by M. M. Kaye
“Any place where it’s hot enough to suit them. They like plenty of sun. Places like Florida and Louisiana and the West Indies. And India and Africa.”
“Not in Boston?”
“No, not in Boston. Look, I’ll show you.”
Barclay laid aside Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus, and taking her over to the low table by the library windows showed her the big softly-coloured globe that stood on it, pointing out the poles and the oceans, the cold countries and the hot: “This one is Africa, where the negroes come from. Zulus and Hottentots and men who are seven feet tall and pygmies who are no higher than your knee.”
“Negroes?” Hero’s face fell. “You mean people like Washington Judd and Sary Boker?”
“That’s right.”
“But they came from Mississippi,” said Hero disgustedly. “I know they did, ‘cos Sary told me so herself, and Mrs Cobb says they’re just runaway niggers an’ one day they’ll be cotched and taken back to their master who’ll whale the livin’ daylights out of them an’ serve them right. What are livin’ daylights, Pa?”
“Mrs Cobb is an old—” began Barclay hastily, and turned the word into a cough. “Well, maybe they did come from Mississippi, but their parents and their grandparents came from Africa.”
“Why did they? Didn’t they like it there?”
“I guess they liked it all right. But slaves were needed to work the plantations, so people caught the poor creatures and shipped them over here to be sold for good money to the planters. And now their children and their children’s children are born as slaves and have no country of their own.”
“Then why don’t they go back?”
“Because that would take ships and money and a lot of other things they haven’t got. Freedom, for one. Besides, how would they know where to go back to? Africa’s a pretty big country you know, Hero.”
“How big?”
“Oh—bigger than America. And a lot wilder. They have lions and giraffes and elephants there, and apes and ivory, and—‘men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.’”
“Like this?” enquired Hero, hunching her small shoulders up to her ears and dropping her chin into the front of her starched pinafore.
“Maybe. Nobody really knows very much about the middle of Africa yet But people are finding out, and any day now a white man may climb the Mountains of the Moon or find King Solomon’s mines.”
“Is Africa an island, Papa?”
“No, it’s a continent.’ Barclay picked up a pencil and using it as a pointer said: “Look—these little bits round the edge are islands. That big one is Madagascar and these are the Comoro Islands. And this is Zanzibar, where the clove trees grow, and all kinds of other spices that Mrs Cobb puts in your Christmas cake.”
Hero bent to stare at the minute speck as though searching for those spices, and presently she laid a small possessive finger on it and said firmly: “Then I shall choose that one, because it has a nice name and I should like my island to have a nice name.”
“Zanzibar? Yes, it is a pretty name. A singing name. But what’s all this about your island?”
“When I’m grown up I’m going to go there.”
“Are you, my daughter? What for?”
“To—to do something,” said Hero vaguely.
“Going to pick yourself a pocket-full of cloves, eh. Hero?”
Hero considered the question gravely. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s that kind of work. I think,” she said making up her mind, “that I shall do something very good and useful. And very clever.”
“Oh, you will, will you? You sure sound very certain about it, daughter. Let’s hope you ain’t going to take after your—” he checked himself abruptly. Had he really been about to say “your mother?” If so, he changed it, for after a brief pause he said instead, and with unnecessary heat, “—your Aunt Lucy. I don’t want you to grow up into a strong-minded little busybody. Or a prig. I don’t think I could stand it.”
“What’s a prig, Papa?”
“You are, when you talk like that!” said Barclay irritably. “I suppose that prissy, feather-headed milk-sop of a Penbury woman has been reading you improving books and filling your head with a lot of clap-trap about Good Works being the only thing worth doing. I might have known it from the way she dresses and the fact that your Aunt Lucy approves of her!”
He paused to cast a mental eye over Miss Penbury and his sister Lucy, and suffered a sharp spasm of sheer panic. Lucy had approved of his marriage to Harriet, and Harriet herself would undoubtedly have approved of Miss Penbury…
He said violently, and as though he were defying them all: “I’m damned if I’m going to have ‘em turn you into a priggish little do-gooder! I’ll get you another governess. A pretty one with a sense of humour, who’ll know how to keep you in order—which is more than Miss Penbury does! It looks to me as if I can’t do it soon enough.”
