Evil in a Mask (46 page)

This bombshell took Roger entirely by surprise and he could not altogether conceal his dismay as the hatchet-faced Marquis went on scathingly:

‘Have you recently regarded yourself in a mirror? If so, you must have seen that, since leaving Lisbon, your hair has reverted to its natural colour. There, owing to your excellent English, you practised a clever deceit upon me by pretending to be your cousin. But you could not change your mannerisms.
When we first met at Persopolis, you had a decided limp. Evidently you were taking great pains to rid yourself of it; for when we met again three months later, it was no longer noticeable. But while on board the
Nunez
you became too ill to control your walk so carefully. Within a week of being at sea I realised the truth.

‘Had I disclosed that when we first met you were in the service of the Corsican brigand, you would have been hung from the yardarm. I refrained only because I at least gave you credit for having been inspired to this duplicity by a deep love for Lisala. It may be that you are now telling the truth, and that it is Bonaparte whom you have deceived. Be that as it may, I can regard you only as an unscrupulous adventurer; and nothing would induce me to give my daughter's hand to such a man.'

Under this torrent of acid denunciation, Roger paled, then said in a low voice, ‘I thank you, milord, for your forbearance during the voyage. That I am, in fact, an Englishman, I vow upon my honour; but I do not deny that for many years past I have served the Emperor. That I should have done so does not weigh upon my conscience, and I will happily give you a full explanation.'

‘I desire no explanation,' de Pombal replied coldly. ‘At best it could be that you are a spy—so dishonourable a trade that it debars all those who practise it from respectable society. I had hoped that when you left the
Nunez
at Macoé I would see you no more. Then, we landed here in Rio and learned of the exertions you had gone to in order to secure for us this comfortable accommodation, I could not bring myself to repudiate you. But now I can no longer defer taking steps to safeguard Lisala's future; and our continued association stands in the way of my doing so. It remains now only for you to say if you are prepared to make the house over to me or if I must find other quarters for myself and my family.'

Ruefully Roger admitted to himself that he was completely defeated. All hope of his marrying Lisala or remaining there as her secret lover had been swept away. Standing up, he bowed and said:

‘My Lord. It should be easier for me to find quarters for
one than you for four, together with your servants; and I am anxious that the ladies should continue to enjoy such comforts as are available here. However, I paid only a deposit on this property, so no doubt you will be willing to relieve me of further liability.'

‘Certainly,' the Marquis replied promptly. ‘I brought with me from Portugal ample funds. Let me have particulars. I will both make myself responsible for the purchase and reimburse you for such outlays as you have already made. Moreover, I wish to make it clear that I have no vindictive feelings towards you. I shall not disclose to anyone that you have created for yourself a dual identity; and when we meet in future, as we are bound to do if you remain in Rio, it will be as acquaintances who have simply decided that we have not found it agreeable to continue living under one roof.'

Roger bowed again. ‘For that I thank you, milord.' As he had been considerably worried about how he was to find the further instalments to pay for the house, its being taken over was a relief. But that had hardly crossed his mind when de Pombal delivered another blow:

‘You will agree, I am sure, that a formal leavetaking would prove most painful to Lisala; so it would be best if you left here some time today, without giving any particular reason. I will then tell her that, after you and I had discussed her future, you volunteered to leave rather than continue to compromise her by your attentions.'

For Roger that meant that he would be deprived of a last night with his beloved, the opportunity to tell her the truth about what had taken place and that, her father's having identified him as
Colonel de Breuc
had wrecked all hope of their marrying. But, since he could not say that to the Marquis, he saw no option other than to agree.

He went upstairs with fury in his heart, packed his belongings into two small bags, then sat down to write a note to Lisala. In it he told her the reason for his leaving, said that he would do his utmost to devise a way by which they could meet in secret, and vowed his eternal devotion.

