by M. M. Kaye
“Did you come in a ship, n’see sharks n’whales n’a mermaid?”
“Sharks and whales, yes. But no mermaids. Have you ever seen a mermaid?”
The child shook her head, and coming a little closer to Hero lowered her voice and said confidentially: “I thought I done once, but Unker Batty said it were only a fish.”
“That’s the trouble with mermaids,” agreed Hero gravely.
Amrah took another step forward and looked up into Hero’s face, studying her with earnest intentness and frowning a little. “I like you,” she announced abruptly.
The candid tribute brought a surprised flush to Hero’s cheeks and she was astonished to find herself feeling as gratified as though she had been given an unexpected and delightful present. It was not that she was unused to compliments, but she had never before received one quite like this. She had not had much to do with young children, and had never been able to gush over them in the pretty feminine manner that was fashionable among her contemporaries. And yet this small sturdy person in fancy-dress had disarmed her with three short words. Feeling warmed and foolishly flattered, she blushed and smiled, and said: “Thank you. I like you too.”
She held out her hand a little diffidently, and her youthful admirer took it confidently and said: “Why’s your hair all short n’ funny?”
“Amrah!“deprecated her mother softly, but Hero only laughed and said: “Because it got into such a bad tangle that I had it all cut off.’ “How did it got a bad tangle?”
“Well, it’s a long story—”
But it was a story that was to remain untold, for quick footsteps sounded in the verandah outside, the curtain was brushed aside, and Hero turned—the child’s hand still in hers—and for a moment imagined herself to be facing a stranger.
Captain Frost’s shore-going clothes, like those of his crew, were very different from the salt-stained and workmanlike attire he had worn on the Virago. They were not even of European manufacture or design, but consisted of a long white robe sashed about the waist with scarlet, under a loose coat of some dark material that was decorated and bordered with elaborate embroidery in gold and silver thread. Except that his head was uncovered he might have been blood-brother to any of the better dressed Arabs that Hero had passed in the streets, for taken in conjunction with that Eastern attire even his sun-bleached blondness and the colour of his eyes suggested an Albino rather than a European.
The momentary surprise on his face changed to the more familiar look of amusement, and he bowed and said formally: “This is a most unexpected pleasure. Miss Hollis.”
His voice contained no trace of sarcasm, but his expression failed to match it, and Hero resisted an impulse to reply sharply. She said instead, and with equal formality: “I have only called, sir, to bring you my aunt’s and uncle’s thanks, and my own, for all you did for me in the matter of my rescue, and for bringing me safely to Zanzibar. We are most grateful.’ Captain Frost remained in the doorway and regarded her steadily for a full half minute. Then he bowed again, with empressement, the laughter back in his eyes: “It was a privilege, Miss Hollis. Is your aunt here with you? Or did Mr Mayo accompany you? Surely you did not come alone?”
Hero was angrily conscious of her rising colour, but she managed to say composedly enough: “No; one of the house servants accompanied me, for my aunt was unfortunately unable to come this evening, and my uncle and Mr Mayo have an official appointment that could not be cancelled. But as I did not wish to delay any longer in calling upon you to express my—our—thanks, I decided not to wait. You cannot be surprised to see me, since I told you that I intended to call.”
“So you did,” grinned Captain Frost. “No, I am not surprised to see you. And may I say that you relieve me, Miss Hollis? I had put you down as incurably truthful, but I should be surprised indeed to discover that your uncle and aunt, or Mr Clayton Mayo either, knew anything of your intention or have the least idea where you are at this moment.”
“My aunt and uncle,” said Hero frigidly, “are well aware what they owe you, but it happens that they—they—”
“Were unfortunately unable to spare the time to accompany you this evening,” finished Captain Frost glibly. “I quite understand. All the same, now that you have discharged your errand I do not think that you should waste any time in returning to the Consulate. This is not Boston, and your visit here might give rise to the sort of comment that I am sure your relations would not approve of They should have considered that before sending you to convey their thanks.”
