Prospero's Daughter (6 page)

But a will-o’-the-wisp, too. She could be blown away with a puff of breath. The fabric of her yellow dress, which was tied to the back in a girlish bow, was thin, almost transparent. He glanced at her again. He could make out shadows behind the thin fabric. It struck him that there was no inconsonance between the word that had occurred to him and the person he was seeing, the brilliance of her yellow dress flashing now against her dark skin not unlike the ethereal light flitting across the dark night in the marshes in England.

“Gin and tonic for you, Inspector?”

Mumsford was so deep in his ruminations, unsettled somewhat by the likeness he had made between the slight woman before him and England (though the comparison he had made was not with her and England but with her and a fairy, not a person in England) that he literally jumped when Gardner’s voice cut across his thoughts.

“Something the matter, Inspector?” Gardner asked.

Mumsford patted his hands down his jacket and folded them over his belt buckle. “I was dreaming,” he said hastily. “Of England. All this reminded me.”

Gardner smiled. “It happens to me sometimes. So will it be gin and tonic, or rum punch?”

“Neither, sir. I can’t have alcohol, sir. Not on the job, sir,” Mumsford said.

“Neither?”

“No, sir.”

Gardner considered his answer for a moment and then threw up his hands. “Then so it will be. But none of the formalities, John, okay? Call me Peter.”

“If you don’t mind, sir,” Mumsford said, “I’d prefer to call you by your surname, sir.”

Gardner frowned and crossed his legs. “If that is what you want.”

“And me, sir. I’d prefer if you’d call me Inspector Mumsford, sir.”

“By God, John, we’re in my house.”

“I’m here on an investigation, sir. If you don’t mind, it should be Inspector Mumsford, sir.”

“Then it shall.” Gardner slapped his knees. “Ariana, ask Inspector Mumsford what he’d like to drink.”

Ariana stepped toward them.

“Orange juice will be fine,” Mumsford said.

“Orange juice and my drink,” Dr. Gardner said to Ariana. She lifted her eyes to his and then quickly lowered them. “So go now,” Gardner said and fluttered his fingers in an exaggerated gesture of irritation. She hesitated. “Go,” Gardner said softly. Her lips parted in a brief smile, and then she turned and walked to the door, her hair swinging behind her, thick and dark, the two tiny globes of her backside clearly outlined under her thin dress.

“And pin up your hair, for God’s sake.”

Yes, Mumsford had no doubt; it was she he had seen dashing across the room without a stitch of clothing on her body. There was no mistaking that, nor the desire palpable in Gardner’s voice.

“They are all the same,” Gardner said and tugged his lower lip. “She, a little better than the others, but for the most part, they have such natures that nurture can never stick.”

“Nurture, sir?”

“Upbringing, Inspector.” His head was still turned in the direction of the door that had closed behind Ariana. “They have no upbringing. And it is a waste of time to educate them.” He dropped his hand and settled back in his chair.

Mumsford reached for his briefcase on the floor. “Well, to the matter in question, sir.”

“The matter in question?” Gardner looked at him, the furrows tightening on his brow as if he didn’t understand.

“The reason I am here, sir,” Mumsford said. “The boy.”

“Ah, the boy.” The furrows smoothened, then tightened again.

“Carlos Codrington, sir.” Mumsford brought the briefcase to his lap and opened it.

“He is the one on whom nurture can least stick,” Gardner said. He sat up and flicked off a piece of lint from the leg of his trousers. “You can have no idea of the pains I took to help him. Did you know I taught him to read?”

“You taught him?”

But Gardner was not listening to him. “Ariana!” he shouted, and when she did not answer him, he called her again. “Ariana, the inspector didn’t ask you to pick the oranges. How long does it take to pour orange juice in a glass?”

The sound of glass clinking against glass filtered into the drawing room.

“Ariana!” Gardner raised his voice for the third time. This time there was silence behind the door, a quiet so complete that though Gardner had set the record player to its lowest volume, the music seemed suddenly loud, the mournful sighs of violin and piano as the needle moved to another track on the record framing the tension in the room.

“I’m not very thirsty,” Mumsford said.

Gardner looked from him to the door and back again at him. “You were telling me you taught the boy.” Mumsford tried again, hoping to refocus him.

