Enemy in the House

by Mignon G. Eberhart

  In her heart she said, over and over, there’s a way out of this trap, there’s a way out.

  Gradually, though, daughter and granddaughter of men who loved the land, her interest was caught. Grappit pointed to the wide-spreading fields of cane, ten or twelve feet high, still as a painted picture in the unearthly still air. During his short stay at Mallam Penn—besides his trip to Spanish Town to investigate her father’s will—he had in fact contrived to acquire considerable knowledge of the sugar plantation. He told her that the fields of cane were called cane pieces, not canefields. The patches of rough and browning stalks showed the latest cutting. That year the crop was early and already being cut for the mill. It was good land, fertile and very rich.

  The penn lay in the morning shadow of the mountains in a kind of wide-spreading cup. The cane pieces were fed by mountain streams which were so reliable that water needed for the mill was always in plentiful supply. He named some of the trees; the coconut tree stood out because of its green, bushy fronds at the top; the pepper tree because of its bright berries; the logwood for its gray-white trunk and pale green foliage. Logwood honey, he told her, was a Jamaica delicacy and smacked his lips just perceptibly, for Grappit was fond of the good things in life.

  He pointed out the spreading settlement of huts and cabins for servants and laborers. There were no people about the huts, not even children, and he frowned, puzzled. “They are so still today. Usually they are everywhere, singing, laughing, very noisy. Oh, well, it makes no difference, the men are at work.”

  The men were at work but it seemed to Amity that they, too, were rather silent, and shot them sulky glances.

  He showed her the mill, run by water wheels, into which fresh canes were fed. He showed her the sugar house and she watched the men stoke the fires for the vats of boiling sugar with what he told her was trash, canes from which the sugary juices had already been extracted. Men standing on platforms above the great vats of boiling sugar were constantly busy, ladling off scum and testing. It was clearly onerous labor. “How long do they work like that?” she asked when they emerged into the fresher, although already sultry, air outside.

  “Twelve hours.”

  “Twelve hours!”

  “Oh, they’re used to it. And they keep awake—oh, yes, they keep awake. Did you see the axe by the door?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s there. It’s for a very useful purpose. If one of the men falls asleep and gets his arm tangled with the machinery, someone can always snatch the axe and—”

  Her self-control wavered at that. “Don’t!”

  “Why, it’s saved many a life! You can’t be squeamish, Niece. Now the distillery—they call it the stillhouse—is over here.”

  The distillery, small though it was, was to Amity’s mind worse than the sugar house, for the acrid smell was almost overpowering. Grappit smiled when she put her handkerchief to her nose.

  “Rum is one of our—I mean your—best paying products. Here is the hospital. They call it the hothouse, probably a derivation of the word hospital. No, you’ll not want to visit it. They see to themselves. They have quite skilled nurses really, after their own fashion. The doctor makes regular visits, once a week. Most of the sick have certain tropical diseases—yaws, for example. Not pretty. There is one thing I’d like to do though, and that is keep the obeah woman out of the hospital. Stupid superstition. Still they believe in it.”

  “Where is the obeah woman?”

  “Actually I don’t think I’ve seen her. She lives apart from the others, back on one of the mountain slopes. They treat her as if she were royalty. She must be got rid of! Chicken feathers, bones, incantations, prophecies! Barbarous! No need to talk to the busha—their word for overseer. He’s a Scot but a rough fellow. The heat is increasing. We’ll return to the house.”

  The heat was increasing. The day was extremely still, with the sky now a pale blue. Not a leaf stirred.

  They did, however, speak to the overseer, who came to meet them so Grappit was obliged to introduce him, though in a lofty way. “Mr. Mallam’s daughter, McWhinn,” he said.

  The overseer, McWhinn, was short, bandy-legged; he took off his hat and displayed a completely bald head, which was white, and a face which was tanned and leathery. He had cold gray eyes, teeth missing in front, and a tobacco-stained, scraggly beard. He said that there was trouble. “The men don’t want to work today.”

  “Not work!” Grappit looked shocked. “Why not?”

