Trade Wind (16 page)

Viewed from a distance, with a mile of blue water separating the ship from the shore, the Arab town of Zanzibar had looked colourful and romantic and not unlike some Eastern Venice. But a closer acquaintance with it not only robbed it of all charm, but confirmed Miss Hollis’s worst fears as to the state of sanitation prevailing among backward and unenlightened races.

The white coraline houses stood crowded together, covering a triangular spit of land which the sea, flowing at high tide into a creek to one side of it, daily transformed for a few hours into an island. There was no pier, and the long, sandy foreshore that separated the houses from the harbour was apparently used not only as a landing stage, but as the repository of every form of filth and refuse that the inhabitants thought fit to throw out of their courtyards and kitchens. The stench that arose from it made Hero bitterly regret discarding Captain Frost’s handkerchief, and she covered her nose with her hands. And would have shut her eyes, except that sheer horror prevented her from doing so. For there was not only garbage on the beach, but worse things. Dead and bloated things that were being torn by lean, scavenging dogs and fought over by raucous clouds of gulls and crows.

“But—but those are bodies!” gasped Hero. “Corpses!”

Lieutenant Larrimore followed the direction of her gaze and said unemotionally: “Yes. I’m afraid you’ll see a good many more of those before you are through: though it’s a deal better now than it was in the old Sultan’s time.”

Hero swallowed convulsively and turned from the appalling sight, her face white with shock and horror. “But why don’t they bury them?”

“Bury slaves? They wouldn’t consider it worth the trouble.”

“Slaves? But do they—are they?”

“This is where the Arab slavers land their cargoes. They ship them from the Sultan’s ports on the mainland, crammed into dhows without food or water; and if the winds fail and the passage is a slow one, over half of them die before they get here. When the dhows are unloaded the dead are merely thrown out onto the beach or into the harbour for the dogs and fishes to dispose of.”

“But it’s horrible!” whispered Hero. “It’s—it’s
inhuman
. Why is it allowed?”

“It’s improving. A few years ago they used to throw out the ones who were not yet dead but seemed unlikely to survive. They’d leave them on the beach to see if they’d recover, or to die slowly if they didn’t. But Colonel Edwards managed to put a stop to that.”

“I didn’t mean that,” said Hero. “I meant all of it. Slavery. Why don’t the foreign consuls do something about it?”

She received no answer, for the simple reason that she had lost the attention of her audience. The sight of the landing steps had deflected the Lieutenant’s thoughts onto other and more personal problems, and he was thinking of her cousin Cressida and wondering, with a mixture of hope and apprehension, how Cressy would receive him? Their last meeting had been a distinctly stormy one, and he had been obliged to sail before he had a chance to see her again and put things right: an omission that had been preying on his mind ever since.

Daniel Larrimore had been on slave patrol for some little time before he first met Cressida Hollis. And taking into account that his duties were confined to a part of the globe where personable, white and unattached young ladies were rarer than blackberries in June (and also that the very nature of those duties brought him into contact with worse things than the average human is capable of imagining) it is not surprising that he saw Cressy as a being from another world—a sweeter, cleaner world that was a million miles removed from the savagery and squalor to which he had become accustomed.

There was very little that Dan did not know by now about the uglier aspects of the slave trade: or of Zanzibar either. He had seen for himself, while on a brief visit to the interior, one of the slave routes that wound across Africa. A trail that had been clearly marked by hordes of vultures perched among the flat-topped thorn trees, and the bleached bones and rotting corpses of innumerable captives who had been unable to stagger any further and been left to die where they fell. He knew, too, that this was only one of many such trails along which the African and Arab traders drove then: human wares with whips and clubs towards the sea, where those who survived the journey were subjected to worse torments in the airless bowels of a slave ship. In Zanzibar itself he had seen a dhow land twenty-two emaciated skeletons out of a cargo that ten days before had numbered two hundred and forty able-bodied negroes—and on that occasion even the Sultan’s Government had jibbed at the prospect of two hundred and eighteen corpses littering the foreshore, and the slaver had reluctantly stood out to sea and dumped its dead overboard into deep water: from whence the tide had returned many of them during the next few days.

