Sleeping Beauty (3 page)
And, yes, thank you, I am better. Much better. Terrible of me to have felt so sorry for myself in my last letter. The above brought my spirits up considerably. But there is another reason I am feeling less woebegone. Don’t laugh. I still have my awful tooth. At the dentist’s today, the nicest young gentleman showed me how to ease the ache by sucking on clove buds. So now I intend to numb my pain with his tasty cure till the tooth either stops hurting or falls out!
The gentleman today had been to Africa, by the way. Stoker. Sir James Stoker, I think. Have you heard of him? He acted as if I should have, though in fact I know so little of England. (I laugh when I think that Mr. Pease wants my drawings to be more English. Does he want them to be grayer perhaps? Or wetter? Or more unfriendly, do you think? Don’t answer that.) You are right, of course: I know little of London and elsewhere because I keep too much to myself. Just to show you I am taking your advice, I am going out to dinner tonight with three rich, calculating friends. I will spend all evening listening to jokes about things like dividends, interest rates, and negotiable securities
.
Nothing like what I spoke of to my gallant hero in the dentist’s parlor. He was so impetuous. And young. He made me laugh with all his cheeky, flirtatious antics. All quite good for my conceit. Still, it would never do, would it, to be chummy with a stranger just because he pleased one’s vanity? And imagine the damage I could do a knight of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. In the end I was abrupt with him. For his own good. I am old enough and wise enough to know how to protect a man from his own imprudent gallantry
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Which I must now do a little with you, too, my dear: No, I do not think you should call me “Maman” nor address your letters thus. Please stop. No, people would not think it
“only natural.” “People” do not care that you are Horace Wild’s heir, that I am his widow, that you love and appreciate my “unconditional maternal support” of you (which is my pleasure, all my pleasure, dear heart), and that you wish to honor me before the eyes of the world. Bare in mind you are in England, which is not the “world” at large. If someone caught wind of this Mamanbusiness, the dust of my past could rise up—it could blacken your future. No. I say this firmly. I will hear no more of the matter
.
Oh, England, silly old cow that she is. I despair of ever making friends here. I envy you the way you slide into your English skin. I laugh when I see how British you’ve become again—in only two short weeks. (And, yes, you may take me to your “hole-in-the-wall tea house” for clotted cream, whatever that is. It sounds ghastly.)
I dreamed last night of Italy. Of our beautiful time there in a pretty house by the sea. How lucky we were. Not that we aren’t lucky now. We are, of course. Luckiest of all, I will see you soon. I delight in your enthusiasm for this new country. I bask in your affection and the private honor you do me daily
.
A thousand kisses,
Coco
I am finally able to write. I have been sick for untold numbers of days, weeks, months, perhaps years. Only God knows. As I staggered out of my hammock today, an equally disheartening fact greeted me: the chief of these people wears two of the micrometer microscopes of my altazimuth theodolite from his belt. I have no idea where the third has gone. It hardly matters. Two boys were given the wheels that determine the instrument’s horizontal and vertical axes, which they played with and lost. It is almost redundant to add that my sextant is missing or that its lens seems to have been fashionably affixed somehow into the chief’s wife’s ear. Children. I owe my life to children with Lilliputian minds
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From the diaries of James Stoker
Principle Geologist to the 1872–1876
Royal Geographical Society expedition
from Transval north into the Congo Basin
T
he party to which James had invited Mrs. Wild was, in fact, at Buckingham Palace, in the largest state ballroom—the only space of sufficient size to hold the public exhibit of what he’d brought back with him from Africa while also holding all the people in attendance at tonight’s opening of the exhibit. Half an hour ago, the Queen herself had come down from her rooms to pay a visit of fifteen unprecedented minutes. The Prince of Wales, the royal who usually saw to Her Majesty’s public duties since his father’s death, was due any moment.
Neither the Queen nor her son, however, was hosting the party; they were simply its most illustrious guests. The celebration was being given by the unlikely trio: the Royal Geographical Society, the University of Cambridge, and the Episcopate of England in the form of none other than the Most Reverend Father in God himself, the Archbishop of Canterbury, aided here in London by the good ladies of Mayfair and Belgravia, who had contributed what they contributed best: not cakes and pies, but rather money with which to buy the finest catering available. In a very high-society way, the gathering was a kind of church-supper-cum-gallery-opening-cum-hero’s-reception.
The party was ostensibly in James’s honor, a homecoming welcome of huge proportion—that is to say, in proportion to the monetary value of tonight’s exhibit, the figure (according to Lloyd’s of London, who’d insured it) being upward from four hundred fifty thousand pounds sterling. James had returned from a southern river basin, that of the Zubtzee River, with offerings from a remote and previously unknown Bantu people who called them
selves the Wakua. They had sent the “reigning chief of James Stoker’s tribe” gold implements and adornments hammered and worked with remarkable skill. Tonight, displayed along a hundred-foot dais against the ballroom’s east wall, sat twenty-four-carat gold platters, thick and heavy, soft and brilliant-yellow. Beside these, behind them, around them lay masses of bracelets and anklets and rings and breastplates, beautifully worked, exotically creative. The long gold-piled dais looked like something out of Burton’s Ali Baba tale—more like the open coffers of forty thieves than a gift from a simple, primitive tribe.
James stood at the far end of this display, momentarily free after two hours of all but uninterrupted congratulations. He glanced at the long run of Wakua gold, then averted his eyes. The sight vaguely unsettled him tonight. Set out in one place, all the shining yellow was a monstrous congeries. James had not realized it was so much.
