‘I shouldn’t drink.’ She rubbed her throbbing temple.
‘Why not?’ He laughed, but softly, as though aware of the shooting pains in her skull. ‘You had been working damn hard all night. Whisky relaxes you, and that’s exactly what you needed.’
She sat up straight, and studied the face of this man who thought he knew what she needed. It lacked the handsome charm of Johnnie’s, and was not distinguished like Nigel’s. But now that his bad-tempered scowl had been banished ever since he set foot on The White Pearl, there was an energy in the alignment of Fitzpayne’s face, a strength in the set of his wide jaw that gave his appearance an unusual kind of attraction. But the complex layers of his grey eyes worried her, the watchful intelligence behind them. What had made him go out of his way last night to get her drunk when she was too weary to resist? What was his purpose? And what had she told him?
Connie felt foolish. Foolish and embarrassed, but worse, she felt a sick churning in her stomach.
‘Mr Fitzpayne,’ she said quietly, ‘I trusted you.’
‘I know, and I value that.’
‘So please tell me, why are you really here?’
‘Mrs Hadley.’ He leaned across the table, and for the first time she could make out the tiny lines of exhaustion that crept around his eyes. ‘I am here because you are trusting me to sail you and your boatload to Singapore. No other reason. Don’t worry, I’ll get you there, come hell or high water.’ He laughed, a strange, disturbing sound, less of a laugh than a collision of thoughts. ‘I think we experienced both hell and high water last night, but we’re still here. Still in one piece. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘So relax. Everyone is relieved this morning just because they’re still alive. You should be, too.’
She rose to her feet, pausing while her head went for a spin around the room. ‘I must find my son.’
‘He’s fine. Your husband has got him gathering firewood on shore.’
She nodded, a wary movement, and made for the stairs. She suddenly realised she was still wearing her oilskins, so she peeled them off and felt an urgency to climb up into the fresh air, but halfway up the stairs she ducked her head and looked back at Fitzpayne. He was still seated, his muscular forearms resting on the table, her empty glass in his hand. His eyes were on her, but it was impossible to read their carefully guarded expression. She wondered if he saw on her face that same curtain that was drawn tight, protecting the secrets that flitted like shadows behind it.
‘Fitz,’ she said, ‘thank you.’
‘For what?’
She smiled at him and headed up on deck.
21
‘I hate this fucking jungle.’
However much Kitty moaned or mutinied, cried or cursed, Madoc didn’t let her stop. He made her walk every hour of daylight. Only when the very last glimmer had spilled from the sky and the darkness of the jungle erupted into life, did he allow her to collapse in a shuddering heap on the tarpaulin that he spread on the saturated earth underfoot.
‘Madoc,’ she hissed at him through clenched teeth, as he lit a strip of bark with one of their last matches, ‘if I have to spend one more night in this bloody jungle, with no food and no dry clothes and no bed and no shelter, with no relief from the bloody mosquitoes, I swear to God I will start cooking you limb by limb, and will eat your heart while it’s still beating, because I can’t …’
‘Hush, Kitty,’ he murmured as he lowered himself down on the tarpaulin, lifted her thick legs one at a time on to his lap and started to hunt out and scorch the plump bodies of the leeches that were buried in her flesh.
‘A fire tonight, Madoc. Please, just a small one.’ She gripped the back of his neck with a hand that was infected and shook his head back and forth. ‘Please. To cook something. To dry my clothes, as well as to scare off the animals that come so close I can smell their greedy breath.’
‘No.’
‘Please.’
‘No.’
‘Blast you.’
Gently, by the flimsy light of a burning length of bark, he dabbed antiseptic on the bleeding holes in her skin. She didn’t wince and didn’t moan, just kept her finger and thumb digging into his neck like a death grip. She was shivering. He felt terrible for her, but he wouldn’t relent.
‘No fire, Kitty. The Japs could be close behind us.’
She leaned her head heavily on his shoulder. ‘You’re crazy. They couldn’t have got this far south yet.’
‘Don’t underestimate them. They move fast.’ He gave a tight grimace that he was glad she couldn’t see. ‘They have bicycles, don’t forget. They will be advancing relentlessly, invisible in the jungle until they slide a bayonet into your guts.’
