The President's Daughter (47 page)

Thance said little to me about the accident, as if evoking it would evoke another long-ago accident. He and Abraham left for the Cape on our own ship, the
Rachel,
the end of January. Although Thance had little experience of Africa, Thor was on the verge of discovering a vaccine and had acquiesced to his twin going.

The
Rachel
carried a cargo of whale oil and would return with a shipment of raw materials for medicines, plus Zanzibar spices and red pepper. The
Rachel
reached Cape Town in the spring of 1843.

Yet the morality of a thing cannot depend on our knowledge or ignorance of its cause. Not knowing why a particular side of an unloaded die turns up cannot make the act of throwing it, or of betting on it, immoral. If we consider games of chance immoral, then every pursuit of human industry is immoral.

Thomas Jefferson

It was the twenty-first of March 1843, in the bush near Bulawayo, South Africa, twenty days after Abe's and my arrival.

I had always sensed a strange loneliness in my wife, Harriet, from the very beginning. Even though I and the other Wellingtons surrounded her with love, there existed an inner furnace of solitude in Harriet which consumed her day and night, fueled by God knows what terrors. I once found a dagger in her skirt pocket and discovered she went abroad armed.

My mother put it down to Harriet's sudden loss of her entire family in the yellow-fever epidemic, but my mother blamed that tragedy for everything she didn't understand about Harriet. I felt it to be more a sense of displacement than of loss, as if Harriet, having been thrust out of her native South into the world, with no other protection than a distantly related guardian who himself was a foreigner, had become a displaced person herself: a domestic immigrant in her own country.

During the long voyage on the
Rachel,
Abe and I spent our time working in our makeshift laboratory or speaking of our respective wives. Through Abe's evocation of Thenia, I thought to discover some clue to Harriet's secretiveness. I suspected that Thenia knew my wife much better than I. also
suspected some southern family secret between them, and I wondered if Abe was privy to this information. If he was, he didn't let on. He seemed to know as little about Thenia as I knew about Harriet, except that they were both Virginia orphans: one black and one white. I knew my wife had rescued Thenia from slavery, had educated and protected her, and in turn Thenia had lavished fierce love, loyalty, and silence upon her.

I wondered about many things that were mysterious to me. Harriet loved me, I was certain. But that love seemed to bring her no serenity. She seemed to live in perpetual contradiction with something inside herself. Sometimes I found her staring at Sinclair or me or one of the twins in the strangest way. Her children seemed to have some other, supplemental meaning for her. God knows she was a perfect mother, protective as a lioness, just, patient, and infinitely adoring. Yet a bonfire of rage seemed to burn inside her, and there existed a well of loneliness so deep, so sad, that even the force of my love was inadequate. I could not free her from her internal enigma and the flame of its everlasting sadness and eternal silence, try as I might to quell that belligerent flame, it burned like a nightlight in her soul, even in our most intimate moments—moments so fragile, so passionate, so superb that to speak of them makes my heart stop in remembered happiness. I never understood
the origin
of her distress, and not understanding it induced in me a corresponding loneliness. To combat the feeling, I threw myself into my work and drew away from her mysteries, which seemed to me altogether too southern, too perverse, especially since she had all that might be deemed happiness for her sex: a spouse, a home, her friends, an adoring family, devoted children, and a talent for music.

But Harriet was afraid, and her fear, I believe, expressed itself in a certain detachment from her children, as if they were not to be loved too much for they might be snatched away at any moment. As if they were not
hers,
but only
in her keeping.

She also possessed a fanatic abhorrence to any kind of oppression or inhumanity to man, an almost irrational rile which manifested itself in an exaggerated enthusiasm for all kinds of causes: abolition, world peace, temperance, transcendentalism, women's rights, protection of animals, protection of Indians. She espoused them all with a fervor and dedication hardly matched in her own domestic life. I do not exaggerate. After Thenia's marriage, she refused to employ Irish nannies for the twins because Irish thugs had beaten up Abraham Boss. She railed against the fact that Philadelphia's blacks were not allowed to ride in the new horse-drawn streetcars. She risked her social standing and that of our entire family by hiding fugitives. She petitioned Congress on behalf of mulattoes suing for their freedom, on behalf of the antislavery cause, on behalf of immediate emancipation. Her excuse was always the magnanimous
one: she had so much—so much love, luck, money, health—that it was criminal not to share her good fortune with the unfortunate, the disinherited of this earth.

