Black Amber

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  In the next room she heard the older girl get up and move around softly. Tracy stayed very still listening. She heard her sister go to the window, heard the unlikely bird chirp from the driveway below. This was not the first time such a thing had happened, and she knew what Anabel would do. It was always frightening and inevitably it threw Tracy into an anguish of indecision. If she went to her parents in their room at the front of the house, she would get her sister into dreadful trouble. Yet if she did not it seemed that terrible trouble would come to the other girl.

  She listened intently while her sister dressed. She heard her slip out of the room and down the stairs, heard the faint squeak that was the kitchen door opening. Followed by silence. She told herself virtuously that what her sister was doing was wrong, that her parents must be told. She got out of bed, shaking a little, and went into the room where they slept. She wakened them and made it clear what had happened. She could remember her father swearing as he dressed, her mother weeping. Dad had gone searching up and down the streets without success. Tracy, watching from an upstairs window, and no longer pleased with her betrayal, was the first to see her sister come home. She leaned out the window whistling a quavery and out-of-tune London Bridge to let her know that everything was indeed “falling down.” Anabel, forewarned, was still undaunted. She looked up at Tracy with a smile and waved her hand in a thumb-up gesture that signified courage—or perhaps only recklessness.

  When she came in there had been a dreadful scene downstairs, with the older daughter weeping at last, and Tracy’s father shouting ugly accusations. It was all quite horrible and Tracy had been thoroughly sick at her stomach.

  Her sister, for once shaken and frightened herself, came upstairs and found her in the bathroom. She bathed Tracy’s green little face and soothed her and helped her back to bed. She put aside her own grave troubles for the sick younger one, giving her the love and care and consideration Tracy had longed for all day. How bittersweet that comfort had been.

  “So that’s the way it was,” she finished. “That’s why I’ve never forgotten.”

  “Because you betrayed her?” Miles said. “Yes, I can see that. Yet you were doing the right thing. Your parents had to be told about this.”

  Tracy shook her head. “The right thing, but for the wrong reason. I didn’t do it to save my sister from harm. I did it because I wanted to punish her for being beautiful and popular. And most of all because my mother loved her best.”

  She picked up the tea glass with a hand that reached blindly because of the mist before her eyes.

  “A few weeks later my sister ran away,” she went on. “She couldn’t endure the way my father treated her, and for a long time I blamed myself for driving her out.”

  “But you grew up,” Miles said. “And probably she did too.”

  Tracy sipped her cooling tea. “Yes, I grew up and I learned enough to know that she would have run away anyhow, no matter what I did. It would be foolish of me to go on blaming myself for something that happened when I was twelve years old.”

  “But you do a little, don’t you?” Miles took her glass and set it down and held her hand in his own. His fingers were firm about hers, and there was strength and reassurance in his grasp. She wanted to cling to the comfort his hand offered. At that moment she liked him enormously and did not question the warmth she felt toward him.

  “It was all so long ago,” she said. “I know it’s foolish to remember. But I suppose I’ll always wonder if I could have helped her more than I did. Perhaps I could have tried harder to understand whatever it was she wanted. Not just then, but later on when I was old enough. She was a wonderful person, really. There was so much about her that was good. I think she could have made something fine of her life.”

  “Was?” Miles asked.

  “My sister is dead,” said Tracy. She drew her hand from Miles’s and touched the feather pin beneath her open coat. This was the moment. This was the time to tell Anabel’s husband the truth. Yet she was helplessly mute.

  Out on the strait a ship moved toward Istanbul. As it glided by, white and shining in the sunlight, Tracy could see beyond it the silver-gray shape of the yali showing among trees on the opposite shore. The whole reason for her being here swept back on a wave of pain.

  “I’m sorry,” Miles said, his tone surprisingly kind. “But of course it’s futile to reproach yourself, or to ask questions that can’t be answered. Perhaps there are those who can never be helped.”

  “We have to try,” Tracy said fervently. “Someone has to try! There are too many who give up easily with the ones like my sister.” She was aware of his long, perceptive look and knew that his thoughts had turned to Anabel. Had he done all he could for the woman who had been his wife? she wondered.

  “I knew a girl very much like your sister,” Miles said, startling Tracy by coming close to her thoughts. “My wife Anabel was charming and gay as your sister must have been. And as thoroughly bent on self-destruction.”

  Tracy waited, knowing that this might be the brink of the very answer she was seeking.

  “Of course the story is that I drove her to her death. You’ve heard that, I expect. But she had only one interest in me by that time. The fact that I was angry and walked out on her wouldn’t have meant a thing. Something happened while I was gone. Perhaps I can even guess what it was. But I’m not sure who was responsible. I don’t know who could have wanted her dead as desperately as that.”

  “Nursel says you did,” Tracy told him. “She says you wear a hair shirt by keeping your wife’s portrait on the wall of your room. In order to punish yourself for her death.”

  The words did not seem to anger him. “A plausible enough explanation, I suppose. If I were that sort of man. I’m not. There was nothing I wouldn’t have done for Anabel.”

  He had given her an answer. His answer, at least.