But of course he had done nothing of the sort. It had been too much trouble and Barclay Hollis was an easy-going man who preferred to avoid trouble—and anything else that might interfere with his reading and riding and the pleasant placid routine of his life. Agnes Penbury stayed, and Hero grew up spoilt, strong-minded and undeniably priggish. And still firmly convinced that she would one day set sail for Zanzibar, though anyone less self-willed would have abandoned such an idea in her early teens: if only because of her father’s strongly expressed detestation of what he called ‘traipsing around’ (a term that apparently included everything from foreign travel to a journey involving more than a single night away from Hollis Hill).
In later years it had taken all her powers of persuasion to coax him into travelling as far as Washington in order to stay with a Crayne cousin whose husband was a well-known Senator, and when, while there, they had received a pressing invitation to visit relatives in South Carolina, Barclay—who could on occasions be every bit as obstinate as his daughter—had flatly refused to move a step further, so that in the end Hero had gone without him.
“I guess you get it from your Mama’s side of the family,” sighed Barclay resignedly; “all the Craynes have been great ones for moving around. You look a lot like your Ma, and maybe if she’d lived she’d have come to be a gadabout too. She wasn’t as big as you…You know, you ought to have been a boy, Hero. Mother Nature sure changed her mind about you at the last minute, and that’s a fact!”
He had sighed again as he said it, and Hero had wondered for the first time if her father regretted her sex and would have preferred a boy, and if that might not have been in his mind when he had named her ‘Hero’ instead of calling her Harriet after her mother? He had certainly never made any attempt to bring her up as a ‘womanly woman’, but in defiance of the Craynes and his sister Lucy had permitted her to learn to shoot and ride, to read before she could write and write before she could sew. The remainder of her education, however, had been left to Miss Penbury, and he had done nothing to correct some of the opinions that his daughter acquired at second-hand from her governess and her Aunt Lucy; or from sundry works of fiction obtained from the shelves of the ‘Ladies’ Lending Library’.
It had been a popular novel by Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe, read in 1852 at the impressionable age of fourteen, that had convinced Hero that the world was a hotbed of injustice, cruelty and squalor, and that something should be done about it at once. Uncle Tom’s Cabin had succeeded in making yet another convert to the cause of Anti-Slavery, and Miss Penbury, in the process of continuing the good work, had escorted her young charge to a lecture on the “Evils of the Slave Trade’, given by a local parson who had quoted the words of Lord Palmerston:
“If all the crimes which the human race has committed from creation down to the present day were added together in one vast aggregate, they would scarcely equal, I am sure they would not exceed, the amount of guilt that has been incurred by mankind in connection with the diabolical Slave Trade.”
But whatever she might think of slave trading, that visit to
South Carolina had served to modify Hero’s view on slave owners, for the Langly family’s slaves had been as healthy, happy and as well-cared-for a community as anyone could wish to see, and neither Gaylord Langly nor his overseer even remotely resembled Simon Legree. Clarissa Hollis Langly, having been born and raised in Massachusetts, disapproved in principle of slavery, but confessed herself unable to see any way out of it:
“It is as though we were caught in a trap,” she explained to Hero. “Our entire economy is bound up with slavery, and if we were to free the negroes we should not only ruin ourselves but them as well, since without slave labour the South could not last a day. We would all go bankrupt, and then who would feed the negroes? or clothe them or give them work? Not the Northern Abolitionists, for all their pious talk! I can see no way out: though it is at times a sad weight on my conscience.”
Mrs Langly applied salve to her conscience by taking a fervent interest in foreign missions, in the belief that if there was nothing that could be done towards freeing the enslaved negroes of America, at least there was much that could be done towards improving the lot of coloured races overseas. She lent her young cousin a number of pamphlets that vividly described the horrors of life in Africa and Asia, with the result that Hero’s sympathies had been widened to include ‘Our Poor Heathen Sisters’ whose status in harems and zenanas appeared to be quite as bad as that of any slave.
