by M. M. Kaye
“A very convenient one.”
Miss Hollis decided that the Captain was amusing himself at her expense, and observed tartly that she supposed he also believed that absurd story of Batty’s about the Sacred Drums of Zanzibar?
“Which story?”
“Is there more than one?”
“Half a dozen, I should say. Which one has Batty been regaling you with?”
“He says that the priests of the Mwenyi—whatever the name is—keep them hidden away in a secret place near Dunga, and that the drums beat of their own accord if any disaster threatens the island.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“And you believe that?”
Captain Frost laughed. “I never believe anything I haven’t seen or heard myself And as I don’t recall being present during a disaster or just before one, perhaps that accounts for my not hearing them.”
“All superstitions,” announced Miss Hollis loftily, “are a bar to education and progress, and should be eradicated.”
“It depends on what you mean by superstition.”
“Why, believing in things that are not true, of course!”
“But then what is truth? That, my self-opinionated child, is the great question. Is it what you believe? Or what I believe? Or what the Mwenyi Mkuu believe?”
“I am not self-opinionated—or your child!” flared Miss Hollis, temporarily abandoning the abstract for the personal. “And you cannot argue in favour of superstition.”
“I’m not arguing. You are and since we are on the subject, what about that gold and those islands full of black men that I heard you telling Batty about on the after-hatch this morning? If that’s not superstition, I don’t know what is!”
“That’s different,” said Hero, blushing hotly. “That was only…”
“You mean you don’t believe a word of it?”
“Yes No! I mean…’ She realized that he was laughing at her, and turning on her heel left him without deigning to complete the sentence.
He really was an infuriating person, and her dislike of him had been sharply exacerbated by the discovery that the flyleaves of several of his books bore an engraved coat-of-arms that was undoubtedly his own, since below each one, written in faded ink and an unformed childish hand, ran the inscription: Emory Tyson Frost, Lyndon Gables, Kent. Anno Domini 1839. The motto they incorporated, ‘I Tayke Wat I Wyll,’ seemed singularly appropriate, but the books themselves were an oddly assorted collection. Not in the least what she would have expected to find in the possession of a slave trader, since they included such items as biographies and military campaigns, the Greek and Latin classics, three different translations of the Odyssey and two of the Iliad. The Koran, the Talmud, the Apocrypha, the Analects of Confucius, Biographia Juridica and The Admiralty Manual shared a shelf with The Travels of Marco Polo, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, Don Quixote and Lavengro, while a book on metallurgy and three on medicine, together with the Principles and Practices of Modem Artillery, provided strange company for the collected works of Shakespeare and the novels of Walter Scott. There were also at least half a dozen volumes of poetry, and when Hero had removed one of these at random it had fallen open at a page marked by a frayed strip of ribbon, on lines that had instantly captured her attention and her imagination:
With a host of furious fancies
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear and a horse of air
To the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end.
Methinks it is no journey.
The lines held a music and a magic that Hero had never encountered in the sedate volumes of selected verse that had hitherto come her way, and she turned the pages slowly, and yet more slowly: ‘Go and catch a falling star,’…‘Tell me where all past years are,’…‘Teach me to hear mermaids singing’…
The Elizabethan poets had not figured on the shelves of Barclay’s library, but judging from the well-thumbed pages of this salt-stained, leather-bound book, they were familiar companions of Emory Tyson Frost’s, and the discovery angered Hero even more than the sight of that coat-of-arms had done.
It would, she thought, have been possible (though difficult) to find excuses for a man handicapped by poverty, ignorance and low beginnings. But there was something not only indefensible, but downright indecent in the fact that a person possessing the advantages of birth and education could stoop to such an infamous and revolting method of earning a livelihood. Captain Frost was not only a disgrace to his own nation, but to the whole of the civilized West!
All the same, she could not believe that on this voyage, at least, the Virago was engaged in slaving, for she had read a great many tracts on the subject of the slave trade, and few had failed to mention that a slave ship could be winded from a considerable distance owing to the stench of unwashed and overcrowded humanity, packed below decks into dark and insanitary holds. But there was certainly no insalubrious smell about the Virago, Only such normal shipboard odours as tar and salt water—if one excepted the exotic and unfamiliar ones of Eastern cookery—and this despite the fact that the crew, with the sole exception of Mr Potter, consisted of a motley collection of coloured cut-throats ranging from Africans to men from Malabar and Macao, with the position of first mate being filled by a tall, hatchet-faced Arab who went by the name of Ralub and was accorded the title of ‘Hajji’ on the strength of having made the pilgrimage to Mecca.
The business of the ship was largely conducted in Arabic, with a smattering of assorted dialects thrown in for good measure, but the precise nature of that business still remained to be verified, and Hero had finally discarded caution in favour of direct attack:
“Just what do you and your men do?” she enquired of the Captain.
“Trade,” replied Captain Frost briefly.
“In what?”
“Anything that seems likely to make a profit.”
“Does that include slaves?”
Captain Frost gave her an oblique look and grinned. “Certainly; on occasions. Though if you are wondering if I have any on board at the moment, the answer is ‘No.’”