Music made her cry. Pictures made her cry. Novels made her cry. Orphans, babies, old people, even Negroes made her cry. Melancholy became the
fleur de peau
of her character, yet her glowing high spirits, her beauty, which she considered a burden, gave it lie. She had not aged one single instant in sixteen years. I had taken on a few gray hairs, I tired more quickly, and the spectacles I had once used as a conceit were now a real necessity. Yet my wife's skin was as smooth, her complexion as fresh, her body as firm, slim, and strong, her hands as fine and unblemished as the day I met her.

Charlotte used to tease me by saying Harriet must sleep in the embalming fluid I used for my specimens. Even Thor, returning home after long absences in Africa, would comment on the remarkable preservation of Harriet's beauty. Sometimes we would speak of it far into the night. We praised her looks, her southernness, her courage, her will, her sweetness, her intelligence, her devotion. Often I would gaze at her while she slept and, with wonder and gratefulness, thank the generous God who had placed such a woman in my keeping. At times I had the distinct feeling that Harriet felt
she
protected
me,
and that, too, pleased me. A warrior woman like my mother (God rest her soul) had always had a particular attraction for me, but Harriet seemed to aspire to more than this. She searched for roles which placed her in the center of tragedy, comedy, or farce, it didn't really matter which, as long as she deemed it Life.

Thor always brought that sense of life back with him: that crowded nuance and musk
of
the unknown and unknowable Africa, with its exuberance, its mystery, its violence and brutality, its danger, its fatality. He would blow in with Africa's smells and hazards and elucidations, and Harriet would smile and burn and glow and present him a new niece or nephew. Then he was off again, returning years later to a new niece or nephew and to our laboratory, where his foliage and bark, roots and leaves and spores, were dissected and analyzed, distilled into science, knowledge, pharmacy.

The mysteries of alchemy linked Thor and me together as brothers night after night, in experiment after experiment, repeating the same gestures, distilling the same substances. In a way, this was what I had wanted to do with Harriet. Distill the essence of the woman, hammer her into a powder, bottle her, put her on a shelf, study her, adore her, admire her color, her taste, her viscosity, and believe that what was on the label was in the vial. Because I didn't believe in chance. I didn't believe I would ever commit another mistake after that first and fatal one with Thor. He believed that that mistake, which had separated him from me forever, which had made him worth half of himself, like a slave, would carry me safely through the rest of my life.
Harriet believed this, too: that the one overwhelming tragedy of her life would carry her through, pay for her passage through the rest of time. How could she have known that other, egregious rules were at play? In trying to eliminate the accidental from my life, I brought about its fatality ten times over. Chance. What the scientific mind excludes.

A slip of the lip. In the intimacy of a warped starry night on the
Rachel,
Abe referred to Thenia as Harriet's niece. In all innocence, I didn't even ask him what he meant or to repeat what he said. Each star had burst with revelation. My mouth fell open and I swallowed the closest one—a burning, brilliant coal which raced through my entrails and rose a hot clump in the back of my brain. Harriet's mother had had to be a colored woman. A slave. God. Damned. Virginian. He had made Harriet lie to her children.

I listed like the
Rachel,
sinking, moving forward, drawn by the pluck of some great force from within, for home, for country, for my sons, for Harriet … and the deck went by slowly, inexorably, like the great, slow blade of the Schuylkill.

