The White Pearl (34 page)

‘What?’

Kitty flicked her gaze over him from head to foot, frowned and then stuck a finger in one of the holes in his shirtsleeve
and tore it so that it flapped loose and forlorn.

‘You’re certainly dirty enough,’ she decided. ‘Like a bloody chimney sweep.’ Nevertheless, she rubbed more earth through his
hair and snapped off a couple of shirt buttons. Satisfied, she nodded. ‘What about me?’

Madoc inspected her filth and sweat, the hunger in her eyes and the way the wind off the sea was whipping her wild grey mane
into a frenzy. He smiled.

‘Kitty, you are perfect.’

*

It was a strange little group, Madoc noted as he and Kitty approached. Eight of them: three men, two women, two natives plus
a boy. And a dog. Seemingly all marooned by the storm on this slender spit of land between the sea and a small horseshoe bay
at the mouth of the creek. Behind them the waves crashed against the mangroves with ferocious determination, trying to tear
their long grey limbs apart. The noise of it was a constant roar in the background. This side of the spit, the water swirled
in and out of the sinuous roots as though in search of their weak spot. Madoc wondered how long it would take him to find
the weak spot of this group.

It was the dog that spotted them first as they walked forward. It raced towards them, a high-speed black torpedo, barking
a warning, but then it stopped short ten feet from them, stiff-legged and teeth bared.

‘Hello, boy,’ Madoc said, and held out his hand with a grub on it, but the animal wasn’t having any of it.

It growled. Madoc halted. He wasn’t comfortable around dogs.

Kitty advanced towards it with a cheery, ‘Piss off, mutt!’ She gave it a tweak of its ears that made its tongue sneak out
and lick her hand. ‘Bloody useless guard dog you are,’ she scolded, and the dog hurtled around her heels.

‘Hello there!’ Madoc raised a hand as he called out to the man approaching them across the ribbon of white sand.

He recognised the type, even from thirty paces away. He’d crossed paths with them all his life. The arrogant set of the shoulders,
the clean-shaven chin held a fraction higher than was natural, so that he could stare down his nose. The crisp cut of his
cream flannels, ready to stride out for a game of cricket at a moment’s notice even in the middle of the bloody jungle. The
Panama hat at an angle that said,
I am better than you
, one of the rulers of the colonial territories. Only the limp betrayed weakness, and fleetingly Madoc wondered how he’d come
by the injury.

‘Hello!’ he called again as he and Kitty closed the gap, but the man didn’t lift his hat to them as courtesy required had
they been equals. He didn’t offer his hand, either.

‘Good God, man! Where the blazes have you come from?’

‘We’ve been escaping through the jungle.’

‘From the Japs,’ Kitty added drily, as though the man were stupid.

‘Are they so close?’ He glanced with alarm at the mass of solid jungle behind them.

‘No, we’ve kept ahead of them. My name is Morgan Madoc and this is my wife, Kitty.’

Madoc watched the man incline his head in polite greeting, as if at a tea party. ‘I am Nigel Hadley.’

‘We need help.’ Madoc spelled it out for him.

In the background, Madoc spotted a couple of the others detach themselves from the group and approach, a tall man with his
arm in a sling accompanied by a slender woman with blond hair and an energetic way of walking – unlike most women of her class,
who never deigned to move faster than a bored snail.

‘Come along,’ Hadley said, ‘come and meet the rest.’

When the man and the blond woman reached them, there was an exchange of ‘Good heavens’ and ‘Bloody hell!’ and ‘Are you all
right?’ All the time Madoc saw the woman’s quick blue eyes skipping between Kitty and himself before settling on Kitty, taking
in the insect bites on her face and the grey lines of exhaustion.

‘You poor thing,’ she said quietly.

She took his wife’s filthy hand and threaded it through her own arm, leading her at a slow, considerate pace over the shifting
sand, ducking her head against the wind. ‘You must be starving,’ she said. ‘Come and have something to eat. Take her other
arm, Johnnie.’ She turned to the cricket man. ‘Nigel, do give Mr Madoc a hand. He looks quite done in.’

Madoc noticed the man she called Nigel give her a long, angry look once her back was turned. So that was how the land lay.
Madoc smiled to himself. Maybe he’d already found the weak spot.

They were trying to fry ham and eggs on the fire, but they were burning them. How could people who could run a bloody empire
not know how to cook eggs?

