by M. M. Kaye
The place smelt of damp earth and mildew, and the light that filtered through the hanging curtain of leaves was green and aqueous. She felt the skin prickle on her arms and the back of her neck and was suddenly conscious of an acute feeling of disquiet: an animal awareness of evil, as though there was something dangerous lurking in the dimness of the small stone cell that she could sense but not see.
A lizard scuttled away across a drift of fallen leaves and she drew back with a sharp intake of breath, and saw for the first time that the thing Rory carried was not a stick but a short iron crowbar. She heard it clink against the stone, and said uncertainly: “Why have you brought me here? What is it you want me to see?”
“This,” said Rory briefly, thrusting the sharpened iron into a crack that he must have known was there, since he could not have seen it under the dust and the leaf mould. The stone came out with surprising ease and he laid the crowbar aside and took a candle and a box of matches out of his pocket.
The small flame leapt and wavered in the draught, striking sparks from the gleaming pile of yellow metal, and Hero forgot her fear of spiders and scorpions, and kneeling on the dank stone, touched the cold ingots with incredulous fingers.
“What is it?”
“Gold,” said Rory.
“But…but…It must be worth a fortune! How did it get here? Did you find it?”
“In a way,” said Rory laconically.
He blew out the candle and returned it to his pocket, and taking Hero’s arm lifted her to her feet and led her back into the sunlight:
“It belonged to Majid’s father—” began Rory. And told her the tale of Sultan Saïd’s hidden treasure and of how he had come by the gold.
He made no excuses and softened no details, and Hero listened and winced; watching his face as he told it and glancing from time to time at the crimson veil of bougainvillæa, as though it hid not only a fortune but the wrinkled, malevolent face of the witchdoctor from Pemba who had died because of it, and cursed it in dying.
“That’s all,” said Rory at last.
Hero shivered and said in a low voice: “Why did you tell me that?”
“I thought you ought to know.”
“Why? Why did you want me to see it?”
“You once told Batty that someone had said that you’d one day have a great fortune in gold. Well, there it is, if you want it. Shall we take it or leave it? We haven’t got much time in which to decide.”
“We?” said Hero.
“Who else? You didn’t think I’d leave you behind, did you?”
The sun slid down below the level of the outer wall and die garden was suddenly in shadow; and it was no longer afternoon but evening. The wind was blowing less strongly now and would die with the twilight, and already the birds were coming home to roost. Soon it would be night…
There will be a moon tonight, thought Hero. The garden would be white with moonlight, as it had been on that other night. And on hundreds of other nights to come. Fireflies in the shadows and the scent of strange flowers; the sound of surf on a coral beach. ‘Teach me to hear mermaids singing’…She was not thinking clearly. She must say something. She must tell him at once that it was impossible and that she had no intention of going with him. That it was an insult and an impertinence to even suggest such a thing. That oil and water…
But life would never be dull with Rory, and the world would never seem small or parochial. There would always be wide horizons and a wind blowing. ‘Sun and rain and salt water…’ She had thought once that if she married Clay she would be only half alive: an automaton. That the rest of her life would be flat and savourless and that she might just as well be dead. But she could not imagine anyone feeling dead in Rory’s company. Or an automaton, or half alive.
‘At least you will not be buying a fake’…Clay had said that; and he had been quoting her father who had known her as well as anyone had ever done, and who had once told Clay that if she should fall in love with an “out-and-out no-good’ with her eyes open, he would not raise much objection, but that it would destroy her to find that she had been ‘tricked into marrying a rascal.’ There was plenty of trickery about Rory Frost, thought Hero, remembering the rifles. But not in that way. And she would never be able to pretend that her eyes had not been open. Wide open…
She said: “Where are you going?”
“To England.”
“But I thought—” Hero stopped short, and Rory gave a curt laugh.
“No, dear love, I haven’t suffered a change of heart in that direction. But it’s somewhere to go. Besides, I have a house there that I’ve always intended to take possession of one day, and now seems as good a time as any.”
“You mean you’d settle down and stay there?”
“For good? No. I like the world too much to stay anchored in one place, and I shall probably go off at frequent intervals to take another look at it.”
“And run slaves, and smuggle, and sell guns!” said Hero bitterly.
Rory’s laugh held a tinge of regret. “Not any more. Those were strictly bachelor pursuits and unsuitable for a sober married man. In future I shall try to keep on the right side of the law. Will that content you? Or must you have good works too? You’ll find plenty of scope in England right on your own doorstep—the East hasn’t got a monopoly of misery and squalor! And then there’s myself. I don’t think you’ll be able to change me—or not much. But you can always try. Perhaps this is the work you have to do: making a useful and law-abiding citizen out of a no-account slave trader. It may sound a small matter compared to setting your neighbours’ affairs to rights, but then charity, we are told, should begin at home. Why are you looking at me like that? What have I said?”
“’The work that you have to do,’” said Hero. “That was what she said: Biddy Jason. That I would always do the work that I had to do and—and that I would make my own bed, and lie on it.”
