Master of Paradise (10 page)

Before she could protest, he’d swept her in
his arms and carried her away.

Suddenly, she was in Rodrigo’s cabin, lying
naked in the folds of those scarlet sheets. He was kissing her,
devouring her with his mouth, igniting her body with wildly roving
hands. His voice at her ear saying softly, “
Beg me.
” And
this time she did. She begged him to take her, voicing her need to
him until at last—
at last!
—he gave her what she wanted. Held
her down and vanquished her body with the conquering fury of a
storm at sea. She could feel his love, his passion, his need of her
that had been denied these many years. And as his body moved over
hers with exquisite skill, she was aware of the love that filled
her heart. She wanted him so badly, she knew she’d die if she
couldn’t have him. Calling his name, she gave herself to him
completely. As his mouth devoured hers, she heard herself whisper,
“Rodrigo, it was always you...”

As she did, she was aware of Beau Vallon in
the background. One by one, the trappings of the happy scene faded
away. As Rodrigo plundered her body and her soul, first her mother,
then Cullen, then the dazzling birds disappeared. Then, before her
eyes, Beau Vallon withered and turned ugly and overgrown.

But Rodrigo took her head in his hands and
turned her gaze to him. “You belong with me,” he told her, and
looking in his eyes, she knew it was true. Then those hands were on
her, parting her thighs and slipping up to play with the reticence
of her arousal, until nothing was left but her panting need to have
him pumping inside her. He stroked her flesh and she threw back her
head in ecstasy. But at the peak of their passion, she was jarred
by a sound—the echo of stretching rope. She looked up sharply and
saw her mother hanging above the bed. As she screamed, as she
pushed and clawed at Rodrigo, seeking release, the image above her
changed.

She saw that it wasn’t her mother hanging
there at all. It was Gabrielle herself.

And Hastings was holding the rope.

Hastings was no help. He came and went
mysteriously, staying out until all hours, coming in long after
she’d gone to bed. She had no idea where he went or what he did,
only that he spent a great deal of time with the Grand Blanc, the
descendants of the original French settlers—still a major force in
the islands even after the British takeover. Hastings seemed to
value their company more than that of his own countrymen. He
scarcely spoke to Gabrielle.

When she ventured to the island bank where,
as Adamson had told her, credit was freely offered her as the
governor’s sister, she hesitated at first, thinking Hastings would
make trouble for her if he found out. When he did, he merely
shrugged. “Dig your own hole, Gabby. Just don’t expect me to pay
your debts when you find you can’t make a living.” He had no faith
in her mission. Determined to prove him wrong, she spared no
expense in hiring servants and took on the work of overseeing the
restoration of her mother’s plantation to its original tropical
splendor.

When she demanded of Hastings what was being
done about Cullen, he fixed her with a blank stare and said, “I
can’t go after him, can I? I don’t know where he is.”

She didn’t dare trust him with her explosive
secret—the location of Rodrigo’s hideout. She wasn’t even certain
where D’Arros was. It would require stealth to divine the
information she needed without giving Rodrigo away. Any obvious
questions would get back to Hastings and likely tip him off.

After a week on the island, she finally found
an opportunity.

She was at a reception celebrating the
building of an Anglican church and honoring the arrival from India
of the new minister, Rev. J. C. Holmes. With much of the island
French Catholic, the British were banding together this night to
commemorate their new cathedral. As governor, Hastings was required
to attend, but he seemed edgy, anxious to be off. He kept pulling
out his pocket watch and glancing at it as if it might force the
hours to fly by. Clearly, the establishment of a new church was
beyond his realm of interest.

But what was he doing? she wondered. Why did
he keep glancing at his watch as if he had some important
appointment to keep? Where did he go every night, to come in close
to dawn?

The party was in the lavish estate of
Jonathan Lambert, deputy governor of the islands. This, too, seemed
suspicious, that Hastings had declined hosting it at State House,
leaving him free to sneak away when it suited him.