‘Shut up, Madoc!’
‘I’m sorry, Kitty.’
Abruptly she released her grip on his neck. ‘One measly bloody fire, that’s all I ask.’ She collapsed onto her side with a defeated groan and lay silent.
Around them, the noises of the night were deafening, a vibrating rowdy crescendo of chirrups and whistles, roars and growls, booms and squeaks. God knows what creatures were out there, what animals made such a cacophony of sound, but it acted like a drum inside Madoc’s head, deadening his thoughts. As he pulled a small bundle from his pack, large-winged moths swarmed around his torch, fluttering against his cheek and blundering into the flame. He unwound the cloth that was wrapped around the bundle and took out two items.
‘Here, Kitty.’ He held them out to her on his palm, like he used to offer an apple to the milkman’s horse when he was a child. ‘Eat something.’
‘Piss off.’
‘You have to eat.’
‘Cook them first and then I’ll eat.’
Madoc looked at the two pale grubs as big as white mice on his hand. They had soft, glistening bodies that tasted foul, but they were food and they weren’t poisonous. In his pack lay a large dead lizard that would taste like chicken if it were cooked.
‘I’ll eat one if you eat one,’ he urged.
She didn’t reply. The black mound of her bulk – that, back home, could fill a room: her boisterous breasts and carthorse hips and her wide, enticing smile – seemed diminished here, and Madoc experienced a strange feeling that he was losing her to the jungle. It was eating her, devouring her damp, creamy flesh, sucking the life out of her the way the leeches did. The thought distressed him. Since the destruction of his bar and his home, he had kept them travelling south day after day, endlessly hacking their way through dense forest, avoiding trails and any kampongs, the native villages that they stumbled across.
‘They will have food,’ Kitty had wailed.
‘When the Japs come,’ he told her, ‘they will hunt down any whites hiding out in the forest or in the villages, and if they hear that we have been in the area, we won’t stand a chance.’
She looked at him with a solemn expression, her face caked in muddy streaks. ‘They really frighten you, these Japs.’
‘They scare the shit out of me. You saw what they did to Morgan’s Bar. They want me dead.’
She had kissed him smack on the mouth. ‘They’ll have to kill me first.’
Now she was threatening to kill him herself if he didn’t light her a fire and roast the lizard. Softly he stroked her dirty hair.
‘Sleep,’ he whispered. When she was rested, she might eat.
He knocked out the stub of flame. Instantly all existence vanished, and there was only the total darkness of the grave. He shuddered, unable to see his hand in front of his face. He curled up behind Kitty, his stinking body merging with hers, and pulled the tarpaulin over them, tucking it tight to keep out the spiders and snakes and the bugs, and whatever else stalked through the trees. In one hand he clutched his knife. He didn’t expect to sleep, but just the familiar warmth of his wife’s flesh next to his relaxed him a fraction. But his throat was dry and tense, the taste of anger in it, bitter as the grubs. Christ, he would kill his own mother for a cigarette.<
br />
That was when the rain came.
‘Kitty! Kitty! Wake up.’
Madoc held a hand over her mouth to keep her quiet. Her eyes popped open, and for a moment her sleep-sodden brain must have thought she was at home in bed because she smiled and reached for him.
‘Kitty, come and look,’ he whispered.
Realisation turned her eyes the colour of dirt. She nodded and he removed his hand, flicking flies off her. Without a word she dragged herself to her feet and followed him along a path he had hacked through the undergrowth earlier with the parang, snaking up a steep hill. Everything was saturated. The earth was slippery beneath their feet, and it was tough going. He held her hand and pulled her over the roots and mud slides, puffing and panting, as the sky turned from unrelenting black to a dull, lifeless grey and a silvery mist crept up the slopes like a sneak-thief.
Near the top of the hill, a rocky outcrop covered in moss and lichen was home to a whole colony of bright green lizards waiting patiently for the heat of the day to warm their blood. They were as sluggish as snails in their movements, and Kitty eyed them with interest, hoping for breakfast, but Madoc drew her around the outcrop to the other side.
