Trade Wind (88 page)

She had reached, without knowing it, a crossroads that was to decide not only her whole life, but the kind of woman she would become, and Clayton had only to indicate a path for her to have taken. Having taken it she would have held to it, and urged forward by her own self-distrust, become in time all that her class and her century, and Clayton Mayo, expected of a Victorian wife. Biddable, decorous, and well-conducted; agreeing dutifully with her husband’s opinions and turning a blind eye to his failings; keeping his house, submitting to his demands and bearing his children. And confining her philanthropic activities to modest donations and a helping hand at Church Bazaars and local charities.

But Clayton was in no mood to sympathize over the tragic ending of an episode that he considered ill-judged, undignified, and personally humiliating to himself. He did not recognize either the signs or the issues involved, and so missed his opportunity.

“I am sorry that you should feel upset,” said Clayton, “but there was no necessity for you to offer your assistance in the first place. You haven’t done a mite of good and merely made yourself and us unhappy. Another time maybe you’ll take the advice of those who have your best interests at heart.”

He kissed her cheek in a perfunctory manner, and Hero flinched under the casual possessiveness of that cold caress and felt something die in her.
This is how it will be for the rest of my life
, she thought; and turned and went up to her own room, where she lay on her bed for a long time, wishing that she could cry and finding that she could not. She felt nothing any more for Clay, but she would have to marry him and spend the rest of her life in his company; meekly accepting his strictures or his caresses, permitting him the management of her fortune, and feeling as she felt now—as though it was she and not the child in The Dolphins’ House who was dead.

For a moment she could almost envy that child and its mother, because they were finished with all problems and at peace. To have to go on, hurt and disillusioned, schooling oneself to resignation and acceptance and becoming in time a mere automaton, seemed a harder fate than Zorah’s. And there was another problem too that might soon have to be faced. It was now more than two months since she had ridden away from The House of Shade in the mist of a rain-swept evening, but she did not know enough to be sure yet; only afraid.

She wished there was someone she could talk to about that, and regretted that she had not forced herself to question Aunt Abby while she had the chance. But it was too late for that now, and there was no one else with whom it could be discussed. Certainly not with Olivia, who would be delightfully shocked and deeply sympathetic, and would talk. Or Millicent Kealey, who was Aunt Abby’s friend, but who was so middle-aged and dull and so primly and chillingly British. Or even Dr Kealey, who had been so kind, but still remained a man and a stranger. If only things had been different between herself and Clay…If Clay had been what she had once imagined him to be she might have been able to talk to him. But that was no longer possible, and there was nothing that she could do except wait.

The days that followed her return to the Consulate were the longest in Hero’s life, and looking back on them she was always to remember them as an interminable stretch of time, and to imagine that they must have covered several months rather than a mere two weeks.

Uncle Nat had decreed that she was not to put a foot outside the Consulate, and reinforced his command by placing a guard upon every exit, and extra locks, to which he had the keys, on the garden gate. He had, he said, no intention of allowing his niece to indulge in any further distasteful shenanigans, and meant to see that for the remainder of her stay she behaved herself in a seemly manner, and did not again scandalize the community and bring disgrace upon himself by getting into some new and unsavoury scrape.

Hero showed no tendency to disoblige him, but her white face and listless manner began to disturb Nathaniel, and there were times when he could almost have wished to see her show a flash of her former spirits. He could not help feeling sorry for her, because he supposed that heredity had a great deal to do with it—Harriet’s tiresome passion for Reform, and his brother Barclay’s eccentric views. And after all, twenty-two was no great age: she was still very young and she had of late endured enough harrowing experiences to turn the brain of many an older woman. He could only hope that her pallor and that uncharacteristic apathy were not due to something more than sorrow at the death of a half-caste child. If they were, it was a damnable situation, and one that did not bear thinking of.

