The President's Daughter (38 page)

“No, Harriet,” he said suddenly as I advanced, but before he could step beyond my reach, I was in his arms, my mouth covering his. He was here. He had received my letter. He had forgiven me. For one moment, his lips responded, and then I was seized and almost lifted off my feet.

“I'm not Thance, Harriet. I'm Thor … Theodore, Thance's twin. Forgive me.”

Blindly I stumbled back. The African twin. “Oh, my God,” I said, my face on fire. Thor rushed on, stuttering as he explained.

“Thance tried to get here in time, but he won't arrive until next month. His … his doctors forbade him to travel before the end of his quarantine, and then he had to await a steamer leaving from Cape Town.”

“Quarantine?”

“He's been ill. A few weeks before I left Cape Town, he fell ill with a mysterious fever after treating some sailors off an American slaver that had been towed into the harbor by a British patroller.”

“But why Thance? He's not a doctor.”

“They couldn't diagnose the fever, which was not malaria or any of the common African ones. So they sent for me.”

“For you?”

“Yes. I'm a specialist in tropical medicine.”

“For a slaver?”

This was the war, I thought, that was going on between the British patrols and the pirate slave ships.

“The whole ship was decimated. Not more than a dozen sailors survived.”

“And the slaves?”

“The cargo?”

“Yes, the cargo.”

“Some hundred were saved out of a cargo of over four hundred. We saw none of them. They had been emancipated in absentia directly off the ship and transferred to a British schooner bound for the West Indies.”

“And Thance caught their fever?”

“Yes. I blame myself for taking him with me.”

“No, it's my fault. If I had been there …”

“Harriet. That wouldn't have changed anything. We would have gone anyway. It's our job. I brought back thousands of specimens of African medicinal plants and other medicines. We were cataloguing them. Nothing would have stopped us.” He paused. “Harriet?”

I looked up into the eyes of the perfect stranger who was the double of my heart's desire. There was something tougher, more durable in his identical contours. It was in his eyes as well.

“Don't you want to know the message I am to deliver?”

“I think you have already delivered it.”

He smiled Thance's smile and drew together the dark eyebrows that made two curves like the
f
-shapes on a violin. “He still loves you. He has never ceased to love you, and he will never love anyone else. He wants you back on any terms you care to impose. It's in the letter he wrote and gave me when he received yours.”

He handed me a thick envelope. I recognized the large, sprawling handwriting.

“Do you know why I left for Europe?” I said, turning to him.

“I don't …”

“Because I am not what I seem, Mr. Wellington, and I'll never be.”

“And why did you come back, Miss Petit?”

“Because I learned in Europe that most people are not what they seem.”

“He doesn't care about your … your secret, whatever it is.”

“And he doesn't want to know?”

“No.”

“And what about you?” I said with as much cruelty as I could. “Would you care to know, for I am prepared to tell you.”

“Tell me if you must. But I swear before God I'll never tell another living soul, and that includes my brother. You've made him a happy man. I refuse to make him an unhappy one. But you said yourself that nobody is what he seems. You thought I was Thance, but I'm not. Oh, that I were,” he whispered softly.

“You are made of the same stuff as Thance. And I would like to trust you.”

Thor Wellington sucked in his breath as if he were about to receive a blow, while I stood over the abyss, leaning into it as my mother had leaned into the wind, ruffling the tobacco blossoms. Outside the door stood Thenia, who could prove everything I said. I opened my mouth, but nothing came. There was only silence.
I am the natural daughter of the third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, whom I cursed as he lay dying the Fourth of July 1826. I love him and hate him and I have forgotten him.

Was it fair to Thor, a perfect stranger, to reveal my most intimate secret? Would it be easier than confessing to Thance? Then I remembered my experiment with Lorenzo. What harm would waiting a month more do? I had waited all this time. I had waited all my life.

MBABANE

(UNDATED)

My dear Harriet,

Impossible to sleep. How to begin the most important letter of my life? By thanking God it will be my last to you before we are joined together, never to be separated again except in death.