  The overseer spat into some brilliant red cannas along the path. “The obeah woman.”

  “Obeah woman! Bah! I told you, Niece, we must get rid of her.”

  McWhinn’s leathery face became very blank. “I’m not sure I’d advise that,” he said, looking at the mountains.

  “Why, man, are you afraid of her?” Grappit gave one of his rare, rusty laughs.

  The overseer’s blank face did not change. “I wouldn’t get rid of her if I were you.”

  “Can you possibly mean that she’d make trouble among the men?”

  “You’ll not have trouble,” McWhinn said shortly. “If she leaves they’ll leave.”

  “But this—why, really—that’s against the law! Besides, where could they go?”

  “Off to join the Maroons, perhaps. You’d never get them back.”

  “Maroons?” This was something new to Grappit in spite of his assiduous study.

  “Never mind. Ah, well, perhaps you should know. They say some of them are descendants of the Spanish. It’s a haven for runaways. They live in the cockpits, in the west. Nobody can touch them. Once somebody sent some dogs after a runaway and—” He glanced at Amity. “Well, there, I’ll only say it would be better, sir, to let the obeah woman bide. Give the men the day. You can save your face by saying it’s a holiday because Miss Mallam and Madam Mallam have arrived. Measure out some rum for them, too.”

  “Good heavens, man!” Grappit looked genuinely appalled. “All this because some old witch woman, obeah woman—”

  “Selene’s not so old,” McWhinn said cautiously and eyed the top of the mountains behind them.

  Amity said, “It will do no harm. McWhinn, could we talk to the obeah woman? My father wrote to me about her.”

  The overseer seemed to debate, chewing on a straw, finally he gave one nod. “I’ll ask her if she’ll come,” he said and ambled away.

  Grappit fumed in a kind of icy way but he said nothing and they waited in the shade of a clump of trees. Finally, McWhinn reappeared and a woman walked almost lazily, yet with a kind of regal grace beside him and she certainly was not old. She was young and she was beautiful.

  Her hair was blue-black and hung straight down, long and shining, to her waist. Her skin had a pearly translucence; her eyes were deep, fathomless black, shaded by long black eyelashes. Her nose and her chin were unexpectedly firm, yet delicate, too. A great, red hibiscus flower was fixed above each small ear. Her white dress was dramatically simple, girded in with a red sash. Her arms were bare except for enormous gold bracelets.

  “Good God,” said Grappit, which gave Amity a small, wicked satisfaction.

  McWhinn said, “Selene” in a perfectly flat voice and then detached himself again by looking at the mountains.

  “Madam Mallam and I arrived yesterday,” Amity said. “We are giving the men a holiday.”

  Selene’s dark eyes met Amity’s; she nodded. “I think it is best.” Her English was clear, with a precise, pure accent. “They feel safer,” she added simply.

  “Safer! Oh, you mean, it is going to storm?”

  Selene made the slightest inclination of her lovely head.

  “Storm!” Grappit cast a look at the pale, quiet sky.

  Selene lowered her long, black eyelashes. Grappit got out a handkerchief and wiped his face. “But you can’t know it’s going to storm! It’s an excuse for them to get out of work!”

  Selene lifted her eyes again as if she had said everything that was to be said. Grappit cleared his thr
oat in a baffled way. Amity said quickly, “We thought perhaps a measure of rum—will you see to it, Mr. McWhinn?”

  She thought there was the faintest approval in the overseer’s eyes. Selene made a slight bow and walked away from them with regal calm.

  McWhinn put on his hat, then touched it to Amity, and went after her.

  Grappit said, “A witch woman!”

  If Neville ever saw her, Amity thought, he’d lose his senses completely!

  Beside the path a fern trembled for no perceptible reason and then was quiet again.

  Thinking of Neville she could not resist a question and neither could she suppress a satiric note in her voice. “And what of Neville’s wishes? Is his marriage for sale, Uncle? A doubtful bargain! Has he no will or choice of his own?”

