Trade Wind (90 page)

“How did you get out? Where the hades have you been?” stormed Clay.

“I thought I told you—Put those goddamned children outside! What in hellfire do you think you’re doing?”

“I couldn’t help it. Clay,” pleaded Hero. “I had to go! I
had
to. Uncle Nat! You see, Olivia said—”

“Go to your room,” ordered Uncle Nat, his face rigid. “It appears to me you aren’t to be trusted with the run of the house, so you’d better stay there for what’s left of your visit.”

“I can’t—the children…”

“I’ll see they get something to eat, and after that they’ll have to go back where you found them.”

“But they haven’t got anywhere to go, Uncle Nat. Their parents are dead and they have no one to look after them. They’re starving. Uncle Nat—
please
! Clay, you can’t—! Fattûma! Where is Fattûma?”

She dodged past her uncle’s burly form and Saw Fattûma standing among the servants at the back of the hall, and said with a sob of thankfulness: “Oh there you are! Take one of these babies before I drop it, will you, and could you warm some milk, and—”

Fattûma retreated precipitately, her eyes wide with apprehension and her voice shrill with alarm: “No!—no, Bibi! No touch…their mothers die of the sickness—they die too, for sure. No bring in here! Take away—take away quick, quick!”

The servants seconded her, babbling like a flock of frightened geese and crowding towards the door that led to the kitchen quarters, their eyeballs rolling whitely in their dark, panic-stricken faces.

“The woman’s right,” said Clay. “You must be plumb crazy to bring these kids here. They may be sickening for cholera already, and yet you bring them into the house and expect the servants to look after them—”

“No. We not look,” cried Fattûma shrilly. “No look! No touch!”

“There, you see? They’ll have to go; and at once.”

“Then I shall go too,” said Hero.

“You’ll do no such thing!” blared Uncle Nat. “This is one time when you’re blamed well going to do what you’re told.
Put those children down and get on up to your room
!”

“I won’t. You can’t make me!”

“Can’t we!” said Clay, and moved swiftly to cut off her retreat from the door. “That’s just where you’re mistaken. I’ll give you exactly one minute to make up your mind whether you’ll go quietly or put on a free show for the servants. Now!”

“Clay, we can’t send them away,” pleaded Hero frantically. “Can’t you see they’re starving? They’ll die—we
must
do something.”

“You heard your uncle say we’d see that they’re fed.”

“But that isn’t enough! What’s one meal? Or two—or twenty? What’s the good of giving them each a bit of bread and pushing them back into the street? They need looking after, they—”

“No look. No touch. Sending away quick before making all die here,” gibbered Fattûma.

“Thirty seconds.”

“Clay please!…Uncle Nat, there’s the summer-house in the garden. I’ll look after them myself…I’ll—”

“I’m sorry. Hero, but it’s just plain impossible. I’ve got to think of the servants too, you know. But maybe we can get the Sultan to work out some scheme that’ll take care of them, and then—”

“But it’ll be too late! Too late for these ones. They’re so small. Please, Uncle Nat!”

“Forty,” said Clay inexorably.

“Oh Clay,
please
—don’t you see…”

They had all forgotten that the front door had been left open and they did not hear any sound of footsteps. But suddenly someone else was there, standing in the doorway behind Clayton and looking across his shoulder at the bedraggled girl and the bewildered, skeleton children who still held to her wet skirts.

“
Rory
!” said Hero on a sob that contained neither surprise nor thankfulness, but was purely one of relief: “Rory, do something!”

“Certainly,” said Captain Emory Frost obligingly. “What?”

Clayton spun round with an oath, and Hero ran past him, tripping on her wet skirts and accompanied by her frightened protegés:

“They say I can’t let the children stay here, but they have to go somewhere and if we send them away they’ll die, because they haven’t anyone and no one cares and they can’t—I can’t—”

“Steady,” said Rory, removing an infant from her convulsive grasp and regarding it with some disfavor.

Hero paused and drew a shuddering breath, struggling for composure, and Clayton took a swift step towards her and found his way blocked by an arm that appeared to be made of steel and whipcord.

“Mind the baby!” admonished Captain Frost without heat.

