And so there he was, sitting in Sir Joseph’s study and looking gloomily out the window when he should have been sailing for Goree. Nine months more. It seemed as if he was doomed to fritter away his talents in Peebles forever, an overworked, underpaid, back-country sawbones. Lord Hobart, Lord Camden, Addington, Pitt — what difference did it make? All he got was excuses.
“Thus,” Sir Joseph was saying, “I am prepared to offer you thirty pounds sterling if you will accompany Mr. Park to Peebles and there tutor him in Arabic in preparation for his forthcoming expedition.”
The Moor looked around him as if he’d just been slapped. “T’irty pound sterling?” he echoed, incredulous. “You give me?” Sir Joseph nodded, and Sidi threw himself on the carpet. ‘‘Ya galbi galbi!” he sang, ‘‘An’ am Allah ‘alaik!”
♦ ♦ ♦
Ailie is in the kitchen, fussing over a partan pie and boiling down the snout, ears, cheeks, brains and feet of a freshly killed hog, when she is suddenly arrested by a sound from the backyard. It’s been going on for a minute or two now, a sort of dull thumping, but she’s been so absorbed in her work she hasn’t paid it any mind. There it is again. Viscous and muffled, the sound of someone splitting wood in the distance — or leading a horse around the corner of the house. Then it hits her: Mungo! In an instant she’s at the door, apron white with flour, the late sun spreading butter over the stable, her husband, the manes of the horses, the pinched dark stranger staring up at her out of his glittering, red-flecked eyes. Who—? she wonders, a vague unease settling in her stomach, but then she’s caught up in Mungo’s arms and nothing else really matters.
Inside, Mungo and his guest settle down at the edge of the hearth, warming their hands, while Ailie puts the kettle on and turns back to her pie. Mungo had perfunctorily introduced the little man outside the stable door. Seedy something-or-other, she didn’t quite catch his name. Meanwhile, the small talk sifts down like a blizzard. Mungo asks how the children have been, what the weather’s been like, has she got enough wood chopped, is that a cold she’s caught? He expatiates on Sir Joseph’s health, the rigors of the trip, the new government, Dickson, Effie and Edwards, but he hasn’t yet gotten round to explaining Seedy. She takes the little man to be an African, judging from the rag wrapped round his head and the slashes dug into his dark cheeks and brow. A Moor? A Mandingo? And what would Mungo be bringing him up here for?. . Unless—
“So,” she says, kneading her dough with a vengeance, “you’ve come to visit Peebles. . Mr. Seedy?”
The Moor looks up at her, as if surprised to hear his name spoken aloud by such a person in such a place. He is huddled so close to the fire she’s afraid he’ll burst into flame at any moment. “Oh my lady, yes, yes, I am visiting Peebles.” The look in his eye reminds her of Douce Davie when someone sets a ham out on the sideboard.
Mungo sighs, and gets up from the hearth. “God, that smells good,” he says. “What are you fixing — brawn?”
“For Christmas,” she says.
“No goose?”
She has the distinct sensation that he is trying to sidetrack her, that there is something about this Seedy he doesn’t want her to know. “Goose, yes,” she says, impatient, “goose too. But tell me,” turning to the Moor, “will you be with us for the holidays, Mr. Seedy?”
The Moor looks puzzled. “Hollandaise?”
In an undertone, quick as a burst of gunfire, Mungo says something to him in a foreign language. Arabic?
Sidi grins. “I am a Moor, precious lady.”
This is getting her nowhere. She turns to her husband, wiping her hands on her apron. “He’ll be staying?”
But before Mungo can answer, the Moor leaps to his feet, as if by prearrangement. “Oh yes, kind lady. Mistress Park,” he whines, rushing up to her and prostrating himself at her feet. “Wit’ your permission, I am to stay two or t’ree mont’.”
Ailie draws back as if she’s been scorched. “Two or three—?”
“Ailie,” Mungo is saying, his voice low and deprecatory.
“Good lady, good lady,” Sidi chants, pursuing her on all fours and making as if to kiss the hem of her dress. Suddenly he looks up at her and barks, “Tutor, tutor,” with all the exhilaration of a lexicographer who’s been searching out the word for a month.
“He’s come to tutor me in Arabic, sweet.”
“Arabic? Whatever for?” But she already knows the answer, her face draining, jaw gone rigid. “You’re not—?”
Mungo looks like a prisoner in the dock. “I uh — I’ve been meaning to tell you, uh, about what Sir Joseph—” he begins, only to be saved by the bell. At that instant Mungo junior pokes his head through the kitchen doorway, closely followed by Thomas. There is a moment of hesitation, and then they burst into the room, hugging at their father’s legs, their shrill infantile voices rattling the windows with an ingenuous, radiant and all-consuming joy.
♦ FATHERS AND SONS ♦
It’s a long road to Hertfordshire. A road that goes by way of Enfield, various hayricks, an old virago’s shack, the county jail and the hulks. But that’s getting ahead of the story. Step back a pace and remember the winter of ‘02, blustery and bitter, and the two ragged figures shivering their way up the Hertfordshire road, starved, penniless and fearful, hounded out of town by the fanatical persistence of Claude Messenger Osprey, Jr.
They are disconsolate, these two, no longer certain that they’ve made the right choice, numbly wondering if freezing to death is really all that much better than hanging. Ned can barely lift his feet, so soporific is the cold. He wants to lie down in a ditch, pull the greatcoat over his ears and dream of steaming cauldrons and mugs of hot broth. And Boyles, poor flat-headed sot, is even worse off. He’s long since fallen into a sort of trance, lurching up the road like a drunken automaton, pitching headlong into the bushes, flopping down in the road and embracing the rock-hard earth as if it were a featherbed. Each time he stumbles Ned turns back to exhort him him to get up and keep moving. “Come on, Billy, get up out of it now. You’ll be dead in an hour if you lie there like that.”
“Good.”
“Come on now,” tugging at the narrow shoulders as if at a harness, “we’ll beg shelter at the next place we come to.”
At that moment, the sound of hoof and wheel swells at them out of the penumbra of early morning. “Look out!” pipes a childish voice, closely followed by the screech of braking wheels and a man’s basso shouting, “Whoa there, whoa!” The shadowy light reveals a farm wagon, its wheels skidded to a halt about half an inch from Boyles’ angular head. The man at the reins is a rut-faced, graying farmer in his late thirties, his hands like blocks of granite and a soft salvationist’s glint in his eye. “Well, brother, what seems to be the trouble here?” he booms, squinting down at Boyles’ inert form.
Ned puts on his best lost-dog look and tells him that they’re on their way to Hertford, but down on their luck. Without shelter they’ll be dead of the cold before the day is out.
The farmer pauses to tamp the bowl of his pipe, the first long rays of the sun suddenly illuminating his face. “Can’t have that,” he grunts, smoke spewing from the corner of his mouth. “Climb aboard and make yourselfs comfortable under the rug with my boys here.”
Two sets of round black eyes peer from the shadows at the farmer’s back.
“Nahum and Joseph,” the farmer says, as the boys make way for Ned and Boyles in the back of the cart. Boyles is glassy-eyed from lack of sleep, warmth and drink. He stumbles twice, but manages to claw his way into the back of the wagon with an assist from Ned. “Under here,” whispers the older boy, who looks to be about six or seven, and a moment later Ned and Boyles are nestled under a skin rug that must weigh eighty pounds, sipping at a jug of still-hot cider and pressing their feet to an iron bed warmer.