Hero drew a deep breath and said carefully: “I would not wish to be rude to someone to whom I must owe a debt of gratitude for saving—”
“I shouldn’t let that worry you,” interrupted the Captain cheerfully. “No one risked a thing in hauling you aboard, and it was probably as much our fault as yours that you got washed off your ship.”
“I am well aware of that!”
“Oh you are, are you? Then in that case you need not hesitate to be as outspoken as you please. Do you disapprove of slavers?”
“Disapprove,” said Hero with emphasis, “is hardly the word I should have chosen. ‘Detest’ is a better one. Or ‘despise.’ To traffic in human beings, and batten on the misery of our fellow creatures, must surely be the most detestable and despicable trade in the whole history of mankind…”
This being a subject on which she felt fully qualified to speak, she had spoken on it at length; giving him her views on the indefensible iniquity of the entire system and ending by telling him, in detail, just what she thought of white men who engaged in it for sordid profit. He might not like it, but it would do him no harm to be told it to his face, and there was always a chance that it might bring him to see the error of his ways.
Captain Frost leant against the rail and listened with an expression of polite interest, and when she had finished, said affably:
“Ah well, it doesn’t look as though there will be much more of it now that Cass is no longer Secretary in Washington. Without him, your countrymen may even get around to joining the British in putting it down, instead of doing their damnedest to keep it going. The bottom’s going to drop out of the trade, and detestable and despicable characters like myself will have to start looking around for other ways of making easy money.”
Hero’s
face paled with anger and she said hotly: “I don’t know how you dare to say such a thing! We have never attempted to keep it going! Just because General Cass would not permit you to stop and search our ships—”
Captain Frost laughed and raised a protesting hand: “Come, come. Miss Hollis. You wrong me. I assure you I should never dream of stopping or searching anyone else’s ship. The boot, alas, is on the other foot. Her Britannic Majesty’s Navy, who appear to have taken upon themselves the sole responsibility of putting down the trade, have been stopping and searching peaceful and harmless people like myself for the past fifty years or more. But owing to the howls of rage and fury raised by your freedom-loving nation, they are still not permitted to stop and search any ship flying an American flag. With the pleasing result that every slaver, whatever his nationality, immediately hoists the stars-and-stripes if sighted and challenged. I confess to having done so myself before now. And why not? It has often proved most useful.”
Why not? Why, I have never heard of anything so—so—” Words appeared to fail Miss Hollis.
Her indignation evidently amused the Captain, for he laughed and said: “My good child, like everyone else I am in this for money. And if your nation chooses to take up the attitude that it is an insult to her flag to have a suspected slaver flying it stopped and searched by the Royal Navy, then she must be prepared to put up with the alternative insult of finding that flag used by less favoured nations as a cover to every variety of illegal transaction. She can’t have it both ways. General Cass, with his Anglophobia and his rooted conviction that Her Majesty’s Navy are using the cloak of Philanthropy to disguise a plot aimed at interrupting the trade of all other nations, has proved a godsend to all hard-working slavers, and we are duly grateful to him. I can only regret that I, personally, have not been able to derive more profit from your country’s patriotic attitude on this issue. But alas, the naval gentleman who esteems it his duty to put down slave trading in these waters knows the Virago only too well, and I doubt if half-a-dozen American flags would stop him from boarding me if he thought he could catch me out with a cargo of black ivory aboard.”
“I don’t believe it!” said Hero furiously. “I do not believe one word of it!”
“Ah, but then you don’t know Dan Larrimore,” said Captain Frost, willfully misunderstanding her.
“I didn’t mean that. I mean I don’t believe that we…that America…Well, maybe some of the Southern States, but we in the North—”
She stopped abruptly, checked by the uncomfortable recollection of a speech that she had heard delivered at an Abolitionist Rally in Boston not so long ago. ‘The Southern States,’ the speaker had asserted, ‘may provide the market. But we cannot absolve ourselves on that account, for it is notorious that the real traffickers in flesh and blood are the citizens of our Northern States. It is in Yankee ships, floated by Yankee capital, commanded by Yankee skippers and sailing forth on their abominable errands with the connivance of bribed Yankee authorities, that the work of the Devil is carried out!’
Hero had been disposed to think that the Reverend gentleman had been exaggerating. But a doubt remained, and encountering Captain Frost’s derisive gaze she said defiantly: “I guess every country has its share of rascals and—and blackguards; and it is well known that England instituted the slave trade and built the fortunes of half-a-dozen of her most flourishing ports on the sufferings of millions of unfortunate negroes. But at least we in the North mean to see that slavery is outlawed, and I assure you that we shall do it!”
“I’m afraid so. It’ll probably go on in the East for another century or so, but as far as the West is concerned the game is very nearly played out.”
“Game?” said Hero in incredulous distaste. “How can you possibly call anything so hideously cruel a ‘game’—or even attempt to defend it?”
“I’m not defending it. Only making money out of it.”
“Out of death and suffering?”