  “Why do you stay here?” she asked him. “Why don’t you work on your book somewhere else and get away from this place?”

  It was almost a relief to have him regard her with more normal impatience. “Do you think it’s this book that matters most to me now? I believe in its worth and I’ll get it done sometime, of course. But for me it’s painting that matters. How do you think it feels to be a sort of cripple—because I want to paint and can’t?”

  “But why here?” Tracy persisted. “Perhaps you’d paint again if you went away.”

  He was silent for a long moment. “I’ve tried it,” he said at last. “I’m pulled back every time. It’s here the thing left me and it’s here I must recover it.”

  She had the curious feeling that he had turned some corner in his thoughts and had abruptly ceased to speak the truth. The feeling that this was a story he had told often—with the truth well hidden behind it.

  “What of your portrait of Mrs. Erim?” she asked. “Isn’t this a step toward painting again?”

  “I’d like to keep Sylvana content for the moment,” he admitted. “But I haven’t the slightest desire to immortalize her on canvas. Nothing went right this afternoon until you called my attention to an odd trick of reflection in the samovar. I’ve decided to experiment with it and find out where it leads. It’s a change in my approach, at least. Perhaps not a happy one.”

  She listened uneasily, still sensing concealment in his words. “It is only because of your painting that you want to stay on at the yali?”

  He glanced at her and then quickly away. “Call it a matter of unfinished business, if you like. But don’t poke about trying to satisfy your curiosity.” His face had darkened and there was a sudden warning in his eyes. “Do your work. Get it done and go home. Play in the shallows, if you like, but stay out of the deeps.”

  She gave him look for angry look, yet in the very instant of her indignation she sensed it was a pretense. She must pretend anger so that he would not guess that she remembered his brief kindness and the touch of his hand holding hers in reassurance. There was a sense of loss in knowing that moment would not
come again.

  He pushed his chair from the table. “Shall we return?”

  Tracy rose without a word and they went down to the landing. She got into the boat quickly, and when Miles had tipped the waiting boys he pushed away from shore.

  On the return trip he paid no attention to her, but kept his eyes upon the far shore. Tracy faced him on the crossboard seat, intensely aware of him—of the rough-hewed look of his face, of dark hair growing thickly back from his forehead, of eyes that had no knowledge of her now, but which she had learned could be warm as well as chill. How far away he seemed there in the stern of the boat with his hand upon the rudder. Eons removed from Tracy Hubbard, who could never be as Anabel had been at her fascinating best. “I would have done anything for Anabel,” he had said—and her portrait hung upon his wall, reminding him always of what he had lost.

  As they neared the shore, she realized that in returning he had headed the boat farther up the Bosporus. They were aproaching the broken palace with its overgrown gardens, where Tracy had wandered that day when she had come upon a tryst in the ruins. When they came opposite cracked marble steps, Miles cut the motor and let the boat drift idly.

  “Do you know what this place is?” he asked.

  “Only that it’s where I fell and scraped my leg the first day I was here,” Tracy told him.

  “As a matter of fact it’s a spot with considerable history behind it. It was a palace in the old days—belonging to the Sultan’s mother. The Sultan Valide as she was called. Neither a sultan’s wife nor mother was ever called a sultana—that’s a word the English created.”

  Tracy’s attention was fully arrested. “A Sultan Valide lived here?”

  “This particular one died here—stabbed to death by an enemy among her own ladies.”

  “In the presence of the Anatolian Samovar,” said Tracy softly. She was thinking in sudden excitement of Anabel’s confused reference to the Sultan Valide who knew a secret. A secret hidden perhaps in the old palace ruins?

  “The samovar again!” Miles said with some impatience. “Did you know that it’s one my wife wanted to own—before Sylvana apparently purchased it behind her back?”

  “Yes,” Tracy said. “Nursel told me.”

  “Sylvana did me a favor, as a matter of fact. Anabel had a taste for tales of wickedness and evil. The opposite facet to the side of her that looked toward the light, I suppose. She made this old ruin and its gardens her own place. She was always running away to hide here and put on her little amusements.”

  Tracy watched him, not wanting to stop this reminiscing, or to miss a word, yet touched by an old pain. He did not notice, his attention wholly upon the crumbling building on the shore. Its arched windows and broken veranda were close to them now. The boat seemed to drift in a pocket of quiet made by a jutting point of land that held them away from the main current.

  “Once when I looked for her here,” Miles said, “I found her putting on one of her performances. For an audience of nightingales and lizards.” There was momentary tenderness in his voice. “Like your sister, she could dance and sing a little. She was tripping around over broken floors, making up little steps and singing to herself as though she occupied a stage. She could be an entrancing person. When I applauded she came running to me like a child.”

  Listening, Tracy could see Anabel there among the ruins, moving as though she were the very spirit of this haunted place, delighting and entrancing in her own special way.

  “I might have thought of Ophelia when I found her here,” Miles said, “except that Anabel was not mad. Or if she was, it was a sort of madness that often made her more appealing than any woman I’ve ever known.”

