Trade Wind

1

In view of the far-reaching effects that a few words mumbled by a disreputable old Irishwoman were to have on the life of Hero Athena Hollis, only child of Barclay Hollis of Boston, Massachusetts, it would be interesting to know to what degree, if any, pre-natal influence was responsible for her character and opinions.

Heredity clearly had a finger in the pie, since her mother, Harriet Crayne Hollis, had always been a fervent supporter of charitable institutions, crusades and causes. A fact that Barclay, unexpectedly trapped by a classic profile and a pair of blue eyes, had been fully aware of when he became a suitor for her hand, though at the time he had only seen it as the sign of a sweetly compassionate and truly womanly nature, and proof that his Harriet’s beauty was far from skin deep.

What he had not bargained for was finding himself married to a wife who expected him to share her enthusiasm for good works. But the honeymoon had been barely over when he discovered that his bride, not content with adding her name to numerous subscription lists, conceived it her duty to serve on boards and committees, write and distribute pamphlets protesting injustices and urging reforms, and campaign vigorously against such evils as drink, child labour, prostitution and slavery. Particularly slavery …

Barclay, an indolent and peace-loving man with a fondness for horses, chess and the classics, had never suffered from any urge to set the world and his neighbours’ affairs to rights, and he considered that his Harriet was carrying things too far. Naturally any thinking person must agree that the world was (and always had been) over-full of cruelty, oppression and injustice. But it was surely both unnecessary and unfeminine for Harriet to take it so passionately to heart and make such a personal issue of it? He was, in consequence, doubly delighted when his wife announced herself pregnant, since he imagined that in addition to providing him with an heir to inherit the broad acres of Hollis Hill, maternal cares and the setting up of a nursery would divert her interests and energy into quieter and more domestic channels.

A large, healthy family, decided Barclay, was just what Hatty needed: handsome, intelligent sons who would share his own interest in Greek mythology and the raising of blood stock, and pretty, lively daughters who would keep their mother busy and fully occupied at home.

But it had not worked out like that. His wife’s too easily aroused emotions, and a few lines of print on a crumpled sheet of newspaper, had put an end to that dream – and to Harriet.

The instrument of fate had been a parcel containing a knitted shawl and a pretty silver rattle, sent in anticipation of the coming event by an erst-while school-friend who had married a planter in Georgia. A sheet of newspaper had been used as an additional protection for the rattle, and on it a single paragraph, printed in bold type, had had the misfortune to catch the expectant mother’s eye:

To be sold. A negro woman and four children. The woman 23 years of age, of good character, a good cook and washer. The children are very likely from 6 years down to 1 1/2. Can be sold separately or together, to suit purchaser.

The advertisement was only one of many. But to Harriet, always a passionate opponent of slavery and herself shortly to become a mother, the callous inhumanity of that concluding sentence was like a blow in the face. Can be sold separately or together, to suit purchaser …

She had paled alarmingly and cried in a high, strangled voice: ‘But surely they cannot take her children from her? Not her own children? They have no right! It is vile – horrible! It should be stopped! … Oh God why doesn’t someone put a stop to it?’

Dropping the crumpled sheet of newspaper as if had been some loathsome insect, she had favoured her husband with a hysterical denunciation of the whole hideous institution of slavery, and ended by snatching up shawl, rattle and paper and flinging them violently on to the fire, where the paper, bursting into flames, created a sudden draught that sucked one of the wide muslin sleeves of Harriet’s négligé into the blaze. The filmy material had flared up as if soaked in oil, and though Barclay had leapt at her and crushed out the flames with his bare hands, she had been so badly burned that the pain and shock had brought on a premature and protracted labour, and a day and a half later her daughter had been born, and Harriet herself had died.

Barclay had not married again. He had been thirty-nine when he had offered for Harriet, and his brief experience of matrimony had been enough to convince him that he was not cut out to be a family man.

Having shocked his relatives by insisting on having his daughter christened ‘Hero Athena’ (the latter name, to make matters worse, being bestowed in honour of a favourite mare rather than the Goddess of Wisdom), he had then touched and surprised them by declining his sister Lucy’s generous offer to bring up the motherless infant among her own large and thriving family. Though if the truth were known, his refusal of Lucy’s offer had not been prompted by any excess of parental feeling for the tiny, squalling hideosity in the lace-draped cot, but by the fact that Lucy too was addicted to good works. In her case, foreign missions.

