by M. M. Kaye
“Give me one good reason why I should, Dan?”
Lieutenant Larrimore jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the sloop and said briefly: “I’ve got both guns trained on you, and I can blow you to matchwood.”
“So I see. But haven’t you forgotten something?”
“Not if you mean that I myself might get damaged in the process, so don’t bank on them not opening fire on that account. They’ve got their orders and somehow I don’t feel that you’d get much satisfaction out of the mere fact that you might be taking me to Hell with you.”
Captain Frost laughed with genuine amusement “You’re right, Dan. You know damn’ well I wouldn’t!—though I’ve no doubt at all that you’d be prepared to go there yourself as long as I accompanied you. But this time I’ve got you checkmated. You can’t loose off either one of your little popguns at me today. Lieutenant, because I happen to have a very valuable hostage on board. You’ve probably never met a mermaid before, but here’s one we caught in a gale off the Comoros. Allow me to introduce you…”
He turned to Hero and made her a formal bow: “Miss Hollis, may I present Lieutenant Daniel Larrimore of Her Majesty’s Navy? He’s quite human when you get to know him. Miss Hollis, Dan, is a niece of the American Consul and first cousin to Miss Cressida.”
Lieutenant Larrimore stared at Hero, his eyes a blue blaze in his brown face, and stupefaction and disbelief showing plainly in his tight mouth and startled brows.
Captain Frost watched him take in the enormity of that cropped hair, black eye and much-mended salt-stained dress, and was interested to see that despite these handicaps his cabin-passenger managed to retain an air of distinction and a certain youthful dignity that belied her raffish appearance. She was, he thought, a tiresome girl, but a courageous one; and he found himself wondering just how many young women in her position, fancying themselves to be held for ransom on board a slaver, would have had the courage to lecture their captor on the iniquities of his trading activities. The reflection amused him and he grinned to himself, and Lieutenant Larrimore, catching sight of that grin, said angrily:
“But that’s impossible! Miss Hollis was coming out on the Norah Crayne.” He turned sharply on the Virago’s Captain: “Is this another of your damned tricks, Frost? Because if so—”
“You still couldn’t fire on my ship,” observed Captain Frost pleasantly: “Not while I’ve got a lady on board, even if she wasn’t Miss Hollis. Which she is. She fell overboard from the Norah Crayne just short of the Comoros, and we fished her out in a mess of torn rigging. If you’d been back to harbour you’d have heard all about it.”
“Is this true?” demanded the Lieutenant, swinging round to address Miss Hollis.
“Quite true. I’m Hero Hollis, and I—I guess everyone must think I am dead.”
Lieutenant Larrimore, recovering his manners, bowed briefly and said that he was more than pleased to meet her: adding that as the Norah Crayne had reportedly arrived a week ago, he presumed that her aunt and cousin would have heard the news, and that he could well imagine the blow it must have dealt them. They would be overjoyed to see her.
“But not in small pieces,” pointed out Captain Frost affably. “So what about those guns of yours, Dan? Don’t you think you’d better call it quits and transfer Miss Hollis to the Daffodil so that you can restore her to the bosom of her family without further delay?”
“It will give me great pleasure to do so,” said Lieutenant Larrimore: “Just as soon as I have satisfied myself as to your cargo. But I am not moving off this ship until I have done that, and I am sure you’ll perceive the advantages of allowing it to be done peaceably.”
“Why, certainly, if you’re set on it. But I warn you, you’re going to be bitterly disappointed, Danny. You ought to know by now that there is no green in my eye.”
He turned to address his impassive crew in Arabic, and three of them moved forward to open the hatches while half-a-dozen British sailors from the jolly-boat clambered briskly on board.
Hero did not accompany the search-party below, for although she had once wished quite as urgently as the naval Lieutenant to see what the Virago was carrying in her hold, she was certain that it was no longer there. It had been landed somewhere else late last night, and if the present cargo contained any trace of contraband, or even evidence that any such thing had been carried, she would be very much surprised. She therefore stayed where she was, looking out at the lovely shore and the jewel-coloured water.
