Trade Wind (49 page)

“Ah, but you see,” said Rory, “they weren’t muskets. They were rifles.”

“I don’t see what that has to do with it!”

“You wouldn’t. But it happens to have a great deal to do with it I was asked if I would be willing to supply, secretly, a certain number of firearms for a purpose that was not named, but which was nevertheless perfectly clear to me.”

“So you knew—you knew all the time!”

“My good girl, not being a credulous spinster, of course I knew. It needed no great intelligence. But a handsome sum of money was mentioned, and I have made it a rule never to refuse a good offer.”

“Even though you pretend to be a friend of the Sultan’s? Even though you say you knew that the muskets would be used against him?”

“Rifles,” corrected Captain Frost blandly.

“Why do you keep saying that? They can still kill people.”

“Not these ones. At least, not until someone can collect a reasonable supply of fulminate of mercury and get down to manufacturing some caps. You see. Miss Hollis, I was not asked to supply the necessary ammunition; only ‘firearms.’ Two hundred of them, to be precise. An acquaintance of mine undertook to provide the ammunition, but owing to a—er—misunderstanding, and the fact that a rifle is still something of a novelty in these parts, he supplied ammunition that was suitable for muskets but not for rifles. You see the point?”

Hero stared at him in incredulous disgust; the classic curve of her lips pressed into a tight line and her grey eyes stony. She said: “Clearly! It was, in fact, a deliberate fraud, designed to cheat your buyer into paying this ‘handsome sum’ you say he was offering, for goods that were entirely worthless.”

“Not entirely—a rifle is still worth its own weight in Cape dollars, and they were in perfectly good condition. It was merely unfortunate, from the viewpoint of the final purchaser, that they could not be used until the proper caps and the correct ammunition were available.”

“But you—”

“I, Miss Hollis, carried out my part of the bargain and delivered two hundred firearms to my client They were then sold again: and but for your unlooked-for interference the whole transaction would have been as harmless as it was lucrative. A large part of the money sent by Thuwani for the purpose of financing a rebellion—Oh yes, he sent funds!—would have been uselessly frittered away. For when old Abdullah-bin-Salim and the chiefs of the el Harth laid eyes on those rifles, they would have discovered that they couldn’t be used with the ammunition they had recently collected and paid for, and they would have held their hands until they could get or manufacture the right variety. Which, believe me, would have taken a considerable time, and provided enough delay to take the heart out of a very large number of Bargash’s supporters, who had been getting noticeably restive and were almost ready to throw their hands in or go over to the other side. However, thanks to you and your fellow heroines, the rifles got into the hands of those silly women at Beit-el-Tani, where Bargash was shown them by night All two hundred of them piled up in a beautiful, martial heap.”

Hero said helplessly: “I don’t see what difference that could make. If he saw them, he’d have known…”

“He hadn’t seen the ammunition—for the simple reason that it had been delivered separately to one of his civilian supporters at a house outside the city. Anyway, he apparently didn’t take the trouble to examine the rifles. One look at them seems to have been enough to send him tipsy with confidence. And since they were removed almost at once to be distributed by ones and twos, not to the chiefs but to the rank and file—who probably imagined that one or other of their leaders would show them how to use these magical new weapons—it isn’t difficult to understand why the mere fact that they got their hands on no less than two hundred of the things was just what the rebels needed to galvanize them into hauling up the anchor.”

Hero drew a deep breath, and after a long pause said unsteadily: “I can understand one thing, at least. That you are entirely unprincipled and prepared to take any risk or perpetrate any fraud in order to enrich yourself But I cannot see how you have the effrontery to take me to task when your own behaviour is wholly indefensible.”

“‘
Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor’
,” quoted Rory with mock regret.

“If I knew what that meant, I might agree with you.”

“I apologize. I imagined that with a name like yours you would have received a classical education. It means ‘I see the better course and approve it: I follow the worst.’ But at least I do it with my eyes open! And now, if you will forgive me, I shall have to leave you to find your own way back to your aunt. The door is over there and I should be grateful if you would close it as you go out—just in case any other members of your party should find it an inducement to trespassing. Good day. Miss Hollis.”