The gathering was tedious as expected, but
again Gabrielle was struck by the pains these British expatriates
took to reconstruct their lives at home. Unlike the majority of the
island’s single-story dwellings with thatched roofs, Lambert had
fashioned a perfect reproduction of an English country estate. The
gardens were legendary, the delight of guests who strolled through
them, but instead of cultivating the lush island foliage, they were
planted with English roses. Most of the entertaining was done in
the relative cool of the evenings, but they were English
entertainments—endless rounds of twilight rides, picnics and
soirees. The temperature dictated their waking hours. Their days
were spent on the ever-present verandahs, moving their chairs from
the shifting path of the sun. Work was done early in the mornings
or late in the afternoons. Amply supplied with slave labor, the
women spent their time riding blooded horses, bearing children,
writing letters home, and endlessly attempting to stay cool.

Gabrielle sauntered through the rooms with
their chintz-covered furnishings, amazed as always by the quantity
of spirits being consumed. When the guests weren’t complaining
about the heat, they were drinking to forget it. She’d heard vague
rumors of widespread opium use among British officials. She didn’t
doubt it from the glazed looks of some of them. For years, John
Company had exported opium into China, ignoring the emperor’s ban,
as a way of supplementing Indian revenues and purchasing the tea
that had made them the most formidable traders the world had ever
known. It wasn’t difficult to imagine that some of it would find
its way across the sea from India to Seychelles.

The guests spoke to her politely, showing
interest in her acting career. Some had even seen her on the stage
in London, years ago. But any questions she asked about her half
brother were dodged with a hasty glance at his formidable back.

She began to suspect they were afraid of
Hastings.

This was brought home after dinner when she
passed by a group of women speaking adamantly in soft tones. She
heard little of the conversation, but the word “slavery” caught her
attention. It seemed that at every gathering, all they could talk
about was the issue of Negro emancipation. She knew a controversial
bill was going before Parliament that would ban the ownership of
human flesh in British colonies. In England, where slavery had been
illegal for decades, the issue was only one of a hundred threatened
reforms, and barely made the papers. Here, the subject was an
obsession—and London’s antislavery leader, Sir Thomas Fowell
Buxton, was cursed as the Antichrist. It was all the colonists
seemed to have on their minds. But every time she tried to join the
conversations, they ceased talking abruptly and gave each other
warning looks.

Tonight, she decided she’d had enough.

“I was surprised to find slavery in the
Seychelles,” she confessed, interrupting them.

The ladies turned to her with arrested looks,
like wild animals caught in the beam of the hunter’s lantern. To
deflect her, one of them said, “We say
Seychelles
, dear, not
the
Seychelles. The way you say England.”

“Very well,” she conceded, determined not to
be thrown off track. “I knew slavery was still legal in the
colonies, of course, but my impression was that slave trading by we
English had ceased. That the owning of slaves was viewed as an
abomination.”

Maybelle Lambert, eager to fulfill her duties
as hostess, broke the ensuing silence. “Oh, my dear, there have
always been slaves here, for as long as anyone can remember. My
husband says it would ruin the economy if that fool Buxton ever had
his way.”

“Why, my dear,” added another matron, “your
mother’s people were some of the largest slaveholders in these
parts. Surely you’re aware of that?”

Gabrielle ignored the stab. “I was under the
impression the trading of slaves has been banned for some
time.”

“Well,” Maybelle hedged, “officially it is,
of course.”

“Then how do the plantations keep getting the
slaves?”

“Maybelle,” someone warned.

Gabrielle could see she was making them
fidget. Several of them stole glances at Hastings, causing her to
wonder how he was involved. Surely if slaves were coming into the
colony, Hastings was allowing it. “To whom does my brother answer,
anyway?”

“Why, the British authorities on Mauritius.
It’s an island some thousand miles to the south.”

“So he was right. He
is
essentially a
law unto himself here.”

“I don’t believe Admiral Fulton would think
so. He patrols these waters with a fleet of Royal Navy ships. He
comes by every three months or so. He should be here within the
month.”

“Is he a friend of the governor’s?”

“Not particularly, I shouldn’t think. They do
what business needs doing, but sometimes they seem to be at
odds.”

