Prospero's Daughter (4 page)

“Cannot?” Again, a shadow of a doubt darkened Mumsford’s brow.

“Everything will be on the QT, of course,” the commissioner said. “Nothing in the newspapers, or anything like that. Still, there is the matter of the law, due process. You can’t put someone in jail without some inquiry, at least the semblance of one. The monks at St. Benedict’s owe me a favor. They will keep the boy until we can lock him up.”

How long? Mumsford wanted to know.

“All the facts have to be gathered and corroborated.”

“Corroborated?”

“There has to be evidence to support the allegations. That’s your job, Mumsford. That girl Ariana has made things a little messy for us. She is a bloody liar, of course, but we need to get the evidence from Dr. Gardner. In the meanwhile, we will remove the boy. Dr. Gardner has him secured, but he can’t remain on the island with the girl, in the same house. It’s not decent.”

It was this point of decency, or rather indecency, that Mumsford was mulling over in his head as he sat back in the car that was taking him to the dock not far from Cocorite, where he would get the boat to Chacachacare. It was not only indecent for the boy to remain on the island and in the same house, it was indecent, he believed, for him to have ever been there at all.

“He was not alone,” the commissioner had explained when Mumsford raised his eyebrows. “There was also Ariana. They were both Dr. Gardner’s servants. Anyhow, there was nowhere else for them to stay.”

The explanation was not satisfactory to Mumsford. Servant or not, it was imprudent, reckless, for an English father to permit a black boy to live in the same house as his young white daughter.

Who was this man? Who was this Peter Gardner who had been so careless as to have risked the virtue of his daughter, as to have endangered her life and limb on this Land of the Dead?

He did not want to go. If the commissioner had not insisted, if Ariana had not sent a letter by the boatman full of her malicious lies, if (and this was the most compelling of all the reasons) Trinidad was not all riled up with talk about independence and colored people were not looking for any excuse to blame their failures on England, there would have been no need for him to go. The message Dr. Gardner had sent, written by his own hand and on his stationery, would have sufficed in spite of the commissioner’s admonition about the law and due process. Now he had to face the half-hour sea crossing.

He leaned forward on his seat and tapped his driver on the shoulder. “I say, what’s the sea like at this hour?” he asked.

The chauffeur looked at him through the rearview mirror. “Good, sir. Calm seas, sir,” he said.

And the sea was calm, but the chauffeur had not warned him about the jellyfish. There were hundreds of them, transparent little blue buoys, their tentacles splayed out behind them like carnival streamers, bobbing in the water around the sides of the boat. He wanted to be brave (he had felt the quivering in his neck from the moment he spotted the jellyfish), but when he raised his leg to step into the boat, his English reserve abandoned him and he found himself waving frantically to his chauffeur, who was leaning casually against the parked car, chewing a toothpick that dangled from his bottom lip.

“Driver!” he shouted. “I say, driver!”

“Sir?” The chauffeur raised his head and turned in his direction, but he remained where he was and Mumsford was forced to be explicit.

“Help me!”

In the end, though Mumsford could not avoid noticing the group of dark-skinned young men snickering in the background, he clutched the chauffeur’s arm, digging his fingers into the chauffeur’s hard flesh with such desperation that the blood drained from his hand, turning his knuckles white as chalk.

And the chauffeur had not mentioned that within minutes of leaving the calm waters of Trinidad, the boat would skirt the edges of the Dragon’s Mouth. When the boat began to rock, Mumsford found himself again at the mercy of a dark-skinned man. For the commissioner, insisting on secrecy to protect the good name of Dr. Gardner’s daughter, had not sent the government’s launch, manned by a uniformed navigational officer; he had rented a pirogue, and the man at the tiller was a fisherman, a local boatman.

“Nothing to worry about.” The boatman grinned when Mumsford turned anxiously toward him. He was sitting sideways with the insouciance of a man on his way to a picnic, one hand steering the engine and the other waving in the air as he spoke.

A fancy man, Mumsford thought. His life was in the hands of a fancy man.
A saga boy.
It was a term he had learned from the officers at the station.

