In secret the educated Carlos calls Gardner by the magician's name because, like Prospero, Gardner has used his botanical knowledge to create a world of his own, with grass that does not need watering and polka-dotted flowers. The only other inhabitants of the island are a small leper colony and a doctor who serves them.
He took over the house from Carlos, then a young, newly orphaned boy, claiming that he had bought it from the dying servant who had been caring for Carlos and the servant girl, Ariana. The household is run by Peter Gardner, a disgraced and reclusive scientist, who came out from England with his young daughter, Virginia, several years earlier. But he has also received a note from Ariana, the other servant in the household, who says that there was no rape and that the two are in love. Mumsford is sent to Chacachacare to investigate an alleged rape of a white girl by her black servant, the Englishman's worst nightmare. Change is in the air, though, with calls for independence, and Mumsford is not certain he can trust his Trinidadian commissioner, whose white skin does not preclude the African blood most people assume runs in the veins of Trinidad's French Creoles. Assistant commissioner, John Mumsford, has come to Trinidad because as a white man and an Englishman he can live the life of a lord that his middle-class birth could not provide at home. Set in 1961 on Trinidad and the small island of Chacachacare off its coast, Prospero's Daughter portrays the intersection of a handful of lives as England's empire withdraws.
As the title declares, this novel retells the story of The Tempest.
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