by M. M. Kaye
“I didn’t—” began Clay automatically. “I…” He sat down suddenly on the bed beside her and put his head in his hands.
He was silent for a long time, and Hero looked at his slumped shoulders and bent head and knew that she had never loved him. That mysterious instinct possessed by all Eve’s daughters and which men refer to—often derisively—as ‘woman’s intuition,’ told her that had she truly done so, the fact that he had lied to her, and was not at all the sort of person she had imagined him to be, would not have been able to destroy that. It could only have caused pain and bitter disappointment, but nothing worse, for she did not believe that you could stop loving someone because they hurt or disappointed you—however much you might wish to do so. It could not be as easy as that Your head might reject them, but surely your heart would not?
Clayton said in a muffled and uneven voice: “I suppose it’s because I like women and I can’t leave them alone. Mother doesn’t understand that. She must have had a hell of a life with my father; he liked them too, and maybe I get it from him. Nat—my stepfather—doesn’t understand it either, and I couldn’t let them know. I had my own place, back home, so it was easy there. But here I had to live in the same house. So I rented those rooms in town. Somewhere where I could do what I liked…be myself.”
“Weren’t you afraid of being found out?”
“Oh, I knew there might be talk, but I thought I could deal with that. I got Joe to do the actual renting for me. It’s in his name, and I knew he wouldn’t give me away. Thérèse used to meet me there. We—we had an affair. It wasn’t altogether her fault; I began it. Old man Tissot’s twice her age and more like her grandfather than her husband, and she—well I guess she fell in love with me…”
Hero said: “Why did you want to marry me, Clay?”
“It seemed a good idea. Ma and Nat both wanted me to marry a nice, steady girl with plenty of money, who would sober me up and settle me down. You, in fact! Oh, I liked you all right. I liked you a lot, though you scared me plenty at times and I used to wonder if I could go through with it and how long I should be able to keep it up—acting noble and high-minded and prosing away like a moralizing missionary! I knew you’d find me out sooner or later, but I thought I might be able to bring you round. One of my uncles told me that Ma was every bit as high-minded when she married my father, but in spite of everything she’d always loved him and had never really gotten over him. And then I—I fancied I knew a hell of a lot about women, so I thought it might work out. That I could bring you down to earth a bit. Teach you to like the things I liked. Making love—parties—having a high time. Spending money on fun instead of using it to convert the heathen or put a stop to drinking or gambling and all the rest of it.”
“Is that why you speculated in slaves and guns? To have money for…for fun?”
“No. Just to have money. You’ve always had it, so you don’t know what it means to be without it. Or not to have enough. It was so damned easy to make it in a place like this, and I’d have been a fool if I’d turned down the chance.”
“But Clay—slaves! How could you? If it had been anything else…”
“The few slaves I bought and sold didn’t make a mite of difference to the wholesale traffic that’s being carried on m this part of the world! If I hadn’t sold them someone else would have done it. And I didn’t make them slaves; they were slaves already—caught and numbered and landed here. There was nothing that could be done about that.”
“And I suppose there was nothing that could be done about the firearms either?”
“That was different. That was just a plain matter of business, and one can’t afford to be sentimental over such things. The politics of these people are no concern of mine.”
“But they concerned Uncle Nat. If he had known—”
“If he’d known he’d have thrown me on to the next ship bound for home. And that might have been no bad thing, either! He’s your kind, Hero: and I suppose that old stick Edwards’ kind too. They probably couldn’t do a crooked thing if they tried. Wouldn’t know how. But they’ll neither of them ever get anywhere, and I shall—unless I end up in jail, or with some hysterical woman’s bullet through my head, like my father!”
He laughed, but with a harsh note of bitterness, and Hero said: “And Zorah?”
