by M. M. Kaye
“No—yes. It isn’t anything,” said Hero confusedly.
“Are you sure? You are not looking at all well.’ Olivia regarded Hero’s drawn face with some concern and said: “Would you like me to stay? Shall I call Fattûma? or Clayton?”
“No, really, Livvy; there’s nothing the matter with me. It’s—I guess it’s only the heat.”
“You ought to get Dr Kealey to give you an iron tonic. Not that it does much good: I tried it. Oh bother—now it’s going to pour, and Jane’s carriage leaks abominably. I shall get soaked. Until tomorrow, then.”
She stooped to kiss Hero’s unresponsive cheek and went away, the noise of her departure lost in a sudden roar of sound as the sagging clouds emptied themselves over the island, blotting it out in a grey cataract of rain.
Hero had not accompanied her to the door or made any motion to rise from her chair. She stayed where she was, facing the streaming windows without seeing them, and presently she said aloud and as though there were still someone in the room with her: “No! They couldn’t do that!”
But she knew that they could. It was more than possible that frightened men might run away and leave others to die of disease and starvation, locked in like animals and unable to escape. But then surely someone in authority would have thought of that? Or would they not care, at a time like this, what happened to a handful of convicted criminals?—or even hear of it? With hundreds of innocent people dying daily, the fate of a few malefactors would seem of little account…But if Olivia knew, then her brother Mr Platt must know. Surely Hubert Platt would make enquiries? Or would he, busied with more urgent affairs, merely hope that others would see to it? It was, after all, a matter for the Sultan’s officials to deal with. The Fort was their province. But according to Olivia, the Sultan and his immediate family—and probably his ministers too!—were living in virtual isolation in country estates well away from the city. So although Majid was certain to have heard of the Daffodil’s departure, the chances were (which was in fact the truth) that he had taken it for granted that her commanding officer would have insisted on taking Captain Frost with him to ensure that he did not escape. In which case…
Uncle Nat had called her in to luncheon, and Hero had made only a pretence of eating and had not answered when she was spoken to: which was not sufficiently unusual to cause comment, but allied to her strained face had made both Clayton and his stepfather regard her anxiously, and afterwards sedulously avoid looking at each other. The meal seemed to take a very long time, and when it was over she went up to her own room; though not to lie down. Her mind was still on the things that Olivia had told her and she could not rest.
Someone should go down to the Fort. One of the servants should be sent to see if it were true: except that they too were terrified of the cholera, and if they knew that there were dead men in the Fort they might refuse. Uncle Nat, if appealed to, would undoubtedly see that someone eventually visited it, but he would not do so without first instituting enquiries, since it was not his province; and Hero had learned by now that the East moved slowly. It would take time, and there might be no time to spare.
Perhaps if she were to speak to Clay? No, not Clay! He would instantly accuse her of meddling in matters that were the sole concern of the authorities, and refuse to believe that it was the very idea of anyone—anyone at all!—being left to die like a rat in a trap that she could not endure.
I must go myself, thought Hero: and shivered, as Olivia had done, because she did not want to go.
She did not want to see for herself the things that Olivia had talked about, because once she did that she knew she would no longer be able to sit here with folded hands, doing nothing and telling herself that there was nothing she could do; nothing useful. Nothing that would not anger Clay and exasperate Uncle Nat. Nothing that would not end in futility or disaster as all her previous efforts had done. It was so much easier to admit defeat and retire into apathy and disinterest: to pretend that Olivia was as usual exaggerating, and accept Uncle Nat’s assurance that everything that could be done was being done: and to obey Clay’s commands that she keep out of it. Yet she knew that she would have to go down to the Fort. And quite suddenly she knew why.
She would have to go because she could not endure the thought of Rory Frost dying slowly in a locked cell. Or dying at all—
Hero went to the window, and leaning her forehead against the welcome coolness of the wet pane, began to plan…
The servants had orders not to permit her to leave the house, but because she had shown no signs of wishing to do so they had become slack, and it should be a simple matter to get the doorkeeper out of the hall for a few minutes: she would only need two at most. She still had the black Arab robes that Fattûma had procured for her, and though they would offer little protection against the drenching downpour she had proved their worth as a disguise. And in any case no one was likely to stop and question a solitary woman on a day like this. She turned from the window to fetch the black clothing, and folding it small, went downstairs.
The house was dark and full of uneasy draughts and the sound of falling rain, and the doorkeeper had not heard her footsteps on the stairs or seen her go into the deserted drawing-room. He was roused from his drowsy abstraction a few minutes later by hearing his name called, and leaping to his feet found himself being requested by the master’s niece to fetch a lamp and tell someone to bring a drink of cold tea and fresh lemon juice to the drawing-room.
The man hurried away, and the moment he had gone Hero returned to the drawing-room, donned the black schele and the concealing fringed head-dress that she had laid ready, and emerging again walked calmly to the door, opened it, and went out into the pouring rain.
