Prospero's Daughter. Elizabeth Nunez

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ was no question—consummation would have been repulsive to him, but Dr. Gardner had given him no proof of consummation. Attempted was the word he used, and the accusation was a garble of words about peopling the island.

      Male concupiscence. Lust. Lascivious intent. Mumsford could find the young man guilty of no more than these. Contemptible, yes. The boy, like the rest of his kind, was prone to carnal lechery, but he had done nothing more than reveal his dirty longings to Gardner.

      But why? Mumsford’s detective mind churned. What was his motive for exposing filthy thoughts to Gardner? Only a fool would be so stupid as to make his intentions known to the very person he intended to hurt. Only a predator gone daft in the head would warn his prey, and yet the boy did not look like a fool. No one capable of sustaining such control over his expression while he was being taunted was a fool.

      Surely the boy knew that Gardner would not have welcomed his crude overtures toward his daughter. But were his overtures crude? People, Gardner said Carlos wanted to do. People as in make babies with his daughter.

      Crude overtures, yes, because she was an English girl; crude because he was a colored man. But Mumsford had seen the chief medical officer get away with this sort of crudeness. He and the chief justice had married Englishwomen and had brown babies with them. These were indecencies to him, and he presumed to all red-blooded Englishmen—to Gardner—but one did not imprison a man for these indecencies.

      Was there more? Was Gardner hiding more? Was it possible that his daughter’s jewel, her virgin knot as he called it, had been broken? Had the boy done more than reveal his dark desires, his criminal intent?

      Was it shame, embarrassment, that caused Gardner to hide the crime? He said, he intimated, that his daughter’s chances for marriage with the American from Boston had been in jeopardy. The man from New England would not marry a slut, he said. Yet Mumsford was certain that Gardner would not have let Carlos off so lightly had he done this, had he raped his daughter. He would have told the commissioner, he would have secured Carlos’s punishment—his death possibly—discreetly, in secret. No, it was not likely that Carlos had raped Dr. Gardner’s daughter.

      Mumsford had already arrived at this conclusion when Carlos appeared from the back of the house, alone. There were no restraints whatsoever on his body. There would have been restraints if he were wrong, Mumsford thought. If the boy had committed such a crime, Gardner would not have let him leave without at least manacling his wrists. He wanted him off the island, that was all, Mumsford decided. He wanted him out of the way when his daughter returned, out of the way in case desire turned into actuality, in case the next time the boy would not declare, but would do what he so foolhardily confessed to be his intention.

      Now cleaned up, dressed in beige pants and a pink long-sleeved cotton shirt, the boy seemed harmless to Mumsford, incapable of that kind of barbarity.

      Misshapen? He had seen him bare-chested. His shoulders were broad, his torso muscular, his hips slim. Was it the shape of his backside that had caused Gardner to tell that lie? Mumsford had heard the snickering in the Country Club. Tails. No one believed it, but it made for raucous laughter when the blacks left and they had the billiard room to themselves.

      Mumsford blushed remembering how his eyes had strayed there, but he had felt compelled to examine the boy as he walked toward the house in front of him. His torso was shorter, his buttocks more pronounced than the average Englishman’s. High, but not misshapen.

      He was facing him now and the blood and pus had been washed off. He had to admit he was handsome; even the freckles were not unattractive. There were pink blotches on his face for sure, and around his ears and neck where the skin was broken, but the freckles spread across his cheekbones seemed to him like chocolate dust sprinkled over a butterscotch brown cake.

      It bothered Mumsford that this pleasant image should come to him at this moment, dredged from a happy time in his childhood. Yet something about Carlos’s face, his skin—butterscotch brown was indeed how he would describe his color—reminded him of toffee and chocolate, and the brown cake he loved as a child.

      And perhaps his gaffe with Gardner had its source from these times, too, when he was a boy, in the early years after the war. He had known better, of course. He had seen freckles on many an Englishman’s face. But the talk in those years in the streets where he lived in England was about the coloreds, the flood of immigrants from the colonies, coming to England now that the country had been battered. “Reverse colonization,” his father called it. “They come to take what we have worked for.”

      Signs warned dark-skinned immigrants that they were not welcome. No dogs. No coloreds. Some were more humiliating: Pets. No coloreds. But nothing stopped these sons and daughters of the Commonwealth. They came in droves from India, Pakistan, China, Africa, the West Indies, from every corner of the world where the sun set on lands the British had colonized, trusting in the propaganda of the Mother Country, believing in her gospel of fair play and justice. When asked, their response was naïve. Their oil, tobacco, cotton, sugar, bananas had made the Mother Country rich. Surely it was their turn.

      The fear among the men was, naturally, the vulnerability of the women. What would happen if a colored man fucked a white woman? Mumsford and his school chums spent many an amusing hour making up answers—Stripes like a zebra, spots like a leopard. Freckles—all the time trying to smother hysteria.

      Say something enough times and myth becomes fact, lies truth, Mumsford now admitted to himself. Carlos had freckles and the skin color of a colored man, but, as he grudgingly had to accede, the facial features of many an Englishman he knew: broad brow; thin lips; a wide, substantial chin; blue eyes undoubtedly inherited from his mother.

      The blue eyes made Mumsford uneasy. They were disconcerting, strange to him on a brown face.

      “Have you taken all you’ll need?” Carlos was standing in front of him, obviously ready to leave, but he had not uttered a single word. “Ready?” Mumsford jerked his head toward the black duffel bag he was holding.

      The young man nodded, but his lips remained sealed.

      He could not figure him out. He could not tell if he was afraid or relieved to be going with him. His eyes told him nothing. They were blank, empty of any expression Mumsford could discern. “Well then,” Mumsford said, when it was clear that Carlos would not answer him, “I’ll let Dr. Gardner know we are leaving.”

      But before he could step forward, the front door opened and Gardner came running out, his shirttails flapping behind him. “See that he rots in jail,” he shouted to Mumsford.

      Carlos made a gurgling sound and puckered his lips.

      “Until his flesh rots.” Gardner had reached where they were standing.

      What happened next so paralyzed both Mumsford and Gardner that neither man moved, stunned by the audacity of it, shocked by the intensity of the rage that had produced it. Had Mumsford been looking at Carlos at the time and seen his eyes narrow to slits and the venom pooled there, he might have anticipated it when he heard the gurgling coming from Carlos’s direction. But he was facing Gardner, and he saw what happened after it happened, after Carlos had done it.

      He saw the stream of spit jetting forward, he saw it land with absolute accuracy on the tip of Gardner’s nose; he saw it slide and drain onto his top lip, and his feet, like Gardner’s, froze to the ground.

      Carlos came close to Gardner. He was breathing hard; his nostrils flared. “You taught me your language well and I use it now to curse you. May you burn in hell, motherfucker!”

      Gardner’s СКАЧАТЬ