Presumably the town and harbour could not be far distant, for among the trees on a low promontory a mile or so ahead she could catch a glimpse of white-walled houses: and though the breeze that blew towards her was still perfumed with flowers and the scent of cloves, it also carried a faint but unmistakable effluvia of ill-kept drains and sewage. Hero’s nostrils wrinkled in distaste. It was only what she had expected, but it was unpleasant to be reminded so soon that the beauty of the Island was only skin-deep. She could hear crates being shifted and opened below, and was seized with sudden impatience. Surely that Larrimore man should have enough sense to know that he was merely wasting his time and providing a great deal of amusement for the Virago’s insufferable Captain? The cases he was opening would be found to contain the items that Batty had listed for her. Ivory and rhino horns, clocks, furniture and fripperies for the Sultan of Zanzibar. And nothing else!
A clatter of boots on the deck heralded the return of the search-party, and she turned to see Captain Frost looking relaxed and bored, the naval Lieutenant expressionless, Batty aggrieved and the Arab, Ralub, amused.
“You can take that grin off your face, Hajji,” snapped Lieutenant Larrimore, beating the dust off his uniform. “I know damned well that you’ve been up to no good, and one of these days I’ll catch you out at it and get the whole bloody lot of you thrown in jail. That’ll teach you bastards to laugh on the other side of your faces!”
He became aware of Miss Hollis, whose presence on board had obviously slipped his mind, and apologized in some confusion for his language.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Hero tonelessly. “May we please go now?”
“Yes, of course. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. Isn’t there anything you want to take with you?”
“I’m afraid Miss Hollis neglected to bring a valise with her,” said Captain Frost blandly: “But she’s welcome to take anything she wants from my inadequate wardrobe.”
The Lieutenant raised his brows and said coldly: “I only wished to make certain that Miss Hollis had not left anything behind on this ship.”
“Only her reputation,” murmured Captain Frost gently.
“Why, you unspeakable!” The Lieutenant’s hands clenched suddenly into a pair of formidable fists, and Captain Frost side-stepped neatly and raised a deprecatory hand:
“Now, now, Dan! I’m surprised at you—brawling in front of a lady! Where are your manners? Or your brains, if it comes to that. I am merely saying aloud what the entire European community in Zanzibar will soon be whispering behind its collective hand. That is, unless we take steps to prevent it.”
“What do you mean? What steps? I don’t see how—”
“Neither do I,” intervened Hero with asperity. “I have never heard such nonsense in my life. I would like you to know, sir, that my reputation is not such a poor thing that it can be damaged by my being in your company.”
“You don’t know Zanzibar,” said the Captain with a laugh. “Or, for that matter, my reputation. But Danny does, don’t you Dan?”
He cocked an amused eye at the Lieutenant’s rigid face, and turned back to Hero: “In the circumstances. Miss Hollis, I think it would save your uncle and aunt, if not yourself, a deal of embarrassment if people were allowed to suppose that you had been found clinging to some piece of wreckage—a spar, perhaps?—and been picked up by the gallant crew of Her Majesty’s sloop. Daffodil, who were providentially patrolling in the vicinity. I can answer for my men keeping their mouths shut, a
nd I have no doubt that Lieutenant Larrimore can promise the same for his. What do you say, Dan?”
The Lieutenant was forestalled by Miss Hollis, who said flatly: “Thank you. But I do not believe that any dissimulation is necessary. My uncle and aunt will naturally accept my word that you and your crew have behaved with complete propriety towards me, and I assure you that I am entirely uninterested in what anyone else may choose to think of me. Shall we go. Lieutenant?”
But the Lieutenant did not move. The anger in his pleasant face had faded and been replaced by doubt, and he pushed up his peaked cap with one hand and looked from the Captain to Hero, and back again, and at last said slowly: “I am obliged to you. Frost. It seems that I was mistaken in supposing that you retained none of the instincts of a gentleman.”
“You flatter me,” grinned Captain Frost.
“I’m sure I do. And I am equally sure that you have some excellent and entirely un-altruistic motive for advancing this suggestion. But for Miss Hollis’s sake I am prepared to accept it at its face value.”
