Prospero's Daughter (28 page)

“It’s not true,” I said. I had made a mistake. I had placed my hopes in him too quickly.

“Your father told me he prevented him just in time,” he said.

“My father did not tell you the truth,” I said.

“You mean he lied?”

“Carlos loves me,” I said.

“So your father’s servant claimed,” he said drily.

“Ariana?”

“She sent a letter. She wrote that Mr. Codrington is in love with you.”

I dug my right hand into the palm of my left hand and pressed my fingernails deep into my skin to stop both my hands from shaking.

He placed the cup gingerly on the saucer and, bending over to put them both on the cocktail table, he asked quietly, “You’re engaged, are you not, Miss Gardner?”

I was taken aback by the question for I had readied myself for Ariana’s accusations, her condemnation of my father. “Engaged?” I asked, relieved.

“Your father said to a Mr. Haynes,” he said, straightening up.

“I’m not engaged,” I said, loosening my hands. My right palm was streaked with the pink prints of my fingernails.

“An American, I believe he is.”

“I saw Mr. Haynes once,” I said.

“Once?”

“Father was trying to arrange for me to marry him.”

“Arrange? Surely, miss . . .”

“Mr. Haynes was not interested in me, Inspector Mumsford.”

“That was not what your father said.” His fingers circled the rim of the saucer on the table.

“Father says what he wants to believe. He and Mrs. Burton wanted Alfred to be interested in me.”

“A pretty English girl?” His hazel eyes glistened.

“Alfred came with his father to see Father’s orchids. That was his only reason for coming.”

“And where’s Mr. Haynes now?” he asked. “Can you tell me, miss?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since I’ve arrived. Mrs. Burton says it would be best to wait until this is over.”

He brushed his mustache back and forth and studied me. “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, I would say that would be best.” He reached again for his notebook. “Do you think, Miss Gardner . . .” He tapped the notebook against his chin. “Do you suppose that Mr. Codrington presumed to speak that way to your father because he knew of your father’s plans for you and Mr. Haynes?”

“What way? Speak what way?” My hands felt suddenly cold and clammy.

“With such insolence,” he said.

He was an Englishman. A generation ago a black man would have been killed on the spot if he had so much as raised his eyes to an Englishman’s daughter.

“Carlos is never insolent,” I said.

“He told your father he wanted to have children with you,” he said.

“He loves me, Inspector. I told you that.”

“Begging your pardon, miss. The suggestion was sexual.”

“Did Father say so?”

“It was unbecoming of a gentleman, miss.”

I felt emboldened by Carlos’s courage. He had done as he had said. He had spoken to Father. “Enough for Father to do what he did to him?” I asked.

“No, miss,” he said. “No. That was not right, miss.”

We were both silent. I could feel him searching for some justification, something that would help him understand why my father had been so cruel. “Is it possible, miss,” he asked at last, “that Mr. Codrington was jealous of Mr. Haynes?”

“He had no reason to be,” I said quietly.

At first he looked puzzled and then my meaning sunk in. “Surely,” he said, “you don’t want me to understand . . . Surely, miss, you could not have any interest in Mr. Codrington?”

“I like him a thousand times better than Mr. Haynes,” I said, making the effort to keep my voice calm.

He reddened. “Surely . . . ” he stuttered.

“Even more,” I said.

“He is a colored man, Miss Gardner.” His face was scarlet.

“That does not matter to me,” I said.

“Does not matter? You’re English, miss.”

“I don’t remember England,” I said. “I was a little girl when I left England.”

“But you are white, miss.”

“Carlos and I love each other,” I said.

He stood up. “This is bad. Very bad.” He shook his head.

“It’s not a crime for Carlos to love me,” I said. He shot an angry glance at me. “Or for me to love him,” I added.

He turned away and walked the length of the room. Had I said too much? Had I made more trouble for Carlos? But Carlos was not on the inspector’s mind when he walked back and stopped abruptly in front of me. Ariana was on his mind.

“How well do you know Ariana?” he asked.

“Ariana?” My heart flip-flopped in my chest.

“How long have you known her?”

“Since I came to Chacachacare. She was living in the house when Father and I arrived.”

“And do you think she tells the truth?”

I did not know which truth he meant. I avoided the one I feared. “What she wrote about Carlos is true,” I said. “And I love him, too.”

A spasm of pain crossed his face. “She came to see me,” he said.

“See you?”

“Yesterday. In my office.”

What had she told him?
I shifted uncomfortably in my chair.

