by M. M. Kaye
The interior of The House of Shade had been very like that of The Dolphins’ House, or any other large Arab house in Zanzibar: a central courtyard open to the sky and surrounded by tiers of colonnaded verandahs. Curving staircases with low iron-work balustrades led up from the four comers of the courtyard, linking each verandah to the next, and the room into which Hero had been ushered was similar in many ways to the one she had seen at The Dolphins’ House. Except that here the doorway had not been protected by a curtain, but by a stout and well-fitting door that had been closed and locked behind her.
She was still angry rather than apprehensive, for although she had heard the key turn and knew that she was still a prisoner, the three windows that faced the sea stood open, and the vast expanse of gold-framed looking-glass that occupied most of one wall reflected the sky and the tree-tops and the open sea, and made the long room seem twice as large. There was a wide divan bed hung with mosquito netting, several small inlaid tables and two carved sandalwood chairs, and in place of rugs or carpets the floor was covered by matting. A second door at one end of the room led into a stone-tiled bathroom, and although a third led out of it, that one too was locked from the outside.
Hero went to the central window and looked down on to the garden, but any idea she might have had of escaping that way was clearly useless, for the wall was smooth and sheer and provided no possible foothold, and the drop from the window-ledge to the stone-paved terrace that surrounded the house was all of thirty feet. She turned and looked meditatively at the mosquito net and the bed sheets (there were no blankets) and decided that the former were far too flimsy to hold any weight, while the latter, if tied together, would not reach nearly far enough. But with the aid of a knife she should be able to tear them in half, and then…
It was a possibility, and such an encouraging one that when Jumah eventually appeared with a lamp and a supper tray, she was able to eat a little food with a tolerably quiet mind, and a growing conviction that the unexplained absence of Captain Frost must be due to the fact that he had remained behind in Zanzibar city in order to negotiate the terms for her release.
Uncle Nat would presumably have no alternative but to pay whatever was asked, but she hoped that Captain Frost would find that he had overreached himself at last and would not remain at liberty to enjoy his ill-gotten gains for very long. Even in such a lawless part of the world as this, kidnapping must surely be a punishable offence, and if the authorities had so far failed to convict him of other crimes for lack of proof, there could be no lack of it now. Uncle Nat and Colonel Edwards could be trusted to see that the least he received for this was a long prison sentence. And if he found himself shut into a cell as cramped and uncomfortable as the humiliating one he had provided for her that day, it would serve him right! That indignity still rankled disproportionately, and Hero was even ready to regret the quixotic impulse that had led her to visit bis unfortunate little daughter at The Dolphins’ House. She should have hardened her heart and avoided anything that had to do with him, and she would know better in future.
She had been on the point of blowing out her light and retiring to bed in her petticoat and under-bodice in lieu of a nightdress, when she heard horses’ hooves and voices from somewhere outside, and then minutes later there had been footsteps on the stairs and the key grating again in the lock. And this time it had been Rory.
He shut the door behind him and stood with his back to it, looking at her for a long time and in silence: and she did not say any of the cutting things she had meant to say. She said nothing at all because she was suddenly afraid, and when he moved at last and came towards her she realized with a sharp stab of panic that he was drunk. Drunk and dangerous.
He walked with a deliberation that contained a curious suggestion of unsteadiness, as though he were walking the deck of a ship in windy weather. His voice was an equally deliberate drawl, and she did not believe a word that he said Clay would never have done such a thing! It was a He. A vulgar, vindictive lie! Of course he did not keep rooms of his own in the city…he would have told her if he had…Uncle Nat would have known. The top floor of a house in a quiet cul-de-sac. Captain Frost said, with its own stair and its own door into the street, where he entertained a few selected friends and transacted private business. Where he met Thérèse Tissot: and other women…”
“Who do you suppose I sold those rifles to? Who do you suppose ordered them in the first place? Your upright, high-minded future husband. That’s who! And he must have been livid with fright and fury when he heard whom fished you out of the sea and what ship you’d been on. No wonder he didn’t want either his stepfather or himself to be jockeyed into calling on me to say ‘Thank you.’ And I’ll bet anything he did his damnedest to give me the worst character he could to make sure that you wouldn’t try it!”
“You’re lying,” said Hero. “You’re lying!”
“Am I? Ask him how much he made on that deal. He paid me a hell of a good price, but it was nothing to what he made himself out of reselling them to Bargash and his supporters. Ask your little friends at Beit-el-Tani how much they paid him for those useless rifles. And don’t imagine that your noble Clayton didn’t know what they were going to be used for. He’d been Thérèse’s lover for a good long time and he knew what she was up to all right! Thérèse was doing it for her husband’s sugar interests, not to mention La Patrie and the prosperity of the French plantations of Bourbon and Reunion. But Clayton Mayo was doing it for money. For money and nothing else!”
Hero said breathlessly: “Now I know you’re lying! Or else you’ve been listening to some garbled rumour about someone else. One of the European clerks, or someone off a ship. A bazaar story! Clay would never dream of doing such a thing. He didn’t need money. He—”
Rory gave a short and ugly laugh. “I don’t know about needing it, but he certainly liked it. That wasn’t the only time I’ve had dealings with him. I’ve bought and shipped slaves for him too, and he’s made a pretty penny out of it—and taken a strong dislike to his sister’s slaver-chasing admirer, for fear of what Dan might find out if he were around too much!”
