Beyond Sunrise

by Candice Proctor

  “He told me he had married one of the native women,” India said, her tone carefully kept emotionless, impersonal. “Had a child by her.”

  Simon Granger nodded. “He was glad enough to see us, but he really didn’t want to leave. Not permanently. He was talking about getting out of the navy. Coming back to Rakaia to live.”

  “He loved her,” India said softly, a strange pain squeezing her chest. “He loved her, and because he’d come to the island, because he brought the Royal Navy to rescue him, she died.”

  Simon Granger stared out over the distant sea, blue-black now in the starlit twilight. There was something strangely revealing about the tense, still way he held himself, and suddenly, India knew. “You were one of the thirty men who opened fire on that village,” she said. “Weren’t you?”

  His jaw tightened. “The islanders had killed three British seamen. Captain Gladstone felt they needed to be taught a lesson.”

  “A lesson? Is that what you call it?”

  “That’s what the Admiralty called it.”

  India kept her gaze on the man beside her. “But how could you? How could you do such a thing? Innocent men, women, children . . .”

  “It was an order.”

  “An order to commit a massacre,” India said with feeling.

  “Yes.” His voice was hushed, torn. “Yes, it was.” He sat silent for a moment, staring off into the starlit darkness. “You can’t imagine what it was like,” he said at last. “The sun was just coming up, spilling a golden light across the water when we were rowed ashore and ordered to form a line across the front of the village. I remember watching the morning breeze ruffle the fronds of the palm trees along the sand, and thinking how beautiful, how idyllic and peaceful it all looked. Like paradise.” Simon Granger blew out his breath in a long, painful sigh, and dropped his gaze to his clenched hands. “Then the shooting started.

  “The native huts, they were never made to stop a bullet. Some of the islanders were killed even before they made it to their doors. But Jack’s wife . . . she came out running. I think she must have been trying to make it to the shelter of the trees, but she was heavy with child and she had the little girl in her arms, too.” Granger paused, his voice becoming hushed, torn. “She must have been hit four, maybe five times.”

  “And Jack Ryder?” India asked quietly. “Where was he?”

  “Captain Gladstone had sent him ashore with a detail of men, to gather fruit for the ship. He wanted Jack well out of the way before the shooting started, but they hadn’t moved that far from the village.”

  “Did he see it? Did Jack see what happened?”

  Granger’s chest jerked with a deep, quick breath. “He ran straight into the line of fire. It’s a wonder he wasn’t killed himself before the seamen realized what was happening and stopped shooting. He probably saved the lives of half the natives by dashing into the village like that. But by the time he got to his wife, she was already dead. The little girl was screaming. When I saw Jack lift her up, covered in blood, I thought she’d been hit, too.” The Englishman’s face convulsed with a spasm of emotion, quickly suppressed. “But it was the mother’s blood.”

  “I don’t know how he bore it,” India whispered.

  Simon Granger shook his head. “He didn’t. He went berserk. He must have wounded half a dozen seamen before they were able to wrestle him down, and even after we had him in irons and were dragging him back on board, he kept thrashing about, swearing he was going to kill Gladstone and every man on the ship.”

  “He was out of his mind with grief. You can’t assume from what he said in such a moment that he then deliberately sank the ship.”

  “It’s not an assumption.” In the bleak moonlight, his face looked stark, cold. “We were supposed to set sail that morning, but the seas were running rough, too rough to navigate the passage through the reef by sight, the way we’d done coming in. Gladstone was planning to follow the charts, but Jack, he suddenly stops raving and says the charts are wrong, that if we try to follow them, we’ll end up on the reef.”

  “And the captain believed him?”

  “Not at first. But in the end, Jack somehow convinced him. Gladstone ordered the helmsman to steer by Jack’s reckoning.” He swallowed, the muscles in his throat working painfully. “The Lady Juliana ran right up on the reef.”

  India was silent for a moment. “You said half the ship’s company died. Why? Were the seas so rough?”