“She claims she was more than a servant to your father,” he said.

I felt as though he were towering over me, but he was not towering over me. He was standing several feet away from me, gripping the back of his chair.

“Did you know that?” He paused, waiting for my answer.

“Did she talk about me?” I asked him.

“Talk about you? Oh no, miss. She did not come to see me to talk about you. She came to talk about your father. Do you know why?”

I pressed my hands on my lap and looked steadily down at them.
Tell the police about you, she said. I’ll tell them about me.
“Whatever she told you about my father is true,” I said.

“I felt so,” he said. “I felt so.”

The sadness in his voice made me look up. His fingers were curled tightly around the top of the chair, his shoulders slumped.

Did I understand what he meant when he said Ariana was more than a servant to my father? he asked me. Yes, I said. I understood him completely.

“And did she tell you all he did to her?” he asked me.

I nodded without a word.

He spared me the details, though in truth I thought he was sparing himself, that he could not bear to hear himself recite the horrors Ariana most likely had told him.

“He was blackmailing her.” His voice was infinitely heavy. “Did you know that, miss?”

I said I did not know that. How could Father blackmail her? What could Father have that she could want, that would put her in his power in that way?

She loved jewelry, he said.

I told him that the only jewelry I saw her wear were earrings.

Did I know they were diamonds? he asked.

I laughed. She loved shiny things, I said. They were probably shiny stones, but not diamonds. She had no money for diamonds. Then he told me the story Ariana had told him and I remembered how she loved to gaze at fireflies.

My father had betrayed all England, he said. All decent Englishmen. How could he have taken advantage of a child?

How could he have taken advantage of me?

What would the inspector think if I told him that betraying decent Englishmen was the least of what my father had done? What would he think if I told him my father had betrayed his daughter, my father had stolen his daughter’s youth?

But the inspector thought decent Englishmen in English colonies did not sexually molest young native girls. He thought English fathers protected English daughters. He thought English fathers did not sneak into the bedrooms of English daughters while they were sleeping.

What would he say if he knew I woke up more mornings than I wanted to remember, the back of my throat aching from my father’s probing? What would he do if I told him my father’s real reason for arranging a marriage for me?

Mrs. Burton had warned me that I would be ruined if people found out, if the slightest suggestion reached their ears that Carlos had attempted, as she put it, to compromise my virginity. If I told the inspector the whole truth about my father, would he think I had been compromised, that I was ruined? Would he feel disgust for my father but still feel scorn for me?

The inspector thought pretty English girls should marry pretty Englishmen. He thought native men in English colonies could not fall in love with English girls and English girls with them. He thought English girls raised in English colonies remained English girls, and the people, the land, the sea, and the sun had no effect on them.

“What is going to happen to Carlos?” I asked him.

“I have your word, and I had Ariana’s,” he said. “I will have to speak to your father, of course. Mr. Codrington will have to come with me and face your father to tell his side of the story, but I expect in the end he will be free to do as he wants, though I would think he would want to leave the island.”

“He was born in Chacachacare,” I said. “He will not want to leave.”

“I don’t think your father will let him stay in the house,” he said.

“We found him in the house when we came,” I said.

“Yes,” he said flatly. “He told me it was his mother’s house.”

Out of guilt I defended my father, for I, too, had known that the house first belonged to Carlos’s mother. “His mother left it to her housekeeper,” I said. “Father bought it from her.”

The inspector arched his eyebrows. “He paid for it?”

“Father said so.”

He did not respond.

“The housekeeper was dying,” I said. “Father took care of her.”

Whether I convinced him or not, I could not tell. His face betrayed no emotion. He put his notebook and pen in his pocket. “I better get going, miss. It’s getting late.”

“And Father? What will happen to Father?” I asked him.

“I expect when I confront him with your statement, he will withdraw the allegation,” he said.

“But what about what he did to Ariana?”

“It’s unfortunate. A dastardly thing for him to do. She’ll stay here. The matron at the station will find a place for her in Trinidad.”

“And Father will be free?”

“So long as he stays on the island, we won’t interfere.”

“And me? Where will I go?”

“Your father must determine that,” he said.

I did not think for a moment he thought I could be in danger. Ariana was in danger. My father had taken advantage of her, but he could not allow himself to think that my father would take advantage of me. Not an English father. But I was in danger and I could not be left alone with my father. I had to see Carlos. I had to make certain that Carlos would stay with me on Chacachacare.

