ORANGE/RED
PERIOD QUOTATION OMITTED; p 144: BLANK
Twelve
LIAMUIGA, 1619 C.E.
IN THE PAST, Sycorax had been afraid of her knowledge.
Gradually, however, she had grown into her role as wisewoman and witch, and come to accept the powers others attributed to her, and agree that she might be the special source and cause.
But now, fallen from her cabin, she was cut off from all understanding, and had no strength to kick against the darkness that had come down around her.
Her pelvis was cracked on her right side and her back broken, though neither she nor Ariel knew this yet in their attention to the burns she had received.
When Ariel gently lifted the old woman to move her to her own quarters up the path in the forest, Sycorax gave a huge cry, the folding of her body in Ariel's arms shot fiery rivers of pain through her that for a while swallowed up all the others she suffered from her burns.
Ariel wept and nearly stumbled, for her own leg was sore too, but she kept on going, determined to take Sycorax away from the men who were camping in their compound, drawing water from the stream, building fire on their hearthstones, and beginning to roast a spitted shoat to eat.
Sycorax fainted, and Ariel bent her cheek to the discoloured cheek of the old woman and licked the salt that fell in her tears, and when she reached the cabin took her inside where the rush screens would keep the flies off her wounds, and made her as comfortable as she could on the ground, with fresh dressings on her burns, a cool soaked cloth on her forehead.
She was singing to her hoarsely, struggling through exhaustion and grief to find breath.
So Ariel kept vigil as the night came down on that day nearly four hundred years ago, when everything changed for them.
Yet the night stole in with habitual, velvet gentleness, as she sang low and hoarse:
The holes in my net are so fine
They catch the moon in the water;
There is always a quarry greater by far,
A tenderer fruit, a softer fur.
Can you find honey in the crack of a tree,
Hear the song in the mouth of the shell?
As Ariel's voice reached through the darkness that had walled up Sycorax in pain, she tried to recall some of the things she had once known; she murmured and found that when she did so Ariel stopped singing, so she tried not to remember out loud, but to save the retrieved pieces inside her so that the low, scraping voice of the girl she loved would not be interrupted.
She remembered there had been fire in starbursts never seen before, and explosions of noise.
Even the fires in the depths of the crater mouth had a kind of slow sly laughter in them that did not erupt and scream and tear at you as these fires did.
people used to talk about a time when the volcano also spat flames and rocks into the sky, like the strangers' guns, when the black strand on the northern promontory of the island was formed by the mountain's spewing.
She thought she would pray to the power in the mountain to stop the pain, and her lips moved to begin her entreaty; Ariel bent to her to catch what she said.
There seemed to Sycorax a great need to placate the gods; within the winding sheet of her bodily agony, she could feel another grief, that she had neglected them, had scorned the gifts they had lavished on her, taken them as they came instead of with gratitude due.
And now, too late.
She was punished, and with her, Ariel.
Ariel heard her and managed to decipher the words: ' Adesang, god of the mountain, do not abandon me! '
She fastened swollen eyes on Ariel.
' And you, don't forget him: Adesang! '
The young woman shook her head and steeped the cloth on Sycorax's brow again, and bent closer, keeping her mind focused on her song, for she knew that someone was at her back, at the opening of her cabin, beyond the screen of rushes that stood there, and he was waiting for her.
She heard the undergrowth squeak under his feet every now and then, but she stuck to her song, making herself think of healing.
Though her thoughts were wayward.
In her mind's eye, she flayed the red man of his sparse pelt and hung it up to dry over a pole in her garden and then used it  as roofing for her animals' hutch perhaps, or a tunic for herself.
He'd be red then, as red as Sycorax's open weals.
' I won't forget him, ' she promised her mother.
' Adesang, yes, ' she reassured her.
Red was close to blue, Sycorax thought.
When you looked up too long without blinking on a day when the sun was high and the blue saturated the sky evenly and deeply from the horizon to the zenith, and closed your eyes, what you saw then was fire, crisscrossed with rivulets of blood.
These were the veins in your lids, she knew that, though now, in the darkness of her pain, she remembered that Adesang, lord of the volcano, the power that leapt in the crater and had leapt to set her on fire, moved along fissures in the earth that forked like those veins in her eyes.
The sky  the aether, the immaterial arch of blue above her  had led her to neglect the material presence of anger in fire.
The blue should have reminded her of his flaming, instead of entrancing her by its own beauty, the beauty which had seemed to be utter and complete in itself.
Now, swept by red wave upon wave, she had to expiate her failure.
The blue I used to make, she thought to herself, was the culmination of a sequence.
It marked the end of the long process of transformations  starting with the seething leaves of the plant, then the reeking green stage of the first steepings, and the sulphurous yellow stage of the liquor before it was exposed to the air, then binding with the air, it gradually turned to blue.
The emptiness in which all things revolve is blue, she went on, in her half-waking state.
Time was no other colour but blue, since distances were blue and water too.
But when you enter into them, she now saw in sorrow, the blueness evaporates.
It has no more substance than a smell.
Like me, like us, who are dissolving into the whirling water too.
Then she checked herself, realising she was wandering in her mind.
The pain wound itself tighter round her.
The people who are seizing and occupying the present time can not belong in my colour, they're like the bits that leap out of a spinning bowl, too heavy, too separate and distinct to be blended in with the other substances; red-hot stones, flung out and setting on fire the place where they land.
Her mind was drifting on the waves of her pain.
We do not exercise power over explosions and crackling and snapping of fire like the strangers, we fall back into the waves  as Dul's mother did, the young woman I dug up all those years ago, who had been drowned, who had returned to the deep blue.
When Sycorax seemed to be quieter, her lips still and her breathing more regular, Ariel drew to the side of the room and stretched out her sore leg and leaned against the wall and closed her eyes.
She heard the red man approach, she saw the screen swell as his motions stirred the air outside.
She did not move, she was too heavy with all that had happened, she could not even lift her hands to cover her face.
She would kill him later, she thought, when she was strong again.
Meanwhile, she must sleep.
He held the screen aside, and said something in his language, and she understood he was inquiring about Sycorax.
Then he pointed to his bandaged arm.
' It's tingling, that's a good sign.
A sign of healing. '
He was standing in the entrance, with the reed door hanging bunched in his good hand.
The tree frogs whistled  three urgent calls on a rising scale, one to another, again and again.
She knew there was nothing she could do to make him go away; and she smelt him, and the acrid want in him.
In spite of her bone-weariness, all of a sudden she was facing him squarely, for she was the same height and if anything, more strongly built.
He caught hold of her hand and pushed it between his legs and ground his mouth against hers.
The dullness she had felt in her exhaustion became a kind of sickness now, as for the second time that day she once again flew from her own body and split into two.
Two Ariels, one outside the other, each watching the other, curious, inert, from the other side of consciousness, in the country where the souls wander.
She was curious, about the whey in his mouth and the shaft of his cock under her palm and the paired kernels of his balls; about the possibility of pleasure her mother Sycorax who was dying now beside her had talked of so often.
She would kill him later, but for the present, she was thinking of Sycorax, who had instructed her in love, and wondering if it would please her that here she was, filling a man with desire just as Sycorax had always said she should.
He flung his head to one side and muttered something, his face was twisted up; he pushed himself away and fell out through the entrance and on to his knees, and she sat down on the floor for her legs felt weak and the wounded one was throbbing painfully, and she crawled over to Sycorax and lay down beside her and sobbed hot, dry grief until she at last fell asleep.
Outside, crouching, his weight resting on his good arm, Kit Everard was praying, ' The Lord is my shepherd, I 'll not want. '
I want, he thought, I want, I want her still, but 1 subdued my want.
He turned over on the ground, and put his hand to his cock and squeezed himself.
Dear Lord God, help me, help me not become today a murderer and a ravisher.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil.
I shall do no evil, I shall not cast the shadow of death around me.
I was not made for this, my Lord, my shepherd.
For thou art with me; thy rod and staff shall comfort me.
He was holding himself rhythmically now, pumping with long, smooth strokes.
By pastures green, he leadeth me, the quiet waters by.
Give me your rod, he implored, give me your strength.
He groaned at his blasphemy, then heaved the words on to his lips.
' Lord, be my shepherd.
Lead me beside the still waters.
Though I should walk in the valley of the shadow of death, save me spasms, he ceased, and lying back quietly now, with no words teeming in his head, he wiped his hand on the ground.
Then he curled up where he lay, at the entrance of the cabin Ariel had built, where Sycorax lay dying, and began to fall asleep.
He had been truly godforsaken today, he was thinking as he sank; he had never before done so much violence to anyone.
I shall found a garden in these Western Isles, he swore.
I've struggled to the edge of the navigable world in my Argo to find the golden fruits of the setting sun, and now I've found them and they're guarded by maidens.
Or at least by one maiden, and she has given me battle.
The fruit was still not in his grasp, but he would reach it, he would tend the tree that bore it, he would plant more from its magical pits and seeds.
His last thoughts were that he would make amends for this day; he could baptise the maiden, they could be saved together, they could marry, he would love her, his heathen maiden, no, his heathen hoyden, he liked the rhyming of that, heathen hoyden, he would cherish her beneath the fruit-laden tree.
All would be healed.
The Lord is my shepherd, I 'll not want.
He maketh me down to lie.
In pastures green, he leadeth me, by the Hesperides, by the Western Isles.
Thirteen
From HOW WE PLAYED: A FAMILY MEMOIR by Sir ' Ant ' Everard
KIT EVERARD TO REBECCA CLOVELLY
Everhope Island, Eighteenth April, Year of Our Lord 1619
DEAR COUSIN,
How should I begin to describe to you the many enchantments of this isle?
It has been nigh on a full month since we first made a landfall on to the north shore: since we rode in the longboat on the crest of the shining surf and I set my foot withal on this fair land in the name of the King.
How I have longed to have you in my arms to show you its marvellous bounty, its plentiful springs and well-watered pastures, its salt ponds and forest arbours where gay birds fly and the trees bear abundantly!
Yet ere now we were not ready to supply a ship to return to our dear native shore and bring you news of our safe passage and happy issue of our venture.
My expectations have been met in full measure, as I think you may ascertain for yourself from our well-beloved Tom Ingledew who conveys to you this packet.
God himself has blessed this land with fruitfulness and beauty.
You can not count the features of loveliness here, but I attach some pages from my notebook to discover to you the ingenious flora of this fair isle and their many productive and rich uses.
That which I trust shall make me worthy of your high esteem.
The first is a cotton bush: Figure a.
describes the fruit in bud, like a green mitten.
The Figure b.
reveals the fruit in ripeness, when the floss inside is ready to be plucked, as soft as the lock of hair I keep with me always from your dear golden head.
The second drawing I submit to your lively discernment is the indigo bush, from which a deep and lustrous shade of blue is obtained by a kind of alchemy.
The natives who abide here practise this art most skilfully: at the Figure a.,
a sprig, like a tamarind in the size of leaf; then, b.,
a piece of indigo compact and ready for use.
