Everfair (25 page)

The “hotel” could be distinguished from Kalima's other houses by its three stories and its condescending facade, like that of an American plantation house. The Lincolns, Negro immigrants from Maryland, owned the place and occupied its ground floor. They rented rooms to travelers who visited Kalima without alliances of kin or trade among the locals.

They climbed the stairs to the top story. Lisette occupied her own room; Fwendi followed her in and used the candle to light the small lamp beside her bed. A pleasant warmth lingered from the day. Lisette's trunk, repository of her next-to-be-revised manuscript, brooded in one corner, upright, like a wardrobe. A valise, open on a wicker chair, offered gloves, scarves, handkerchiefs, and stockings to wear on the morrow, when she would have to decide … what she would not now think of.

Lisette removed her hat and suspended it from a peg beside a looking glass. A blue-glazed water pitcher stood on a washstand near one white-curtained window. Shades of barkcloth curled behind the curtains, ready to unroll. Altogether, it was as comfortable a home as she had occupied in years.

“'Soir,” she said carelessly as Fwendi retired to her own room, which she shared with Rima. Those two did not harmonize. In moments, as Lisette had expected, she heard a sharp rapping on her door.

“Enter,” she said. Not in French. This newest member of her makeshift, itinerant household spoke only English.

Rima—Serenissima Bailey—blew through the opening door like a storm. Her namesake, the tragic, forest-dwelling white heroine of William Hudson's popular novel
Green Mansions,
had been described as fragile, small, demure—but that was not this tall nineteen-year-old, strong and swift as a cyclone. Rima's long brown shins thrust impatiently free of her dress's slit panels. Her half-bare arms reached for Lisette, crossed behind her back and pulled her close to murmur mock-angry reproaches for her late return to the hotel: had she planned to stay out all the night?

Lisette sighed and avoided the offered kiss. “No. But—”

“But you wasn't meanin to spend time with me, was you? Naw, I thought not.” Rima dropped to sit on the bed in an attitude that ought to have been graceless: face jammed in cupped hands, elbows dug into her knees, feet planted wide.

“Of course I was. But not in my room. Not alone.” Not in Everfair, with its memories. Its possibilities.

A shy smile played over Rima's berry-dark lips. “It was good, though, wasn't it? What we done?” Her enchantingly slanted eyes peeked upward. “Don't make neither one of us no bull dagger.” The last in a worried tone—the girl still feared social consequences due to their encounters; these would have been harsh, indeed, in the Florida village where Lisette had first found her. Even in cosmopolitan New York, where Lisette had introduced her charmingly brash prot
é
g
é
e to the emerging literary crowd, the code was strict. One had to be careful …

“You'd best go to your room.”

“Yes'm.” Rima rose to leave and turned her back, posture suddenly elegant as a hussar's. Perversely, Lisette wished her to stay. In that instant Rima whirled around and crossed the room in two strides, bending to embrace her. “Promise! Promise!” she demanded, pressing her brow against Lisette's as if seeking to force her way into her mind.

What should I promise?
Lisette wondered, but she knew what was needed: a vow of love. A vow she could not, despite Rima's captivating energy, bring herself to make.

*   *   *

Morning. Breakfast was included in her arrangement with the Lincolns, but they provided it between the uncivilized hours of five and nine. Lisette girded herself for the day alone: she had dismissed Rima well before midnight.

Matty awaited her on the net-veiled verandah, pouring chocolate into a large, ugly cup. The smell of it had lured her to this table spread with a clean enough cloth and set with fresh bread, jam, curls of butter in ice, and a revolting pyramid of small, dead fish.

In blessed silence, Matty filled her cup too, and pulled forward a chair for her. As Lisette sipped and composed herself, she noted that he placed three of the fish on his plate before assuming his own seat. Well, he was a Scotchman.

“'Jour.”

“The Grand Mote is next Market Day, and you'll be there in plenty of time,” he told her needlessly. He must mean to soothe her. “Enjoy your holiday.”

Matty's hatred of Leopold was legendary. Someday soon the king would die. What would Matty do once his old enemy was no more?