  The old hurt that was now a new hurt deepened in Tracy. She studied the ruins above the boat, understanding better than he knew. This was what Anabel had been like, possessed of her own special magic, or madness, holding those who loved her with a bond that only strengthened with her perversity and need for protection from herself.

  “Well, it’s done now!” The change in Miles’s tone made her look at him quickly, and she saw in his eyes an anger that startled her.

  The quiet of the tiny cove was shattered by the sudden sound of the motor. Their little boat cut through the water as though the very speed of its movement gave vent to Miles’s need for turbulent action.

  Tracy clung to her seat, wondering that she had ever thought him a man in whom all emotion had died. She had glimpsed just now a degree of anger that she shrank from in alarm. Never would she understand the complexities of his nature. With such a man anything was possible—love and hate, perhaps vengeance. But vengeance against whom? Was his anger against someone who existed in the present, or was there some violence that Miles Radburn had brought down upon one who had incurred his anger in the past? Anabel, perhaps, with her ability to subjugate and repel almost in the same breath? His mood had changed so swiftly from tenderness to rage.

  They reached the yali quickly and as quickly his emotion subsided, outwardly at least. He seemed cold again and far removed from all feeling.

  Ahmet was waiting as they came ashore. The old man stood back until they were out of the boat, and then slipped silently away through the passage. Was he off to the kiosk to report to Sylvana, as he had perhaps been instructed to do? For the first time Tracy thought of the fact that Mrs. Erim would not approve of this excursion Miles had made across the Bosporus, taking Tracy with him.

  But she could waste no concern upon Mrs. Erim. Or even upon Miles and his hidden angers. Not now. Since the moment when he had spoken of the Sultan Valide, she had known what she must do. This was the time, if she could slip away without being seen.

  Unexpectedly, Miles was studying her as though she puzzled him for some reason.

  “Thank you for tea,” she said, stiffly polite, and glanced at her watch. It was nearly five.

  He said nothing. It was as if he had become acutely aware of her, as if he searched for an answer to some troublesome problem that had its source in Tracy Hubbard. She had the feeling that he might be asking himself why he had spoken out so frankly to a stranger who meant nothing to him. Perhaps wondering why she had confided in him. She understood, but he could not. He had no idea of the invisible bond that drew them together.

  The moment lasted briefly. “I believe I’ll walk over to the village,” he said, turning curtly from her. His gesture rejected whatever had held his attention, rejected perhaps, the possibility of friendship between them.

  The boatman was busy getting the small craft into its place in the boathouse under the yali and Tracy stood watching for a moment until she was sure Miles was out of sight. Then she slipped through the marble corridor of the ground floor and went through the far door to the driveway. No one was there. There was no one at the windows of the kiosk on the hill above. She slipped quickly away up the same winding path she had followed on her first exploration. Winter shrubbery offered little shield for her going, but as far as she knew no one saw her.

  She found her way to the side gate. Again it was unlocked. Probably because Miles had gone through. But the village lay in the other direction and she would not meet him now. She hurried along the road, knowing her way.

  As she walked, she thought again of Anabel’s words. Miles himself had given her a possible answer to them in the fact that Anabel had often gone to the old ruins where the Sultan Valide had once reigned. Perhaps she had hidden something there that she was trying to tell her sister of in that last hysterical effort.

  Rounding the turn in the road, Tracy saw the iron gate askew upon its great hinges and she began to run, lest some car come suddenly along the road so that she would be seen entering the old garden.

  She went through the gate quietly and trod softly across flagstones, where grass and weeds had sprung up in rebirth. Heavy brown brush cut off the view of the front door and she welcomed it, since it would hide her from the road. She hurried past spiderwebs spun across bushes and ran lightly over the pebbled mosaic belo
w the marble steps.

  Even as she moved there was a sound within the house, and before she could halt her headlong pace a man came through the door and stood awaiting her. It was Murat Erim.

  12

  Tracy stumbled to a halt, staring at the man in the doorway. He did not seem nearly so surprised to see her as she was to see him. Indeed, he smiled at her easily and came down the few steps to her level. She did not like a smile which touched his lips but did not reach black, unfathomable eyes.

  “I have startled you,” he said. “I am sorry for that. I did not hear you until you were through the gate. You enjoyed your boat trip across the Bosporus?”

  “Why—yes,” Tracy said. “We—we had tea on the opposite shore.”

  He nodded. “I supposed as much. There is a fine view of the water from this place. I could see your boat drifting close to the walls on your way back. I was just in there, you see—at the embrasure of the windows.” He gestured toward the house behind him. “You will forgive me—I could not help but hear you speaking together of Mrs. Radburn. It seems he still does not know that you are her sister?”

  “No,” Tracy said. “I haven’t told him yet.” She wanted only to get away, to keep to herself the secret of why she had come here.

  “As Mr. Radburn mentioned, this was a place your sister loved,” Dr. Erim went on. “A place she visited often. Sometimes I used to wonder why. But when I asked, she only laughed and would not tell me. It is possible that you know the reason?”

  Tracy shook her head. It was ridiculous to be afraid. This man meant her no harm. Indeed, he had been kind to her in the beginning. But now he probed dangerously near the truth, and she tried to find an explanation that would put him off.