The natives are amenable for all their savage state, and impart their wisdom to us in exchange for fribbling items: a mere hairpin will set them to an ecstasy of delight, for they are like to children and have no metals.
The third is the tobacco plant: a.,
the flower; b.,
the leaves plucked and drying.
I know you know of it and have even assayed it in a pipe, as they did at court when Astraea ruled and she was inclined to taste it now and then.
Companion of my heart, I trust in God that all we venture here bear fruit and I count on your prayers too, for the Lord must incline his will when such a one as you petitions him.
We are settled on the southern shore, called Belmont for the amenity of the situation, within a stout stockade I am causing to be built.
Though these measures are not due to necessity, as the people here are glad to be of service to us and treat us with courtesy in which not a little deference is admixed, for as I say they count many simple things great wonders: my fine paste shoe buckles (the only part remaining after some native rats that are very large and like to be tame devoured the rest of the appurtenances) inspired much clicking of teeth and clucking of tongues till I thought I should have to part with them.
But I restrained the impulse, for it is as well to eke out such tokens of our goodwill as we possess.
I desire you to ask your good father if he can procure me a joiner or two and one or two masons.
They will be very serviceable, and needs must bring their tools with them insofar as these be scant indeed on the island.
Their labours will meet reward, for such servants are as gold in these parts.
I desire he would send also a box of Castile soap, a chest of candles, four hats (the sun does not like my complexion), a small case of drinking glasses (the supply on board the Hopewell was dashed to pieces) and should the passage lie by the isle of Madeira, a pipe of that nectar, for I have exhausted my store.
But let not these requests from a young planter discourage you, my dear cousin.
He has planted himself and his small company betimes; indeed, apart from the few native people as I say, there is no one here to give us hindrance in our enterprise.
Our sojourn here will raise such a city as Cadmus when he sowed the Theban field.
May God continue to give us his blessing.
I would have you smile too, fair cousin, as it is my hope and one that you are privy to that you may soon be more to me than cousin.
In this we will meet the desires of your good father, who has been gracious enough to give permission for my suit and endow his future son with the means withal to be worthy of your hand.
Fly here to stand by my side, sweet lady, for we can further the walls of Christendom on this isle in goodly state.
then shall my happiness be complete.
I give thanks to the Lord that he has seen fit now to bless my long devotion to the wind.
Ever yours in hope, from the fair newfoundland of Everhope...
Fourteen
THE BELMONT STOCKADE, EVERHOPE, 1619 C.E.
DUL SKIMMED INTO shore silently, under cover of darkness, and threaded through the banana fronds and mango groves to Ariel's cabin; a leaf here, a twig there gave under him, but the English sailor posted watch in the clearing was fast asleep and the others would not have woken from their stone weariness if Dul had hallooed at them.
Some of his companions had reported smoke, but Dul had thought little of it  Sycorax could have been stewing the indigo with special enthusiasm.
Then the fear reached him that there had been an assault  a ship had been seen, moored, the men had been observed returning with limbs dressed for wounds.
Dul had been at sea all day beyond the outer reef, fishing for rose conches and the sweet eggwhite-smooth lambie inside; he returned to his paddle and plied it swiftly, making the crossing under the stars.
He had overcome the islanders' deep dislike of the sea by night, when shadows welled in the phosphorescence and the pale monster Manjiku reared his snout from the waves.
He addressed the invisible monster in an undertone, swearing at him till he laughed out loud at his own inventions: ' You 'll choke for greed one of these days, Manjiku!
You 'll open those jaws of yours so wide the hinges will snap at the corners. '
Manjiku was the creature who wanted to be a woman; the beast that stole children for his own because he could not give birth to them himself.
The youth drew the pirogue up the grey sand and crept forward to the clearing, and stood, trying to piece together the disorder that he could dimly pick out in the darkness.
He could taste the charred wood, the burned sap still in the air, sniff the sourness of the indigo where it had been trampled and soaked into the ground.
He began to rake the shadows, furious he could not set a light; his eyes were keener underwater than in this dark, all shapes around him were phantoms edged in blue in the starlight, but he saw no bundle among the sleeping men that could be Sycorax, no body that was Ariel 's.
He thought of the cabin up the creek to which his sister had withdrawn at his urging, and he turned to find the track, willing himself to control his horror, to keep moving nimbly and stealthily as if he did not feel unstrung.
It did not come to his mind to murder any of them; it was not his way, or the way he had been raised, to take life in cold blood, without a formal challenge or warning, without the necessary ritual preparation for combat and maybe death.
If someone had suggested he should have killed them then, where they lay, and avert all the trouble that was to come, Dul would have been astonished that such a cowardly procedure could be proposed, let alone seriously entertained.
To attack in self-defence, as Ariel had done, was a warrior's response, justified in the heat of the battle.
But to despatch a victim in the dark, while he was sleeping, was not a method of attack or survival understood by Dul or the people among whom he had grown up.
So much that was to come would have not happened on Liamuiga and Oualie, or would have happened later, perhaps not to him, and with a difference, if Dul had followed another code.
When he reached the hut Ariel had built, he found Kit Everard asleep on the threshold, curled up like a worm when a hoe has struck it in the earth, rust-pink and grimacing with his whole body, as if in pain.
One hand was on the stock of his gun, the other on his groin.
Dul looked, gauged the depths of his sleep, and lifted the gun from his loose hand.
He studied the stranger for a moment; a trickle of something shapeless, cold, disturbed him deep inside, a connection he did not care to splice, not then.
He closed his fist on the gun; he had heard of such weapons though never had one within his reach before.
Then, gripping it, he passed through the rustle of the reed jalousie hanging in the doorway into the small interior, where Sycorax lay on her side, collapsed on the beaten earth like a child's poppet made from plaited grass, with Ariel on her haunches beside her, head sunk on her knees, a fan fallen to the ground beside her.
A sickly, clotted stench filled the space.
He squatted to take his sister by the shoulder and rouse her; she was groggy, she could barely lift her eyelids to look at him, but when she saw who it was, she wrapped her arms around him, and pressed her head to his chest.
She whispered, hoarse from weariness, ' She is dying, Dul.
Even her art can't save her, not now. '
Dul leaned to look at the dark husk that was the old woman's body; shadows bound the close air inside the room and he could see her only as a lighter shape.
He put out his hand to touch her face; it felt on fire, hot and dry with fever, as she turned to his hand mouthing, as if to take some sustenance from it.
Ariel poured water from a gourd on to a cloth and pressed it to Sycorax's lips, and she sucked like an infant.
Grief clutched Dul in the heart.
Opposed, he could breathe fire; contradicted or challenged, he could put up his fists and fight.
If his enemy held a stave he could cross weapons with him.
But here, in this dark, with the broken figures of his mother, her enchantments undone, and his sister, her winged limbs hobbled, and the unfamiliar worm-like red man curled at the entrance of their dwelling, Dul was emptied of all feeling except a scarring, stabbing pity.
' Let me carry her.
You follow. '
He squatted to take hold of Sycorax.
' No! '
Ariel cried out.
' She can't be moved, not now. '
She gestured at her body, sweeping a hand over her thighs, her stomach, her chest to indicate the range of Sycorax's burns.
' We can't move her.
Not now.
Not yet. '
Dul was sweating, and the sweat was drying cold in his armpits and the small of his back.
' What shall I do? '
' Bring the others.
As many as possible.
And food, presents, tobacco. '
Ariel was dry-eyed, but a lump stood in her throat.
' Some people to help me.
To stay with me.
As soon as Sycorax can be moved, then we must come back, to the village.
She paused.
Her voice continued, low, stammering.
' I don't want to live here any more.
Dul!
You left...
I want to go too. '
She was weeping now, and he knelt beside her, stiffly, and promised her with the touch of his hand on her shoulder that he would bring help.
' Soon, Ariel, soon!
You 'll be able to go, to go wherever you want, I swear it.
Like me.
Another island, another place, my island, you can have land there for yourself, for us, it can be ours. '
' I want to be with other people, Dul.
Not alone.
Not any more. '
' You shan't be. '
' Adesang, ' whispered Ariel.
' He rules over fire.
She said to me, ' Do not forget him.
Adesang. '
Her eyes in the darkness found his and her dry hand clasped his leg, where he now stood beside her, preparing to leave.
' And he will not forget you. '
For the first time, Ariel felt the need to worship a higher power, a fate who might avenge her and protect her in answer to her entreaties.
For a month Sycorax lay feverish; her dreams were filled with violence.
Ariel took care of her.
She washed her carefully, passing over the thin, dry limbs with smooth, light strokes, her hand filled with moss she had soaked in balm; combing out the sparse hair with quills and twisting it back up again into a knot.
Sycorax no longer leaked whatever liquids or foods she was able to consume, as she had during the worst of her fever, and Ariel could prop her up into a sitting position, and then, presenting her shoulders to her, go down on one knee to hoist her piggy-back and carry her to the privy in the forest a few minutes' walk away.
In these early weeks of her dying, Sycorax slept, and in her sleep, cried out.
And sometimes laughed, uproariously.
That cackling witch, Kit thought, when will she die?
The Englishman longed for her death, Kit even found himself praying sometimes for it.
Sycorax was lodged in his conscience and she lamed him, like a stone in a horse's hoof; yet he could not bring himself to have her murdered.
On the one hand, he sensed the anger of the island and its hot spirits if the powerful enchantress died (for so he saw her); he attempted to exorcise this fear with prayer and readings from the Bible, sometimes aloud to the uncomprehending heathen girl who tended the hag as if she were a lover.
On the other hand, he grasped the high value of the old woman and her nurse as hostages.
The deputation which arrived soon after the unfortunate events that attended their arrival had made it quite clear that he should not surrender such precious captives.
He met the island's emissaries under the huge saman tree where the old woman had lived in her treehouse, for Kit had established his command from this forest clearing; he sensed he was usurping the mana of the great tree, and it invigorated him.
He had also quickly grasped that the islanders would do nothing to endanger the safety of Sycorax.
The waxed calabashes of oils and spices, the pouches of prepared tobacco, the bricks of indigo and necklaces of shells and seeds they offered Kit and his party betrayed how important a stake he had unwittingly obtained; it had been a remarkable experience, he had to admit, receiving the embassy.
Beating drums and sticks and piping, with dancers and tumblers leaping ahead of them, the grave band of three old men and four younger ones in cloaks of feathers and aprons of leaves had approached him and they had parleyed, as far as their inability to communicate in language allowed.
They had walked the perimeter his men had already marked out in preparation for the stockade he planned around the new settlement; the deputies had taken this in, uttering cries among themselves at the tools his men handled.
He presented them with an axe, and set up a log to split.
They had liked that, he could see.
Then one of the older men, a chieftain, he must have been, beckoned a young man, small and lithe and darker-skinned, with flared nostrils and springy black hair rising from a high brow, and he came forward and offered himself, it became clear, as a hostage in exchange for the old woman and the girl.
But Kit wasn't having some young blood replace his female prizes.
He would require a twenty-four-hour watch, as Kit could hardly trust his word; the women were much easier to supervise and hold.
