Prospero's Daughter (8 page)

“But one would have thought the colonial office would have prepared you men better before they let you come out here.”

“They prepared me, sir.”

“But surely, you’ve seen a freckled white person?”

Mumsford’s face hardened. “He lived here in the house with you?” His voice was loaded with exaggerated formality.

“Carlos?” Gardner seemed surprised by the question.

“I am here to discuss Carlos, sir. Did he live here?” Mumsford crossed off
misshapen
in his notes.

“Here?” Gardner looked around him.

“Yes. Did he live here?”

“From the first day,” Gardner said.

“With you and your daughter? Twelve years?” Mumsford pressed his questions.

“I thought he would be someone to amuse her. I let them play together.” Gardner stroked the legs of his pants.

“Them?”

“Carlos and my daughter. Then, when I started teaching her to read—she was four, he was six at the time—he stood nearby listening. He picked up what I was saying to her. Later he would take her little books and try to read on his own. Sometimes I would see him reading to her. Many times I was busy in my garden.” He paused, and checked the buttons on his shirt. The top one was undone. He buttoned it. “My orchids, you know, Mumsford. They are the rarest in the world. If we have time, before you leave . . .”

But Mumsford would not let him change the subject so easily. Biology might not be his expertise, he might know nothing about botany, he might not be able to grow grass that looked like plastic or make polka dots appear on the petals of bougainvillea, but he was an expert in detective work. He could keep his focus in a deposition. “So he read to her?” Mumsford cut him off in mid-sentence.

“I gave him my books. I taught my daughter and he listened,” Gardner said.

“Your daughter did not go to school?”

“We don’t have school here, Inspector. It’s a leper colony. Or haven’t you noticed?”

“Surely her education?”

“Fire i’ th’ blood, Inspector. These tropical climes arouse a man’s sexual desires. We men are old goats. I could not put her at risk sending her to school in Trinidad.”

“Surely in a boarding school?” Mumsford asked, malice curling around the edges of his question.

“There are never sufficient protections. Besides, Inspector, she could do no better than to have me as a schoolmaster. Others might not have been so careful.”

“Careful?”

“To teach her what she needed to know.”

Mumsford was struck by his emphasis on
needed
but he stuck to his objective, which now was not merely to gather information, but to make Gardner pay for humiliating him. “But Carlos?” he asked, taking no little satisfaction in noticing that his line of questioning was agitating Gardner.

“If she were a princess in a castle, she could not have had a better tutor,” Gardner said.

Mumsford made himself clearer. “Was Carlos there all the time when you were teaching her?”

“I’m not sure what you are implying, Inspector, but yes, he was there sometimes. I took interest in him when I saw how quickly he learned. He had some aptitude for science. I gave him my books.”

“Was he a help to you, sir?”

“A help?”

“When you were working with the lepers, sir.”

“I was not needed to work with the lepers. I thought I made that clear, Inspector.”

“Ah, yes. Then in the garden, sir?”

“The garden?”

“Did he help you in the garden? With your orchids, sir?”

“Ah, my orchids.” A grim smile cut across Gardner’s face. “He excelled there. He learned quickly about crossbreeding, cross-pollination. He was a bastard, you see. A crossbreed himself.”

“And you think it was that he wanted to do?”

“That?”

“With your daughter, sir. Was it crossbreeding he was thinking of, sir?”

Gardner got up abruptly and paced the room. He ran his hand over the top of his head down to his neck. The elastic band that held his ponytail slid off and his hair hung in limp locks above his shoulders. “None of this. None of what I say to you must leave here.” He came close to Mumsford. The muscles in his face were taut as wires.

“Only to the commissioner,” Mumsford said. “Only between us.”

“He came to me and said he wanted to have children with her.” Gardner was breathing hard. A vein popped out along the length of his forehead, slight at first and then thick, blue, hard, ugly, pushing against his leathery skin.

“He said that? Those words exactly?” Mumsford was taking notes.

“No. He used an ancient language from one of my books.”

“Which book?”

“Never mind.” Gardner massaged the back of his neck. “He said he wanted to people the island with little Carloses.”

“People?”

“Make babies.”

“But his exact words, sir? Do you remember his exact words?”

“He said he wanted to people the island with Calibans.”

“Calibans?”

“He meant himself.”

“But he didn’t give you any indication to suggest . . .”

Gardner did not let him finish. “Do you take me for an idiot, Inspector? I know how to guard my daughter’s honor.”

“But when you were in the garden, sir. Were there times they could have been alone?”

“I resent these insinuations, Inspector.”

“I am sorry, sir. It’s my job, sir. I must ask. The commissioner will expect me to ask.”

Gardner’s hand tightened around the back of his neck, and his head fell on his shoulders. With infinite patience, as if he were speaking to a child, he said, “When I was not with them, Inspector, Ariana was always there. She was my spy.”

