Prospero's Daughter (31 page)

Then, suddenly, something fluttered out from the opening under the platform. A piece of cloth. Red.

“He’s there! He’s there!” Carlos shouted.

The corbeaux perched on the tree flapped their wings and craned their necks. The loose skin under their helmeted heads trembled.

“It’s his cloak.”

My heart was a drum thumping in my chest. More red. It slid through the slit on the wall.

Red: my father’s cloak. Red: the fire outside my bedroom window. My
father chanting. A glimpse of him before Ariana pulls me away. There are silver stars on his red cloak. They flicker in the sparks breaking loose from the
fire. His hair rises. Red, too, like the fire. I scramble under the bed.

I crouched down lower now in my hiding place, terrified, blinded by the tumble of images crashing down on me. “Carlos!” I called out to him. I could hear him running toward me.

“Stop!” The inspector’s voice was commanding. “Halt!”

Carlos’s footsteps ended.

“Stay!”

I peeked out from the bushes. Carlos had turned toward the inspector.

“Leave her. Let her be, Codrington.”

But Carlos turned around again.

“I am an officer of the law, Codrington. Do not give me a reason to arrest you.”

I would have cried out to Carlos to come no farther, but he, too, heard the determination in the inspector’s voice. There was no doubt he would do as he had threatened. He would arrest him.

“She’s safe, Codrington,” the inspector was saying now. I saw him place his hand on Carlos’s arm. It was the gesture that a friend would make. “It’s better this way. Better that he doesn’t see her right away.” His tone was soothing, and once again I felt that though the inspector was a pompous man, he was a decent man, and in the end he would not abandon us.

When they were a few feet away from the base of the lighthouse, the inspector cupped his hands around his mouth, cocked his head upward, and called out to Father. “I know you are there, Dr. Gardner!”

More red fluttered from the slit in the lighthouse wall, then vanished.

“Come down, Dr. Gardner!” the inspector called again.

The door to the lighthouse was on the other side of the tower, facing the sea. Close to it, in viewing distance of the door, was a large tree laden with green fruit. A mango tree. I recognized the fruit. When I saw Carlos leading the inspector around the tower, I moved from the bushes and hid behind the tree trunk.

“Come down now, Dr. Gardner!” the inspector shouted. “I say,
now
!”

The door cracked open. A flash of red, and then my father appeared. I barely recognized him. His red velvet cape with the silver stars flowed over his shoulders and draped down the length of his back. It was tied around his neck with a gold ribbon.
A magician’s cloak.
In one hand he held the cane with the silver top, and in the other, his red book. His hair was clumped in thin locks that fell down the sides of his face like wet straw. “Filthy slave!” he yelled. I could hear him distinctly. “Ungrateful whelp! Send him away. Lock him up!”

He was standing too far away for me to see his face clearly, but I could imagine his crinkled brow, clogged with dirt from the long walk over the hills above our bay; I could imagine the rivers of black sweat coursing down his reddened face. I could imagine his eyes, a wild boar’s eyes before the kill, hardened, pitiless.

“Bloody devil! Bastard! Lascivious slave! You think you fooled me? You think I didn’t know who you were? Filth! Pervert!” He stepped closer to Carlos.

The inspector pushed him back.

“Pervert!” he spat out again.

I cringed. The inspector must have cringed, too. Ariana had told him what Father had done to her. But he did not know about me, what Father had done to me. He did not know how well my father knew which one of them was the pervert.

“No need for nasty words, Dr. Gardner,” the inspector said. “We can settle this business now and we’ll be gone.”

“Settle?”

“We have a report from someone that says Mr. Codrington is innocent.”

“
Mister
Codrington?
Mister?
Do you see it’s a black man in front of you, Inspector?”

“Someone reported . . . ” the inspector began again.

“Lies!” My father cut him off. “I told you, Inspector, what this beast was plotting to do to my virgin daughter.”

Carlos stepped toward him. The inspector raised his hand and signaled to him to stay back. “Remain where you are, Codrington,” he cautioned him.

“Let him come. Let him come and I will beat him to a pulp.” My father shook his cane at Carlos.