The wind swirled about her snatching at the loose folds of material and billowing them briefly out behind her, and then the driving rain drenched them into subjection so that they clung about her, limp and dripping, and she could feel the wetness soaking through to her skin and trickling down her back. The road was already a rushing torrent and the rain blotted out the tall buildings and made it difficult for her to see where she was going, but there seemed to be very few people about, and those few were nearly all children who splashed through the swirling water with happy disregard for the filth it carried, or begged from her as she passed in shrill little voices that were barely audible in the downpour.
She took a wrong turning, and realizing that she had done so, stopped in the shelter of a deep-arched doorway while she tried to re-orientate herself and recall the lie of the streets. The dangling fringe that concealed her eyes ran with water and she pushed it aside impatiently and saw with a sudden jerk of alarm that she had a companion. Someone else had also taken shelter in the same doorway and was sitting propped up against the door-jamb, gazing up at her with a dropped jaw and wide, startled eyes.
Hero hastily readjusted the fringe and fled back into the rain; disconcerted by the man’s open-mouthed surprise and hoping that he had not recognized her. But she had gone less than twenty yards when it occurred to her that if he had indeed recognized her, he must be someone she knew; perhaps someone from The Dolphins’ House or one of the Platts’ servants, who could direct her to the Fort or give her news that would make it unnecessary for her to go there. She turned back quickly, afraid that he might have gone, but he was still there. He had not even moved; nor had his expression altered. The eyes that stared up at her were fixed and blank, and as she bent over hun a fly settled upon one staring eyeball and another flew out of the open mouth.
Hero backed away, her throat tight with horror, and turning, began to run; splashing and stumbling through the deserted streets, taking another wrong turning and then another; losing her way, and finding it again by chance rather than by design.
She had seen the Arab Fort often enough, but only from the outside and without much interest It was the oldest building in the city and Cressy had pronounced its castellated walls to be romantic, while Olivia had made several water-colour sketches whi
ch portrayed it as pristine white by midday and bright pink, orange or lemon-yellow in a series of improbable sunsets. But there was nothing romantic or colourful about it now. It loomed greyly through the rain with its gate gaping wide and the hunched shapes of a dozen vultures forming a ragged frieze along the battlements. And there was nobody on guard and no one inside it No one alive.
A cold scent of corruption mingled with the stench of drains and garbage, and a crow that had been feeding on something in the courtyard flapped up with a harsh croak that sent Hero’s heart racing in panic. She had to force herself to make a circuit of the deserted building and satisfy herself that no one was there, forgotten and left behind to die in a locked cell, and she had steeled herself to glance at the bodies of the unburied dead to make sure that Rory’s was not among them. But the eaters of carrion had been before her, and it was hardly possible to say whether one at least of the things that defaced the courtyard had even been a man, let alone a white man.
A tuft of hair showed pale among the ugly fragments: white or yellow? It might have been either. The white hairs of advancing age or the blond, sun-bleached ones of an Anglo-Saxon. I shall never know, thought Hero. I shall never know…And was abruptly and violently sick.
The rain appeared to have spent its initial fury and was falling less heavily as she left the Fort, and she could hear, above the boom of surf on the long stretch of the harbour beach, the mewing of innumerable gulls; and did not need to be told what had brought so many birds to the Island. She was wet through, and shivering, but with nausea rather than cold, for the rain and the wind were both warm; but both seemed as sickeningly laden with the stench of death as the closed rooms of the Consulate were with the cloying incense of Dr Kealey’s pastilles.
The smell of those burning pastilles had been hateful to her, and she had persuaded herself that they were to blame for her headaches and insomnia and lack of appetite, and had declared that the risk of infection would be preferable. But she realized now that they had never been intended as specific against infection, but had been burned to disguise the terrible smell of mortality; and that if she had listened with more attention to Olivia she would have known this, and not complained.
There were so many things that she had refused to listen to: shut up in the security of Uncle Nat’s comfortable Consulate, with the windows barred against the tainted air of the city and the doors locked to keep her from straying outside and seeing the things that she was seeing now. The unburied dead, the vultures and the carrion crows, the children—
Hero had barely noticed the children as she hurried through the lashing downpour on her way to the Fort But now that she was walking slowly and with dragging feet, it was impossible not to notice them.
There were dozens of them. Starving children who were not paddling through the dirt of the rushing gutters for pleasure, but in search of food, grabbing and gobbling any floating scrap of filth. Forlorn little creatures who crouched sobbing in doorways; others who were too weak to move or cry.
She saw a gaunt pariah dog nose something in the roadway and spring back with a snarl as it uttered a feeble wail, and realized with horror that it was a half-drowned baby who had been swept along in a rush of water and caught up in a tangle of garbage.
Leaping forward, she snatched it up, and saw that there was another and even smaller one a yard away…and another…
Twenty minutes later Hero was standing in the hall of the Consulate, clutching not one but three infants, and accompanied by half a dozen naked, starving toddlers and a famished six-year-old who looked like a walking skeleton and carried yet another wailing baby.
Her absence had only just been discovered, for the doorkeeper had at first supposed that she had returned to her bedroom, and it was only when Fattûma knocked at her door, and finding the room empty came down to make enquiries, that he realized that the front door was no longer locked.