She should tell him her official reason for stopping here—which was almost the real one. Yet his loyalty to the Triple Entente formed between Great Britain, Russia, and France gave her pause. Did it outweigh his concern for Everfair? Would he favor the Entente over the Central Powers—Germany and Austro-Hungary—regardless of Everfair's benefit?

Instead of trying to assess the persistence of Matty's patriotic feelings, Lisette asked whether he thought her understudy capable of performing her part. In many ways Rima was ideal. Her darker complexion needed little or no makeup compared to the cosmetics with which Lisette disguised the European portion of her heritage.

“She brings to the stage a certain”—Matty hesitated diplomatically—“a definite
verve
.”

Lisette glanced up suspiciously from a critical examination of her cuticles. Did he not care for her prot
é
g
é
e? Perhaps the Scotchman thought her unschooled? “I have been coaching her voice.”

“No, she'll be fine—brilliant, quite—quite active; I've watched—”

Ah! It was
Lisette's
self-regard he was wary of damaging. She relaxed. Writing, rather than acting, was where her self-regard resided. To tease him, she responded, “Fwendi is pleased also.”

At this, Matty blushed. Fwendi was approximately twenty-six, and he was all of fifty-four. One year younger than Daisy. Though the gap between those two was nearly double that between Daisy and Lisette.

*   *   *

Aircanoes could fly by night, given a sufficiently bright moon. The newer models traveled sometimes as many as 120 kilometers in an hour. If Daisy had received Lisette's message immediately upon
Okondo
mooring in Kisangani, she could well have boarded the vessel for its return trip. Allowing four hours to unload, Lisette had calculated the aircanoe's arrival here to be at ten this morning. Then she had laughed at these calculations, so obviously her own desires disguising themselves as reliable estimates.

With Fwendi at her side and Rima trailing sulkily behind them, Lisette proceeded back through Kalima to the warehouse, considering how unlikely it was for Daisy even to have been awake at such an hour—two a.m., assuredly, by the time the aircanoe tied up to the Kisangani tower.

It was 10:45. In daylight the town's streets were filled with people. A cluster of toddlers stared straightforwardly at Fwendi's hand—such prostheses were uncommon now the atrocities necessitating them had ceased. The attention in no way discomfited Fwendi: she obliged her impromptu audience with a little show, rolling her sleeve high and spinning her hand like a weathercock at the end of her beautiful, glittering arm. This latest version included flint and steel: she struck sparks with thumb and ring finger, and one chubby boy tried to imitate her, squealing with frustration.

A shadow passed. Lisette looked up:
Okondo!
Her heart sped, and she slipped eagerly through the ring of children. Some seconds later, her entourage was back beside her. The dust their boots kicked up hurried before them, whipped by a little wind. Worried, Lisette scanned the clouds, the mountainsides, but saw no sign of turbulence in the sky's upper reaches.

Ten wooden stairs, then a gravel track. Then a few more stairs, but these were mere indentations in the bluff's earth, buttressed with sections chopped from some poor tree's trunk. She fell behind Fwendi—age had its advantages, but physical alacrity was not one of them. On the flat area above she regained her lead. Rima continued to trail them both.

Again the glad shade. Dark against the dazzling sky, the aircanoe hovered, now merely seven meters above her head, lassoed to the mooring post.

Freight comprised the line's primary business; though the gondola was of the new enclosed sort, it wasn't equipped for passengers. She recalled the process by which she had disembarked yesterday. Perhaps she shouldn't watch Daisy subjected to such indignities? A makeshift sling had lowered Lisette to the ground, or fairly close—only a bit over a meter she'd had to jump as the sling swayed and shifted with the balloon's small but constant movements.

Too late, though. A black square opened in the gondola's tight-woven bottom. Leaf-wrapped bundles cascaded out, followed by crew swarming down ropes and leaping to stack them neatly at the dock's far end, nearest the warehouse. They were all clad in colorless loose shirts and wide trousers, shod in sandals. It took Lisette more time than she would have expected to recognize that one of these gymnasts was Daisy.

But at fifty-five years, what was the dear woman thinking of, to be so active? On her feet without recollection of rising, Lisette ran over the stones of the loading dock to her, to the one she had no right to ask anything of, who had joined her here anyhow at the first invitation—the first direct communication between them in a decade.