“Just the wash from the first boca, sir. We go pass far from it and I go take the boat easy, easy, past the second and the third one.”

Mumsford clamped his hands down hard on the sides of his seat and braced himself.

The Dragon’s Mouth. It was the channel that connected the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Paria. Across it were underwater rocks, some visible above the surface of the sea, three large enough for the rich to build vacation homes on them.

“The Dragon teeth,” the boatman shouted from the back of the boat. “The first two big teeth call Monos and Huevos. The last one I taking you to is Chacachacare. Is a boca in the space between each big teeth. The water bad there. It rough. He have four mouth, the Dragon.”

Mumsford pressed down harder on his seat. Cerberus, lips drawn back in a grin of fangs, one more head to strike terror in the heart of the condemned.

“You have nothing to worry about, sir.” The boatman’s voice rose above the drone of the boat engine. “You in good hands with me, sir.”

In good hands?
He was barefooted, dressed scantily in a loose navy T-shirt and red shorts. How could he be in good hands with this man who could not even speak proper English? He should have put more pressure on the commissioner to give him the launch, Mumsford thought, demanded he send him a man in a uniform.

“We just pass one of the Dragon small tooth,” the boatman called out merrily. “We does call it Scorpion Island. Well, we don’t call it Scorpion no more. We call it Centipede Island now. They have more centipede there than scorpion. Centipede long, long. ’Bout twelve, fourteen, inches.”

Mumsford looked back and saw the tiny island topped with green vegetation.

“Don’t know if centipede long like that eat the scorpion or the centipede more frisky than scorpion. Know what I mean?” The boatman winked at him, but Mumsford was in no mood for winks. He was terrified.

“And on Chacachacare?” he asked nervously. “Are there scorpions . . . centipedes, there?”

“Maybe one or two scorpion, I think. Telling you the truth, sir . . .” The boatman scratched his head and wrinkled his nose. “I never hear ’bout leper dying from scorpion bite.” The idea seemed to strike him as funny. He laughed out loud. “Scorpion catch leprosy before leper die from scorpion bite. You know what I mean, sir?”

Mumsford’s face remained resolutely serious. “So are there scorpions on Chacachacare?” he asked.

The boatman wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I never hear about that, sir. It only have centipede, and if centipede bite you on your leg, you don’t have to bother. Just have to mash the centipede in rum and pour the rum over where they bite you. You be surprise how your leg heal up fast, fast.”

Mumsford gritted his teeth and faced forward in his seat. He had only to step on the poisonous millepatte, the gardener had said to him, and he would get rich. Now the boatman was recommending an antidote to a centipede bite. Crush the centipede in rum, he said. Thank God he was born in England, where medicine was based on science and not in this godforsaken part of the world, where he would have been at the mercy of the superstitions of ignorant people!

The boat rocked, but slightly, as they neared the second boca between the islands of Monos and Huevos. True to the boatman’s word, they passed its outskirts without much difficulty.

“Dey name is Spanish. You know, from the time when Columbus and the other Spanish people came down here. Monos is monkey in Spanish,” the boatman said proudly, “and Huevos mean egg.”

Mumsford already knew the literal translation from his Spanish classes in grammar school and he conveyed his disinterest to the boatman.

“You don’t want to know why? The tourists and them always asking why. Why this, why that. Sometimes just to satisfy them, I does make up things I don’t know nothing about, but I know about Monos and Huevos.”

Mumsford was not impressed. He was more concerned about what he needed to look out for when he got to Chacachacare. “Are there monkeys on Chacachacare?” he asked.

“It don’t have no monkey on Chacachacare,” the boatman said, and undeterred, though Mumsford had positioned his back firmly against him, he informed him that the Spanish people killed all the monkeys on Monos. “They name it Monos and then they kill the Red Howlers. You think they would’ve change the name after that, right? But you wrong.”

Mumsford looked steadily in front of him.

“Is turtle egg they have on Huevos,” the boatman went on. “The turtle swim out in the sea after they lay they egg on the beach. That is how the Spanish people make it in the early days. They eat turtle egg and turtle meat. When they leave here and gone on their way discovering, they used to turn the turtle upside down on the ship so the turtle stay alive. I just can’t believe they was so bad that every day they cut off a piece of the turtle and leave them bleeding till they finish them off. But you know,” his voice became grave, “those Spanish people did some bad, bad things to the Africans they made slaves.”

