The meal ended with mango in dry wine, and they rose to return to the salon. The double doors to the hall were open and a childish figure in a white nightdress stood in the opening. She was crying, the tears wet and forlorn on her cheeks.
‘I—I heard her,’ sobbed Rue. ‘I heard the Golden Lady!’
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT was Lucan who consoled the child with soothing words and hot chocolate beside the salon fire, and though she calmed down as she sipped her drink, her head resting against his shoulder, she still insisted that she had heard someone in a silk dress outside her room.
‘It’s all imagination,’ Clare muttered as she lit a cigarette. ‘She has more than her share of it.’
‘All the same,’ said Nils, ‘it might reassure Rue if I took a look around upstairs. A bat might have flown in through a gallery window and the flutter of its wings would sound eerie.’
‘I might as well come with you.’ Clare followed Nils out of the room, a rather unsympathetic type of woman in Kara’s estimation. One of those who could not see things with a child’s eyes, or feel the insecurity of being a small person in a large, many-roomed house where the servants were superstitious. Kara herself had been affected by the tale of the Golden Lady, who was said to haunt this house in which she had been unhappy.
Rue, her small feet warming by the fire, listened to Lucan’s tale of an Irish princess. Gradually her green eyes grew drowsy and her head nestled sleepily against him, and as Kara sat looking at the two of them she was stabbed by a painful suspicion.
Rue’s unknown mother had abandoned her as a baby to the care of the Savidges … and it could not be a coincidence that the child had eyes like Lucan and hair with a wild fire gleam … she even had his love.
Kara put a hand to her throat, to the pulse that beat wildly there. Pryde from his wheelchair—Pryde like a shadowed portrait against the velvet curtains—glanced at her, and surely there was a gleam of sympathy in his grey eyes.
‘Are you finding us a rather overpowering family, Kara?’ he asked. He dipped a spoon in the ice-water Samuel had brought him and let a drop of it sink the grounds of his Turkish coffee. His hands had a power and grace denied to his body; and his concise voice lacked the Irish lilt in her husband’s. ‘Will you join me, or do you prefer a milder coffee?’
‘This is from the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, ma’am,’ Samuel said, with his grave smile. She smiled back at him and he filled her little blue cup.
‘I am afraid I have a hard palate to please,’ Pryde said drily. ‘Lucan, as you see, has a boyish penchant for sweet things.’
Lucan quirked an eyebrow, for he was sharing Rue’s mug of chocolate. ‘And what happened, Yunk? Did the princess marry the warrior?’ Rue nuzzled his shoulder and gave a sleepy yawn. ‘Did they live happy ever after?’
‘Yes, in their castle above an Irish glen, with the turf fires smoking into the cool evening air, and the princess making music at her harp.’
‘What’s a harp?’
‘It’s what angels play, my poppet.’
‘And was the princess truly happy with her warrior?’
‘Until they went beyond the sunset.’ Lucan stood up, cradling the child against him. ‘Come, little one, I’ll take you up to bed—’
‘No—’ She began to struggle and the tears started to her eyes again. ‘No, I don’t want to be all on my own up there!’
Kara set aside her coffee cup and rose to her feet. ‘I will stay with her until she sleeps.’ She smiled at Rue. ‘Would you like that?’
Rue nodded, and Kara was touched to her heart by that small, frightened face. She turned to Pryde to say goodnight, and he took her fine-boned hand into his and she felt the steel in his fingers, and gazed down at the face that might have been that of Sebastian, the martyr of a thousand arrows.
‘The young are imaginative and full of fancies,’ he said. ‘Don’t allow yourself to give way to youthful fancies, Kara. This is a large house and it has seen a lot of history, but now we must all look forward to the future—to the brothers and sisters Rue will have in time.’
Kara pulled her hand quickly free of Pryde’s. ‘Goodnight, seigneur,’ she said, and as she walked upstairs beside Lucan and the child she was sure that Pryde had not spoken figuratively. He had meant her to understand that if she had a child it would be the brother or sister of Rue.
Clare and Nils were talking on the first gallery. Clare swung round at the sound of footfalls, and there was a defensive glitter in her eyes. ‘Oh, are you and Lucan off to bed ?’ she said to Kara.