“I want to go with you when you take Carlos back,” I said.

“What about your visitors? The Americans? Mr. Haynes?”

“They will not miss me.”

“And Mrs. Burton?”

“I will speak to her,” I said.

He adjusted the belt on his waist. “Are you sure that is what you want to do?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea, miss.”

“I
must
go,” I said. I could tell he was ready to object again, so I added quickly, “Father would want me to come.”

He considered my answer and seemed to decide it was reasonable. “Then nine o’clock. On the dot. I will send a car for you. ”

Before he left, he told Mrs. Burton that the matter with Carlos was settled. He was taking him back tomorrow to make his statement in the presence of my father. He didn’t expect my father to press charges.

That would be best, Mrs. Burton said. There was nothing to be gained from a scandal. Virginia was not harmed, thank God.

“What will you do with him when he comes back?” she asked. “We can’t have him running loose here.”

“We can’t lock him up without charges,” the inspector said. “In any case, I believe he may want to stay.”

“Want to stay?” Mrs. Burton snorted when we were alone and the rumble of the inspector’s car had long faded. “What does it matter what
he
wants? He cannot be permitted to stay. Not with you on the island. Your father was lax, lax to have a colored boy living in your house. I’ll speak to him. You must remain here with me, my dear. You can’t return with that boy on the loose.”

I told her I was going back the next day with the inspector to Chacachacare.

She lost her temper. An ungrateful wretch, she called me.

TWENTY-THREE

THE INSPECTOR was true to his word. At nine o’clock the car arrived to take me to the boat to Chacachacare. The inspector did not come out of the car. He sent his driver to fetch me.

I had seen Mrs. Burton earlier that morning in the dining room. Jane had rung the bell at seven for breakfast. The night before, her pride stung when I opposed her, Mrs. Burton informed me, with all the scorn she could muster in her voice, that in the civilized world—and I don’t mean here, she said, or in your backwoods on that leper colony where no one knows manners—we don’t shout and yell. So tomorrow, at seven, and I don’t mean one minute to seven, but seven exactly—for time means nothing to these people here; you say seven and they come at eight—Jane will ring the bell. I expect you to be dressed and at the table for breakfast.

My father did not need to use a bell. He told us when we would eat and Ariana obeyed and served us on time.

At breakfast Mrs. Burton was tight-lipped. When Jane put the platter of scrambled eggs and ham on the table in front of her, she pushed it away. “Too hard,” she said. “Haven’t I told you often enough not to let the eggs get hard? Take it away. We’ll just have the ham.”

I knew she was taking out her anger with me on Jane, and I met Jane’s eyes and tried to convey my sympathy.

“Be quick!” Mrs. Burton tapped Jane on her arm as she placed a slice of ham on her plate and another on mine. She seemed hardly able to wait for Jane to leave the room. No sooner had the door closed than she began to harangue me.

“You’re making a serious mistake,” she said. She reached over for the butter plate and cut down hard into the solid square of butter. “The inspector can deal with the situation quite well without you. You don’t know what you’re doing to your reputation to go on the boat with that boy. People will see you. They will talk.”

“I will be with the inspector,” I said defensively.

She swiped the butter across her toast and did not answer me.

I tried again to reason with her. “The inspector is taking Carlos back home. If Carlos had done anything wrong, the inspector wouldn’t be taking him back to Chacachacare.”

She stopped buttering her toast and pointed her knife at me. “
I
know where the inspector brought the boy. If I know, don’t you think other people know? The people here gossip. One servant tells your business to another servant and before you know it, everybody knows. Jane told me the boy was at Mount St. Benedict. Yes, don’t look surprised. She knew even before you knew. If you aren’t here when I have my party for Mr. Haynes and his son—and I am going to have the party whether you are here or not—I can’t vouch for what people will say about you. I can’t keep making excuses for you. People will put two and two together. Jane has already put two and two together, what with the inspector here yesterday. And if you leave with him this morning, she’ll be sure to figure it out. You can’t go. I just
won’t
let you go. What will your father say?”

In the end I thought it was her promise to my father that worried her more than the loss of my reputation. It had taken her a long time to persuade my father to give her one of his orchids. She had come in second at the Chelsea Flower Show the year before. She wanted to come in first.

In the car the inspector told me that Carlos would meet us at the dock at the Yacht Club. I was excited to see Carlos again, but I was nervous, too. Doubts that had not been there before crowded my mind. Suppose Carlos changed his mind. Could he still love me after what my father had done to him? Would he despise me? I looked out of the window, barely seeing the town and villages we passed, their newness overshadowed by my worries and fears.