He turned abruptly to Hero and said: “I think it very likely, ma’am, that Mr Frost is in the right of it. If you will forgive me for speaking plainly, his reputation and that of his ship are such that your relatives could not welcome your name being mentioned in connection with either of them, and I think it would be advisable if you consulted your uncle before committing yourself to any statement. He may well agree with Mr Frost’s view, for small communities are apt to indulge in gossip to a greater extent than large ones, and as you are a stranger in Zanzibar, little will be known of you, while a great deal is known of Frost—and none of it to his credit.”
Captain Frost bowed gravely, and the Lieutenant’s voice took on a harder edge as he said curtly: “That is why, ma’am, I imagine your uncle may well prefer it to be given out that you have spent the last ten days on my sloop rather than on the Virago and in the company of her Captain.”
“Exactly,” agreed Captain Frost cordially. “One cannot, in short, touch pitch without being defiled, and I’m afraid that in the opinion of the European community of our insalubrious city I am pitch personified.”
Hero frowned, shrugged, and capitulated without further argument; since if the truth were known she was not indifferent to the advantages of arriving in Zanzibar under the protection of the British Navy rather than being handed ashore by a notorious slave trader with an unsavoury reputation. To be bracketed in the public mind with such a person could not add to her consequence in the island or increase the credit of her uncle the Consul, so it seemed best, in the circumstances, to fall in with Captain Frost’s unexpectedly chivalrous suggestion. She therefore thanked him for his services with a greater degree of graciousness than she would otherwise have shown towards him, and accepting Lieutenant Larrimore’s proffered hand, went over the side to be rowed across to the Daffodil by six deeply interested bluejackets of Her Majesty’s Navy.
8
The sloop rounded a green headland and Lieutenant Daniel Larrimore, who had been endeavouring to make polite conversation and tactfully avoid any direct question for the last quarter of an hour, turned to his passenger and enquired abruptly: “You say you were on the Virago for ten days, Miss Hollis. Were they carrying slaves?”
“Not that I know of. And I cannot help thinking that I would have known if they had been.”
“You would indeed,” said the Lieutenant grimly. “From the smell if nothing else. It’s not a thing that anyone could overlook; which is why I had to make that abortive search this morning. I found no trace of it, but all the same I’ll lay any money that Rory Frost was up to some roguery, and I’d give a lot to know what it was.”
Hero opened her mouth to tell him of the ship they had met in mid-ocean and the mysterious transactions of the previous night, but she shut it again without speaking. Not because she held any brief for Captain Frost and his disreputable crew, but because it occurred to her that it was a poor return for the surprisingly magnanimous gesture that had resulted in her transfer to the Daffodil, to betray their proceedings to the Lieutenant without giving the matter some further thought.
She was not even certain that the British Navy had any legal right to exercise authority in these waters; though a glance at the Lieutenant’s square jaw and determined features was enough to convince her that such an argument, even if valid, would not weigh with him for an instant Legally or not, his countrymen had abrogated to themselves the right to police the seas that linked them to their Empire, and to put down the slave trade. And Lieutenant Larrimore would conceive it his duty to carry out that policy at whatever cost.
But that was no reason, decided Hero, why she should confide in him. Uncle Nat was the proper person to tell these things to, and he would know what to do about it. Besides, at the moment there were other things to occupy her attention, for the Daffodil was passing between a sprinkling of little rocky islets, and ahead of her lay the harbour and the capital city of Zanzibar: a white town of tall, flat-topped Eastern houses, an ancient fort and a confusion of shipping—sails, hulls, masts, and spars duplicating themselves in the opal-tinted water, with among them, dwarfing them all, the familiar shape of the Norah Crayne.
“I’m glad for your sake, that she hasn’t sailed yet,” commented Lieutenant Larrimore as the Daffodil dropped anchor: “You would not have wished her to leave again without hearing the good news.”
