‘You know who it is?’ Treasure put the question.
‘Yes, sah, he was caught in de act but he gone escaped. De criminal’s name is Perry Green Gore, and when we catch dat man we’ll tear him apart.’
It was one of those maturing moments in life when engulfing awfulness proves reality can be worse than nightmares. Peregrine Gore was not without previous experience in this connection but this was the first time he had become a wide-awake victim while crouching in his underpants in the centre of a sugar plantation. Within earshot were a score at least of people intent not simply on catching him but on dismembering him when they had achieved their fairly easy objective.
Already he was regretting he had not stood his ground at the beginning of the whole ghastly episode. That he had failed to do so had probably been an error of judgement but it would have taken more than simple courage to have tested the theory.
It had been eight o’clock when Peregrine had come awake with a start. A glance at his watch confirmed that he had overslept – and that Joe O’Hara had done so too. He was the more angry with himself because he had been awake – or more accurately had been awakened – much earlier, as dawn was breaking. The time had been 5.30 and he had self-indulgently estimated he could slumber on for another hour at least. He remembered concluding that Joe O’Hara must have risen earlier than expected and that the older man could thus be relied upon to rouse him as arranged.
Resigned to the fact that he was too late to set off for the service on Mount Manitou, Peregrine had wandered sleepily from his room into the central area of the log cabin – a large sitting-room giving directly on to the verandah through wide double doors. He had been a little surprised to note that these were open – as was the door to the room he knew O’Hara had been using. It had occurred to him that his host might have risen and gone about his business, having forgotten Peregrine’s existence. If this had been so the young man would have been neither surprised nor affronted; if his talents were modest it was to his credit that his disposition and expectancies were also. But he had not been put out of mind by O’Hara – for the sight that had greeted his tentative peek into the older man’s room proved that O’Hara no longer had a mind to exercise in any context.
The head had been completely severed from the body. It was this grotesque fact that had registered first – unreal and unbelievable but not, on the instant, as shocking as it was incredible. O’Hara who had been a whole man had become two lifeless objects, not so much separated as seeming to be unassembled – like a shortly to be completed figure at a waxworks. There had been very little blood. The body was lying on a day bed under a long open window. From the thick woollen socks up to the lanyard and neckerchief held in place by the traditional leather woggle – incongruously, Peregrine had recalled the name of this equipage – the figure of a properly uniformed, vintage scout-master had lain in natural repose. The head that should have been resting on a dark blue cushion was propped up in profile on the window ledge; the gaze – appropriately melancholic – appeared to be directed at the curved machete that lay on the same ledge before it.
Peregrine had hurried to the window. The harshest fact he had ever needed to face had not yet been fully accepted by a mind still in need of sleep. There had been no logic – only a strange sense of compassion – involved in his putting out his hands to the severed head, in his lifting it to make sure . . . irrationally to be certain. He had put the cold object down again with a shudder. His gaze had fallen on the stubby cleaver. The blade was clean – but it should not have been. The sabre true cut cleanly through . . . He picked it up.
‘Murder!’
The cry had come from a woman. He had looked up and found himself staring through the unglazed window at a dozen or so apparently transfixed Carib warriors dressed in loin-cloths and feathered head-dresses. They were carrying spears. The single woman in the party had on a flowered sarong; she had been carrying a basket. They had all come from the direction of the bridge. Of course, they were the first arrivals for the re-enactment of the Treaty Ceremony – hence their appearance and the antique, ornamental weaponry. Peregrine had consciously regretted that a woman had been obliged to witness the macabre sight. He had been about to instruct one of the men on what should be done when the first ornamental spear demonstrated it did service as the real thing by grazing his shoulder: the natives were no longer transfixed.
‘Murderer! Murderer! He kill Uncle Joe.’
The cry had been taken up. More figures had come racing from the bridge. The accusation had been preposterous. The people had no idea of the true facts of the situation. Simply, they had seen Peregrine put down the head – and handle the machete. Another spear had bedded itself with a thud below the window. Its owner, making up in enthusiasm what he lacked in practice, was following in its wake with a cutless in his hand more primitive than the blade on the window-sill – it was bigger and looked much more lethal.
‘Kill him. We kill him now.’
The mass irresponsibility had been indefensible – like Peregrine. He had grasped the machete; perhaps a show of strength . . . ? The crowd had not been impressed. The leading members had been heaving themselves over the balcony rail when he had slammed the window shutters together, inadvertently propelling the head of the late Joe O’Hara into the advancing throng. There had been a roar of horror and disgust from outside – quite understandable in the circumstances, but Peregrine had been in no position to consider niceties. He had plunged back through the cabin to his own room.
His first intention to gather some of his belongings had been abandoned as the shouts from outside came appreciably closer. He kept going – through the window, across the verandah. He dropped the machete on the way. He had vaulted the balustrade before remembering the overhang. The drop was twenty feet – with a fine view of the waterfall, if one had time to appreciate it.