  He shook his head. “The first lifeboat cleared the reef without much trouble. But by the time the second boat was filled, the natives had realized what was happening and launched their war canoes.

  “We tried to put back, to come to their aid, but the seas were running against us. All we could do was watch.” He swung his head to meet her gaze. “They killed them all, Miss McKnight. The captain, and the rest of the ship’s men. The only survivors besides those of us lucky enough to have made it into the first boat were Jack Ryder and Toby Jenkins. The islanders spared them.”

  India stood abruptly, her tented hands coming up to cover her nose and mouth, her boots sinking into the sand as she took a hasty step away from him. “If you told me Jack Ryder had killed a dozen seamen in a grief-stricken rage, then I might believe you. But to deliberately, diabolically plot to sink a ship? No. That’s not Jack.”

  Simon Granger sighed. “He says Gladstone changed his mind. That the helmsman steered by the charts, and that’s why the Lady Juliana hit the reef. But there’s no way to prove it.”

  India swung to face him again, her hands falling to her sides. “There must be. Has anyone ever been back to Rakaia?”

  He nodded grimly. “The Barracuda put in there just a few months ago. What’s left of the Lady Juliana is still caught on the reef. If we had the ship’s log and charts, the question would be answered in an instant. But as it is . . .”

  India felt a hollow sense of dread, low in her stomach. “They were lost?”

  “Everyone assumed they were. Captain Gladstone had them in the lifeboat that was attacked by the natives. But according to Jack, Toby Jenkins found them, and kept them.”

  “So where is Toby Jenkins now?”

  “He was on Rakaia.”

  “Was? He’s not anymore?”

  Simon Granger shook his head. “The island is deserted. Completely deserted.”

  India stared at him in frustrated, frightened bewilderment. “How can that be?”

  “I’ve seen it happen before. Sometimes it’s typhoid, or influenza. But it doesn’t need to be that serious. Something as simple as the measles or even a cold can wipe out the entire native population of an island in a matter of weeks.”

  “But—” India broke off as a new thought struck her, a thought that took her breath and brought a sick wrench of compassion and sorrow to her stomach. “Jack’s little girl—the one his wife died trying to protect—he left her with his wife’s family. On Rakaia.”

  “He told me.”

  The wind kicked up stronger, swelling the waves and setting the dark fronds of the coconut palms to dancing back and forth above them. India came to sink back down on the log, her gaze caught by the squalid outline of Johnny Amok’s storeroom, all but lost now in the thick, hot night. She thought about the man who lay there, alone in the darkness, and her heart ached for him. “Does he know?” she asked at last. “Does Jack Ryder know about the epidemic on Rakaia?”

  “He does now.” The English captain’s face was tight, shuttered.

  Dear God, thought India. Dear God.

  Granger glanced toward the beach, where the lazy surf of the lagoon whispered gently in and out over sand bathed in white moonlight. The jolly boat had long since returned for him, its seamen lounging at ease, only the occasional restless clunking of an oar against the boat’s wooden sides ringing out in the warm tropical evening. “He asked me to take him there, to Rakaia. Before we sail for London.”

  India swung to fix a steady stare on the man who sat beside her. “Will you?”
>
  “What would be the point?”

  “But if the charts and logs are there—”

  Granger shook his head. “If they ever were on that island, they obviously aren’t there anymore.”

  “If? You don’t believe him?”

  A wry smile tightened the captain’s lips. “There are some people in this world who simply don’t believe in playing by the rules, and Jack’s one of them.”

  “You think he’s trying to trick you?”

  “I think Jack would do anything, say anything to keep from hanging—and to get back to that island and see what happened to his little girl.”

  “Don’t you think he should be allowed to find out for certain? Before you carry him off to London?”

  “I have my orders, Miss McKnight. And they don’t call for using a royal corvette to escort a Colonial renegade halfway across the South Pacific in a quest to discover the whereabouts of his abandoned half-native offspring.”

  “But the Lady Juliana’s charts—”

  Simon Granger stood abruptly. “Were lost ten years ago.”

