♦ ♦ ♦
She haunted the streets for a week, slept outside the shop on Monmouth Street every night. She ate nothing. The laudanum gave out. She lay in the alleyway back of the store, gasping for breath, her stomach punctured, heart torn out. She was a whore, an opium eater, a childless mother. All her beauty, all her stamina, all her resourcefulness had brought her to this. It was the nineteenth century. What else was a heroine to do but make her way to the river?
The month was October, the year 1801— but she hardly knew it. Napoleon was lulling the British with the Peace of Amiens, De Quincey was sixteen and bridling under the regimen at the Manchester Grammar School, Ned Rise was busy ducking Osprey and looking, with a sort of hopeless resignation for his lost love, for her, Fanny. Fanny, however, was looking for no one. Her son was gone, Ned was a memory. She made her way to Blackfriars Bridge one foggy night, pulled herself over the railing and toppled into the mist below. The flat dark water closed over her like a curtain drawn across a stage.
♦ NAIAD, YES INDEED ♦
The river is a murmur, a pulse, a dream of the body, schools of dace and shiners ebbing like blood, the tick-tick-tick of an arrested branch as persistent as a heartbeat. From down here, on a level with it, the surface seems to break into a thousand fingers, each one probing for direction, smoothing channels, skirting the worn black rocks that seem to dip and swell like shoulderblades as the current washes over them. Mungo leans back in the stiff high grass that overspills the bank, his face to the sun, the tip of his cane pole propped up against an overhanging branch. He is on holiday, at Fowlshiels, the playful cries of his children and the murmur of his wife’s chatter washing over him like balm. The earth breathes in and breathes out again. Beside him, Alexander Anderson lazily thumbs through an account of the West African slave trade and sips at a pint of porter.
After awhile the explorer props himself on an elbow and glances up the bank to where Ailie stands knee-deep in the cold swirling water while Thomas and Mungo junior play in the mud and grandmother Park rocks the baby in her cradle. Ailie catches his eye, a smile and a wave, and then she’s gone, slashing into the current like an arrow. The month is September, the year 1803. Two years have dragged by since the move to Peebles. Two years of on-again, off-again preparations for a second expedition to West Africa, two years of pacifying Ailie and trying to overrule a multitude of objections, two years of the most tedious and thankless work he’s ever done, tending the sick and cankered ingrates of Peebleshire. Two more years, two more children. Mungo junior came along in the fall of 1801, just after they got settled at Peebles; Elizabeth was born last spring.
All well and good. Healthy children, a loving wife. That’s what life is all about. But already the size of his family has begun to worry him. Four years of marriage, three children. He tries to imagine himself in twenty years, his hair gone white, fifteen children clamoring for meat and milk and sugar buns, new suits and dresses, schoolbooks, dowries, university fees, “Three’s enough,” he tells Ailie, but she just looks at him out of the corner of her eye, sly and suggestive, fertile as Niger mud. “I want bairns to remember you by when you go off and leave me,” she says, no trace of humor in her voice, each child a new link in the chain that binds him to her.
At night she lights candles before the carved black statue that squats in the center of her dressing table like an icon, and once he caught her rubbing its swollen belly before climbing into bed. Touch her and she’s pregnant again.
“I’m worried, Zander.”
Zander squints up from his book.
“The way the family’s grown and all. I feel responsible for them, I want to provide for them. . but I just can’t see going back to Peebles. This week down here at Fowlshiels has been heaven compared with the grind up there — heaven — and still I can’t enjoy it. I feel like I’m wasting my life away. Every time I get on that horse and tramp out to some godforsaken cottage in the hills to watch some old gaffer wheeze to death I can’t help thinking that’s the way I’ll wind up. Dying on my back. In bed. After forty years of boredom.”
“So what does Ailie think?”
“You know what she thinks.”
“No Africa.”
“No Africa.”
The explorer tugs indolently at his line for a moment, then shifts his gaze back to Ailie. He watches as she negotiates the current, cutting back against the flow, one arm suspended in a flash of foam, then the other, silver, luminous, clean and precise. She moves like a creature born to water. Moves with an easy fluid athletic grace, moves with a beauty that catches in his throat. He loses her momentarily in a shimmering crescent of reflected sun, only to watch her reemerge in an aureole of light, transfigured in that flashing instant to something beyond flesh and blood, something mythic and eternal. How could he ever leave her?
“Well,” Zander is saying, “maybe there are greater duties than family duty. Maybe you owe something to science and civilization too.”
Mungo turns to look him in the eye. “I got a letter this morning, Zandei. Brought down by special messenger from Peebles. Early. Before she was up.”
The news hits Alexander Anderson like an electric shock. Ten thousand volts. He kicks over the beer, drops the book and leaps to his feet. “From London?”
The explorer nods. “From the government. Lord Hobart. He wants to see me immediately about heading up an expedition to determine the course of the Niger.” The last few words are delivered in an almost reverential whisper.
Zander has been watching him, rapt, his eyes dilated, lips moving in silent accord with his every word. Suddenly he breaks into a grin and begins pumping the explorer’s hand. “This is what we’ve been waiting for — this is it!”
“Shhhhh.” Mungo looks like a weasel with an egg in its mouth. “I haven’t told your sister yet.”
“She won’t like it.”
“No.”
Zander squats down beside him, balancing on toes and fingertips. He is twenty-nine and looks eighteen. “But surely she can see it’s for a higher purpose — she’s got to. She’ll understand. I know she will.”
Mungo snorts. “I wish I could share your optimism.”
“Tell her. Go ahead — maybe you’ll be surprised.”
The explorer looks tentatively over his shoulder. Ailie and Thomas are wrapped in a blanket and roasting bits of meat over a fire. His mother is paring apples and rocking the baby, the two-year-old is screeching like a loon and running naked up and down the bank as if he’d been locked in the closet for a week. “You know, you may be right. Zander,” Mungo says finally, rising to his feet. “I might as well have it out now.” And then, less certain: “Though I hate to spoil the day.”
But before he can take two steps, the whole question of the letter, Africa, ambition and Ailie is suddenly shunted to the back burner — because at that instant the tip of the cane pole begins to twitch. Very gingerly at first, but convincingly enough to catch Zander’s eye. “Mungo!” he shouts, and the explorer, his reactions honed in the wilds of Africa, wheels round to appraise the situation in a flash, perceiving the pieces of the puzzle and its solution almost simultaneously (Zander’s face, the pointed finger, the cane pole trembling along its length from the shock of a solid hit and careering for the water like a pilotless bobsled). He reacts without hesitation. One moment he’s standing there looking down expectantly at his brother-in-law, the next he’s throwing himself at the fast-receding pole, barely managing to catch hold of its last knobby deformation. He fights to his knees, staggers to his feet, the pole bent double in his hands, an incredible slashing force communicating with him at the far end of the line, silver in the depths, beating and rushing with the pulse of the river itself. “He’s got one,” Zander is shouting, “he’s got a keltie!” And now Ailie and the boys are running toward him, excitement slapped across their faces like the first flush of winter.