Daisy had seen her, of course. She said something unintelligible to her companions and approached Lisette with the free-limbed gait of an adolescent boy. Her hair, still dark, remained shockingly short, mere inches below her lovely jawline, restrained at her neck with a ribbon the greenish-blue of a redwing's eggs; a matching length circled her throat. Only faint lines creased her well-tanned brow and bracketed her thin, smiling mouth. That was all Lisette had time to note before being crushed in an embrace so tight it threatened suffocation.

Released quickly, she would have staggered, but Daisy kept a hand on one shoulder, kneading it with a kitten's loving fierceness.

Lisette blinked and saw that tears filled Daisy's eyes also. “You came,” she pronounced, rather stupidly.

“Naturally.” Daisy attempted to give Lisette a look of severe reproach down her long nose, which served merely to lower the spillways of her lashes. Then both wept openly a little while, laughing as well.

They wiped their cheeks. Lisette made the introductions and they walked to the hotel. Rima displayed an awful, forced cheerfulness, pacing backward along the uneven roads, chatting amiably with her rival. Who seemed as youthful as ever she had been. Her work on the aircanoe aided her, she claimed, in writing her poems.

Rima answered Daisy's questions about the Continent when Lisette couldn't bring herself to speak. This occurred frequently.

Fwendi had a parasol, which she clamped in her brass hand and held to shade herself and Lisette. By the time they reached the hotel the sun was noon-high and broilingly hot, even so near the mountains. Rima's determined gaiety had mercifully subsided and the party mounted the hotel's exterior steps in silence. In the dim entryway the eldest Lincoln girl offered them luncheon, then, when that was turned down, iced tea, which they gratefully accepted.

Once more to the verandah. Lisette was tempted to stretch out upon the wood and raffia divan, but knew better. The straight-backed chairs kept her head up, her chin becomingly high. Matty had intercepted the tray and bore it out to them. The drinks' chill revived her somewhat. Ice also had been formerly unknown in Everfair.

“Ah, Fwendi, I need your opinion of a change in the script I'm contemplating making.” Pathetic, the lengths to which the man went. At some recent point the encounters he'd contrived with the two of them had become trysts—platonic, evidently, yet affording him obvious pleasure. Really, despite his help with the British in Cairo, there was no need for him to have joined them for this trip at all—but Lisette could not grudge him whatever happiness he found in the young woman's company.

“Yes? A change in the play? You'd like to read a passage to me, perhaps?” Fwendi rose from her seat on the divan. “In your room?”

Matty followed her within as if mesmerized.

Rima remained. “Well. I imagine y'all have plenty things you wanna talk about.” But she made no move to depart. Uneasiness thrummed in the silence like a hidden insect.

From above came an interruption to the awkwardness: Fwendi's voice. “Rima! Rima, come up here—to our room—please?” With apologies for giving them what they wanted, the actress at last left Daisy and Lisette alone with one another.

Perhaps … perhaps only a couple of meters separated them now. Jackie had died last August, in Ireland. Did Daisy still mourn him?

Of course she did. But how deeply? For how long?

“I was told you've been entrusted with—”

Lisette shook her head, a warning that they could too easily be overheard, and crooked her finger. Daisy comprehended. She closed her mouth and crossed the verandah's wide planks to Lisette's side.

“Make believe you love me,” Lisette instructed her. Muffled laughter in Lisette's hair. “What is the joke in that, Mrs. Albin?” she drew back to ask, pretending offended dignity.

“Oh, ch
é
rie—”

Lisette found herself on her feet, drawn up into Daisy's arms. Balancing on her tiptoes, she put her lips to one of Daisy's ears. “Now we whisper.” She shut her eyes.

“Yes. Ch
é
rie—”

Lisette wanted only to listen—to the fast beat of Daisy's heart, to her soft, uneven breathing—but she must speak, and quickly. “Others may intrude at any moment.” Their hosts. Or Rima, who'd left them so reluctantly. “I have received secret offers for the Mote from both Central Powers and Entente. Let us pledge an assignation to discuss them in detail.”