Trade Wind (2 page)

“That?” scoffed Biddy Jason. She glanced scornfully at the little trinket and then at the child’s anxious face. But if she had meant to laugh, she did not. She was greedy and sly and undoubtedly dishonest and it was difficult to imagine that she had ever been young. But now some long-buried memory from her own far-off and forgotten childhood stirred to life in her, and for a moment she saw the cheap trinket as Hero saw it An object of glittering beauty and incalculable value. Gold…!

Looked at in that light the brooch represented a magnificent fee, and one relatively far greater than the small packets of tea, snuff and sugar, or the rarer dimes and quarters, that were normally paid her in return for mumbling the time-worn and time-hallowed cliches and clap-trap that credulous women never seemed to grow tired of hearing. She reached out and took the little piece of gilded tin, and surprised herself by saying: “Yes, that’ll do. Give me your hand, child. No, not the left one: that one’ll only be showin’ what you could do and not what ye will. It’s the other one that counts—”

She took the small pink palm between her ancient, claw-like hands, and peering at it intently was silent for so long that Hero began to get restless and to wonder anxiously if there was, after all, nothing to tell about Perhaps, unlike Mrs Cobb, she was to have no Fortune? She could hear Mrs Cobb’s stay-bones creaking to the rhythm of her heavy, indignant breathing, and presently the kettle on the hob began to sing softly to itself and the ticking of the kitchen clock became loud and intrusive, hurrying towards the moment when Miss Penbury would return from Aunt Lucy’s and she, Hero, would be ordered back to the nursery.

Biddy Jason spoke at last, but in an entirely different voice from the one she had used when she had told Mrs Cobb about the fair-haired woman who boded no good. She spoke in a hoarse, low sing-song, barely above a whisper: “There’s sun in your hand, and wind and salt water. And rain…warm rain and an island full of black men…”

The wrinkled face dropped to within an inch of Hero’s palm, and the whispering voice became almost inaudible: “Ye’ll sail halfway round the world to meet the work that is waiting for ye to do and the one who’ll help ye to do it…Ye’ll have a hand in helpin’ a power o’ folk to die and a sight more to live, an’ ye’ll get hard words for the one and no thanks for the other. Ye’ll lay your hand on gold past counting, but no good will ye get of it. And all your life ye’ll do what you have to do. Ye’ll make your own bed…an’ ye’ll lie on it…”

The hoarse murmur died into silence and the old woman released Hero’s hand and backed away, shaking her head as though to free it from something, and looking dazed and stupid. The little brooch fell to the floor and Hero picked it up and held it out to her, but she pushed it away muttering: “Keep it, child. “Tis no manner av use to me. No use…wind and salt water and trees like broomsticks—and brown men and black a’ dyin’. Dyin’ in the sun and the rain…”

She stumbled towards the door, hugging her rusty black shawl about her shoulders and mumbling something about “dogs and dead men,” and then the kitchen door shut behind her and Mrs Cobb said loudly and angrily: “There now!—didn’t I tell you it ‘ud all be lies? Black men and trees like broomsticks, indeed! Stuffin’ your head up with such nonsense. What your Pa ‘ud say—”

She crossed quickly to the dresser, and lifting down the big blue and white crock where the sugar was kept, fumbled in it for the largest lump she could find. “Here you are, you just suck that and keep your little mouth shut.” Her voice took on a wheedling tone: “She’s a wicked old woman, that one, and I wouldn’t have let her put a foot inside my kitchen only she came begging to the door and I hadn’t the heart to turn the poor creature away: not without giving her a scraping of tea and a sit by the fire for the sake o’ Christian charity. But your Pa wouldn’t like it, and that’s a fact, so you be a good girl and don’t go tattling to him and gettin’ me in trouble. Just you forget it, see?”

But Hero had never forgotten it.

Sun and wind and salt water, and an island full of black men…

“Are there really trees like broomsticks?” she enquired of her father next day.

“Like broomsticks? Do you mean palm trees?” Barclay smiled indulgently at his spoilt only child: “Who’s been telling you about palm trees?”

“No one. I just wondered. Where do they grow?”

“Any place where it’s hot enough to suit them. They like plenty of sun. Places like Florida and Louisiana and the West Indies. And India and Africa.”

“Not in Boston?”

