Trade Wind (21 page)

But it was a point that Clayton refused to see, and Uncle Nathaniel and Aunt Abigail, entering the drawing-room some five minutes later, had taken his part:

“The man Frost,” said Uncle Nathaniel, summing up, “is, as you have already been told, just a low-down rascal, and I guess every Consul in the place has had to fight against his pernicious influence with the Sultan. I’m telling you straight. Hero, that even sending along Selim with a message of thanks went mighty hard against the grain, yet I did it—for precisely the reason that you keep urging on me. Because I will not give a white-trash slaver any excuse to accuse me of discourtesy. But I’m not going to meet him or have him enter this house, or allow any relative of mine to put a foot inside his. Nor will I, by putting my thanks on paper, provide him with written proof that you have spent ten days unchaperoned on board his ship, which he might well use one day to blackmail you with. You will have no more to do with him, and that’s an order!”

“But Uncle Nat—”

“That’s enough, Hero. Now let’s go eat, and forget about all this.”

11

There had been a great many callers at the Consulate on the day of the
Norah Crayne
’s departure, for the dramatic story of young Miss Hollis’s return from the dead had spread rapidly, and the European community, who barely a week ago had left cards of condolence, were now hastening to present their congratulations and meet the heroine of the drama. But Aunt Abby had no intention of presenting her niece until those disfiguring bruises had faded, and she had been adamant. Dear Hero, she informed them, was still feeling very shaken, and Dr Kealey had advised that she should rest as much as possible, and on no account be permitted to discuss her terrifying ordeal, since to do so would only distress her and retard her recovery.

The callers had had to be content with a colourless account of the rescue, in which the
Daffodil
played substitute for the
Virago
, and when Dr Kealey, the Medical Officer attached to the British Consulate, had been interrogated by half-a-dozen interested matrons, he had been unable to add anything to the story.

Lieutenant Larrimore had proved equally uncommunicative (though in his case reticence had been misconstrued as modesty), while as for Hero herself, she possessed sufficient vanity to fall in with her aunt’s wishes and remain
incommunicado
until the interest died down and her bruises with it. This might entail several days of enforced seclusion, but would at least give her plenty of time in which to find some way of escaping unobserved from the Consulate in order to pay a courtesy call upon Captain Emory Frost. For if the Consul imagined that subject to be closed, he did not know his niece! Hero had no intention of being dictated to on a matter that she conceived to be a personal point of honour, and she had made up her mind that if neither Clayton nor Uncle Nat would oblige her by squaring her account with the
Virago
’s Captain, she must do so herself.

It had been easy enough to decide on such an action, but putting it into practice had proved unexpectedly difficult, for when she suggested taking a short walk in the evening—bonneted, veiled and unaccompanied so that no one need suspect who she was—she had received a horrified refusal from her aunt. Never, positively
never
! was she to go out alone. She must remember that this was the East and not America, and that many of the natives here were quite uncivilized. Anything might happen. Why, even well-bred Arab women never dreamed of going out by day, and those of the poorer classes kept their faces covered when in the streets.

Uncle Nathaniel had endorsed these strictures: adding that apart from the impropriety of such an action, there were grave risks attached to walking alone in Zanzibar city, for the late Sultan had signed a treaty that had led to the freeing of a considerable number of slaves, with results that had not been visualized by the well-meaning Western philanthropists whose efforts had brought it about. The freed slaves had been turned adrift by men who could not afford to pay them wages as well as keep, and now the town was awash with homeless negroes, unemployed and rapidly becoming unemployable, whose only means of livelihood was begging or theft.

“Mind you, I’m not defending the old system,” said Uncle Nat. “There can be no defence of slavery. But people should have been able to figure out a less cruel way of ending it I sometimes feel it’s a pity that some of those talkative and charitable folk back home can’t come out here and see what their abstract philanthropy has led to.”

“But it is a beginning,” urged Hero, “and surely that’s better than nothing? Though I do think that the owners should have been forced to keep them.”