‘I am going to sit with Rue until she falls asleep.’ Kara managed to smile at her sister-in-law, but at heart she was trembling, appalled by the thought of going to bed with Lucan, a man she did not know any more. A stranger to her, who had a beautiful girl-friend in Paris, and who might be the father of the child whom Pryde had adopted.
‘Goodnight, pretty one.’ Nils gave the child’s soft hair a stroke. ‘You are lucky to have such nice young aunt.’
‘You are spoiled and indulged, Rue.’ Clare’s lips were drawn in tightly, and as she hurried downstairs her dress rustled around her like a coating of ice.
Nils’ eyes held a wry expression as he gazed after her. ‘There were no ghosts,’ he said, but Kara shivered and felt the past all about in this house at Dragon Bay.
Lucan carried Rue into her bedroom, which was much too large and grand for a small child. Her night-lamp was still alight. Shaped like Aladdin’s magic lamp it aureoled the big bed but left shadows lurking in corners and between the carved furniture. A child needed a room with light-coloured walls and rugs, Kara thought, and furniture of her own dimensions, brightly painted.
Lucan tucked the covers around Rue, who lay looking up at him, small and defenceless in the lamplight.
‘Kara will sing you to sleep,’ he said. ‘She knows many old songs, but she is too shy to sing one for me.’
‘But she is your wife,’ giggled Rue, loving the attention she was receiving from him. She reached up and touched his cheek.
‘Yes,’ he cast a quizzical glance across the bed at Kara. ‘And I am her husband.’
Kara, her nerves drawn as taut as a bowstring, watched the lamp glisten on the dark fire of his hair as he bent to give Rue a goodnight kiss. ‘See you tomorrow, mischief.’
‘See you tomorrow, darling Yunk.’
He strode to the door and from there he gazed back at Kara, tall and dominant, his eyes taking in her chiffon-clad figure. ‘Just one song,’ he said, and then abruptly he unbuttoned his dinner jacket, brought it to Kara and wrapped its warmth about her. ‘The nights grow cold at Dragon Bay,’ he added, and the next moment he was gone and the door was closing behind him.
Kara felt the warm weight of Lucan’s jacket like an embrace. She wanted to throw it off, but Rue would have been bewildered, even hurt. ‘Where are your toys, Rue ?’ she asked, for the room was so unchildlike, with not a doll or a paintbox in sight.
Rue pointed to a large corner cupboard, and Kara went and opened it. The deep shelves held a number of dolls and books and other toys, all tidily arranged. ‘I’m not allowed to clutter,’ said Rue. ‘Da gets annoyed at untidiness.’.
Da, who had been so annoyed with the boyish Lucan for being untidy. Kara took out a copy of Les Fables de la Fontaine and glanced through it. Suddenly her heart felt jarred, for inside on the flyleaf was written: ‘Ma chère Lucan, who has told me so many fairy tales.’ The handwriting was feminine, the ink faded. The book was about eight or nine years old.
‘Do you read these la Fontaine fables, Rue?’ she asked, forcing herself to speak calmly, telling herself that before she had met Lucan she, too, had loved someone else.
Rue nodded. ‘The book belongs to Uncle Lucan, but he lets me read it. I don’t understand all the stories—would you read me one, Kara?’
‘Not right now,’ Kara replaced the book, and spun the sail of a painted windmill. She thought of the old, fire-blackened sugar mill and t
he shadow that had darkened its window as she and Lucan rode by. ‘I have not yet met your Da,’ she said. ‘She sounds a martinet.’
‘Da has a son she visits—she is treated almost like one of the family because she has been at the Great House for fifty years.’ The awe with which Rue spoke was punctuated by a yawn, and as Kara came to the bedside she saw that the child was struggling not to fall asleep. She was afraid to be left alone.
Kara sat down on the bed and stroked a strand of russet hair out of the child’s eyes—the green and drowsy eyes of a little curled-up cat, her lashes catching the lamplight and glinting with foxfire.
‘What is a f-foundling?’ Rue asked, and Kara felt a sudden painful urge to take the sleepy bundle into her arms.
‘Who has called you that, poppet?’ she asked quietly.
Rue bit her lip. ‘Oh, I read it in a book. It was in Daddy Long Legs, I think. Does it mean my—my father didn’t want me and gave me away ?’