“No, not in Boston. Look, I’ll show you.”

Barclay laid aside Plutarch’s
Life of Lycurgus
, and taking her over to the low table by the library windows showed her the big softly-coloured globe that stood on it, pointing out the poles and the oceans, the cold countries and the hot: “This one is Africa, where the negroes come from. Zulus and Hottentots and men who are seven feet tall and pygmies who are no higher than your knee.”

“Negroes?” Hero’s face fell. “You mean people like Washington Judd and Sary Boker?”

“That’s right.”

“But they came from Mississippi,” said Hero disgustedly. “I know they did, ‘cos Sary told me so herself, and Mrs Cobb says they’re just runaway niggers an’ one day they’ll be cotched and taken back to their master who’ll whale the livin’ daylights out of them an’ serve them right. What are livin’ daylights, Pa?”

“Mrs Cobb is an old—” began Barclay hastily, and turned the word into a cough. “Well, maybe they did come from Mississippi, but their parents and their grandparents came from Africa.”

“Why did they? Didn’t they like it there?”

“I guess they liked it all right. But slaves were needed to work the plantations, so people caught the poor creatures and shipped them over here to be sold for good money to the planters. And now their children and their children’s children are born as slaves and have no country of their own.”

“Then why don’t they go back?”

“Because that would take ships and money and a lot of other things they haven’t got. Freedom, for one. Besides, how would they know where to go back to? Africa’s a pretty big country you know, Hero.”

“How big?”

“Oh—bigger than America. And a lot wilder. They have lions and giraffes and elephants there, and apes and ivory, and—‘
men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders
.’”

“Like this?” enquired Hero, hunching her small shoulders up to her ears and dropping her chin into the front of her starched pinafore.

“Maybe. Nobody really knows very much about the middle of Africa yet But people are finding out, and any day now a white man may climb the Mountains of the Moon or find King Solomon’s mines.”

“Is Africa an island, Papa?”

“No, it’s a continent.’ Barclay picked up a pencil and using it as a pointer said: “Look—these little bits round the edge are islands. That big one is Madagascar and these are the Comoro Islands. And this is Zanzibar, where the clove trees grow, and all kinds of other spices that Mrs Cobb puts in your Christmas cake.”

Hero bent to stare at the minute speck as though searching for those spices, and presently she laid a small possessive finger on it and said firmly: “Then I shall choose that one, because it has a nice name and I should like my island to have a nice name.”

“Zanzibar? Yes, it is a pretty name. A singing name. But what’s all this about your island?”

“When I’m grown up I’m going to go there.”

“Are you, my daughter? What for?”

“To—to do something,” said Hero vaguely.

“Going to pick yourself a pocket-full of cloves, eh. Hero?”

Hero considered the question gravely. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s that kind of work. I think,” she said making up her mind, “that I shall do something very good and useful. And very clever.”

“Oh, you will, will you? You sure sound very certain about it, daughter. Let’s hope you ain’t going to take after your—” he checked himself abruptly. Had he really been about to say “your mother?” If so, he changed it, for after a brief pause he said instead, and with unnecessary heat, “—your Aunt Lucy. I don’t want you to grow up into a strong-minded little busybody. Or a prig. I don’t think I could stand it.”

“What’s a prig, Papa?”

“You are, when you talk like that!” said Barclay irritably. “I suppose that prissy, feather-headed milk-sop of a Penbury woman has been reading you improving books and filling your head with a lot of clap-trap about Good Works being the only thing worth doing. I might have known it from the way she dresses and the fact that your Aunt Lucy approves of her!”

He paused to cast a mental eye over Miss Penbury and his sister Lucy, and suffered a sharp spasm of sheer panic. Lucy had approved of his marriage to Harriet, and Harriet herself would undoubtedly have approved of Miss Penbury…

He said violently, and as though he were defying them all: “I’m damned if I’m going to have ‘em turn you into a priggish little do-gooder! I’ll get you another governess. A pretty one with a sense of humour, who’ll know how to keep you in order—which is more than Miss Penbury does! It looks to me as if I can’t do it soon enough.”