This dawn, my heart, my spirit are so light I should deem myself feebleminded with happiness. Everything I see is ravishing. I feel before having seen the state of the heavens: an admirable serenity of azure. A moon almost full still reigns in the sky, fading with the dawn. The air has an incomparable suaveness, heady, caressing, light. …

I want to be good and I want to be wise. I curse the convalescence which keeps me from rushing to you.

Thor, who will sail in a fortnight, will place this in your hands, which I kiss with all the fervor of a resurrected soul and the ardor of a heart
redeemed. I read and reread your letter. I fold and unfold it. Smooth it out. I hold it to the light, perhaps to indulge myself that there is one more word of love. I place it to my heart knowing you have touched it, perhaps even pressed it to your lips. The words I hold in my hand are scentless. How glad I am you didn't coquettishly try to perfume them like a banal billet-doux, for not only is this letter a letter of love, but of war, of peace, a threat, a promise, a cry from the heart, a treaty, a poem. Moreover, no European fragrance could match the perfume of Africa. Any of those scents would seem stupid, insipid, and artificial in this luxuriant nature where, in an instant, one beholds enough beauty to last a lifetime; where the spine of a butterfly can ravish your eyes and your emotions for hours; where the fauna grows as you breathe, metamorphosing from instant to instant with the light, the temperature, the moisture in the air, like magic. In fact, African life—plant, animal, or human —responds to the beguiling force of nature as to a lover's: not condescendingly or halfheartedly, but without reserve, generously, in a rush of squirming humus burrowing into mulatto earth.

How fast time flies! The terrible months when time was interminable, when night never moved and I was awake before every dawn, when even exhaustion was no guarantee of peace or sleep. Then Thor placed your letter in my hand and my headache left, my eyesight cleared, my burning throat emptied. I stood on wobbly legs and roared. And Thor rushed in in alarm and found me weeping with joy on my feet at last. And we walked to the end of the settlement and took the road that rises toward the hills to a ridge that gives way to a great forest, a million years old, as dense as granite. The last rays of the sun lit its top. A great silence first; then, as the shadows grew, the forest filled with strange noises, fighting cries and songs of birds, evocations from unknown animals, the rustling of foliage that bespeaks of heaven knows what animal or what whisper of God. A troop of monkeys chatter nearby, but we don't manage to see them. The butterfly I captured, zebra-striped with a belly of blue and edged in yellow, I press into this letter.

Next day. All along the road, a mixture of tribes, both men and women, hurry toward the town carrying on their heads produce from distant villages — sweet potatoes, cornmeal, etc.—in great baskets covered with palm leaves. When we pass, they all put down what they're carrying and salute military-style and then, before we can return their salute, they burst into hilarious laughter. We must be hilarious. The joke's on us here.

Fifty feet from where I write, the great vaporous curtain of the falls, silvered by the great clarity of the moon, which here seems bigger than ours, insinuates itself amongst the elephant grass. At sunrise, the falls are veneered with a single column of light the width of a building. The falls are really twin falls, because the cascades are divided by a verdant island
which separates the waters so that one cannot see the two falls at the same time, and one is amazed that what one is admiring in its majesty and amplitude is only
half
the waters of the
fleuve.

Africa is a strange continent where heat pierces the body and transforms it back into the dust from which we are all made.

Enough—I cannot write more. My hand still trembles, not from weakness, but from love. I enclose with this my letters to you which were never sent, that had no destination except my grave. There are a hundred, I believe. In chronological order, you will read the day-to-day happenings of our expedition and how many times I thought of you.

The small package contains gems I would like you to have set in a necklace by a fine jeweler in New York or Philadelphia. Workmanship here is not of the greatest order. Mother can help you. It is a wedding present from

Your Thance in happiness

“You can't break a man's heart the way you did and then expect to come back a year later and pick up the pieces. Who do you think you are?
What
do you think Thance is?”

