Read Online Prospero's Daughter by Elizabeth Nunez - Free Book Online Page A

saying.
    “He, sir?” It was Mumsford’s turn to be distracted.
    “Carlos. We are speaking about Carlos, Inspector.”
    “Yes, yes. Carlos.” When he looked again, the yellow was gone.
    “He was speaking like the rest of them when I came here,” Gardner said. “Dat and dis and dey, as if there were no th’s in the English language. He used to say,
I ’as
instead of
I do.
Now, you wouldn’t believe it. Like a proper Englishman.”
    Mumsford opened his notebook.
He must have made a mistake. There
was no yellow near the door.
“So you would say, sir,” he said, writing determinedly, “that in some instances nurture stuck.”
    “Stuck?”
    “What you were saying, sir, about nature,” Mumsford said.
    “Yes, I know what I was saying, Mumsford.”
    “That will be Inspector Mumsford, sir. If you don’t mind, sir.”
    “Yes, I know what I said, Inspector Mumsford, but if you had waited a while you would have heard the rest. Carlos speaks like an Englishman only when he is sober. The rest of the time, which is most of the time, he speaks like a common sailor.”
    “An English sailor, sir?” Mumsford scribbled more notes in his notebook.
    “Yes, yes, by God, an English sailor, Inspector. And he curses as one, too.”
    “So you’d say on the night in question . . .”
    “It wasn’t night.”
    “Then day, sir?”
    “Yes, day.”
    “Well, you’d say on the day in question he was drunk?”
    Gardner became agitated. He bent his head and picked nervously at the loose threads on the pocket of his shirt. Mumsford could see the roots of his hair. Red, English red, he was certain that was the color of Gardner’s hair before the sun had stripped it.
Dirty color rust,
he scribbled in his notebook.
    “What are you writing now, Inspector?” Gardner snapped back his head and glared at him.
    “The details of the case,” Mumsford said. And at that moment he felt a surge of pity for him. He had been sun-dried, bleached like a piece of driftwood.
    “I haven’t given you the details of the case, Inspector,” Gardner said gruffly.
    “About the event happening in the day, not the night, sir.” Gardner sighed and sat back in his chair. “He was not drunk on the day in question,” he said. He looked tired, a wrinkled old man, though he was not much past fifty.
    Not for me, Mumsford thought. I will not turn into a leathery old man before my time. After this matter has ended, the perpetrator put in jail, I will submit my resignation, return to England, marry a young English girl, settle down in some quiet English countryside. Next year will not find me here.
    “Yes. That would have been quite another matter, indeed,” he said to Gardner, the picture he had formed in his head softening his tone.
    “Another matter?” Gardner asked.
    “One can never tell what a man is capable of doing when he is drunk,” Mumsford said.
    “Well, he wasn’t.” Gardner sat up. “Not that day.”
    “Other days then?” Mumsford asked. He did not want to agitate him again, but the deposition had to be precise.
    Gardner smoothed back the wrinkles on his cheeks. “Other days,” he said. “Other days.” His voice trailed.
    He must have been handsome once, Mumsford thought. In England his skin would not have turned to leather. In England his red hair would have been streaked with bronze, not rust, the detestable sun would not have hardened his eyes, and there would have been muscles, not wires in his arms.
    “When?” he asked. “Which other days?”
    But Gardner’s mind was on Ariana again. He turned toward the door through which she had exited moments ago.
    “Ariana!” He was calling her again. “Ariana!”
    This time Mumsford was certain of the yellow. He saw it move. She had been standing there all along, behind the door, listening to them.
    “Ariana!”
    The sliver of yellow widened and she was in the room, smiling, balancing a tray with two glasses on it, one the color of orange juice, the other a disturbing blue.
    “I