“Give me that.” The inspector held out his hand for my father’s cane. “Hand it over, Dr. Gardner.”

My father tightened his grip on the cane.

“I’ll have to file charges against you, Dr. Gardner, if you don’t give me that cane.”

“File charges? File charges against an Englishman? Do you see this beast here, Mumsford? Tie up the beast, Mumsford.”

“Hand me the cane or I’ll have to take it from you, Dr. Gardner.”

“Bastard!” My father shook his cane again at Carlos.

“Hand it to me!”

“You forget yourself, Mumsford,” my father said.

“You forget yourself, sir,” the inspector said and grabbed the cane.

Stunned that the inspector had sided with a brown man against him, my father released his hold on the cane like a man in a trance.

“There, there, Dr. Gardner. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” the inspector crooned.

My father found his voice and glared at him. “You do not know what you are doing, Mumsford,” he hissed.

“Pardon me, sir,” the inspector said, “but I do know, sir.”

“Filth!” My father lashed out again at Carlos.

Satisfied that he had disarmed my father, the inspector tried once again to get him to admit to Carlos’s innocence. “Someone has reported that Codrington never harmed your daughter, sir.”

My father was still holding on to his red book, clutching it to his chest in the bend of his arm. “I prevented him,” he said. “The bastard. He thought I would let him ruin my daughter.”

“Someone said he never would have harmed your daughter, sir.”

“Someone? Someone? Who did the lying beast get to help him tell his lies?”

“Ariana, sir. She said Codrington would never hurt your daughter, sir. She said he was good to your daughter, sir.”

“She is one of his kind. They lie. Lying is in their nature.”

“She said you did things to her, sir,” the inspector said.

I thought my father would back down. I thought guilt would silence him, but he threw back his head and laughed. “Things to her? The slut! Things to her?”

“She said you did these things to her when she was only a child,” the inspector said. It must have taken all the effort of his training for him to say those words to my father without emotion, but then he was a policeman on duty, conducting an investigation. And my father was an Englishman. For the Englishman’s sake, somewhere in his head, he must have still held on to a sliver of doubt.

“Liar! Slut! The both of them, lying slaves,” my father screamed.

Carlos had his back to me, but I could see his fists opening and closing at his sides.

“
He
did things to her.” My father pointed his finger at Carlos.

The fists Carlos made with his hands were tighter. I knew it would not be long before he would lose his patience, before he would explode and knock my father down.

“
He
screwed her!”

It was the last straw. If he had not told such a bald-faced lie, if he had not made such a malicious accusation, Carlos might have been able to stand there a little longer, bottling his rage, squeezing it tight in his clenched fists.

Carlos lunged forward and grabbed his hand, twisting it with such force that my father lost his grip on his red book and it fell with a dull thud to the ground.

For a second both men stopped, paralyzed by the sight of my father’s precious book, his sacred book, sprawled in the dirt. Carlos recovered first. He stuck out his foot and aimed at the book. The kick he gave it sent it tumbling over clumps of broken bits of coral and rock. When it settled, it lay on its back, its spine broken, its pages fanning in the breeze that had risen from the sea.

My father’s eyes welled with tears, but they were not tears of sorrow. They were tears of indignation, tears of frustration. Tears of humiliation. He wanted revenge now, and he cried out to the inspector to use his baton to strike down Carlos. “Stripes will move him not kindness. The cat-o’-nine-tails is what he needs. Beat him!”

Carlos was still holding on to my father’s hand, his fingers wrapped around his wrist. “You stole my house,” he shouted. “Did you think I would forget you stole my house?”

Now I knew. Now I understood the stiff jaw, the hardness in his eyes on the boat that brought us here. I could no longer deceive myself: I had accepted my father’s lies to staunch my own needs, to hold back the dam that would have split open, tears running down my cheeks forever if I had confronted the truth.

In my heart of hearts I must have always known, always believed what Carlos had said to me: The house was his. But I could not choose. I needed them both, Carlos and Father. I was afraid Carlos would put us out if I agreed that the house was his. And I could not be left alone with Father.