“As slaves?”

“No, of course not. As properly paid servants.”

“Can’t have it both ways,” said Uncle Nat, snipping off the end of a fresh cigar. “Folk in this part of the world can’t see anything wrong in slavery. I guess it’s been going on ever since the sons of Noah divided up the world after the Flood, and by now it seems as natural to them as breathing. They just can’t understand why anyone should want to stop it, and the Sultan himself couldn’t make them free their slaves and at the same time house and feed them.”

“But if there was work for them before,” persisted Hero, “it must still need doing, and people would surely pay to have it done?”

“It’s not as simple as that. When it was only a matter of feeding and housing his labour, a man could afford to keep a large number of slaves: they added to his prestige and he very seldom overworked them or turned them off in their old age. But as soon as he had to pay them he found that five hired hands, working for a wage, could easily do what twenty-five slaves had previously parcelled out between them. That’s why only the strongest and best get hired now, while the rest are turned off—and turned out. They are becoming a mighty serious problem, and no one is really safe on the streets: certainly not a lone white woman walking round town unattended!”

This was a situation that had never even occurred to Hero. And the obstacle it presented was not the only one, for the Arabic and Swahili of which she had been so proud turned out to be largely unintelligible to her uncle’s servants. They listened to her with polite, expectant smiles and nodded their heads (which she had at first taken for assent, not realizing that in general it signified the reverse), and it was soon clear that the languages she had so painstakingly acquired in Boston differed as widely from the real thing as Miss Penbury’s French differed from that spoken by Monsieur Jules Dubail.

Without a working knowledge of one of the local tongues, and some knowledge of the town. Hero did not see how she was to find her way to Captain Frost’s house. But these last two problems were speedily solved, for Aunt Abby had engaged a personal maid for her, Fattûma, who not only spoke and understood English, but was familiar with every street, lane and alleyway in the city.

Questioned by her new mistress, Fattûma assured Hero that the house occupied by the Captain and several members of the
Virago
’s crew was well known and lay in one of the quieter streets near the edge of the town, less than a quarter of a mile from the Consulate. It was known locally as ‘The Dolphins’ House’—taking its name from a frieze of those creatures carved above the door—and could be easily identified because it faced an ancient graveyard; a small private burial ground, much overgrown by trees, where half-a-dozen broken tombstones were said to mark the graves of a Portuguese Admiral and his Arab wives.

The only question that remained was how to get there, and though this should have been the easiest part of it, it proved the hardest. For though the European community in Zanzibar made it a custom to stroll or ride upon the open
maidan
in the cool of the evening. Aunt Abby was certainly not going to permit her niece to join such promenades until the damage to her looks had been repaired, and Hero found herself virtually a prisoner, with her walks restricted to the Consulate garden. A situation that in the circumstances she found distinctly frustrating.

The garden was not a large one, but it was cool and shady. A stone-flagged terrace, on to which the doors and french windows of die ground-floor rooms opened, was made colourful by jars filled with flowering shrubs, and a short flight of steps led down from it to a formal pattern of little paths bisecting the equally formal flowerbeds which centred on a small pool sprinkled with lily-pads. Frangipani and jasmine scented the air, there were pomegranates, jacarandas, a palm and a feathery pepper tree, and, at the far end of the garden, a cluster of orange trees that concealed a thatched summer-house, a fitter of flower-pots and watering-cans, and a small iron-barred door that was used only by the gardeners and the night-watchman.

An old, high and solid wall enclosed the whole, and from the far side of it rose the noise and clamour of Zanzibar: the cries of coconut-sellers and vendors of fruit and water, the creak of
homali
carts, the shrill voices of children, a babel of tongues gossiping, quarrelling, cursing, laughing; the twang of zithers and the thump of drums, the braying of donkeys and the bark of pariah dogs. But inside the wall the scent of flowers and the green shade of trees gave an illusion of quiet, and it was as though the garden was some small enclosed backwater beside a rushing river.