So he refused to accept Dul in exchange.
Kit ordered Ariel brought, so that the islanders could see she was as well as could be expected, and recovering from the wound to her thigh.
He allowed her to speak, briefly, and the youth who offered himself as hostage for her replied, in a low, feline voice that gave Kit a shiver.
He saw the girl's smooth face like a polished fruit pucker with pain.
Dul was saying, ' We will let them stay  for a while.
Then we will see.
We can not achieve your release yet.
Not till we have found a way to outwit or even match their guns.
Enough said.
Now we must see Sycorax. '
Tiguary accompanied the chief and Dul to the cabin.
Ariel had laid down Sycorax at the cabin entrance, under the dappled broad shade of a mango tree.
She had made her a cool and sweet-smelling bed of grasses inside a circle of powder to keep away ants and other insects.
They stood, in silent vigil, at her side: Tiguary implored the chief to find a way of bringing her back with them, offered himself in exchange, but Ariel knew that Sycorax could still not be moved any distance without endangering her life.
The chief allotted Sycorax and Ariel three women to attend them, and then turned to face Kit, and traced between them with his staff three circles in the dust.
He pointed to the sky and then to the clearing, to the path that led to the cabin where Sycorax lay, and Kit understood that he had been granted permission to remain three cycles of the moon.
He took his sword still sheathed in its scabbard, and in turn struck lines in the dust: adding four more full moons.
In seven months, he could get the Hopewell back to Virginia, and thence to London, with a request for more men and supplies to plant this colony.
In the meantime, he could raise a harvest of tobacco, indigo and cotton, to be ripe and ready on the Hopewell's return to ship back home to the Lord Clovelly; a load of perhaps ten thousand pounds of goods to increase his fortune, reinforce his foothold.
The chief rubbed out the seventh mark in the earth; at the look on his face, Kit did not press his demand.
In six months, could both passages, there and back, be effected?
If he were fortunate; if God blessed his enterprise.
He would pray for a happy outcome for his plan, he would pray fervently.
The chief disposed his attendants in a circle, and sat down on a hide spread for him.
Dul took the centre of the ring, a finger drum began to pitter-pat, a pair of flutes at different pitches to call and coo; at the click of a rattle Dul lifted the ten-foot ladder into a vertical position and balanced it at arm's length; facing it, he dropped his head as if to a partner in a dance, placed one foot on the bottom rung and made a feint at climbing, the ladder pitched away from him and he let it fall, to rising laughter from the audience around him.
Strange, how these savages celebrate calamity, Kit Everard reflected.
And mortifying.
Dul stalked the ladder again, and circled it, turning it with him as he paced; again he bowed to his adversary, again he placed a foot on the lowest rung as it stood up held light by his right hand.
The drum grew louder in the final roll, the flautists blew steadily, keying up anticipation, and the rattle fell silent as Dul took one step with his other foot and left the ground, then hand over hand into the air shinned up the free-standing ladder till he alighted at the tenth rung and hung there like a heron on a breakwater at home, it seemed to Kit, even as he asked himself in wonder, what unearthly magic's here?
What infernal arts?
Ariel, watching, wished that she too could defy the bonds that tied her to the earth, and her blood leapt with Dul's ascent.
He was poised in the air, both arms outstretched for a moment, before the ladder swayed and he jumped clear, on to his haunches on the ground while the music picked up again.
The company made way for the next entertainment the islanders offered to mark the treaty they had made, and Tiguary gave Dul a drink and hugged him, sitting him down beside him to watch the dancers who now occupied the clearing.
Kit wondered why the old hag and her lovely Amazon of a daughter had proved such trump cards in his strategy of settlement.
Not of an inquiring cast of mind, however, but rather a pragmatist, who seized his opportunities with a sure touch, he did not wonder long.
Yet the two females' apparent significance also made him uneasy: he did not relish the revenge these men might mete out to him and his fellows if Sycorax were to die, or Ariel come to further harm.
The men must be tightly controlled, he resolved; no one must touch them.
Soon after the embassy, he assembled the lads and told them: anyone who laid a finger on the girl would be keelhauled.
Then, if he had survived by any chance, he would be hanged.
No quarter would be shown.
Kit Everard kept a Christian ship.
The chief and his embassy sent the three women to help Ariel attend Sycorax.
Kit assigned them all a changing guard.
But the appointed attendants snivelled by day and snored by night, and understood nothing of the pharmacopoeia and its uses, until Ariel, strained taut by her predicament, became impatient with them.
When they nagged her to let them go, she conveyed to Kit he should allow it.
Ariel soon began to pick up some English, especially from Jack Elsey, a nineteen-year-old from Southwark, who'd been the cook on the outward journey, and was prompt to learn from her the flavours of the island vegetables and herbs, the edible flowers and fruits he'd never imagined could possibly exist when he was growing up one of the twelve offspring of a Thames waterman.
He was obliging, and liked to run errands for the girl and help her with the care of her old lady.
With familiarity, he grew less afraid than his mates from the Hopewell.
From him, Ariel learned to speak her English with the accent of the Thames river rat.
At first, it would make Kit Everard roar with laughter; he would scold her and try to change her speech into proximate ladylikeness.
When her moments of lucidity grew longer, Sycorax began to issue orders to Ariel, as she had done before the fire; first, she felt an urgency, while her slow death continued, to pass on what she knew.
But she would not speak when the guard was near; she did not want to betray her knowledge to the strangers.
She hissed at Ariel to make him leave, and Ariel would wave him to keep his distance; Jack did not mind.
Guard duty over the two women was much lighter than tree-felling in the steamy forest or sawing up the timbers into six-feet lengths, then splitting them into staves for the stockade, the master's house, and the other habitations they were erecting in the settlement.
The enclave throbbed to the sound of the axe, and shook to the rhythm of the saw.
Sunlight beat down on them, now the tall mahogany and fig trees were thinned around; the ferns shrivelled in the shafts; animals which had wandered in and out of Sycorax's compound now watered in the creek further upstream, and avoided the company of men.
Ariel had kept her cabin sheltered, persuading the strangers' headman how Sycorax and she needed the shade of the jungle canopy overhead.
Her animals remained with her, the toads, the pigs and fowls and other birds; after the fighting, the bees had swarmed and left Sycorax's tree.
And with Ariel a prisoner her young caveys seemed to forget how once they too had loved to hunt.
Kit Everard had his men raise him a sleeping pavilion on the eastern bank across the creek from the saman tree where he had established his strategic headquarters.
He called his future domicile Belmont, for it stood on the high ground, with a view sweeping down through the coconut palms to the shore where he had first landed that night he took possession.
The island wind would blow freshly through the wooden casements of his bedroom there, and a columned verandah as in a Roman country villa would keep out the heat of the sun at its zenith from the interior.
He was using scented woods: white cedar, resinous palm.
Soon after the landing that spring, he sent one of his officers, his friend and right-hand man, Tom Ingledew, to England in the Hopewell to fetch needed reinforcements, men, ordnance, and even, if they were willing to join the nursling venture, some women too.
He carried a letter to Rebecca, as well as others, to the merchants of Spitalfields, the sponsors who had loaned Kit the means to equip the Hopewell on the outward journey.
The Ingledew mansion was going up across the creek on the other side, above the grove where the saman stood and facing west; Tom had sited his Great House further up the slope, by a magnificent specimen of an Indian fig tree with aerial roots falling like stilts and snaking over the ground below, and had designed a belvedere in the roof to give views to the four quarters.
(The estate and its future vast sugar plantations came to be known as Figtree.)
With the exceptions of one or two unusual specimens, like the saman tree, which the settlers spared for their curiosity value, the forest was cleared on the west-facing slope of the stream, within the boundaries of Kit's personal estate; tobacco was planted, and maize, and peanuts, and cotton.
When Tom returned, he too would clear his land and start planting the same crops  to begin with.
(In less than fifteen years after their landing, Kit and his fellow colonists would be sailing further and further in search of wood to build their settlements and fuel their fires.)
Kit had learned how to grow certain lucrative crops on the mainland, when he served with Roger Pole and the local Indians had been drafted to instruct them; but he was cultivating indigo for the first time, in Sycorax's former enclave, and he found the plant tricky and demanding and considered its production women's work.
When Ariel saw how the incomers failed to meet indigo's exacting standards of care, she could not restrain herself from offering her expertise; she tended, restaked, pruned and watered the trampled shrubberies of Sycorax, teaching the English how to cultivate the precious dye.
Tiguary and his people kept an eye on the Englishmen's building work; they watched their planting and their forest clearance with mounting apprehension.
Dul sent word from Oualie: ' They intend to remain  let me steal Sycorax and Ariel away and then attack them.
What else should we do? '
But the chief replied, ' Let's wait.
Others have tried before to do what these strangers are doing.
They've never succeeded: sickness, hunger, wanderlust, something drives them on.
This time too.
Besides, we gave our word  six months. '
It seemed miraculous to Kit that the old woman did not die; that she could haul herself back to life by miracles of her own devising, or by the medicine Ariel applied.
On the whole the Englishmen he commanded feared her: because death lay on her, and because she repelled it too.
Both her mortality and her immortality scared them until they kept their distance, and invented stories about her powers that made them shiver in their bones.
Her burns had left pale patches on her body, like distemper on windfallen fruit, and her pelvis mended in a twisted shape, leaving one leg four inches shorter than the other, and shooting pains through her back and shoulders when she moved.
Her back knitted, but doubled over, for after the first weeks when she was laid on the ground from fear of hurting her raw flesh, she had preferred to lie in a hammock, where she had lain curved for weeks on end.
She had not thought to have Ariel set her whole spine on a splint, so when, after three months, Sycorax raised herself and found her weak legs and took a few steps, her whole weight slung against Ariel on one side and Jack Elsey on the other, she was bent like a hoop and could only shuffle forward, raising her head, like a turtle poking out of its shell, to address anyone who was not actually on the floor below her.
She was in continual pain, and took tinctures she mixed herself to deaden it; some had a bracing effect on her, others made her soporific.
Ariel began to long for the peace the latter draughts brought to her.
For Sycorax was filled with rage at her condition.
Each day Ariel fed Sycorax, mixing ingredients she was allowed to collect under guard from the fenced area of the compound's grounds.
The supply was diminishing daily, and Ariel hoped that soon she would be able to persuade her captors she needed to gather further afield.
As prisoners, they were left eggs and men's fire.
On the other side of the stockade, the pattern of the vegetation was changing, the earth burning up as the sun reached the ground unchecked, so many big trees had been cut down to erect the Belmont stockade.
As she prepared to leave for one of her foraging expeditions, Sycorax would poke up at her and hiss, ' Don't let them see what you pick!
Trick them by hiding the leaf you want in a bunch of something useless, or even poisonous.
No!
Not even that!
They must not know what can be used against anyone, for it might be us. '
She'd jab a finger into Ariel's side and clutch her.
' You 'll not betray us, will you, my darling?
