Beyond Sunrise (23 page)

Chapter Twenty-eight

Two days later, they were within several hours' sailing of Waigeu when the afternoon grew increasingly overcast, the sky lowering until it seemed to press down upon them, heavy and airless.

"Shit," said Jack in an undervoice when a huge flash of red lightning crackled across the ugly gray clouds.

India came to stand beside him, her gaze, like his, on the approaching squall. "You think the
Sea Hawk
can't take another bad storm, don't you?"

"I think the impact with that reef strained her timbers." He paused. "I'm not looking forward to finding out how bad."

Almost any other woman—or man—would have fallen apart at the thought of sailing into a storm aboard an unseaworthy boat. But not India. She simply nodded once, accepting the danger. Only the quick flaring of her nostrils as she took a steadying breath betrayed whatever inner trepidation she might be experiencing.

"How bad is the channel into Waigeu's lagoon?" she asked, squinting into the smudgy distance, as if she could will the land to appear before them.

He shook his head. "Waigeu doesn't have a barrier reef. It'll be an easy run into the bay... once we get there."

She brought her gaze to his. He saw the flare of interest in her clear gray eyes, saw her hesitate, then succumb to the promptings of her insatiable curiosity. "Are you familiar with Waigeu?"

The
Sea Hawk
lunged through a wave high enough to send spray flying over the deck. "Familiar enough. Why?"

Her cheeks glistened with a faint wet sheen as her lips parted with excitement. "Do you know if there are any maraes or stone carvings on the island?"

He laughed softly. "I was wondering how long it would take before you got around to asking that."

The
Sea Hawk
lurched and pitched heavily with the growing swells, so that she had to make a quick grab for the mast beside them. "Well? Are there?"

"I remember seeing a large marae on the coast near the northern village. But I don't remember whether or not there are carvings associated with it. Patu would know."

The wind was high enough now that it was screeching through the rigging, and Patu was moving quickly to trim the boat down to rail breeze. "Hey! Patu!" Jack called. "Are there any rock carvings on Waigeu?"

The boy turned to look at them, his eyes wide, his answer lost in the flapping of the canvas and the crash of the waves.

"Why would Patu know?" India asked as another flash of lightning lit up the rolling black waves.

"Because he's from Waigeu," Jack said. Then the squall hit, bringing with it a world of rain that poured down in a sudden, roaring torrent.

The squall was fierce but blessedly brief. By the time they reached the open, unsheltered bay of Waigeu, the sea had calmed to gentle swells and the sky cleared to a brilliant turquoise, paling now with the approach of evening.

"We made it," said India, her smile slipping slightly when the
Sea Hawk
gave a peculiar, inexplicable lurch that had her grabbing at the rail.

The island rising out of the sea before them was high and rugged and beautiful. Mist shrouded the towering volcanic peaks of the interior, but the sun shone hot and fierce on the steep, lower slopes and shadowy ravines covered in a lush, dark green tangle of trees and vines and ferns. It wasn't until they drew closer to shore that India realized several of the broad valleys running down to the bay had been stripped of their natural vegetation. The black earth lay open and exposed, like great, ugly slashes only partially covered by pale, oddly tidy rows of green.

"Vanilla plantations," Jack said, coming to stand beside her at the rail.

India glanced at Patu, his face still and closed as he, too, stared at the island before them. "It didn't used to look like this," he said in a tight, broken voice. Then his gaze shifted to the dozen or more small dugouts skimming across the bay toward them, and his expression cleared as the men in the canoes began to shout, laughing and gesturing when they caught sight of him. "Look! There's my uncle," he cried, kicking off his shoes. "And my cousin Timi."

They were a Polynesian people, the Waigeuns, closely related by language and bloodline to the inhabitants of Tahiti, to the east. Golden-skinned, with dark hair and strikingly molded features, the men looked tall and broad-shouldered and hale. And it seemed to India, watching, that she and Jack had become spectators to a scene as old as time: the welcoming home of a wandering, prodigal son.

