Each morning the senhor held sick-call on the veranda that fronted the living-rooms of the house. With the assistance of a white-uniformed Raya he would treat eye infections with ophthalmic drops, give doses of worm medicine to the giggling, cocoa-brown children, and shots of penicillin and vitamins. The Indians weren't a bit afraid of the needle. Broad smiles would crease their brown faces. There was more magic in being pricked than in swallowing a pill.
Morvenna liked the fazenda Indians, with their triangular dark eyes and graceful bodies. She wandered among them quite unafraid, though girls of her colour-
ing were not a familiar sight to them. Dark hands often reached out shyly to touch her hair, as though some special icaro might be imparted, and the other day the senhor had smartly reprimanded one of the youths for doing this.
"Wear a hat when you are out alone," he advised her curtly.
Morvenna crinkled her nose and caressed Ringo's ears with her finger. His muff of a body quivered with pleasure, and clambering on to her shoulder he snoozed with his long nose pressing against her neck. He stayed comfortably in that position as Morvenna took a walk. Like all wild things he responded instinctively to genuine tenderness.
She wandered round the side of the fazenda, and then stood very still, poised for instant flight. Roque de Braz Ferro was sitting in a fan-backed chair under the shady eaves, a slim cigar in hand, a lazy air about him. On the rattan table in front of him stood a jug of fruit juice, and a dish covered by a snowy napkin.
Morvenna gazed for a startled moment at his profile, and at the dark peak of hair that stabbed the bronze skin of his nape. Even in repose there was a taut strength about the man that suggested a jungle cat, ever on the alert. Even as Morvenna retreated with a natural delicacy of movement, those alert instincts of his warned him of a presence.
He swung round in his chair and his glance was like a flash of blue mercury. Bees droned, and jungle scents drifted across the compound on the somnolent air.
"Won't you join me, Miss Fayr ?" He rose to his feet and invited her with a gesture of a lean hand to take
the chair at the other side of the rattan table. His eyes took in the coati that drowsed on her shoulder, and he added dryly, "You may bring your friend."
She approached him reluctantly, for though he was clad with his usual daytime informality in a bush shirt and canvas trousers, there was little humility about the rest of him. He drew out the chair for her and she sat down. She felt Ringo stir against her as a lean, bronzed hand stroked him.
"You are fond of animals, eh ?"
"I have always found them easy to get along with, senhor." She was tense in the fan-back chair, unable to relax with those keen blue eyes upon her. "All an animal asks of one is a little loving kindness and in return he gives his heart. He doesn't care if you sweep roads. If your house is poor, he finds it a palace."
"You think that too many people have lost their sense of values, eh? Nowadays they respond not to loving kindness, but to money, position, and appearance ?"
"They are less merciful, senhor. You said it yourself."
"Yes," his gaze dwelt reflectively on her, then he indicated the jug of fruit juice, cooled by a tube of ice fitted inside. The fazenda was supplied with ice from the big refrigerator that was fed from the estate generator. "May I pour you a glass of pineapple juice, and offer you some maiden's kisses ?"
"What?" She looked at him in alarm, and he was laughing as he whipped the table napkin off the dish on the table. It held a selection of tasty-looking pastries.
"Maiden's kisses," he said. "I am fond of them."
She didn't doubt that, and said demurely that she would like a pastry and a glass of fruit juice. Ringo stirred instinctively at the mention of eatables, and she
shared her pastry with him as her host sat smoking his cigar, long legs crossed, his eyes faintly amused as he watched her with the coati.
"Have you been wandering about again without a hat ?" he asked.
"I always seem to forget it," she wished to goodness he would. "Anyway, I didn't go beyond the compound. I had a chat with Poppy until she fell asleep. She feels a lot better and intends to get up this evening."
"Your friend has made a quick recovery in the circumstances, and I am sure she will be sensible enough to regard this interlude on our island as a holiday." Cigar smoke veiled his eyes, but Morvenna was sure the slight hardening of his voice was meant for her when he added: "I advise you to do the same, Miss Fayr. The time will pass much more quickly if you try to enjoy your stay on the island instead of just marking time until the steamer comes to call in three weeks' time."