You are so lovely, and so young, what are we to do? '
Her ruined face where her eyes now stared from a distance, like a reflection of a look in a pond, not the look itself, would wrinkle up even more tightly.
' Don't.
What do you think I can do?
There's nothing I can do. '
Ariel was bitter; in turns Sycorax's power stifled her, then the old woman's weakness dragged at her like a disease afflicting her as well.
She would remonstrate with her, ' You 'll make yourself more ill brooding like this. '
' I might as well die.
You'd rather I died, I know. '
Sycorax would push away the young woman and click drily in her mouth.
' I've made your life a misery. '
' No, Mother.
They have.
Now shush. '
She would press on, till Ariel wanted to clap a hand to her mouth to stop her, ' You 'll betray me, I know.
You 'll let me die.
You will take my dyes, my remedies, my secrets away from me and use them for others.
My skill!
There's no faithfulness in anyone, it's a thing dead and useless, as I should be.
We were noble, my people, we carried our heads high.
But now?
What now? '
During those early months, Kit Everard tried every evening to retire to his new quarters at Belmont and go to sleep; he read the Bible, by the light of an oil lamp floating in a coconut shell, for they had used the last of their candles.
The supply ship should be on its way, it should be arriving within a month, if the news had reached London safely.
But as he read, restlessness would overcome him, the whistling of the tree frogs ground on his nerves, and sleep stayed a stranger.
Once, a bat whirred inside his chamber, invisible and apprehensible only from the eerie displacement of the air, the frenzy of wings on a high note.
He fancied in his exhaustion that the devil had taken bodily form to keep close by him and seize his soul.
To reach Ariel and her mother, he had to cross the stream; he did so, night after night, using stepping stones over unearthly flashes of phosphorescence in the water, and stepping up on to the further bank, still unwilling, still keeping his mind on Rebecca and the love he had sworn to her, until once more he found himself at the entrance of Ariel's cabin, once more gave orders to the guard to leave him, and entered to speak to her, disturbing her rest, though she had come to expect his call; then after their unsatisfactory exchanges, he would lift the fronds at the entrance and leave again, only to succumb once more, and toss himself off in rage and helplessness, before he skulked back to Belmont.
Only after weeks had passed with him ablaze like this did the hag stir on one occasion when he came to call and curse him ; or he felt she did  with her eyes open and one hand raised and pointing.
One night, soon after Sycorax had imprecated against his entry into their cell, Ariel gestured out of doors and seemed to want to follow him.
The old woman lay in her hammock, sleeping; it was a time when she had taken a heavy dose, and he was able to lead Ariel out and let her walk before him, now and then turning to make sure he was not about to do something to her, put a halter on her or hit her, and she made for the fence and pointed over it and asked him with her hands and eyes if she could go there, beyond the stockade, into the receding forest, where the bromeliads pushed out their stiff blades, and the monkeys nibbled at mango fruits and threw them down when they were unripe with tiny rows of toothmarks like some sharp-fanged fairy child 's, where the birds of many colours screeched.
A deeper pink suffused his face, colouring the skin between the freckles of pale orange that the tropical sun had cast there, and he took her by the wrists and said, in English, ' Maybe, we 'll see, maybe one day. '
Then he pulled her to him, and kissed her and this time stayed kissing her, and when she did not struggle, he pressed on, and went down to the ground with her and months of longing for her flooded him almost instantly, so that he had no time to swing with her long, cool firmness as he had dreamed of so often, but the instant release in contact with her swept away all his turbulence.
Then, only a beat later it seemed to him, shame and anger raced back to take possession of him again, and so overcome by these conflicting feelings was he that he had no consciousness of her in all this, until he became aware, to his surprise, that she was shaking him out of his stupor, bringing him to her again with her mouth and her hands.
He fell forward on his knees and tried to implore his God to save him.
In this encounter and during many others following, as it turned out, his God proved more willing to try him than to catch him up to safety; and in this trial of his will, Kit Everard failed.
Ariel tasted a certain triumph in his weakness; she found cruelty a reward, now that she was penned in, her customary lightness fettered, her speed reined.
With the once cool moist forest falling, the maidenhair ferns that had arched on fine black stems in the shade blistered, the bromeliads' swordpoints discoloured by direct light and the monkeys and the birds of many colours in retreat, she wanted punishment, hers and others'.
She began to regard herself as she had not done before, and what she saw she no longer understood at all.
Her confinement with Sycorax stretched back and back and she stood within it, a speck, a smudge.
The man's trembling want of her made her feel that speck grow into a force; she began to enjoy denying him, then permitting him again, she used her strength to grip and pin him and squeeze him in parts that made him cry out, to gouge and scratch his pale, thin flesh, she fortified him with tisanes that make men what was called in her language ' cross', and gave him leaves to chew to stay his excitement so she could explore the crustacean pinkness of his flesh and turn her curiosity and its tinge of disgust to a form of power over him which gave her pleasure.
She liked the way he shuddered and groaned, docile as the pets that once had surrounded her and Sycorax and who would have submitted likewise if she had chosen to maltreat them.
She never liked the killing of them, though, whereas now she looked forward to the moment when she would finally take advantage of his surrender.
When they were together, she felt in charge; and the feeling made her forget all that had brought her to this.
But as it faded when they stopped, she wanted to repeat their coupling again, and drown again in the sweet rush of forgetfulness, until the time when she would bring it all to an end, or so she promised herself she would.
She nursed his ailments too, and with a needle from a certain yucca picked out the chigoes from his feet, neatly, so as not to burst the sac in which the nits were hatching and release them into his flesh: the insects between his pink and white toes were just like a shrimp's roe.
She told him he should not squeeze his toes in borrowed shoes, but go barefoot, and strengthen his feet; but he felt he would thereby dishonour his monarch and disparage the image of the Christian gentleman.
He sent a lad along who was limping badly from the ulcers between his toes caused by an infestation of the chigoes: Ariel tended him.
She could hardly send him away, though Sycorax from the hammock where she lay, surveying the scene, clicked her dry tongue impatiently and tossed about.
Ariel began to communicate with the strangers in English; she told Kit about the hot springs up the mountain, hoping he would let her go there.
She described their properties of healing of invigoration.
Kit sometimes roared good-humouredly at the effect of her pronunciation, and sometimes sneered, and tried to straighten out her vowels.
At other times he'd smile, and teach her tricks to amuse him, unfitting words on the lips of a young woman that thrilled him to hear.
She did not understand that he was mocking her, or that he would take such a revenge on her for the pleasure he found in her.
The third month of their captivity passed, and Sycorax could now hobble further, when the opiates for a moment eased her from her rack of pain.
Sometimes, she fixed Ariel with her eyes, where albumen seemed to have congealed and dimmed to a blind blue, and wished her and any offspring she might bear all the evils she could call down upon them.
When she did this, Ariel hugged her knees and rocked on the ground beside her, singing to herself charms against the spells of Sycorax: her antidote to the old woman's venom, her hopes for a different life far away from the ferocious spirit of her crooked mother.
She was able to roam further afield now, for Kit Everard felt he could gamble on her honour (he hoped she was becoming attached to him too), and allowed her to walk on the beach by herself, and swim out to sea, even though he realised it meant she could slip out of the compound, for the sections of the stockade that he had left till last would enclose the shore.
Besides, she could swim round the headland too, and vanish.
But it would mean abandoning Sycorax, and Kit Everard conjectured, rightly, that she would not do that.
Some days Ariel carried the hooped Sycorax on her back (she would not ride on anyone else) down to the shore and into the water, and held her up under the arms so that she could let her contorted frame float free; small currents spun in the water as if to ease her, and the sky's blue height seemed to catch them up into its soft vastness and give them fins and wings to fly and swoop, so that they both felt airier and brighter than they had since their freedom had come to an end, and the memory of their former peace returned for a space.
Sometimes, the old woman's rage ebbed, and she was again the spirited and loving force Ariel had known when she was a child.
In these intervals of comparative serenity, she would instruct Ariel urgently in her lore; but these moments were brief, and soon she'd fly into a fury of pain again.
One afternoon after they had been for a swim together, Sycorax said, as Ariel took her on her back again, grunting for the old woman had grown so much heavier, it seemed, since her immersion, ' You are having the red man's child. '
The arch of the sky bore down on her like a chain, and the sounds of the camp returned, the shouts and jokes of the Englishmen, the ceaseless crash of the axe for wood and more wood to build.
' I 'll abort it for you, I can do it still with herbs.
But if you wait, it will be hard, for my hands are not what they were. '
Ariel did not falter but moved carefully on, up the hot sand of the shore following the creek, with the four-square house Kit Everard had erected far on her right, the huts and half-built dwellings of the men nearer, on her left.
' What do you say? '
Sycorax squeezed her fingers into Ariel's arms where she held on.
' You don't answer. '
' I wasn't sure, ' she said.
' I haven't been eating much.
I thought that might be why my last bleed didn't come. '
' Well, what do you say? '
Ariel kept on walking, and did not respond until she had lowered Sycorax from her back into her hammock and was sponging her limbs to rinse them free of salt.
Then she said, carefully, ' He's a different man, you know, when he's alone with me.
He... '
But the scorn of Sycorax stopped her there.
' You're a fool, I thought differently of you, but you're nothing but a fool, a lovesick fool, like every other idiot girl I've known.
They come to me, whining and wheedling, ' old Mother, this, make him fall in love with me, ' ' old Mother, that, he's a good man, I love him, but he beats me and goes with other women. '
She would have spat if she had the spit to spare in her dry carcass.
Ariel made an effort.
' I don't know what else... '
' No?
I tell you now, Ariel, that you shan't have your way, not with him, nor with me.
As soon as I saw what you were heading for, that you and he were hot at it, I cursed the baby you might have. '
She tugged at the sides of the hammock and hooked her head forward as she whispered to Ariel, who was standing away from her, the moss she had been using dripping water on to the dust.
' The child in your belly isn't a human child.
I've changed him  your son, I know it is a son.
For it will be a whelp you carry, a small, red-furred beast with sharp teeth and sharper claws that will grow up a bear, a fox, who knows?
Some kind of savage creature.
Like its father, and he will mangle you.
' You've lost your wits, my girl.
And that will be your punishment. '
Fifteen
ARIEL'S BABY WAS born in the early spring, normal at around seven pounds, and healthy.
She called him Roukoub, which means Red Bear Cub: by accepting the curse Sycorax had laid on him, she meant to deflect it.
Kit Everard sent for a midwife from the islanders to come and help her; two did so, and strained coffee roots in tisanes to strengthen her as she laboured.
They left soon after the birth, and Ariel could tell they were glad to.
Sycorax was there when the baby was born, but she crumpled up when the infant was put in her arms by Ariel.
A wild bear cub, he looked to her, before the full long shag has grown, with scanty red hairs on his head, pinkish creases in his flesh, at thigh and neck and elbow, the larval roundness, the white smell of milk  she pushed him away and pursed her lips to spit.
Kit Everard would not own to the baby either; and Ariel's changed body, the milk that rounded her breasts and the infant's leaky, necessitous presence filled Kit with a deeper fear of his transgressions.
