Mistress of Darkness (20 page)

He did not suppose she required an answer, and in any event, Augustus the butler was placing avocado halves in front of them. Georgiana's sister. But could anyone be less like that bundle of lascivious evil than this cool woman, who lived in these unexciting surroundings, married to a man twice her age and fitting herself to his life exactly?

And she was his gaoler. He must not forget that.

'Six barrels of wine. Four sides of salted pork. Twelve boxes of cheese. That seems to be the sum of it.' Dirk Huys scratched his ear with his pencil. 'Oh, and that perfume. General Dalling likes his ladies to smell sweet and he has enough of them.'

The Negroes loaded the last of the boxes on to the cart, and Matt ticked them off on his pad. And wiped sweat from his neck. But the sun was at last starting to droop towards the west and the heat to leave the day. Another day, soon to be followed by another night. Why, in a few days it would be Christmas. And what would happen then? They would sit clown to dinner, and drink more wine than usual, and after dinner some of Dirk's friends would come in for punch -men friends only, for punch - while Suzanne would retire to her sewing, and Matt ... Matt would be invited to join the men. Dirk was scrupulous about treating him as a member of the family. But Matt would decline. Supposing Matt were still here.

He waited for the signal. But Dirk must walk slowly round and round the cart, checking and rechecking the goods. He was a careful man, which no doubt accounted for his prosperity. And now at last he was nodding. ' 'Tis the official sloop, Matt.' He grinned at the boy. 'A sorry world, would you not say, where the Governor of Jamaica himself plays his part in smuggling his requirements. Ah, well, I am off up the hill. We'll expect you in an hour.' He went for his horse, while his Negro foreman began shutting up the warehouse. Matt nodded to the driver, and the mule was given a crack of the whip; slowly the cart rumbled down the road towards the docks, Matt walking behind.

Even at dusk the harbour was as busy as ever. It was impossible to imagine the waterfront of Orange Town as other than busy, an ant heap of anxious prosperity. And General Dalling's jolly-boat was waiting alongside the dock, with Plummer the first mate impatiently flicking his leg with his stick. 'Haste, Mr. Hilton,' he shouted. 'Haste. This wind will not stay east forever.'

'You'd not spoil his excellency's wine, now would you? Or his perfume.' Matt nodded to the driver, who began to unload, with the help of the seamen.

Plummer strolled across. 'You've a manifest?'

'All checked. Have you ever found any shortages from Huys?

'No. That's true enough.' Plummer squinted at the carefully formed letters; he was a seaman rather than a clerk, and did not find reading a simple matter.

Matt lowered his voice. 'And what have you for me, Mr. Plummer?'

The mate sighed, still pretending to read. 'No cheer, Mr. Hilton. No cheer. My captain bids you be patient.'

'Be patient?' Matt cried, and glanced at the Negro. Then dropped his voice again. 'He wants more money, no doubt.'

'Well, sir,' Plummer said, 'of that I cannot say. It would have to be a great deal to make him risk Mr. Hilton's wrath. It would certainly cost him his position. And me mine, no doubt; your cousin plays at cards with the Governor every Saturday night.'

'And who would know it was you?' Matt demanded. 'I am not asking you to anchor in Charleston Road. I am but asking you to find yourself within a mile of the beach. I can swim.'

'And no doubt you are too tough for the sharks, Mr. Hilton,' Plummer said sadly. 'But they would know, sir. As we know you have approached every captain sailing from Statia south or west. Why, sir, your machinations are all the joke on the waterfront.'

Matt flushed. 'And to you as well, I perceive.'

'I am trying to assist you, sir,' Plummer insisted. 'You are too hasty about the matter. My advice to you would be to pretend to abandon all idea of leaving Statia. Set to with a will to play your part with Huys. Pretend to like the place. Pretend to have no more desire to leave. Only that way will you make them lose interest in keeping you here. And then, who knows, it may be possible for us to assist you.'

'And how long, do you think, will that take?' Matt inquired sarcastically.

Plummer shrugged. 'Who knows, Mr. Hilton. Perhaps if you were to give it a month or two ...'