But of course he had done nothing of the sort. It had been too much trouble and Barclay Hollis was an easy-going man who preferred to avoid trouble—and anything else that might interfere with his reading and riding and the pleasant placid routine of his life. Agnes Penbury stayed, and Hero grew up spoilt, strong-minded and undeniably priggish. And still firmly convinced that she would one day set sail for Zanzibar, though anyone less self-willed would have abandoned such an idea in her early teens: if only because of her father’s strongly expressed detestation of what he called ‘traipsing around’ (a term that apparently included everything from foreign travel to a journey involving more than a single night away from Hollis Hill).

In later years it had taken all her powers of persuasion to coax him into travelling as far as Washington in order to stay with a Crayne cousin whose husband was a well-known Senator, and when, while there, they had received a pressing invitation to visit relatives in South Carolina, Barclay—who could on occasions be every bit as obstinate as his daughter—had flatly refused to move a step further, so that in the end Hero had gone without him.

“I guess you get it from your Mama’s side of the family,” sighed Barclay resignedly; “all the Craynes have been great ones for moving around. You look a lot like your Ma, and maybe if she’d lived she’d have come to be a gadabout too. She wasn’t as big as you…You know, you ought to have been a boy, Hero. Mother Nature sure changed her mind about you at the last minute, and that’s a fact!”

He had sighed again as he said it, and Hero had wondered for the first time if her father regretted her sex and would have preferred a boy, and if that might not have been in his mind when he had named her ‘Hero’ instead of calling her Harriet after her mother? He had certainly never made any attempt to bring her up as a ‘womanly woman’, but in defiance of the Craynes and his sister Lucy had permitted her to learn to shoot and ride, to read before she could write and write before she could sew. The remainder of her education, however, had been left to Miss Penbury, and he had done nothing to correct some of the opinions that his daughter acquired at second-hand from her governess and her Aunt Lucy; or from sundry works of fiction obtained from the shelves of the ‘Ladies’ Lending Library’.

It had been a popular novel by Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe, read in 1852 at the impressionable age of fourteen, that had convinced Hero that the world was a hotbed of injustice, cruelty and squalor, and that something should be done about it at once.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
had succeeded in making yet another convert to the cause of Anti-Slavery, and Miss Penbury, in the process of continuing the good work, had escorted her young charge to a lecture on the “Evils of the Slave Trade’, given by a local parson who had quoted the words of Lord Palmerston:

“If all the crimes which the human race has committed from creation down to the present day were added together in one vast aggregate, they would scarcely equal, I am sure they would not exceed, the amount of guilt that has been incurred by mankind in connection with the diabolical Slave Trade.”

But whatever she might think of slave trading, that visit to South Carolina had served to modify Hero’s view on slave owners, for the Langly family’s slaves had been as healthy, happy and as well-cared-for a community as anyone could wish to see, and neither Gaylord Langly nor his overseer even remotely resembled Simon Legree. Clarissa Hollis Langly, having been born and raised in Massachusetts, disapproved in principle of slavery, but confessed herself unable to see any way out of it:

“It is as though we were caught in a trap,” she explained to Hero. “Our entire economy is bound up with slavery, and if we were to free the negroes we should not only ruin ourselves but them as well, since without slave labour the South could not last a day. We would all go bankrupt, and then who would feed the negroes? or clothe them or give them work? Not the Northern Abolitionists, for all their pious talk! I can see no way out: though it is at times a sad weight on my conscience.”

Mrs Langly applied salve to her conscience by taking a fervent interest in foreign missions, in the belief that if there was nothing that could be done towards freeing the enslaved negroes of America, at least there was much that could be done towards improving the lot of coloured races overseas. She lent her young cousin a number of pamphlets that vividly described the horrors of life in Africa and Asia, with the result that Hero’s sympathies had been widened to include ‘Our Poor Heathen Sisters’ whose status in harems and zenanas appeared to be quite as bad as that of any slave.

Brooding upon the fate of these unhappy women, it had seemed to Hero cruelly unfair that while she herself enjoyed the full benefits of freedom in a civilized and prosperous country, hapless millions in Eastern lands were doomed to live and die in unrelieved misery for lack of a little enlightenment—a crumb from the Rich Man’s table. There were even times when she could almost imagine that those anonymous, suffering millions were calling to her: the sequestered women in harems and seraglios, the slaves in the black holds of dhows and the disease-ridden poor…‘Come over into Macedonia and help us’…!