Clayton looked up, his face drawn and bewildered: “I thought she was just a—just another prostitute, and no different from the rest except that she was prettier than most of them. I didn’t think she’d care a damn as long as she got her money, and I never dreamt she’d…I never thought…How could I have known? Hero, I swear I didn’t mean any harm there. Not real harm; not to her. I thought it would rile Frost if she spent a few days with me for a change, but that was all. He’s always gotten my goat…
carrying on as though there was nothing wrong in slaving and smuggling and wenching just as long as you spoke out about it and didn’t give a damn who knew, but that there was something sneaky and low-down and rotten about doing it on the quiet. That isn’t true! Boasting about it doesn’t make it a mite better. And keeping quiet about it doesn’t make it any worse.”
“Or excuse it,” said Hero.
“I’m not excusing it. I’m just telling you how I came to do it, and why. I’m not proud of it, God knows, and if I could have kept you from finding out I would. But Zorah…that was your fault too. You and your ‘touch-me-not’ attitudes! You may not be my type, but you’re a damned good-looker all the same, and I’m not a dried up stick or a block of ice. You don’t know what it’s been like…not being allowed to kiss you or lay a finger on you for fear of scaring you into running for cover and breaking the whole thing off…I tell you it’s been hell! Holding myself in; playing prunes and prisms and all the while wanting to throw you down and show you what it’s all about. Sometimes I used to sneak out at night, after a chaste evening with you and one kiss on your shrinking cheek, and get me a woman from the Lai Bazaar. If I hadn’t, I’d have gone crazy. And if it hadn’t been for the state you got me in I daresay I wouldn’t have made a fool of myself over Zorah!”
Hero said in a whisper: “Oh no. Clay! Oh no…’ as though she were pleading with him, or with herself.
But Clay was not listening to her. He said: “As for all the rest of it, the money was there for the making, and if I hadn’t made it myself, someone else would. You can be as sentimental and self-righteous as you like about it, but I’ve done a sight less harm and caused a lot less misery by dealing in captured negroes than men like Dan Larrimore, who spend years of their lives trying to free them. There have been literally thousands of wretched blacks flung into the sea to drown, or landed and left to die of thirst and starvation, by captains of slave ships who were being chased by the British and didn’t dare risk being caught red-handed with slaves on board. But all I’ve done is to buy them at one price from a rascally trader, and sell them for a higher one to rich men who will provide them with food and clothes and their keep for life—and who’ll treat ‘em a sight better than many a white servant-girl gets treated back home in Boston, at that! It’s all in the way you look at it.”
He rose and stretched himself, straightening his shoulders as though he shrugged off a burden, and said: “Well, now I guess you know all about me, and maybe its better that way. Maybe it’ll give us a better chance of making a go of marriage.”
Hero said quietly: “But I’m not going to marry you, Clay.”
“You haven’t any choice, dear. And since what happened to you was mostly my fault, I haven’t either. If we get married at once, and you should have a child, it will be thought to be mine even if it’s not. That’s the very least I can do for you. And it’s the least you can do for—Well, for all of us. You do see that, don’t you?”
Hero was silent for so long that he thought that she had not understood him, and he said more urgently: “We just can’t afford to have a scandal. It would involve not only ourselves but my stepfather, and Mama and Cressy too. And then there are t
he Craynes to be thought of, as well as your own father’s family. Hollis Hill still stands for something, and you can’t go back there to have a nameless child, or even to bear one that we must pretend is prematurely born. You can’t think only of yourself I can promise you though, that I shall do everything in my power to protect you and make it up to you.”
Hero stood up slowly and went to stand by the window, holding aside the curtain and looking out at the darkened garden and the lights of the city. She said without turning: “I guess not…I—I will think about it.”
“Don’t think about it too long. And try not to blame me too much.”
“I’m not blaming you. I know that I am the one to blame. For being blind and self-opinionated and so sure that I must always be right about everything. For not realizing that people do things, or don’t do them, because there is something in them that pushes them that way and that they are not always strong enough to fight against…something that perhaps they cannot help; heredity, or the wrong sort of teaching. Or strong appetites that need to be satisfied, and which I—I never really understood anything about…before. You couldn’t resist women or the chance of making easy money, and I couldn’t resist interfering and helping to cause a great deal of harm because I was so sure that I was right, and—and I suppose because I enjoyed feeling that I was so much better and more public-spirited and intolerant of injustice than other people. Cousin Josiah was right and we ought to start with ourselves. I thought that was selfish once, but he said it was sense, and I guess it is.”