“What are you doing here?” Clayton’s voice was a grating whisper and his face was no longer flushed with anger but drained of all colour. “What do you want? Edwards said you’d given him your word They can’t have let you out!”

“Not intentionally. They merely neglected to lock me in and then ran off and abandoned the place: which came to the same thing.”

Clayton said in the same stifled voice: “If you’ve got anything to say to me, say it and get out!”

“You mean about Zorah? I haven’t. I didn’t come here to see you.”

“Then why?” began Clayton, and was interrupted by his stepfather who said harshly: “I guess we’re none of us interested in why you’re here or how you got here or who you want to see. But unless you get out here fast I’m sending for the guard.”

“What guard?” enquired Rory blandly. “I don’t think there is one any more.”

“I wouldn’t count on that! There’re still enough white men in the city who’d be happy to form one, so I’d advise you to leave.”

“Certainly, sir. Are you coming with me. Hero?”

Clay’s fist shot out, and Rory ducked with equal swiftness, avoiding the blow, and the next instant the Consul had gripped his step-son’s arm and jerked him back: “That’s enough. Clay!” He turned his head and spoke a curt word of dismissal to the saucer-eyed servants who had remained gaping at the back of the hall, and when the door had closed behind them said tersely: “I’m not having any brawling before the servants—or anyone else! Now get out of here, Frost.”

“Well, Hero?” enquired Rory.

“Can I take the children?”

“Why not? there’s plenty of room.”

“Hero!” cried Clay: “You couldn’t Don’t you dare! I forbid you!

I—” his voiced cracked.

The Consul said sharply: “Be quiet, Clay! There’s no question of her going.”

“Yes, there is,” said Hero. “I’m sorry, Uncle Nat. I’m so very sorry. I wish—” She broke off and shook her head in helplessness and regret, and saw her uncle’s harassed face harden into deep harsh lines.

Mr Hollis was a tolerant man, but he had endured much of late and now suddenly he reached the end of his patience. “Very well,” said Uncle Nat quietly and coldly. “You are of age; and as you have been at some pains to demonstrate, your own mistress. But I’m telling you, Hero, if you go with that slaver you don’t come back to this house. I shall wash my hands of you and have nothing further to do with you. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Uncle Nat. I—I’m sorry.”

“So am I. I’ll see you get your things. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, Uncle Nat.”

“
Hero
!” Clay flung off his stepfather’s restraining hand and lunged at her, and Rory put out a foot, tripping him, and hit him as he fell.

The blow was not all it might have been, for Rory was hampered by the baby. But he had a score to settle, and it made up in viciousness what it lacked in the way of science. It seemed to lift Clayton off his feet, and sent him spinning sideways to trip and fall on his face, spread-eagled and inert across the threshold of the drawing-room door.

“I owed you that,” observed Rory dispassionately. “Come on. Hero. Time we were going.”

He bent and picked up a weeping toddler, and they turned together and went out into the rain, the bewildered children following docilely at their heels.

38

“History seems to be repeating itself again,” observed Captain Frost, regarding his soaking guest critically. “You’d better get out of those things as soon as possible. Dahili will have to lend you something dry until your own gear arrives.”

They were back once more in The Dolphins’ House, and although the majority of the household had shown little enthusiasm at the prospect of taking in a batch of starving waifs who might well be tainted with the cholera, the Captain’s orders, backed by several texts from the Koran extolling the merits of charity, had overcome their reluctance.

“All things are with Allah,” agreed Hajji Ralub. “It is good to feed the hungry and fatherless: and if the hour and the manner of our death be already written, why should we trouble ourselves over what is ordained? God is great!”

The children had been removed to be fed, a message dispatched to Dr Kealey and Jumah sent out to see about laying in further supplies of milk; and Hero and Captain Frost were alone in the long upper room where the white cockatoo still paraded on its silver perch and the Persian kitten, now grown into a large and stately cat, slept curled up on a cushion.

Hero had been barely conscious of her wet clothing for the past hour, but now she looked down at it, grimacing at the sight of the spreading pool that darkened the carpet about her feet, and glancing at Rory’s own drenched clothes, said: “Yours are just as wet.”

“So they are. When did you last have something to eat?”

“I don’t know,” said Hero, startled. “Noon, I guess. Why?”