He handed Hero into the jolly-boat once more, and two minutes later she was being rowed briskly across the dancing water on the last lap of a journey that had started long ago in the lamplit kitchen at Hollis Hill, when an aged Irish crone had told a six-year-old child her fortune…
Viewed from a distance, with a mile of blue water separating the ship from the shore, the Arab town of Zanzibar had looked colourful and romantic and not unlike some Eastern Venice. But a closer acquaintance with it not only robbed it of all charm, but confirmed Miss Hollis’s worst fears as to the state of sanitation prevailing among backward and unenlightened races.
The white coraline houses stood crowded together, covering a triangular spit of land which the sea, flowing at high tide into a creek to one side of it, daily transformed for a few hours into an island. There was no pier, and the long, sandy foreshore that separated the houses from the harbour was apparently used not only as a landing stage, but as the repository of every form of filth and refuse that the inhabitants thought fit to throw out of their courtyards and kitchens. The stench that arose from it made Hero bitterly regret discarding Captain Frost’s handkerchief, and she covered her nose with her hands. And would have shut her eyes, except that sheer horror prevented her from doing so. For there was not only garbage on the beach, but worse things. Dead and bloated things that were being torn by lean, scavenging dogs and fought over by raucous clouds of gulls and crows.
“But—but those are bodies!” gasped Hero. “Corpses!”
Lieutenant Larrimore followed the direction of her gaze and said unemotionally: “Yes. I’m afraid you’ll see a good many more of those before you are through: though it’s a deal better now than it was in the old Sultan’s time.”
Hero swallowed convulsively and turned from the appalling sight, her face white with shock and horror. “But why don’t they bury them?”
“Bury slaves? They wouldn’t consider it worth the trouble.”
“Slaves? But do they—are they?”
“This is where the Arab slavers land their cargoes. They ship them from the Sultan’s ports on the mainland, crammed into dhows without food or water; and if the winds fail and the passage is a slow one, over half of them die before they get here. When the dhows are unloaded the dead are merely thrown out onto the beach or into the harbour for the dogs and fishes to dispose of.”
“But it’s horrible!” whispered Hero. “It’s—it’s inhuman. Why is it allowed?”
“It’s improving. A few years ago they used to throw out the ones who were not yet dead but seemed unlikely to survive. They’d leave th
em on the beach to see if they’d recover, or to die slowly if they didn’t. But Colonel Edwards managed to put a stop to that.”
“I didn’t mean that,” said Hero. “I meant all of it. Slavery. Why don’t the foreign consuls do something about it?”
She received no answer, for the simple reason that she had lost the attention of her audience. The sight of the landing steps had deflected the Lieutenant’s thoughts onto other and more personal problems, and he was thinking of her cousin Cressida and wondering, with a mixture of hope and apprehension, how Cressy would receive him? Their last meeting had been a distinctly stormy one, and he had been obliged to sail before he had a chance to see her again and put things right: an omission that had been preying on his mind ever since.
Daniel Larrimore had been on slave patrol for some little time before he first met Cressida Hollis. And taking into account that his duties were confined to a part of the globe where personable, white and unattached young ladies were rarer than blackberries in June (and also that the very nature of those duties brought him into contact with worse things than the average human is capable of imagining) it is not surprising that he saw Cressy as a being from another world—a sweeter, cleaner world that was a million miles removed from the savagery and squalor to which he had become accustomed.
There was very little that Dan did not know by now about the uglier aspects of the slave trade: or of Zanzibar either. He had seen for himself, while on a brief visit to the interior, one of the slave routes that wound across Africa. A trail that had been clearly marked by hordes of vultures perched among the flat-topped thorn trees, and the bleached bones and rotting corpses of innumerable captives who had been unable to stagger any further and been left to die where they fell. He knew, too, that this was only one of many such trails along which the African and Arab traders drove then: human wares with whips and clubs towards the sea, where those who survived the journey were subjected to worse torments in the airless bowels of a slave ship. In Zanzibar itself he had seen a dhow land twenty-two emaciated skeletons out of a cargo that ten days before had numbered two hundred and forty able-bodied negroes—and on that occasion even the Sultan’s Government had jibbed at the prospect of two hundred and eighteen corpses littering the foreshore, and the slaver had reluctantly stood out to sea and dumped its dead overboard into deep water: from whence the tide had returned many of them during the next few days.