He fell into some light scrub and had rolled thirty yards downhill before his progress was arrested by a stout tree. His descent had been parallel with the steps Joe O’Hara’s grandfather had arranged at the side of the Falls; of more immediate import, his unlikely course had not been observed by his pursuers. A quick glance upwards confirmed that he was beyond the view of anyone at the cabin. Eschewing the steps that followed a curving and leisured route to the river valley, he slipped and tumbled on down the slope through the brush cover. He was shoeless, more than half naked, badly scratched, but now fully awake.
At the bottom he had been tempted to hurl himself into the fast-flowing river to his left – to swim with the current and to use the cool water as balm for torn skin, as relief from the painfulness of going further on bare feet. The roar of the waterfall obliterated all other sound but already he could see figures gathering and dispersing, hunting and gesticulating on both sides of the water on the plateau above. A wall of sugar cane to the right had offered the best chance of concealment. He had forced his way into the plantation and pushed onwards at right angles to the river through line upon line of canes.
He had been halted by a high wire fence – a somehow unexpected obstacle. Praedial larceny was surely not rife among the sugar canes. The mesh was a climbable ten feet – but topped by several rows of barbed wire, threaded taut through arched stanchions.
There was no going backwards. He began to pick up the voices of the hunters – it was only a matter of time. The cries were demoniac. Clearly responsible authority was not yet on hand to control an ugly and recognizably bloodthirsty mob – nor, in compensation, to organize a methodical search.
It was while Peregrine considered his next move, sitting on the ground and calculating expected events, that the unexpected happened. There was a sudden frenzied rustling behind him, and before he had time to turn there came a quick snort of triumph and something hot, wet and fleshy was thrust into the small of his back.
CHAPTER XI
Sarah, the maid, sat dejected and uncomforted on the bed in her little room at the guest-house. She picked at a tea-towel as big tears
coursed down her cheeks. The towel had been set aside for mending but she was mindlessly making the hole in it a good deal bigger.
The source of Sarah’s distress was that she had seen a murder – or as good as seen it – a disturbing enough event for any young girl, and the more so for one already involved in an emotional crisis.
Like most Carleons, Sarah had loved Joe O’Hara. He had been a father figure to her. Her mother had been somewhat vague about the identity of her real father. This is not to suggest that by any stretch of imagination or fact Joe could have been the man in question. Simply, there was a question – a common enough one in the West Indies where marriage tends for the underprivileged to feature as an act of capitulation associated with middle age. Despite the Church’s influence, King Charles Island was very little different from its neighbours in this respect.
Sarah had been her mother’s tenth child – a coincidental tribute to Catholic teaching in one respect at least. However, it cannot be overlooked that nine months previous to the birth Sarah’s mother had been co-habiting with three men – not strictly all at the same time, since each had his allocated days of the week. For this reason, it had not been possible accurately to name Sarah’s father, a circumstance further confused by the fact that when the child was old enough to utter her first ‘Dadda’ the three, as it were, certified contenders for the title had been replaced in her mother’s affections by three others with no title whatsoever.
It is necessary fully to comprehend these vexing circumstances in order to appreciate the depth of Sarah’s transferred but true filial devotion to Joe O’Hara, whose name had featured in virtually every benefaction she had received from infancy upwards and who, by extension, had provided much that a good father should. While it must be admitted this worthy sentiment could properly be shared by all those in the population of KCI in the least mindful of the source of their relative good fortune, for Sarah – an incorrigible romantic – her affection was deepened by a tenuous, remote, but for her very real relationship of a more literally familiar kind.
In the register of St John’s Church, Rupertstown, it was recorded for all to see who cared to take the trouble – and Sarah had – that on 1 June 1860, one Maria Josephine Rafferty, aged seventeen and ten months, had been lawfully married to Matthew James Michael O’Hara, aged seventy-two – despite the almost indecipherable squiggle that recorded this last fact. No more than three days later there was witnessed in that same register the baptism of an infant by the union – one Terence Matthew Michael O’Hara. Old Matthew had been taking no chances in this, as in countless other attempts, to secure a legitimate heir to succeed to his riches and his planned new house.
While there were no less than three hundred souls who were or who claimed to be Raffertys on KCI, and thus the same number who could aspire to some kind of kinship with the O’Haras, it was one whose provable claim in this context was certainly more suspect than most who held it the dearest. Her name was Sarah Rafferty and she was just seventeen years old.
Sarah, who was weeping now, had been near to tears the night before when she had literally eavesdropped on the callous conversation between the Dogwalls and Paul O’Hara – the latter long since established with the islanders as no true Carleon.
It was then that Sarah had finally resolved to emulate the example of the girl she fondly imagined to be her great-great-aunt – or cousin at the very least – and offer herself as a chaste vessel for the carriage of another overdue O’Hara heir. After what she had heard, it seemed to her even more unthinkable than it had been before that Joe was childless by design and not through fault of trying: she would explain he was welcome to try her without obligation.
Having spent some time in prayer, bathed herself and donned a white dress – the symbolism was as convenient as considered; it was her best dress – she had set out for Devil’s Falls before dawn. To her credit she had no experience in such matters, but observation in her mother’s one-roomed home suggested that elderly men were most disposed to energetic amatory involvement following a night’s rest.