Clayton looked relieved, if not entirely sure what she was talking about, and he went over to her with the intention of putting an arm about her and assuring her of his continued affection. But when she turned her head and looked at him there was something in her face that made him think better of it, and he contented himself with saying that he appreciated her generosity and would be grateful if she would add to it by saying nothing of all this to his stepfather.
“Mama would forgive me,” said Clay, “but Nat wouldn’t, and I’d rather he kept his illusions—he and Aunt Lucy and the rest of them. It’s kind of queer, when you come to think of it, that your father should have been the only one I couldn’t fool. He told me he believed in ‘Live and Let Live,’ and that if you’d fallen in love with an out-and-out no-good with your eyes open, he wouldn’t have raised too much dust, because it might have worked out. But he reckoned that if you took on someone you thought was as high-minded and strait-laced as yourself, and then found that you’d been tricked into marrying a rascal, it would just about destroy you, and he wasn’t going to stand for you being sold a fake. Maybe I should have listened to him. But then you won’t be buying a fake now. You know what I’m like and you won’t expect me to behave like a plaster saint. It’ll work out, dear. I know it.”
Hero did not say anything, and he lifted her hand and kissed it lightly, and went away, looking considerably less hag-ridden than he had been at any time since he had heard of Zorah’s death. He was sorry about that And about what had happened to Hero. But he could not help thinking that it had not ended as disastrously as it might have done. Or at least, not as far as he himself was concerned.
31
Mr Potter, unrecognizable in the garb of a Banyan shopkeeper, was admitted to a quiet room in the Sultan’s Palace where he found Captain Emory Frost sleeping the sleep that should by rights belong only to the just, and awakened him without compunction.
“You seems to be doin’ all right,” remarked Batty, gazing sourly about him. “Comfortable little place you ‘ave ‘ere.”
“Very, thank you. Was that all you woke me up to tell me?”
“Not likely! I don’t go running me ‘ead into an ‘omets’ nest just for the sake of ‘aving a chat. Thought you’d like to know as I been back to The Dolphins’ ‘Ouse.”
“Damned silly of you,” observed Rory, yawning. “You might have been caught.”
“No fear. I goes in with old Ram Dass as ‘is assistant, selling cloth an’ such. Someone ‘as to find out ‘ow the nipper is. Misses ‘er Ma, she does, poor babby.”
Rory made no comment, but Batty saw the muscles of his jaw tighten and a comer of his mouth twitch, and recognizing those signs was partially satisfied. “What y’going to do with ‘er?” he demanded.
“She’s all right where she is for the time being. All those women spoil her: and so do you!”
“Maybe I does, but now that we got to play ‘Ide-and-Seek with young Danny, I ain’t there to do it. And no more are you.”
“What do you expect me to do about it?”
“That’s what I come to see you for. We ought to take ‘er away. It ain’t safe for ‘er to be around in these parts just now.”
“Oh, talk sense. Batty! No one’s going to harm her. If you think either Dan or old Edwards would lift a finger against her you must be losing your mind!”
“It ain’t that kind of’arm I’m talking of,” said Batty angrily. “You been too bloody busy with your blasted self to keep your lugs open, but I been ‘earing things that I don’t like.”
“What sort of things?”
“Remember them yarns we ‘card on the coast, about a plague? Well, Ibrahim ‘e meets a cove off a dhow from Kilwa last night, and this cove tells ‘im that it’s the black cholera, and that it’s rampagin’ all across Africa. The Masai are dying like flies, and ‘ole slave caravans ‘ave been lost—‘e says ‘e meets a man who was the only one left alive out of one of ‘em, and this cove reaches the coast on ‘is own, but dies two days later. I don’t like the sound of that, and I’d be a lot ‘appier if young Amrah were took out of this, for if it’s got to the coast there’s no saying but it won’t get ‘ere.”