His next problem was to get it to her unseen. As he carried
his bags out to the stable, he ran into the giant Negro, Baob. It then occurred to him that this newcomer to the household was much more likely to prove trustworthy than one of the servants whom the Marquis had brought with him from Portugal. So he gave Baob the note, together with a
muriodor
and charged him to give the missive to Lisala when no-one was looking. With a cheerful grin the colourfully-clad black man accepted the commission.

An hour later Roger was drinking a bottle of wine with Philippe. The inn was crowded to capacity, but the Frenchman, eager to repay Roger in some measure for the fortune he was now making, at once volunteered to turn out the guest who was occupying his old room, so that he could install himself there for as long as he wished; and said that he would get for him a slave as a personal servant.

Next morning Baob arrived with a note from Lisala. It was brief but poignant.
I am utterly distraught. I could kill my father for having turned you out. You must find some way to come to me at nights. You must. You must
.

At ten o'clock that night Roger was outside the house, reconnoitring it for a possible means of getting up to Lisala's bedroom. He knew already that, like every other house in Rio, the heavy doors were securely bolted and the ground-floor windows shuttered and barred, as a protection against the innumerable thieves and half-starved, desperate men who swarmed in the city. Had Lisala's room been at the front of the house, he might have climbed to it by way of the verandah; but hers and that of the Dona Christina were at the back and on that side there was not even a creeper that might have given him a handhold to scale the wall. Her window was at least fifteen feet above the ground and, clearly, the only means of reaching it was by a ladder.

Moodily, he walked all round the house, then round the outbuildings. In a loft above the big barn the slaves slept on a thin layer of infrequently-changed straw, and no precautions were taken to prevent desperadoes entering there. The door of the barn was a little open, so he went in. The starlight was just sufficient for him to make out a long ladder against the wall;
but a glance was enough to tell him that it was far too heavy for him to lift unaided.

On recrossing the yard, he saw that Lisala's window was now dimly lit. Evidently she was expecting him; but not that he would have arrived so early. Apparently she had been listening intently, so had caught the sound of his careful footsteps, as the curtain was pulled aside and she put her head out of the window.

‘Roger, Roger my love, come up to me,' she whispered.

‘I cannot,' he whispered back. ‘How can I without a ladder? And the one in the barn is too heavy for me to lift. You must come down and let me in.'

She shook her head. ‘No. You know those bolts, bars and chains on the doors as well as I do. Undoing them would make such a clatter it's certain I'd be heard.'

At that moment there came the screech of ill-fitting wood on wood, as the Dona Christina threw up her window. Roger had just time to dive behind a wagon that was standing in the yard, then came the high-pitched voice of the old woman:

‘Who's that? Who is that out there?'

Lisala had drawn in her head and swiftly snuffed her candle. Roger held his breath and remained crouching behind the wagon. Minutes passed; the silence was intense. At last the duenna decided that she had been mistaken in thinking that someone was outside, gave a raucous cough and shut her window. Before moving, Roger slowly counted up to a thousand; then he tiptoed away.

Next day Baob brought another note from Lisala. In it she implored Roger to find some way to come to her and heaped curses on her father.

Roger wrote back, saying that the only way in which he might reach her room was for her to secure somehow a rope ladder, or at least a knotted rope, which she could lower to him so that he could climb up.

The following day she replied to the effect that he must surely realise how impossible it was for her to come by a rope, or hide it if she did; so he must suggest some other means of coming to her.

Although he had brooded over the question for hours, he could think of none, and wrote to tell her so, ending by assuring her that he shared her distress, and of his unfailing devotion.

There, for the time being, their correspondence ended; and he endeavoured to reconcile himself to their unhappy situation. Now and then they met at the houses of mutual friends, but had no opportunity to exchange even a few words together unheard by others. On such occasions her huge tawny eyes silently reproached him, but he could do no more than acknowledge her glances by an almost imperceptible shrug, and little helpless gestures.