So there
was
an authority in the
Indian Ocean who wasn’t in Hastings’s back pocket. This was
encouraging news. Perhaps she could persuade him to help her. But a
month! Could she afford to wait that long?

Emboldened by this discovery, she pressed a
little harder. “There are certainly a great many islands in this
part of the ocean, aren’t there? I saw dozens on the trip to
Mahé.”

“Oh, hundreds, my dear,” Maybelle jumped in,
relieved by the change of subject. “But they’re just about all
uninhabited. There are some people on Praslin, which, next to Mahé,
is the largest. That’s pronounced
Prah-lean,
my dear. Aren’t
the pronunciations beastly, though? Then there’s La Digue. And of
course, Fregate. That was once the family home of that pirate,
Soro. Those are all fairly close by, in the Granitic Islands
group.”

Recalling Captain Watkins’s words, she asked,
“Are there some islands called Amirantes?”

“Oh, yes, dear, but they’re far to the
west—two or three days’ sail at least. Highly inaccessible. The
coral reefs in that area are treacherous—simply treacherous!
Sailors are afraid to go there. My husband says they think the
pirate Soro hides out somewhere in those dangerous waters.”

“What are the names of some of those
islands?”

“Why, let’s see. There’s African Banks, and
Rémire, I think, and D’Arros, and yes, my favorite, Sand Cay. They
all sound rather romantic, don’t they?”

“Yes, indeed,” Gabrielle muttered. But she’d
stopped paying attention.
D’Arros!
Rodrigo and Cullen were
on an island two or three days to the west.

As everyone went in to dinner, Gabrielle was
surging with her discovery. But before she could think of what—if
anything—she might do about it, she saw Hastings look at his watch
again and wander out to the porch. Coming up the lawn, she
recognized three of the island’s more prominent French
planters—Delon, Montand, and DeVille. They surrounded Hastings,
seeming to argue with him, until he capitulated and allowed them to
drag him away. But as he was leaving, she noticed that Hastings
cast a sly glance over his shoulder, like an adolescent sneaking
away from his parents to go mischief-making.

What was he up to? she wondered again. And
decided to follow them and find out.

She was in luck. Wherever the four men were
going, they were traveling on foot, speaking softly and chuckling
in low tones. Even though it was dark, she had to follow some
distance behind so her presence wouldn’t be detected. Once or twice
she was afraid she’d lost them, but she increased her stride and
caught up easily enough.

Less than a mile away, they came to a
plantation she’d once passed and inquired about, only to have her
queries deflected in the most evasive terms. All she knew was that
it was French, owned by the premier French planter, Delon, and
seemed to be shrouded in mystery. No one spoke openly of it, and no
lady was ever seen to pay a call.

As they walked past the house toward the
back, she began to hear the faint sounds of drumming in the
distance. She followed them through a grove of coconut trees. Soon
a bonfire in the distance lit the way. As she came closer, she
witnessed a horrifying sight. A black slave girl was tied
spread-eagle to a whipping post, completely naked, her dark skin
gleaming like molten chocolate in the glare of the firelight. An
African man, naked as well, had her anchored with his hands cupping
her buttocks, and was slamming into her mercilessly while she cried
out her agony into the night.

Lounging in the surrounding grasses of the
steamy night were a group of men she recognized as French planters,
smoking opium from long pipes, looking glassy-eyed and dreamy as
they watched the proceedings. Slave women were gathered round,
their sleek, naked bodies available to the wandering hands of the
men. One woman knelt beside one of the planters, parting his
tailored trousers and servicing him with her mouth. Distractedly,
his hand went to the back of her head, petting her like a
kitten.

“What’s afoot?” Hastings asked, his gaze
settling on the woman being raped before their eyes.

“Oh, she wouldn’t cooperate,” one of them
explained, reaching over to take the smoking pipe. He shrugged
philosophically. “What can I say? She’s new and inexperienced. But
no matter—she’ll learn. By the end of the night, we’ll all have had
her, and she’ll be better acquainted with her duties, eh?”