Miss Hollis raised her brows and took the wind out of his sails by remarking sweetly: “Oh, but surely you must realize that after spending well over a week in your company I have no reputation left to lose, and may therefore do as I choose?”
“Vixen!” commented the Captain appreciatively. “And after all the care we took to provide for your comfort—not to mention protecting your morals.”
“If by that you mean locking me up so that I might not see what you were doing, I imagine it was your own safety and not my morals that you were concerned to protect,” retorted Miss Hollis with asperity. She rose, the child still holding on to her hand, and giving her crushed skirts a little shake, said casually: “Just what cargo were you carrying on the Virago?”
“Still inquisitive. Miss Hollis?”
“Still interested, Captain Frost.”
The Captain laughed and said lightly: “Obviously it was nothing illegal, or else our enthusiastic young naval friend would have been onto it in a trice. He has the most suspicious nature I have ever had the misfortune to encounter, and he is quite as inquisitive as you are.”
“I guess he knows you too well,” observed Hero pleasantly. “And I was not, as you are well aware, referring to the cargo that Lieutenant Larrimore had occasion to inspect, but to that portion of it which you landed somewhere else on the previous night. I admit to being still interested in that, for if it were not slaves I cannot understand why you should be so excessively secretive about it.”
Captain Frost said dryly: “There are other commodities besides slaves which the authorities take an undue interest in. Miss Hollis. Arms, for instance.”
“Arms? Do you mean firearms?—muskets? But what for? I mean—So that was what you were carrying!”
“I did not say so.”
“But you were,” said Hero with conviction, recalling the shape of those heavy bundles that had so unpleasantly suggested dead bodies. “Of course they were muskets! But why should anyone want so many? Or did you want them for yourself?”
“For myself?” The idea seemed to amuse Captain Frost and he laughed again. “Good God, no! I’m a peaceable man who detests loud noises and martial attitudes. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not prepared to sell such things to anyone who is foolish enough to want them and prepared to offer me a good enough price. Trade’s trade, and it’s all in the way of business. You know, I hate to hurry you. Miss Hollis, but hadn’t you better be getting back before your relatives return from their evening sail and start asking where you are?”
“How did you know they ” began Hero; and bit her lip, angry with herself for the slip. Captain Frost’s burst of laughter was hatefully familiar, and she drew herself up and said coldly: “Pray do not worry yourself on my account. I had no intention of making a long call and have been most hospitably entertained by these ladies.”
She bowed graciously in the direction of Zorah, and then turned to the child who still stood beside her, and said: “Goodbye, Amrah. I have to go now.”
The small fingers tugged at her hand demandingly. “Will you come back?”
“To see you? That would be very nice, but I think it would be even nicer if you would come and see me. We must try and arrange it sometime.”
“You will forget.”
“No, I won’t,” promised Hero. She shook hands gravely, exchanged another smiling bow with the child’s mother, and went out under the curtain that Captain Frost was holding aside for her.
> He dropped it into place behind her and she turned with a stiff, social smile and held out her hand: “Goodbye, Captain Frost You need not trouble to come down with me. In fact I would far rather you did not Fattûma will be waiting for me and we can find our own way out.”
Captain Frost ignored the proffered hand. I’m sure you can, Madame Mermaid, but you will perhaps allow me to see you as far as the stairs.”
He fell into step beside her as the stout little negress, who had been squatting patiently in the verandah, rose to her feet and scuttled away to call Fattûma. Hero glanced down at the deep well of the courtyard and observed conversationally: “What a very large house this is when one sees it from the inside. It does not look nearly so big from the street Whose is that enchanting child?”
“Mine,” said Captain Frost.
“Yours? But—”
The full meaning of that casually spoken monosyllable suddenly dawned on Hero, and she stopped on a gasp and turned swiftly to face him: “Yours?” You mean—But you never told me you were married?”
“I’m not.”
