She asked him what he meant.
“I mean I don’t know where we’re going to be. We could just get moved in and then have to pack up and leave.”
She’d been afraid of something like this all along. “You don’t mean to say you’re going to leave a wife pregnant with your first child and go off and disappear for another three and a half years? Disappear and maybe never come back? Good God, man, we’re just married and already you want to leave me a widow?”
“Ailie. We, I said we. Sir Joseph has been talking about the government’s setting up a colony on the Niger — we’ve got to, if we’re going to beat the French to it. They’d want me — us — to run the place. Think of it.” His eyes had gone out of focus, distant and hazy. “Think of what we could do if we lived right there on the Niger — think of the territory I could cover, the discoveries I could make!”
“I do not want to live in Africa,” she said, but he wasn’t listening, didn’t hear a word, didn’t even see her. No, he was talking to someone else, talking to himself, selling Africa, a place of color and life and extravagant nature, where the rivers were choked with gold and the earth was so fertile you didn’t even need to cultivate it.
Nine months later, when Thomas was born, they were still at Fowlshiels.
♦ ♦ ♦
Now, the first child weaned and a second on the way, she sits on the porch at that same Fowlshiels, sipping at a cup of coffee, an open book in her lap. Summer, 1801. Nothing has changed. There’s a war on with France. Prices have gone crazy. People are emigrating in droves. Mungo is still waiting.
Since he finished the book he’s had alot of time on his hands. Two years’ worth. He fishes. He hunts. He takes long solitary hikes through the hills, sometimes spends an overnight in the woods with Zander. Since his father’s death and Adam’s move to India, he helps his brother Archie look after the farm. He is silent, morose. Once he didn’t show up for dinner and she found him down by the river, staring into the water. He was dropping pebbles in, one at a time, and counting to himself — one thousand, two thousand, three thousand. It’s how I used to figure the depth of streams in Africa, he said. Then he smiled for the first time in a week: Important to know when you’ve got to wade across them. He wakes in a sweat sometimes, shouting out in a strange language. His sexual appetite is astonishing. He says he’s happy.
Still, when the London mail comes in, he’s first in line. Looking for an envelope with the government seal — or Sir Joseph’s. Inevitably he is disappointed. The news has been bad. The government has diverted its attention to the war. Sir Joseph feels that the time is not right to go ahead with a second expedition, the French are making inroads in West Africa. .
Ailie is worried. What will happen if the war ends or Sir Joseph reconsiders or the French stop making inroads? She looks up at the steady green sweep of the hills and sees instead a seething jungle. The fetus moves inside her. Somewhere, from deep in the house, the child of the century begins to cry.
PEEBLES
Peebles.
There’s no other answer for it.
Yes, Peebles. She’ll speak to him when he gets back.
♦ ♦ ♦
It is late afternoon when she spots him emerging from a stand of larches at the far end of the field, Zander at his side. The sun is low in the sky, cold and milky, and shadows ravel out from the trees. Deep, menacing, blue-black shadows, stretching across the field like fingers, reaching out as if reluctant to give up the burden of her husband and brother. She loses them for a moment, but there — the flash of Mungo’s hair as he glances into the sun, the familiar loping stride, Zander struggling to keep up. A moment later they’re coming up the cart path.
“Hello,” she calls.
They wave in response.
“Thirsty?”
“Aye.”
By the time they reach the porch she has two tankards of ale set out for them. They fling themselves down on the wooden chairs with the easy animal grace of men who have just performed some prodigious feat. Zander’s collar is soaked through with sweat. His nose is sunburned.
“So where’ve you been today?”
“Out to Ancrum Moor,” Zander replies.
“Ancrum Moor? It must be fourteen miles there and back.”
“Seventeen.”
“And I suppose you talked of nothing but crocodiles and Mandingoes the whole way?”
Zander grins. The baby, who has been playing in the dirt, cries out in infantine rapture, and Mungo turns to look down at his son in an abstracted sort of way, as if he doesn’t recognize him. Thomas regards his father steadily, then sticks a bit of offal in his mouth. His chin is slick with a film of dirt and saliva.
There is a moment of silence, the men concentrating on their ale. Ailie picks up her knitting. “Father was out today,” she says.
No response.
“He told me of a place open at Peebles. A doctor’s place — and a fine old house with it. What do you think?”
Mungo looks up from his ale. “Peebles? But that’s a day’s ride from here.”
“It’d mean leaving our family and friends. But we can’t hang around here forever — waiting. Can we?”
Zander has been waiting all his life. He sets his tankard down. “I don’t see why not. Better to wait on the chance of going off on a new adventure than get mired down in the life of a country physician. Look what it’s done to the old man.”
Mungo gives her a doleful look. “I don’t know,” he says.
Suddenly Zander laughs out loud. “What is it they say about Peebles?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, that expression old man Ferguson used to come out with all the time—”
The explorer’s face lights with recognition. “Yes, yes — I remember. ‘It was an unco still night,’ he’d say, ‘quiet as the grave — or Peebles.’ “
♦ GRAVE BUSINESS ♦
The mourners lining the front steps are professionals, in black suits and scarves, their eyes fixed solemnly on the ground or gazing off into space with an expression of profound grief and bewilderment. Each stands rigidly at attention, holding a long ebony mourner’s pole at half-mast before him, the black-plumed tips crossed like swords. A fine doleful drizzle beads on their top hats and muttonchop whiskers. They are waiting patiently, professionally, for the funeral procession to begin, after which they look forward to falling on the remains of the funeral supper and drinking themselves into a stupor. The procession is scheduled for 9:00 p.m.
Throughout the afternoon, a succession of carriages has pulled up at the gate and discharged various groups of sober-faced men, stricken women and sniveling children. Relatives mostly, earning their inheritances. They are gathered in the house now, weeping and moaning. At quarter past eight a gleaming phaeton lurches up to the gate and a gentleman in black swings back the door and leaps into the street, too distraught to concern himself with ceremony. An instant later he is at the door, out of breath, his hair perfect, face radiant with tears.
The gentleman is Ned Rise. Dressed in a suit of black Genoan velvet, gloves and scarf dyed in printer’s ink, even the soles of his shoes blackened for the occasion. In his pocket, a black silk handkerchief soaked in vinegar. He presses it to his face as he enters the house.
A lugubrious old man with a pitted nose sits at the door passing out sprigs of rue and gold rings engraved with the deceased’s name and dates. Walls, windows and ceiling are draped in black crape and candles in sconces light the place like a chapel. From the room beyond, the sound of hushed voices and a steady sonorous undercurrent of mewling and nose blowing. Already in tears, Ned takes a fortifying whiff of his handkerchief and is about to plunge into the front room in a state of hyperaqueous hysteria, when he feels a hand on his arm. He turns round and finds himself staring at the trembling lower lip of a young woman — a girl, actually, no more than seventeen or eighteen. Her hair falls to her waist in two sheets, her eyes are like pools of oil, there is a mole on her left breast. “Claude?” she says.