Hunting Midnight

regime of punishment and reward. So when Midnight was wounded by a bullet in the arm, he was allowed to be seen by a physician. His life was spared and he was sold by a soldier to Reynolds, the Yorkshireman from whom my father would later steal him.

When asked his name, he replied that it was Midnight, for this was the name Mantis had instructed him to assume when among Europeans. “It will help you to remain at your own center,” the insect-god had told him.

It was an itinerant Welsh minister named Dee, with burning coals for eyes, who informed Midnight that his parents had been killed not by men but by God. Furthermore, he said, the Lord was no longer willing to permit heathens in the civilized Africa that Europe was forging out of the primitive, pestilent, and dark chaos that it had once been. Having had the misfortune to be born a Bushman, Midnight, too, would be barred from heaven unless — here the minister withdrew a New Testament from his small leather satchel — he received Christ into his heart.

Dee visited all the English farms on the Cape. Clad in a hat lined with purple velvet and a mantle of rabbit pelts, he told all the servants that their dancing and — in the case of the Bushmen — their nomadic way of life were affronts to God. The sole cure for both illness and ignorance was Baptism.

Unlike the other African servants on the farm, Midnight refused the minister’s cure. Whipped until his skin was shredded, he was carried to the servants’ quarters. There, Jackal appeared to him in a dream, peeing on Mantis. But the insect remained unperturbed. In fact, he was laughing.

The next day, Mrs. Reynolds took her carriage to town for some cordage that her husband needed. The next candidate for Baptism was a Xhosa lad called John, who was generally regarded as lazy and expendable. He was not as fortunate as Midnight. Though he had agreed to the ceremony, he was to be made an example.

With all the slaves in attendance, John was tied to the porch rail and whipped until the skin on his back had peeled off and he would never cry again. With his bright eyes still wide open, but with his life gone, Minister Dee untied him and pronounced him saved.

This was why Midnight allowed water to be sprinkled on his head. But the Time of the Hyena was on him, and he was unable to laugh like Mantis. In fact, he did not talk for many months.

*

Father, Mother, and I listened in rapt silence while Midnight told us of these times in Africa. At first we didn’t understand the connection of his past to what he might or might not have done to Lourenco Reis — until he said that after seeing the preacher on St. John’s Eve he had remembered Minister Dee and the Xhosa young man named John who had been lashed to death. Midnight believed that the correspondence of names was not accidental. “I understood that Mantis was telling me that our John would die if Reis were to live.”

“Just because he has the same name as that Xhosa lad?” Papa asked.

“I believe that such coincidences point to connections between destinies that we cannot always see. But Mantis can see them.” Midnight told us that over the previous nights he had tracked Reis from one city square to another, where growing crowds welcomed his words with great cheers.

“Just after eleven o’clock last night,” the African said, “Reis walked very, very briskly to the wharf. As he conversed with a ferryman, I ran up the hill and hid in the bushes.”

“What happened after that?” Papa asked.

“Then … then I shot him … I shot Reis.”

“Your arrow reached him from the hillside?” Papa asked.

“Yes, I could see him distinctly in the lantern light. My first arrow pierced his shoulder blade. It had a tip of strong-strong poison. There was no need for another. He is dead by now.”

Before he could say any more, Mama rushed to Midnight, weeping.

“I care not for myself, but you have delivered my John from Pharaoh,” she said solemnly. “You have saved him again. Thank you for your sacrifice. I shall always be grateful.”

Kissing the African’s hands, she rested her head against his chest. I was dumbfounded, and so, too, was my father. Neither of us had realized the extent of her fear these past days and the supreme effort she had made to conceal her emotions.

Mama later told me that she knew in her heart that the Inquisition would have started afresh had not the Bushman murdered Lourenco Reis. “There was no question in my mind. One man would have turned us all to smoke and ash. Do you understand? It takes only one.”

“He was mad,” I replied.

“No, no. He was quite sane. He knew precisely what he was doing. They always do.”

*

I must confess the story Midnight told us may not have been entirely true. I learned from the Olive Tree Sisters that Reis had been seen entering Senhor Benjamin’s home on the night of his death — a fact later confirmed by the apothecary. Benjamin would also admit that a note from him requesting a meeting with the necromancer had been delivered to Reis, though he would never divulge the identity of the messenger.

With the benefit of hindsight, I suspect that Reis was lured to Benjamin’s home by Midnight, who had been following him and who would have had ample opportunity to hand him a note. Once there, the preacher might have been given a clever poison in a glass of wine or water, one that would only take effect several hours later. Or the poison might even have been placed secretly in his snuff.

The ferryman who rowed Reis back to land told me that the preacher had not been wounded by any arrow. Instead, after placing two pinches of snuff in his nose and inhaling, he complained of deep chest pains and then fell almost immediately into a rigid paralysis. He was dead within minutes.

I did not discern the discrepancies in the African’s story at the time because we did not discuss the situation with anyone outside our family — for obvious reasons.

I have come to believe that Reis’s death was planned by Benjamin, who prevailed upon Midnight to lie to us so that we might only reveal a false version of events if ever questioned by ecclesiastical or civil authorities. In this way, we could neither implicate the apothecary nor be regarded as coconspirators. I have often wondered if Papa, too, might have been one of the originators of the plan.

I am quite sure that Midnight could have been convinced to lie to us, if he was sure that it would protect my family.

It might be considered that Benjamin endangered Midnight by compelling him to lie to us about having murdered Reis. But the Bushman would not have been in any true peril, since his story, even if recounted to representatives of the Crown or the Church, could easily have been refuted. Reis’s body bore no arrow wound, as the ferryman and others could testify.

*

In the twenty years that have elapsed, I have read what I could find about Reis, who is mentioned twice in Artur Moura Carneiro’s chronicle of Porto in the years prior to the Napoleonic Wars. It is written there that he had returned to Porto from Goa, where he had endeavored to reestablish the stranglehold of the Inquisition on Portuguese India. Why he chose our city for the revivification of his career in continental Portugal remains a mystery, but he probably thought that the greater part of commerce in our city was controlled by the British and the Christianized Jews. This was hardly true, but his hatred of us blinded him to the reality of our situation.

Another very intriguing possibility is that his true target may not have been the Marranos at all, but rather the Freemasons, a nearly invisible clan I knew nothing about at the time, but who were apparently well-placed in the city’s hierarchy. Perhaps he wanted to take advantage of the traditional Christian distrust of the Jews as a way of reestablishing the Inquisition, intending to turn its persecutory power against these Masons at a later date.

*

Whatever the truth of this episode, we thought it prudent that Midnight leave Porto for a time. My father, who was due to travel upriver to survey lands, decided to take all of us with him.

We spent a peaceful fortnight in a stone manor house on the north bank of the Douro River. Papa, who had visited it often, dubbed it Macbeth’s Castle, where dark night strangles the traveling lamp. But as we were all together as a family, we could not have been happier.

XIX