At any other time such an atmosphere might have seemed soothing and pleasant to Hero. But now she found it exasperating to stroll gently along garden paths when she wished to go out into the city and look for a house with dolphins carved above its door. She was unused to being thwarted, and the whole situation had begun to irk her abominably, because she could not feel free to embark upon any campaign against slave trading in Zanzibar until she had paid her promised debt to one shameless trader. Once that was done and the slate clean, she need have no qualms about doing all that was possible to have him outlawed from the Island. But until then she felt as though her hands were tied, and she she did not relish the feeling. There
must
be some way of getting out of the house unseen and without her relations.

Three days later, in the dullest hour of the day, a solution to that problem suddenly presented itself…

The long hot gap between noon and the hour when the air cooled toward sundown was occupied by a siesta: a custom which appeared common to all Zanzibar, and seemed a scandalous waste of time to Miss Hollis, who could not understand how white people could let themselves become so sunk in sloth as to sleep away the greater part of each day. On this afternoon, as usual, the voices and the busy clatter of the morning had died down to a drowsy murmur no louder than the sound of distant surf, and even the crows and the pariah dogs appeared to have fallen asleep. And once again a suffocating feeling of frustration pressed upon Hero like a tangible weight: the whole situation was ridiculous, and in her present position she was not much better off than those unfortunate Arab women who lived penned up in harems and were only allowed out cloaked and veiled and—

Why, that’s it!
thought Hero.
Of course that’s it! Why ever didn’t I think of it before
?

She sprang up from the bed, and in the next instant was across the room and ringing the small brass hand bell for Fattûma.

That same evening Uncle Nat and Clayton were engaged to visit an influential landowner who lived some few miles outside the city on the east coast of the island. As his estate could be reached more easily by sea they were taking a boat, and it had been decided that Aunt Abby, Hero and Cressy should accompany them for the sail: the ladies to remain on board during the call, which might be expected to last for at least an hour. It was to have been Hero’s first outing, and she regretted having to miss it, but the opportunity it offered her was far too good to be wasted.

She consoled herself with the reflection that duty should come before pleasure, and when Cressy came to rouse her from the afternoon siesta she pleaded a headache and urged that the expedition should not be cancelled on her account, but that she might be left to sleep. Fattûma, said Hero, would look after her, and there was not the least need for either Aunt Abby or Cressy to remain in the house. In fact if they meant to forgo their evening outing on her behalf they would only succeed in making her feel sadly upset.

It was this last observation that had persuaded them to leave her, and the rest had been simple. Ten minutes after their departure Hero was safely in the summer-house and being robed by the resourceful Fattûma in a
schele
, the street garb of an Arab woman. A shapeless black garment that covered her from head to foot and left only a narrow, heavily fringed slit for her eyes.

Worn over her own dress it proved stiflingly hot, but she could not very well appear before Captain Frost in her petticoat It was bad enough to have to remove her hoops, for she would naturally have preferred to look dignified and well dressed on such an occasion. But that could not be helped, and Hero Athena had never been one to cry over spilt milk or allow trifles to obstruct her. If this was the only way in which she could pay a personal call upon Captain Frost to thank him—and thereby prove him wrong—then it would have to be taken.

She removed her shoes, and exchanging them for a pair of heelless curl-toed slippers that Fattûma had provided, shuffled after her maid through the grass and the fallen leaves to the door in the garden wall. The hinges squeaked as Fattûma eased it open, but there was no one at hand to hear or see the two women slip out into the hot dust of a narrow, evil-smelling lane, closing the door cautiously behind them.

The air inside the garden had been sweet with the scent of flowering trees and cool from the newly watered earth, but once outside, the heat and stench of the city met them like a waft from a burning rubbish dump. Fattûma glanced anxiously about her, but except for a gaunt pariah dog nosing at a Utter of decaying refuse the lane was deserted, and she turned down it and led the way at a brisk pace for some fifty yards to where a sharp turn brought them into a busy street frill of cobblers’ shops.