“I taught him to speak properly,” Gardner said.

Mumsford took his notebook and pen from his briefcase. From the corner of his eye, he could see the door crack open, a slight sliver of a crack, a line, but enough to reveal yellow flickering in the narrow space between the door frame and the door.

“Now he speaks like an Englishman,” Gardner was saying.

“He, sir?” It was Mumsford’s turn to be distracted.

“Carlos. We are speaking about Carlos, Inspector.”

“Yes, yes. Carlos.” When he looked again, the yellow was gone.

“He was speaking like the rest of them when I came here,” Gardner said. “Dat and dis and dey, as if there were no th’s in the English language. He used to say,
I ’as
instead of
I do.
Now, you wouldn’t believe it. Like a proper Englishman.”

Mumsford opened his notebook.
He must have made a mistake. There
was no yellow near the door.
“So you would say, sir,” he said, writing determinedly, “that in some instances nurture stuck.”

“Stuck?”

“What you were saying, sir, about nature,” Mumsford said.

“Yes, I know what I was saying, Mumsford.”

“That will be Inspector Mumsford, sir. If you don’t mind, sir.”

“Yes, I know what I said, Inspector Mumsford, but if you had waited a while you would have heard the rest. Carlos speaks like an Englishman only when he is sober. The rest of the time, which is most of the time, he speaks like a common sailor.”

“An English sailor, sir?” Mumsford scribbled more notes in his notebook.

“Yes, yes, by God, an English sailor, Inspector. And he curses as one, too.”

“So you’d say on the night in question . . .”

“It wasn’t night.”

“Then day, sir?”

“Yes, day.”

“Well, you’d say on the day in question he was drunk?”

Gardner became agitated. He bent his head and picked nervously at the loose threads on the pocket of his shirt. Mumsford could see the roots of his hair. Red, English red, he was certain that was the color of Gardner’s hair before the sun had stripped it.
Dirty color rust,
he scribbled in his notebook.

“What are you writing now, Inspector?” Gardner snapped back his head and glared at him.

“The details of the case,” Mumsford said. And at that moment he felt a surge of pity for him. He had been sun-dried, bleached like a piece of driftwood.

“I haven’t given you the details of the case, Inspector,” Gardner said gruffly.

“About the event happening in the day, not the night, sir.” Gardner sighed and sat back in his chair. “He was not drunk on the day in question,” he said. He looked tired, a wrinkled old man, though he was not much past fifty.

Not for me, Mumsford thought. I will not turn into a leathery old man before my time. After this matter has ended, the perpetrator put in jail, I will submit my resignation, return to England, marry a young English girl, settle down in some quiet English countryside. Next year will not find me here.

“Yes. That would have been quite another matter, indeed,” he said to Gardner, the picture he had formed in his head softening his tone.

“Another matter?” Gardner asked.

“One can never tell what a man is capable of doing when he is drunk,” Mumsford said.

“Well, he wasn’t.” Gardner sat up. “Not that day.”

“Other days then?” Mumsford asked. He did not want to agitate him again, but the deposition had to be precise.

Gardner smoothed back the wrinkles on his cheeks. “Other days,” he said. “Other days.” His voice trailed.

He must have been handsome once, Mumsford thought. In England his skin would not have turned to leather. In England his red hair would have been streaked with bronze, not rust, the detestable sun would not have hardened his eyes, and there would have been muscles, not wires in his arms.

“When?” he asked. “Which other days?”

But Gardner’s mind was on Ariana again. He turned toward the door through which she had exited moments ago.

“Ariana!” He was calling her again. “Ariana!”

This time Mumsford was certain of the yellow. He saw it move. She had been standing there all along, behind the door, listening to them.

“Ariana!”

The sliver of yellow widened and she was in the room, smiling, balancing a tray with two glasses on it, one the color of orange juice, the other a disturbing blue.

“I come to answer your best pleasure, Dr. Gardner. Whether you want me to fly, to swim, to dive into the fire, to ride on the clouds. I come to do your bidding task.” She batted her eyes and swung her hips.

Mumsford strangled a gasp. He could not believe the change in her. Minutes before she was surly, pouting, refusing to answer him.