Barclay felt that he had had quite enough of that sort of thing, and he had no intention of allowing his daughter to follow in her mother’s footsteps and become an active and vocal supporter of Causes. In his opinion, a woman’s place was in the home and not on a public platform. And had it not been for the fact that some few years later he had elected to visit a sick friend on the same evening that his daughter’s governess, Miss Penbury, had promised to deliver her contribution to Lucy’s latest Sale of Work, it is quite possible that Hero Athena would have obliged him in this. Though one cannot of course be sure, since she was, after all, Harriet Crayne’s child. But in the event the temporary absence of Mr Hollis left the way clear for a certain Biddy Jason to pay a surreptitious call at Hollis Hill – something that would never have been allowed to happen if the master of the house had been at home!

It was said of the Widow Jason that she was the seventh daughter of the seventh son of that Bridey Clooney of Tyrone who had been famed as a Wise Woman and burned as a Witch. And it may even have been true. Certainly there were plenty of folk in Boston who were willing to believe it, and to believe too that old Mrs Jason had the Second Sight and could foretell the future: among them Mrs Cobb, the cook at Hollis Hill.

Mrs Cobb had sent word to the seeress that the coast was clear, and she was engaged in having her fortune told, in return for a packet of snuff and two ounces of China tea, when her master’s daughter, six-year-old Hero Hollis, sidled into the kitchen.

By rights, Hero should have been in the nursery. But her governess would not be back for another hour, her Papa was out and she was bored with sewing the singularly dull sampler that Miss Penbury had given her to keep her occupied. She was also accustomed to doing what she pleased, so she folded up the sampler and went downstairs in search of cookies and crystallized sugar.

The lamps had not yet been lit and the hall was in darkness, but Hero could hear voices from the kitchen, while a warm gleam of light showed that the door at the far end of the long stone-flagged passage had been left ajar. She tiptoed towards it very quietly, and easing her small body through the narrow gap, stood listening in the shadow of the big dresser: enthralled by the sight of the strange, witchlike old crone in the old-fashioned tall-crowned hat, and the sound of a muttering voice that spoke of unexpected meetings, dark men and journeys over water, and warned Mrs Cobb to beware of a fair woman who boded no good.

‘That’ll be Alice Tilberry from the Stonehavens’ place,’ said Mrs Cobb, breathing heavily with excitement. ‘If I ever catch the hussy …! Go on, tell me more.’

‘There’s no more,’ said Biddy Jason, pushing the plump palm away. ‘An’ I’ll thank you for the tay and the snuff. Though I’m thinking it’s the master of the house should be getting me thanks, for well I know you niver paid for either!’

Hero had made no sound, and Mrs Cobb, owl-eyed and absorbed, had not seen her. But perhaps Biddy Jason was in truth the granddaughter of a witch, for though she had been sitting with her back to the door she appeared to know that Hero was there, and now, unexpectedly, she turned her head and spoke over her shoulder: ‘And what is ut that you’re wishful for, ye young spalpeen? Come away out now, and let owld Biddy get a sight av ye. My, my! ‘tis a big colleen you are, and a rare pretty one too.’

The ancient creature cackled with laughter and beckoned with a gnarled and crooked finger, and Hero moved out of the shadows into the lamplight: a small girl in a red velveteen dress, ruffled pantalettes and pinafore, with a mop of unruly chestnut-coloured curls inadequately confined by a ribboned snood.

‘Who are you?’ enquired Hero, interested. ‘What were you talking about?’

‘Nothing to do with you, miss!’ scolded Mrs Cobb. ‘Just you get right back to the nursery this minute. You’ve no business to be creepin’ about down here, giving folks a start. Go on now, or we’ll be havin’ that governess of yours down looking for you.’

‘Miss Penbury’s taken a parcel over to Aunt Lucy’s house, and it’s cold in the nursery. What were you doing?’

‘Jus’ readin’ av her palm I was.’

‘Her palm?’

‘Her hand, child. Sure an’ it’s all there for them that can see it. What ye’ll be and what’ll happen to you. Yes, yes, it’s all there. Your fortune writ plain.’

Hero stared down at her own small palm and could see nothing in it except lines, and an ink stain that she had tried to remove with spit but that was still clearly visible. ‘What’s a fortune?’ she enquired.

‘The things that’ll happen to you when you’ve grown up. The good luck an’ the bad.’

‘But Mrs Cobb is grown up already,’ protested Hero indignantly. ‘She’s old! so how can she have a fortune?’

‘That’s enough,’ said Mrs Cobb sharply. ‘You’ll get along out of my kitchen. Hurry now!’

