Hunting Midnight (20 page)

“Let it go, James,” said Benjamin. “Please, let us return home. Midnight, come here and help me.”

“Make no mistake, we shall burn you all!” the necromancer cried. “We shall burn them for Christ, shall we not? And we shall send their smoke to Him on this holy night.”

With my heart beating so loud that I could hear little except my own fear, I screamed, “You are the foreigner here! And you are the one who will die!”

Pointing a damning finger at me, he exclaimed, “You are the devil. You shall not tempt me. You shall not win a victory in this City of God. I shall see you burned at the cross!”

This was too much for Papa to bear. He raised his cane above his head and was about to charge at him. More
powerful
by half than Lourenço Reis, I believe he would have beaten him senseless had he not been restrained by Benjamin and Midnight.

“I shall kill you!” Papa was shouting.

“No, James,” Benjamin said firmly. “Not now. I shall deal with him at the right moment. And when I get him, I shall send him straight back to hell. I promise you that.”

But Papa would not be dissuaded. “I shall murder you, you coward!” he swore.

The necromancer smiled, then raised his staff over his head and shouted, “Let us burn them now! Let us send their smoke to God.”

With Midnight’s help, Benjamin steered Papa back to our street. Something shattering had happened and no one could find the words to put the encounter into perspective. Mama had gone completely pale and stopped speaking altogether. We considered it best to return home.

There, with all the worry over Mama, Papa and Benjamin did not seem to notice Midnight slipping out of our house with his quiver and a basket, but I did. He held up a finger to his lips as he crept outside.

Mother leaned on Father as he walked her up to their room, where he put her to bed. Benjamin started a fire in our hearth, and he told me that when he was close to my age, he had witnessed an Act of Faith in Lisbon in which more than fifty shackled
Marranos
had been marched around a square and jeered at by the crowds. Three of them had been burned at the stake. “I never plan to smell burning Jewish flesh again,” he said, almost to himself.

That night, I heard Papa and Benjamin whispering about having Lourenço Reis expelled from Porto by the civil
authorities
. It was fairly clear that this was not their first such conversation. This was when I first began to believe that
Midnight
might not have been acting on his own in slipping out of
our home and that he and Papa might have been involved in a conspiracy that Benjamin had started weaving days – or even weeks – earlier.

Midnight told me of his clandestine activities the next day when, at dawn, I heard him creeping up to the Lookout Tower. Yawning in his doorway, my eyes still heavy with slumber, I asked him where he had been. He took me back to bed. Sitting by my side, he said, “Mantis spoke to me a few weeks ago in a dream. He told me that a beast would drink up all the water in Porto and create a terrible drought. Many of us would die. When I saw the preacher, I understood. So I took my quiver and arrows and hid them in a basket.”

The Bushman told me that he had watched Lourenço Reis ranting to ever larger crowds until, at the stroke of twelve, the evil man climbed down from his stage and strode off toward New Square.

Midnight tracked him through the lantern-lit night. At each of three successive festive sites around the city, Reis succeeded in raising furious cries against the
Marranos.
A short time past three in the morning, he ceased his rabble-rousing and strode off alone toward the river. After rapping on the door of a large stone mansion, he was hastily admitted. From Midnight’s description, I was able to identify this building as the Dominican monastery.

“Presumably, he is still there now,” Midnight told me.

“So what will you do?”

“I have a favor to ask you, John. You must tell Benjamin that I shall not come to work today. Tell him that Mantis has asked me to do an errand for him.”

“Will you follow the necromancer?”

Midnight nodded.

I asked, “Will you kill him?”

He lifted my blanket up over my mouth to keep me quiet, then patted my chest. “Return to sleep, my little gemsbok. You need not worry. I shall be safe.”

I sat up. “But you might need my help.”

“No, Mantis told me that you are to stay here. We Bushmen
coat ourselves with a scent that Hyena cannot abide. We are perfectly safe. But a gemsbok” – here he growled and bared his teeth – “a gemsbok would be eaten.” Then he gave me his wide, infectious smile.

Midnight left the house fifteen minutes later. Anxious, I dressed quickly and went to the garden to play with Fanny. After a little while, my father questioned me about Midnight’s whereabouts. I lied, saying that he had gone off in search of rain.

