An Appetite for Violets (35 page)

Jesmire had scuttled back at last, twitching with triumph. ‘The captain and I will suit each other very nicely,’ she said. In fact, so well did she like him that she told Loveday there was no necessity to go all the way back to Ombrosa.

‘But Miss Jesmire,’ he protested, ‘I tell Miss Biddy we back today. She ’spect us six clock.’

‘Well she will just have to be disappointed, won’t she?’ Jesmire said, smiling sourly to herself. ‘We will return to the inn tonight, and I will write henceforth to Mr Pars. The captain says my quarters will be all shipshape by noon tomorrow. The captain is a most discerning, very particular sort of—’

Loveday brooded as she squawked on. He did want to look around this city of ships, but hated breaking his word to Biddy. Yet how could he change Jesmire’s mind? However fortunate he was to be here, it still felt very wrong to break his promise to Biddy.

After supper Jesmire passed him a letter and told him to find the post house. Once free of her nit-picking presence he stopped at a tavern, ordered a tankard of beer, and deftly untied the letter and read its contents:

Dear Mr Pars,

I am delighted to inform you that I have secured a position at the most satisfactory establishment of Captain William Dodsley, Retd, of Casa Il Porto, Leghorn. As a consequence, I give you notice and request that you forward my outstanding remuneration to the address herewith given above.

I have a number of errands still to complete, for which I require the carriage, and will send it back as soon as I am able, along with the driver and footman.

Your servant,

Miss Amelia Jesmire

Once night fell, Loveday had fallen asleep at the inn. He slept uneasily until suddenly his eyes opened wide in the darkness. A sound had burrowed into his dreams and noisily cleared a path back to wakefulness. He listened, blinking slowly. Beside him, the coachman snored softly, his dark head burrowed under his coat. The noise that had woken him started up again; the wavering yarl of a crying baby. Loveday listened closely and knew that the poor little creature was frightened. The sound grew louder and louder until it scraped the insides of his ears. Pulling his coat over his head he rolled over and shut his eyes again. It was no good. The sound seemed to be just on the other side of the room’s thin wall. The baby sobbed and gasped and started up another ear-scouring wail.

Agitated, he stood up and crossed the room to pull back the shutters. Outside the air was still warm and smelled of the sea and pungent tree sap. The moon was full, a pitted globe of silver hanging low above the rooftops.

‘
Mother Fula,
’ he whispered to the moon. She was naked and unpitying, casting bold silver rays across the sleeping town. The baby’s weeping grew quieter and sadder, sinking to a heartbreaking sob. It might be coming from anywhere; the inn was on a narrow alley with tottering buildings all about it. He trod silently on the pads of his feet towards the door, wondering if he could find its mother, the person whose love should comfort the child. But out on the landing he found only doors, and whenever he placed his ear to the rough wood, the sound of the baby disappeared. It was a puzzle, but he also knew it was something more. His
manger
was oddly excited. This sound – had he not heard it below the usual hubbub for most of the day? Amongst the market women this morning, and then echoing up from the laundry at the captain’s house? Even in the ale house it had droned on just below his attention, like a mosquito buzzing in the wind. He returned to the window and looked up at the moon.
Mother Fula,
the moon, had betrayed him to the white men on that last night on Lamahona, for she was a trickster. But she was also a truth-teller, a revealer of hidden secrets.

He stared at her and thought of the tides she pulled across the earth with her magical will, the complex pattern of sea roads bringing bounty or loss to hunters and fishermen. He knew there were other dark flows of change that she wrought. The bleeding of women every month, the pains of birthing. The baby’s cries rose again, beseeched him, begged him – and suddenly he had no will left to stop himself from taking fate’s path.
Mother Fula
drove him to pull on his boots and scrabble his wig and coat into a saddlebag. He shook the coachman and rapidly told him he was going back to the villa so he must bring the carriage back alone. ‘A message come to me,’ was all he could think to say.