But Hero was not afraid of Mrs Cobb. And nor, it seemed, was the Widow Jason, who laughed until her little eyes disappeared into folds of yellow wrinkles: ‘Ah, sure now, there’s always somethin’ ahead of folks they don’t know about, no matter how old they get. Like what’ll happen to ’em tomorrow, or the next day. Or next week. Always somethin’ they don’t know.’

‘Do you know, then?’ demanded Hero, her eyes as round as dollars.

Biddy Jason’s eyes were small and black, and despite her age very bright and observant. They reappeared now from among the wrinkles and stared into Hero’s grey ones, and presently she looked away again and said in a harsh whisper, and almost as though she were talking to herself rather than to the child: ‘Not always … No, not always. There’s times it seems I do, and times I don’t. But when I don’t I just tells the fools what they’re wishful to hear, an’ that’s just as good for ’em – or better!’

She gave another shrill cackle of laughter and stretching out a claw-like hand, gathered up the two small packets that Mrs Cobb had laid on the table, and stowed them away in the recesses of her rusty garments: ‘I’ll be goin’ on me way now. ‘Tis a cold night and a dark one, an’ there’ll be rain before long. Good day to ye, Missis Cobb.’

She rose stiffly, and Hero took another step forward and said breathlessly: ‘Would you know about me? What will happen when I grow up, I mean? Do you think you could read my – my what you called it?’

She held out her hand for inspection as she had seen Mrs Cobb do, but old Biddy Jason shook her head and said sourly: ‘Tell ye for free? Now how would I be getting me living if I were to tell folk their fortunes for naught? Things ye want ye have to pay for. You should be knowing that.’

‘I’d ask Papa,’ said Hero breathlessly. ‘He’d pay you. I know he would.’

‘You’ll do no such thing!’ intervened Mrs Cobb, understandably agitated. ‘I’ll not have you worritin’ your Pa with such stuff, and that I tell you. Now be a good girl and quit bothering and I’ll give you a sugar lump.’

‘I don’t want a sugar lump,’ said Hero obstinately. ‘I want to have my fortune told.’ Suddenly, it had become important to her.

‘What would you want your fortune told for?’ snapped Mrs Cobb. ‘You heard Mrs Jason say it was all lies, didn’t you? Now be a good girl.’

But Hero was not paying attention to her. She was busy searching in the pocket of her pinafore, and now she found what she was looking for: a cheap gilt brooch that had come out of a Christmas cracker and that for months past had been one of her most cherished possessions. Even now, looking at it, she hesitated. It was such a pretty thing! But curiosity, that fatal and ineradicable legacy from Eve, was too strong for her, and she held it out and said huskily: ‘I don’t have any money, but you can have this. You could sell it, couldn’t you? It’s – it’s gold!’

‘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 clichés 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 half way 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’ …!

‘I must learn something about nursing,’ decided Hero. And to the dismay of her father and the strongly expressed disapproval of her relations she had actually done so. Going three days a week to a local Charity Hospital whose staff had been only too glad to accept the services of an unpaid voluntary assistant, and whose head doctor had informed her disgruntled parent that his daughter was not only a born nurse, but a credit to her sex: ‘We get a heap of rough characters in our wards, Mr Hollis,’ said the doctor, ‘but you ought to see the way their eyes light up when your girl comes in. She seems to be able to comfort them; and to give them confidence that they’ll get well, which is half the battle. They just about worship her. Even the worst of them!’

But Barclay was not to be placated by such praise, and he continued to regard Hero’s visits to the hospital with a baffled mixture of disbelief and aversion. ‘If I’d known what bees you were going to bring back in your bonnet, damned if I’d ever have let you go traipsing around in Carolina with those Langlys! he observed sourly.

He was not to know that the shorter stay in Washington was to have a far greater effect on his daughter’s future than all Clarissa Langly’s pamphlets. The reason being that the Crayne cousins in the capital had entertained lavishly for their guests, and since their friends were largely drawn from Government circles, Hero had been able to hold forth on her favourite topics (slavery and the sad state of that infamous centre of the trade, Zanzibar) to a wide variety of disconcerted Senators and Congressmen. So that when, a few months afterwards, hearing that her Uncle Nathaniel had been appointed American Consul in Zanzibar, his brother Barclay had declared it to be an odd coincidence and his niece had seen it as the finger of fate, neither had been right. For in point of fact a solid hour of Hero’s conversation during an evening party at Cousin Louella’s house, had caused the name of ‘Hollis’ to become so inextricably linked with Zanzibar in the mind of one influential guest, that the appointment had been more in the nature of a reflex action.