“It was my mother’s house!” The words roared out of Carlos’s mouth.

My father swung at him with his other hand. “Stop the brute, the devil, the beast!” he yelled out to the inspector. The inspector jumped between them, wielding his baton.

To this day I do not believe the inspector intended to hit Carlos. I believe he intended to use his baton as a shield to pry Carlos away from my father. From what I could see, the baton would have struck my father’s head had he not ducked. It came down instead on Carlos’s shoulder. When I saw Carlos double over, I knew the pain that ripped through his body would make him lose all sense of caution, all fear that he was in the presence of two Englishmen, one, though he appeared to be defending him, an officer of the law, an English inspector. Carlos had withstood my father’s insults; he had suffered torture at his hands. I knew his rage would blind him.

He grasped my father’s neck and I bounded out of my hiding place. I had to save him. I had to prevent him from strangling my father. He would go to jail if he harmed my father. “Stop! Stop!” I shouted.

My father saw me before either the inspector or Carlos heard me. “Virginia!” My name warbled through the strained strings of his vocal cords. “Virginia!” His jaw fell open; his eyes shot out of their sockets.

Carlos dropped his hands from around my father’s neck and backed away.

“Virginia!”

The inspector clutched my father’s arm and tried to steady him.

No one but my father and I knew what thoughts were going through our minds. No one but my father and I knew his perverted secret.

I came closer to him and looked directly into his eyes. “Tell the inspector that Carlos is innocent,” I said.

“You,” he breathed.

“Tell him.”

“Forgive me,” he said.

“Tell him.”

He reached for my hand. I flinched and pulled my hand away. “Say you lied.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he groaned.

I gritted my teeth. “Say you lied.”

“Forgive me.” He dropped to his knees.

“No,” I said.

He looked over to the inspector, his eyes pleading with him. Not understanding, the inspector reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “Here,” he said. “You just have to sign this paper, Dr. Gardner, and I’ll leave you with your daughter.”

But my father was not listening to him. He was repeating “Forgive me, forgive me,” on his knees still before me.

Clearly disturbed by my father’s odd behavior, the inspector begged him to stand. “You’ll scrape your knees. Up, Dr. Gardner.”

My father placed his opened palm on the ground, and the inspector, thinking he was trying to brace himself up, bent down to help him. “That’s it,” he cooed. “Up, Dr. Gardner. You just have to sign the paper.”

My father knocked the paper out of the inspector’s hand. Dirt rising with the wind rolled toward it. Before the inspector could retrieve the paper, it fluttered away, carried on the tiny puffs of dirt swelling beneath it.

Again my father asked for my forgiveness. Again I told him he had to confess. Tears in his eyes, he stumbled to his feet, his hands outstretched, a mendicant, a common street beggar.

“No!” I could not bear his touch, his fingers on my skin.

He stumbled back.

The inspector tried again to calm him. “We’ll go back to the house,” he said. “We’ll talk there.”

A terrible light flashed across my father’s eyes, the sun striking the blue, the cold steel edge of a sword, malevolent. He grabbed the hem of his cloak and twisted it around his body. A mummy. The ribbon at his neck cut deep into the creases in his skin.

Afraid of the light in my father’s eyes, the desperation he must have seen there, the inspector hollered, “Wait!” But my father had already spun around and was running through the bramble in front of the lighthouse, heading for the edge of the precipice.

Before he curled himself into a ball, my father looked back. Did he hope I would stop him? Did he hope I would forgive him?

By the time we reached him, he was already rolling downward. A ledge midway down the slope broke his fall. He stood up, looked back at me again, and then, extending his arms, he threw himself forward down the steep drop to the sea. Above him his cape fluttered like wings in the wind. The corbeaux screeched and swooped down from their perch on the thick-trunked tree, his ceremonial guards lined up behind him.

“He looked like a crucifix,” the inspector said. “His body falling down like that.”

“A corbeau,” Carlos said.

“A bird,” the inspector conceded. Later he told me he believed that at that moment my father had gone mad; he had lost his senses. He thought he could fly.