One of the islanders, a middle-aged man in a scarlet and sapphire pareu, stood up to wave at Patu and shout,
"Mea maitai outou?"
Are you well?

"Ia ora na oe i te atua,"
Patu called back. Whipping off his shirt, he climbed the
Sea Hawk's
rail to dive in a graceful, long arc that sent him plunging deep into the purple-blue waters of his home.

The beach rimming the open bay of Waigeu was formed of black volcanic sand lined with coconut palms and puroo, a kind of cross between a mulberry and a fig tree, with giant yellow poppylike blooms touched in the center with maroon.

By the time the
Sea Hawk's
dingy scraped up onto the beach, Patu was already there, dripping wet and smiling and surrounded by a deep circle of chattering women and laughing men and small, flower-decked children who darted excitedly between legs and chased after a barking, half-grown, golden-haired dog that raced across the sparkling black sand toward the bamboo and pandanus huts just visible through a thin screen of palm trees.

"Has it changed so much?" India asked, her fingertips resting easily on Jack's shoulders as he swung her up and over the side of the dingy.

"Well, that wasn't here before," he said, one hand lingering at her waist as he nodded toward a large, white-plank structure with a green painted door and a neatly lettered sign that read DIVINE WORD MISSION.

They called it a himine house, a hymn house. And like the tidy bungalow of milled lumber that stood beside it, its roof of corrugated iron gleaming bright and hot in the tropical sun, it was as alien to this place as the fair-haired woman with corset-stiffened waist and thick layers of dark, voluminous skirts who appeared on the veranda, a hand coming up to shade her eyes.

One of the children, a bright-eyed boy of about ten, with a skinny bare chest and a tiari blossom tucked behind his left ear, noticed the direction of their gaze and paused in his game of chase-the-dog long enough to say proudly, "We're all Methodists now. Even the Cath'lics."

"What happened to Father Paul?" Jack asked, his brows drawing together as he stared beyond the new mission, to a small knoll where what was left of pale pink stucco walls was rapidly disappearing beneath an overgrown tangle of jungle vines.

"Father Paul?" In the act of darting off again, the boy paused to glance back over his shoulder and say something India didn't quite catch, something that sounded like
"pohe."

"What does it mean?" India asked, a sense of unease blooming suddenly within her as she lifted her gaze to Jack's hard, shuttered face. "What did he say?"

"He said Father Paul is dead."

"He died four—no, five months ago," said the Reverend William Watson, lowering his slim, small-boned frame into a wooden armchair. He was an earnest-looking man of about thirty, with a high forehead and thin face, and a splendid mustache flowing into a long, light-brown beard. "There was an epidemic of some sort on an island he considered part of his parish. He went to try to help, and took sick himself."

India glanced at Jack, who stood gazing out one of the Watsons' green-painted frame windows overlooking the bay. "That wouldn't have been Rakaia, would it?" he said, his voice smooth and flat and carefully stripped of all emotion.

"Yes. That was it. Rakaia." The reverend rested his elbows on the chair's frame and brought up one hand to stroke his beard. "Sometimes I wonder if there will be any Polynesians left by the end of the century. The population of Waigeu is less than twenty percent what it was in Captain Cook's time. Imagine that! Twenty percent."

Jack kept his gaze leveled on the scene outside the window, where the sun sparkled on the palm-fringed bay, and high white clouds moved serenely with the trade winds. It was India who asked, her throat raw and tight, "Did no one on Rakaia survive?"

The reverend's nostrils flared wide as he drew himself up in his chair, his entire being exuding a peculiar, almost throbbing fury that was part righteous indignation, part personal affront. "A few, but not many. A rascally knave who claims he was once an English sailor brought some of them away in an old jolly boat." Watson let out a harsh laugh and shook his head. "Sailor. Huh. Pirate is more likely."

Jack swung about, his body held so still, India could have sworn he wasn't even breathing. "Was one of them a girl? A blue-eyed girl of about eleven?"