Uncle Nathaniel had not been pleased, but he was too conscientious a man to contest the posting; and Hero Athena, sublimely unaware of being in any way responsible, had been torn between awe and envy. It was unbelievable! Zanzibar – her chosen island! … and Aunt Abby and Cousin Cressy would be going with him; and Clayton too. If only … If only …!

But there had never been any question of her accompanying them. And in any case, relations between the two families had recently become strained, owing to Barclay having taken a sudden and violent dislike to his brother’s step-son, Clayton Mayo.

Long ago, on the occasion of his daughter’s christening, Barclay had hotly defended his choice of names for the motherless infant: ‘Just you wait!’ he had retorted to the shocked chorus of disapproval: ‘She’ll have them swimming the Hellespont in droves one of these days. She’s going to be a beauty, is my girl. You’ll see!’

Well, he had been right in the last of those predictions, because Hero had certainly grown up to be a beauty. But a beauty without an ounce of coquetry or feminine allure. ‘The best lookin’ gal in Boston,’ as her cousin Hartley Crayne had been heard to remark, ‘and the biggest goddamned bore!’ By the time she celebrated her twentieth birthday – and according to the standards of the day was in grave danger of being classed as an Old Maid – there had still been no sign of any Leander: unless her Uncle Nathaniel’s handsome step-son, Clayton Mayo, could be regarded as a possible swimmer of the Hellespont. Numerous young men had looked and admired. But only from a distance, for a closer acquaintance had invariably resulted in disappointment and a hasty retreat; the young sparks of Boston preferring dimpled and sweetly feminine charmers to Grecian goddesses who looked them squarely in the eye, had no patience with coyness, swooning or the vapours, and considered flirting vulgar.

Clayton Mayo had proved to be the solitary exception. But Barclay, in his daughter’s opinion, had been impossible about Clay!

Hero was well aware that her father (when he took the trouble to think about it!) was worried by the lack of suitors for her hand. Yet he had been extravagantly annoyed by young Mr Mayo’s attentions to her, and greatly relieved when Clayton had agreed to accompany his step-father to Zanzibar in the semi-official capacity of confidential secretary.

Hero had not seen Clayton again, but in a letter smuggled to her by a sympathetic housemaid he had promised to ‘prove by his constancy the enduring nature of his regard’, and to return one day, having made his fortune, and formally request her hand in marriage. Which, though gratifying, was hardly romantic. But then it had not been a particularly romantic affair.

Clay had only kissed her once – and then on the cheek, because realizing his intention she had suddenly taken fright and turned her head away at the last moment. And after he had sailed and the strife and agitation had had time to subside, she was inclined to think that perhaps everything had turned out for the best, because until her father had interfered she had not been in the least certain about her feeling for Clay.

Then, little more than a year later, Barclay died very suddenly from a heart attack, and after that there was nothing to keep his daughter in Boston or prevent her from setting out in search of her destiny. Nothing but an unbearably empty house, for even Miss Penbury had long since retired to a cottage in Pennsylvania. Hero Athena Hollis was free to do what she liked and go where she wished, and when Aunt Abby’s letter arrived urging her to visit them in Zanzibar, she had accepted thankfully and without hesitation. And without pausing to remember that old Biddy Jason, who had spoken of sun and salt water and an island full of black men, had also said: ‘Things you want, you have to pay for.’ Whether Clayton was one of those things remained to be seen.

There had, of course, been difficulties. Cousin Josiah Crayne, who as Chairman and co-owner of the Crayne Line Clippers might have been expected to help, had been deeply shocked. It was unthinkable that any young woman of his family (Hero must not forget that her own dear mother had been a Crayne!) should even contemplate a voyage to such an outlandish spot – and without so much as a maid or a chaperone to accompany her! He would have nothing to do with it, and he had taken the opportunity to read her a blunt lecture to the effect that people who felt called upon to do good to others had much better make a start in their own back-yard rather than in someone else’s. She would find, said Cousin Josiah, plenty of scope for her charitable instincts right here in Massachusetts.

He had not been the only one to express disapproval. Numerous other relatives and connections had not hesitated to add their own strictures, but neither lectures nor family disapproval had altered Hero’s decision: for save in the matter of Clayton she had always had her own way and got what she wanted, and now she wanted to go to Zanzibar. Not only as an escape from grief or to see Clay again, but because she was firmly convinced (or, as Josiah Crayne observed tartly, had convinced herself), that Providence intended her to go. She had always known that there was work there for her to do. And in the event there was no one with the authority to stop her, since in addition to being in sole possession of a considerable fortune, she had now turned twenty-one and was her own mistress.

