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  “No,” Mehuru chuckled. “You misunderstand me. I am not a farmer, I am not a pioneer. When I say I want to go home, I did not mean that I wanted to camp out in the bush. I want to go home to my house, to my work, to my own country.”

  Dr. Hadley hesitated. “Forgive me,” he said. “I had thought of all Africans as living off the land, in . . . er . . . I suppose mud huts.”

  Mehuru thought of the high stone walls of Oyo and the architecture of the great houses and the palaces. “I might as well suppose that all Englishmen lived in warehouses beside stinking rivers,” he said bitingly.

  They were at the back of Queens Square. The Merchant Venturers’ immense crane threw a shadow like a giant gibbet over the quayside.

  “You are right to correct me,” Stuart Hadley said. “It is hard for white men to imagine your country.”

  “That’s all right,” Mehuru replied bleakly. “Sometimes it is hard for me to remember it, too.”

  KBARA WAS DOZING IN the chair when Mehuru slipped in through the back door. He started awake, and Mehuru clapped his hand over his mouth. “Sshhh! Fool!” Mehuru said swiftly in Mandinka. “Is everything quiet?”

  “The little boy is sick.”

  “Like James?”

  “The same.”

  “Is he as bad?”

  “Elizabeth says not yet, but she is worried for him.”

  Mehuru thought. “Should we fetch the doctor now?”

  “Elizabeth said you were to go to her when you came in.”

  Mehuru stepped out of his shoes, took them in his hand, and crept up the stairs. Kbara stayed behind to lock the kitchen door and shoot the oiled bolts.

  Mehuru hesitated on the landing. The two grand front bedrooms were Josiah’s and Frances’s. From the one on the left came a rumbling snore—Josiah—which meant that Frances was sleeping alone. Mehuru paused. He had a great desire to see her asleep. He wanted to see her without her knowing he was there, standing at the foot of the bed. He wanted to see her as a sleeping woman, innocent of her power as his slave owner. He wanted to see her warm and half naked in her bed. He went toward her door, his feet silent on the Turkish rugs. He turned the handle and took one step inside her room.

  Her window curtains were only partly drawn, and the moonlight bathed the room in pale colors. Mehuru came a little closer to the bed. Frances was asleep on her back, one hand outflung. Her long hair was twisted into a careless plait. She was wearing a white nightgown of pure lawn, embroidered and pin-tucked around the neck. In her sleep one of the buttons had come undone, and he could see the pale column of her throat and the two smooth lines of her collar bones.

  Mehuru swallowed. She was a lovely woman in the moonlight. Pale as a woman made of white flour, pale as a woman sculpted from frozen cream. He thought of what Dr. Hadley had told him—that many black men had married white women—and he wondered if he would ever lie with a woman again. He could not believe that he must not go closer to Frances, could not believe that he was not allowed to touch her outstretched hand nor put his lips to where the pulse beat slowly and steadily at the base of her throat.

  He heard Kbara’s stealthy tread on the stairs, and he slipped back out of the door, closing it quietly behind him, and met him on the landing. They went up the next flight of stairs together and tapped softly on the women’s door. It was locked, of course. One of Cook’s jobs before she bolted the back and front doors was to lock the slaves in their rooms. Kbara took down the key from its hook, unfastened the door, and Elizabeth opened it from the inside. Her face was strained and tired. She had grieved for the death of James, her little foster son, and watched them take him away and bury him in the cold, alien ground. Now John was coughing as badly, and his fever was rising.

  “Should we fetch a doctor tonight?”

  She nodded. “He is a good man. Ask him to come.”

  “I shall have to ask Frances,” Mehuru said.

  “Do we have to wait until she is awake?” Kbara asked. “Wait till the morning?”

  The temptation to wake Frances was too much for him. “I will wake her now to ask her,” he decided. “I will go. Kbara, you go to bed. I will fetch the doctor. Frances will give me the front-door key.”

  He went quickly down the stairs before they could argue, tapped very softly on Frances’s door, and went into the room. She opened her eyes as he came in, and for a moment she thought she was dreaming and that he had come to her in a dream of desire. Then she blinked herself awake, and there was no mistaking the expression on her face. “Mehuru!” she said, and her voice was full of joy.

  He touched her outstretched hand, and in a movement too quick for either of them to consider, they clasped hands and he bent down to her bed, snatching her to him. Her arms went around his neck, he kissed her throat, the warm hollow where the pulse was now thudding, a line of kisses up to her mouth, which was warm and sweet and opened under his. Her skin smelled of rose water. He rubbed his face against her neck and felt beneath his moving lips the smooth swell of her breasts.

  Her hands pulled at his stock, at his jacket, and he moved to throw his jacket aside but suddenly checked. “Frances! No . . . ”

  “What is it? What is it, Mehuru?”

  “I must not. . . . I came to tell you—it’s John. He’s sick.”

  Her eyelids fluttered for a moment, and then a cold, closed look spread over her face. Her years of training shut down upon her desires like a trap. Her hand went to the open neck of her nightgown and pulled it close. “Oh. Oh. I see.”

  “Elizabeth wants him to see the doctor. May I go for him?”

  She threw back the covers of the bed. He had a brief glimpse of her pale, long legs. “Frances . . .”

  But she had herself under control. She would not even look at him. She threw a shawl around her shoulders, and when she finally turned to him, her face was icy. “Mr. Cole does not want the doctor called except in an emergency.”

  “The child is sick.”

  “Is he seriously ill?”

  Mehuru exclaimed with impatience and reached out to her, but she stepped back. The coldness of her face forbade him to come closer. He felt his quick anger rise at once.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said bitingly. “Excuse me, Mrs. Cole. Yes, he is sick. He is sick like little James. Do you want him to be left to die, or shall I fetch the doctor?”

  She flushed at the insult in his voice. “You can fetch the doctor.”

  He went to the door and hesitated, wondering if she would call him back. His mouth was still hot with her passionate kisses. He could not understand how she could suddenly summon such iciness and distance.

  “The front-door key is in the drawer in the table in the hall,” Frances said precisely.

  “Yes, Mrs. Cole.”

  STUART HADLEY WAS READING in his study when Mehuru arrived, breathless and hatless. He grabbed his bag and washed his face while Mehuru put his horse between the shafts of the phaeton and drove it around to the front door.

  “Same symptoms?”

  “Symptoms? I don’t know that word.”

  “Signs, signs of illness.”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  Hadley nodded. “Better pray it’s not typhoid.”

  The clock in St. Mary Redclift struck two and was answered by the cathedral clock on the other side of the city.

  “Get into the house all right?”

  “Yes.”

  The carriage wheels rattled over John’s Bridge, and Mehuru turned the horse sharply to the right to drive down the bumping cobbles of the quay. The tide was out, and the mud steamed with fresh sewage. Even in the cool night air, the smell was overpowering.

  “It’s a wonder anyone survives,” Hadley said shortly.

  Mehuru turned the carriage away from the quay and into the clean, white enclosure of Queens Square.

  “Will the horse stand?”

  “He’s used to it.”

  Mehuru looped the reins over a railing and led the way into the house, up the s