by M. M. Kaye
Hero had only been able to spare him a few minutes, for the child was awake and racked with fever, and though she listened to him patiently enough there was an abstracted look in her eyes and a faint frown between her brows, and he was resentfully aware that she was giving him only half her attention. His voice began to rise, and she lifted a hand quickly, hushing him:
“Please, Clay. Don’t be angry! I know how you feel and that you are only anxious on my account. But this is something I have to do.”
“Why? it’s nothing whatever to do with you. Why in thunder can’t you think of me for a change?—of my feelings instead of always your own? Or if mine are of no importance to you, you might try thinking of all the anxiety you are causing Ma and Cressy and your uncle.”
“I have thought of it,” said Hero, distressed. “And I am very sorry that they are worried, but there is no need for them to be, because—”
“Because it doesn’t mean a blamed thing to you compared with getting your own way and interfering in matters that are no concern of yours, does it?” interrupted Clay furiously.
“That is not true. And it does concern me: and you too, Clay.”
“Me? Just what do you mean by that?”
“You know. Or you should know.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, unless you’re going to tell me that after all that has happened, you still reckon we owe that goddamned slaver something for pulling you out of the sea—”
“I wasn’t thinking of him. I was thinking of Zorah.”
She saw Clayton’s flushed face pale and his eyes turn aside from hers, and said unhappily: “You see, Clay, if she had been alive she might have prevented this. Or if she could not, she would at least have noticed it earlier and been here to nurse the child. And—and you told me that it was partly my fault that you did…what you did. That I helped drive you to it I don’t know if that’s true or not, but you must see that I—that we…Clay, we cannot let her child die! Not without trying to do all we can to prevent it. We owe her that much.”
Clayton’s wandering gaze returned to her face and his grey eyes were hard. He said harshly: “Yes, I guess I see all right! This is your way of getting back at me. Not a generous, warmhearted gesture at all, but a carefully-thought-out punishment. Real smart of you, my dear, and I guess I deserve it But don’t you think you might have thought up some way of paying me out that didn’t involve my mother and sister in so much distress, or put my stepfather to so much embarrassment? It seems a mite unfair that they should have to suffer for my misdeeds. But maybe our collective misery will serve to even your score with me.”
Hero said helplessly: “It is not that at all. I’m only trying to—to atone a little for something that…Oh, what’s the use of talking if you do not wish to understand? And it is not only that; I have become fond of the child for her own sake, too.”
“One of Frost’s bastards!” said Clayton, spitting the words out as though they were acid in his mouth.
Hero’s face was suddenly rigid, but she did not raise her voice and it remained low-pitched and even: “You forget,” she said quietly, “that I may bear one of them myself.”
She turned from him with a faint rustle of poplin, and when he would have followed her he found his way barred by Batty Potter, who stepped out of the shadows of the sickroom and stood wiry and immobile in the doorway, his eyes cold chips of granite and the set of his whiskered jaw very sobering to hot blood. Batty might be getting old, but he had learned his fighting in a hard school where there were no such things as Queensberry Rules; and he too had not forgotten Zorah.
They looked at each other for a long, measuring minute, and then Batty sighed and said softly; “I wouldn’t—not if I was you, Mister Mayo.”
He shook his grizzled head regretfully, realizing that this was neither the time nor the place for loud words and blows, and that much as he would have liked to try his hand at rearranging Mr Mayo’s handsome features, there was nothing for it but to see that the unwelcome visitor left quickly—and quietly.
“Ain’t no sense in getting your dander up when you’re one agin a dozen,” remarked Batty reasonably, “for that ain’t nowise good odds, and you don’t want to go gettin’ yourself ‘eaved out of the ‘ouse by a lot of low deck’ands, now do you?” So just you go ‘ome quiet-like and tell your folks that they’ve no call to go worritin’ themselves over Miss ‘Ero, for no one ain’t going to lay a finger on ‘er. Jumah ‘ere’ll show you out.”