Charlotte's stern Unitarian eyes were lagoons of recrimination.

“Charlotte, how do you know what I've decided?”

“You've
decided! It took all of Thance's strength, plus ours, to get him on that boat to Cape Town … to save his life.”

For a moment I imagined that Charlotte was in love with Thance. My heart stopped. No. If Charlotte had wanted Thance, she would never have let him leave for Africa. I remained silent under her recriminations. Each hurtful, defiant word of my adored Charlotte was like a balm to the deep open wound I now carried, for it helped me harden my heart.

“The trouble with you, Harriet, is that you are so engrossed in your own insignificant problems that you don't seem to realize other people suffer because of you.”

“Thance was ill and you didn't even write me,” I accused her.

“But I
did
write to you—in Paris,” Charlotte cried. “My letters were returned, marked ‘address unknown.' That was in July.”

“But I was—” I stopped.

“Yes, Harriet. Where were you?”

“I was …”
the residue of the property of Thomas Jefferson
—pleading for my life.

“He could have died … and I wouldn't even have known it,” I said out loud.

“Perhaps he has died, and it is Thor who has taken his place,” Charlotte said bitterly. “You wouldn't know the difference.”

At that moment, I wondered if Charlotte loved
Thor.

“How can you suddenly be so hard-hearted?” I said.

“Because,” insisted Charlotte, “you've always been cruel to people who love you … the more they love you, the crueler you are.” She burst into tears then, and between sobs, she said, “Where were you, Harriet? What are you hiding? Where did Thenia really come from?” she whispered.

I studied Charlotte. My Charlotte. Her ignorance was the price I had to pay for the friendship I held dearest to me.

Two men walked down the gangplank of the ship called the
Galleon.
Both wore white planter's suits with indigo blue shirts and wide panama hats, but one man was white and the other was black. Thance returned home less than nine weeks after my encounter with his twin. Weeks in which I read and reread the letters he had written me from Africa, and in my heart answered each, one by one. The Africa that Thance described haunted me much more than the map Lorenzo had drawn on the
Montezuma.

The darker man was handsome, with a wide, square face, shrewd, intelligent eyes, and deep dimples in each cheek, accentuated by what I would learn were tribal marks—his fingerprints—carved into his skin. He had other marks, too—three horizontal slashes on each temple. They flashed like dark signals with his burst of conversation as the two men set foot on the quay. Thance held on to the other man's arm for support, and his suit hung loose on him; he had not yet gained back the flesh he had lost to his illness. They were still too far away from me for me to hear the conversation that held them both in such thrall, but they turned together as Thor raced across the busy wharf toward them.

“Thance!” he called. “Abraham!”

The three joined in an embrace that sent a pang of jealousy through me, although I knew it wasn't fair. Soon Thance would leave the others behind. Soon I would look into his black eyes and rest. The odyssey was over.

The two brothers and the man between them turned. Thance broke loose and raced across the cobbled walkway. He smelled of salt, love, and Africa. He looked so young.

He didn't kiss me. Not even my hand. We were much too shy, too
embarrassed, by so many strangers gazing from the deck of the
Galleon,
from the wharves, from the carriages parked pell-mell around the pier.

“Let me look at you,” he said softly. “You are more beautiful, not the same, but more beautiful. You're wearing the necklace.”

“Your mother helped me. Mr. Duren, at Bailey, Banks, and Biddle, worked day and night to finish it in time,” I said shyly. “She's waiting for you at home.”

I had been lucky to have gotten off so easily with the widow Wellington. But Thance's narrow escape from death in Africa had made her ready even to renounce her vow never to allow me into her family again.

“I'm so happy, Harriet.”

“So am I.”

He broke away from me then and turned toward Thor and the smiling brown man, who had approached us.

“This is Abraham Bos'th, who took care of me at the hospice. He is a great apothecary and homeopath whom I'm going to introduce to Philadelphia's pharmaceutical wonders. He's come to work for us at our new laboratory. His tribe is the Ndebele.”