Down in the stables the horsemen were snoring on bales of straw. He shook the youngest boy and held out a silver coin from his pocket. ‘
Cavallo,
’ he whispered, remembering the Italian word he heard so often. The boy rubbed his crusty eyes and rapidly plunged the silver inside his rags. With barely a chink or slap of sound he prepared a tall brown horse and led him out of the stall into the yard. Soon Loveday was astride it, gripping the horse’s reins with his hands and guiding its flanks with his knees. It was a crazed sort of journey to take alone at the dead of night, yet as he rode out of the sleeping city his progress was unexpectedly easy. Above him the silvered towers and arches of the fancy stone buildings were silent save for the echoes of his horse’s metal shoes. He passed the brine-smelling port with its forest of masts, and then the horse turned towards the road he had travelled the previous day. With only the gentlest of nudges, it trotted quickly from the cobbled stone streets onto the dusty road back to Ombrosa, moving as effortlessly as a fish glides to its spawning ground. Loveday’s long hair fell loose from his pigtail and lifted in the warm breeze, and his chest was bare of his tiresome coat. And
Mother Fula,
shining as cold and heavy as a disc of Portuguese silver, lit the road all the way to the eastern hills.

*   *   *

The night was still hushed when he noticed familiar outlines. A few torches flickered at the barred wooden gates of Ombrosa up on the black hump of the hill. Then he saw the pale blur of the ruined tower at the crossroads. Leaning over the horse’s neck he whispered into its twitching ears and stroked them gently, before carefully turning off the road. The iron gates of Villa Ombrosa stood black and watchful above him. Loveday dismounted and tied his horse’s reins to a tree. Then he pulled off his boots and hid them beneath a bush.

His bare feet knew the way through the grounds better than his eyes. Ignoring the noisy gates he slithered under a broken fence and felt at first the hard stones of the driveway digging into his soles, then the itchy spikes of rain-parched grass. The house stood cliff-high in the darkness.
Mother Fula
was dropping low in the sky now, her fat body hanging over the villa’s pointed roof. He crept as silently as a snake around to the back of the house and the kitchen door. He halted there, sniffing the unfamiliar bitterness of ash and burned cloth. It smelled wrong; it smelled of badness and destruction. Then he slipped inside and found only dying embers in the kitchen grate.

In the dim glow he saw signs of bustle and mess about the place. Cakes were scattered untidily across the table, not as Biddy usually left them, in a metal cage to protect them from insects and mice. And the air was thick with a terrible and familiar scent. Whale
amber.
The sweet strength of it reached his nostrils like a crowd of haunting ghosts made solid. He covered his nose with his palm and looked carefully around the room that was lit by only the dying fire. The bread basket was overturned, and a patterned cloth lay on the floor. He picked it up and sniffed it; it had a faintly human smell.

Footstep by footstep he moved through the rooms and listened. The downstairs was empty, so he made ready to climb the stairs. Just then, his left foot felt something wet. Crouching, he dragged his finger through the stickiness. In the moonlight it looked as dark as tar. He slid his fingertip into his mouth. The metallic flavour was the familiar taste of blood. Without a sound he rose as tall and still as a bamboo cane. He listened for a long time, striving to catch every breath and shift of the house.

The house was silent – too silent for a house of sleepers. Where were Mr Pars’ rattling snores? Or Bengo’s yaps and whimpers? Feeling his way toe by toe, he climbed the stairs. When he reached the top he padded silently to Biddy’s chamber. The door lay open, the bed not slept in. Next he visited Mr Pars’ fusty room. His door also stood ajar. The shutters were open, and
Mother Fula
showed him the room was empty. All gone were Mr Pars’ tottering piles of papers, his dirty clothes, and ink wells. Only a portmanteau and his precious strongbox stood neat in the middle of the empty floor. Loveday asked himself why Mr Pars might have left the house in such a manner. Sudden news? Yet whose was the blood? And what of his mistress? She would not have left her bed so near her birthing time.

He listened hard outside his mistress’s door, but heard nothing. Then, as slowly as a thief, he turned the knob and opened it. At first he thought the room was also empty. The shutters were open, and moonlight shone on the chairs, the table, the bed. The bed – his heart leaped suddenly against his ribcage. She was asleep on the bed. Leaning forward he saw the profile of his mistress lying motionless on her back, a sheet raised above her breasts. Beneath his straining toes a floorboard creaked and he flinched. His mistress did not move. Then he smelt the fug of blood – deep purple blood, like a butcher’s mangled leavings. He looked into her face and recoiled in fright. His mistress’s eyes were staring open, staring right at him. He touched her arm. It was as cold as stone.