Sycorax saw that in this regard she had achieved her curse: for Kit too, Roukoub was a mongrel whelp, the reminder of his weakness and Ariel's strangeness.
He prayed to build on his aversion and include Ariel herself in his disgust; it was not as difficult as before to force himself to keep his distance, because he was angry at the child's existence, the visible emblem and consequence of their unlawful coupling, and he wanted to punish Ariel for not using her clever arts to prevent the baby coming.
By the time Rebecca arrived, he would be free and pure again.
To Ariel, Roukoub was the creamy colour of a peanut kernel, as if she, in her cinnamon tawniness, had been shucked to reveal him inside her; and inside him, the pulse of his life, beating in the soft place of his head where the plates of his skull had not yet met.
The baby was voluble: he snuffled and sighed and grunted and bawled.
Noise had become Ariel's lot: she, who had lifted her feet and put them down again so quietly on the slopes that birds did not stir at her passing, was used to hearing a single song in her head at any one time.
Otherwise she had lived in privacy, which was a kind of speaking silence.
But since her captivity, a babel seethed around her constantly, the cries and demands of Sycorax, the commands of the men on guard over her, the hammering and planing of the pales for the stockade and for the settlers' other plans; the shouts of the men from the boat-building on the beach, the barking of orders to bondsmen brought from England on the ship that had returned, the yells of slaves whom they had loaded in Dahomey or Yoruba on the journey back, and roped and chained and put to work under the whip, and the bellowing laughter now and then of the overseer, a tall African who had been taken out of chains himself to hold the lash over his fellows.
And now, the calling of her infant.
Ariel herself made almost no sound: she choked on speech, for nobody could return an answer.
Sycorax would not reply except to rasp her curses.
Kit's language was bitter in her mouth.
She sometimes pulled herself into a corner of the cabin with Roukoub across her knees on his stomach and patted out a tune softly as she rubbed his back after feeding him, but she no longer made up words: she had no more words, indeed it seemed to her she no longer owned a voice, but only a hollow drum for a head on which others beat their summons.
And it had been so since the day that she had turned to leave Sycorax at the hot springs.
Kit Everard continued to avoid her; but until he gave contrary orders, she and the child and the old woman were still supervised, their material needs met.
The surveillance was assiduous, but not brutal.
Sometimes, in the morning, there was even an offering on the threshold.
As her own people had done before their captivity, the newcomers laid petitions at the sorceress's door, clandestinely, while by day the same Englishmen, from a safe distance, mocked and mimicked the bent hag and laughed loudly to show they were not afraid of her.
They had brought tales with them from England of witchcraft and the King's concern; an Essex man who had come with the Hopewell on the return voyage recalled how when he was a child, a pricker was calling on all the households of the nearby villages to discover the sources of a murrain on the flocks.
His family had feared that they too would be discovered to harbour
The description of Sycorax's magic circulated and of course grew in the telling: scarred by fire, she now played with the element, burning circles of flame round creatures she had demanded Ariel procure for her; she watched their panic, as they spun in their prison of flames.
She chuckled, then might pick up the animal by the scruff (if it were a cavey, or a bird), and dash it to death on the ground and spill the guts to read them for herself, then sprinkle blood inside the circle and on her cheeks and brow.
She moaned to herself, and Ariel felt her scalp prick and her palms damp, and was frightened for her child.
Adesang, god of the volcano, was the lord of Sycorax's rites, and Ariel, even in her mutism, was startled by the fervour of the woman who had once been so sceptical of others' belief in her powers, who used to insist that all mysteries lay in the processes of nature and need only be observed and analysed and understood.
One night Kit stumbled by, when Ariel was sitting outside the cabin, with the baby sleeping near her in the small hammock she had rigged up for him.
Kit knelt in front of Ariel and cried; he asked her for forgiveness.
She remained mute; he rose and collapsed on to her to kiss her.
Her mouth was dry and hollow, a socket, no longer a well, as if she had no tongue to kiss with.
His excitement meant nothing to her; she felt she was covering him with a pall of ash.
He fell back down on his knees and prayed, then, to his Jesus god, and she watched him, beating his forehead on the ground, where the marks of Sycorax's rites still lay in charcoal tracks.
She took up her child and clutched him to her, for his frail, warm, sleeping form seemed to put up a shield between her and the falling ashes around them.
Her position was more dangerous now: the tension between the strangers and the islanders was growing.
When the settlers had showed no signs of departure at the end of the agreed six months, the islanders negotiated with them again.
They pointed to the solidity and height of the buildings raised on the land ; the broad and fragrant house at Belmont where Kit Everard was now living, the smaller, but equally sturdy dwelling of Tom Ingledew on the opposite bank, of James Lariot around the bay.
When Tiguary indicated the gun emplacements at intervals in the Belmont stockade and asked what they were for (he had an idea), Kit waved a hand and answered, ' So the chickens can pop in and out.
We don't want to keep them prisoners in here, you know. '
On the whole, Kit ignored their questions, sued for a little more time, talked of harvests and animals' breeding cycles.
So, faced with his reluctance and the size of the settlement, the islanders laid battle plans.
Tiguary, at the north tip of the island, could muster about five hundred men; from the length of the northern shore, the chiefs there could raise another four hundred; on Oualie, Dul could promise a force nearly two hundred strong of a mixed crowd of men, a core of maroons from islands in the archipelago colonised already, some redlegs, or tallow men, renegades to their own people and the more ardent to fight for that very apostasy (some of them former prisoners and others who had been press-ganged into sailing service).
Among the men who had joined Dul on Oualie were also many who resembled him in body, square-shouldered, chestnut-coloured men with good balance.
They mainly lived by the sea, making the crossing to Liamuiga with catches of lambie conch and spiny lobster, parrot- and butterfly- and damsel-fish from the shady eaves of the coral reef, sea urchins and grouper and eel, to exchange against cloth and vessels and other useful goods they did not make themselves as yet.
As Dul had never heard his mother tongue, he and his new companions could only surmise, from the similar flare of their nostrils, the high broad set of their shoulders on slender frames, and the deep oval plunge of their chins on thin, round necks, that he came from the same part of the hinterland of West Africa, was of the Iqbo people in his origins.
Some of them had a memory of metal, of bronze heads, and shields and tools: when they came upon the hulk of a wrecked ship on one of the cays of Oualie, they found rusted nails and coopers' bands and knew that they had remembered right something the islands had never known.
Others among his newly constituted group were taller, broader in build, spoke another language and came from Dahomey.
These youths had all escaped in one way or another from forced labour throughout the archipelago and the mainland colonies; there were some women with them, but not many, and Dul planned to bring Ariel and her baby to live with him on Oualie.
She should choose among his friends, he decided  or rather, hoped.
Under the captaincy of Tom Ingledew, the Hopewell had returned late, but safely, the first autumn of their occupancy of Everhope, laden with goods, with candles, skillets, nails, lace shirts, hats, hammers and other necessities of civilisation (but no shoes, unfortunately), as well as several more of their countrymen willing to try their fortunes in the Americas.
Among them, tradesmen  a cabinetmaker, a cooper and a joiner  all single men, but this first return voyage also brought Mistress Ingledew, Tom's wife, and their three children, the first family to take the step and turn the settlement into a whole society in the making.
Tom had also stopped at a Dutch trading post on an island to the north and purchased, in exchange for provisions in short supply, some twenty-five Africans.
Among them were men from Dul's people  five of this first shipment of slaves; they were all to work on the new sugar plantation; to stake out canefields in the rainforest.
' In the city, the talk is sugar.
Sugar, only sugar, ' reported Tom.
' our good patron the Lord Clovelly enjoins you, Kit, not to squander our chances here on indigo and tobacco.
The market will soon be sated, in his opinion.
Sweetness is in the air! '
In London and in Plymouth, in Paris and in Toulouse, in Madrid and in Venice, the appetite for sugar was growing, the demand greedy, he told them.
The slaves would work the cane, the Spaniards had already demonstrated how well they tolerated the crop's conditions, and most of the slaves were strong, young males.
Tom proposed that two of these should be used as studs, or servers; there were five women who were to be brood mares for the plantation.
' A fair passage! '
Kit congratulated his friend, in delight.
' I grew anxious when you did not appear, but you had good reason, and I 'm glad of your foresight in this matter. '
Yet there was no news from the King, no acknowledgement of his adventure, nor reward for his service.
This gave him a pang of disappointment; however, in view of the providence they were enjoying in so many other respects, he did not allow the feeling to pierce him long.
During the first summer and autumn on the island, the English had built another sloop  thirty tons, clinker-hulled, two masted  from felled mahogany trees they dragged down from the forest; they then fitted her with four barbaresque guns forged in the Italian style, transported from Europe by the Hopewell.
Their first tobacco ripened, it was cut and hung to dry on trellises.
By the time the Hopewell returned, the crop was ready to bale and stow and send back to England.
The men only had to scrape the ship and careen her, recaulk her seams and overhaul her rigging in readiness for the voyage home to market.
After the Africans arrived, it was they who worked, while the Englishmen, who had previously laboured, now drilled under two army sergeants who had been recruited and brought out to the settlement.
Between military exercises, they rested, they smoked, they consumed the madeira purchased en route.
The Africans chopped and hauled the timber for the continuing building, it was they who stirred the stinking indigo: Sycorax fleeting from the side at their imitation of her skills.
Soon it too was dried and cut into bricks for shipping.
All over the island and its neighbours, the indigenous islanders grew more anxious at the bustle of the settlement, at its expansion.
Did the new ship mean that the strangers were planning to sail on, after the harvest, as had been agreed?
Early the following year, the Hopewell was loaded once more with harvests of cotton and indigo as well as its principal cargo, 9,500 pounds of tobacco, and she set sail from the harbour with her sails reefed against the season's squalls and a small crew on board, under James Lariot as captain.
The rest of the growing colony was left behind, so the islanders accepted that the settlers had no intention of fulfilling the terms of the treaty and leaving.
Though it grated on their code of hospitality, the island hosts then decided there were to be no more gifts of food or drink, no more counselling or mapping, no more lending of labour, or advice.
They wanted to free Sycorax without further delay, and Ariel too, though some doubted her allegiance, and were willing to abandon her for carrying the stranger's child.
At the meetings called in different villages, some proposed a raid on the Rebecca, as the new sloop was called; others planned to murder the guards in the food stores behind the stockade at Belmont and set them on fire; but when Dul and his companions sailed in from Oualie to discuss the best strategy, they suggested slow, persistent attrition: waylaying the occasional soldier or watch outside the compound, or in the sturdy dwellings of the English leaders, until the islanders had accumulated at least twenty guns, as well as the necessary tackle to go with them, the gunpowder kegs and pouches for shot, the ramrods to load the barrels.
Dul added, ' It's a skill, firing these weapons.
I've tried, but my eyes aren't suited to the task.
But we have men who have used them before. '
He pointed to one or two of the maroons who accompanied him.