Brooding upon the fate of these unhappy women, it had seemed to Hero cruelly unfair that while she herself enjoyed the full benefits of freedom in a civilized and prosperous country, hapless millions in Eastern lands were doomed to live and die in unrelieved misery for lack of a little enlightenment—a crumb from the Rich Man’s table. There were even times when she could almost imagine that those anonymous, suffering millions were calling to her: the sequestered women in harems and seraglios, the slaves in the black holds of dhows and the disease-ridden poor…‘Come over into Macedonia and help us’…!
“I must learn something about nursing,” decided Hero. And to the dismay of her father and the strongly expressed disapproval of her relations she had actually done so. Going three days a week to a local Charity Hospital whose staff had been only too glad to accept the services of an unpaid voluntary assistant, and whose head doctor had informed her disgruntled parent that his daughter was not only a born nurse, but a credit to her sex: “We get a heap of rough characters in our wards, Mr Hollis,” said the doctor,” but you ought to see the way their eyes light up when your girl comes in. She seems to be able to comfort them; and to give them confidence that they’ll get well, which is half the battle. They just about worship her. Even the worst of them!”
But Barclay was not to be placated by such praise, and he continued to regard Hero’s visits to the hospital with a baffled mixture of disbelief and aversion.’ If I’d known what bees you were going to bring back in your bonnet, damned if I’d ever have let you go traipsing around in Carolina with those Langlys!” he observed sourly.
He was not to know that the shorter stay in Washington was to have a far greater effect on his daughter’s future than all Clarissa Langly’s pamphlets. The reason being that the Crayne cousins in the capital had entertained lavishly for their guests, and since their friends were largely drawn from Government circles. Hero had been able to hold forth on her favourite topics (slavery and the sad state of that infamous centre of the trade, Zanzibar) to a wide variety of disconcerted Senators and Congressmen. So that when, a few months afterwards, hearing that her Uncle Nathaniel had been appointed American Consul in Zanzibar, his brother Barclay had declared it to be an odd coincidence and his niece had seen it as the finger of fate, neither had been right. For in point of fact a solid hour of Hero’s conversation during an evening party at Cousin Louella’s house, had caused the name of “Hollis’ to become so inextricably linked with Zanzibar in the mind of one influential guest, that the appointment had been more in the nature of a reflex action.
Uncle Nathaniel had not been pleased, but he was too conscientious a man to contest the posting; and Hero Athena, sublimely unaware of being in any way responsible, had been torn between awe and envy. It was unbelievable! Zanzibar—her chosen island!…and Aunt Abby and Cousin Cressy would be going with him; and Clayton too. If only…If only…!
But there had never been any question of her accompanying them. And in any case, relations between the two families had recently become strained, owing to Barclay having taken a sudden and violent dislike to his brother’s step-son, Clayton Mayo.
Long ago, on the occasion of his daughter’s christening, Barclay had hotly defended his choice of names for die motherless infant: ‘Just you wait!’ he had retorted to the shocked chorus of disapproval: “She’ll have them swimming the Hellespont in droves one of these days. She’s going to be a beauty, is my girl. You’ll see!”
Well, he had been right in the last of those predictions, because Hero had certainly grown up to be a beauty. But a beauty without an ounce of coquetry or feminine allure. “The best lookin’ gal in Boston,” as her cousin Hartley Crayne had been heard to remark, “and the biggest goddamned bore!” By the time she celebrated her twentieth birthday—and according to the standards of the day was in grave danger of being classed as an Old Maid—there had still been no sign of any Leander: unless her Uncle Nathaniel’s handsome step-son, Clayton Mayo, could be regarded as a possible swimmer of the Hellespont. Numerous young men had looked and admired. But only from a distance, for a closer acquaintance had invariably resulted in disappointment and a hasty retreat; the young sparks of Boston preferring dimpled and sweetly feminine charmers to Grecian goddesses who looked them squarely in the eye, had no patience with coyness, swooning or the vapours, and considered flirting vulgar.