Clayton had known the risk he had run when he had come to The Dolphins’ House, and he had come armed. But he also had the sense to know when he was beaten. The old man was right, and there was nothing to be gained by a show of force except the humiliation of being ejected by a handful of grinning Africans—unless he used his revolver, which would only result in the death of several people, including himself.
His left hand ceased to be a fist, and die right, which had moved towards the holster concealed under his coat, fell to his side. Turning on his heel he left without further words, ignoring Jumah who hurried ahead of him to see that the door was opened and waited to make sure that it was barred behind him. He had not attempted a second visit, and later that day his mother had packed a valise which had been delivered to Hero by an able seaman from the Daffodil.
Nathaniel Hollis had made no further move to bring his niece to her senses, and had flatly refused Cressy’s plea that she might call and see how Hero went on. He too had become alarmed by the thought of typhoid, and so afraid for the safety of his daughter that he was almost tempted to ask Dr Kealey not to call at the Consulate with news of Hero, for fear that he might carry the contagion with him.
But it was not long before the threat of typhoid, terrible as it had once seemed, faded into insignificance against the towering menace of the cholera, and Dr Kealey no longer had time to call on Mr Consul Hollis; and little enough to spare for Amrah, struggling feebly for life in an upper room of the house of the Dolphins. The life of one small child shrank in importance when hundreds were dying daily in the crowded hovels of the Black Town, the stifling streets, the bazaars and the tall Arab houses of Zanzibar city, and in villages among the coconut groves and the clove plantations.
It was too late now for Nathaniel Hollis to regret that he had not moved his family to a house in the country, for by this time there were none available. All he could do was confine his wife and daughter to the Consulate and pray for a ship: an American ship. Or a European one bound for some safe port that would take Abigail and Cressy out of this pest-house of an island.
But no ship came, and those dhows that had been in harbour when the cholera struck hastened to leave it, and spread the news up and down the coast that to put in to Zanzibar was to court death, so that the harbour was emptier than it had been since the coming of Seyyid Saïd the first Sultan, and save for Majid’s few ships and a handful of fishing boats, only the Daffodil and the Virago remained at anchor…
“Surely, Colonel, there can no longer be any necessity to keep Larrimore and his men here for our protection?” argued Mr Hubert Platt, whose wife Jane was in a fever of anxiety on account of the twins, and had been pestering him night and day to arrange for their transport out of the Island: “Would it not be possible to send some of the families away on the Daffodil?”
But the British Consul was still reluctant to rid himself of the only deterrent the city possessed against the return of the pirates, and he hesitated to turn the Daffodil into a passenger ship when she might still be needed for sterner duties. Besides, for all they knew the epidemic might bum itself out sooner than they supposed, and without affecting the better built and more open portions of the Stone Town where the white community lived. Or the Cormorant might arrive earlier than expected; or possibly another ship?
But the death rate leapt, and the Cormorant, coming on the track of a slaver, altered course and sailed southward on a long chase that was to postpone her arrival by several weeks. And two serving-women at Beit-el-Ta
ni, a native clerk from the French Consulate, and one of Clayton Mayo’s grooms, died of the cholera. Their deaths were only four among two hundred and thirty-seven deaths in Zanzibar that day, but they proved that even the privileged dwellers in the Stone Town were not immune, and Dan, calling on his betrothed the following evening, found her mother in tears and die Consul looking haggard and grim. A young relative of Clayton’s late groom, who had been serving as a dish-washer in the Consulate kitchen, had died that very afternoon and in the servants’ quarters attached to the house…
“They say he had been to his uncle’s funeral,” wept Abby, twisting her wet handkerchief until the fabric tore: “And though he did not feel well this morning, he got up as usual and helped in the kitchen until Cook says he just fell down on the floor and and they had to carry him out to the quarters and I didn’t know it could be so quick. It was only hours! He was alive this afternoon, and now…And it happened right here in the house. In our own kitchen! They didn’t even tell us until an hour ago, and we’ve all been eating our meals off plates and cups that he must have touched, and…”
“Now, Abby,” interposed her husband soothingly, patting her plump shoulders with a hand that was almost as unsteady as her own.