Matt turned away in disgust. A month or two. That would be February. Caiman had estimated that Gislane would scarce arrive in Nevis before then, so he was really losing no time by taking Plummer's advice. He could not assist her while she was in mid-ocean. It was the inactivity, the fact that he was living here, in total comfort and even some luxury, while she ... but his imagination could not frame the necessary pictures. He had too little experience of men and the world. He had seen female slaves ill-treated as a boy, and had thought nothing of it. The idea of Gislane being submitted to the lash was inconceivable, and like to drive him mad. But what about the alternatives?

Matt stamped up the steps, discovered Suzanne and Dirk seated in their rocking chairs on the verandah, sipping punch.

'You look hot and careworn,' Suzanne said with her usual gentle smile. 'Augustus, fetch some punch for Mr. Hilton.'

'And are the goods delivered?' Dirk asked.

Matt nodded, and sat down with a sigh, fanning himself with his hat, watching the sun sinking into the ocean, beyond the ships, listening to the buzz of the insects rising out of the garden.

'And was Mr. Plummer no more co-operative than everyone else?' Dirk asked, and burst into a roar of laughter as Matt's head turned sharply. 'Do you not think we are well aware of your scheming, boy? By Christ, you have made it necessary for me to have a word, personally, with every master who visits Orange Town. Oh, you are a deal of trouble. But surely now you will give it a rest.'

Augustus stood at his elbow with a tray, but Matt ignored him. 'You have known?'

Dirk gave another guffaw of laughter. 'Do you take us for

fools? But what was I to do? Load irons on your ankles? You know, Robert might have done that. I believe in promoting just sufficient force to achieve the object. In your case, why, none was necessary. I had but to sit back and allow you to exhaust every possibility of escaping Statia. And I think you have done so. I trust you will now allow yourself to enjoy life to a certain extent.'

Matt stared at him, and then glanced at Suzanne, who flushed. 'Dirk has always possessed a direct manner, Matt. Yet is he right.' She reached across to take his hand. 'It has been most difficult for us, to watch you consuming yourself with misdirected energy. You fell in love with a face, a smile, a voice, perhaps. Many a young man has done that, Matt, and lived to rejoice that fate intervened to save him from the consequences of his own folly, however miserable it may have left him at the time.'

Her fingers rested on top of his, and he looked down at them. And what of you, sweet Sue, he wanted to ask. Did fate intervene to save you from lying nightly beneath this great oaf, as Georgiana so aptly put it, and as the evidence of my own ears testifies? Is that the best fate, in her wisdom, has to offer?

But he was, indeed, learning to dissemble. He slipped his hand from beneath hers and stood up. 'I feel like a small boy caught with his fingers in the jam jar.'

Dirk guffawed, yet again. 'An apt simile, by Christ.'

'Therefore must I be punished,' Matt said. ‘I will retire without supper.'

'Oh, Matt,' Suzanne said. 'Don't be absurd. We are not here to punish you. Only to prevent you ...' she hesitated, glancing at her husband, 'making a mistake.'

'You would, I think, have preferred to say, making a fool of myself,' Matt said gently. 'In truth, it seems that I have been making a fool of myself, in my frantic approaches to all and sundry, without realizing that they listened only to you, Dirk. And to the far reaching insistence of Robert. So I am ashamed, and have lost my appetite. As you say, by tomorrow I shall have recovered. I will bid you good night.'

'Matt ...' Suzanne began, but Dirk silenced her with a shake of his head. Matt climbed the stairs to his bedroom, stripped off his clothes and crawled beneath the mosquito netting. He lay on his back and stared at the white mound which hung above him, listened to the ceasless buzz of the frustrated insects seeking a way through the restricting gauze, absently brushed trickles of sweat from his neck. How they must have laughed, at his futile, frantic endeavours this past month. How they must be laughing, now, at his equally futile anger, which had done no more than deprive him of his supper.

Did they laugh? He frowned into the darkness. Dirk laughed, certainly. Constantly and vigorously. He could not say the same for Suzanne. She smiled and endeavoured to maintain an atmosphere of tranquillity in her home. No doubt this was what Dirk wanted. But shedid not laugh. She does not love him, Georgiana had said. Well, no doubt Georgiana was right. Yet had she accepted her position as his wife with resignation. And regardless of what she was as a wife, she was Robert Hilton's eldest sister as a woman. There was the sum of her character. Her sympathy could be no more than pretended.

