Curiosity by Joan Thomas Read Free Book Online Page B

their bed and worm her way into the warm channel between them. She rolled over and tucked an arm under her head as a pillow. The day of the cowpox cure came vividly to her – she had begun to think of that day with a kind of joy. Walking out with her father and Joseph, and crossing a field where black-faced sheep with tattered coats stood to watch them. Seeing Ware Manor Farm, with geese running in a pack in the green yard, and the dead tree that stood with buckets hung upside down to dry on its limbs. It all came to her – Farmer Ware in his smock, walking between the barn and the dairy with stately step because of the yoke over his shoulders, the smell of manure in the cowshed, sostrong it made her eyes burn, and her father lifting her up to a railing heedless of the muck that coated it. “Did ye ever see a poxy milkmaid?” he said, and he brought the tip of the sharp clasp knife to her forearm, and she kept her eyes on his and did not let out so much as a whimper.

FOUR
    n hour out on the Great West Road, Henry is frantic with pain from his lacerated buttocks. He braces his boots against the floor of the bouncing coach and shifts his weight from one hip to the other, while Alger, sitting in the opposite corner, watches him suspiciously. His uncle insists on having the curtains pulled across; the light bothers his eyes. So there is not even the distraction of the road. They’re locked together in this dim box for three days of torment.
    Will I have
scars
? Henry wonders. Tallo, his nurse’s husband at Halse Hall, had cross-hatching on his back like woven wicker. Not from floggings at Halse Hall, from before that. In fact, he was sold to Halse Hall because of it, because if the back is thickly enough scarred, the slave becomes indifferent to the lash. So Henry’s mother said, in recounting how Henry’s father naively bought Tallo the week after arriving in Jamaica and thought he’d got a bargain. Not that Henry’s father intended to rely on the lash. It was 1799 when he took over the plantation – before the Wilberforce Bill banned the trade from Africa, but England was all talk of abolition and his father was resolved to be adifferent sort of planter. A short-lived intention, it would seem, because Henry can remember bare backs in the shed, hands bound to a hook high above. He can remember the sound of the lash, although not the sight of it reaching its mark; just Tomkin the overseer pausing to wipe sweat from his face and neck.
    And now
I
have been flogged, he says to himself as they bounce along the Great West Road. The part of his brain that was counting was stunned into silence at about
three
, but Chorley had reported fifteen lashes. Henry stuffs his jacket under him to augment the thin horsehair cushion, and perches gingerly on it, thinking about what lies ahead, living in disgrace in Bristol with this uncle with the skewed wig and a belly that joggles to the rhythm of the coach. They were identical twins, his father and Uncle Alger. His mother always asks, “When you see Algernon, do you remember your father?” and he says, “No, I remember Algernon.” Which is to say, between annual visits to Bristol, he forgets entirely what his uncle looks like, and he denies any resemblance at all between them – his father, Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas De la Beche, a distinguished officer with the Norfolk Regiment of Fencible Cavalry, and this tedious, dyspeptic bachelor.
    Alger is drifting off to sleep now, his head tipped back against the cushions. Henry watches his mouth slacken and his head fall to the side. Finding himself suddenly in solitude, Henry opens the curtains a crack. He tries to keep his mind off his backside. He needs to focus on the inner meaning of his situation. The meaning no one will see, until he has the chance to share it with his mother. That he acted in truth against a master who
merited
ridicule, by his deficiencies and his vanity and his absurd self-righteous monologues. Mr. Truepenny