"The island is very interesting, even lovely," she admitted. "An earthly paradise, senhor."
"But you have no taste for paradise at the present time. You want to go through the hell of a jungle search ?"
"It would be worth it, even without a map." Her violet eyes fenced with his. "I have to know one way or the other whether my father is alive or dead. He meant a lot to me, with his big laugh and his rough diamond charm, but I'm sure you wouldn't understand my feelings."
"I had parents, Miss Fayr, and don't presume to be sure about me, or my motives, after only a few days' acquaintance." His mouth was imperious, his brows a
dark bridge above the brilliant eyes. Eyes that might probe another person's mind without revealing his thoughts and feelings. "The jungle is full of hazards and I would not dream of exposing a girl so young and inexperienced to the heat and the rains, and the bite of fever-carrying mosquitoes."
His eyes flicked her boyishly cut hair and her vulnerable young neck. "I admire courage and spirit, senhorinha, but not obstinacy."
"It isn't obstinacy." She felt a sudden angry trembling through all her slim body; even her lips trembled. "If I had been able to weep for Llew, then I should have known that I had lost him for always."
"Your reasoning is that of a child who has been left too much alone," he said crisply. "I know the jungles of Brazil only too well, and though to a stranger they might appear to be cut off from all contact with the outside world, this is far from the truth. The drums of the Indians 'talk' constantly. They relay the jungle news as regularly as any broadcasting system, and if a white prospector had been found in the bush, suffering from fever or an injury, then I should have got to hear of it."
"White people have been kept prisoner in the bush," Morvenna blurted. "Nuno and his sister were — "
"They were brought up as members of the Incala tribe," he said patiently. "Even hostile Indians would be unlikely to harm a pair of children. Miss Fayr, will it set your mind at comparative rest to know that my Indians are keeping their ears to the ground.? Any unusual item of news will be reported to me, but I warn you again that the chance of your father being still alive is a remote one."
Morvenna gazed for a long moment at the inscrutable face of Roque de Braz Ferro, then she relaxed with a little sigh against the fan back of her chair. "Why couldn't you have told me before that something was being done, senhor?"
"Perhaps I took it for granted, senhorinha, that you would credit me with a little humanity." His smile was faintly mocking. "In any case, the Latin is not as blunt as a British person. It is a quality which we find disconcerting."
"You prefer to wrap everything in secrecy ?"
"Woman herself is a secret, senhorinha. Few men understand even the woman they choose to love, for it is our instincts, not our intellect, that sways us towards one person rather than another."
"Meaning there are people who love someone against their better judgment ?" People like poor Gerald Tyson, she thought.
"A prosaic way of putting it." She saw the muscles tauten against his shirt as he leaned forward to stub his cigar. "Love is a sweet and savage combat, more so in a land such as mine, and that is why I warn you to keep your hair covered. The men of Janaleza are not used to girls with dawn-silver hair."
"This ?" She put up a hand and touched her hair in amazement. "Poppy thinks I look like Joan of
Arc."
"The young Amazon maidens were said to look like silver-haired boys." His smile was a flash of strong white teeth. "All the same, you are not a boy, despite the pants and the shirts."
"They're comfortable," she said defensively, "if not exactly glamorous. Poppy will provide all the glamour that I can't."
"Has your association with Mrs. Tyson been of very long duration ?" The keen note of interest in his voice did not surprise Morvenna unduly. He might be the overlord of Janaleza, but he was still a man — very much a man — and bound to be attracted by Poppy. Her warm, ripe looks blinded men to the cool, calculating heart inside her shapely body.
"We met at Manaos soon after my arrival there. Mr. Tyson was kind, and interested in the search I wished to undertake. Poor Gerald," Morvenna looked stricken, "he might still be alive but for that meeting with me."
"My dear girl," a hand fettered her wrist on the table and gave it a shake, "you can't go through life with a bundle of regrets on your shoulders. They will never stand the strain. You are too much alive, I think, to the fears and hurts in other people. You need protection against your own softness of heart."