The news had shaken Dan quite as badly as it had shaken Cressy’s parents, and for the same reason. What was the good of confining her to the house and the garden when the cholera was already here, inside their own walls? He looked at Nathaniel Hollis, and for the first time the two men, father and suitor, not only understood each other but were in complete agreement. And it was at that moment that Nathaniel Hollis’s liking for the younger man began; born of the conviction that here was someone who cared just as deeply for Cressy as he himself did, and could be trusted to take good care of her.
“How soon can they be ready, sir?” asked Dan as though everything had already been discussed and agreed upon—as indeed it had.
“Inside an hour, I guess,” replied the Consul promptly.
“I’m afraid it won’t be quite as soon as that, sir. There will be a good many arrangements to make.”
“And your Consul’s permission to get.”
“Of course, sir. But I do not think that will be difficult, because he has already received similar suggestions from other residents, and it’s getting plainer every day that as far as the pirates are concerned the cholera will prove a far more effective deterrent than any force we could provide. They will not be back this year, and if they have put in at any other coastal port the chances are that a good many of them are dead by now.”
Colonel Edwards had already come round to the same opinion, and as Dan had predicted, it had been easy enough to gain his consent to embark any families of foreign residents who wished to leave, and to take them at once to the Cape, from whence they could return to their several countries or wait until it was safe to rejoin their husbands in Zanzibar.
“No one is going to raise any riots at a time like this,” agreed Colonel Edwards grimly. He had sent word to the consulates and the houses of the European merchants, and helped to see that the Daffodil was adequately provisioned for such a voyage and provided with such medicines as could be spared from his own and Dr Kealey’s all too slender resources.
At no time during the busy hours that elapsed between the decision to sail and the moment when the Daffodil’s weed-hung anchor rose dripping from the harbour bed, did either Colonel Edwards or Daniel Larrimore spare a thought for Captain Emory Frost of the Virago, left a prisoner in the Arab Fort. And even if they had remembered him it would have been impossible to take him on board, since every spare foot of space was crammed to overflowing with women and children, cots, perambulators, travelling trunks and bulging valises. They had, however, quite simply forgotten him: and as the white coral town and the green trees of Zanzibar began to fade in the heat haze, it was Cressy’s face that Dan looked at and not the walls of the Arab Fort, still visible beyond the rocky outline of Grave Island.
The wives and families of most of the city’s white colony had gathered on deck to wave a tearful’ Goodbye’ to husbands and fathers standing on the shore. But Hero Hollis had not been among them. She had refused to leave the Island as quietly and as stubbornly as she had refused to leave The Dolphins’ House, and when at the urgent insistence of his wife and daughter her uncle had called at the house with the intention of ordering her obedience, he had not been admitted. The only foreigner permitted entrance was Dr Kealey, and it was he who in the end had carried letters to Hero: letters from Aunt Abby, Cressy and Clay, a brief note from Uncle Nat and a verbal message, equally brief, from Dan. He had also carried the answers, which were all substantially the same; though he too had done what he could to persuade her to change her mind.
“I have to tell you,” said Dr Kealey reluctantly, “that in my opinion the child stands very little chance of recovery. And if she dies after the ship has sailed—”
“She won’t,” said Hero.
“They cannot wait for you,” warned Dr Kealey.
“No. They must go as quickly as they can. Give Aunt Abby and Cressy my dearest love, and tell them that I am sorry, but I cannot go with them. And please thank Lieutenant Larrimore for his offer, and say he must not let Cressy worry. She gets so easily upset.”
“He doesn’t,” said Dr Kealey dryly.