He sketched the briefest of bows, and turning on his heel walked away down the flower-bordered path and up the short flight of steps that led to the terrace, leaving Hero standing among the shadows with her skirts still entangled in the trails of yellow briar and feeling like a dismissed kitchen-maid.

The sound of his footsteps echoed under an unseen archway and were gone, and Hero tore at the roses, pricked her fingers and ripped another long tear in the frail muslin of her petticoat, and gathering up her skirts, fled from the garden: slamming the door behind her and stumbling down the rocky path to the beach, her mind a turmoil of anger and shock and her lips moving in foolish, sobbing whispers: ‘
I don’t believe it…I won’t believe it…I don’t believe it…
’

23

“I don’t believe it!” insisted Hero stubbornly. But in the end she had to believe it. Or at least some part of it, for Uncle Nat, appealed to that same evening, had supported a good deal of what Captain Frost had said:

“Why yes,” said Uncle Nat, “I guess that’s so. The French have always wanted a footing on the mainland around these parts, and there’s nothing they’d like better than to dethrone the Sultan and put an end to British influence here. After the old man died they hoped to get rid of Majid in favour of Thuwani, and see Zanzibar and her East African territories declared a dependency of Muscat again, so that they’d get the secession of a port from the new and grateful ruler—with the right to ship slaves from it. In fact they’ve been a blame nuisance, one way and another.”

“But—but the French were the first to try and stop the slave trade!” protested Hero, dismayed. “You
know
that’s so, Uncle Nat. I remember Miss Penbury telling me that they made the very first anti-slave laws in Europe, when the National Convention abolished negro slavery back in the seventeen-hundreds. You can read about it!”

“Well, you know how it is with these things,” said Uncle Nat easily. “It’s all a question of politics. I guess it seemed a great idea to abolish slavery when they were cooking up a revolution: ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ and all that. But it got put back on the books a few years later by the Consulate; and you can read about that too!
Conformément aux lois et règlements antérieurs
. It’s been an ‘On again, off again’ arrangement ever since, because the Republic officially abolished it again, but there’s no blinking the fact that this ‘
engagés
‘ system of theirs is just another name for the same thing. They need negro slaves for their colonies and they’re going to get ‘em, come hell or high water! But they’d get ‘em a sight easier if they could get a foothold on the coast, which they won’t manage to do as long as Majid is on the throne, on account of him leaning towards the English.”

Hero said in a stifled voice: “Why did you never tell me this before, Uncle Nat?”

“I guess you never asked. And how is it you’re so interested all of a sudden, anyway?”

“I’m not…I mean, I’ve always been interested. People have to be, if it’s ever going to end. This selling human beings like—like cattle and not caring if they live or die. You have to care about cruelty; you
have
to! But I didn’t know about the
engagés
and Reunion and—and…’ Her voice wavered on the verge of tears.

“No need why you should bother your pretty head about such things,” said Uncle Nat infuriatingly. He had always adhered firmly to the view that women should confine their energies to what he vaguely termed “womanly pursuits’, and these apparently did not include anything outside the home. He had strongly disapproved of Hero’s mother, Harriet, and now he looked long and thoughtfully at his niece, and clearing his throat with a shade of embarrassment said carefully:

“You know, Hero, this may sound like some kind of a sermon, but it don’t do to start blaming any one nation more than another for a thing like the slave trade. Before you get your dander up you’ve got to remember we’ve all been in it. And by that I mean Mankind! Even the negroes themselves are in it—up to their necks, and I don’t mean their slave-halters either. The African tribes have preyed on each other in order to supply the traders, and made a mighty good thing out of selling their own people into slavery. Arabs, Africans and Indians, the British and the French, Dutchmen, Spaniards and Portuguese, North and South Americans—there isn’t one of ‘em can show a clean pair of hands, and it’s as well to remember that. Why, our own Thomas Jefferson, at the very time when he was speaking and writing against the slaving activities of the English, owned more than eighty slaves himself—and explained that though he hated the whole system he just couldn’t afford, for financial reasons, to free his own negroes! We’re all tarred with the same brush, and there’s a sound old saying about ‘people who live in glass houses’ that we’d do well to remember before any of us start in reaching for stones. And I guess that goes for a heap of other things besides the slave trade! One way or another, all our houses are glass.”