On arrival at O’Hara’s cabin, Sarah’s nerve had failed. It is not, after all, every day that young girls offer themselves in supreme sacrifice to men over sixty, and while, as many male sexagenarians will attest, the probability of rebuff is broadly speaking remote, a girl as innocent as Sarah might understandably have maidenly pause for thought on this count.
It was while Sarah was pausing – and well concealed among some bushes beside the cabin – that in the half light of early dawn she saw a man she immediately identified – a respected figure – cross the verandah and enter the house. This man undoubtedly might have proper cause to call upon Mr O’Hara at any time of the day or night, and there was nothing stealthy in the approach. Sarah had wished she had arrived earlier, and with a heavy heart expected to see the two men emerge together – perhaps to make an early start for Mount Manitou. Already she began to plan some other occasion when it might be convenient for Mr O’Hara to have her offer herself to him; she had to take account of how busy he was. Perhaps . . .
It was then that she heard the thud and soon after that the terrible, unbelievable, devil work took place. The man put the head on the ledge not fifty feet from where Sarah was hiding – the severed head of Joseph O’Hara, father of a people, and more particularly, until lately prospective father of Sarah Rafferty’s first-born. It had been all Sarah could do not to cry out – not to vent the scream that welled in her throat. But she had somehow kept silent. In truth, fears for her own safety overcame all other considerations, though still she could not credit that the man who next stole away from the cabin would do her harm – even after what she had witnessed.
In horror she had fled the scene. All thoughts of attending Mass on the mountain went from her mind – the Mass she had intended would sanctify her union with the great man and bring God’s blessing on a conception as immaculate as Maria Josephine Rafferty’s in 1860, which, as it happened, had been nothing of the sort.
Sarah picked at the tea-cloth and mourned the loss of her divinely appointed role. Soon she would mourn a little for Joe O’Hara too. After that it was reasonable to expect she would come to think about her public responsibility; she was only seventeen, and very romantic.
The curious-looking pig flopped on to its haunches and fixed Peregrine with a baleful stare. Most members of the pig species affect an air of disenchantment; this one was especially lack-lustre after establishing through touch and smell that Peregrine was not one of her own kind.
Peregrine was only relieved at the sight of the harmless intruder and not conscious that his bare flesh had just been inspected for pig-like propensities. He stared back at the creature which, while continuing to fix her eyes on his, began swaying her head from side to side in mournful negation.
Pigs, Peregrine was dimly aware, came in a variety of colours, shapes and sizes. The example here presented corresponded only in a few particulars to the sorts he had observed on farms; indeed, the short tusks suggested it might properly belong in a zoo. Then again, it seemed a friendly enough creature; the tusks were really only protruding back teeth, and, despite the long snout and bristly mane, the dark brown body and floppy ears had a woolly, cuddly look. There was also the evidence of the mournful countenance.
At the turn of the century, Terence O’Hara’s ceaseless efforts to find cross breeds of livestock suited to the environment of KCI had produced stranger hybrids than the kind now confronting Peregrine. The Sus scrofa, or wild boar of Southern Europe, the Large Black and other strains of Chinese origins had all played their parts. The young gilt-pig breathing heavily on Peregrine’s knee was sufficiently unique not to merit connection with any registered Breed Society; it was literally a reject and actually a throw-back. Not surprisingly, it was also lonely.
Peregrine extended a hand and tentatively gave the pig a pat on the head. The animal promptly rolled over on its back, exhibited an ample stomach and gave a grunt that was unmistakably one of pur
e pleasure. Peregrine had made a friend – and one which by instinct appeared to recognize that one good turn deserved another.
The pig heaved itself on to its feet, swayed a little, and then proceeded a few yards along the wire fence with a gait that was noticeably unsteady. It paused and slowly turned its head as though to ensure that Peregrine was following. Since, so far as the fugitive was concerned, one direction was as good as another, he complied; the pig proceeded, from time to time bumping into the fence, and several times falling over. Had the creature been human Peregrine would have had no hesitation in concluding that it was inebriated – but a drunken pig was hard to credit.
Peregrine glanced behind him; there was no sign of pursuit. On looking ahead once more he observed a fundamental change in the order of progress. The pig was now on the other side of the wire, and while, earlier, the two had been following a beaten if not actually well-trodden path, the way ahead for Peregrine was now overgrown and undisturbed. Clearly the path – or what there was of it – had crossed the wire; any hole or tunnel capable of taking a pig two feet high and broad withal would certainly accommodate Peregrine. He retraced his steps. The clean-cut gap in the fence might be convenient for a pig, but it had been made by human hand. Peregrine squeezed under the wire without difficulty.
The companionable pig had fallen over again, and this time was showing no inclination to pick itself up and proceed. It lay stretched out on its back emitting short and regular grunts of a kind that might easily have been taken for snores: there was no mistake – the pig had gone to sleep.
Peregrine debated whether he should go on alone. It was at once absurd and humiliating to have one’s movements dependent on the whims of a narcoleptic pig – casually encountered and of questionable sobriety. On the other hand, the pig alone knew the terrain, and before its collapse had evidently been purposefully heading for some firm objective – perhaps a human habitation.
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