Cousin Josiah gave up the unequal struggle and arranged a passage for her on one of his own clippers. And since he had also managed to placate family opinion by conjuring up a chaperone for her in the person of the captain’s wife, in the spring of 1859 Hero at last set sail for Zanzibar.

2

‘’Ere she comes, sir!’

The Daffodil’s coxswain spoke in a hoarse whisper, as though he were afraid that even in that surf-loud, murmurous night, any more audible sound might carry to the deck of the distant ship that was slowly emerging from among the trees and the tall coral rocks that masked the entrance to a small, hidden bay.

Few were aware of the existence of that bay. And those few used it exclusively for unlawful purposes. It did not appear on the official maps of the East African coast or figure on any Admiralty chart, and Lieutenant Larrimore, in command of Her Britannic Majesty’s steam sloop, Daffodil, had frequently passed within half a mile of it without even suspecting that what appeared to be part of the mainland was, in reality, a high, narrow reef of wind-worn coral, topped by a tangle of palms and tropical vegetation, and concealing a small, deep bay capable of sheltering half a dozen sea-going dhows.

Daniel Larrimore knew the coastal waters between Lourenço Marques and Mogadishu well, for he had spent the best part of the last five years assisting in the thankless task of suppressing the East African slave trade: that traffic having greatly increased of late as the trade shrank on the West Coast, where stricter surveillance and the strengthening of the West African and Cape Squadrons had combined to make slaving an increasingly dangerous and unprofitable venture. Although he had on occasion heard rumours of a hidden bay, he had never been able to confirm them, and as recently as a week ago would have been inclined to dismiss them as fables. On the previous Thursday, however, while his ship was engaged in taking on water and supplies of fresh food at Zanzibar, one of the negro slaves whom the Arab contractor employed to carry baskets of fruit and vegetables on board had plucked furtively at his sleeve and whispered a highly interesting piece of information …

The hidden harbour, it appeared, was no myth, but a secure and secret haven known to certain of the Arab slave traders, where they could embark slaves in safety, take refuge from storms and doldrums, and lie concealed when naval vessels were known to be on the prowl. Moreover, a notorious English-owned schooner, loaded with illegal cargo, would be leaving it at nightfall the following Tuesday, bound for an unknown destination.

The information had been both detailed and circumstantial, but the negro could not be persuaded to tell how he had come by it, and when pressed had become frightened and stupid, and backing away, muttered that he did not understand the white man’s talk.

Lieutenant Larrimore had been of two minds whether to believe him or not. Yet the story not only confirmed those earlier rumours, but explained how certain ships, sighted and pursued towards sundown, had managed to escape in the darkness when their sailing speeds were certainly not superior to his own. At least there could be no harm in acting upon the information; and the Daffodil had raised steam and left Zanzibar on the following day, heading northwards; her commanding officer having announced his intention of visiting Mombasa.

Once out of sight of the island, however, he had altered course, and turning south crept down the coast as close to the shore as reefs would permit. And now, late on the Tuesday evening, his ship lay in wait; lights darkened and full steam up, keeping watch on the barely visible break in the long, uneven line of coral cliffs and dark jungle, and rocking idly to the slow-breathing swell that broke lazily and monotonously against the darkened shore.

There had been little wind that day, or for many days; but an hour ago a breeze had arisen with the rising moon, and now it blew strongly off the land, dispersing at last the stinging, singing cloud of mosquitoes that had been plaguing the watchers, and bringing with it the taint of an odour; rancid, sickly, and entirely horrible.

‘’Strewth!’ muttered the coxswain, grimacing with disgust: ‘Stinks like a floating sewer, don’t she? Must ‘av a full load on board this trip; and ‘arf of ’em dead already, I’d say. You’d think them dhows would ‘av more sense than to kill off their own goods, wouldn’t yer?’

‘This one isn’t a dhow,’ said Lieutenant Larrimore grimly. ‘If my information is correct, it’s a bird of a very different feather. Look—–’

The slave ship had edged forward into the unseen passage, and now the moonlight caught her full on and she was no longer a shadowy and unidentifiable shape, but a thing of silver, picking her way cautiously through the narrow channel under jib and foresail, and sounding as she went.