Mumsford wanted him to shut up. “If there are turtle eggs on the island, the Spaniards must not have killed all the turtles,” he said mockingly. He was tired of these stories about what white men had done to Africans. The past was the past. The slaves were free now. The present was what concerned him, and in the present, his body was on fire. If the trip lasted much longer he would burn, and then in a matter of days he would start shedding like a common reptile.

“You right, sir. So I suppose you could say in the case of Huevos, the name still fit. Correct, sir?”

“Correct,” Mumsford said without enthusiasm.

The boatman said nothing more for a while. When he spoke again, his voice was so soft that Mumsford was not quite sure he had heard him correctly.

“I suppose you know the princess was there.” That was what the boatman had said, and it was only his tone that made Mumsford ask him to repeat himself, for a sly intimacy had entered his voice and Mumsford wanted to be sure.

“Yes, Princess Margaret sheself,” the boatman said.

Mumsford glared at him.

“She come with the governor-general, two, maybe three years now. She like the tortoiseshell she find there. Papers say she plan to make a comb and spectacles for sheself.”

It was not tortoiseshell; it was the shell of the hawksbill turtle, unique for its translucent amber color, some of which was speckled with black, others with green, red, or white. A letter written by a self-styled naturalist was printed in the papers warning of the extinction of the turtles if “certain royalty” insisted on killing them for combs and spectacles.

“He doesn’t dare mention the princess by name,” Mumsford had said to his mother when he read the complaint. “The coward. These are Crown lands and Crown seas. The Crown can do whatever the Crown wants with Crown property.”

“She say the water in the bay in Huevos so nice, she find it hard to leave. She bathe here all the time in she bathing suit. Between you and me,” the boatman continued confidentially, “she could have bathed naked if she want. Hardly anybody here.”

His mouth quivered slightly and Mumsford took notice when he passed his tongue across his bottom lip.

“I lucky. I get the chance to see her one day. She cheeks pink, pink, like a rose. But I never did see her in she bathing suit. If only . . .”

It was too much for him. The body of Her Royal Highness exposed to the lecherous fantasies of a common boatman! Mumsford cut him off. “How much farther?” he barked.

But if the boatman had been hurt by Mumsford’s rebuff, he soon got his revenge. They were now entering the tail end of the third boca on the approach to Rust’s Bay in Chacachacare. Waves swelled and fell in quick succession like the folds of a fan. Mumsford clutched his seat. “Hold on tight!” the boatman called out to him. The boat rose high in the air and then slapped down hard on the water. Mumsford lurched forward.

“Hold up your back!” the boatman shouted. Before Mumsford could respond, he was walking toward him. “Yes, just so,” the boatman said, and passed him, making his way to the helm of the boat. “See, I can stand up because I accustom.” He spread out his arms and legs, balancing himself perfectly though the boat pitched up and down, flinging long sprays of water at them, almost blinding Mumsford. “This is nothing. We do this all the time. I know how it bad for you people from the big countries,” he yelled over the loud thudding sounds of the hull hitting the water. “Is just a little rough passage. We go pass it soon. Don’t be frighten. Is a little thing.”

The nerves at the ends of Mumsford’s fingers were still tingling, his stomach still churning, when the boat reached calmer waters, close to the right prong of the horseshoe that was the island of Chacachacare. His face was scorched, and in spite of the seawater that had soaked his jacket, he was hot, sweaty. Only after the boat rounded the bend and a pleasant assortment of pink and ivory angles appeared at the edge of the sea, nestled in the forest of trees that fanned up an incline, did the tightness in his jaw begin to loosen.

It was the A-framed structure, with wings behind it, on top of another floor with a covered veranda, that calmed him. For suddenly in front of him were not the contours of a tropical house but of a Swiss chalet. Snow, an icy wind blowing through pine trees were what he was thinking of when he took out his handkerchief and dried the perspiration that had gathered on his brow.