Madoc sat on the sand drinking tea out of a dainty porcelain cup, and kept a civil tongue in his head. Best to see the lie
of the land first. He didn’t yell at them to put out the fire. He didn’t argue when told the stiff gale would probably blow
itself out overnight. He noted the small breakfast rations handed out to each person, and the way the dark-haired white woman
looked as if she wanted to snatch the plate from his hand. The young kid with eyes as bright as bullets plonked himself down
next to Madoc, clutching a pencil and notebook, and started asking all the
questions that the men, who seemed to have a broom up their arse, were too polite to ask.

‘Did you see any Japanese?’

‘What kind of aeroplane strafed your home? Did it have twin engines?’

‘Did you see any leopards in the jungle?’

‘How did you navigate?’

‘Were there lots of snakes?’

‘What did you eat?’

‘Did you have to swim a river?’

Each answer was jotted down in the notebook. After a long pause, there came a whispered, ‘Were you frightened?’

‘Teddy,’ Constance Hadley chided fondly as she tended Kitty’s infected bites, ‘leave poor Mr Madoc in peace.’

She gave Madoc an apologetic smile, and in that brief moment he was surprised by what he saw in her face. This was not a woman
at peace. This was a woman chafing against something. She reminded him of a magpie with a broken wing he’d once rescued. It
used to wander gracefully around the yard on its slender feet, but all the time it uttered a sharp, choked cry, desperate
to fly.

‘What do you reckon, Madoc?’ Kitty muttered.

‘They won’t leave us stranded here, they’re British,’ he chuckled as he sipped his tea and wished like hell that it had a
splash of something stronger in it. ‘They do the decent thing.’

‘That Henry Court fellow isn’t so keen.’

‘Nor Hadley.’

He eyed the group, who had withdrawn in a huddle to the water’s edge to discuss the situation, leaving Madoc and Kitty seated
beside the fire with the charred food. It was clear that the discussion was heated. Only the native girl stayed away from
it, prowling up and down the spit of land in her sarong like a young jungle cat waiting to sink its claws into something.

‘So what do you reckon?’ Kitty asked again between mouthfuls of egg.

‘Three against two. The kid and the native boy won’t get a vote.’

‘For us or against us?’

He shook his head. ‘It looks like it’s going against us.’

‘Oh, hell!’

‘I think the Flight Lieutenant and Mrs Hadley will vote to take us on board. But the others are scared shitless at the idea
of us contaminating them and overcrowding their precious boat.’

Kitty stirred a piece of ham through the sulphurous smears on her plate. ‘There will be plenty of room for us on deck.’

‘They don’t want us eating their food, either. Did you see the look the dark-haired woman gave your plate?’

‘Bastards.’

As the wind chased the smoke from the fire into their eyes, Kitty gave him a long look. ‘All right, Madoc, what are you looking
so pleased about? You want to sit on this beach until the Japs ride in on their bloody bicycles?’

He leaned his shoulder against hers. ‘Kitty, my sweet, I have hot food in my belly, you safe at my side and we’re about to
sail on a boat that would fetch a pretty penny for someone who knew where to sell her.’

Kitty’s eyes widened. ‘Madoc! Back off. We’re in enough trouble.’

He kissed her dirty cheek and smelled the stale odour of her sweat as he stared out at the sleek yacht, rolling and yawing
as the waves churned beneath her. A male figure that Madoc hadn’t seen before was standing at the rail, and the native kid
was rowing out to him in a small boat.

‘Luscious, ripe and ours for the taking.’

‘Watch yourself, Madoc! Don’t be a bloody fool. We’re not even going to be invited on board.’

He leaned forward, picked up the butt of the cigarette that had been discarded in the sand and lit it from the fire. ‘You
underestimate Mrs Hadley.’

‘What? What do you mean?’

Madoc was always careful of what he said about other women to Kitty. Her tongue could be sharp.

‘Just that she is …’ he hesitated, seeking out the right word, ‘… unfettered.’

‘Rot! All women of her class are in chains. They wear them as naturally as they wear their hats.’

‘Not this one.’ He took a last drag on the cigarette butt and flicked it into the fire. ‘It seems to me that she’s dumped
her chains in the sea. That’s why her husband looks at her as if he’s chewing on a porcupine.’