‘Schooner!’ exclaimed the coxswain. ‘I believe it’s – no, it couldn’t be … By goles, sir, I believe it is! Look at the cut of ‘er jib – if that ‘aint the Virago, I’m a Dutchman!’

‘So that negro was right,’ said the Lieutenant between his teeth. ‘It is Frost – we’ve got him at last, and red-handed.’

He whirled round and yelled: ‘Up anchor! Headsails out! Full speed ahead!’

The anchor came up with a rattle that drowned the slow crash and mumble of the surf, furled sails blossomed white in the moonlight, and smoke and sparks lit the blue of the night as the paddles threshed and turned.

The schooner had seen them, but too late. She was too nearly free of the channel to check or turn, and there was nothing for it but to crowd on sail and go forward; and winning clear of the shoals she came about and fled before the strengthening wind, heeling to larboard with the long wake of foam streaming out behind her like a shimmering path across the dancing sea.

Colours broke from her masthead and fluttered in the breeze, but by the light of the half moon it was difficult to make out what they were, until a midshipman staring through a telescope announced: ‘American, sir. She’s hoisted the stars-and-stripes.’

‘Has she, by God,’ snarled the Lieutenant. ‘That trick may work with the West Coast Squadron, but it won’t with me. There’s nothing American about that bastard except his blasted impertinence. Put a shot across him, Bates.’

‘Ay, ay, sir.’

There was a flash and a boom, and the shot passed over the schooner’s masthead and plunged into the sea beyond.

‘They’re lightening ship, sir.’

The fleeing shape ahead of them was flinging everything movable overboard. Spars, casks and timber flashed briefly in the moonlight and bobbed away in the creaming wake, and as the breeze freshened the tiny dark figures of her crew could be seen throwing water on her straining canvas and scrambling from one side to the other to trim the ship.

Even in those light airs she was faster than Lieutenant Larrimore had thought possible, and it was obvious that she was being handled in a masterly manner. He began to realize that even with the advantage of steam in his favour she might draw away from him if the breeze continued to strengthen, for he could not keep up the chase for long – the Admiralty being notoriously parsimonious in the matter of fuel, his supply of coal was far from adequate.

‘Come on! come on, blast you!’ muttered the Lieutenant, apparently urging the threshing paddles to greater speed: ‘We can’t let that chousing scug get away from us this time. God damn this wind! If only …’ He turned abruptly to snap out an order to the coxswain demanding another knot from the engine room. Two, if possible.

But half an hour later the schooner was not only still ahead of him, but appeared to be increasing her lead. And though the Daffodil’s guns had scored several hits, a cross swell combined with the uncertain light had not been conducive to good shooting, and none of them had served to slow the slaver’s pace.

Lieutenant Larrimore, fuming, was recklessly ordering the fires to be stoked to danger point, when a lucky shot cut away the schooner’s steering sails. She yawed and lost way, and five minutes later another shot ripped through her mainsail and the taut canvas split and fell idle. The crippled ship hauled down her colours and hove to – though only backing her fore topsail, and leaving her fore and aft sails still set.

The Lieutenant, observing this last, remarked grimly that Rory Frost must think he was born yesterday.

‘If he imagines that he can trick me into lowering a boat, and then pile on sail and run for it while we’re getting back on board again, he’s much mistaken.’

He picked up a speaking trumpet and yelled through it:

‘Lower your sails at once, and come aboard!’

The breeze distorted the reply so that the words were unintelligible, but the coxswain, who was peering through a telescope, ripped out a sudden oath, and said: ‘It ‘aint the Virago, sir. Same build, but she’s a shade sharper forrard, an’ she ‘aint got the port’oles.’

‘Nonsense! There isn’t another ship in these waters that—– Here, give me that.’

He snatched the telescope and peered through it at the drifting moonlit ship with the torn mainsail, and then put it down again and said heavily: ‘Damn and blast!’

‘Probably a genuine Yankee after all,’ said the Assistant-Surgeon apprehensively. ‘If she is, we’re for it.’

‘Hell to that! she’s a slaver – you can smell her,’ snapped Lieutenant Larrimore. ‘I’m going aboard.’

He picked up the trumpet again, and shouted through it, and this time the reply was audible:

‘No understand Inglese!’

‘That’s a relief. Try him with French,’ suggested the surgeon.

The Lieutenant’s French, however, produced no result, and losing patience he issued a curt order to the gun’s crew to fire at the slaver’s jib halyard block and to continue doing so until it was cut away.

