their self-righteousness, in their blindness to their inner natures, in their impulse to remake the world and reinvent themselves, never realizing that the world wishes to remain as it is and that oneself is not as malleable as one likes to think. Quinette told her visitors that in her fevered dreams she was haunted by three specters: Suleiman, Tara, and a woman called Yamila. Malachy and Fitzhugh listened to her unburden herself: She had condemned Suleiman by refusing to plead for his life, condemned Tara by remaining silent after her husband disclosed the plan he and Douglas had laid, condemned Yamila to slavery by uttering two words. She asked the priest if it was sometimes necessary to do evil in order to do good. He replied that it was done all the time, but the good never made the evil any the less evil. Though she was a Protestant, he called on her to repeat after him the words to the Act of Contrition, and she did: ” ‘O, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended you . . . in all that I have done and failed to do . . .’ ” At the end Malachy absolved her: “Your sins are forgiven, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
She wasn’t convinced they had been, as Fitzhugh discovered the following day. He’d gone to the hospital to visit her again, alone this time. He didn’t know why. Some vague notion that there was more to be said compelled him to see her. She had suffered a relapse, and he found her shivering and sweating through another delirious episode. “Yamila! Please!” she cried out several times, stark terror on her damp face. “Yamila! Please!”
Please what? Fitzhugh asked himself. Please leave me alone? Please forgive me? Was that what she wanted, not divine forgiveness but the forgiveness of the Nuban woman? If it was, she would never get it. Quinette’s eyes widened, and she screamed loudly enough to bring an orderly into the room. Fitzhugh told him it was all right, the memsahib had had a bad dream. But he wondered what she had seen in her deranged vision to tear from her throat such a horrified cry. It could have been Yamila. Or it could have been someone else.
We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
But what we become, Fitzhugh thinks, is what we have been all along. To outward appearances, each of us is a half truth. The self we present to the world conceals a clandestine self that awaits its time to come out. Africa had not changed Quinette. It had merely provided the right circumstances and the right climate for her pretty chrysalis to pop open and reveal the creature within. To see the whole truth of oneself is also a redemption of sorts. Whether that was what Quinette had beheld, Fitzhugh would never know. Again, he knew only what he wanted to believe, and he wanted to believe redemption was possible.
Redeemed or no, Africa had a special fate in mind for her; a fate not necessarily deserved for all she had done and failed to do; Africa’s Supreme Being neither punishes sinners nor rewards saints but does as he pleases. And it pleased him to demand a payment from this young American woman who had presumed to wed one of his sons and to regard herself as an adopted daughter.
Quinette recovered and returned to the Nuba and her now less-than-happy marriage. Michael blamed her for the loss of their son. She had tempted him into violating a sacred ordinance of his people, and they had suffered the consequence. She felt that the only way to make it up to him would be to get pregnant again. A year later she presented him with their second son, whom they named Gabriel. A year and half after his birth, a third came along, Raphael. (Evidently Michael’s bitterness hadn’t affected their physical attraction.) During both pregnancies Quinette strictly adhered to custom, and the sexual abstinence had the effect she had feared. Michael took a second wife, nineteen years old.
He hadn’t done this solely for reasons of physical gratification. A Nuban man’s status is reflected in the number of his wives, and Michael’s status had changed. With the cessation of hostilities in the Nuba, his military career ended and he was appointed provisional governor of all the rebel-held areas in the region. He exchanged his camouflage for open-neck