  “You don’t know that,” India said, almost pleading with him. “A man’s life is at stake.”

  Granger glanced back at his ship, his voice crisp, hard. “I have my orders.”

  “Yes, of course,” India said. “Your orders.”

  He left soon after that, standing stiff and upright in the prow of the jolly boat as the seamen from the Barracuda leaned into their oars and the dark water curled away from the boat’s sides in twin phosphorescent waves that washed out in an ever-widening V across the smooth surface of the lagoon. But India stayed where she was, her head falling back as she stared up at the waving fronds of the coconut palms silhouetted black against the purple, starlit sky. The night was full of the sounds of the sea and the scents of strange flowers and a throbbing, aching kind of sadness that seemed to emanate from the island itself.

  After a time, she heard again the splash of oars and looked out over the lagoon to see a small dinghy pulling away from the darkened hull of the Sea Hawk. She stood then, and walked down to the beach, her boots sinking into the soft sand until she reached the wave-darkened, hardened verge where the lagoon lapped against the shore and Patu ran his boat up beside her.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  HE HEARD THE whispers first.

  Jack was lying on his back, blood trickling down from a cut on his cheek to seep into the mattress below, when he heard a low-voiced murmur. He tensed, wondering how many more nocturnal visits he was going to have to endure. Then he heard India’s hushed but unmistakable Scots accent, coming up the path toward the storeroom, and relief mingled with confusion and a surge of powerful, contradictory emotions he didn’t want and couldn’t even afford to contemplate.

  Lifting his head, Jack squinted toward the door. He thought about trying to stand up, because he really didn’t want her finding him like this. But it all seemed more trouble than it was worth, and so he simply lay there in the close darkness and listened to Johnny Amok’s key grate in the rusty old lock.

  The door swung inward, admitting a flood of moonlight that fell on his face. “Oh my goodness,” exclaimed India. She paused for a moment, her statuesque shape silhouetted against the moonlight in a way he would have appreciated if his ribs hadn’t been aching like a sonofabitch. Then she came across the dusty flag floor in a rush and fell to her knees beside his filthy mattress, her hands hovering over him, but not quite touching him. “What happened? Who did this?”

  He gave her a crooked smile that pulled painfully at his cut lip. “Did what?”

  It was Johnny Amok who answered her. “The commissioner paid him a visit. Along with three of his gendarmes.” Two to hold Jack up, his arms tied behind his back, and one to hit him. Again. And again.

  She twisted around to stare at the trader. “And you let him?” Her voice quavered with a sense of outrage and betrayal, as if Amok could somehow have stopped the French commissioner from beating up one of his prisoners. “You let them do this?”

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” Jack said, struggling to sit up, although actually, the reverse was true: the damage to his face had been peripheral, almost accidental. With the British navy taking him in the morning, Poirot hadn’t wanted to mark Jack up too badly. The French were very good at making a man hurt in ways that wouldn’t necessarily show.

  She touched her fingertips to his cheek, but jerked her hand back when he winced. “Can you walk?”

  Instead of answering, he looked from her to Amok, and back. “What are you doing here? What time is it?”

  “Just after midnight.”

  Through the open door, Jack saw only dark shadows and a distant moonlit sliver of the sea. He was aware, suddenly, of the hush of the settlement around them, a stillness that spoke of closed doors and deep sleep, and he realized he must have passed out after Poirot and his boys had finished with him. “Where’s the guard?”

  The lenses of Amok’s glasses flashed in the night as he went to sit on an upturned barrel near the far wall. “One of the village women is—” He glanced at India, and seemed to reconsider what he’d been about to say. “—entertaining him.”

  “She’ll tell on you.”

  “No, she won’t. I’ve promised her two new Mother Hubbards, a silk shawl, and a case of corned beef every year, for as long as she keeps her mouth shut.”

  Jack grunted. “That will cost you plenty.”

  Amok smiled softly into the night. “I reckon you’re good for it, mate.”

  Jack laughed, then regretted it when a red-hot pain curled around his side to take his breath away.