‘Good shooting,’ commended Lieutenant Larrimore, watching the halyard block come rattling down. ‘Lower a boat. I’m going over.’

‘You cannot board me!’ yelled a bearded man in a peaked cap, whose suit may have once been white, but which even by moonlight showed blotched and stained with dirt and sweat of many seasons. ‘It is illegal! I am Americano! I report you to your Consul! I make much trouble for you!’

He appeared to have learned to speak English with remarkable rapidity.

‘You can report me to the Archangel Gabriel if you wish,’ retorted the Lieutenant, and scrambled aboard.

Five years in the East African Squadron should have inured Daniel Larrimore to horrors, but he had never got used to the sight and stench of human suffering, and each time he witnessed it, it seemed to him like the first time – and the worst. Mr Wilson, the coxswain, a hearty, grizzled mariner newly out from home, took one look at the schooner’s crowded and filthy deck and was instantly and violently sick, while the Assistant-Surgeon turned an unhealthy green and found himself feeling oddly faint as the intolerable stench took him by the throat.

The ship was crammed with naked slaves: their emaciated black bodies patched with festering sores, their ankles and wrists chafed and bleeding from heavy iron fetters or gangrenous from ropes that had been tied so tightly that they had eaten into the dark flesh. The schooner’s hatchways had been secured by iron crossbars, and pressed against them from below were the heads of men, women and children who had been packed into the hot, dark, airless space as though they had been bales of cloth; crouching ankle deep in their own filth, unable to move and barely able to breathe, and chained together so that the starving, dying, tortured living were still manacled to the decomposing bodies of the fortunate dead.

Apart from the crew there were three hundred captive negroes on the schooner, and of these eighteen were found to be dead, while a dozen more lay on the deck, huddled together at the foot of the foremast and dying of disease and starvation.

‘Bring ’em up,’ ordered Dan Larrimore, his voice as hard and expressionless as his rigid face. He stood back while they were drawn up through the small hatches to collapse on to the deck where some lay still and moaned, while others crawled feebly to the scuppers and licked the salt water with tongues that were blackened and swollen from thirst.

More than half of the captives were children. Boys and girls whose ages ranged from eight to fourteen years, who had been captured by men of their own race to be sold into slavery for a handful of china beads or a cheap knife. Young and defenceless creatures who had committed no crime against humanity, but who represented a fat profit in counted coin, and whose hands were needed for planting, tending and picking the sugar-cane and cotton on rich plantations on the other side of the world. In Cuba and Brazil, the West Indies and the Southern States of America.

‘And we dare to call ourselves Christians!’ thought Dan Larrimore bitterly. ‘We have the infernal impudence to send out missions to the heathen and preach sanctimonious sermons from our pulpits. And half Spain and Portugal and South America light candles to the saints and burn incense and go to Confession, and can hardly move for priests and churches and statues of the Virgin. It’s enough to make one vomit …’

A dazed, emaciated negress stumbled towards the rail, holding in her arms the body of a child whose skull had been crushed, and seeing that the ugly wound was fresh and bleeding, Dan said sharply: ‘How did that happen?’

The woman shook her head dumbly, and he repeated the question in her own tongue.

‘My son cried when your ship came near,’ said the woman in a parched whisper, ‘and the overseer feared that you might hear and struck him with an iron bar.’

She turned away from him, and leaning over the rail dropped the little body into the sea. And before he could stop her, or even realize what she was about, she climbed onto the rail and leapt in after it.

Her head surfaced only once, and as it did so a black, triangular fin sliced through the water. There was a swirl and a splash and the sea was stained with something that would have been red by daylight but that by moonlight showed only as a spreading patch of oily darkness. Then the shark sank out of sight, and the woman with it. Presently other bodies were sent to join them as the dead were separated from the living and flung overboard, and the scavengers of the deep tore them in pieces and dragged them under, and the waves washed the sea clean again.

The slaver’s boats were lowered, and her hapless cargo – dazed, apathetic and convinced that they were merely falling from the clutches of one set of brutal captors into the hands of another and possibly worse one – were transferred to the Daffodil to the accompaniment of hysterical threats from their late owner.

The schooner’s Captain stormed and raged, calling down curses upon the collective heads of the entire British Navy, and shouting that his name was Peter Fenner, and that he was an American citizen and Perfidious Albion would be made to pay dearly for having fired upon him. But his log had been written in Spanish, his flag lockers proved to contain the flags of a dozen different nations, and his papers gave his name as Pedro Fernandez and his ‘Country of residence’ as Cuba.