“But then—” Hero checked herself again, and observing her scarlet cheeks and the appalled comprehension in her eyes Captain Frost laughed and said: “There is no need for you to look so shocked. It’s an old established custom in the East And a most convenient one for those who like myself are really bachelors at heart. I paid a few shillings and a bolt of striped calico for Zorah twelve years ago, and it was the best bargain I ever made.”
“You bought her?”
“Off a rascally negro slave dealer in Lagos, who was preparing to ship the child aboard a slaver bound for Charlestown and the North American plantations. God knows where he picked her up—somewhere a good deal further north, I’d say, for she spoke Arabic and had only a few words of the coast dialect. It was a sentimental gesture on my part, but one I have never regretted. Though I’m bound to say—”
But Hero did not wait to hear any more. Gathering up her skirts in both hands she ran from him down the long length of the verandah and took the shallow stone steps of the staircase two at a time. Fattûma was waiting for her in the courtyard, and oblivious of a dozen curious onlookers she snatched at the crumpled schele, and pulling it on, dragged the fringed head-covering into place and hurried through the open doorway and out into the quiet street as though she were escaping from the plague.
The sky above the high, flat rooftops had turned from pale blue to an even paler green, and now that the air had grown perceptibly cooler there seemed to be more people abroad in the main streets of the city. But Hero, hurrying away from the shameful house that she had entered so carelessly, had no attention to spare for the jostling crowds or the beauties of nature.
How right Uncle Nat and Clay had been to forbid her to go there! She should have listened to them instead of being so foolishly stubborn. They had repeatedly warned her that Captain Frost’s reputation precluded any gentleman, let alone any lady, from having dealings with him (or indeed being seen speaking to him), and striven to impress upon her that even a verbal message of thanks to such a man was a concession. Yet instead of listening to them she had actually called on a man who kept a mistress. A coloured mistress! A creature whom he had bought off an African slave-dealer for a handful of silver and a bolt of cheap cloth, and raised in his house until she was old enough to share his bed and bear him a half-caste bastard.
How many other native doxies did he keep hidden away in those curtained, sandalwood-scented rooms?—and how many more casually fathered brats whose veins mingled his Anglo-Saxon blood with the dark strains of Africa and Asia?
Hero had always prided herself on being a modern, forward-looking and outspoken girl with no nonsense about her, but her views on such dark matters as mistresses and miscegenation had been largely gathered from half-hints on the part of her Aunt Lucy and certain shocking confidences whispered by Clarissa Langly, and despite her boasted emancipation she was every bit as capable of being shocked by the visual evidence of such things as the primmest and most prudish of Victorian virgins.
It was true that history books and novels frequently made reference to mistresses and “kept women’, and that some of the more colourful examples—such as Madame de Pompadour and Nell Gwynne—could even be mentioned in polite society. But it had never dawned on Hero that anyone she was actually acquainted with could keep such creatures.
Or that she herself would ever speak to one. That child! No wonder it had seemed so un-Eastern! The cleft chin and the straight line of the eyebrows should have told her at once who its father was;—and would certainly have done so had it even entered her head that Captain Frost, in addition to his other sins, could sink to such depths of depravity.
Recalling the voices and laughter and the strains of the mandolin that had drifted down from the upper verandahs of The Dolphins’ House, she visualized a harem of coloured concubines scheming and intriguing for the favours of that gun-running slave trader, and bearing him a succession of mulatto brats who could not fail to provide the native population of Zanzibar with a visual commentary on the depths to which white races and Western men could sink. ‘It’s an old established custom in the East, and a most convenient one…‘How dared he!
All the inborn Puritanism that Hero had inherited from her New England ancestors and her Scottish great-grandmother flared into life, burning in her with a violent sense of outrage that far transcended her previous anger and indignation on the score of Captain Frost’s dealings in slavery and smuggling. She felt as though she had touched something unclean and must wash it off her with hot water and a scrubbing brush to rid herself of its slime. And she did, in fact, do exactly that as soon as she was safely back in the Consulate: to the consternation of Fattûma and the water-boy, who had been kept busy toiling up and down the back staircase with steaming cans to fill the tin tub that stood in Hero’s stone tiled bathroom.
