Prospero's Daughter. Elizabeth Nunez
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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.
Now cleaned up, dressed in beige pants and a pink long-sleeved cotton shirt, the boy seemed harmless to Mumsford, incapable of that kind of barbarity.
Misshapen? He had seen him bare-chested. His shoulders were broad, his torso muscular, his hips slim. Was it the shape of his backside that had caused Gardner to tell that lie? Mumsford had heard the snickering in the Country Club. Tails. No one believed it, but it made for raucous laughter when the blacks left and they had the billiard room to themselves.
Mumsford blushed remembering how his eyes had strayed there, but he had felt compelled to examine the boy as he walked toward the house in front of him. His torso was shorter, his buttocks more pronounced than the average Englishman’s. High, but not misshapen.
He was facing him now and the blood and pus had been washed off. He had to admit he was handsome; even the freckles were not unattractive. There were pink blotches on his face for sure, and around his ears and neck where the skin was broken, but the freckles spread across his cheekbones seemed to him like chocolate dust sprinkled over a butterscotch brown cake.
It bothered Mumsford that this pleasant image should come to him at this moment, dredged from a happy time in his childhood. Yet something about Carlos’s face, his skin—butterscotch brown was indeed how he would describe his color—reminded him of toffee and chocolate, and the brown cake he loved as a child.
And perhaps his gaffe with Gardner had its source from these times, too, when he was a boy, in the early years after the war. He had known better, of course. He had seen freckles on many an Englishman’s face. But the talk in those years in the streets where he lived in England was about the coloreds, the flood of immigrants from the colonies, coming to England now that the country had been battered. “Reverse colonization,” his father called it. “They come to take what we have