"I — I can take care of myself, even if I have got a soft heart." She tried to wrench free of his hand, but only succeeded in dislodging the coati. He scampered off her shoulder, leaving her alone and at the mercy of Roque de Braz Ferro.
"You are so easy to bully," he taunted. "What on earth would you do right now if I were not your host but a seringueiro who had not seen a woman for several months ?"
Even as she looked at him, startled, he yanked her to her feet and she found herself imprisoned by an arm that felt like a steel band. In a panic she raised her left hand to fend him off, and instantly he caught hold of her hand and held it disconcertingly close to his warm throat.
"Is this how you prove your ability to take care of
yourself?" His blue eyes mocked, his lips were within kissing distance of her own. "You could scream, kick, even bite, but you do none of these things. Are you too polite, Miss Fayr ?"
"This — is only play-acting," she said breathlessly. "You are not a real seringueiro."
"Ah, but I have a rubber plantation at the other side of the island, so what makes you so sure this is playacting, as you call it ?"
Her heart beat furiously. Temper was growing in her that he should bait her in this way. "I should hate to chance my teeth on you," she said fiercely. "I'd probably lose a couple."
"You consider me as tough as boot leather, eh ?" Laughter made lines at the edge of his eyes, and close to him like this she saw more than strength in his features. She glimpsed a certain whimsical tenderness; and knew him to be totally aware of how vulnerable a woman was.
Vulnerable as no man had ever been, or could ever feel, and Morvenna felt strangely shaken that this man understood.
He let her go and watched quizzically as she drew quickly away from him. "Don't be polite, Miss Fayr, the next time you find yourself at the mercy of a man. Don't, in fact, wander too far beyond the village when you are alone. There are seringueiros in the bush who work the rubber, and they are not nearly as polite as I am."
His bow was a slightly mocking one, and a moment later he was crossing the compound, tall, lithe, striding as though the muscles of his feet enjoyed the pressure of the ground. The island soil from which sprang the tall
trees and the ardent plants that grew everywhere like live things. The place was in his blood, at the very core of his being, and as Morvenna watched him he became one with the trees and the compound looked strangely empty.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE dress Morvenna wore that evening was from the island store. It was of white cotton, with a plain sleeveless top and a floral patterned skirt — cool, crisp, youthful, but it needed a necklace, and as she stood at the dressing-table she fingered the coral on a fine chain which Nuno, with casual shyness, had dropped into her hand the other day.
A flush-pink coral, which he said he would like her to have because all her belongings had been lost in the sea. She fastened the chain about her neck and was pleased at the effect.
Nuno was such a nice boy, she thought, kinder at heart than his exotic twin sister. There was about Raya a demure insolence that became more apparent when she discarded her nurse's uniform for one of her wild-silk sarongs. She liked wearing flowers in her dark hair, and referred to her house in a grove of feathery palm and papaya as the "house of the ransomed one". Chains of shells and red coral hung in her porch, and the roof was pagoda-peaked.
Leird was bewitched by her, and curiously morose these days when in anyone else's company. Morvenna, who was doomed to worry about other people, was
concerned for Leird. He had helped her to swim ashore when the yacht had wrecked itself on the reef, and she liked him as she might a cousin. She had never known a cousin, for her mother had grown up in an orphanage, and her father had run away from his Tiger Bay home many years ago.
Love, the sweet and savage combat as Roque de Braz Ferro had called it. Did he speak from experience, or was it another of his Latin philosophies ? He seemed to have quite a collection of them, and somehow he did not strike her as a man who had ever let a woman into his heart. He would have to conquer, and was a trifle cynical about women because he had learned, probably as a boy, that they were too eager to run to him at a snap of his fingers.
Morvenna shrugged. Most of her own knowledge of love was bound up in her folk music. Romance had not infringed, though she had been aware when playing and singing a poignant song that love could be a thing of magic.