The inspector patted my hand, trying to comfort me. “Everything will be all right, miss,” he said. “Your father will see reason. He won’t press charges.”

He had come dressed in full uniform: belted khaki jacket, khaki shorts stopped at the knees, tasseled high brown socks, polished shoes, baton, and pith helmet. Her Majesty’s representative. An Englishman. He could not conceive that I could love Carlos and Carlos could love me. He could not contain in his brain that my fears were not only for Carlos’s safety, but also for my happiness. I was my father’s daughter. What that irrefutable truth would cost me weakened my knees and sent my heart racing.

Carlos was waiting for us on the pier. I broke away from the inspector and ran to him. At first all I saw was his familiar shape, his broad shoulders, his slim hips, his long legs. Only when I got close did I see the sores. I flung my arms around his neck horrified by the red blotches that had spread across his handsome face. He tightened his hold on me and I buried my head in his shoulder, my tears soaking his shirt.

“It’s okay, Virginia,” he whispered. “It’s okay. I’m well. I’m fine.” But when I raised my head and saw the red, raw bumps around his ears, his nose, climbing up his neck and in between the brown freckles that I loved, my tears fell again.

“Shhh.” He brought my head to his chest and held me still. “Shhh.”

“Must be getting on, miss.” The inspector had reached us. He stood next to me, his legs apart, planted firmly on the ground, striking his baton on his open palm. “No time for lollygagging.”

The childish word he used, his subdued tone, betrayed his embarrassment, his discomfort at witnessing our intimacy, our open display of affection, but he seemed moved, too, his heart softened. “One more minute then,” he said. “That is all I can give you.” He walked away and left us alone.

Carlos disentangled my arms from around his neck and took my hand. The long pants he was wearing covered his legs, but his arms were almost bare under his short-sleeved shirt. There were mosquito bites on almost every inch of his skin, most of them concentrated at his elbows. How many mosquitoes at one time had sunk their probes into his flesh? Ariana had seen him when he was bloody. What would I have done if I had seen blood oozing from his sores?

Tenderly, not wanting to cause him more pain than he had already suffered, I brought one arm and then his other arm to my lips and kissed them in turn, lingering on the spots where the mosquitoes had clustered. “Father will pay for this,” I said. Yet at that moment, I did not know how.

Carlos pulled his arms gently away from my mouth. “The inspector came to see me last night,” he said. “I know what you told him.”

“I will say it again in front of Father,” I said.

He looked away from me.

“I
will,
” I said.

Why should he have believed me? I had not defended him when Father tried to teach me I was superior to him, that the color of my skin made me better than him. I was a child then when Father first gave me that lesson, and perhaps I could be forgiven, but I was no longer a child when Carlos told me the house was his, that Father had stolen it from him.

“My mother loved this house,” he had said. “Every room my father built, he had built to please her.” He reminded me of the carvings at the top of each of the wood partitions that had separated the rooms. “My father had those carvings made for me. Why would my mother not want me to have the house my father had spent so many days and nights building for us? Your father is a liar. My mother would never have given the house to Lucinda. She left it for me.”

Father said Carlos’s mother was a party girl. She was careless. Party girls did careless, irresponsible things. Things like leaving their houses to servants.

When I said to the inspector that Carlos’s mother had left the house to Lucinda, I knew I was trying to hold on to the last shred of hope that the father I loved as a little girl had not always lied to me.

Shame, and feelings more paralyzing than shame, had stopped me from exposing Father to the inspector. I owed my life to Father. I would not have survived without him. He loved me. He loved me so much that he gave up his life in England for me. All he did, he said, he did for me. And yet Father had betrayed me. And yet he had abused me.

I put my hand on Carlos’s chin and forced him to face me. This time would not be like other times. This time I would not keep silent. “Father will hear the truth from my lips,” I said. “The inspector will be my witness.”

“And afterward?” he asked me.

But it was I who wanted to know what would happen afterward. I needed to be sure. “Will you go back to Trinidad afterward?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “We belong in Chacachacare.”

We.
I knew he had not ceased to love me. “Don’t leave me alone with Father,” I said.

The inspector had restricted us to a minute, but we had taken more than a minute. When I looked back, he was standing on the dock, tapping his baton against his leg, peering steadfastly into the water.