' once we have the weapons, they, 11 handle them. '
' There was a time, ' one said, with a choking laugh, ' I could splinter a hazelnut tossed up in the air at five hundred yards.
I was that deadly! '
' We 'll train others, too. '
Tiguary indicated the group of youths standing round the clearing where the council was being held.
' We're not short of them. '
' We should take prisoners, ' said Dul.
' The time has come to pay the strangers back in kind.
We can exchange them, in due course. '
He paused, and frowned.
' No killing, at this stage.
We must exchange hostage for hostage.
An English chief for Sycorax, an English boy for Ariel. '
The islanders were successful in their first sorties, they stole some guns, and they took their first prisoner, one Harry Butt, who seemed glad to give up without a struggle.
But Kit Everard would not exchange him against either of the women, and indeed, showed little interest in recovering him.
Harry later ; not so much later  sought to marry an island girl, and settled down.
Three days afterwards, a group of men from the Belmont camp out hunting for some gamefowl for their supper, strayed into an ambush: this time, the prizes were more valuable, for Philip Ingledew, Tom's fourteen-year-old son, was among the hunters.
Tiguary's men recognised his value from the chased silver on his powder horn and on the barrel of his gun, and the gleaming gold gimp on his velvet breeches.
They picked him and one other as their prisoners, and let the others free to spread the news.
So by the end of February, with the Hopewell in mid-ocean and all his fortunes pinned on her safe arrival and a high price for her goods, Kit wasn't in good heart.
The kidnapping of his friend's son, the policy of intermittent, small-scale attacks, together with the persistent driving winds (no hurricane had hit, but nevertheless the autumn gales had torn at the trees all night and blown his nerves to bits), and the impending birth of his child by the savage girl who'd taken possession of him  all this harried Kit Everard in his sleep until more than once, he was ready to move on, find another island, preferably entirely uninhabited.
Yet, like his Everhope, verdant, gently sloping, not rugged, watered by many fresh streams, rich in fruits and animals good to eat.
There 'll never be such a place without people in it already, he groaned.
His troubles also gave him a longing to escape, to try again, with Mistress Rebecca noble and pure at his side, a fresh start, without the muddles he had already made.
' It's the start of a thing that's sweet, ' he told Tom one evening drawing on a long pipe filled with the first pluckings of their own tobacco.
' Now, I don't know which is worse, the chigoes or the natives.
They nip you here, bite you there, they creep in under your skin and lie curled there.
Till they suddenly wake, and  nip!  another man gone, another musket. '
' But Kit, ' Tom reminded him, barely a year ago, we hardly knew that this paradise existed.
And think of it, when our ship returns, we could shoe our horses with silver!
If we had horses.
(By the way, next voyage, let's have some shipped.)
We don't have to live by the sweat of our brow.
Others may be obliged to.
Not us.
We can stand by and watch the crops ripen and grow.
Sunshine by day, sweet dew by night, the soft wind.
I tell you, this is the original garden God forgot to close. '
' Shush, don't tempt Providence.
Pray instead our ships reach harbour.
And that the price of tobacco holds. '
' Why don't we send for horses, truly?
You know, they'd do very well here. '
' To ride in these hills would indeed be pleasant. '
Yet Kit sounded anxious.
He went on, ' I worry, Tom, does the Almighty approve our venture?
Are we true apostles in his grand design, as I hope we are?
The coming struggle fills me with fear  there 'll be bloodshed, there must be bloodshed.
They're stealing our weapons, you don't seem to grasp that ; we 'll be outnumbered and we 'll need more than our superior skills  we 'll need the Almighty on our side. '
' You've always said, my dear Kit, that we shouldn't play pirates on the high seas any longer.
We're to be civilisers, settlers, land-holders, indeed; men like the ancient heroes, who founded cities and gave laws and trade to the world as a gift.
War's simply a necessary, early stage, we 'll... '
' Yes, yes, ' Kit butted in, ' yet these natives chafe me.
I want their happiness, I seek their salvation, and I see I can't convince them, and I don't care for it. '
' Yet you have your Amazon princess, I think!
Your enemy brought to tameness to eat bread from your hand... '
Kit's friend smiled at him.
' Oh, how it shames me!
I pray day and night for escape  for her soul, as for mine. '
' Some would think you a fortunate man  in this remote place... '
' Enough! '
' We should perhaps remind them of the dangers they run, provoking us to... retaliate? '
' Shall we treat with them? '
' They might refuse our requests, then we'd have to declare battle  I can see no other course. '
' If we treated with them, we could gain valuable time  we need to wait for the Hopewell's return.
Then we'd be able to see what our harvest has brought from London, what we can expect from this place, and from the King. '
The Englishmen did not have time to put their delaying tactics to the test, because the islanders struck, in greater numbers than ever before, and armed with muskets and other stolen firepower.
Two hours before sunrise on the ninth of March 1620, twelve forty-foot-long pirogues slipped out of the mangroves where they had been concealed; each craft was carrying around ten men, each man an axe with a blade of sharpened rock and a small gouge of oystershell in the cloth tied around his waist; three in each had quivers full of arrows and a pouch of manchineel sap, also at their waists; one man in each was armed with a gun.
The fighters had conjured strength together in a dance on the eve of the attack, for striking in the darkness on the water filled many of them with foreboding.
Dul was only lightly armed in his boat: his task was different, for his skills at diving fitted him to a particular duty.
In the bottom of each boat was a gourd of pitch, alight and smouldering, but covered with a lid to prevent the reek escaping and alerting the watch on the Rebecca.
He was gliding softly through the water towards the deep ultramarine stain the sloop made in the brimming blackness all around.
The stars were fading, the half moon had set; the land behind floated in the blind blackness, with nicks of silver where the leaves of certain trees shone as they moved in the breeze, as if it were an irregular and battered meteorite floating in the emptiness.
In this otherworldly space of time, the surprise could be complete.
Dul was to slip into the sea, then, binding the container of burning pitch to his head with a deep cushioning of reeds in between to prevent him getting burned, he would swim to the ship, gouge a hole in the hull with his knife and, taking dry tinder from a companion swimming alongside him, light spills from the fire and pass them through the walls of the ship, then slip back under the cover of the mangroves and lie in wait for the panic.
The other divers would follow suit: the ship would burn, or sink, or both; the crew, taken by surprise, would leap into the water where the waiting canoeists would finish them off.
As Tiguary announced the plan to the assembled chiefs, Dul could see the scene in his mind's eye: the fire licking up one mast, then leaping in the rigging to the other, snaking through the spars, then falling in sparks, and setting the decks to smouldering while sleepy men sloshed water about with the balers, yelling orders to one another, until, when the flames had lit up all the timbers and the ship blazed in a transparent lattice of spars and ribs, her defenders would fling themselves into the sea and the warriors would swoop out of the shallows and fall on them: it would be as easy as catching fish.
Meanwhile, the greater forces would be assembled in the forest: the fire in the sloop should act as a decoy, so that the army of over five hundred warriors could fall on the settlement while its defenders were distracted, sweeping down on them, while they flapped around the burning ship, from the rainforest where they would be concealed till then.
The day before the battle, Dul had marked certain rocks on the beach in an attempt to warn Ariel; it was a way he had communicated with her now and then, on his sorties from Oualie.
She was still occasionally allowed to leave the compound under guard, on the pretext of gathering ingredients for the settlement's pharmacopoeia.
The settlement increasingly depended on her lore for the relief of its ailments.
Ariel saw the timehri, a chevron cut by a downward stroke, signifying great peril; then again, later, after she told Jack Elsey that she could not find the necessary seaweed for a certain panacea on this stretch of the shore, but must go further, she found another rock, with the same fresh cipher.
So she begged Jack to let her go for a swim, as it was so hot that day, out to the reef, where she could find the weed she needed in fresh, young supply.
When she dived, she felt around in the tussock of tough brown japweed for the knubbly cigua whelks underneath, and prised some off the coral just below the waterline.
They were more common than the spirals of the indigo snails that Sycorax had once used now and then, and a grave hazard the islanders understood always to avoid.
After storms disturbed the sea, the fish themselves could be contaminated by secretions of the disturbed molluscs.
Ariel wasn't thinking clearly, her brain was fogged by the din around her and the rage of Sycorax, but the message in the stones summoned her to some action, something to break the silence and the stasis that held her prisoner.
She thought now, This was the time to kill him, the time she had been planning; the thought lit her up, she felt unaccustomed muscles in her face move again, her tongue seek her lips and pass over them as she considered how to do it.
On her return, she told Jack she must see his leader, so he sent one of the lads with the message, and the answer came back that Ariel could present herself to Kit.
She shook her head, pointed to the baby first and then to Sycorax as if her maternal cares in both their cases meant she could not stir a moment from their side.
' Tell him it's important.
Tell him... ' she thought a while, ' tell him Sycorax is dying. '
He came, for Ariel had never summoned him before.
He sent the boy to call her out to him, alone.
He could not bear to see the pale cream child tied to her back with his small head bobbing on her shoulder, or bundled to her breast, asleep in satisfaction after food.
But she disobeyed him, brought the baby out, and he had never found her so gay, so welcoming.
She'd caught a rumour no doubt that Rebecca Clovelly was on her way, in the return voyage of the Hopewell, and like a woman, stung by a rival, wished to make him cleave to her.
The child, her charms.
He would not, could not, he bunched his fists and looked away from her fierce brow and curving lips and asked her brusquely what she wanted.
She held out the child to him.
' He's yours, ' she said.
' Look, see, he is. '
She told him if he could not face her and the baby, he must let them leave this place.
He looked at her then.
' You've suffered no harm.
No one treats you ill. '
He tried to chaff her.
' You're my guarantee against all manner of harm. '
' Tiguary will offer you other hostages  more valuable... ' she paused, with a sly smile.
' More diverting, too? '
She put the baby in the small hammock hanging between branches in the shade by the hut, and came closer, put a hand to his cheek and stroked it.
At the touch of her dry, quick hand, which he remembered on his back, his neck, his thighs, his cock, the bridge of flesh at the root of his balls, he felt a shiver run through his limbs of renewed longing again.
She caught sight of it and put up her other hand, and with a finger stroked his bottom lip until he flinched and turned his head away, parting his lips as he did so however to bite her finger slightly, and close on it.
Even as he felt the danger of his need sweep over him, he perceived another danger beneath it: he let the pleasure of her carry him off, but within his pleasure's flow a small bitter seed remained, as it were stuck between his teeth, offering him warning.
They sat down together facing each other, her face full of unaccustomed excitement, and then she rose to fetch him a dish to tickle his appetite, six pale gleaming molluscs like oysters, with wedges of lime around them, prettily, and a sprinkling of red pepper over them.
Yet he set the dish aside and noticed the shadow pass her face.
' Is the Old Mother failing then? ' he asked, as if thoughts of Sycorax distracted him from tasting.
From the dim interior Sycorax cursed them.
Ariel heard her call, ' My death would please you so, I swear I 'll not do it, I 'll not die.
