Rose Read Free

Ashanti goes into battle with a musket and boxes of verse from the Koran stitched to his shirt. The British infantryman goes into battle with a Martini-Henry rifle. It will be a glorious slaughter.”
    “Meanwhile the evil of slavery goes on.”
    “England doesn’t want their slaves, it wants their gold.”
    “Of course it does. That’s what you were supposed to find and didn’t.”
    “I’ll go back for you.” He had meant to introduce the offer slowly, not to blurt it out as desperately as this.
    The Bishop smiled. “Send you back to the Gold Coast? So you could abet your slaver friends again?”
    “No, to finish the survey I’ve already started. Who knows the land as well as I do?”
    “It’s out of the question.”
    Blair was familiar enough with Hannay to understand that the Bishop answered personal appeal with contempt. Well, there were many routes to Africa. He tried a different one. “I understand there’ll be an expedition to the Horn next year. There’s gold there. You’ll need someone like me.”
    “Someone
like
you, not necessarily you. The Society would prefer anyone to you.”
    “You’re the major sponsor, they’ll do what you say.”
    “At the moment that does not work to your benefit.” Hannay managed to look amused without a smile. “I see through you, Blair. You hate London, you detest England, every hour here is odious to you. You want to get back to your jungle and your coffee-colored women. You are transparent.”
    Blair felt a warm flush on his cheeks that had nothing to do with either malaria or port. Hannay had diagnosed him in a brutally accurate way. And perhaps dismissed him, too. The Bishop crossed to the bookshelves. Burton’s
First Footsteps in East Africa
was there. Also Livingstone’s
Missionary Travels
. Both had been best-sellers on a scale usually reserved for Dickens’s maudlin myths of London. Hannay ran his fingers lightly across Society reports:
Trade Routes of the Arab Dhow, Superstitions and Rituals of the Hottentot, Mineral Resources of the Horn of Africa, Certain Practices Among the Peoples of the Horn
. The latter two had been Blair’s own minor contributions. As if he were alone, Hannay moved in a leisurely fashion to the shelf devoted to South Africa, to Zulus and Boers.
    No protest or exit line came to Blair’s mind. Perhaps he had been expelled and the expulsion had been so swift that he had missed the kick. In the silence he calculated how much he owed for his miserable lodging. Besides the clothes on his back he owned nothing that didn’t fit into a pack. His only valuable possession was his surveying equipment: chronometer, brass sextant, telescope.
    “What are your prospects?” Bishop Hannay asked, as if Blair had been wondering aloud.
    “There are other mining companies in London. The East India Company or an Egyptian interest. I’ll catch on.”
    “Any employer will ask for a recommendation, and you’ll be publicly infamous before a week is out.”
    “Or go to New York or California. There’s still plenty of gold there.”
    “Not without a steamship ticket. Your hat is soaked. You didn’t have enough for a cab here.”
    “For a bishop you are a mean son of a bitch.”
    “I’m Church of England,” Hannay said. “That gives me a great deal of latitude. That’s why I tolerate you.”
    “I’ve engineered Hannay mines in America, Mexico, Brazil. You’re the one who sent me to Africa.”
    “Asked, not sent, and you were off like a shot.”
    “I’m not asking for money, not even what the Society owes me. Just a ticket to New York, nothing more.”
    “That’s all?”
    “The world is full of mines.”
    “And like the white rabbit, you’ll pop down a hole andnever be seen again.” To emphasize his point, Hannay dropped his own frame into the chair opposite Blair.
    “Right.”
    “Well, I would miss you, Blair. You may be many things, but a rabbit is hardly one of them. I do feel responsibility for you. You’ve done some good