“Or anywhere else, for that matter,” said Rory, “which means that she’s safer here than she would be anywhere on the mainland. Even if these stories are not exaggerated there is a good chance that it’ll miss Zanzibar, for there won’t be any more slave dhows in until May.”
“I weren’t thinking of the mainland,” said Batty. “If them yarns is true there ain’t no place in all Africa that would be safe. I was thinking maybe we could take the old Virago across to Cutch, or try our “and at a bit of pearling off Ceylon. Wouldn’t do none of us no “arm to get outer this place for a spell—what with Danny and ‘is dinky little shellbacks a’raging and a’roaring round as fierce as lions. What do you say?”
“It’s a thought,” said Rory. “When’s the Virago likely to be back?”
“Well, you told us to light out for the Amirantes and stay clear of Zanzibar for a matter of a month or so—or until we ‘ear that Dan ‘as shifted ‘is ‘unting grounds. So I suspicions that Ralub’ll carry out your orders.”
“Just as you did,” observed Rory dryly.
“Someone ‘ad to stay and see that you didn’t go bargin’ about the island getting yourself ‘ung,” retorted Batty defensively. “‘Sides, I didn’t like leaving young Amrah with just them silly women to look after ‘er. ‘Ajji Ralub is a sensible man ‘oo can be trusted not to behave foolish, so I reckon ‘e’ll be back soon as it’s safe. And when ‘e comes I ‘ope you’ll ‘ave the sense to pick up the nipper and light out of ‘ere—which’ll keep you clear of the Colonel and the cholera both. I don’t like neither of’em, and I’m for loping off quick!”
“I’ll think about it,” said Rory. “I might even see if I can get the Sultan to put a stop to any more ships from the coast putting in here for a while. Don’t go getting yourself caught. Uncle.”
Mr Potter made a noise that dismissed the suggestion as one beneath contempt, and left. And that same evening, over a game of chess in the Sultan’s private apartments, Rory brought up the matter of the cholera, and Majid dismissed it with a wave of the hand. He had, he said, heard similar tales—a dozen at least. And if it were true that the Masai were being decimated, it was no bad thing, since they were a savage and warlike people, unsuitable as slaves and much given to attacking the caravans of slave traders in or
der to train their young men in battle. They would be no loss, and the cholera was not in the least likely to reach the coast.
“It is nothing,” said Majid lightly. “I tell you, cholera has never yet come to us from that direction, so you need not fear that it will come now. And since our treaty with the English forbids us to import any slaves from the mainland during the months of the northeast monsoon, the risk of it being brought here by sea is negligible. That is one of the advantages of living on an island. But rest assured, if we hear it has broken out in any of the coastal towns we shall see that any dhow from an infected port is forbidden to send men ashore, or to anchor too near the town. The merchants and the Customs House officials will see to that!”
His hand hovered for a moment above the ivory army: “The Lieutenant is still here,” he remarked pensively, advancing his bishop to capture one of the Captain’s pawns: “And his ship.”
“I am aware of it,” sighed Rory, studying the chequered board. “Very tiresome of them.”
“Are you also aware that they watch your house night and day, and this morning I receive yet another call from the British Consul, who enquires once again if I have any knowledge as to where you may be found or what you are doing?”
“What did you tell him?”
“The truth. As I did not know in which room you were at that precise moment, or if you were engaged in eating or sleeping or meditating upon your many sins, I was able to reply that I had no idea.”
“Did he believe you?”
“I don’t think so. He is not a fool.”
“No, alas. How long do you suppose they’ll keep this up?” Rory moved another pawn, unmasking a knight: “Check.”
Majid clicked his tongue and frowned above the chessboard, and after due deliberation moved a second bishop to cover his queen and said: “As far as the good Colonel is concerned, until he leaves Zanzibar: which I think will be soon, for his health is not good and he has applied to be sent on leave to his own country. But without the Daffodil he can do little, and it is a great pity that the Lieutenant cannot be persuaded to go and look for slave ships and slavers elsewhere. I tell the Colonel that I am sure many slaves are being illegally taken out of my territories on the coast, and he agrees with me and does nothing. It is scandalous!”