Rose (2 page)

He didn’t like English tea. He would have preferred sweet Moroccan minted tea served in a glass. Or thick Turkish coffee. Or a tin cup of American boiled coffee. In London, however, he thought this was probably about as pleasant as life could get.

Once he’d had his tea, Blair chanced getting dressed. Fashioning his scarf into a sort of tie gave him problems, since he couldn’t raise his arms without triggering the shakes. Because he hadn’t dared put a razor near his throat for days he had the beginnings of a beard. He did still have decent clothes and a pocket watch to tell him that if he was going to walk from Holborn Road to Savile Row—he certainly didn’t have money to ride—he had to leave at once. Ordinarily the route was half an hour’s stroll. Today it lay before him like a passage through mountains, deserts, swamps. He leaned against the window and stared down at the hunched backs of cabs and vying streams of umbrellas on the sidewalks. The glass reflected a face that was raw and high-colored by a life spent out-of-doors. Not a friendly or comfortable face, even to its owner.

Going down the stairs he swayed like a sailor. As long as he didn’t break a leg he’d be fine, he told himself. Anyway, this was an appointment he couldn’t afford to miss, not if he wanted to get out of England. He’d crawl on his elbows to do that.

London assaulted him with the steaming smell of horse droppings, the shouts of a rag wagon contending with a line of hackney cabs, the argument punctuated with explosive discharges of phlegm. The boulevards of Paris
were washed once a day. In San Francisco dirt at least rolled down to the bay. In London filth accreted undisturbed but for the daily piss from the heavens, creating a stench that made the nose weep.

Well, that was what England itself was like, a snuffling nose set by the blue eye of the North Sea, Blair thought. This other Eden, this sceptered isle, this chamber pot beneath the sky. And every subject proud of his umbrella.

At this end of Holborn Road the local tribes were Jews, Irish and Romanians, all dressed in bowlers and drab rags. Every block had its pawnshop, mission hall, tripe house, oyster stall, brace of alehouses. If the surrounding stench was a miasma, the inhabitants on the street took no more notice than fish took of salt water. Horse-drawn buses with open upper decks lurched through layers of drizzle and fog. Men in sandwich boards carried the offers of chiropractors, dentists, psychics. Women in sodden boas offered glimpses of rouge and venereal disease. Corner vendors sold French rolls, penny rolls, hot potatoes and newspaper headlines announcing
HEARTSICK STRANGLER KILLS BABE, MUM
! How the editors sorted out which of the daily multitude of urban atrocities to sell, Blair couldn’t imagine.

Halfway, by Charing Cross, billboards advertised the staples of middle-class life: liver pills and elderberry, Nestlé’s milk and Cockburn’s sherry. Here the population was transformed to a masculine society in black suits and top hats: clerks with one hand clutching their collars, tradesmen with cotton gloves and ribboned boxes, barristers in vests festooned with silver fobs, all jostling with umbrellas. Blair had no umbrella himself, only a broad-brimmed hat that diverted rain onto the shoulders of his mackintosh. On his feet he had a pair of leaky Wellingtons, the soles lined with pages torn from a mission hymnal: “A Closer Walk with Thee” in the left boot. He stopped every other block to rest against a lamppost.

By the time he reached St. James’s, the chills had
returned as spasms that made his teeth chatter. Although he was late, he turned into a public house with a chalkboard that declared
CHEAPEST GIN
. He laid his last coin on the bar and found himself given ample room by the regulars, a lunchtime gallery of shop assistants and apprentices with the drawn faces of mourners in training.

The bartender delivered a glass of gin and said, “There’s pickled eggs or oysters comes with that, if you want.”

“No, thanks. I’m off solids.”

Every eye seemed to watch him down the glass. It wasn’t simply that their faces were white. Compared with other complexions, British skin had the sallow shine that reflected a sun long lost in a pall of smoke. A boy with brighter eyes edged along the counter. He wore a green band on his hat, a purple tie squashed as flat as a cabbage leaf and yellow gloves with rings on the outside.

“Illustrated London News,”
he said and extended a hand.

A reporter. Blair didn’t wait for his change. He pushed himself away from the bar and plunged through the door.

The boy had a grin of someone who had found a pearl in his oyster. “That was Blair,” he announced. “Blair of the Gold Coast. Nigger Blair.”