The music had become a swaying blur an hour ago, one long, interchangeable waltz—at about the same time that all the ladies with whom James had been dancing had become an embarrassing muddle; he could no longer keep their names straight. Presently, he let the room swirl, content to watch the prisms of light from the chandeliers move through the crowd and over the gilt walls. His sense of movement was, he hoped, more the affect of four hundred or so people’s spinning and turning in a mass before him than the result of his consuming an imprecise number of glasses of champagne. There had been a lot of toasting when he had first come into the room, then some smaller private
rounds as he’d paid his respects to the university’s Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor, various chairs and heads of college, the president of the geographical society, and ultimately, the Queen of England.
“Dr. Stoker—” A gruff voice interrupted his peace as an elbow jostled into his arm. Champagne spilled over the rim of James’s glass onto his hand. “You brought all this back single-handedly?”
James turned to find the only guest of any importance to whom he had not yet spoken tonight, Nigel Athers, the Bishop of Swansbridge. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Athers’s immediate and only superior in ecclesiastical government, had sent him in his stead to represent the Church of England tonight.
James smiled benignly. “Well, not exactly alone, Bishop,” he said. “I had the help of almost four hundred carriers and twenty native scouts.” Not to mention the entire Wakua tribe as far as the Zambezi, eventually a caravan of several thousand camels, and finally Captain Layton and his crew of the British Royal Navy.
“But of your expedition party, you alone survived.”
James glanced down into his glass of champagne. “Yes,” he murmured.
“Amazing,” Athers said. Though he didn’t sound amazed. He sounded like what he was, an energetic and highly placed member of a large and powerful organization, a man who, until a week ago, had held to the position that all the gold before them belonged to the Church of England, saying God, as reigning chiefs went, superceded the Queen.
Last week, the Vice-Chancellor and the Bishop
had taken the joint position that the Crown was entitled to the golden tribute that had cost their people their lives—though “certain compensations” would have to be negotiated. This shared stand went on to propose that the “compensations” should be shared out “publically,” that is, that the university and church represented larger moral interests than “mere adventurers.”
James tried to stand clear of the fray, but he knew where his loyalties lay—with the Vice-Chancellor and the university, which alas meant that for the moment they must also lay with the contentious Bishop who stood beside him.
As if aside, Athers added, “Father Menlow informed me today that Ishmael Rogers of your expedition was supposed to have gotten twenty-eight pounds, two shillings with which he was to buy bibles in Cape Town.”
“Really?” James thought it impolitic to mention he didn’t care about how many blooming Bibles came along on a geological expedition.
“Yes. But, you see, Ishmael wired us from Capetown. He never mentioned Bibles. Never even mentioned the money. What I want to know is, Did he get the money, and where is it now?”
“Money?”
“The Bible Fund. What became of it?”
“I was not aware there was a Bible Fund.”
“There was. Rogers apparently expected to take three boxes of Bibles into the interior, Bibles that a monk had translated into Arabic.”
“Arabic,” James repeated flatly. He frowned at the Bishop. The thirty-some Bantu tribes in the southern regions of Africa had their own language
and dialects, all as far removed from Arabic as they were from English.
Athers continued. “What happened to the money Rogers was supposed to get?”
“I couldn’t begin to say. I know nothing about it.”
“It was your expedition.”
James had to hold back an indignant snort. “Dr. Athers, I only headed up the geological portion. I have no idea what went on in any number of other parts of the expedition. We divided up and were often separated, one group from the other, for months.” Seeing this was not going to appease his ecclesiastical sense of injustice, James offered, “But, if you are asking me to guess, I’d say any money Rogers had was buried with him. The people who found us had no clear notion of pounds sterling.”
Without missing a beat, Athers said, “Well, you are the only one remaining now, so I advise you not to guess. You’d best find out and prepare an official statement.”
James laughed. “For twenty-eight and two? You’re joking.” But Athers eyed him as seriously as if he were conducting a mass for the dead. James lifted one brow and said, “I won’t. Tell Menlow I’ll write him a bank draft for twenty-nine pounds out of my own account. That should suit him. I would think, Nigel”—James used the Bishop’s first name, an intentional leveling of the playing field—“you wouldn’t allow your subordinates to burden you or anyone else with trivia. My God, men died there.”
“It’s not the amount, it’s the principle.”
“Precisely.”
“The principle of the Church’s interests and investments being treated lightly from the start—”
But before James could hear, the conversation was sidetracked as someone clasped James round the shoulders.
A friendly voice broke in. “By God, Jamie, what a good show! What a bloody, splendid good show! Ai—Oh—Sorry, my lord Bishop—” It was Teddy Lamott, a fellow from All Souls, who continued with the cheerful nonchalance of a man well corked. “But what a dashed good show, all the same, what? All that glittery stuff taken into the proper care of an upstanding Englishman. God, Queen, and country, all that. Then carried up the whole bleeding—er, ’scuse me, blooming Continent and across the Med home. What a job, Jamie. Egad,
Sir
Jamie. Fine show, aye, old man….”
Teddy blathered on, with James stepping between his tipsy friend and Athers, separating the young man from a clergyman reputed to be a teetotaler.
Happily, something across the room distracted the Bishop momentarily.
James took the opportunity to murmur, “Teddy, you’re foxed. This is no place to make a fool of yourself.”
“Never mind. Guess who I just met?” Teddy didn’t wait for an answer but leaned toward James, saying in gleeful sotto voce, “Nicole Villars is who.”
“Who?”
“You know.” Teddy nodded in the direction of the orchestra, widening his eyes and wiggling his brow in a lusty manner. “That woman who reput
edly took a bath in champagne for the private benefit of Prince Napoleon back when, you know, France still had a shred of dignity. The one with the house on the Bois in Paris. She’s over there. We spoke. I’m sure it’s she.”