No other visitor had ever demanded so much hot water at a time of year when the rising temperature called for tepid baths, palm-leaf fans and cold drinks, and Fattûma was of the opinion that her mistress must be suffering from some illness of the brain that necessitated drawing away the blood from the head. But an energetic session with carbolic soap and a scrubbing brush had left Hero with a self-righteous feeling of having symbolically cleansed herself of defilement, and by the time the Consul and his family returned from their evening expedition she had decided to put the whole distasteful episode out of her mind.
There were, she considered, other and more important things to think of: Clayton, for one. And her visit to The Dolphins’ House had not been wasted, for in addition to discharging her debt it had served to confirm her in the opinion that Jules Dubail, Cressy’s two married friends, and the Sultan’s sisters, were undoubtedly right. The present ruler of Zanzibar must certainly be deposed, and the sooner the better, since no friend and ally of Emory Frost’s could be other than corrupt, and therefore quite unfitted to hold any position of authority.
12
“What do you yourself think of him, Uncle Nat?” asked Hero; still bent on discovering whether Bargash possessed the right qualifications to succeed Majid, but using an oblique approach to disguise her objective.
“The Sultan? Waall…’ Uncle Nathaniel leaned back in his chair and considered the question.
They were seated, all five of them, on the terrace in front of the drawing-room windows, sipping coffee while an enormous yellow moon rose above the jacarandas and the orange trees, and Aunt Abby plied a large palm-leaf fan to keep the mosquitoes at bay.
“I guess he’s not much worse than the rest of these Eastern potentates,” said Uncle Nat “But then I’m happy to say I haven’t met too many of em.
Five hot, idle days had passed since the evening that Hero had paid her ill-advised call upon Emory Frost, and when not engaged in listening to Cressy’s confidences she had, in spite of herself, spent an undue proportion of them in brooding upon the infamous conduct of that slave-trading libertin
e. But though time had done little towards lessening her indignation, it had undoubtedly done a great deal towards improving her looks, and seen now by the pale light of the rising moon and the warm, reflected glow from the lamplit drawing-room, her face no longer displayed any trace of swelling or bruises. All that remained of the injuries that had so disfigured her were a small scar on her lower lip and that short-cropped hair, and Clayton Mayo, studying her over the rim of his coffee cup, came to the conclusion that both improved her.
That scar, for instance, had the odd effect of making her lips look less severe and more…Clay groped for a word and was astonished when his mind presented him with “kissable’, because it was a term he had certainly never thought of applying to them before. As for that shorn head, though he had thought it a disaster when he had first seen it, there was no denying that the crop of childish, chestnut curls served to soften a certain austerity that had made the perfection of Hero’s features a cold rather than an alluring thing. They made her look younger and gentler…more like a charming Botticelli angel than a forbidding marble goddess from Ancient Greece.
Yes, she was certainly a good looking girl, mused Clay, and might even, some day, be a pretty one. Which to his way of thinking was a deal better than being merely beautiful. If only she were not so set on her own opinions…so inflexible in her views and her virtue and her condemnation of the faults of others…Contemplating Hero’s unconscious profile, he found himself wondering if a taste of rough treatment, adversity and harsh experience might not exercise the same beneficent effect upon her character as those mid minutes in a stormy sea had exercised upon her looks. It was an interesting idea and he toyed with it, withdrawing his attention from his stepfather, who was still pursuing the subject of the Sultan:
“I’ve been told,” said the Consul, “that his father was a great man. Well, maybe he was. But if so, this son certainly ain’t inherited any of his old man’s grit and gumption. Majid just lolls around in the Palace and lets the rest of the Island go govern itself.”