From the moment Gardner opened the back door in the kitchen, Mumsford was accosted by the stench. It came on the first wave of heat that, after the cool of the interior, felt like a blast from a blowtorch on his face. The combination of heat and foul odor almost knocked him off of his feet. His knees buckled and his head felt light. It was shit: cow shit, dog shit, pig shit. It stank as if the sun had vaporized all the shit in the world into the very particles of the air he breathed. He put his handkerchief to his nose, but even the cologne he had dampened it with that morning could not mask the stench. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck, and goose bumps ran down the length of his arms.

“Stink, isn’t it?” Gardner said, smirking.

In front of them it was green, an immaculate plastic lawn that had recently been cut, or, as the discomforting thought snaked its way into Mumsford’s consciousness, had never needed cutting, stretching out to a chain-link fence behind which the bush grew tall and wild. There was no animal in sight, no mound of shit anywhere.

“Where?” Mumsford looked over the handkerchief he held plastered to his nose and mouth.

Gardner grinned and motioned him to follow him.

What registered first in Mumsford’s brain when they turned the corner was color, a mirage of color. He saw color first because the sun dazzled him, because here, on this side of the house, there was not a sliver of green, no grass, no trees, just dry, brown dirt and beds of gray pebbles; because when he squinted to protect his eyes from the glare, it was the macabre shimmering of color that arrested him; because though he could not have missed the chain-link fence enclosing a tiny area behind the color and the outlines of the man inside, it was easier, less painful, to focus on the color.

“My orchids,” Gardner said.

Never in all his years of police work had Mumsford seen a sight more terrible. Never had he smelled a stench more foul.

“They are my pride and joy,” Gardner said.

The mirage cleared and the outlines took shape. A young man— Mumsford guessed he was about seventeen; seventeen it would be exactly, for Carlos Codrington was two years older than the girl—was sitting on a rock in the scorching sun, penned in an area hardly more than six feet by six. In front of him were Gardner’s orchids, a blaze of purple, pink, and white flowers springing out from a maze of brown roots clinging crablike to gray stumps of coconut tree trunks cut in half and sunk into beds of gravel.

“My prizewinners.” Gardner was beaming.

Mumsford’s throat burned, nausea mounted his upper chest. Except for black boxer shorts, the man was naked, his torso, his arms, thighs, and legs bare and blanketed with red bumps. Some of the bumps had turned into sores, and Mumsford could see blood seeping slowly out of them. Some were already pustulant. At his feet, on one side of the base of the rock, was a pool of putrid water, on the other mounds of foul-smelling brown dirt Mumsford was certain was excrement. Mosquitoes buzzed around the water, in and out of the excrement, and lit upon the young man in clusters on his face and over his body. The young man did not move. He did not swat them away. He sat still as a statue, his hands clutched to his knees, his head bent. Only when Gardner approached did he give any sign of life. He must have heard the gravel crunch and when the sounds stopped, he raised his head.

“I’ve brought the police,” Gardner said.

The young man looked at him with hatred in his eyes purer than any Mumsford could ever have imagined.

“He is filth,” Gardner said.

Mumsford turned away in horror. “Get him out of here! Now!” he shouted at Gardner.

Gardner smiled cruelly. “A lying slave whom stripes may move, not kindness.”

“You have not beaten him?” Mumsford glanced quickly at the young man.

“The cat-o’-nine-tails for what he did to my daughter.”

“You have not struck him?” Mumsford asked again.

“No, I have been kind to him, filth that he is.”

“Clean him up,” Mumsford said. Nausea clogged his throat.

“He deserves worse than a prison.”

“Now, Dr. Gardner! I say now! Take him out of there!”

“I put him there on that rock for endangering the honor of my child.” Gardner curled his lips.

“Clean him up, I say, Dr. Gardner!”

“People the island with Carloses, eh?” Gardner taunted Carlos. “Let’s see you people now.”

“Enough, Dr. Gardner. Get him ready. I will take him now.” Gardner came closer to the fence. “Filth,” he shouted.

“For God’s sake, Dr. Gardner, he is harmless now. Leave him be.”

Gardner curled his fingers around the loops at the top of the fence. His chest was pumping up and down. “Worse than filth,” he shouted.

“The commissioner will handle the situation,” Mumsford said. “I will take him to Trinidad.”

“To jail,” Gardner said.

“The commissioner will know what to do.” Mumsford tugged Gardner’s arm.

“You’re a lucky boy.” Gardner shook his finger at Carlos. “If the inspector had not come . . .”

Mumsford pulled his arm harder and with a parting curse to Carlos, Gardner let go of the fence.

At least, Mumsford thought, Carlos had not been beaten. At least he had seen no evidence of stripes on his body, only sores.

Inside the house, Gardner shouted orders at Ariana. “Clean him up! See he takes his things with him. I want nothing of his left here.”

He invited Mumsford to wait in the drawing room, but Mumsford declined. He was not prepared to call Gardner a torturer, but he could not bear to stay a minute more in his presence, tempting though it was to sit in the cool of the air-conditioned room. He mumbled something about needing to get on his way and said he would wait on the porch.

The boy had been tortured. When he replayed Gardner’s words, he thought tortured for nothing. His better self, his English self, his more noble self, told him that. For nothing. For expressing a wish, a desire.

Did intent warrant such torture?
Consummation—there 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.