With February there came Lent and a fervid display of the religious fanaticism that obsessed the population of Rio. There were fasts, processions in which hundreds of people followed sacred relics of the saints, crawling on their knees along the ground, public flagellations and votive offerings, out of which the unwashed priesthood lined their coffers.

From dawn to dusk the big Candelabra Church and all the others were packed with penitents beating their breasts and wailing repentance for their sins. Out of curiosity, Roger visited a few of the churches, but left again almost at once, repelled by the stench, not only of the living but also of the dead.

For there were no cemeteries in Rio. Everyone of importance was buried either under the floor or in cavities in the walls of the churches. Owing to the high rate of mortality, there had been recent interments in all of them and, quite often, the stones had not been securely replaced, with the result that the horrible emanations from rotting corpses pervaded these places of worship.

Slaves and the destitute who died in the gutters were not buried at all. Their bodies were roughly bundled up in straw, thrown into carts, then dumped on the waste ground outside the city. Great flights of vultures descended upon them and, within a few hours, picked the bones clean.

One day Roger rode out to see the slave market at Vallonga. It was situated in a long, narrow valley between two wooded hills, one of which ended in a high cliff dropping sheer to the sparkling sea. On it stood a small, whitewashed Chapel to the
Virgin and the big warehouses into which the human cargoes from Africa were herded, after the tax upon them had been paid to the Crown.

Their sufferings during the long crossing were so terrible that it was a miracle that any of them survived. Three hundred and more were packed into the holds of small ships, where they lay for weeks head to foot like sardines, manacled and bound. To weaken them and so decrease the possibility of mutineering, they were deliberately half-starved. Even so, at times they were seized by a suicidal despair. Groups of them staggered to their feet; then, weeping and cursing, beat with their handcuffs on the iron gratings that confined them. The frenzy spread until the hold became a seething mass of screaming men and women. But their hopes of deliverance were invariably crushed. A dozen of the crew would descend with muskets and pour volley after volley of buckshot into the demented swarm of Negroes, killing some, wounding others so that they soon died from untended wounds, and cowing the remainder into submission.

When the survivors were flogged ashore, their bodies were those of living skeletons, scarcely able to walk, their ribs sticking out under the taut skin of their chests. Still manacled, they were kept in the long warehouses for several weeks while being fattened up for sale. Their stomachs shrunken from many weeks of semi-starvation, they were unable to keep down the quantities of corn mush with which they were forcibly fed, and spewed it up. Lying in their vomit and excrement, they gradually put on weight until they were thought sufficiently saleable to be auctioned.

Roger knew, too, that their last days would be scarcely less terrible. In the Southern States of America, it was the custom that, when the cotton-picking slaves became too old to work any longer in the fields, they were allowed to sit idle in the sun and given enough food to support them. But that was not so here in Brazil. When slaves, through illness or old age, became a charge upon their master, they were turned out to fend for themselves. For a year or two they might continue a miserable existence begging their bread in the streets then, incapable
from weakness or disease of doing so any longer, they died like pariah dogs; and the sanctimonious frequenters of the so-called Christian churches did not even spare a glance for the wasted bodies of such human offal.

Utterly appalled by this spectacle of ruthless inhumanity, had Roger been a less rational man he would have gone into the Chapel of the Virgin and overthrown her image for permitting such atrocities. As it was, having long since rejected the belief that, if a Christian God did exist, he had any power whatever to protect his votaries, he rode back into Rio sick with rage and disgust.

At the end of the month, news arrived that caused the merchant community of Rio to become delirious with joy. For three centuries Brazil, as a colony of Portugal, had been restricted to selling her products only to the mother country; and Portugal could absorb only a limited quantity of the valuable merchandise that Brazil could supply. Under the liberal influence of José da Silva Lisboa, Viconde de Cairu, the Prince Regent had issued an Ordinance opening Brazilian ports to the ships of all nations. A still further cause for rejoicing was that Don Joao had left Bahia and was on his way to Rio, which he intended to make his permanent capital.