  It rolled off him smoothly. “Why, Niece, Neville is very fond of you. Yes, an excellent and sensible arrangement.” He thrust some ferns aside for her solicitously and she could have struck him.

  As they entered the house Amity glanced back. Already the news of the holiday had traveled without any visible means of communication, as if borne by the air. Wagons drawn by mules were leaving the cane pieces.

  They were too late for the heavy second breakfast, but a maid brought a huge tureen to the table. “You should taste it,” Grappit told Amity coolly. “A famed Jamaican dish, black crab stewed with ham and chicken, spices—delicious.” He took a great steaming mouthful.

  Her enforced cold politeness had come to an end. It would have choked her to break bread with him. Without replying she left him. Jamey was asleep with Dolcy wielding a palmetto fan over him. His red curls were moist from the heat. But even in his sleep his chin was set, his fists doubled up, his sturdy legs thrust out defiantly.

  She had a fantastic picture, a second’s nightmare, of Grappit swooping him up like a great hawk and flapping away with him. “Take care of him, Dolcy.” She spoke so urgently that she made excuses for it. “He’s so young—accidents. I mean a—a scorpion—”

  Dolcy’s dark gaze had a definite quality of understanding. “Yes, lady. Yes.”

  China’s door was open and she was in her blue silk peignoir, fanning herself. “Where have you been?” she said fretfully. “The place is quiet as a tomb. Charles and Neville took riding horses and went to that little village, whatever its name is, Punt Town.” She wiped her pretty, heat-flushed face with a lace handkerchief. “I vow this heat is prodigious.”

  Amity replied something and went into her room. All afternoon she wrestled with her problem and could come to only two possible answers. Both were feeble, so tenuous that she could hope for little from either. One was, of course, an appeal to the authorities, the courts, and she knew too well the outcome of that, for any sensible man would almost automatically give Jamey’s guardianship to the man, the head of the family. Certainly rather that than to the wife of an officer in the Continental Army. The other was even more tenuous and that was, simply, time. Time and events, something might change.

  She longed for Simon. He would have done something, she didn’t know what, but something. She longed for him with such heartsick desolation that she could endure it and the stifling room no longer. She brushed her hair; she washed in tepid water from the enormous china pitcher. She dressed in her thinnest frock, muslin, pale pink as a blush rose, with a moss-green velvet knot at her waist. In the sultry heat it seemed a great effort merely to walk through the empty lounge and out to the veranda. There was no one anywhere, not even a bird flashed across from tree to tree.

  The sea was a flat blue; the sky was a flat blue. Already she had grown accustomed to the undertones of sound at Mallam Penn; she missed the thud and beat of the mill, distant voices, the stir and commotion from the cookhouse. She might have been the only person living in a green and blue world which seemed subtly menacing in spite of, almost because of, its unearthly beauty.

  She went down the curving flight of steps and slowly along the driveway. She had gone about fifty feet when the drums began. At first she was only conscious of a kind of throbbing, the barest pulse in the air. But then in a slow crescendo it swelled, it filled the air, it came from everywhere, it came from nowhere. Why, she thought, it’s drums. There was a strange, irregular rhythm, something that she began to feel she had known sometime, somewhere, like an atavistic memory. But she didn’t like the drums nevertheless. She turned back toward the house. As she passed the gap in the hedge and the untended garden she saw Hester.

  She wore her green silk dress but her shoulders were covered with a pale red scarf, like a mocking gesture to decorum which in fact, however, only gave an added fillip of wanton extravagance, out of place, tawdry as tarnished gold lace and yet arrogant as one of the great clusters of crimson bougainvillaea sprawling negligently from a trellis behind her. She was staring at nothing, her full lips open, listening to the drums. The girl seemed a part of the strangeness, the beauty and the hypnotic, distant, age-old throbbing.

  Amity went on, up the steps and into the house. Still no one was in the lounge. It was dusky; its only light came from the doors at each end. The sound of drums, muted only a little, seemed to pursue her. She found the tinderbox, lighted a candle and then went around the hall, lighting every candle. The drums stopped. It was then too still. A chair across the room slid toward her, paused and quietly slid back again but a little askew.