It had not been many months after this episode, and while it was still raw in his memory, that the Hollises had arrived in the island, and Lieutenant Larrimore, accompanying Colonel Edwards to a formal call on the new American Consul, had met the Consul’s daughter. And straightway lost his heart…

She was seventeen and as pretty as a spray of apple blossom: “A sight for sore eyes’ indeed—and Dan’s had been sore for too long. Everything about her enchanted him: her gaiety, her impulsiveness, her enjoyment of all that was strange and new, her obvious love for her father and her pretty, coaxing way with him. Even her youthful silliness, which in another girl he would probably have thought tiresome, merely made him feel fondly indulgent and increased his desire to protect her: from which it may be seen that Dan, like Captain Fullbright, did not demand brains and force of character in a woman, but preferred sweetness and charm; qualities that Cressy possessed in abundance.

Yet in spite of the fact that the object of his devotion showed every sign of reciprocating his feeling for her, his wooing had not gone smoothly. Partly because his visits to Zanzibar were erratic and never long enough for him to make the headway he could have wished with her parents, let alone with Cressy, and partly because her half-brother, Clayton Mayo, had unaccountably taken a dislike to him and gone out of his way to see that Dan’s visits to the Consulate were as short (and as well chaperoned!) as possible—though fortunately Mayo, being a popular young man, was often out, and left to herself Cressy’s mother was far from strict. Dan was at a loss to know what he could have said or done to arouse Mayo’s hostility, and it still puzzled him. It could not, surely, be because of his nationality, for Mayo was on excellent terms with the rest of the British community. Perhaps it was only because he did not consider a mere naval lieutenant a good enough match for his pretty sister? In which case…

The jolly-boat passed under the tall, carved poop of a dhow and the beach was hidden from them, though the stench remained heavy on the hot air and followed them to where a flight of stone steps rose up from the oily water.

“I’m afraid you’ll find the smell a bit overpowering in the daytime, “apologized the Lieutenant, who had obviously got used to it, “but it’s not too bad at night when the wind blows off the land. They’re an insanitary lot, and as long as their houses are clean they don’t seem to care what state the streets get into—or the beaches either. But it’ll be a lot better once the monsoon breaks and the rains clean the place up a bit.”

He handed Hero on to the slippery, weed-grown steps and hurried her up through a narrow street where the gutters ran with filth, and veiled and shrouded women and a motley, idling crowd of black, brown, yellow and coffee-coloured men stared at her curiously.

“Why do they all look so different?” enquired Hero, gazing back with equal interest: “From each other, I mean?”

“They are different. The people here come from a dozen different places. Madagascar, the Comoro Islands, India, Africa, Arabia, Goa—even China. It’s the last great slaving centre in the East, and thousands of slaves pass through the Zanzibar Customs House every year. In fact here are some now on their way to the slave market.”

He drew her back against the wall as a file of negroes stumbled past them through the narrow crowded street, roped together and under the charge of a stout Arab trader and half-a-dozen swaggering African retainers who were armed with whips and staves. Fear and starvation had given them a dazed and uncomprehending look that verged on idiocy, and Hero stared at them in white-faced horror: realizing for the second time that morning the enormous difference that lay between reading about something and actually seeing it with one’s own eyes.

She said in a high, choking voice: “Why do you allow it? Why don’t you do something? Why don’t you do something
now
?”

The Lieutenant turned to look at her, his brow wrinkled in a frown. “Didn’t your relations tell you about this? I know it’s upsetting, the first time you see it, but—”

“
You’ll get used to it!
Don’t say it! Don’t! I shall never get used to it—never! Those poor creatures. Half of them are children. You’ve got to do something! You stopped the
Virago
to look for slaves, didn’t you? Then why don’t you arrest that man there and take his slaves away? Now, at once?”

“Because he’s not a British subject and so there’s nothing I can do about it,” said Lieutenant Larrimore curtly. He took her arm and began to urge her along the street.

“But you could buy them…I could buy them. Yes, that’s what I’ll do! I can buy them myself and set them free.”

“To starve?” enquired the Lieutenant dryly. “How are they going to live?”

“My uncle would employ them at the Consulate. He could find work for them, I’m sure. He would if I asked him to.”