For a long while Kitty said nothing, just stared into the flames while the wind snatched at her hair and threw small whirlwinds
of sand at her.
The growl of the breakers masked the voices of the group at the water’s edge, and Madoc felt the familiar sensation of a bubble
expanding in his chest until it was almost painful. The nerves of his fingertips and the soles of his feet started to dance
and prickle. A sure sign: the game was on. Winner takes all. His hand slid down to his pack and fingered the Russian pistol
inside it.

Suddenly Kitty started to laugh, and the tense hunch of her shoulders vanished. She sat up straight and skimmed Mrs Hadley’s
china plate across the sand in a gesture of abandon, then she gave him the sideways look that always stirred his loins.

‘Go for it, Madoc.’

‘Mr Madoc.’

‘Yes, Mrs Hadley?’

‘I am worried about your wife.’

‘So am I. She’s not well.’ Madoc cast a look of concern at Kitty, who had slumped on the sand in a passable imitation of someone
struggling against total collapse. ‘She doesn’t have a fever,’ he assured the woman as she bent over and felt Kitty’s forehead.
He couldn’t have her thinking there was any risk of infection.

She crouched down and rested a hand on Kitty’s shoulder. ‘It’ll be the shock,’ she said quietly. ‘Losing everything.’

‘And starvation. She hadn’t eaten in days until the meal you gave her.’

Her face under the wind-tossed hair was mobile, her full mouth was wide and expressive. As a rule, Madoc didn’t take to blondes.
Their skin was always far too pallid for his taste, but there was something about this woman. Something that drew his interest.
Beneath her gentle hands and her soft voice, he was aware of a strength that made him cautious. He recognised it at once because
it was the same quiet quality that Kitty had, a kind of taut steel mesh under the pliant skin. The woman’s blue eyes possessed
a single-mindedness that her long golden lashes couldn’t hide, however hard she tried.

Madoc had survived where others perished because he was good at picking out what made people tick, and it was as plain as
day to him that this was the kind of woman who would shoot you through the head without drawing breath if you so much as touched
the things she cared for in life.
Watch yourself, Madoc
, he heard Kitty’s voice in his head. He glanced across the beach at the boy called Teddy, digging a hole in the sand on
all fours with his dog, both with pink tongues hanging out. His face had the structure of his father’s, but there was an awareness
and a carefulness in the kid’s brown eyes that spoke of his mother.
Is that her weak spot? The boy?

‘What’s going on here?’

Nigel Hadley had rejoined them, and was staring uncomfortably down at his wife’s head bent over Kitty. Behind him stood the
other couple – the Courts, was that their name? – the wife clutching a cracker in her hand. For one surprised moment he thought
she was going to offer it to Kitty, but no, she sank her teeth into it and licked the crumbs from her lips.

‘If your wife is exhausted, Mr Madoc,’ Hadley said, ‘maybe she would prefer to stay on shore and rest, rather than take the
risk of rough seas on the boat. Don’t you think so, Constance?’

‘No, I don’t.’ Still crouched beside Kitty, Constance Hadley gave her husband an uneasy stare. ‘I think it would be inhuman
to leave her here.’

‘For God’s sake, Connie,’ Henry Court pushed the cushion of his stomach forward, the way Madoc had seen lawyers do when making
a point against him in the dock, ‘have you thought this through and considered what might happen?’

‘What is it you are frightened might happen, Henry?’

‘The food,’ her husband interrupted. ‘We have to watch out for our rations, otherwise …’

‘Otherwise Harriet might eat them all,’ Connie finished, and watched the colour rise in Harriet’s cheeks.

‘Now listen to me,’ Henry Court started, ‘I demand an apology for …’

‘I can cook for you on your boat.’ It was Kitty’s voice, a sad, bleating sound. But she had lifted her head from her hands
and was giving Nigel Hadley her most convincingly docile smile. ‘I’m a good cook. Ask Madoc.’

Oh Kitty, I love you.

Instantly there was a murmuring between the two men, and their hostility slithered away.

‘Perhaps we should find room for them after all, Nigel,’ Court said, unconsciously resting his hand on his stomach. ‘Can’t
just leave them here for the Japs.’

Madoc had to bite his tongue to stop a laugh.

‘Well, well, damn me if it isn’t Madoc Morgan, the wharf rat!’

Madoc swung around to see who had spoken behind him. The rowing boat was lying like a tired turtle on the sand, and deep footprints
led from it to the man who addressed him. Broad-shouldered, dark-haired, eyes the colour of a freshly sharpened blade, the
kind of man Madoc had spent a lifetime avoiding. In his hand he swung a
parang
that glistened in the morning air.