Over breakfast, while handing me my second plate of eggs, Papa cleared his throat and said, “John, your mother and I intend to send you to school in England. We believe you will be happier there.”

“In England?”

“Yes, to a boarding school. It is a grand place that will greatly benefit your education.” He struggled to smile. “The lads stroll around the grounds giving Latin names to birds and reading Shakespeare. It will be just the place for you.”

“No,” I replied.

Mother handed me another cup of tea. “Many a lad would envy your chance to study at such a place.”

“Good, then let them go instead of me.”

Papa glared. “I’ll thank you not to use that tone of voice with your mother.”

“I shan’t, if she will stop telling me how lucky I am to leave behind everything I know.”

Papa had only struck me once in my life, but I could almost feel my backside burning again. “Even you ought to be able to see that this is not your choice. This is a decision we have reached. You shall travel to my sister in England, with a letter from me, and she will enroll you in a proper school. I already have some excellent suggestions from the English consul here in Porto, and he knows all the best schools.”

Though I knew Papa would explode, I was adamant that I would never leave Portugal. “We shall see,” I said, and reached across the table for the salt shaker, to signal that the conversation was at an end.

Mother grabbed my wrist and said, “You are not safe here. You know I would not send you away otherwise. That I should be separated from you – ” Unable to finish her sentence, she withdrew her hand and looked down to hide her tears.

“Will Fanny be allowed to come with me?” I asked.

“No,” Father replied. “But she will be fine. We shall treat her like a queen, and you can see her on holidays.”

“Then I can come back?”

Father’s resolve yielded now to sorrow, which was precisely as I’d hoped. I wanted to punish him for even conceiving of such a plot against me.

“Dear God, lad, do you think we are monsters?”

“And Midnight – I shall have to leave him too?” I asked, purposely ignoring his question.

“Yes,” Papa replied.

“How much time do I have before this sentence begins?” I asked.

“Three weeks, I’d say,” he replied. “Six weeks at the most.”

Mama, sobbing, fled to her pianoforte. Father looked at me glumly and said, “John, you might try sometimes to make the unpleasant matters of life a trifle easier.” Then he went to her.

I listened to their subdued voices from the table, unrepentant, furious at my father’s criticism.

“I cannot,” Mama whispered to Papa.

“You must. At least for a time.”

“For a year, no longer. Any longer, James, and I shall die.”

Midnight failed to come home over the next two days, and I was greatly concerned for his safety. When I asked Papa if he’d seen him, all he would say was “Worry not, laddie. Midnight can take care of himself. I’m sure he’s well.”

Benjamin came to see us the following evening. From the top of the stairs I heard him explain that he had not been granted an audience with the Bishop but had spoken at great length to one of his staff. He had been told in no uncertain terms that nothing would – or indeed could – be done to silence the necromancer, since his activities were outside the jurisdiction of the diocese of
Porto, which was a flimsy excuse at best. He suspected that the Bishop had decided to look the other way.

Benjamin believed that rousing the residents of Porto against the
Marranos
was of great use to the Church right now, for its power was waning. The ecclesiastical hierarchy wanted a strong hand to play at Napoleon’s table should he become ruler of Portugal.

“Then we are on our own,” Father said quietly.

Midnight returned the next day at dawn. He came to my room and knelt down next to my bed. His shirt sleeve was torn and he was dripping with sweat.

“Did you track the necromancer? Did you kill him?”

He smiled. “If I am taken away, my little gemsbok, do not be too upset. The important thing is that you are safe now.”

My father must have heard him come up the stairs, because he appeared now in my doorway, clearly surprised. “Midnight! We were worried.” Noticing the quill on the end of my bed, he said, “Have you been hunting?”

The African stood up and faced him. “I am sorry to have caused you concern, Mr. Stewart. Yes, I’ve been hunting. We must talk.”

Mother then appeared. “What has happened?”

“One moment, Mrs. Stewart,” the African replied. He went to my window and peered out, then closed the shutters. “I may have been followed here,” he explained.

I saw that his hair was matted with wee twigs and that there were soil stains on the back of his breeches. “Who would want to follow you?” I asked.