Kara noticed that the child did not say father and mother. It was her father who was important to her, and Kara wondered how much she had guessed or surmised from the conversation of the servants. Da for instance had been here for fifty years. She would know everything that went on at Dragon Bay.
‘Sometimes,’ Kara said gently, ‘grown-up people do things they regret and some of them try to atone for any pain they have caused. As you grow into a big girl, Rue, you will understand better—’ Kara stifled a sigh, for she didn’t fully understand herself, or condone actions that caused heartache for other people. She was bewildered and hurt by the things she was learning about Lucan.
‘Sing to me,’ Rue coaxed. ‘Uncle Lucan said you would.’
And softly, in the lamplight, Kara sang a Greek song of her own childhood to this lovely, imaginative child born out of a wild and fleeting love.
Rue stirred and lifted her drowsy eyelids as the song came to an end. ‘Kara, don’t leave me all alone,’ she pleaded.
‘Of course I won’t.’ Kara rose from the side of the bed and went and drew open the curtains at the big windows. The stars blinked in the sky like golden eyes as she turned out the Aladdin lamp and slipped out of her dress. She slipped into bed beside Rue and the child cuddled against her with a sigh of contentment. In a while she slept, but Kara lay wide-eyed in the starlit room.
She knew that if she had returned to her own bedroom she would have locked the door against Lucan. It was better that she stay here, where she had the excuse of being needed by Rue. She strove not to think about Lucan, but there was pain at her heart as Rue’s silky hair brushed her cheek.
From that night onward a barrier arose between Kara and her husband which he made no immediate attempt to break down. He was away from the house for hours at a stretch, supervising the work down in the cocoa valley, and among the acres of banana trees. Green and tousled-looking trees, borne down by the great ripening hands of fruit.
Now and again Kara rode with him on his rounds, for there existed between them a kind of ice-hot truce; a game of make-believe they played in front of his brother and Clare: a charade that ended when they closed the door of their suite and shut between them the door of Kara’s bedroom.
Kara never knew when Lucan’s restraint would break, when the suave companion would turn upon her with demanding eyes, and so their rides together held a dangerous charm. Their beach picnics, often with Rue, held an underlying tension that tinged the hot days with a shadow of storm.
Kara and Rue fished with scoop-nets from the slippery rocks of Dragon Bay, and cooked their catch over a fire of sun-dried driftwood and seaweed. They sang as they toasted their catch, a pair of sea-draggled urchins in shorts and sun-tops. Their driftwood fire smoked tangily and shot out flames as blue as the tropical sky.
The days were not unhappy. The sun felt good on Kara’s skin as they clambered about among the rocks, avoiding the spiny sea-eggs and collecting clumps of rainbow coral and fan-bright shells. When Julius was about they clamoured for crisp, nutty coconut meat, and he went hand over hand up the incline of a coconut palm, his bare feet gripping its ridges, and lopped the nuts from among the leaves with his razor-sharp cutlass. The hairy brown nuts came thudding to the sun-white sand, and Rue said with bloodthirsty relish that they were like the heads of pirates hiding up the tree from fierce Julius.
Julius laughed richly, and Kara saw how he worshipped the child, and why. From their boyhood, Lucan had told her, Julius had been his own special Carib. There existed between "them a bond that reminded Kara of that between her brother Paul and Yannis, the black-eyed Greek who had fought with him in the rebellion and who served him with such devotion.
Kara had written to Paul from Dragon Bay, and she awaited his reply to her letter with trepidation. She had hoped that Paul or Domini would not read between the lines of a letter that was filled mainly with descriptions of the sugar-cane fields and the plantations.
‘You catch a dusting I catch you, giving me that facety talk, man!’ One of the cocoa workers went running by Kara, gay and brown and chased by a woman brandishing a twig broom. Kara laughed, for these people lived a rich life that had nothing to do with riches.
Each worker had his own house, with a plot for vegetables and a yard where pullets and piglets mingled with small children, who ran about in all their sun-dark nakedness. They were irresistible, with eyes like huge dark pansies, and Kara liked to sit on the veranda of the cocoa storehouse and be amused by the children.
Their mothers accepted Kara among them with a certain curiosity, but as the days went by they began to talk to her and to invite her into their colourful, food-spiced houses.