Hero too avoided thinking of it. Though it was difficult not to do so in the long, aimless days when there was nothing to do but sit idle, pretending to read or sew and listening to the rain dripping from the gutters, the wet palms rustling in the wind and the surf booming endlessly on the coral beaches. She would push the thought away from her, closing her mind against it as though she were shutting one of the books that she held in her hands and did not read; but odd splinters and fragments of memory escaped to torment her—

‘By God! we’ve caught a mermaid!’…‘You disapprove of slavers, don’t you?’…‘Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end. Methinks it is no journey!’…‘Poor Miss Hollis! that’s what you get for being innocent and credulous!’…‘I never play fair.’…‘Goodbye, my lovely Galatea.
’ A white pigeon cooing on a window-sill. The scent of sun-warmed flowers below a balcony. Fireflies in the garden of The House of Shade, and a man’s hands—thin and brown and very sure. A man’s hard body—How could you hate someone so bitterly and yet remember that with a shiver that was not hatred at all?
‘It’s nice to know that you are unlikely to forget me
…’

Neither Clayton nor her uncle discussed the course of the epidemic before Hero, and though Fattûma and the other servants went about with scared faces they rarely spoke of what was happening in the city, and Hero did not ask.

Dr Kealey had not been to see her, for he was too busy to spare any time for visits of a purely social nature, and though Mrs Kealey had fully intended to do so, she had contracted a bad head cold, which allied to a sore throat and severe prickly-heat had prevented her for the moment from doing more than send a friendly letter and a bunch of flowers. But Olivia Credwell came whenever possible, and it was she who brought Hero the news of the city and provided the only break in the heat and the rain and the crawling hours.

“Oh, Hero, the children!” cried Olivia, arriving damp and distressed on a wet afternoon. “They are by far the worst part of it all! Not the ones who die of the cholera, though there are enough of those, poor little things, but the ones whose parents have died and who have no one to look after them, and are just left to wander about the streets eating rubbish out of the gutters, or just die because there is no one to feed them. And the dogs! you’ve no
idea
how terrifying! Hubert says it is eating human flesh that’s making them so fierce. They’re like wolves, and they snatch children right out of the houses at night—live children! Oh, if only there was something that one could
do
. It’s so terrible not to be able to do anything, but how can one? I send the servants out with food, but I’m beginning to think that they sell it, and Hubert refuses to let me give it out myself because he says…Well, I suppose he is right, but…”

Her tales of what was happening in the city had roused Hero into asking her uncle if it would not be possible to open a soup kitchen somewhere in the town, or take some of the abandoned children into the Consulate. But Uncle Nat told her that both projects were impossible.

“You just don’t understand the extent of the crisis,” said Uncle Nat. “A big crowd of people milling about a soup kitchen would only help to breed the cholera faster than it’s breeding right now. Crowds are a danger, because it’s where folk are packed together that it’s hitting worst. You’d kill a mighty lot more people that way than you’d save. And as for turning this house into an orphanage, the servants would light out at once. They’re scared enough as it is.”

“But—but surely one ought to do
something
, uncle Nat?”

“Now see here, just you keep right out of this. Hero!” warned Clayton peremptorily, scenting danger. “There’s nothing you or anyone can do about it—except to see that you don’t fall sick yourself!”

His stepfather gave him a reproving frown and said soothingly: “Everything that can be done is being done, my dear. There are a whole heap of charitable folk in this town, and people are helping each other all they can. You can be sure of that.”

“I suppose so,” said Hero listlessly, and lapsed into silence.

She talked very little these days, confining herself to a few empty generalities and replying politely, though absently, to any direct question, as though her mind were not on what she was saying. Her uncle was profoundly relieved when she did not pursue the subject, since it was not one that he cared to discuss, for the plight of the stricken city appalled him. It harassed his waking hours and haunted his sleep, and the fact that he could do little or nothing to alleviate it gave him a suffocating feeling of helplessness; as though he were the victim of a nightmare, bound hand and foot and compelled to watch while men and women drowned before his eyes.