Clayton Mayo had proved to be the solitary exception. But Barclay, in his daughter’s opinion, had been impossible about Clay!
Hero was well aware that her father (when he took the trouble to think about it!) was worried by the lack of suitors for her hand. Yet he had been extravagantly annoyed by young Mr Mayo’s attentions to her, and greatly relieved when Clayton had agreed to accompany his stepfather to Zanzibar in the semi-official capacity of confidential secretary.
Hero had not seen Clayton again, but in a letter smuggled to her by a sympathetic housemaid he had promised to “prove by his constancy the enduring nature of his regard’, and to return one day, having made his fortune, and formally request her hand in marriage. Which, though gratifying, was hardly romantic. But then it had not been a particularly romantic affair.
Clay had only kissed her once—and then on the cheek, because realizing his intention she had suddenly taken fright and turned her head away at the last moment. And after he had sailed and the strife and agitation had had time to subside, she was inclined to think that perhaps everything had turned out for die best, because until her father had interfered she had not been in the least certain about her feeling for Clay.
Then, little more than a year later, Barclay died very suddenly from a heart attack, and after that there was nothing to keep his daughter in Boston or prevent her from setting out in search of her destiny. Nothing but an unbearably empty house, for even Miss Penbury had long since retired to a cottage in Pennsylvania. Hero Athena Hollis was free to do what she liked and go where she wished, and when Aunt Abby’s letter arrived urging her to visit them in Zanzibar, she had accepted thankfully and without hesitation. And without pausing to remember that old Biddy Jason, who had spoken of sun and salt water and an island full of black men, had also said: “Things you want, you have to pay for.’ Whether Clayton was one of those things remained to be seen.
There had, of course, been difficulties. Cousin Josiah Crayne, who as Chairman and co-owner of the Crayne Line Clippers might have been expected to help, had been deeply shocked. It was unthinkable that any young woman of his family (Hero must not forget that her own dear mother had been a Crayne!) should even contemplate a voyage to such an outlandish spot—and without so much as
a maid or a chaperone to accompany her! He would have nothing to do with it, and he had taken the opportunity to read her a blunt lecture to the effect that people who felt called upon to do good to others had much better make a start in their own back-yard rather than in someone else’s. She would find, said Cousin Josiah, plenty of scope for her charitable instincts right here in Massachusetts.
He had not been the only one to express disapproval. Numerous other relatives and connections had not hesitated to add their own strictures, but neither lectures nor family disapproval had altered Hero’s decision: for save in the matter of Clayton she had always had her own way and got what she wanted, and now she wanted to go to Zanzibar. Not only as an escape from grief or to see Clay again, but because she was firmly convinced (or, as Josiah Crayne observed tartly, had convinced herself), that Providence intended her to go. She had always known that there was work there for her to do. And in the event there was no one with the authority to stop her, since in addition to being in sole possession of a considerable fortune, she had now turned twenty-one and was her own mistress.
Cousin Josiah gave up the unequal struggle and arranged a passage for her on one of his own clippers. And since he had also managed to placate family opinion by conjuring up a chaperone for her in the person of the captain’s wife, in the spring of 1859, Hero at last set sail for Zanzibar.
2
“Ere she comes, sir!”
The Daffodil’s coxswain spoke in a hoarse whisper, as though he were afraid that even in that surf-loud, murmurous night, any more audible sound might carry to the deck of the distant ship that was slowly emerging from among the trees and the tall coral rocks that masked the entrance to a small, hidden bay.
Few were aware of the existence of that bay. And those few used it exclusively for unlawful purposes. It did not appear on the official maps of the East African coast or figure on any Admiralty chart, and Lieutenant Larrimore, in command of Her Britannic Majesty’s steam sloop, Daffodily had frequently passed within half a mile of it without even suspecting that what appeared to be part of the mainland was, in reality, a high, narrow reef of wind-worn coral, topped by a tangle of palms and tropical vegetation, and concealing a small, deep bay capable of sheltering half a dozen sea-going dhows.