“Moody today, aren’t you, Ariana?” Gardner got up and took the glasses from the tray.

“Your thoughts are mine,” she said.

“And so they should be, Ariana.” Gardner stood close to her, so close that he would only have to lean forward slightly and their lips would meet.

“Tell me your pleasure, my commander. Is there more toil?”

Mumsford had to strain his ears to hear her.

“No,” Gardner said softly, his voice a caress. “There is no more toil.”

Their whispered intimacy embarrassed Mumsford. He flipped through the pages of his notebook, busying himself. The whispering continued, Ariana’s voice gliding seductively across the room, Gardner’s at once gruff and plaintive but so low Mumsford could not discern the words.

Mumsford coughed again and shifted his body nosily in his chair, but nothing worked. Then, when he least expected it, Gardner’s voice changed from an anxious drone to a harsh whisper and then to a command. “Well, be off with you,” Mumsford heard him say. He caught Ariana’s eyes. There was something curiously submissive in her expression. He had seen that look before—many times it seemed lately— when he apprehended a native: a shading over the eyes that did little to mask fear, feelings of powerlessness, of defeat, and yet somehow beneath the fear, defiance.

Gardner raised his voice again and ordered Ariana to leave. She threw her head back and walked slowly and deliberately out of the room, tossing her hair over her shoulders and swaying her hips seductively from side to side as if she knew, as indeed it was true, that Gardner’s eyes would be glued on her.

When the door clicked shut, Gardner explained: “She wants something. They are childish that way. They pout, and when that doesn’t work, they turn on the charm. Soon she’ll sulk.”

What was it she wanted?
The question formed in Mumsford’s mind, but he knew better than to ask it. The commissioner’s instructions were explicit. He was not to arouse suspicions in Dr. Gardner that Ariana had betrayed him, that the day before she had sent a letter by a boatman with an accusation of her own:
He tell a lie. Mr. Prospero lie.

“I taught her those words.” Gardner handed Mumsford the glass with the drink the color of orange juice. “Quite an actress, wouldn’t you say?”

Mumsford brought his glass quickly to his lips to hide his consternation. A performance, perhaps, but more natural than artificial, Gardner’s words about nature and nurture still lingering in his head.

“Mine is special,” Gardner said, holding up the drink with the bluish hue and regarding it from the distance of his arm. “It’s something I’ve concocted. It builds the mind.” He pointed to his right temple.

It looked like poison, Mumsford thought, but that was none of his business. Nor was Gardner’s relationship with Ariana. Whether Gardner was putting on his clothes when he came to the door, whether Ariana had been naked and had run to the back of the house to dress, whether she and Gardner had been fucking like pigs, none of that mattered. That was not why he was here. He took two more sips from his orange juice, put down the glass, reached into his pocket for his handkerchief, dabbed his lips dry, and began. “So, sir, back to the business that brings me here.” He sat forward on his chair, his pen poised over his notebook. “Can you tell me, sir, what happened exactly on that day? I am assuming, of course, we are speaking in privacy.”

“Ariana is in the kitchen.” Gardner continued to regard his drink.

“Can’t she hear us, sir?”

Gardner swirled the blue liquid in his glass. “It’s no matter,” he said vacantly.

“And the young man . . .”

“As I wrote to the commissioner, the young man, as you call him, is safely locked up in the back of the house.”

“Yes, yes. But your daughter, sir?”

“My daughter has gone to Trinidad for a few days.”

The commissioner had not told him that, and Mumsford wondered whether he knew.

Gardner seemed to read the puzzlement on his face. “It so happens that her intended . . .”

“Her intended? Is she engaged, sir?”

“I didn’t say so, Inspector. Her intended, the man who intends to marry her . . . It so happens he is here on holiday.”

“She is fifteen, isn’t she, sir?”

“She is fifteen, Inspector.” Gardner stated the fact bluntly, his eyes challenging Mumsford to make more of his statement.

Mumsford looked away. “A bit young, don’t you think, sir?” he asked. He softened the inflection at the end so his question would not sound as harsh as the thoughts that ran through his head:
Fifteen?

“I am her father,” Gardner said. “I will be the judge of that.”

“I was just saying, sir . . .”