By all the powers I can command. '
Her voice was so dry now that sometimes Kit fancied he heard her when he could not, in the scraping of the boughs of trees, the footfalls in the dusty earth.
He made a cross of his hands, to ward off her evil.
Ariel paused, and tried a smile.
' While there's life in her, she goes on raging. '
She began again to caress him; rose to sit kittenishly in his lap, but she was as clumsy at this babying as she was grand at being leopardine, and he found it possible this time to check his lust; she bent to blow on his neck and ear, as he liked her to do, but he twisted sharply to avert his head, and struck her on the upper arm to beat her off, and then without another word, his face blazing with the effort of his denial, he turned and left her.
He had not touched the whelks.
The return to speech and motion had cost Ariel so much that when Kit had gone, she choked and vomited from the pit of her belly until green bile came up and burned her.
Sycorax called her over.
' Get me up, now, I want to get up.
Why have you left me here today? '
Ariel went to her, and held her by the shoulders and raised her till her feet touched the earthen floor, then pitched her forward till she stood in her crooked hoop.
She supported her and whispered, ' We are going to leave today, my mother, and you are coming with me.
One step at a time, out of the gate, you, me, and my baby. '
' So you've rediscovered speech, have you?
What's it like, talking again? '
' No, don't, not today, don't rail.
One step at a time, tonight.
Or you can ride on my back, if you prefer.
You 'll have to promise to stop railing, because nobody must hear us, or realise what we're doing. '
' You're more of a fool than I ever thought you were. '
' One step at a time, my mother.
Tonight. '
' You believe you can do this?
That you have some magic powers?
You're more deluded even than a dying old fool like me.
' Now I 'll get you up.
You must tell me what you want to take.
Later, we 'll walk away.
We 'll wait, then we 'll go, one step at a time. '
Kit Everard was not a vain man, and he knew that even in the encounters that had given Ariel some pleasure (later, when he'd learned to check his premature excitement with her), she had not cared for him with her heart.
He thought she might not have a heart, or tried to explain away her indifference by imagining she were made of obsidian through and through.
He needed to think that he had been well-intentioned, but her consent or inclination did not figure among the considerations with which he weighed the matter.
She did not believe in sin, after all, and her people knew only sensual gratification, he knew, not the higher principle of love between man and woman.
So he persuaded himself, for it made his own sin less grievous that he was not leading her into temptation too.
For she and the other natives of these isles lived at a time before sin, it seemed to him, a happy time, but inferior in intelligence and humanity to the enlightened ideals of his kind.
So he was suspicious of her welcome, her sudden ardour, her newfound tongue to kiss with and to speak.
Then he understood: she wasn't inveigling him to return; she was bidding farewell.
Moreover, he understood another, deeper thing: it was not clear which of them was departing.
' They 'll quench you, ' she had said of the whelks.
' After hot work. '
(It was so unlike her to tease.)
Quench you.
Yes, but she could be parting from him in a different way ; stealing away, running off, he was surprised she had never done so, that she hadn't killed the old woman with a poison in the way she had perhaps schemed to kill him, that she had not held her under just a moment too long when she took her swimming that she had not simply abandoned her in the settlement.
These natives, they certainly respected the old, they had a sense of family, you had to grant it.
He sighed.
He had it then, as clear as a map of a well-charted route unfolded on the captain's table, what lay in store for him and for the settlement; though the islanders had not burned wet leaves and swelled white smoke into a pillar of cloud to issue a warning, the signal might as well have been as clear.
Kit Everard shared his suspicions with Tom Ingledew, who, though he feared terribly for his son's life, agreed that they should seize the offensive, in secret, and place all their forces on the qui vive that night, in readiness for battle in the morning.
There were around two hundred Englishmen, far fewer than the islands' combined forces, as they realised.
They were short of footwear, but they had cannon, muskets, and pistols as well as swords, and knew how to use them well.
The slaves could come in, if need be, as support from the rear, resupplying the front line; but Kit was loath to call on them at all, and they would have to fight unarmed.
Meanwhile, they were to be kept under guard.
He gave the two armed men on the slaves' camp orders not to leave their posts, as he did not want more hands taking advantage of the confusion to run away and join the maroons infesting Oualie nearby.
(If he won, he would clear them off Oualie  how he coveted that island's green streams and slopes!)
He moved the most experienced soldiers in two squads of twenty-five men each, and deployed them to make a wedge within the stockade, their lines defending its walls, the point of the wedge facing the valley formed by the stream below the hot springs.
He reckoned his enemies would be concealed in the forest, and if they were mustering in any strength at all, would need to use the comparatively level and open banks for their attack.
While the force inside the stockade could batter the attackers from behind its stout fence, another detachment of men could steal out and close in on the attackers' flank on the landward side; the Rebecca's guns covered the beach below the settlement, so they would not be able to make their approach from the beach, unless they discounted major losses of life.
Ariel was saying to Sycorax, ' Remember, you loved me once, it was I who ran away from you, I didn't understand, I couldn't see ahead.
Tonight I 'll strap Roukoub to my front, and put you on my back, and we're going to leave, we're going to step out of this place.
I shouldn't have done it, I know.
But I so wanted... something.
To give me what you'd so often described to me. '
' You meant the world to me, ' Sycorax whispered from inside the hammock.
' But it was a long time ago, before... '
She was calm and did not rail in spite, that night, as they waited for the island's noises to change to the night's flutings and clicks and sighs.
Then Ariel bent over the drowsing Sycorax.
' Come, let me lift you, ' she whispered.
She leant in and stooped to take her under the arms; like a peach tree blighted by leafcurl, Sycorax lay tinder-dry in a narrow crescent, her body hardly filling the hammock's web.
With Sycorax on her back, Ariel dropped on to her haunches and took up her baby and tied him in a cloth to her breast; she rubbed his mouth with soursop juice to keep him dry so that he would not howl with discomfort to be changed (she packed soft moss against his bottom, just to be sure); then she took a basket of her herbs and preparations and whistled softly to Paca, the last of her caveys, to follow.
Ariel steps through the reed curtain and into the night.
Though Sycorax is wasted and weighs little, Ariel can't move fast with her double burden, and her usual springy tread falls heavily on the earth.
The guard posted at the entrance to their quarters is a man she does not know well; Ariel registers this discrepancy, wonders about it, thinks of Jack Elsey with a moment of affection.
The absence of the customary guard is connected to the danger Dul has warned her of, she knows.
But her mind still works only dimly, and she can not make the connection now, she must trudge forward, following the one impulse that has taken possession of her: to escape.
She tells him she is taking Sycorax for a piss and the man backs away, scared, and lets them turn behind their dwelling.
The moon has set (the warriors with Dul are still gliding towards the Rebecca; the sloop is growing broader, taller, blacker as they approach her), but the stars are burning in the dark blue distance, one of them sparkling emerald and ruby and sapphire as if shaking drops of water from itself after a bathe in the liquid of the sky.
This star is Canopus, which Ariel and her people knew by a different name.
Ariel starts across the clearing; the trees and undergrowth, the tangle of roots and flowers have been razed, she must trudge across open ground to reach the sea, which is her aim; she will walk out on the west side of the settlement's boundaries, where the stockade has not yet been driven into the beach, past the rinsing and brewing pools which have already come to look neglected, the waterline slimy with weed, the flies hatching on the surface.
They circle Sycorax's saman tree, where stands the hut Kit used as a temporary headquarters before Belmont House was finished, and they turn south to pass out of the colony, into the residual forest, where they can hide until it will be safe to join a village  if her people will take her in again.
She thinks of Dul, for he beckons to her: they will cross the channel to Oualie and be with him, perhaps, as he has asked, the three of them together again, with Roukoub as well, and Sycorax will recover.
She hears the guard who is posted by the slaves' quarters to her right call, ' Halt ', but she doesn't stop; she keeps on, and he begins to shout, the torch at his side bobbing and smoking, he doesn't come after her (he must not leave his post), but halloos.
Then she feels Sycorax struggling, and though she clamps her arms over hers where they are clasped around her shoulders so that Roukoub's head lies against them, Sycorax is letting go.
She is whispering to Ariel, ' Run, my darling, run! '
Ariel feels the old woman flapping feebly with her legs, and though she holds on, Sycorax slides off her back and on to the ground; she cries to Ariel again to run, run as hard as she can, and from the ground she begins to shriek, till the guard himself cries out, and drops on one knee to take aim in the pitch dark.
He knows it is the hostages, the old witch, her precious daughter, and her whelp, and he's scared to the marrow of his bones.
He screams back at her to be still.
But the hag keeps up her terrifying noise, her writhing and screaming, to pin down the youth's attention, stop him from pursuing Ariel, and she succeeds, he can not bear the sound of her hissing and shrieking another moment.
Ariel clasps Roukoub and runs towards the sea; the shadows conceal her, she hears the shot, but then she splashes into the shoals and turns to run along the tideline to keep her bearings in the dark.
The silver water shatters under her feet, the child bounces as he rides on her breast, and she no longer hears Sycorax, only the pulse of the sea as it breaks in frills on the smooth and shiny sand, the splash of her stride and the drumming of her heart as she makes for the forest to the north, her back turned to the bay where the English ship rides at anchor, where the sea battle will take place.
Sixteen
THE LIDs OVER the cannons' eyes slid open as the pirogues approached; the watch would have thought that he was only imagining the narrow prows breaking the black water, but the order had been given, ' Full alert ', and so the English sailor trusted his eyes and raised the alarm.
When the guns exploded from the Rebecca's beam, three of the boats capsized in the heave of the sea under the impact of the cannonballs; in spite of their horror of the lightless waves, some of these warriors swam on, thinking to scale the vessel.
Others struck back for the beach.
There was another burst of fire from the Rebecca; two more canoes overturned.
The salt air began to smell of rending, and the islanders in the water knew that Manjiku liked nothing better than the smell of blood.
(His desire to become gravid was so fierce that no menstruating woman was safe from him  he might strike even by day, if he caught the iron whiff of their menses.)
Seven surviving canoes struggled on towards the sloop, a place of safety now, as well as the target at which they aimed; they reached the port quarter of the Rebecca, and sought to shin halfway up her walls, hoping to be concealed by the overhang of the gunwales.
Managing to grip the clinker boarding of her hull, they jammed their sharpened sticks of wood  lignum vitae, hard as metal, rustproof  into the softer timbers of the sloop and bored holes in the sides.
But then one of their number was cut down by musket fire, to which they could not reply, for, clinging to the side, they had no hands free.
One of the attackers, an Irishman, got a handhold on a gun casement; he was a redleg from Oualie who had fled forced labour on a nearby island and determined to survive in freedom.
He twisted there, shouting for one of his fellow raiders to join him and pass the tinder into the ship through the opening; but the cannon's blast came again and flung him loose, sideways into the water.
Dul's canoe had not foundered in the first rounds of gunfire, but kept skimming on towards the Rebecca, with the remaining boats still around him, offering cover.
They had not achieved the essential element of surprise on which he had counted, and he was filled with foreboding.
If this decoy assault should fail to draw the English troops from the camp at Belmont, he knew the islanders could not match the outsiders' firepower in open battle.