“You look almost as thin as those children. It doesn’t suit you. You ought never to have stayed behind. Why on earth couldn’t you behave sensibly for once and go along with your aunt and cousin and all the rest of them?”

Hero raised her eyes from the damp stains on the carpet and looked at him briefly, and looked away again without answering; and Rory said brusquely and as though she had spoken: “I know. And I’m deeply grateful to you.”

“You don’t have to be,” said Hero bleakly. “It wasn’t any use.”

“Don’t say it like that. It may be a platitude, but it’s the trying that counts.”

“Who with?” asked Hero bitterly.

“Yourself, of course. Who else? You’re the one you’ve got to live with. If anyone had told you that all those children you’ve collected would die anyway inside a week, I don’t suppose you’d have left them there. Or would you?”

“No. And they won’t die!”

“They may. You’ve got to face that. And if they do—”

“They will not!” cried Hero passionately. “They will not! They’re not ill, they’re only hungry. And there must be hundreds more like them—thousands. If we could only—”

Rory laughed and flung up a protesting hand: “Don’t say it! I ought to have known that worse was to come. Go and get yourself into some dry clothes before you contract pneumonia. I warn you, if you go sick on me I shall throw your protegés into the street I don’t feel capable of running an orphan asylum single-handed.”

Hero stared at him for a long moment, her eyes wide and questioning. Then colour rushed up to her white face, making it young and glowing and alive again, and she gave a gasp of relief:

“
Thank you!
” breathed Hero, and smiled at him as though he had given her some fabulous present.

The curtain swung into place behind her, and listening to the sound of her footsteps running along the verandah, Rory’s own smile was twisted and more than a little wry.

It was disconcerting to find himself trapped at last by an emotion he had sedulously avoided for years and ended by fancying himself immune to. And by Hero Hollis, of all people! One of the last women in the world, he would have said, to hold any appeal for him—which was possibly why this had taken him unawares. He had not even seen it coming, for though he had thought about her a good deal during the past weeks, it was always as someone he would never see again, and he had accepted that: there was a finality about it that made her a part of the past and far out of reach, and he was not given to vain regrets and useless speculation. Besides, his own life was likely to terminate painfully in the near future, and he was confident that someone—Dan or her family—would have arranged to send her away to safety once the cholera took hold. She would be well on her way home, and that, as far as he was concerned, was the end of it. Which was just as well for both their sakes.

He had been wholly unprepared for Batty’s disclosure that Hero was still in Zanzibar. And even less prepared for the violence of his own reaction to it. It was as though someone had hit him across the face without provocation or warning, and after the first blinding moment of disbelief, shock had exploded into rage and he had been seized with a fury of anger against Batty, Dan, Clayton, the Hollises and Colonel Edwards for allowing her to stay—and with Hero herself for being so exasperatingly, idiotically obstinate as to insist upon staying.

Barely pausing to change out of the rags in which he had left the Fort, he had gone to die Consulate with no very clear idea in view beyond the satisfaction of telling them all exactly what he thought of them. And it was only when he walked in through the open door and saw her standing there, wet and desperate and once again disastrously involved in benevolence, that he had realized what she meant to him. Perhaps because she could hardly have looked less physically alluring, yet it had made no difference at all to the way she looked to him; and he had known in that moment that it never would…

It had not been a pleasant discovery. And even less so was the belated realization that part of the blind rage that had driven him to abduct her had nothing whatever to do with Zorah, but had had its roots in jealousy. Jealousy of Clayton Mayo, who must at all costs be prevented from marrying her, and if that were not possible, should at least only take her at second hand.

I must be mad!
thought Rory. He shrugged philosophically, and went off to change his own soaked garments for the second time that day, and to inform Ralub that a further influx of young visitors could be expected shortly and arrangements must be made to accommodate them.

He might have felt less philosophic about it had he known the full extent of what he had let himself in for.

One of the infants—the first that Hero had acquired—died on the following day, and another a day later. But since their deaths were due to starvation and neglect, and not to cholera, the household of the Dolphins were not unduly dismayed. And in any case, by that time there were at least a dozen other infants in the house in addition to the original number, as well as over twenty children ranging in age from two to six years old.