The boat waiting for us was not a government launch. It was an ordinary pirogue, unpainted and covered over in the center with a piece of dark green tarpaulin held up by four bamboo poles. The boatman appeared to be one of the local fishermen. He was barefooted, and wore a rumpled yellow T-shirt and brown cotton shorts. The inspector explained later that he hadn’t taken the launch because he did not want to attract the attention of the locals. The commissioner had cautioned him to be inconspicuous, but, of course, in the full regalia of a police inspector, the inspector was anything but inconspicuous.

The boatman had already untied the rope that was attached to a metal ring at the edge of the pier and was holding it tight, trying to keep the boat from rocking. From time to time he looked up expectantly at the inspector, but in spite of his urgent glances, the inspector did not move. I thought the inspector was losing his patience waiting for us and I said to Carlos that we needed to hurry. It was Carlos who figured out that the inspector was afraid, not impatient. He let go of my hand, and, without saying a word, though by then I noticed that the color was drained from the inspector’s face, he walked over to the inspector and took his elbow. Clinging to Carlos’s shoulder, the inspector tentatively lifted his leg over the rim of the boat and let Carlos guide him inside.

Carlos took the backseat in front of the boatman and put me to sit next to the inspector. I could tell from the brief smile that broke on the inspector’s lips that he was pleased with this arrangement, pleased, too, that Carlos had been discreet, that he had placed his hand under his arm with such little ceremony that it appeared as if he were extending a courtesy to a government official, not rescuing him from his dread of slipping into the water.

The tarpaulin over the boat was not wide enough to spare the inspector’s right arm and leg from burning under the fiery sun. The inspector did not complain, but I felt sorry for him and moved closer to the edge of the boat to give him more space. He was grateful and he thanked me, and slid to the middle of the seat. Squashed somewhat, I leaned over the boat and let my hand trail in the water. When I looked down I saw tiny fish—blue, purple with blue; red, yellow with red; green, orange with green, all the dazzling colors of the rainbow— darting through the emerald-green reeds of sea plants shimmering above the speckled white sand. I did not know what the inspector and Carlos were thinking at that moment. Perhaps they were thinking of their impending confrontation with my father, but I was not thinking of my father when I saw those fish, when I saw those green reeds, when my eyes traveled farther across the silken blue water. I was thinking:
This is my sea, my place in the world. This is where I belong.

As if on cue, a school of dolphins arced in unison in front of us. Eight in all, their silver-gray bodies glistening and then disappearing under the sea.

The inspector perked up. “I didn’t think they came so close,” he said excitedly.

“Dey like people,” the boatman said. “Watch, dey go come up again and follow we.”

The dolphins reappeared on the side of the boat, leaping into the air, nodding their heads back and forth at us, their eyes shining in their expressive faces.

“Dey showing off. Dey like you,” the boatman said.

Even the inspector laughed.

I belonged here, in this place. A feeling of pride surged through me like an electric current.

The dolphins left us when we reached the outskirts of the boca between Monos and Chacachacare. The currents there, spilling out of the Dragon’s Mouth, pitched the boat up and down, and I gripped my seat to steady myself.

“Lucky you come today,” the boatman said, his white teeth gleaming behind his lips spread apart. “Tomorrow the sea here go be rough, rough.” He pointed to the north where in the far distance gray clouds had gathered at the edge of the blue sky.

“Are you certain we’ll be back before it rains?” the inspector asked nervously.

“We come back long time before dat, sir. From the looks of those clouds so far away, it don’t storm till way after midnight.”

And indeed directly above us the clouds were bright white. Soon we were on calm waters again, approaching my island. In front of us a nest of trees rose up the incline above the narrow shore. We rounded the bend and the doctor’s house came into sight with its rusty red galvanized roof and A-frame second story. The salt in the sea air, the wind, and the sun had wreaked havoc on it, but it signaled home to me, home, where I wanted to be.

For the first time I noticed how gracefully the cement steps curved upward to the pillared veranda. For the first time I noticed that the peak of the A-frame resembled the spire of a church.
Holy ground.
Home.
To the right of the stone wall that protected the house from the sea, I could make out the gray rocks I had climbed with Carlos when he took me to the cove on the other side.

I could not leave here. I could not return to the busyness of Trinidad, to the stuffiness of Mrs. Burton’s way of life. And yet with Father on the island, how could I stay?

“The house is farther back behind the trees,” Carlos said to the inspector.

He didn’t have to remind him, the inspector replied. But Carlos had guessed, as I had, that the inspector was uneasy.