‘Look!’ he said, and pointed.
In the distance beyond the trees lay the sea, whipped up into rolling breakers by last night’s storm. But much nearer, on the edge of the shoreline that was hidden from them by the forest, a thin grey ribbon rose above the canopy of the jungle. It was smoke.
‘The fools have lit a fire.’
Madoc could almost hear Kitty’s brain clicking into life beside him.
‘Breakfast,’ she murmured. ‘Cooked breakfast.’
But it wasn’t the fire that Madoc was staring at as they stood under cover among the palms on the forest ridge. He had eyes only for the boat. She was a two-masted yacht with elegant lines, riding at anchor and lifting her bow in the rough waters like a racing hound sniffing the air, eager to set off. Madoc clenched his fist as excitement screwed up his gut.
He snorted into the early-morning mist. ‘Fuck me if there isn’t a God in heaven after all!’
‘Let me take a look at you.’
‘What?’
Kitty flicked her gaze over him from head to foot, frowned and then stuck a finger in one of the holes in his shirtsleeve and tore it so that it flapped loose and forlorn.
‘You’re certainly dirty enough,’ she decided. ‘Like a bloody chimney sweep.’ Nevertheless, she rubbed more earth through his hair and snapped off a couple of shirt buttons. Satisfied, she nodded. ‘What about me?’
Madoc inspected her filth and sweat, the hunger in her eyes and the way the wind off the sea was whipping her wild grey mane into a frenzy. He smiled.
‘Kitty, you are perfect.’
*
It was a strange little group, Madoc noted as he and Kitty approached. Eight of them: three men, two women, two natives plus a boy. And a dog. Seemingly all marooned by the storm on this slender spit of land between the sea and a small horseshoe bay at the mouth of the creek. Behind them the waves crashed against the mangroves with ferocious determination, trying to tear their long grey limbs apart. The noise of it was a constant roar in the background. This side of the spit, the water swirled in and out of the sinuous roots as though in search of their weak spot. Madoc wondered how long it would take him to find the weak spot of this group.
It was the dog that spotted them first as they walked forward. It raced towards them, a high-speed black torpedo, barking a warning, but then it stopped short ten feet from them, stiff-legged and teeth bared.
‘Hello, boy,’ Madoc said, and held out his hand with a grub on it, but the animal wasn’t having any of it.
It growled. Madoc halted. He wasn’t comfortable around dogs.
Kitty advanced towards it with a cheery, ‘Piss off, mutt!’ She gave it a tweak of its ears that made its tongue sneak out and lick her hand. ‘Bloody useless guard dog you are,’ she scolded, and the dog hurtled around her heels.
‘Hello there!’ Madoc raised a hand as he called out to the man approaching them across the ribbon of white sand.
He recognised the type, even from thirty paces away. He’d crossed paths with them all his life. The arrogant set of the shoulders, the clean-shaven chin held a fraction higher than was natural, so that he could stare down his nose. The crisp cut of his cream flannels, ready to stride out for a game of cricket at a moment’s notice even in the middle of the bloody jungle. The Panama hat at an angle that said, I am better than you, one of the rulers of the colonial territories. Only the limp betrayed weakness, and fleetingly Madoc wondered how he’d come by the injury.
‘Hello!’ he called again as he and Kitty closed the gap, but the man didn’t lift his hat to them as courtesy required had they been equals. He didn’t offer his hand, either.
‘Good God, man! Where the blazes have you come from?’
‘We’ve been escaping through the jungle.’
‘From the Japs,’ Kitty added drily, as though the man were stupid.
‘Are they so close?’ He glanced with alarm at the mass of solid jungle behind them.
‘No, we’ve kept ahead of them. My name is Morgan Madoc and this is my wife, Kitty.’
Madoc watched the man incline his head in polite greeting, as if at a tea party. ‘I am Nigel Hadley.’
‘We need help.’ Madoc spelled it out for him.
In the background, Madoc spotted a couple of the others detach themselves from the group and approach, a tall man with his arm in a sling accompanied by a slender woman with blond hair and an energetic way of walking – unlike most women of her class, who never deigned to move faster than a bored snail.