“You know why you’re saying all this, don’t you? Because you know that he hates and despises you!—and all slavers. Because you know he would like to see you run out of the Island!”
“I know he hates me all right. That was all part of the deal once: officially he was to hate my guts and make a great show of wanting to see me deported. It made him feel safer, for if his stepfather had ever begun to suspect what he was up to he’d have shipped him home steerage and never spoken to him again. But it became the real thing, because he was ashamed of what he was doing. And because he knew that I knew too much about him, and he was never quite sure that I wouldn’t tell. Oh, he hates me all right; that’s natural enough—I’m ‘The one who knows.’ And why the hell should I care what he says or thinks as long as he pays?—and he paid! But this is different. He thought that because she was an Arab slave-girl—a ‘kept woman’—he could snatch Zorah in the street and use her for his own filthy pleasures for a few days, and then throw her back again with a handful of money to pay her off and buy her silence. Well now he’s going to know what it feels like to have his own girl snatched in the streets and treated like a cheap strumpet, and handed back to him with a fat purse to compensate her for the experience. That’s unfair, isn’t it? Unfair on you. But then I don’t have to be fair to you. Any more than your honourable lover was fair to my…to Amrah’s mother.”
“You’re making a mistake,” said Hero in a panting whisper “Clay wouldn’t…You’re drunk! You’re lying—”
She would have screamed then, except that she knew that no one who heard her would come, and that it would be a waste of time—and a waste of breath that she needed for other things. For trying to reason with him, and at the last, and equally fruitlessly, for fighting him.
29
Beyond the windows the morning sky was as clear and as serenely blue as the sky of a New Eng
land summer, and on the window-sill a fan-tailed pigeon cooed and strutted and preened its feathers in the sunshine.
There had been fan-tailed pigeons at Hollis Hill, thought Hero in-consequently. Eighteen of them. How long ago that seemed—how impossibly long ago! As long ago as yesterday, which was suddenly separated from her by an impassable gulf that yawned as deep and as wide as the one that separated her from the summer mornings of her childhood and those other white pigeons…
She had not cried last night, and she did not cry now. She lay still and listened to that liquid cooing; looking out at the blue sky and thinking of her father’s house and the settled peace and safety of all that she had left behind—and lost…
“If you feel that you have to do something for your fellow-men,” cousin Josiah Crayne had said, “you don’t have to go as far afield as Africa. You’ll find there’s plenty needs doing right here in your own back yard. If folk would only begin by getting rid of the beam in their own eye before hurrying off to remove the one they can see in their neighbour’s, we’d all be a heap better off. When there’s no more room for improvement in your own country, then’s the time to start in improving someone else’s and telling them how they should go on. There’s too much self-righteous interference in the world: every nation sure it’s better than the next one and running off to set the other one to rights, leaving its own middens to look after themselves.”
“But surely,” Hero had argued, “one should try and help one’s neighbours? To work only at improving one’s own yard is being plain selfish.”
“Maybe. But it’s sense.”
Perhaps it was; for she had certainly done no good in Zanzibar, and helped to do much harm. Not from any lack of good will, but because these people were not her people, and she did not understand their processes of thought or the way they reasoned or felt, and so she could not guess how they would act. Yet she had insisted on coming here, and it had led her by devious routes and blind alleys to…this!
Even now she could not really believe that it had happened—and to her. Things like that might happen to other people: to slaves and concubines. To people in books and women in seraglios. But not to her, in this enlightened and progressive nineteenth century! Not to Hero Hollis, who only a short while ago had been pitying the subservient occupants of harems, and wondering what it must be like to be forced to submit to the embraces of a man who inspired no affection but only fear and repulsion. Well, she knew now; and the knowledge had left her bruised and aching, and so exhausted by shock, that even knowing also that the open windows offered her the chance of escape and a way of avoiding the appalling ignominy of having to face him again after what he had done to her, she could not rouse herself to take it She did not want to do anything but just lie still—and not think…
The pigeon flew off with a noisy flutter of wings, and a warm breeze wandered in at the uncurtained windows and brought with it a scent of cloves and orange blossom and the sound of the surf And all at once the guttering morning held nothing that spoke of home or familiar things, but only of the tropics: of strange, wild, exotic places where men were violent and lawless and took what they wanted and did what they chose, and held life and honour cheap.
Hero sat up slowly and found that it was an effort to move at all But it was an effort that had to be made, because she could not lie here for ever, staring through the mosquito net at the sky beyond the windows and thinking useless thoughts. Presumably she would be allowed to go now, for if it was not ransom money but revenge that Rory Frost had wanted, he had taken that and could have no further use for her, or any reason to keep her here.