“We all do that, my dear darling.”
“I—I guess so…Cousin Josiah said that people ought to set their own affairs to rights before trying to settle other people’s for them.”
“There you are, you see?”
“But you are not my affair and I don’t have to marry you.”
“Not now,” said Rory. “But you’re going to marry me all the same—if I have to kidnap you all over again in order to see that you do! I thought once that you might have to, but when you lost the child I thought I’d lost my only chance with it, and that I might as well give up.”
“Who told you?” said Hero in a whisper. “How did you know?”
“It was my house,” said Rory dryly.
“I—I see. Then why?”
“Thérèse. I met her on the waterfront this morning. I’d just seen Edwards and I was feeling like cutting my throat. But when I told her that I’d got to leave at once she asked me if I was going to take you with me. I knew I shouldn’t: that I ought to do the right thing—well the sensible thing anyway!—and get out and stay out. But…She said that you’d wanted that child and that you couldn’t have done so unless you loved me. Did you want it?”
“Yes,” said Hero.
Rory put his arms about her and held her so hard against him that she did not know if it were his heart that she could feel beating or her own. But resting her head against his shoulder she knew that she had come home, because although he might never stay long in any one place, anywhere he happened to be would always be home to her. She would do the work that she had to do and lie on the bed she had made—because she no longer had the power to choose differently: and did not want it.
Rory said slowly, murmuring the words against her ear so that they seemed like an echo of her own thoughts: “You are not in the least the sort of woman I could ever have imagined myself marrying. You are everything I didn’t like and thought I couldn’t endure. But somehow you’ve got into my blood and I can’t get you out again—and I don’t even want to.”
He took her chin in his hand and tilted her face up a
nd kissed her. And knew that this was the end of a life he had loved and the beginning of a new one that was going to be very different, and probably very difficult: because he did not believe that people changed over-much in essentials, and Hero was unlikely to turn into a different person; and neither was he.
There would be times when she would remember his sins and throw them in his face, and others when he would resent her virtues and be exasperated by them—and by her. There was a part of Hero that he would never be able to possess, and part of himself that would always be beyond her reach. But for some unfathomable reason they were the right people for each other. They should not have been, but they were. Each supplied a crying lack in the other, and possibly Fate had known what it was about when it tipped Hero Hollis overboard in mid-ocean and permitted Emory Frost to rescue her…
‘God is a great deviser of stratagems,’ thought Rory, recalling with a smile one of Hajji Ralub’s favourite quotations from the Koran. But the smile held more than a trace of wryness, for he had never intended to marry anyone. He had meant to stay free and without ties to the end of his life; and he had intended to see if he could not turn a frigid piece of Grecian marble into a warm flesh-and-blood woman, and had done so—and found that he could not live without her…
Batty Potter’s hoarse voice addressed them from the shadows that were gathering in the garden:
“Well, are you takin’ it or leavin’ it? We ain’t got much time.”
Hero turned her head and Rory released her without haste. She blinked at the old man as though awakening from a dream, and said:
“Taking what, Batty?”
“The gold, of course. Ain’t that what ‘e bring you ‘ere for?”
“Oh that,” said Hero, and shuddered. “No. We don’t need it. Cover it up again.”
“Ah!—just what I says meself,” approved Batty. “That yellow muck ain’t ‘ealthy. There’s blood on it.”
Rory shrugged and said: “All right: it’s two to one. Put the stone back, Uncle, and we’ll let it lie. Even if I never come back I still own this place, and maybe one day a son of mine will come here and find the stuff, and put it to better use than I would have done.”
“If ‘e ‘as the sense to take after ‘is Ma,” observed Batty pointedly, “I’ll pull it out and pitch it into the sea. Best place for it!”
He ducked under the trails of bougainvillæa, and after a time reappeared again, carrying the crowbar, and announced with relief that that was done, and good riddance. “And now,” said Batty, “I reckons we’d best be goin’ before we loses the wind. There’s a mort of work to be done before morning.”
They went out by the door in the outer wall, and the Trade Wind met them. Blowing from the south-east and smelling of cloves and the sea and strange flowers, and rustling the fronds of the coconut palms that fringe the white beaches of Zanzibar.
POSTSCRIPT
Back in the mid-fifties, I was fortunate enough to be invited to Zanzibar, and as a result of my stay in that lovely island, I wrote a light-hearted ‘whodunnit’ entitled The House of Shade, Its plot hinged on certain papers left by a black-sheep ancestor of one of the characters: Emory Frost, one-time slave-trading owner of Kivulimi, Later on, after the publication of that book, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to try my hand at writing the story of this fictional Emory. The reason being that I had discovered a fabulous hoard of books about the slave trade, the Island and the Arabs from Oman in the little library of Zanzibar’s British Club; read the lot and taken copious notes.
Trade Wind is that story. But for the benefit of readers who like the history in a historical novel to be reasonably accurate, I must confess to taking certain liberties in this one.