The reverend shook his head. "I wouldn't know. He's not a godly man, that sailor. When I went to try to minister to them, he chased me off with a shotgun. Imagine that! A shotgun."

A step on the veranda heralded the return of Cynthia Watson, the reverend's wife. She came bustling in the open front door, a tray laden with a steaming teapot and a plate of tinned biscuits and a stack of rose-patterned china cups and saucers clutched against her ample bosom. "Here we are," she said, the tray rattling as she set it on the lace-covered table that occupied much of the center of the room. "The tea is fresh from China." She held up a white pitcher. "And the milk is fresh, too. It's from our goat!"

She laughed when she said it, for her demeanor was considerably more merry and open than her husband's. They probably made a good pair, India thought as she went to help the other woman pour tea; while the reverend preached fire and brimstone from his pulpit, his good-natured, round-faced wife would teach the islanders their gospel and help them sew clothes. For those embarked on a missionary life, covering the natives' nakedness was almost as important as converting them.

"Are you saying the survivors from Rakaia settled here?" Jack said, reaching automatically to take the cup India handed him. "On Waigeu?"

The reverend nodded. "The southern part of the island, where no one lived anymore."

Her own teacup in hand, India let her gaze wander around the cozy little parlor, with its white gauze curtains and lovingly polished harmonium and old wooden mantel clock that sat on a shelf and filled the air with an inescapable, ticktocking awareness of the passage of time. They might have been in England, she thought, rather than on this tropical island of bamboo huts and warm trade winds, where time had once been marked by nothing more than the tides, and the coming and going of the hurricane season.

"I met your father once," the Reverend Watson was saying to India. "In Edinburgh a couple of years ago. I always admired his writings, particularly those espousing the importance of missionary work among the darker races. I was sorry to hear of his death."

"Thank you," said India, painfully aware of Jack's hard gaze upon her.

China clinked as Cynthia Watson collected the tea things. "You never considered missionary work yourself?" she asked.

India shook her head. "I prefer travel writing."

The reverend's mustache swished back and forth as he pushed his lips out in a tight frown. "I read your book on East Africa."

"Did you?" India said, both surprised and gratified.

"Yes," said the reverend's wife, hefting her tea tray. "He rather enjoyed the first part. But after he read what you had to say about the missionaries you met in Nairobi, he ordered me to burn it."

"What did you say about the missionaries in Nairobi?" Jack asked, a smile crinkling the skin at the edges of his eyes as they made their way back down to the beach.

India laughed softly. "I believe I said something to the effect that while missionary work might be well-meaning, it doesn't alter the fact that obliterating an ancient culture and substituting for it an alien way of life is essentially arrogant and destructive."

"No wonder William Watson burned your book." His smile faded slowly. "What did the Reverend McKnight have to say about it?"

India stared out over the dark, violet blue of the sea. The air was sweet with the scent of brine and all the rich, earthy fragrances of the rain forest rising up steep and dense beyond the beach. "I never heard. He died a few weeks after it was published."

"I'd had the impression your father died right after your mother."

India paused, the soft black sand shifting beneath her feet as she turned to face him. "My father was a strong believer in that old dictate 'spare the rod and spoil the child.' When I was a little girl, I was terrified of him. But I always believed he loved me, the same way I believed God Our Father loves His children here on earth. Then my mother died, and my father just... sent me away. I'd write to him, but he would never answer." Her throat swelled, her eyes stinging with the threat of tears she refused to let fall. "My aunt used to make excuses for him. Tell me how busy he was with his lectures, his writings. But it wasn't true. The truth was, he'd always been disappointed in me. Disappointed in me for not being a son. For not believing everything he told me I must believe. For not being a credit to
him."

Jack's hand cradled the back of her head, drawing her forward until her cheek pressed against the warm softness of his shirt and she could feel the rumble of his chest when he spoke. "You were a credit to him," he said softly. "He was just too blind and opinionated to see it."