“I—I suppose so,” said Hero desolately. Her own had certainly been; and she spent a sleepless night brooding on Captain Frost’s horrifying revelations and Uncle Nat’s confirmation of them, and convicting herself at least of manslaughter if not actually murder. She had been unbelievably stupid and stubborn, and Clay had been right…Clay had tried to warn her and she had refused to listen to him, because she had imagined herself to be settling the destiny of the Island for its own good, when all the time she was merely being used and made a fool of by Thérèse Tissot, Cholé and Bargash, who had tricked her as easily as though she had been a conceited child. And she could not even acquit herself of behaving like one, because surely even a child should have seen through that story of the treasure chests that must not be opened.

Had Olivia known? Somehow Hero did not believe it. But the reflection that Olivia and Cressy had been equally gullible did nothing towards lessening her own agony of remorse and self-loathing, for she had thought herself so much cleverer and far more capable than either of them, and had considered Olivia Credwell to be an empty-headed, sentimental creature, and Cressy a silly child. Yet her own behaviour had been marked by a sentimental silliness that she could hardly bear to contemplate: criminal silliness! for she had done a great deal of harm. What could have possessed her to lend herself to pulling other people’s dubious chestnuts out of the fire? She should have known: she should have suspected. ‘
Ye’ll have a hand in helpin’ a power o’ folk to die
…’ Biddy Jason had known! All those long years ago she had known, and this is what she had meant—

“A power of folk”…How many men had died inside the walls of
Marseilles
and on the parched ground between the raw stumps of clove trees and coconut palms that had been hacked down to clear a field of fire for Bargash’s men? Two hundred?—three?—four? Her own part in the rising had been so trivial that her share of the responsibility must be equally small: a minute proportion of the whole. But then guilt was not a thing that could be measured out on a pair of kitchen scales or split like a hair under a microscope, and perhaps if you allowed yourself to have even a fractional share in something that resulted in the death of others, you were morally responsible for the whole. If that were so, she must shoulder the blame for everything that she had in any way helped to bring about, and the fact that she had not known what she was doing could not be held to excuse her.
Ignorance of the law excuses nobody
…Captain Frost had said that.

Quite suddenly, lying there in the dark, she realized that at least one of the questions she had asked herself was answered. The reason that she had thrown herself so blindly and hastily into this disastrous affair was less for the sake of sympathy for the suffering citizens of Zanzibar, than for a personal detestation of Captain Emory Frost of the
Virago
, It was as simple—and as humiliating—as that!

Rory Frost embodied everything that she had learned to hold in abhorrence: slavery and the white men who helped to keep the horror alive and make fortunes from the tragedy and suffering of captive negroes: dishonesty, profligacy and miscegenation: the English, who had attempted to force iniquitous laws on free-born Americans, burned the White House and fired on peaceful farmers. And as if that were not enough, he had made fun of her, lectured her and treated her with casual disrespect, had the effrontery to admit his crimes without a trace of shame or apology, and worst of all, to be a man of birth and education.

That last still seemed to Hero less forgivable than a coloured mistress and bastard children, since it stripped him of all excuses and branded him as someone who, as he himself had said, could see the better course yet deliberately follow the worst. Because all this had outraged her, she had allowed herself to embark on a personal vendetta that had blinded her to everything else and completely destroyed her sense of proportion. It was a singularly unpleasant reflection, and for the first time in her life Hero took stock of herself—and did not like what she saw.

One result of her unhappy meditations was that Clayton Mayo appeared in a far better light than at any time since the days when she had first imagined herself in love with him.

Clay had tried to warn her for her own good, but he had never reproached her, and except for the unfortunate scenes that had marked the day of her arrival, remained unfailingly considerate. He had not pressed any claims or thrust himself upon her notice, and in her present state of self-abasement he began to seem the only stable thing in an uncertain world, for he not only loved and admired her, but he would protect her from her own impetuousness, and apply balm to her wounds by making her feel cherished and adored—and safe! Though why she should suddenly desire safety she did not know. She only knew that the need was there and that Clay would satisfy it.