“The men who were with Lourenço Reis.”

XVIII

M
idnight remembered musket and cannon fire exploding around him the first time he was captured by
Europeans
. But most of all he remembered the horses. “Swiftness and power given life,” he told me. “Even Mantis watched them with awe.”

Dark heavy balls of metal launched from cannons exploded in storms of fire. Blood spilled from his wounded tribesmen; all save three young children were left to rot in the African sun. Midnight never knew what happened to his two surviving kin.

The howls of hyenas gorging themselves could be heard from his new home, a farm owned by a round-faced Dutchman, whose servant he became for a few short months. But although he could carry water, feed the chickens and cattle, and kill snakes with only a stick, Midnight had an enormous appetite and ate more than he could earn.

Rather than slit his throat, as the Dutchman ordered, a Zulu servant, under cover of darkness, walked Midnight an hour into the countryside, offering him to the will of the desert. The land and sky proved generous that night; he found his way by moonlight to a family of Bushmen following the rains to the Shaggy Hills, thirty miles east. They offered him water from a hollowed ostrich shell and some dried meat. They became his new kin.

Fourteen years later by Papa’s estimation, Boer soldiers
returned
, different ones to a different place but mounted on horses just the same. By now they knew that even Bushmen adults could be “domesticated” with a regime of punishment and reward. So when Midnight was wounded by a bullet in the arm, he was allowed to be seen by a physician. His life was spared and he was
sold by a soldier to Reynolds, the Yorkshireman from whom my father would later steal him.

When asked his name, he replied that it was Midnight, for this was the name Mantis had instructed him to assume when among Europeans. “It will help you to remain at your own center,” the insect-god had told him.

It was an itinerant Welsh minister named Dee, with burning coals for eyes, who informed Midnight that his parents had been killed not by men but by God. Furthermore, he said, the Lord was no longer willing to permit heathens in the civilized Africa that Europe was forging out of the primitive, pestilent, and dark chaos that it had once been. Having had the misfortune to be born a Bushman, Midnight, too, would be barred from heaven unless – here the minister withdrew a New Testament from his small leather satchel – he received Christ into his heart.

Dee visited all the English farms on the Cape. Clad in a hat lined with purple velvet and a mantle of rabbit pelts, he told all the servants that their dancing and – in the case of the Bushmen – their nomadic way of life were affronts to God. The sole cure for both illness and ignorance was Baptism.

Unlike the other African servants on the farm, Midnight refused the minister’s cure. Whipped until his skin was shredded, he was carried to the servants’ quarters. There, Jackal appeared to him in a dream, peeing on Mantis. But the insect remained unperturbed. In fact, he was laughing.

The next day, Mrs. Reynolds took her carriage to town for some cordage that her husband needed. The next candidate for Baptism was a Xhosa lad called John, who was generally regarded as lazy and expendable. He was not as fortunate as Midnight. Though he had agreed to the ceremony, he was to be made an example.

With all the slaves in attendance, John was tied to the porch rail and whipped until the skin on his back had peeled off and he would never cry again. With his bright eyes still wide open, but with his life gone, Minister Dee untied him and pronounced him saved.

This was why Midnight allowed water to be sprinkled on his
head. But the Time of the Hyena was on him, and he was unable to laugh like Mantis. In fact, he did not talk for many months.

Father, Mother, and I listened in rapt silence while Midnight told us of these times in Africa. At first we didn’t understand the connection of his past to what he might or might not have done to Lourenço Reis – until he said that after seeing the preacher on St. John’s Eve he had remembered Minister Dee and the Xhosa young man named John who had been lashed to death.
Midnight
believed that the correspondence of names was not
accidental
. “I understood that Mantis was telling me that
our
John would die if Reis were to live.”

“Just because he has the same name as that Xhosa lad?” Papa asked.

“I believe that such coincidences point to connections between destinies that we cannot always see. But Mantis can see them.” Midnight told us that over the previous nights he had tracked Reis from one city square to another, where growing crowds welcomed his words with great cheers.

“Just after eleven o’clock last night,” the African said, “Reis walked very, very briskly to the wharf. As he conversed with a ferryman, I ran up the hill and hid in the bushes.”