The attempt on Majid’s life, the whole Bargash rebellion (except of course for the parts played in it by the fictional characters) and the way it ended, Salmé‘s elopement and the great cholera epidemic, really happened; and in that order. But over a period of years, whereas here I have compressed them into one year, for the sake of the story. The date of Hero’s departure from Boston is therefore purely arbitrary, and should not be taken too seriously by students of Zanzibar’s history. But the American Consulate really was besieged by the pirates from the Gulf, whose annual raids are also fact and not fiction, though my Consul and his family, and all the British, American and European characters in Trade Wind, with the exception of Wilhelm Ruete and Commander Adams, are pure invention and not intended to be portraits of any real persons. I have given to Dan Larrimore and H.M.S. Daffodil some of the parts played at that time, in real life, by Commander Adams of H. M. S. Assaye and Captain Oldfield of H.M.S. Lyra; for which piece of author’s licence I hope the shades of those officers and their ships’ crews will forgive me.
I am chiefly indebted to Salmé for the details of Saïd’s life at Motoni, his death and the quarrels and plotting and rebellion that followed it, since she recorded it all in her autobiography, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess. But my thanks must also go to many more writers. Some of them modern, such as Genesta Hamilton and Christopher Lloyd; others, the authors of the old, musty volumes on a bottom shelf of the Club library, published long ago in the nineteenth century and—judging from the number of uncut pages—largely unread. These contained a treasure-trove of information on Zanzibar, and one of them gave a detailed and horrific eyewitness’s account of the cholera epidemic—a far more gruesome one than I have given here. I heard later that when the Island ceased to be a British Protectorate and became independent, all the books in the library were removed and burnt; which, if true, is a tragedy, as the ones I read were all first editions and irreplaceable. Most, though not all, can be read in the British Museum. But it would have been nice to know that they were still available in Zanzibar. Maybe they are.
Any reader interested in what happened to Zanzibar’s quarrelsome royal family may like to know that Bargash did, in fact, achieve his ambition. He became Sultan when Majid died, and one hopes that Cholé was still around to enjoy the fruits of his triumph. Majid’s death at the early age of thirty-six was due, I regret to say, to over-indulgence in ‘sensuality and stimulants’—aggravated, one suspects, by constant anxiety! But at least he was luckier than his brother Thuwani of Muscat, who was murdered three years earlier by his son Selim, who like too many of his family could not wait for a throne. As for Salmé, she did indeed see Zanzibar again (though that, as Kipling used to say, is another story). But sadly, her life with Wilhelm was all too short, for they had only been married for three years when he was killed in an accident, leaving her a widow with three small children to bring up. By then she was known as Frau Emily Ruete. When I was in Germany in 1964—my husband, Major-General Goff Hamilton, having been posted to Bonn in the Federal Republic—I was enthralled to learn that one of her children, a daughter, was alive and living in that country. Naturally, I hoped very much that I might be allowed to meet her. But alas, she was not only too old, but too frail to have visitors; which was a great disappointment to me, as it would have been a tremendous privilege to actually meet and talk to the niece of Majid, Bargash and Cholé, and all the rest of those colourful children of the great Sultan Saïd, ‘Lion of Oman.’ May they rest in peace!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
M. M. Kaye, the world-famous author of several children’s books, eight romantic thrillers and two international bestsellers—The Far Pavilions and Shadow of the Moon, was born in Simla, the summer residence of the British viceroy and the city to which she returned every summer for the first ten years of her life. At the time, her father was president of the council of an Indian state and she often accompanied him on official visits to other parts of the country. It was during one of these visits that an Indian first told her a story that had been handed down from one generation to the next—a story of a colorful and impressive royal wedding that was complicated by the efforts of the bride’s father to substitute another daughter at the last moment. Many years after hearing this tale, M. M. Kaye stumbled across t
he same story in a diary kept by a young English officer who had figured in the incident. She remembered the version told to her long ago, and decided that here were the makings of the novel she had always wanted to write—and thus was The Far Pavilions born. For fifteen years she devoted herself to The Far Pavilions, and every page bears the indelible stamp of her own experience in British Lidia as well as her unparalleled knowledge of its tumultuous and varied history, its legends and its people.
“Shadow of the Moon, like The Far Pavilions,” says M. M. Kaye, “contains far more truth than fiction. I did not need to invent, for it was all handed to me on a plate. All that was needed was to invent a hero and heroine and a handful of other characters to do the things that real people had done.” The first draft of Shadow of the Moon was published—with over 55 percent of the manuscript cut out by the publishers—over twenty years ago. For the present edition, M. M. Kaye has revised and restored the missing material.
After her education in England, she returned to India and married Goff Hamilton, an officer in Queen Victoria’s Own Corps of Guides. Her husband’s military assignments have taken her all over India as well as Egypt, Kenya, Germany, England, Northern Ireland and Scotland. They have two daughters—Carolyn, married to American Tom Bachman, and actress Nichola Hamilton—and two small grandchildren, James and Mollie.