His destination was in the sort of Savile Row town house that merchant banks and clubs were fond of: an entrance between banded columns, three floors of windows overhung with marble crenellation that expressed confidence, propriety, discretion. A brass plaque on a column read
THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
.

“Mr. Blair.” Jessup, the steward, was always solicitous for reasons Blair never understood. He helped Blair off with his hat and coat, led him to the rear of the cloakroom and fetched him tea and milk. “How are you feeling, sir?” he asked.

“A little chilled, just the smallest bit.” Blair was
trembling so hard from the short dash from the pub that he could barely keep the tea in the cup.

“Gunpowder tea will set you straight, sir. It’s good to see you again, sir.”

“A pleasure to see you, Jessup. The Bishop is still here?”

“His Grace is still here. One of the men just took him some cheese and port. You catch your breath. I read the reports of your work with great interest, sir. I hope there will be more accounts to come.”

“I hope so, too.”

“Do you think you can stand, sir?”

“I believe I can.” The shakes were subsiding. He got semi-briskly to his feet and Jessup brushed his jacket.

“Gin will rot your insides, sir.”

“Thank you, Jessup.” He started to move while he was still faintly refreshed.

“You’ll find the Bishop in the map room, sir. Please be careful. He’s in a mood.”

The map room was testimony of the Society’s contribution to exploration and knowledge. It had started as the African Association. A great map delineated expeditions the Society had sponsored: Mungo Park up the Niger, Burton and Speke to Lake Victoria, Speke and Grant to the White Nile, Baker to Uganda in search of Speke, Livingstone to the Congo. The walls were two levels of book and map shelves, the upper walkway supported by cast-iron columns and a spiral stairway. Watery light showed through the glass roof. In the middle of the room a mounted globe showed the British possessions as an earth-girdling corporation in imperial pink.

By the globe stood Bishop Hannay, a tall man of middle age in a black woolen suit and the inverted V of an ecclesiastical collar. Because most English dressed in black they seemed a nation in perpetual grief, but the somber cloth and white collar only emphasized the
Bishop’s inappropriate vigor and the bluntness of his gaze. He had ruddy skin with red lips, and dark hair gone gray and wild at the temples and brows as if singed.

He said, “Sit down, Blair. You look like hell.”

Two high-back chairs were at a map table set with cheese and port. Blair accepted the invitation to collapse.

“It’s good to see you again, too, Your Grace. Sorry about being late.”

“You stink of gin. Have some port.”

Hannay poured him a glass, taking none for himself.

“You’re in bad odor altogether, Blair. Embezzlement of charitable funds, willful disobedience of orders, abetting slavery, for God’s sake! You embarrassed the Society and the Foreign Office. And you were my recommendation.”

“I only took funds that were owed me. If I could meet with the Board of Governors—”

“If you did, they’d slap your face and turn you out the door.”

“Well, I’d hate to provoke them to violence.” Blair refilled the glass and looked up. “You’ll listen to me?”

“I’m not as easily shocked as the others—I expect moral turpitude.” The Bishop sat back. “But, no, I won’t listen because it would be a waste of time. They resent you for reasons that have nothing to do with the accusations.”

“Such as?”

“You’re American. I know you were born here, but you’re American now. You have no idea how abrasive your style and voice can be. And you’re poor.”

Blair said, “That’s why I took the money. There I was in Kumasi on survey. I’m not like Speke; I don’t need an army, just five men, assay equipment, medicine, food, gifts for the chiefs. I had to pay the men in advance, and I’d already spent all my own funds. Those people depend on me. Twenty pounds. It’s little enough money anyway, and half the men die. Where was all the money promised by the Foreign Office and the Society? Spent
by the colonial administration in Accra. The only thing I could get my hands on was the Bible Fund. I used it. It was food or books.”

“Bibles, Blair. The food of souls. Even if it was for Methodists.” The Bishop whispered so low that Blair couldn’t tell whether he was inviting a laugh.

“You know what the office in Accra spent my money on? They splurged on ceremonies and honors for a murderous cretin, your nephew.”

“It was an official visit. Of course they put on a show. If you weren’t so poor it wouldn’t have been a problem. That’s why Africa is a field for gentlemen. Whereas you are—”

“A mining engineer.”

“Let’s say more than just a mining engineer. A geologist, a cartographer, but definitely not a gentleman. Gentlemen have sufficient private means so that unexpected situations don’t become painful embarrassments. Don’t worry, I made good on the Bible Fund for you.”