“Oh, I don’t think so: if you are suggesting that I am one of those subhuman fools whose idiot greed prompts them to thrust four hundred slaves into accommodation which is only fit for less than half that number of hogs. Personally, I’ve never lost a slave yet from an avoidable cause, and the trade would have lasted profitably for many more years, and without earning itself such a bad name, if others had had as much sense. But unfortunately there will always be a few greedy cretins who can be counted upon to ruin any really lucrative dodge.”
“And that is how you think of it—as a ‘lucrative dodge’? Have you no—no compassion?”
“No, I don’t think so. Compassion is an expensive luxury and one I can’t afford. And as far as I can remember no one ever had any for me.”
“I can’t believe that. Someone must have been kind to you—fond of you. Forgiven you things. Your mother—”
“She ran away with a dancing master when I was six.”
“Oh…Well then, your father.”
“If this is an attempt to coax me into telling you the sad story of my life,” said Captain Frost with a grin, “I feel it is only fair to warn you that you would find it intolerably dull.”
Miss Hollis regarded him with undisguised loathing, and having coldly informed him that she had already heard more than enough about him and was profoundly uninterested in his past, retired to her cabin in considerable dudgeon: firmly resolving to avoid his company for the remainder of her stay in his ship, and on no account to ask him any further questions.
She had not, however, been able to keep either of these admirable resolutions, for three nights later, aroused by the sound of a boat being lowered over the side, she had left her berth to investigate, and been startled to find that someone had not only blocked her view from both portholes by hanging heavy strips of coconut matting from the deck above, but had also bolted her cabin door from the outside.
Tugging at the handle in the hot darkness she became aware that the Virago was no longer moving, and that it was the unaccustomed silence that had made those other noises so clearly audible. Yet she could not believe that they were near land, for there was no sound of surf. The matting rasped against the side of the ship as the schooner rolled sleepily to the swell, and from behind it came a soft splash of oars that retreated until Hero could no longer hear them, and after a long interval returned again. A boat bumped alongside, and presently there were other noises; a murmur of voices and a familiar laugh. The squeak and whine of the windlass, and once again a boat pulling away…
Something was either being token off the ship or on to it, and quite suddenly Hero was sure that she knew what it was. They were taking on slaves! This, then, was what Captain Frost and his venal crew had been waiting for. A rendezvous with some sinister Arab dhow, presumably delayed by the storm (which would account for the loitering of the past week!) A dhow which was at that very moment engaged in transferring a human cargo to the dark hold of the Virago.
For a wild moment anger and shock almost betrayed her into hammering on the door and screaming to be let out, but the futility and foolishness of such an action came home to her in time. If the men out there were engaged in some ugly transaction that they did not wish her to witness, no one would come. Or if anyone did, it might well be the worse for her. For the moment, at least, there was nothing that she could do;—except register a solemn vow that as soon as she won free from this infamous ship she would do everything in her power to see that its owner was brought to justice and made to pay for his crimes.
“And I’ll do it, too!” Hero promised herself in a passionate whisper. She would find an opportunity the very next day to see for herself what cargo had been taken aboard, and if it proved to be what she suspected, she would tell Uncle Nat, who could be counted upon to inform the proper authority: presumably this British naval Lieutenant that Captain Fullbright had spoken of—Daniel Larrimore, who would “like to have the hanging of Rory Frost’.
She slept badly, and awakened late to find the cabin frill of sunshine and a s
ea breeze billowing the curtains as the Virago raced before the wind with all sails set. The matting that had covered the portholes had vanished, and when she tried the cabin door she found that it was no longer secured. But her breakfast that morning had included ripe figs and a fresh paw-paw, neither of which had figured on the menu before or would have kept for any length of time on board, and though Jumah, the Captain’s personal servant, spoke tolerable English and was fond of airing it, when she enquired where the fresh fruit had come from he affected not to understand her and replied affably in Arabic. Batty Potter having proved equally unhelpful. Hero had broken her resolution not to ask any further questions or enter into conversation with the Virago’s infamous owner.
“The fruit?” said Captain Frost, in no way disconcerted by her query:
“I hope there was nothing wrong with it? It came off a coastal dhow that we stopped to speak to last night. We lowered a boat and took on some supplies. I’m surprised we didn’t wake you.”
There was a faintly satirical note in his voice and a distinct glint of amusement in his regard, and Hero was seized with the uncomfortable suspicion that he was not only well aware that she had been awakened, but also that she had attempted to push the matting away from the porthole and had tried the handle of the door.
She said in a carefully controlled voice: “You did. But when I wished to come up on deck to see why we had stopped, I found that I was unable to do so because someone had locked the door.”
“Indeed? You should have called out,” said Captain Frost blandly. “Or perhaps you did so, and no one heard you?”
“You know very well that I did not,” retorted Hero crossly, “and that if I had, no one would have come. In fact I wouldn’t be a mite surprised if it was you yourself who locked me in!”
“It was. It seemed to me a wise precaution, and I see that my forethought was fully justified. It would not have done at all for you to have been seen on deck last night.”
“Because I might have seen something that you wished to conceal?”