then our garden, accompanied from behind by a very curious Fanny.
I stepped quietly back inside to eavesdrop on my parents. Mama was speaking in hushed tones of my fall from the roof. She delicately suggested that it might not have been an accident. She then went on to mention that, as a consequence, she had been administering a spoonful of tincture of opium to me every morning. At that, the trap sprung, and Papa accused her of trying to poison me. “You have rendered him drug-damned, you foolish woman!”
“I am fighting for him in the only way I know how,” Mama cried. “It’s so easy for you to criticize me, but what would you suggest I ought to have done?”
Shortly afterward Papa apologized, and my parents went to their room. Hearing no further quarrel or conversation, I presumed my father unable to keep his travel-induced slumber at bay any longer. Grumbling to myself about their neglect of me, I returned to our garden, where I found the African sitting on his heels in the middle of a profusion of shoulder-high weeds, his eyes closed, breathing softly.
Loudly, so that he might hear and take offense, I said, “That must be the way Africans sleep. They don’t even have sense enough to lie down.”
His eyes remained closed, though I saw a smile cross his lips. Thoughts of murder entered my mind.
Dragging myself inside, I slumped down on the Persian rug in our sitting room, propped my head on one of the cushions my mother had recently embroidered with tulips, and dozed off. Doors opened and closed in my dreams. Mice scattered. The ceiling swelled and seemed to press against my chest.
I awoke a short time later with a dull ache in my belly. And my head … A devilish sprite was tightening a rusted winch in my neck.
Papa soon came bobbing down the stairs, too cheerful by half. “Hello there, John, how’s my laddie?”
I sat up and stretched. “Fine, Papa. Tired.”
I was not as overjoyed to see him as I imagined I would be, for he seemed greatly changed. His eyes seemed too blue, his long hair too tightly tied at the back. Being young, I didn’t know that after a long absence a period of readjustment is often necessary. It seemed likely that I would never love him again as I had before.
“So what do you think of our Midnight?” he inquired.
“He is very dark,” I answered.
My father laughed. “Why, yes, I suppose he is. Sable of color compared to a pale Scotsman like you.”
Mama came down the stairs, pinning up her hair. She smiled at Papa, who winked at her. He took one of his pipes from a rack on our mantelpiece, a meerschaum beauty carved with the head of a bat that had been purchased in Glasgow many years earlier by his father. Removing his tobacco pouch from his waistcoat pocket, he sighed. “It is good to be home.”
Mama announced that she would make us all some tea. “To give you two time alone,” she beamed, whereupon she left us for the garden to pump water into her kettle.
Papa graciously invited me to sit next to him on the blue and green brocade armchair usually reserved for Mama.
“I expect Midnight is still in the garden,” he said, leaning toward me and filling the bowl of his pipe with a pinch of tobacco. “I’m sorry you’ve been a sad
“I have been just fine,” I replied.
“Aye, I can see how
The possibility that I would not have access to my spoonful of opium filled me with worry.
“Well?” he prompted.
“I shall try very hard not to see or hear Daniel,” I told him, loath to spoil his homecoming.
“Midnight may be able to help, you know. What is your opinion of him so far?”
“I have no opinion, Papa.”
“But surely you do.” He pointed the stem of his pipe at me. “Out with it, lad.”
Since being sent to bed was probably the worst that would happen, and since I should not have minded going to sleep, I said, “I do not like him. I think he’s ugly.”
“But why, lad?”
“I cannot think why he is here,” I answered. “You must admit he is strange.”
Papa puffed away thoughtfully, then said, “To one of your wee birdies he would surely seem not so different from you or me.”
I was not so sure.
Mama returned to place her windmill-patterned teacups and saucers on our round wooden table. “Just waiting for the water to boil,” she said. “Are you having a pleasant chat?”
I nodded and Papa kissed her hand. Then he turned to me and said, “Son, if he is a friend of mine, is that not good enough for you?”
Mama bit her lip while considering whether to voice her opinion. I was about to lie to avoid a crisis when she said, “James, please be reasonable. John and I have not come to know him yet.”
“If he were a friend from London, May, would you be so reticent?”
“I do not know.” She waved a dismissive hand in the air. “The point is moot, James, because John is right. He is too dark to be English, and the neighbors may not be so … so generous as you and I.”
I sensed she had made a tactical error by mentioning the partiality of our neighbors. Father cared not a whit for their opinions on guests in our home or anything else.
He inhaled too sharply on his smoke, causing him to cough. After clearing his throat several times, he sought to trump her by saying, “I should like you to know, May, that Midnight was a subject of the British Crown in the Cape Colony.”
Mama sat down on one of our Windsor chairs, moving it beside mine as though to present a common defense of hearth and home. “That, dear husband, does not make him British.”
“Well, then, damn the British and damn the neighbors both! And damn you, May, for being so clever.”
Papa puffed away demonically and came near to suffocating us in his angry cloud of smoke. But when he spoke, it was with renewed tenderness. “I have learned that he is a very good man. So I will enter into a contract with you both. If, after three weeks, you still find him disagreeable, I shall pay his way back to the Cape and you will never see him again.”
“It is only that he could not have come to us at a worse time,” my mother observed, sensing she had given more offense than she had intended. “Otherwise, I would happily welcome him into our home.”
“On the contrary, May, a better time could hardly be found. As I was telling you.”
“Yes.” She clasped her hands tightly in her lap. “I only hope you are right.”
“Three weeks is all I ask. Is that too much to give a husband who has been away for far too long and who has missed his wife and son terribly?”
These words weakened Mama’s resolve, and my own as well. She and I agreed to his request.
Papa stroked my hair. “Do not fear, John,” he said, patting my head, “for I am home now and you shall get better. I shall see to that if it is the last thing I do.”
These words chilled me, since they implied that a long war might be necessary to win me back to health. Even so, I was pleased that he filled his pipe a second time and continued to caress my hair, for his soothing scent and touch brought him finally home to me. I gulped down my tea and held the warm cup to my temples to ease the throbbing. I prayed for Daniel to stay away.
At about five in the afternoon, my father left the house with Midnight in tow. He explained that he had an engagement at the Douro Wine Company that he could not miss.
No sooner had the front door closed than my mother turned to me and said, “I shall be back presently. Do not — I repeat! — do not venture off or do anything silly.” Then she, too, left the house.
I sat in the garden, throwing Fanny’s leather ball into the weeds for her to fetch, fighting the nausea in the
