its legs together somewhere in the far corner of the room. Outside, beyond the lace curtains, a thousand others respond until the night crepitates with an airy whistling cacophony that sounds like an army of babies shaking their rattles. Ailie gets up from the bed, arms and legs bare, glides to the dressing table and hefts the package in one hand. Heavy. Solid. What an odd shape. She wants to tear it open, but no, she can’t do that — Mungo would want to see her surprise. Resolute, she sets it down again. And begins unlacing her stays. A moment later she slips out of the corset, drops her underthings to the floor, and is about to start for the wardrobe when the package again catches her eye. She hfts it a second time, puzzling, and then — before she can think — she’s shredding the paper with her nails.
Now she’s even more puzzled.
It seems to be some sort of carving — wood or stone. She turns it over in her hands. Smooth, black. So black it seems to drink in light and swallow it. At first she can make no sense of the thing, but then as she traces the thickly carved lines it comes to her: a woman. Ponderous, disproportionate, her head the size of an acorn, sagging dugs, abdomen and nates distended to cruelly absurd proportions. She looks closer. The woman’s feet are like trees, each toe a bole. And what’s this? Tortuous, secretive, black on black, a snake winds its way up her leg.
Ailie stares down at the figurine for a long while, lost in the pure rich glossy blackness of it, and then she begins to shiver. A night breeze lifts the curtains. Naked, she sets it down on the table and moves for the wardrobe and her nightgown. Outside the crickets stir.
♦ CHILD OF THE CENTURY ♦
In the summer of 1799, while Napoleon was slipping out of Egypt and Nelson was embroiled in Italian politics, Ailie Anderson changed her surname to Park. Less than a year later — in June of 1800—her first child was born. Dr. Dinwoodie performed the delivery, her father and Mungo sharing a nervous pint of whisky in the front room. It was a boy. So big he nearly split her in two. They named him Thomas.
Mungo held the infant in his arm, the eyes yellow with mucus, fingers creased and reddened as if they’d washed ten thousand dishes, the head a slick bulb of vein and tissue. Ailie’s father proposed a toast. “To the child of the century!”
Ailie couldn’t quite believe the whole thing. After all those years of fear and uncertainty, all the interminable days and weeks and months of waiting, he was back. Less than two years after he’d appeared on her front porch, all but a stranger, she was Mrs. Mungo Park, mother of his child. Each morning she woke beside him, each night sat down with him to supper. He was hers. She was absorbed with the thought of it, saturated to the very tips of her fingers with pride and satisfaction. The microscope gathered dust.
Of course, they had had their problems.
The first year after his return had been an admixture of hope and disillusionment, in equal parts. For six months Mungo lived at Fowlshiels, working on his book from morning till late in the afternoon. Then he would ride into Selkirk and spend the evening with her. They strolled along the river and watched the leaves spin down from the trees, rode out to visit Katlin Gibbie and danced a strathspey in her parlor, built a fire in the woods and roasted salmon on a spit. They grew to know one another again. It was like it once was.
But then the pull of Africa exerted its influence yet again. At Christmas Mungo took the coach to London and was gone five and a half months — while he and Edwards put the finishing touches to Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa. The book came out in May. It was an immediate and resounding success. A second edition was ordered. And then a third. African clubs and associations sprang up all over the continent. He wrote her every day.
In August she married a famous man. Packed up her books and microscope and moved to Fowlshiels — temporarily. Mungo was up in the air. Offers were coming in so fast it took half his time and energy just to reject them. The government wanted him to survey Australia, Banks was holding out for a second expedition to West Africa, others wanted him to lecture, write articles, collect plants, head up expeditions to Greenland, Borneo, Belize. “I don’t want to settle down in our own place just yet,” he told her.