He must, she thought, have loved that girl Zorah very deeply to have done such a thing. It would be terrible to love someone so much and lose them so tragically. She had loved her father and lost him, and had grieved for him. But that was a different form of love—and of loss. Last night she had accused Rory of lying, but now, thinking back on it in the bright daylight, she knew that he must at least have told her the truth about Zorah’s death, and that it was because he had loved her and she was the mother of his child that her death, and the manner of it, had turned his brain and driven him first to drink and from there to plotting this brutal, senseless act of revenge. But he had been wrong about Clay. Clay would never have done such a thing, and it had obviously been someone else.
She had tried to tell him this last night, but he would not listen. Yet it was so easy to see how the mistake had occurred. Neither he nor his ship had been in Zanzibar when it happened, and when he returned he had been told some garbled story involving an unknown white man, retailed to him by one of his disreputable friends: probably a local slave dealer who had a grudge against her because she was known to be an active opponent of slavery, and who, knowing that she was to marry Clay, had deliberately embroidered the tale with scraps of malicious gossip and innuendo designed to point to her betrothed as the man responsible for the tragedy. (Harsh experience had already taught Hero how little conscience people had about telling lies when it suited them to do so!). As for the rest of Emory Frost’s wild accusations, he had either invented them in an attempt to justify himself further, or else—which seemed highly probable—someone had been using Clay’s name—possibly Madame Tissot! Clay had always distrusted Thérèse. Or perhaps the Banyan, Balu Ram, in whose cellars the rifles had been stored? It would have been an excellent cover, and she was quite sure that Clayton himself had never exchanged a word with the Virago’s captain!
Freeing herself from the mosquito net. Hero looked about the room, but could see no sign of her clothes, so she pulled a sheet from the bed and wrapping that around her instead, went to the table by the window. It still bore the remains of her last night’s meal, but even the fruit did not tempt her, for she was not hungry: only very thirsty. She poured herself out a glass of the harsh red wine and drank it as though it had been water, and poured and drank a second that made her feel a little lightheaded but considerably stronger.
Turning from the table she caught sight of her own reflection in the damp-spotted expanse of looking-glass, and crossed the room to stand in front of it; staring at herself as though at a stranger.
There had once, long weeks ago, been a grotesque stranger who had looked back at her from a mirror in the cabin of the Virago, But the woman who faced her now did not seem to have altered at all from the girl who only yesterday morning had combed her curls and adjusted her riding-habit before the cheval-glass in a bedroom at the American Consulate.
It seemed incredible to Hero that the past night should have made no difference to her outward appearance and left no stamp on her face. She ought to look different: aged and soiled and ugly with the knowledge and experience of ugliness. It was an affront that she should look exactly the same.
She let the sheet drop, and for the first time in her life studied her naked body, and was surprised to find that though there were bruises on the white skin, it looked smooth and innocent and astonishingly beautiful. She had not known that naked, living flesh could be so lovely a thing, and as satisfying to the eye as the pure curves of stone nymphs and marble Aphrodites. Or that her own proportions could vie with either. The girl in the looking-glass was as tall and rounded and slender as Botticelli’s grave young Venus standing lightly on her sea-shell, and the damp-mottled glass lent her a curious look of unreality; as though she were indeed a picture—or a dream.
Intent upon her own reflection she did not hear the key turn or the door open, and it was a movement and not a sound that caught her attention, for there was suddenly someone else in the looking-glass, and she snatched the sheet back about her, holding it close.
Rory said: “A very charming and virginal gesture, but in the circumstances, surely unnecessary?”
Hero turned and looked at him for a full minute: and found that she did not experience any of the emotions she had expected to feel at having to face him again in the harsh daylight. Perhaps her capacity for emotion had been exhausted; or perhaps the wine she
had drunk had given her a temporary armour against such futile things as shame or anger for something that had been done and could not now be revoked.
She said slowly: “You are only talking like that because you are ashamed of yourself.”
“I suppose so. I never thought I should come down to wasting my time regretting something I’ve done and can’t undo. But it seems I was wrong. And yet that isn’t quite true either…”
He pushed back the mosquito netting and sat down on the divan, leaning his head against the wall and surveying her with detached interest, his hands in his pockets and his face no longer tight and strained. His rage had left him as suddenly as it had come, and he felt as though he had recovered from a bout of fever or rid himself at last of a crushing weight that had been pressing intolerably upon his shoulders.
He said thoughtfully: “In theory, I regret having made you a whipping-boy for Clayton Mayo, because Batty was right and it was an unpardonably dirty trick. But I can’t honestly say I’m sorry, because anything that turned out to be so surprisingly enjoyable cannot be a matter for regret. Which is probably why I am suffering a slight pang of conscience on your account; for to be honest with you, I hadn’t expected to enjoy it much, and the fact that I did puts the whole thing on a different footing. I suppose I ought to send you back to him; though I must say it seems a pity. Like casting pearls before swine. Do you still want to marry him?”
“How can I—now?”
“Then that’s one good thing to come out of this. You deserve something a deal better than that double-dealing Lothario.”
“You don’t understand,” said Hero, evenly and without anger: “Nothing that you have said or could say can alter my opinion of Mr Mayo, or make me not wish to marry him. But he will no longer wish to marry me, and I shall not blame him for it. No one could wish to, now.”