“With the money I spent in Kumasi, the Society still owes me a hundred pounds.”

“After the way you disgraced them? I don’t think so.”

The Bishop stood. He was as tall as a Dinka. Blair knew for sure because Hannay was the only member of the Board of Governors to ever go to Africa, the real Africa south of the Sahara. Blair had taken him into the Sudan, where they encountered first the flies, then the cattle, and finally the camp of nomadic Dinkas. The women ran from the visitors’ white faces. Africans usually did; the story was that whites ate blacks. The Dinka men stood in a bold line, naked except for a ghostly dusting of ash and armbands of ivory. Out of curiosity the Bishop stripped off his suit and matched himself limb for limb with the largest warrior. From the shoulders down in every physical particular the two giants were identical.

Hannay rose. He gave the globe a light spin. “This slavery business. Explain that.”

Blair said, “Your nephew, Rowland, came inland slaughtering animals.”

“He was gathering scientific specimens.”

“Specimens with holes. When someone shoots fifty hippos and twenty elephants in half a day, he’s a butcher, not a scientist.”

“He’s an amateur scientist. What has that to do with slavery?”

“Your nephew revealed he had a commission from the Foreign Office to investigate native affairs, and he declared that he was shocked to find slavery in a British colony.”

“British
protectorate
.” Hannay put up his hand.

“He had troops and a letter from you retaining me as his guide. He announced he would free the Ashanti’s slaves and put the king in irons. It was a statement designed to provoke an Ashanti reaction and bring in British troops.”

“What’s wrong with that? The Ashanti grew fat off slavery.”

“So did England. England and the Dutch and the Portuguese set up the slave trade with the Ashanti.”

“But now England has shut the slave trade down. The only way to do it completely is to crush the Ashanti and make British rule secure throughout the Gold Coast. But you, Jonathan Blair, my employee, took the side of black slavers. Just when did you find it in your competence to frustrate the policies of the Foreign Office or to question the moral vision of Lord Rowland?”

Blair knew Hannay used Rowland’s title to emphasize his own far inferior status. He swallowed the impulse to make an angry, democratic exit.

“All I did was advise the king to retreat and live to fight another day. We can slaughter him and his family a few years from now.”

“The Ashanti fight well. It won’t be a slaughter.”

“The Ashanti goes into battle with a musket and boxes of verse from the Koran stitched to his shirt. The British infantryman goes into battle with a Martini-Henry rifle. It will be a glorious slaughter.”

“Meanwhile the evil of slavery goes on.”

“England doesn’t want their slaves, it wants their gold.”

“Of course it does. That’s what you were supposed to find and didn’t.”

“I’ll go back for you.” He had meant to introduce the offer slowly, not to blurt it out as desperately as this.

The Bishop smiled. “Send you back to the Gold Coast? So you could abet your slaver friends again?”

“No, to finish the survey I’ve already started. Who knows the land as well as I do?”

“It’s out of the question.”

Blair was familiar enough with Hannay to understand that the Bishop answered personal appeal with contempt. Well, there were many routes to Africa. He tried a different one. “I understand there’ll be an expedition to the Horn next year. There’s gold there. You’ll need someone like me.”

“Someone
like
you, not necessarily you. The Society would prefer anyone to you.”

“You’re the major sponsor, they’ll do what you say.”

“At the moment that does not work to your benefit.” Hannay managed to look amused without a smile. “I see through you, Blair. You hate London, you detest England, every hour here is odious to you. You want to get back to your jungle and your coffee-colored women. You are transparent.”

Blair felt a warm flush on his cheeks that had nothing to do with either malaria or port. Hannay had diagnosed him in a brutally accurate way. And perhaps dismissed him, too. The Bishop crossed to the bookshelves. Burton’s
First Footsteps in East Africa
was there. Also Livingstone’s
Missionary Travels
. Both had been best-sellers on a scale usually reserved for Dickens’s maudlin myths of London. Hannay ran his fingers lightly across Society reports:
Trade Routes of the Arab Dhow, Superstitions and Rituals of the Hottentot, Mineral Resources of the Horn of Africa, Certain Practices Among the Peoples of the Horn
. The latter two had been Blair’s own minor contributions. As if he were alone, Hannay moved in a leisurely fashion to the shelf devoted to South Africa, to Zulus and Boers.