“What happened after that?” Papa asked.

“Then … then I shot him … I shot Reis.”

“Your arrow reached him from the hillside?” Papa asked.

“Yes, I could see him distinctly in the lantern light. My first arrow pierced his shoulder blade. It had a tip of strong-strong poison. There was no need for another. He is dead by now.”

Before he could say any more, Mama rushed to Midnight, weeping.

“I care not for myself, but you have delivered my John from Pharaoh,” she said solemnly. “You have saved him again. Thank you for your sacrifice. I shall always be grateful.”

Kissing the African’s hands, she rested her head against his chest. I was dumbfounded, and so, too, was my father. Neither of us had realized the extent of her fear these past days and the supreme effort she had made to conceal her emotions.

Mama later told me that she knew in her heart that the Inquisition would have started afresh had not the Bushman murdered Lourenço Reis. “There was no question in my mind. One man would have turned us all to smoke and ash. Do you understand? It takes only one.”

“He was mad,” I replied.

“No, no. He was quite sane. He knew precisely what he was doing. They always do.”

I must confess the story Midnight told us may not have been entirely true. I learned from the Olive Tree Sisters that Reis had been seen entering Senhor Benjamin’s home on the night of his death – a fact later confirmed by the apothecary. Benjamin would also admit that a note from him requesting a meeting with the necromancer had been delivered to Reis, though he would never divulge the identity of the messenger.

With the benefit of hindsight, I suspect that Reis was lured to Benjamin’s home by Midnight, who had been following him and who would have had ample opportunity to hand him a note. Once there, the preacher might have been given a clever poison in a glass of wine or water, one that would only take effect several hours later. Or the poison might even have been placed secretly in his snuff.

The ferryman who rowed Reis back to land told me that the preacher had not been wounded by any arrow. Instead,
after
placing
two
pinches
of
snuff
in
his
nose
and
inhaling,
he complained of deep chest pains and then fell almost immediately into a rigid paralysis. He was dead within minutes.

I did not discern the discrepancies in the African’s story at the time because we did not discuss the situation with anyone outside our family – for obvious reasons.

I have come to believe that Reis’s death was planned by Benjamin, who prevailed upon Midnight to lie to us so that we might only reveal a false version of events if ever questioned by ecclesiastical or civil authorities. In this way, we could neither implicate the apothecary nor be regarded as coconspirators. I have often wondered if Papa, too, might have been one of the originators of the plan.

I am quite sure that Midnight could have been convinced to lie to us, if he was sure that it would protect my family.

It might be considered that Benjamin endangered Midnight by compelling him to lie to us about having murdered Reis. But the Bushman would not have been in any true peril, since his story, even if recounted to representatives of the Crown or the Church, could easily have been refuted. Reis’s body bore no arrow wound, as the ferryman and others could testify.

In the twenty years that have elapsed, I have read what I could find about Reis, who is mentioned twice in Artur Moura
Carneiro’s
chronicle of Porto in the years prior to the Napoleonic Wars. It is written there that he had returned to Porto from Goa, where he had endeavored to reestablish the stranglehold of the Inquisition on Portuguese India. Why he chose our city for the revivification of his career in continental Portugal remains a mystery, but he probably thought that the greater part of commerce in our city was controlled by the British and the Christianized Jews. This was hardly true, but his hatred of us blinded him to the reality of our situation.

Another very intriguing possibility is that his true target may not have been the
Marranos
at all, but rather the Freemasons, a nearly invisible clan I knew nothing about at the time, but who were apparently well-placed in the city’s hierarchy. Perhaps he wanted to take advantage of the traditional Christian distrust of the Jews as a way of reestablishing the Inquisition, intending to turn its persecutory power against these Masons at a later date.

Whatever the truth of this episode, we thought it prudent that Midnight leave Porto for a time. My father, who was due to travel upriver to survey lands, decided to take all of us with him.

We spent a peaceful fortnight in a stone manor house on the north bank of the Douro River. Papa, who had visited it often, dubbed it Macbeth’s Castle, where
dark
night
strangles
the
traveling
lamp.
But as we were all together as a family, we could not have been happier.