He needed to know if the baby had come, for the smell of woman’s blood was strong. Holding himself rigid, he grasped the sheet that covered her corpse and lifted it. Even in the colourless moonlight he could see a tar-black gash across his mistress’s white belly, an opening where no woman should open. The baby had gone, that was for sure, for the belly had sunk down from its straining dome.

His mistress’s spirit must still be close, but what of the baby? Was it living or dead? He crossed the room to the cradle that Biddy had fashioned from a wooden box. Inside lay a tangle of damp cloths, but none of them blood-stained. He lifted one to his nose. It still held the sharp tang of piss.

He returned to Biddy’s room and pressed his hand to the bedclothes. They were cold. The open shutters drew him to look outside at the back of the villa. Only a short time now, he said to himself. Baby soon die. Not knowing what else to do, he stood at the open window and breathed very slowly, trying to follow his
manger,
trying to clutch at the threads of knowledge that his spirit-seeking mother had passed to him. He heard the creatures battling in the trees, the chirrups of warning, and muted screams of unlucky prey. And behind that he heard insects whirring and buzzing inside their tiny cities in the trunks of trees and their palace-caves deep in the ground. And, even quieter, he heard the stream by his hut, warbling and splashing across the rocks. Then, there it was, very faint and far away. A baby’s wailing cry.

Noiselessly, he took the path to his hut and there he picked up his harpoon that slid so sweetly into his hand. Once outside, he followed the sound of the baby, creeping stealthily beneath the black trees. As he grew closer another sound joined the baby’s hopeless wailing. A sharp crunch and thudding rumble. Someone was moving something, over by the spiky trees that circled the Stone Garden.

The faint glow of a lamp standing on the ground helped him find them. He halted twenty paces away, sheltering beneath a thick-trunked tree. Now he could hear the figure puffing and groaning. It was Mr Pars, standing in a deep hole as he shovelled earth up to the surface. The baby was in the far bushes; its wailing had quieted to a mournful hopeless mewling.

Loveday felt he had fallen into the kingdom of dreams. His right hand tightened on the shaft of his harpoon. The stink of
amber
whale stones filled his nose like rushing seawater. The white man digging the hole was square-shouldered, hard-faced, a half-seen shadow. The name he had given to the first white man he had ever seen sprang from his memory: Scarface. The white man had murdered his tribe and enslaved his beloved Bulan and Burat.

Loveday’s hand began to shake. The terror of that last night on Lamahona gripped him again. When he had confronted Scarface the man had made a terrible crack of sound like thunder that had torn a hole in his shoulder. Remembering that night made his bones go as soft as seaweed. Sweat filled his palms, and his harpoon slithered in his grip.

I am a coward, he told himself. I must quickly-quickly creep off in the trees before he see me. The gods have punished me because I have no courage to act like a man. Nothing has changed. He lifted the sole of his foot and started to turn away.

Just then the moon slipped off her skirt of cloud and shone triumphantly down upon him. The hole in the earth, the baby, the white man’s grimacing face – all sprang before him in vivid pearl-white detail. For the first time he noticed a bundle tossed on the grass, just a few paces from the hole. The cloth was long and crumpled and a pale face peeped from its midst. The face belonged to Biddy. She lay on the ground as still and lifeless as an old sack.

Then the white man lifted his face, and his eyes gleamed in the moonlight. The white man saw him and his evil-eyes were like sparking blades that could jag your guts out, leaving you a soulless carcass.

‘Hey!’ shouted the man. ‘Get away from here. Get back to the house you black dog!’

Loveday froze in the act of turning to leave. White man. Black dog. The sweet reek of ambergris sizzled in every part of his skull. Instead of fear, some other pounding force rose in his veins like a whale’s impatient spouting. He had lost his wife. He had lost his son. Now he would lose his only friend. Biddy. His heart thumped, his ears buzzed, his mind rumbled like a mountain erupting firestones. Evil memories chased through his mind: of every beating he had suffered from a Damong club, of every man who ever
toknogud
to him, of every devil who ever called him rubbishman – he was going to
tok
em all back now. He turned back to face the no good white man. He, Keraf, father of Burat, lifted his harpoon in his strong right arm and aimed it at the white man’s ugly cry-cry face. Then with true straight aim he let go of it and it flew like a runaway bird.