She met her own eyes in the mirror and was struck by their faintly wistful expression. Her hair fitted her head neat and shiningly. She felt slick and cool all over, for she showered in the little shower-house at the rear of the fazenda, on the look-out all the time for the saucer-sized spiders that came up through the drain in the centre of the cement floor. Her skin was fresh from the eau-de-cologne she had dabbed on, with its tang of menthol.
She had better go next door and see if Poppy needed her.
Poppy was being waited on like a queen by an Indian woman whose face was lined all over like ivory when
aged. Her eyes were quick and obsidian dark, full of a lively curiosity as they dwelt on Morvenna.
"Darling," Poppy turned to give Morvenna a dazzling smile, "isn't the senhor a pet? He has sent Isidra to maid me – the old lady who found me on the beach and who looked after me so well, all through that ghastly night. She doesn't speak a word of English, but she knows how to be a lady's maid because she worked for the senhor's mother, ages ago, when he was a boy. See how she's arranged my hair ?"
Poppy's hair was swept up in tawny loops and held in place by tortoiseshell combs – a Latin style, with which she hoped to impress the senhor, no doubt.
"It looks very attractive," Morvenna took a step backwards out of the room, feeling an interloper as Isidra fussed round Poppy as though she were the mistress of the house. "Well, if you don't need me — ?"
"I don't, darling, not now," Poppy said complacently. "Do run along and get smart yourself."
"But I — " Morvenna glanced down wryly at her cotton dress and the embroidered Indian slippers that had to serve as evening shoes. "I'll see you later, Poppy."
As Morvenna turned and walked away, her wry little smile still clung to her lips. She knew she looked far from glamorous in the cotton dress, but there had been no need for Poppy to rub it in. It was funny, but it always stung more when another woman dismissed one as plain and awkward and badly dressed.
Morvenna came to the doors of the big living-room of the fazenda and was relieved to find the room unoccupied. She entered and was immediately aware of the musk of flowers. She looked round and saw the vase
of jaguar flowers, with tawny splotches on the pointed petals. And the great spray of violet jacaranda, arranged in a brass bowl on one of the low tables carved from jungle wood.
Each time Morvenna set foot in this fascinating room it cast
its spell upon her. The corner lamps under their golden shades were switched on, casting pools of light on the inlaid floor, islanded here and there by velvety puma pelts. Antique fans clung to the ceiling like big, purring moths. The walls were panelled in richly grained wood, against which snarled a magnificent jaguar head. The great paws of the beast held ashtrays on the elbow tables set beside armchairs. On a handsome sideboard hewn out of jungle mahogany there stood an antique tantalus, the old sherry and brandy gleaming through heavy cut-glass. A pair of golden Aztec masks guarded a painting of the woman who had given birth to Roque de Braz Ferro.
Morvenna stood amidst the fantastic shadows and glimmering pelts of this room in this jungle island house, and studied the face of the Brazilian girl who had come to this house as a bride; who had borne a son and passed on to him a pair of eyes as blue as aquamarines. The sculpturing of her brow was more delicate, the straight nose did not arch at the nostrils, but her hair had been as raven-dark.
Nuno Sebastian had told Morvenna how she had died.
Fearlessly at home in the jungle, she had gone out with her husband to hunt a killer jaguar who had been terrorizing the people of the village. By nightfall the big cat was dead . . . and so was Rosa de Braz Ferro, her long, lovely neck broken when the tawny killer sprang
upon her from a broken column of the temple ruins where it had its lair.
Morvenna rubbed the goose-bumps from her arms, and against her will her gaze was drawn to the jaguar head on the opposite wall. A thread of shock ran through her, for as silently as any jungle cat Roque de Braz Ferro had entered the room and was standing beneath the snarling head of the beast that had killed his mother.
He wore immaculate white drill, which threw into prominence the dark virility and pagan distinction of his looks. His blue gaze was on the nerve that beat visibly in her throat, and she tensed as he crossed the room towards her.
"Good evening," he gave her a brief bow, and something flickered on his mouth that might have been a smile. "Whenever I approach you, Miss Fayr, you stiffen as though I bite. Do you think I bite ?"
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