Prospero's Daughter. Elizabeth Nunez

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ walked away.

      * * *

      Mumsford had brought handcuffs, but he did not use them. After Carlos spat on Gardner’s face and cursed him, he seemed ready to leave, anxious even. “Can we go now?” he asked Mumsford. His voice was as cool as ice.

      Why had Gardner not retaliated? Why hadn’t he struck him or insisted that Mumsford beat him with his baton? Why, when they faced each other, was Gardner the first to turn away? The conclusion Mumsford came to was the same one he had arrived at minutes before: Carlos had committed no real crime. The expression of his desire to have babies with Virginia was an insult to Gardner, no more. Still, to spit in the face of an Englishman!

      “That was disrespectful.” He said so to Carlos.

      “He deserved it.” Carlos’s breathing had slowed. He spoke without emotion, as if merely stating an obvious fact.

      And perhaps it was an obvious fact. The boy had been tortured. It had irked Mumsford when the commissioner had told him to take Carlos to the monks. Jail, he thought, would have been more appropriate for the perpetrator of a crime against an English girl. But he was grateful now for the commissioner’s insistence, now after he had witnessed Gardner’s cruelty.

      “I’m not taking you to jail,” he said, wanting to put the boy at ease. “The commissioner has asked me to bring you to the monks at St. Benedict’s.”

      The young man remained stubbornly silent, but Mumsford saw the muscles on the side of his face loosen and his jaw relax.

      “There will be no more punishment, Codrington.”

      He wanted to say more to him, but decided it would be imprudent. The fact remained that the investigation was not yet over. He had yet to speak to Virginia, to get her side of the story.

      The boatman was waiting at the spot where he said he would be. The moment he saw Carlos, he came quickly toward him. “Is good you leaving, Mister Carlos,” he said. He grabbed his hand and shook it vigorously.

      Mumsford frowned at him, unsettled by the honorific. Mister?

      The boatman paid no attention to his frown. “You lead the way, Mister Carlos,” he said.

      Carlos smiled and walked in front of him. Mumsford had no choice but to follow, and the boatman picked up the rear.

      No one spoke on the brief walk to the water, the silence broken only by the swish of branches, the call of birds, the occasional pebble rolling downhill. Once a twig snapped and then another, rapidly, behind it. Mumsford turned around sharply. “Iguana,” the boatman said. “Plenty in the bush.” But when they neared the clearing, Mumsford saw the unmistakable flicker of yellow between the greens and browns in the bushes.

       Ariana!

      He told the boatman to wait in the boat with Carlos and he went to the place where he had seen the yellow. Ariana parted the branches and appeared before him.

      “I tell you a lot about Carlos and Miss Virginia but not now. I can’t stay.” She held up her hand.

      Mumsford brushed aside the flicker of irritation that flashed through him and concentrated. “Can you come to the station?” he asked.

      “I come tomorrow. Tomorrow is Friday. He study on Friday; read he books all day. I come ten o’clock.”

      “Ten o’clock is fine. But won’t he miss you?”

      “Prospero miss nobody when he read his books.”

      It was not the time to ask the question, but Mumsford could not help himself. “Why do you call him Prospero?” he asked.

      She shrugged. “He prosperous. He rich.”

      “So that is it?”

      “Ask Carlos. If it have another reason, Carlos know. Is he who give him the name.”

      But it made no sense to ask Carlos then or during the sea crossing to Trinidad. It was clear he was determined not to speak, to remain in stony silence no matter what was said to him. When he did speak, as he was getting off the boat in Trinidad, it was to utter only four short sentences. He said them not to Mumsford and not to the boatman, either. It was as if he were speaking to himself, having felt a need to hear his own voice.

      “My mother,” he said, “was blue-eyed, but she was not a hag. She was beautiful. The house was hers. He stole it from me.”

      FOUR

      PETER GARDNER, as Mumsford could have surmised from his cagey answers, had not come for the lepers. He did not stay because of them. He would never have chosen this hellhole to raise his daughter. If he were forced to tell the truth, he would have said it was his innocence that had brought him here. His naïveté. His trust sans bounds and confidence in a brother who, next to his daughter, of all the world he loved. A brother who had clung to him like ivy but only to suck him dry. Only to hide his talent from others.

      They were doctors, he and Paul, when he used to live in London. Peter and Paul Bidwedder, before he changed his surname to Gardner. His parents, ardent Christians when their sons were born, named them for the loyal disciples of Christ, but regretted their decision later, with the war, after the deaths of so many of England’s most promising. After an explosion in a field in France brought their father back home a quadriplegic. By the time he and Paul left for medical school, their parents were proselytizing atheists.

      It was because of their father that he and Paul decided to become doctors. He chose research, for unlike Paul, he was happiest when he was in the library, his head buried in a pile of dusty books. He told his father that he believed it was possible to grow new arms and legs for him in the laboratory. He was sure it was only a matter of figuring out the right cells and stimulating them. Then, when they multiplied into arms and legs, he would attach them where the old limbs had been amputated.

      Voodoo medicine, Paul called it, but their father grabbed on to the hope Peter offered. “Maybe not as perfect as the ones you had before, Father, but they could grow back almost as strong.”

      Paul scoffed at him. He was the realist, the practical man. He spoke of a future of mechanical artificial limbs. Better still, robots that could respond to human command.

      “You wouldn’t have to do a thing,” Paul said to his father. “It would be like having a personal servant.”

      His father preferred the fantasies Peter spun for him.

      “All it would take is figuring out the human genome,” Peter said. “Then we would have the secret to life. We could even make a clone of you, Father.”

      Their mother, who loved Paul best anyhow, was horrified. “Dr. Frankenstein was a monster,” she said.

      Peter waved her away. “Oh, those ideas are passé,” he said. “No one is planning to use the dead.”

      “Playing God,” she said.

      “Yes, playing God,” Paul repeated after her, but even when he was ridiculing Peter envy was eating him up.

      In medical school, it was obvious that the professors admired Peter. He was СКАЧАТЬ