  “Can you walk?” India asked again.

  “Walk, yes.” By gritting his teeth, Jack managed to struggle to his feet. “But run . . . I don’t think so.”

  India stood beside him. “You only need to make it as far as the lagoon. Patu says there’s another passage through the reef, on the northeast end of the island. He’s arranged for you to borrow one of the natives’ outriggers. The owner is a man named Savo, and he’s on the Sea Hawk right now. He’ll help Patu navigate through the main channel out of the bay, then paddle himself back to shore when we meet you outside the windward passage on the far side of the island.”

  Jack stared at her. “The windward passage?”

  “Yes. Patu says it will be difficult, but he’s confident in your ability to navigate it.”

  Something about the way her gaze skittered away provoked Jack into asking, “What else did Patu say?”

  Her brows drew together in a worried frown as she brought her gaze back to his. “He said that given a choice between drowning and hanging, he thought you’d prefer to drown.”

  “Well, he’s right about that.”

  She touched her hand, gently, to his cheek, and he knew, from the sorrow in her face, what she was going to say before she said it. “Captain Granger told me about . . . about Rakaia. I am so sorry.”

  Jack looked away from her, out the open door, to the moonwashed sea. “My daughter’s not dead.” He said it fiercely, firmly, because it must be so. Surely he would have known it if it wasn’t so? Surely he would have felt it, deep down in the soul of him? For ten long years he had gone through the motions of his life, laughing, drinking, sailing into the sun with a sea breeze fresh in his face. Ten long years of living. Yet always, always, a part of him had belonged to that little blue-eyed, dark-haired girl who was a mingling of him and the woman he had loved and lost.

  Sometimes, when the trades were blowing wild and free from out of the east, he would stare off across the ocean and try to imagine what she looked like, what she was doing at that moment. Ulani laughing in the sun. Ulani, her lashes long and dark against her cheeks as she drifted off to sleep. He had to keep reminding himself that as the years passed for him, they were passing for her, too. And so he would be careful to try to picture what she must look like. Ulani at four. Ulani at eight. Ulani, now almost twelve. And it would scare him, and sadden him
, to realize that she would soon be a woman grown. All those growing-up years, lived without him.

  But always, always, the certainty that she was alive glowed warm and true within him. And so he said it again. “I know she’s not dead.”

  India nodded, although whether in agreement, or simply in sympathy, he couldn’t have said. He took an awkward step toward the door, but had to stop and suck in his breath when the movement jarred his sore ribs and set his insides on fire. Her arm came around his waist, catching his weight as he wavered, his vision blurring, the storeroom whirling giddily around him.

  “You are hurt.”

  He didn’t want to lean on her, but he was afraid that if he didn’t, he might topple over backward. “Why are you doing this?” he finally managed to say, his hand gripping her shoulder as he twisted his head to meet her gaze.

  She was so tall, her eyes were nearly level with his, which he figured was probably a good thing, seeing as how his weight would have crushed a smaller woman. “Because it’s the right thing to do,” she said simply, her gaze holding his steadily.

  He shook his head. “I can’t ask this of you. I can’t run away and leave you and Amok to face the British and the French in my place.”

  “No worries, mate,” said Amok, settling more comfortably on his barrel. “I’m the victim here. First I’m assaulted in my bed and threatened with all sorts of bodily mayhem if I don’t hand over the storeroom key to your friends, and then what do the ruffians do but lock me in my own storeroom.” He shook his head sadly. “It’s shocking, the breakdown of law and order in the islands these days.”

  Jack smiled at his old friend. “Huh. So what’s your excuse going to be for not having set up a shout once these ‘ruffians’ had gone?”

  His glasses winking in the moonlight, Amok extracted a small porcelain bottle from his sleeve, and held it up. “Given a choice between getting a bloody bump on the head and surrendering to the sweetly scented dreams of opium, what alternative did I have?” Unstopping the bottle, he tilted back his head to down the contents, then looked at them and grinned. “Don’t forget to lock the door on your way out.”