Wait! I feel a draft behind me—like the small tornadoes we suffer on the Transvaal plains. There is the whistle of steel. A thud. A kind of blindness filled with extraordinary pain. There is nothing wrong with my eyes, but a veil of darkness has descended over them like pitch. Except it's red. It's my own blood. Help! Help! Abraham. Abraham is near me. I hear him. He's screaming something—what? I can't make out what it is. Suddenly, I see his arm hacked off. He looks surprised. He swoons; his arm flies off in space, its finger still pointing. Or is it I who have sunk further down into blood? Another blow, this time sharpened steel, not wood. Oh God. It makes a different sound. Harriet. My wife. My love. This is death. A shroud memory engulfs me. My mother's hand on my brow, how my father's dark green tartan overcoat smelled in the rain, the night Thor fell, Harriet's wedding dress and her scent of roses, Sinclair's freshly washed hair. The twins. Oh, Harriet, my chest is open to the sky. My heart is beating outside its cavity. So beautiful to see. There's Abraham and Mother. Stop the drums. This is death. This is death. This is death. Harriet …

BY DIPLOMATIC POUCH VIA THE AFRICAN PATROL VESSEL,
WANDERER,
WITH A COPY TO BE DELIVERED BY HAND BY CAPTAIN LEWIS OF THE
RACHEL
. MARCH
23, 1843

Dear Madam,

As Brigadier General, Division Commander of the Third Regiment of Her Majesty Victoria's Royal Scouts and Lancers, I have the sad and tragic duty to inform you that the expeditionary camp of Dr. William John
Thadius Wellington was attacked Sunday night, March 21, near Bulawayo, by a raiding party of Zulu warriors in revolt against the authority of the Royal forces of Her Majesty's Third Regiment near Durban in the Province of Natal and in retaliation for an unprovoked attack by Boers against the Zulu village of Bulawayo, which caused the death of the Ngwane Prince, Ngoza. A military rescue mission which arrived in the early hours of Thursday, the 22nd of March, 1843, found the camp devastated and all its occupants massacred. The raiders were not apprehended. Wellington's body was found and buried with full military honors on the spot to await your instructions. His assistant, Abraham Boss, himself a Ndebele, was found nearby badly wounded, and when he subsequently died of his injuries, his body was buried next to your husband's.

Please believe me, Madam, that you elicit my highest respects and deepest condolences and sympathy. Our Foreign Office will forward to you the complete official report on your husband's death.

May God have mercy on Dr. Wellington's soul.

Respectfully,

Brig. Gen. Banastre Tarleton II

I was born to lose everything I love. Others may lose of their abundance, but I of my want, have lost even the half of all I had.

Thomas Jefferson

The shape of the world. The line of the Equator. The Tropic of Cancer. How many times had Thance explained to me how the world turned?

Brigadier General Tarleton's letter was already posted, and the world turned on its axis. Oblivious, I continued living, as yet deprived of knowledge, as half my life disappeared. The children and I waited for news from the Cape via the clippers, the barques, the schooners, the packets, the brigs, and the sloops that crisscrossed the oceans, the world, the line that divided it into northern and southern hemispheres.

Perfectly happy, I wrote out my inventories in the warehouse, bathed my children, listened to the woes of the twins and the joys of Ellen Wayles and Jane Elizabeth, ran my house, grew my vegetables, invented my menus, laid out clothes, counted linen, paid bills, played music, and rescued runaways. I polished the prosperous surface of my false life until it glistened like a pane of glass.

And I believed life continued in harmony with this circular, diametrical motion of the seasons, the tides, the constellations, and a woman's cycle. I was four months pregnant and so was Thenia. We planned this unexpected gift as a homecoming present for Thance and Abraham. I stored this knowledge up inside myself, surrounded first by my womb, then the armor of my body, and beyond that, my house, my city, and my comfortable place in American society as Mrs. Thadius Wellington.

The
Rachel
arrived April thirty-first, four months ahead of schedule. Even
before she docked, she dispatched a longboat to the wharf, where the captain found Thor and me at the warehouse. There was no need for words. The early, unexpected, and unannounced arrival of the empty
Rachel
spelled disaster. The captain's face, his helpless gestures told us the rest. And suddenly my world stopped turning on its axis.

“I should never have let Thance go alone ... even with Abe.” Thor's cry of despair and anguish froze my own grief into a diamond-hard compassion for him.

Word was already out that the
Rachel
had returned empty when Thenia burst into the warehouse. But, like all of us, so enamored with our own pumping hearts and circulating blood, she could stare death in the face and still disbelieve. She ignored the captain and addressed me directly.