As if she, or Dirk, mattered. He had indeed been foolish. Of course Robert would have issued instructions that every shipmaster must be warned off carrying Matt; there was the power of the Hilton name, which could rob a man of his command, of his very livelihood, if driven to it. There had been his mistake, a mistake of youth, of inexperience. Nevis, and Gislane, were not be gained that easily.

But there were men on Statia who had no position, no commands to lose. Who could only gain, from accommodating the Hilton heir. There were Negro fishermen, who put to sea in the small hours of the morning, and returned at noon to sell their catches. No one knew, or cared, where they went at dawn. So perhaps Nevis was a long carry for an open fishing boat. But they could set him ashore on St. Kitts, only a few miles to the south. Thence he could walk to Basseterre, and find another fisherman to ferry him across the Narrows.

There was his course of action. He felt almost contented, and only a little impatient. As from tomorrow he would seek his freedom in a more subtle manner, and match the patient secrecy of his captors. And this time he would succeed.

But now he regretted having forgone his supper. He lay in the overheated bed, listening to the rumblings of his belly, and listening too, to other sounds. Sounds to which he had become used, which roused his manhood as they revolted his imagination. Dirk Huys was a vigorous animal, married to a young and beautiful wife; he had to be very drunk not to seek to renew his physical devotion in the room beyond the partition, with grunts and sighs, and murmured caresses. He called her his poppet, and the bed creaked as he heaved his weight about, and no doubt hers as well. Yet she uttered not a sound. At least, not a sound that Matt could interpret, and the odd whisper which reached his room might as easily have been uttered by Dirk as by her. But she submitted, no doubt, time and time again. And the thought of it made him sweat. With desire, for Sue? How could it be otherwise. But it was a strange, perverse sort of desire, compounded of the knowledge that she lay, only a thin wall away, naked in the arms of another man. He had only Georgiana's word for it that she was a reluctant lover, and even had she been, in the beginning, no more than a reluctant lover, she had now been married three years, and had certainly become reconciled to her fate. And perhaps more than reconciled.

And perhaps she was silent merely because she knew he could hear and would be listening, and knew too that she must meet him in the morning, and smile at him in that reassuring fashion, her face unmarked by passion, even if her body still retained the bruises caused by Dirk's fingers. Another reason for escaping this place, lest he go mad with confused emotion, lest the purity of his determination to regain Gislane, to live with her in honour and in love, become diluted with the ambition only to achieve woman.

'Man, Mr. Hilton,' Lancelot said, 'you know we can't do that.'

Matt's horse pawed the sand, and he, himself, felt like stamping, to relieve his angry frustration. 'I am offering you all I possess,' he explained. 'At this moment. But in the years to come I will have more money than you can ever have dreamed of. And where is the risk to you? You take your boat farther afield than that.' From the beach, St. Kitts looked no farther than a stone's throw. Close enough, indeed, to be reached by swimming. But he knew better. It was several miles of open sea, with a fierce current boiling between the islands and sufficient sharks and barracuda to bring him down before he was a hundred yards from the shore.

Lancelot removed his battered straw hat and scratched his head. He was the recognized king of the Statia fishing fleet, his black face gnarled by years of sea breeze and flying spray. Matt had not meant to begin with him, but none of
the
others would contemplate taking him to St. Kitts; it had to be Lancelot, or it would be no one. And now, he was realizing, it would be no one. Statia was too small, and the combination of Robert Hilton's name, even in a Dutch island, and Dirk's physical presence, was too all pervading.

'Man, Mr. Hilton,' Lancelot attempted to explain. 'Man ...'

Matt wheeled his horse, walked it up the gully between the cliffs, leaving the beach and the sea behind. And Gislane, yet again. It was February, and by now no doubt she had arrived, beaten and outraged, but still waiting, and praying, for him to come to her. What would she think of him, of all mankind, of all white mankind, certainly. And to suppose that she might be twenty miles away, and he unable to reach her, was next to unbearable. Well, then, he possessed his last resource. He did not know enough about the sea and even the fishing boats generally required a crew of at least three. But if he had to, he would manage on his own. Certainly navigation should prove no problem, and with the wind steadily from the east he should make good progress. And become a pirate, as well as a vagabond.