India shook her head, her hands clutching fistfuls of his shirt as she held on to him, held on to him tight. "I don't care anymore. I quit caring a long time ago."

It wasn't until Jack brushed his fingertips across the curve of her cheek that she realized there were tears there. "Then why are you crying?"

Chapter Twenty-nine

They found Patu on the beach, near the water's edge. Instead of his usual canvas trousers, shirt, and shoes, he wore a bright red pareu tied about his waist, his bare feet dangling over the foaming surf as it rushed in to swirl about the whitened base of the old driftwood log on which he sat.

"You heard about the people from Rakaia?" he asked, when Jack and India walked up to him. "On the southern end of the island?"

"The Watsons told us," India said, when Jack only stared out over the sea, turning silver now with the coming of the night.

Patu's hands curled into fists that pressed, hard, against the smooth wood of the log. "I asked, but no one seems to know exactly how many survivors there are, or anything about them. The people here say no one has sailed down to the southern end of the island for years." He let out a low, harsh laugh, and shook his head. "Very few of the men even go out with their nets anymore. They live surrounded by all this—" He drew an arm through the air in a wide sweep, taking in the shining sea and the rain-forest-clad mountains rising up steep and dark behind them. "All this, and they work in some Englishman's vanilla fields, and eat tinned fish and corned beef."

A sad silence fell, filled with the swish of the surf and the haunting cry of a seabird. "How's your mother?" Jack asked softly.

Patu's face grew tight, strained. "She cried."

Jack blew out a long breath, his eyes narrowing as he continued to stare off across the darkening waves. "The last time I went back to Queensland, to visit my family... everything there was different from the way I remembered it. And I guess I was different, too. That's the problem with going off and leaving the place where you were raised. It's never easy, coming home again. The fit is all wrong. You realize you don't belong there anymore. But you don't really belong anyplace else, either."

Patu nodded, a muscle along his jaw throbbing noticeably as he jerked his chin toward the yacht riding at anchor in the bay. "How long you reckon it'll take us to get the
Hawk
seaworthy again?"

Jack shrugged. "I guess we'll know that in the morning, when we get a good look at her."

"I'm not staying here," Patu said suddenly, as if someone had suggested it. "I can't stay here."

Jack kept his gaze on the sleek, bobbing hull of the yacht. "And your mother?"

Patu blinked. "She'll have my brothers and sisters."

A lilting note, at once mournful and yet oddly
joyous, filled the briny evening air. India turned toward the sound, and felt the gentle tropical breeze lift
the loose hair from her forehead. "What's that?"

"They're having a luau," Patu said. "To celebrate my homecoming." He pressed his lips together, as if trying to keep back an angry outburst. Then he said, "A couple of the villagers didn't want my family to hold it. They said the Reverend Watson wouldn't like it."

India looked around in surprise. "But why not?"

"You haven't seen one yet," said Jack, amusement lightening his voice. "The music is positively
heathen, and the traditional dancing... shocking. Shocking and shameful."

"Oh, good." India checked quickly to make certain her notebook was in her knapsack. "I do so love witnessing shamefully shocking displays of heathen culture." Her smile slipped
a bit. "As long as no one expects me to eat roast pork."

For the first time since they'd met him on the beach, the frown etching lines across Patu's forehead cleared, and he laughed.

It was the sounds she would remember the most, India decided; the erotic, pulsing beat of the drum, and the hushed whisper of the warm wind sighing through the feathery tops of the palms, and the crackling fires, all played out against the endless boom and swish of the silver-crested surf breaking against that strange black beach.

They feasted on prawns and crabs, and raw fish dipped in coconut milk; on taro, and pumpkin greens, and chicken wrapped in the leaves of the purau tree and baked beneath red-hot shingles and sand. Torches of dried palm fronds, wrapped together into bundles some six feet long and as big around as a man, flamed and snapped and hissed, their golden light flickering over laughing faces and bare brown arms and legs, and banana mats piled high with mangoes and bananas and oranges, guavas and baked fei and pineapples. The air was sweet with the briny tang of the sea mingling with the smell of roasted foods and the heady scent of tiare and gardenia blooming in exuberant splendor from the dark edges of the rain forest, or woven with ferns and hibiscus into wreaths.