‘Come along,’ Hadley said, ‘come and meet the rest.’
When the man and the blond woman reached them, there was an exchange of ‘Good heavens’ and ‘Bloody hell!’ and ‘Are you all right?’ All the time Madoc saw the woman’s quick blue eyes skipping between Kitty and himself before settling on Kitty, taking in the insect bites on her face and the grey lines of exhaustion.
‘You poor thing,’ she said quietly.
She took his wife’s filthy hand and threaded it through her own arm, leading her at a slow, considerate pace over the shifting sand, ducking her head against the wind. ‘You must be starving,’ she said. ‘Come and have something to eat. Take her other arm, Johnnie.’ She turned to the cricket man. ‘Nigel, do give Mr Madoc a hand. He looks quite done in.’
Madoc noticed the man she called Nigel give her a long, angry look once her back was turned. So that was how the land lay. Madoc smiled to himself. Maybe he’d already found the weak spot.
They were trying to fry ham and eggs on the fire, but they were burning them. How could people who could run a bloody empire not know how to cook eggs?
Madoc sat on the sand drinking tea out of a dainty porcelain cup, and kept a civil tongue in his head. Best to see the lie of the land first. He didn’t yell at them to put out the fire. He didn’t argue when told the stiff gale would probably blow itself out overnight. He noted the small breakfast rations handed out to each person, and the way the dark-haired white woman looked as if she wanted to snatch the plate from his hand. The young kid with eyes as bright as bullets plonked himself down next to Madoc, clutching a pencil and notebook, and started asking all the questions that the men, who seemed to have a broom up their arse, were too polite to ask.
‘Did you see any Japanese?’
‘What kind of aeroplane strafed your home? Did it have twin engines?’
‘Did you see any leopards in the jungle?’
‘How did you navigate?’
‘Were there lots of snakes?’
‘What did you eat?’
‘Did you have to swim a river?’
Each answer was jotted down in the notebook. After a long pause, there came a whispered, ‘Were you frightened?’
‘Teddy,’ Constance Hadley chided fondly as she tended Kitty’s infected bites, ‘le
ave poor Mr Madoc in peace.’
She gave Madoc an apologetic smile, and in that brief moment he was surprised by what he saw in her face. This was not a woman at peace. This was a woman chafing against something. She reminded him of a magpie with a broken wing he’d once rescued. It used to wander gracefully around the yard on its slender feet, but all the time it uttered a sharp, choked cry, desperate to fly.
‘What do you reckon, Madoc?’ Kitty muttered.
‘They won’t leave us stranded here, they’re British,’ he chuckled as he sipped his tea and wished like hell that it had a splash of something stronger in it. ‘They do the decent thing.’
‘That Henry Court fellow isn’t so keen.’
‘Nor Hadley.’
He eyed the group, who had withdrawn in a huddle to the water’s edge to discuss the situation, leaving Madoc and Kitty seated beside the fire with the charred food. It was clear that the discussion was heated. Only the native girl stayed away from it, prowling up and down the spit of land in her sarong like a young jungle cat waiting to sink its claws into something.
‘So what do you reckon?’ Kitty asked again between mouthfuls of egg.
‘Three against two. The kid and the native boy won’t get a vote.’
‘For us or against us?’
He shook his head. ‘It looks like it’s going against us.’
‘Oh, hell!’
‘I think the Flight Lieutenant and Mrs Hadley will vote to take us on board. But the others are scared shitless at the idea of us contaminating them and overcrowding their precious boat.’
Kitty stirred a piece of ham through the sulphurous smears on her plate. ‘There will be plenty of room for us on deck.’
‘They don’t want us eating their food, either. Did you see the look the dark-haired woman gave your plate?’
‘Bastards.’
As the wind chased the smoke from the fire into their eyes, Kitty gave him a long look. ‘All right, Madoc, what are you looking so pleased about? You want to sit on this beach until the Japs ride in on their bloody bicycles?’
He leaned his shoulder against hers. ‘Kitty, my sweet, I have hot food in my belly, you safe at my side and we’re about to sail on a boat that would fetch a pretty penny for someone who knew where to sell her.’
The White Pearl Page 26