Katherine raised her voice then — she couldn’t help herself. It wasn’t right to show any emotion with the help — it just brought you down to their level, and she’d known that all her life — but she just couldn’t restrain herself, not here, not now. “Enough!” she cried. “I don’t give two figs for the manure man and his monkeys — I want to see my husband. And if I can’t see him, I want to know why. Now, will you lead me to Dr. Hamilton this instant or am I going to have to terminate the employment of every last person on these grounds and start all over again?”
Sixty seconds later, after having determined that her mother would rather stay behind and “have a nice chat with Mr. Thompson,” Katherine was back outside, following O‘Kane through the garden at the rear of the house. If she weren’t in such a state she might have appreciated what Dr. Franceschi had accomplished with his bold arrangements of daphnes and rock roses, the flood of gazanias, long-necked birds of paradise, nasturtiums the size of saucers, but appreciation would have to wait. She saw nothing but an undifferentiated mass of vegetation and the back of O’Kane’s head, where the soft blond hair of his nape joined inaVand descended into the white band of his collar. The path took them through the garden and into an open field of golden, waist-high grass, from the depths of which two piebald cows looked up at them stupidly, and finally into the dense shade of a stand of live oak.
“Dr. Hamilton?” O‘Kane called, and there was an odd note to his voice, a note of warning, as if to intimate that he wasn’t alone. He slowed his pace, edging forward into the shadows, Katherine right behind him. It was warm. She could feel the perspiration on her brow, at the hairline, just under the brim of her hat.
“Edward?” The doctor’s voice came from somewhere off to the right, arising disembodied from the twisted maze of snaking limbs and overarching branches. “Are they here already?” the voice called. “Because if they are, you’re going to have to stall them a minute while I—”
“I’ve got Mrs. McCormick with me,” O‘Kane shouted, and in that instant the doctor appeared, materializing out of the gloom where two massive gray trunks intersected like crossed swords not thirty feet away. He was in his shirtsleeves, his collar was unfastened and there seemed to be something in his hair, some foreign matter, dander or fluff or something — or was it straw? “Katherine!” he cried, scurrying across the cracked yellow earth in dusty shoes and a pair of trousers that looked as if they’d been used to clean out the stables. “How good to see you!”
She allowed him to take her hand while he writhed and groveled and disparaged himself for the state of his clothes and hair and most of all for not having been there to greet her in person, but it was all the fault — a chuckle here, nervous and high-pitched — of the hominoids, the anthropoids, the monkeys, because didn’t she see that they’d gotten very lucky indeed with Captain Piroscz and she had to have a look at them, just a look, because they were so, so engaging—
At this juncture there was a long trailing inhuman shriek from the clump of vegetation just ahead, and the wizened frowning face of a little fur-covered homunculus peered out at them from a frame of cupped leaves. “Oh, there you are, you little devil,” Hamilton chided, and he inched forward with his left arm crooked at the elbow and held out stiffly before him, as if he were inviting the thing to dance. “Come on,” he crooned, “come to Papa.”
The monkey — Katherine recognized it from her lab work as a rhesus — merely stared at the doctor out of its saucer eyes. It was a spectacularly unattractive specimen, the color of mustard left out to dry overnight on the edge of a knife, its fur patchy and worn and its skin maculated with open sores and dark matted scabs. There seemed to be something wrong with one of its front paws and its eyes weren’t quite right — there was some sort of film or web over the cornea. When Hamilton got within five feet of it, coaxing and making kissing noises with his lips, it let out another howl and vanished into the canopy overhead.
The doctor dropped his arm to his side and let out a little laugh. “I’m sorry, Katherine,” he said, and she could see that he wasn’t sorry at all, “sorry to have to put you through this — they’re just feeling their oats, that’s all. And perhaps I shouldn’t have released them, but they were looking so pathetic in that cramped bamboo cage and you just knew they hadn’t so much as stretched their limbs the whole way across the Pacific, probably not since they’d been captured in the jungles of the Orient… besides which, this is where I’ve decided to construct the apery and I do intend to give them as much freedom as possible.” There was a pause, as if he were thinking about something else altogether, and then he clapped his hands suddenly and wrung them as if they were wet. “Well,” he said. “And so how are you?”
Katherine was about to say that she wasn’t feeling well at all, that she was worn out from worry and travel and not a little irritated and that she was stunned and disconcerted to find the doctor’s henchmen daring to interfere with her seeing her husband and that furthermore she demanded to know just where she stood, but she never got the chance. Because at that moment, as the doctor slouched there in disarray and O‘Kane shuffled his feet in the dirt and the declining sun coppered the branches of the trees, the monkey suddenly plopped down from above and landed squarely on Hamilton’s head, digging its fingers into his scalp and hissing like a cornered cat. But that wasn’t alclass="underline" in the next instant it was joined by another, which came sailing out of thin air to adhere, caterpillar-like, to the doctor’s shoulder. “Screeee-screeee!” they jeered, boxing furiously at one another with leathery fists while the doctor’s pince-nez flew in one direction and his collar in the other. And then, just as suddenly as they’d appeared, they were gone again, hurtling through the branches like phantoms.
Katherine couldn’t help herself. She was furious, maddened, out for blood, but at the sight of the punctilious little doctor’s utter helplessness in the face of such primitive energy, she had to laugh. To his credit, the doctor laughed too. And O‘Kane, the bruiser, who’d gone absolutely pale at the sight of the tiny hominoids that couldn’t have weighed a twentieth of what he did, joined in, albeit belatedly and with a laugh that trailed off into a whinny.
“They just won’t listen to reason,” Hamilton snorted, facetious and gay, the pince-nez dangling jauntily from his throat, his collar crushed underfoot. The monkeys rode high in the treetops, chittering and screeching. O‘Kane shuffled his feet. Katherine pressed a handkerchief to her face, suppressed a sneeze. “Ha!” Hamilton exclaimed, “I know the type, don’t think I don’t,” and he let out an extraneous laugh. “The devils, the very devils — they’re even worse than my patients.”
That was when the gaiety went out of the air, as thoroughly as if it had been sucked into a vacuum. Katherine’s face was burning. Now, suddenly, she felt nothing but outrage. “I want to see my husband,” she said, and her voice was small and cold.
Hamilton frowned. He was hateful, ridiculous, a smear of monkey urine on his sleeve, lint in his hair — he was a man and he was going to deny her. “I’ve been meaning to write you,” he said.
5. GIOVANNELLA DIMUCCI