She turned away. “I don’t want to think about it,” she said. “Do whatever you feel is right.”
He kissed her in front of the house before he left. And then pressed her to him and kissed her again, stroking her hair and tracing the line of her jaw with trembling fingers. She was surprised at his passion.
“Give my love to the Macleods and Leasks,” she said, “and to old Saltoun. . You’ll be back in four or five days?”
He was mounted now, looming high over the horse like a bronze statue frozen against the sky. She thought of the military, of the war with France, of Colin Raeburn and Oliphant Graham, dead at Copenhagen. And then suddenly, inexplicably, she thought of her mother. Mungo’s face was impassive. She managed to smile. “Four or five days?” she repeated.
The sun was at his back and she had to squint to get a look at his eyes. They were the color of ice. The horse whinnied and she felt something shift in her stomach. He never answered her. Just drew back on the reins, swung the animal’s head, and cantered off.
♦ ♦ ♦
The letter came two weeks later. From London. There was no return address:
19 September, 1804
My Dear Ailie:
Forgive me. I couldn’t face a scene. As you wil1 have guessed, or gathered from talking with your brother, I am off again for Africa. This time I will be at the head of an expedition financed by the government and consisting of some forty men. The opportunity is enormous. It is my patriotic duty to take it.
I will be in an agony until I return to you and the children, no doubt within the year. Our plan is to launch a boat at Segu and float it down to the sea. If the child is a boy, name him after Archie, could you?
Please try to understand me, Ailie, dearest Ailie. The Yarrow is tame, life is tame. There are wonders out there, wonders waiting for the right man to risk all to reveal them. I am that man, Ailie, I am that man.
Yours in love & Contrition,
Mungo
The letter pierced her like a bone spear flung by some black aborigine, some Seedy, straight from the stink and fear and incomprehensibility of Africa, straight from the black heart itself. She hadn’t spoken a word to Zander: he’d been avoiding her. After the first week had gone by she knew the letter would come, knew what it would say before she opened it. She knew, but prayed to all the saints and archangels and powers in their spheres that she was wrong, that Mungo had been detained in Edinburgh, that he’d had a minor accident or gone out to the country with Robbie Macleod.
But no. He’d deceived her again. The son of a bitch. The cowardly, irresponsible, lying son of a bitch. To desert her like this, to lie to her, make it up, and lie to her again. To tell his innermost secrets to a stranger like Scott, and conceal them from her. Well she was through with him. He was no good, he was a liar and a cheat. He’d taken her love and trust, her faith and confidence, and stolen off under cover of a lie — like a thief.
She read through the letter again, flung it down in disgust. And then, almost as an afterthought, she picked up the envelope, turned it over in her hand and noticed that there was something scribbled inside the leaf — a postscript? The writing was cramped and hurried, so contorted it could almost have come from a different hand. She took the envelope to the window and squinted at the flailing loops and tight squiggles until she could make sense of them: I can hear it in my dreams, hear it in the morning when I wake and the birds are in the trees — a rustling, a tinkling— a sound of music. You know what it is? The Niger. Rushing, falling, heaving toward its hidden mouth, toward the sea. That’s what I hear Ailie, day and night. Music.
The baby cried out. She dropped the envelope in the fireplace.
THREE. NIGER REDUX
“My son, you have now seen the temporal fire,
And that which is eternal; you have reached
A place where I myself can see no farther.
Thus far I have conducted you with skill;
Henceforth your own good sense must be your guide.”
GOREE (A HYMN TO CONTAGION)
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the West Coast of Africa — from Dakar to the Bight of Benin — had a reputation for pestilence and rot unequaled anywhere in the world. With its heat and humidity, seasonal deluges and galaxies of insects, it was a sort of monumental Petri dish for the culture of exotic and frighteningly destructive diseases. Beware and take care of the Bight of Benin, went a sailor’s ditty of the time. There’s one comes out for forty goes in.
Spotted fever, yaws, typhus and trypanosomiasis throve here. Hookworm, cholera and plague. There was billiarzia and guinea worm in the drinking water, hydrophobia in the sharp incisors of bats and wolves, filariasis in the saliva of mosquitoes and horseflies. Step outside, take a bath, drink the water or put a scrap of food in your mouth and you’ve got them all — bacilli, spirilla and cocci, viruses, fungi, nematodes, trematodes and amoebae — all eating away at your marrow and organs, blurring your vision, sapping your fiber, eradicating your memory as neatly as an eraser moving over the scribbled wisdom of a blackboard.
From a cosmetic standpoint, the filarial diseases — elephantiasis and loiasis (also known as wriggle-eye) — were especially unfortunate. In elephantiasis, a mosquito-borne malady, teeming roundworms dam up the lymphatic system like insidious little beavers, causing the skin to erupt in granulomatous lesions and the legs and testicles to swell up like obscene fruits. Loiasis, on the other hand, focuses its ravages above the neck, and is transmitted by the bite of certain bloodsucking flies so abundant in the area that most mammals wear a sort of dark coat of them from dawn till dusk — when the mosquitoes take over. In its final stages the disease is characterized by the appearance of the adult worms beneath the conjunctiva of the eye. The worms pulse and writhe there, active little ribbons of flesh, quietly going about their business of feeding, mating and eliminating waste.
If one managed to survive such horrors, there was always kala azar or dumdum fever. A chronic disease, invariably fatal, kala azar makes its presence known by the appearance of pustulating epidermal ulcers, marasmus and enlargement of the spleen. And then there was leprosy, the most dreaded affliction of them all. Relentless in its gross deformation of the body, malignant and hideous in its gradual abrasion of the extremities and the slow but persistent degeneration of facial tissue that leaves its victims looking like pitted prunes. Balla jou, the locals called it: incurable.
And then of course there were the more prosaic diseases, the ones that were largely responsible for saving thousands of French, English, Dutch and Portuguese colonials the expense of cemetery plots back in Paris, London, Amsterdam or Lisbon. Malaria headed the list, closely followed by dysentery and yellow fever. Their victims — tradesmen, slavers and soldiers of fortune alike — would literally sweat and shit themselves to death, often within a week of their arrival on what had become popularly known as the Fever Coast.
There were no cures. Various quacks prescribed bloodletting, calomel, laxatives, and emetics to encourage “a gentle puke.” Or Dr. James’ Powder, a talc-and borax-based product no more effective in combating disease than candied orange peel or horsehair pillows. Jesuit’s bark or cinchona had been known since the 1600’s as effective in treating malaria, but the evidence current at the turn of the nineteenth century was against it, labeling it a quack remedy like all the rest. The poor blundering star-crossed soldiers and explorers of the day didn’t have the vaguest conception of what caused the host of appalling disorders that decimated their ranks and crushed their hopes. It was generally believed that miasmata, “putrid exhalations from the earth,” brought on the ravages of these fevers and digestive cataclysms. The mosquitoes, flies and sandfleas? Why bother even to swat them.