Hero returned to find it still on the latch and the hall ringing with loud, angry voices and full of people who turned to stare at her and did not recognize her. The frantic doorkeeper had taken her to be some desperate woman from the town and shouted at her to leave at once, but he had not approached her, while the servants had backed hastily away, retreating to the far end of the hall as though she had been the black cholera itself.
It had been a full minute before anyone realized who she was, and even then they had found it difficult to believe, for with her arms full of babies she had not been able to remove the fringed head-covering that concealed her face, and it was Uncle Nat who had torn it off and said furiously: “Hero—! What fool trick is this?”
“How did you get out? Where the hades have you been?” stormed Clay.
“I thought I told you—Put those goddamned children outside! What in hellfire do you think you’re doing?”
“I couldn’t help it. Clay,” pleaded Hero. “I had to go! I had to. Uncle Nat! You see, Olivia said—”
“Go to your room,” ordered Uncle Nat, his face rigid. “It appears to me you aren’t to be trusted with the run of the house, so you’d better stay there for what’s left of your visit.”
“I can’t—the children…”
“I’ll see they get something to eat, and after that they’ll have to go back where you found them.”
“But they haven’t got anywhere to go, Uncle Nat. Their parents are dead and they have no one to look after them. They’re starving. Uncle Nat—please! Clay, you can’t—! Fattûma! Where is Fattûma?”
She dodged past her uncle’s burly form and Saw Fattûma standing among the servants at the back of the hall, and said with a sob of thankfulness: “Oh there you are! Take one of these babies before I drop it, will you, and could you warm some milk, and—”
Fattûma retreated precipitately, her eyes wide with apprehension and her voice shrill with alarm: “No!—no, Bibi! No touch…their mothers die of the sickness—they die too, for sure. No bring in here! Take away—take away quick, quick!”
The servants seconded her, babbling like a flock of frightened geese and crowding towards the door that led to the kitchen quarters, their eyeballs rolling whitely in their dark, panic-stricken faces.
“The woman’s right,” said Clay. “You must be plumb crazy to bring these kids here. They may be sickening for cholera already, and yet you bring them into the house and expect the servants to look after them—”
“No. We not look,” cried Fattûma shrilly. “No look! No touch!”
“There, you see? They’ll have to go; and at once.”
“Then I shall go too,” said Hero.
“You’ll do no such thing!” blared Uncle Nat. “This is one time when you’re blamed well going to do what you’re told. Put those children down and get on up to your room!”
“I won’t. You can’t make me!”
“Can’t we!” said Clay, and moved swiftly to cut off her retreat from the door. “That’s just where you’re mistaken. I’ll give you exactly one minute to make up your mind whether you’ll go quietly or put on a free show for the servants. Now!”
“Clay, we can’t send them away,” pleaded Hero frantically. “Can’t you see they’re starving? They’ll die—we must do something.”
“You heard your uncle say we’d see that they’re fed.”
“But that isn’t enough! What’s one meal? Or two—or twenty? What’s the good of giving them each a bit of bread and pushing them back into the street? They need looking after, they—”
“No look. No touch. Sending away quick before making all die here,” gibbered Fattûma.
“Thirty seconds.”
“Clay please!…Uncle Nat, there’s the summer-house in the garden. I’ll look after them myself…I’ll—”
“I’m sorry. Hero, but it’s just plain impossible. I’ve got to think of the servants too, you know. But maybe we can get the Sultan to work out some scheme that’ll take care of them, and then—”
“But it’ll be too late! Too late for these ones. They’re so smal
l. Please, Uncle Nat!”
“Forty,” said Clay inexorably.
“Oh Clay, please—don’t you see…”
They had all forgotten that the front door had been left open and they did not hear any sound of footsteps. But suddenly someone else was there, standing in the doorway behind Clayton and looking across his shoulder at the bedraggled girl and the bewildered, skeleton children who still held to her wet skirts.
“Rory!” said Hero on a sob that contained neither surprise nor thankfulness, but was purely one of relief: “Rory, do something!”
“Certainly,” said Captain Emory Frost obligingly. “What?”
Clayton spun round with an oath, and Hero ran past him, tripping on her wet skirts and accompanied by her frightened protegés:
“They say I can’t let the children stay here, but they have to go somewhere and if we send them away they’ll die, because they haven’t anyone and no one cares and they can’t—I can’t—”
“Steady,” said Rory, removing an infant from her convulsive grasp and regarding it with some disfavor.
Hero paused and drew a shuddering breath, struggling for composure, and Clayton took a swift step towards her and found his way blocked by an arm that appeared to be made of steel and whipcord.
“Mind the baby!” admonished Captain Frost without heat.
“What are you doing here?” Clayton’s voice was a grating whisper and his face was no longer flushed with anger but drained of all colour. “What do you want? Edwards said you’d given him your word They can’t have let you out!”
“Not intentionally. They merely neglected to lock me in and then ran off and abandoned the place: which came to the same thing.”
Clayton said in the same stifled voice: “If you’ve got anything to say to me, say it and get out!”
“You mean about Zorah? I haven’t. I didn’t come here to see you.”