T. Boyle - Water Music

Disappointment creases her face. “Thank. . you,” she stammers, a bit confused and embarrassed, awkward in the role of sacrificial lamb. When she reaches out to take the wreath, she pricks her finger. A spot of blood wells up almost instantly.

“Here,” he says, snatching up her hand. “Let me suck it.”

And so she stands there, feeling foolish in her orange feet and rumpled dressing gown, while the rain gargles in the gutters and her husband-to-be bends over her and sucks at her thumb like a baby at his mother’s breast.

♦ ♦ ♦

Ten minutes later, the door closed and latched, she tiptoes around the room, stuffing things into a black leather satchel. Her mouth is set, her movements fluid and furtive. When Katlin turns over in bed she freezes in midstep and waits a long silent moment for her friend’s breathing to settle back into the gentle soughing rhythm of sleep. In the hallway she digs out her gloves, hat, scarf. She can hear her father and uncle snoring like a gristmill in the back room as she eases through the kitchen and out the door.

The rain is steady and sonorous. There is a smell of purity and renewal in the air, as if the earth has been washed clean. Up ahead the slick bare trunks glow with wet; behind, the house sinks into the mist. Bent low, she fades into the trees like a thief.

♦ HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO ♦

Should he get down on his knees and kiss the earth? No. Too theatrical. But what a rush it is to tread the old sod once again! What a thrill to hear the English tongue, gaze on English faces, bonnets, churchtowers and shingled cottages! Overwhelming! He can’t resist, he must. . get down on his knees this. . instant. .

As the repatriated explorer dodges down to buss the earth — or rather the slick, weed-strewn planks of the Falmouth docks — he is so thoroughly caught up in the rhapsody of the moment that he fails to take account of the traffic behind him. The other passengers, anxious to disembark and be on their way, pile up at his back — one of them. Colonel Messing, colliding with the man in front of him and dipping awkwardly to one knee. The Colonel, just returned from an inspection of his estates in the West Indies, is a man of unimpeachable personal dignity. He rises to his feet, dusts his stockings and raps his cane smartly across the explorer’s upturned buttocks.

“Out of the way, you impudent young dog.”

♦ ♦ ♦

An inauspicious homecoming, to say the least — but then all of Great Britain thinks he’s gone the same route as Houghton and Ledyard and the rest. No one recognizes him, no one expects him. At the Dog & Duck Tavern, Falmouth, he glances up from his eggs and drippings to scan the ruddy faces and long noses at the bar, pregnant with his secret, savoring the quiet incubation of his celebrity. If they only knew. He stifles a sudden impulse to shout it out, dance on the tables, set it to music and sing it to them, emblazon it on great drooping banners like bellying sails: I DID IT. I ALONE. I’VE BEEN WHERE NO OTHER MAN HAS BEEN AND I’VE SEEN WHAT NO OTHER MAN HAS SEEN AND I’M HERE TO TELL ABOUT IT. But no, let them read it in the London papers and crowd round this very bar, stunned and amazed: “Gorry—’ee was ‘ere. In this very room. The chance of lifetime and Oy nivir so much as lifted me ‘ead. But ‘oo was to know?”

Who indeed? But there’s one who should know — and without a moment’s delay. The explorer calls for pen and paper and scratches off the good news, as excited as the day he won his first football match:

Dog & Duck, Falmouth

22 December, 1797

My Love:

I am alive and well and my mission has been an unqualified success. Know that the great and glorious Niger flows eastward and that I am rushing home to your arms.

M.

The following morning he books a place on the packet boat to Southampton, and from there finds himself squeezed into the tiny compartment of a coach-and-four bound for London. His fellow passengers turn out to be a Mrs. Higgenbotham, on the rebound from a visit to her niece in Portsmouth, a pair of disreputable-looking drummers selling “the latest in stickless frying pans and guaranteed runless hose for gennelmen,” and Colonel Messing, of the short temper and long cane. Another three passengers are perched atop the convex roof: two young girls and a cleric in formal dress. Fortunately, Colonel Messing does not seem to recognize the explorer. After an hour or so of jostling along in silence he leans forward confidentially and tells Mungo that he shouldn’t mind the tear in the knee of his breeches. “You see,” he explains, “I’m just back from Antigua and all my things are gone ahead in the wagon. And damn me if I didn’t have a bit of an accident before I ever set foot on shore. Some histrionic young ass was bent over double kissing the bleeding dock, if you can believe it, as if we’d been at sea three years instead of a month — and it cost me a good tumble.”

Mungo makes a sympathetic noise in the back of his throat, and the Colonel suddenly stiffens up and gives him a penetrating stare.

“That’s quite a skin color you got there, lad. If I didn’t know you was English by the sand of your hair, I’d swear you was a Chinaman. Where you coming from, anyways?”

♦ ♦ ♦

One night at an inn along the way, and the next — Christmas Eve— jostling through the dark countryside, through Newington, St. George’s Fields and Southwark, across the Blackfriars Bridge and right on up to the White Swan on Farringdon Street. Christmas morning, 6:00 a.m., a cold drizzle hangs on the air like a washcloth, the Colonel snoring over a pint of brandy. The explorer steps down from the coach, his legs stiff, shoulders his satchel and starts off down the street. But then stops short, as if jerked by a rope. Where to? His sister Effie’s? But she’d be asleep at this hour. If it were ten or eleven he could take a cab to Soho Square and astonish Sir Joseph. Walk in as blithely as if he’d just strolled round the block and rewrite the map of Africa. “Well, Sir, I’m back. Back from the Niger. I’ve seen it, tasted it, swum in it. It’s no myth, believe me. Magnificent. Dwarfs the Nile, the Thames, the Mississippi. . riches untold. . a thriving civilization crowding its shores. And oh yes: it flows, most decidedly, to the eastward .’’

But at 6:00 a.m., on a holiday?

Suddenly it hits him. Effie’s husband, Charles Dickson. He’ll be at the British Museum at this hour, tending the plants. It was Dickson who’d launched the whole Niger venture in the first place, through his botanical association with Sir Joseph. Of course. He should be the first to know — especially since he’s the only one likely to be stirring at this hour. The explorer turns around and starts off for the museum. But then stops dead again. Will he be there on Christmas Day? Mungo pictures his brother-in-law bent over mounds of dried specimens in a white smock; feeding, watering and pruning his indoor collection; winterizing the arboretum; pinching off stamens and anthers; living and breathing horticulture till it must burgeon in his dreams like the thickest Gambian rain forests. . and knows he’ll be there.

There are no cabs at this hour, but it’s a short walk up to High Holborn and from there to Great Russell Street and Montague House, where the museum had been relocated six months before he left for Africa. Fingers of light are beginning to take hold of the eastern sky. There are wreaths on the doors, pine cones and red ribbon. The explorer feels as if he’s just been handed a million pounds. He flings the satchel in the air, claps his hands twice and catches it on the way down without breaking stride. Then launches into a hearty whistle, a Christmas carol. The wet cobblestones echo with it, glad of heart, soaring, heroic, until he modulates into another key and slides into “Now a’ ye that in England are,” thinking of Ailie.