  10

  NOTHING ELSE IN THE hall had changed. The candle flames looked garish; they put pools of light on the floor with its parquet of satinwood and teakwood. They reflected themselves in a great mirror and in the face of the enormous clock which stood in the corner.

  When Amity permitted herself a quick glance again at the chair it still stood, mysteriously, a little crooked, just out of line. Then something like an invisible hand pushed and shook her.

  With a burst a door flung open and back against the wall and China came running, clutching up her pink skirts. “Amity! Something’s happening—something’s wrong—”

  A door down the opposite corridor banged open, too, and Aunt Grappit surged into the lounge, a puce-colored dressing gown flung around her, her hair streaming in eldritch locks around her face. “My mirror moved! What is happening in this horrible—”

  She got that far when it really happened.

  The straw matting moved first, curled itself up and trembled. Then the whole house gave itself a rending, grinding shake. Chairs went everywhere. Candles were flung from tables. There was a tinkle and crash of breaking glass, high above a rumbling sound which seemed to jar the earth. Amity clutched at a chair which moved away from her, she reached for a candle which flew from her hand, she found the corridor and staggered along it as if she were back on the Southern Cross in the middle of the storm.

  She tugged at the door of Hester’s room where Jamey should be and as it opened she fell into the room, flat on a floor which all at once became quiet and solid, was just a floor again, endowed with no terrible life of its own.

  With a sense of vast surprise, she thought, why, it’s an earthquake. The room was light enough to see that neither Jamey nor Dolcy was there. She was calling him, trying to disentangle herself from her wide skirts, when the second shock came.

  The world left its moorings, took into itself unknown elements and became a part of them. She was on her knees. There was again the distant thunder and grinding roar. She felt dust in her throat. Someone knelt down beside her, arms came down over her. Charles shouted in her ear, “Pray God the house stands—”

  He gave a strangled kind of cry, she felt his body brace, she felt his muscles strain in that hurly-burly dusk and then, close at hand, beside her, there was a deafening thud and crash.

  She could see dimly that a huge chest had fallen, spilling out drawers. It had fallen at an angle, thrust away from her by Charles’ swift action and swifter perception.

  It would have killed me, she thought dully.

  Charles scrambled to his feet. “I think it’s over.”

  “Jamey
! Where is Jamey?”

  The grinding turbulence outside had stopped as if the conductor of some gigantic orchestra had brought down his baton, but there were screams from the lounge. Billows of black smoke, points of red flames surged from it. Charles shouted, “Fire!” and plunged past her.

  All those candles I lighted, she thought. Where is Jamey?

  It was all the candles she had lighted, spilling everywhere, shooting flames along the straw matting, the cushions, the walls.

  Aunt Grappit had torn off her dressing gown and in tightly laced stays and billowing petticoats was flailing at the flames with the puce silk. China stood huddled in a corner, staring like a frightened rabbit. Neville was beating at the flames creeping along a sofa with his green velvet coat. Charles snatched up the burning straw matting and pulled it along the room in a shower of sparks, and outside. She saw him drop it over the veranda railing and Grappit, ghostly in his white linen, came pounding into the house with Charles.

  He, too, snatched off his coat, presenting himself in a rather alarming pink cotton shirt with ruffled sleeves. Amity trod out a tiny tongue of flame along the floor. Aunt Grappit disappeared and came back carrying a great china pitcher. She flung water over the sofa Neville was beating with his coat.

  Charles snatched up a huge crockery jar of drinking water which stood on the table at the back of the lounge. As he did so, it fell apart and water went everywhere.

  Somehow though, in a moment, there were no more creeping tongues of flame. The air was foul with smoke and the smell of wet, charred wood. Neville dropped his stained velvet coat, pushed a hand over his disheveled black hair, took the one candle which had remained upright in its stand and went around the room gathering up and lighting candles.

  They then looked at each other and looked at the room. Grappit, bizarre in his ruffled pink shirt, wiped a hand over his face leaving sooty streaks. Aunt Grappit sank down into a chair.