“I know. I used to think he would not do at all for Cressy, but now I am not so sure, for he will always love her and look after her, and be…’ Hero hesitated for a moment and then said: “dependable. Cressy needs someone like that, and maybe it’ll turn out after all that she has shown a great deal of sense in falling in love with him.”
“I think so,” agreed Dr Kealey.
“Do you? I’m glad. Tell her that I No. You had better not tell her anything. Just say ‘thank you’ to them all for troubling about me and that I hope they may forgive me for not wishing to go with them, but that you will be here to see that I come to no harm.”
“I will do that,” said Dr Kealey; and added with a wry smile: “Millicent will not go either.”
“Your wife?—is she staying?”
“She insists that she must remain to see that I take the precautions I urge upon others. But that is only an excuse. The real reason is that she is a damned obstinate woman who is as stubborn as—as—”
“Myself!” finished Hero with a faint smile.
“I was going to say ‘as a mule,’” confessed the doctor, “but perhaps you are right. Try and get a bit more rest, my dear. You are looking very worn.”
He had conveyed Hero’s messages to her relations, and informed Dan that Miss Hollis found herself unable to accept his kind offer.
“I never thought she would,” admitted Dan. “Is the child still too ill to be moved?”
“The child is dying,” said Dr Kealey bluntly: and saw Dan’s face stiffen.
“I’m sorry, I had hoped that perhaps…How long?”
“I don’t know. A day. Two days? Three at most.”
“We can’t wait that long. If we go at all it must be at once.”
“She knows that She said to tell you not to let Miss Cressida worry.”
Dan did not say anything for several minutes but stood looking fixedly at the floor, and at last he said curtly: “Tell her I’ll try.”
He lifted his head and grinned at the doctor: “Mr Hollis told me that it was her father who insisted on giving her that damned silly name, but it seems as though he knew what he was about when he did it!”
36
Hero did not know when the Daffodil sailed, but Batty had seen the smudge of smoke against the hot sky, and he had fetched Rory’s brass-bound telescope and watched her go. And when she had been swallowed up at last by the heat haze he had sighed with relief—because the Captain was still in Zanzibar and so was Miss Hero, and he had been deadly afraid that one or both of them would sail with her.
At least Danny and his bluejackets had gone! And it was a long haul from Zanzibar to the Cape—and a
longer one back again, with the wind against them! It would be several weeks before there was any chance of their return, and Batty was inclined to think that it would be nearer three months, and that Dan would receive orders to wait until the epidemic had passed and the end of the “Long Rains’ brought the south-east Trade Winds to aid his return to Zanzibar under sail—thereby saving a parsimonious Admiralty the expense of fuel. But now that the threat of his armed seamen and the Daffodil’s guns had been removed, there was every chance that the Baluchi troops in charge of the Fort would prove amenable to bribery and the Captain be permitted to escape. The Virago was still in harbour and ready to leave at short notice, and there was no one now to prevent them sailing or to pursue them once they had left They could quit just as soon as Amrah—
Batty’s thoughts jerked to a stop as though the child’s name had been a yawning crevasse that gaped suddenly across a pleasant path he had been wandering along; for though he would not admit it, he too could see that she was getting no better (even to himself he would not put it into any stronger words).
She was small, thought Batty, but she was strong and sturdy for her age. Not like these frail little native brats who went out like a candle-flame in a puff of wind at the first touch of sickness. She would soon begin to pick up; Miss Hero would see to that. Miss Hero wouldn’t let her go; she was a fighter, miss was. Look how she had stood out against them all when they’d wanted her to go back to her uncle’s. And when they’d wanted to ship her off to the Cape? She wouldn’t let Amrah die—not Miss Hero!
Batty shivered, remembering the slightness of the little body that had once seemed so sturdy and was now so small that it barely showed under the single thin sheet. He pushed the thought behind him with an effort of will, and putting away the telescope, closed the shutters against the burning day and lay down to get some sleep, for he had taken the last watch of the night while Hero slept, and surrendered his place to her an hour after dawn.