India was scribbling furtive notes in her book when Jack's hand closed over hers, stopping her. "Write about it later," he said, the firelight dancing warm and golden over the angles of his face as he leaned into her. "But for now, just enjoy it."

She glanced beyond him, to where two lines of female impersonators bedecked in white tiare blossoms and wearing grass skirts over their pareus were going through a bizarre parody of a French gavotte, taught to them by some long-ago, well-intentioned, but ultimately unsuccessful missionary bent on replacing the lusty native dances with something considered to be more sedate and proper. "I can record what I'm seeing and still enjoy it," she said, as the young men, their faces earnest and serious, the fringed pandanus around their ankles and wrists flaring, executed flawless pirouettes.

"But you can't write and dance at the same time." He drew her up with him, her notebook sliding off her lap into the sand.

"I'm the wrong sex," she said with a laugh.

"No, you're not." He nodded beyond her, to where a circle of giggling men and women was forming. The serious young men executed their last pirouette, bowed to each other, then broke away laughing. Hands began to beat the hard-packed sand, pounding out an ancient, primitive rhythm joined by the tap of drumsticks of braided husk fiber against blocks carved from coconut trunks.

"I can't do this," India said, her stomach fluttering with panic as he drew her into the circle.

He slipped a wreath of tiare and sweet ferns over her head, and brushed her lips with a quick kiss. "Yes you can."

Hands undulating like the waves of a tropical sea, feet shuffling sideways, the laughing circle of men and women shifted to the right, slowly at first, then faster as the beat picked up, became louder, more insistent.
Thrum, thrum
went the drums as India circled forward, then back again, Jack at her side, guiding her with a gentle touch, encouraging her with a smile. She felt her body search for the rhythm, find it. She stopped watching her feet. Her hair slipped from its neat chignon to fall in wind-tossed curls about her face, but she didn't care.

Turning her head, she watched the man beside her. She watched the way the trades ruffled the worn cloth of his shirt, the way his neck arched when he threw back his head and laughed. The torches cast enticing, mysterious patterns of golden light and dark shadow across the strong bones of his face, and it was as if something shifted within her, and broke free.

The sand whispered warm and soft beneath her moving feet. The breeze felt gentle and fragrant against her cheek, the air sweet with the scents of sea and rain forest. She drew in a deep breath, drew it all in, until it flowed into her and she reached out to it, became a part of it—a part of the darkly undulating sea and the palm trees waving gently against the star-spangled tropical sky. She was a part of this place, and it was a part of her. She heard the beat of the drums, felt Jack catch her shoulders, swinging her to face him. Their gazes caught, and held.

Slowly, their gazes still locked, they moved as one, hands clutching hands, hips undulating erotically, suggestively together. The features of his face were sharp, stark, the glow in his eyes fierce, almost predatory. She heard the drums pound louder, faster, their beat primeval, insistent, with a savage sexuality that entered her blood, pulsed through her, through them both. His hands tightened around hers, swinging her halfway about to pull her sharply back against him, her spine pressing against the hard length of him, his arms folded across her breasts, holding her close. Over her shoulder, her gaze met his again. She saw the flash of his smile in the flaring of the torchlight, felt the warmth of his breath against her cheek. The beat of the drums mingled with the crash of the surf and the haunting, unearthly wail of the conch shell. And she thought, This is life. This is life as in the past I might have recorded it, written about it. But I never lived it. Not until now.

"I want you," he whispered, his lips just inches from hers.

"Yes," she said simply.

Gently, his hands cradled her cheeks, urging her around until she faced him. She thought he might kiss her. Instead he said, "There's something I want you to see," and his lips twitched up into a lopsided smile that creased his cheek and stole her heart all over again.