He could not even send for help, because there was no one to send. And in a part of the world where communications were still slow and uncertain, the worst would be over long before any reply to an appeal could be received, even had there been anyone to take it. Young Larrimore had promised to do all that he could, but Zanzibar was only one small speck on the map, and half Africa was being ravaged by this same plague. It was unlikely that any form of help would or could be sent, and the Consul gave liberally to a fund for the relief of the destitute, and was grateful that his niece refrained from discussing the appalling tragedy that was taking place within a stone’s-throw of his house. He had not expected it of her.

But if it surprised him that after the to-do she had made over one sick child she should show so little concern over the death of thousands, it did not surprise his step-son. Hero’s lack of interest in the fate of the city seemed to Clay a clear indication that she had at last received a salutary lesson, and been brought to realize the unwisdom of interfering in matters that were not her concern.

He was sorry that the child should have died, but if the sight of sickness and death, and a close experience of the insanitary, hugger-mugger and probably immoral existence of a native household had shocked his betrothed out of any further desire to pose as an Angel of Mercy, he could only be deeply thankful. She would in any case have had to give up these tiresome ideas once they were married, since he had no intention of permitting his wife to follow in the footsteps of her mother, Harriet, who from all accounts had been a most fatiguing woman. It was therefore just as well that Hero should have abandoned them of her own accord, instead of putting him to the trouble of seeing that she did so.

She was certainly now showing every sign of becoming quieter and more tractable, thought Clay, so perhaps even that shocking abduction would prove in the end to have had its uses, in that it would not only give him a hold over her, but provide him with an effective answer to any future criticism of his own behaviour. There could not be many men who would be willing to accept the leavings of a profligate slave trader and risk lending their name to a bastard, and Hero could not fail to be properly grateful for such magnanimity; or to repay it by studying to become an uncritical and accommodating wife!

I always figured that what she needed was a real hard shock and a bit of brutal handling to bring her down a peg and put a stop to all that goddamned self-opinionated bunkum
, thought Clay. It was, of course, a pity she had to get it that way. But then no one back home would ever know, and she would never be able to run tattling to her folk and making trouble for him every time he stepped out of line. It could, in fact, have been worse. A whole heap worse.

There had been a break in the rains and for a week the skies were clear and the temperature rose steadily, and Dr Kealey sent medicated pastilles to be burned in every room as a protection against infection. Their suffocating incense-like odour made the hot rooms seem hotter, and Hero gasped for air and took to spending the greater part of the day supine on her bed dressed in nothing but a thin cotton wrapper, and only appearing downstairs after the sun had set and it was possible to walk in the garden.

But even the heavy scent of the flowers was mingled now with something less pleasant and as yet unidentifiable, and the garden seemed little cooler than the house and almost as airless and enclosed. She could not go outside it because the gate was double locked; and even if it had not been she no longer had any desire to do so, or any curiosity as to what went on behind the high wall that protected it from the city. She was conscious of only one desire, and that was to be left alone to brood over her inadequacies and readjust herself to life and the fact that the future was not going to be in the least as she had planned it, because she herself was not the clear-sighted, capable and uncompromising person she had always considered herself to be, but fallible and inadequate, and humiliatingly feminine.

It was a depressing prospect, and after a time she found that she could contemplate it no longer and that it was simpler to retreat into a hazy half-world where only the heat and her headaches were real, and yesterday and tomorrow of no importance. But though Clayton and her uncle were profoundly relieved by her lack of interest in the progress of the epidemic, and only too willing to respect her desire for solitude, Olivia was not.

Olivia conceived it her duty to prevent dear Hero from “falling into a decline’, and was sure that such a public-spirited girl could not fail to be interested in the affairs of the unhappy city and as harrowed by them as she herself was. The fact that Hero paid little or no attention to her conversation, replying, if at all, in colourless monosyllables, did not alter her opinion or deter her from calling again, and it was, in the end, a remark of Olivia’s that roused Hero from her morbid apathy and once again led her to behave in a manner that both her uncle and her betrothed had optimistically believed to be a thing of the past.