She was Massa Lucan’s woman, and a dig in the ribs from a cigar-smoking crone was, she knew, the equivalent of a burning question. When could all the folks expect to see a boy-child at Dragon Bay? They knew, these earthy women, why a man like Lucan took a wife, and a certain wonderment shone in their eyes that their big fiery boss should marry a girl so slenderly boyish, with a face more elfin than pretty.
Spices sweetened the air; nutmeg and mace, and hundreds of bushy cocoa trees. The fruits of the sapodilla added a strawberry flavour, and there was a scent of grapefruit from the orchards of the Great House.
At night the songs of the workers echoed up the hillside, as they sat round the fires in the yards of their dwellings. Strange, primitive songs, and drums beating low like pulses, finding an echo in the heart of a slim Greek girl who was far from her homeland.
When Rue was at her lessons with Nils Ericsson, Kara took walks on her own. Today, feeling restless and a little homesick for Paul and his family, she wandered further than usual into the woods above the valley. Here grew the fairy bamboo which looked so pretty but was cruelly sharp and entangling, and here among the scarlet trees and the golden chain vines and parasol ferns ran the manacou, a swift little forest creature with the perky appearance of a squirrel. Kara knew there were snakes in the forest as well, that would lie as still as a branch and then strike out with the hiss of a lance.
With a wicker hat pushed to the back of her head she wandered on, the bamboos striping her path, purple and white chalices brimming upon the vines with a wild, moist scent. She caught a glimpse of a green-bronze bird with a pendulum tail and heard his startled coo as she passed by. A king of the woods hidden among some trees dripping with scarlet tails.
The sun stripes grew wider and the trees less dense, and Kara guessed that she was coming out of the woods at some distance from the cocoa valley.
She paused on the path, feeling hot and pulling at the waist of her gingham dress. Nearby, at the base of a tree, she noticed a cluster of the flowers Lucan called touch-me-nots. She bent to touch one and watched fascinated as it closed its petals with a shrinking movement. It reminded her of the sardonic look Lucan had worn while showing her some of the flowers the other day. He had plucked a few and tucked them into the neck of her blouse, as if to remind her that he would not always tolerate a touch-me-not wife.
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br /> She hurried on out of the woods and saw that she was below the knoll on which stood the old sugar mill, empty and haunted, its bell still suspended in the arched opening of the turret.
The chirring of cicadas seemed loud in the afternoon stillness, and Kara felt herself drawn towards the old mill as though by an invisible force. She climbed the knoll and smelled the rank grasses and old stone overgrown by moss. She pushed at the door and winced at the loud protesting groan of the single hinge on which it hung. The echoes were overloud in the dim ruin, cobwebs hung from the beams and patches of mildew stained the walls.
It was hard to believe that long ago flames had leapt under the abandoned sugar cauldrons, and a tumult of voices had added to the crackling of fire under the huge witch-pots in which the sugar boiled. An overturned sugar cauldron was said to have caused the fire in which Luella Savidge had perished, up there in the bell turret where she and her lover used to meet.
Kara walked slowly to the foot of the rickety iron stairs, winding upwards to a room haunted by an old, unhappy love. She was tempted to mount the stairs, up which flame had roared, belching a black smoke which had choked Luella to death. The young overseer had been out in the fields … he had galloped his horse furiously through the cane to the mill, and had tried to leap up the iron stairs to Luella. The sugar workers had restrained him. …
Kara pictured him with black smoke on his face, struggling to go to the girl he loved, listening as she tugged frantically at the bell-rope.
Suddenly the old bell moved again and the sound of it drifted down to Kara; a hollow little clang that made her go cold all over. She backed away from the stairs, her eyes fixed upon them until she reached the door. She pulled it open and ran down the knoll as if she had the devil at her heels.
She ran along a corridor through the cane, and her heart thumped as she heard behind her the thud of a horse’s hooves—nearer all the time, real and menacing and not the hooves of a ghost horse. She turned to cry out to the rider to stop, and it was like a nightmare, for the big golden beast was riding her down, its great black mane hiding the rider’s face as the horse reared up on its hind legs and brought its forelegs crashing down towards her.
[Stephanos 02] - Dragon Bay Page 11