“I doubt it The consulates are over-staffed already, and it would create a deal of trouble among your uncle’s other servants. He wouldn’t have quarters for them for one thing, and for another they would have to be fed and clothed as well as housed, and it would take a long time to train them to do even the simplest tasks.”

“But we could surely find
someone
who would be glad of their help and would be kind to them?”

“If they are bought by any of the local Arabs they will be treated kindly enough,” the Lieutenant assured her. “The Koran forbids the ill-treatment of slaves, and any who are bought here and remain on the island will be lucky. It’s the ones who don’t get sold and are shipped off somewhere else whom you can be sorry for. Even if you did start buying them, you could only buy the smallest fraction of the number that pass through here yearly, and you wouldn’t know what to do with them when you’d got them.”

“I could hire a boat and send them back to—to wherever they came from. Some of them, anyway. The ones that no one else wanted to buy.”

“The chances are that they haven’t any homes left to go to and would be caught and sold again inside a week. What’s more, you’d only be suspected of making money out of it, because not one of the locals would believe you were being altruistic. You can’t afford that. Or rather, your uncle can’t. It would not only be misunderstood, but if it once got about that you were prepared to buy slaves, for whatever reason, half the rascals in the town would bring you their oldest and most useless slaves in order to avoid having to care for them themselves. And it would be your uncle and not you who would have to shoulder that problem. I’m afraid that as his niece and house-guest you are hardly a private individual, and that sort of thing could make things very difficult for him—officially.”

Hero jerked her arm away and quickened her steps as though she could by doing so escape from the cold-hearted common sense of those arguments. But she knew that he was right To buy and free a few slaves, even a few hundred slaves, would not help. And this—this hideous cruelty—was something that men like Captain Frost were responsible for. She had been sailing with a slaver…on a slave ship! That was suddenly something as dreadful to contemplate as the sight of those dazed, starving captives had been.

She did not notice that they had reached a quieter and more open part of the town until, turning a comer they came upon palms and green grass and a frangipani tree whose white, waxy blossoms smelt piercingly sweet after the fetid atmosphere they had left behind them. The tree threw sharp black shadows across the front of a tall white house from the roof of which a flag bearing the familiar stars-and-stripes snapped briskly in the wind, and Lieutenant Larrimore said briefly: “This is the American Consulate. Your uncle’s house.”

Aunt Abigail Hollis had been sitting on a sofa in the drawing-room; clad in deep mourning and engaged in consoling Mrs Fullbright, who was still tearfully blaming herself for the seasickness that had prevented her from taking proper care of her charge. Neither lady had at first recognized Hero, and when they had at last done so, Amelia Fullbright had swooned and Aunt Abby given way to strong hysterics.

Lieutenant Larrimore, dismayed by this display of feminine sensibility, left hastily in search of Mr Hollis, leaving Hero to contend single-handed with the situation. And Cressy and her father, arriving upon the scene simultaneously and from opposite directions, found bedlam reigning and someone who appeared to be a complete stranger slapping Amelia Fullbright’s hands while exhorting Aunt Abby to stop screaming and fetch the hartshorn.

“
Hero!
” shrieked Cressy, turning alarmingly pale and showing every sign of following her mother’s example: “It isn’t—it can’t be. I don’t believe it! Whatever have you been…Hero!”

“Yes, it’s me,” said Miss Hollis in ungrammatical agitation. “And don’t you dare start screaming, Cressy. Go get some water…for pity’s sake do something! Uncle Nat—oh, thank goodness you’ve come. Help me lift her.”

The next few minutes were fully occupied by restoring Mrs Fullbright and quieting Mrs Hollis, and after a further and confused interval of tears, kisses, laughter and embraces, a servant was sent running down to the harbour to fetch Captain Thaddaeus and another to find Mr Clayton Mayo, who was thought to be at the French Consulate.

“I just can’t believe it,” wept Mrs Fullbright, keeping tight hold of Hero’s hand: “If you
knew
what agonies of remorse I have suffered. I don’t know how I survived it. I felt like I’d absolutely
die
when Thaddaeus told me the dreadful, dreadful news—
Drowned!
”