‘What do you propose to do with him?’ demanded the Assistant-Surgeon, gulping brandy from a bottle that he had found in the Captain’s cabin – for he, like the coxswain, was new to the realities of slave trading. ‘If we take him back to Zanzibar they’ll only keep him there for a month or so, and then ship him off to some place like Lourenço Marques where he’ll be treated like a prodigal son and allowed to get off scot free. And we haven’t enough coal to take him to the Cape.’

‘I know. That’s why we’re going to leave him here.’

The slaver’s Captain, smiling broadly, spoke insolently over his shoulder, and in Spanish, to his first mate:

‘You see, Sanchez? They can do nothing. They dare not hold us, and when they have gone we shall go back and pick up more slaves, and these pigs will not even know. Par Dios! What fools are these English!’

Lieutenant Larrimore returned the smile, though less pleasantly, and remarked in the same language: ‘But not too foolish to speak Spanish – which is unfortunate for you SeñTor Perro (dog) is it not?’

He turned back to the Assistant-Surgeon and continued as though there had been no interruption:

‘We’re well clear of the land and the wind seems to be dying down again, so I shall sink his boats and confiscate his canvas. We’ll let him keep some food and water – about the same amount, and in the same proportion, that he seems to have considered sufficient for those poor devils. Agreed?’

‘Agreed!’ said the Assistant-Surgeon briskly. ‘I shall enjoy seeing to it.’

They finished the brandy and returned to the deck, where the boarding party unbent all the sails and removed every shred of canvas (‘Nothing to stop them using their bedding to rig up a jib,’ suggested the Lieutenant unkindly), unreeved all the rigging, threw guns, bunting, and every movable object overboard, let go both anchors to the limit of their chains, and dealt drastically with both food and water.

‘And you can thank us,’ said Lieutenant Larrimore in conclusion, ‘for leaving you a compass.’

He climbed over the side and was rowed back to the Daffodil in the first pale light of dawn: unaware that behind him a dhow that had also been lurking in the hidden bay, and that had left it as soon as the chase had moved far enough out to sea, had slipped away unseen and set her course due south for a rendezvous that was no more than a pin-point on a well-thumbed chart.

3

Captain Thaddaeus Fullbright of the Norah Crayne, ninety-eight days out from Boston, glanced at the barometer for the fourth time in ten minutes, and frowned. The sea was as flat and as motionless as it had been for the past three weeks, but the glass continued to fall, and although it was midday the sun was still veiled by a hot, tarnished haze that was neither fog nor cloud.

It was an ugly and unseasonable haze, and it disturbed Captain Fullbright, for this was normally the season of swift passages; of roaring blue seas and scudding cloud shadows. But ever since they had rounded the Cape they had met with nothing but this unnatural calm and these rusty, hazy days. The Norah Crayne had idled up the coast of Africa, often making less than a knot, and now it began to look as though they would be lucky if they made land in another ten days.

‘If at all!’ muttered Captain Fullbright. And was startled to discover that he had spoken the words aloud.

It was a measure of his anxiety that he could even entertain such a thought, let alone put it into words, and it occurred to him that at this rate he would soon be emulating Tod MacKechnie, that maundering old Scotsman back in Durban who had discoursed so depressingly on death and the Judgements of Jehovah.

‘Bah!’ said Captain Fullbright, addressing himself impartially to the barometer and the shade of the absent MacKechnie. He turned his back abruptly upon both, and staring out at the flat leagues of tarnished silver, wondered pessimistically what further mischances might lie in wait before he saw Boston harbour again.

It had been a bad voyage so far, and he regretted this as much for his wife’s sake as his own, for it was not often that Amelia was permitted to accompany him. The owners had never previously encouraged it, and she would not have been here now if a cousin of the Craynes’ had not happened to be the only lady among a long list of male passengers, and Josiah Crayne, being strongly opposed to Miss Hollis travelling unchaperoned, had not personally requested Amelia’s presence.

Mr Crane would have done better, thought Captain Thaddaeus wryly, to prevent his young cousin from sailing at all. But then Miss Hollis appeared to be a headstrong young woman who was obviously accustomed to having her own way, and Josiah Crayne had probably found it less fatiguing to let her have it than to attempt to argue with her. It was also possible that he was not altogether sorry to be temporarily rid of her!

Captain Fullbright grinned to himself; and immediately suffered a twinge of remorse. It was plumb ungrateful of him to criticize a girl who had heroically conquered her own nausea, and reversing their roles, nursed her chaperone through several