The sky was beginning to lighten to the east, streaks of day, as bright as magnesium flares, at the meeting point of sea and air set a fresh breeze stirring and whipped up a rhythm on the water's surface.
The sea's turbulence increased; the noise of the cannons' fire was terrible, unknown, the men felt panic rise inside them, yet the fear lashed them into frenzy of battle  then another canoe tipped up, and another, but still not the one in which Dul rode.
He urged them on through the mounting waves until they too reached the Rebecca, and he was able to ram one hole, fill it with pitch, then another, and another, round the hull beneath the overhang of the bows, in a rain of missiles, with fire sizzling around him, and his fellow fighters hanging on, hoping for the moment when the timbers would be ablaze.
He rammed in the pitch, keeping his balance in the tossing pirogue, as only he could, he with his funambulist's antennae, who might have scaled the ship on a free-floating ladder if it had been a parade, a feast, a time of play and rejoicing.
But now, the men on board ship above him were screaming, and with three holes fired on each side of the vessel, he gave the signal to bear away as swiftly as they could ply their paddles.
Some eighty men took part in the attack on the sloop Rebecca; of those Dul and some of the crew of his boat survived.
Among the victims from the other boats, they counted, when they made a rough reckoning on the beach, thirty-three men.
The youngest was a Spanish cabinboy who had run away a few years before from his vicious captain, the oldest a maroon from Benin who had fled a plantation on an island to the north: he had stowed away in a pirate ship that had stopped to draw water on Oualie.
But they were only two of the dead and dying.
Twenty of the men who had fought with Dul that early morning died in the water, maimed by the cannonshot; eleven drowned in the confusion of fire and shipwreck in the attack on the Rebecca.
The first survivors who reached the shore regrouped up the estuary past the bony tangles of mangrove in the forest at the arranged meeting place; they were met there by a waiting group of islanders, men and women, ready to re-arm them and send them into battle.
The old men, past the age of warfare, were dressed in fronds of palm and banana, with garlands of poui flowers and hibiscus on their heads.
They sang and stamped and danced on the earth and shook the petals in their hair and beards to make the warriors laugh at their travesty and forget the nearness of the dead.
So they tried to revive their warlike spirits, while the women rubbed and slapped their heavy limbs and applied ointments to the survivors' burns and bruises.
It was full dawn, a silver-grey dawn of the late days of spring, and it was still cool by the water's edge.
The wounded who were carried in from the attack on the Rebecca lay in the shade under the trees while their hurts were being dressed.
By the creek, the main force of the islands' fighters was gathered for the simultaneous assault on Belmont, which was shaking the ground even at this range, like the bass drum of a ceremonial band.
When Dul and his companions regained the beach, they were so stunned and wearied by the water and the flames, the howling and frantic clangour of their rout, that they dragged themselves and their boat to the first cover they could find, and lay face down against the earth; they could sense it trembling as if it were an animal alive beneath them.
The battle at the creek had begun, and they were far too undone to go to it.
In the hour before dawn, when the islanders' forces knew that the raid on the Rebecca had started, they rose and advanced against the Belmont stockade, thinking to find only the skeleton watch Kit posted nightly and everyone else in their beds.
Instead, they fell against some fifty concealed musketeers deployed behind the robust palisade of the settlement at the easiest point of access, the gate by the bridge over the stream.
The defending Englishmen were clustered in groups of three at intervals around thirty yards apart, strung out along the stockade itself and its command lookouts; in the stream that passed through the settlement, and bounded the headland where Belmont's Great House now commanded the rise, they stood in a double row to bar access to the settlement by that approach; in the mangroves at the mouth of the stream two young sentries kept watch, though the prevailing easterly breeze rendered it unlikely, the English commanders decided, that the islanders' attack would come from the sea on that shore.
Kit Everard had calculated that the Rebecca made a sitting target; she would draw the enemy and pin down some of the fighting men, on both sides.
But when he surmised the attack was due that night, Tom Ingledew agreed that they would have to sacrifice some fighting capacity on that front  and even some lives  in order to gain the maximum advantage from keeping the sloop as a decoy.
In the interval between night and day, when it appears all colour may have been leached from the world in the blood wedding of sea and sky the night before, the men in Tiguary's warrior band crept softly towards the English compound, some picking their way in the sulphurous stream, others moving in single file along the banks.
They aimed to pass over to the other side of the stockade through the gap between one section and the other, where the bridge spanned the stream.
They considered this the most vulnerable point in the settlement's defences, as Kit himself recognised.
When they reached it, they spied two men standing at the ready as they had expected: the passage through the palisade over the water was always manned by a guard or two.
They fanned out, their feet far stealthier on the undergrowth of smooth-skinned roots and tumbled vines than the animals they were used to stalking.
Yet the watch caught a glimpse of the movement, for he had been warned.
The islanders were now very near the English hideouts; the fighters drew out an arrow each, dipped it in manchineel and took aim.
The air was beginning to blush with the first, reassuring glow of the mounting sun, and the breeze that had tossed Dul and his companions in the pirogues was freshening.
The morning stirred in the trees and interrupted the sleep of stem and leaf and fruit and blossom as gently and efficiently as a mother lifting the cover from her child's bed and blowing on her face in play to wake her.
When Kit, informed by his scout that the enemy was present, gave the first order to fire, the soft promise of the light burst into flame; the vanguard of the islanders fell back from the English muskets.
Soon after, from the turrets of the stockade, three cannon opened fire, blowing off the legs of several among the attackers, blasting fragments of earth and rock into the abdomen of others.
Dul and his companions, face down on the beach, shuddered with the thud of the cannonballs, and caught the smell of the flames, of split flesh, and heard the howls and cries of the wounded and dying.
The green men in their cloaks of leaves and branches then discovered them, and came down to the beach and circled Dul and his companions where they lay prone, and shook their fronds and squatted on their haunches and kicked their legs and tossed their heads and slapped palm to thigh, in order to rally them and send them off again; pouring spirits and water into their faces to invigorate them, beating out a rhythm with their feet.
At last, Dul rose, and forced his dragging limbs to take steps; he shouted at the fighters with him, and roused them to stand by his side.
While the rhythm of the dancers speeded up in pleasure at their revival, he told them:
' Remember what you suffered in the past!
' Those of you who have known slavery, remember the life you led then!
' When the conflict is bitter, think of the time when you were not your own masters, how its bitterness can never be forgotten!
' Think of our fellowship and our lives on Oualie!
' And you, you who remember the past in far distant and happier places, think of what you have lost!
' For the tallow men smile with one face, they murder with the other. '
Their helpers strapped poison gourds to the full quivers of those who preferred blowpipes or arrows for their weapon; others were given horns of dry powder, and issued with muskets and daggers and clubs made of splendid polished mahogany.
Then, prodded by the older men in their topsy-turvy costumes as the quick spirits of sap and growth, they gradually unbent and felt the thirst for blood sing again in their veins.
Dul took a path westwards, following the shore, with Belmont on their right to the north and the burning ship behind them; as they drew nearer, the sounds of battle made the ground shake, and when they stood still, the percussion of the fighting vibrated through them, as if they too were strings stretched over shells and struck.
When Dul looked back he smelled the burning of the Rebecca on the breeze; his companions told him that the column of pitchy smoke rose in the dawn like an offering.
But the burning of the sloop in the Bight was to be the only successful venture of the day on their side.
Gradually, as they stole up to the Belmont stockade, Dul distinguished different sounds  the fierce explosions of musket fire, the shrieking of the attackers, the yells and shouts and curses and groans of fighting men, their voices thick with fury, the different languages reduced to meaninglessness by the struggles, as men grappled, stabbed, battered, poked at one another's eyes and even bit one another in the combat at close quarters; while at a distance the screams of rage and pain merged with the volleys of musket fire and the singing of the arrows.
The morning sky was smudged yellow and grey with smoke and the heat was beginning to beat down on the fighting when Dul gave a leg-up to one of his fellow fighters to scale the stockade.
From the top of the fence, he squinnied at the settlement of Belmont.
He reported scorched bushes, a blazing building, and the plantings of indigo and cotton and vegetables inside the fence trampled by the battle.
He nodded encouragement to his fellows, and they shinned up after him and dropped down into the stockade.
They moved from cover to cover within the compound, advancing towards the rear of the battle, following the sounds that would lead them to their own side and to news of the day's progress.
The reek grew stronger of flesh and carbon and gunpowder and smoke, and the chaos of noise more ferocious as at last Dul came up behind the gaggle of the English defenders.
They were now concentrating their fire on the bank beyond the gate; there the main force of the islanders was still dug in, sending a steady shower of arrows and the occasional round of musket fire.
In Belmont, English sailors and other men lay, some puffed by poison, others with missing limbs, still groaning.
Dul passed them and remembered how he had only felt wonder, not this stab of pleasure, when first he saw them sleeping on the ground near Ariel's cabin that long year ago.
The line of islanders was entrenched behind burning shrubs on the bank of the stream, at the point where the stockade was indeed vulnerable, but they hadn't penetrated beyond it, though they had inflicted damage on the settlement's defenders.
Failing to pass through it, or change their strategy and invest the compound from another route, over the fence, as he had done, their plan had stalled at the resistance the settlers were able to muster at that very node.
Now the row of islanders, at least two men deep, confronted the stockade where four cannon had been brought to bear on them; the English forces were firing in furious waves of shot from the top of the stockade.
Dul waved to his group of survivors: they would attack one of the cannon's crew from the rear; no fire until they were upon them.
Yet he feared they were like biting fish in a fine mesh net, if they swam forward they would never escape; he saw them lifting their limbs with automatic motion, as crayfish with their lumbering claws knock against the basketwork of the pens in which they have been trapped.
He asked a scout to search through the turmoil and pick out Tiguary, if possible, or someone who could give him a message.
The heat was intense now, it was mid-morning, nearing the zenith, and the men steamed in their huddles, as the firepower battered them, their eyes red and swollen from smoke and weariness and the horror of the mutilations and deaths among their companions.
Dul found himself longing, this carnage, this bloodshed must come to an end, we must call a truce, make a new treaty.
Yet he and his companions were creeping towards the stockade's turret, where one of the guns exploded, when they were spotted; one shot picked out the young man next to Dul.
Dul saw him fall, and ran, swung himself up the smooth wall of the redoubt where the gunners were hard at work, and found himself at a mere arm's length from one.
Before he could reach out and stab him as he planned, and then kill his companion too, and with support from his companions, seize the cannon himself, he heard a scream of pain behind him and realised that another of his fellow fighters had fallen from the ring fence on to the ground.
And in that moment, as he winced at this new casualty, he lost the advantage that the suddenness of his irruption into the gun chamber had given him.
He heard one Englishman shout at him, as he was thrown to the ground by another and pierced by the halberd on the end of his musket, like a sunfish in a rockpool.
Ariel, crawled into a shelter of leaves by the sea to the west, clasped Roukoub to her breast where he snuffled as he nursed.
She heard the sounds of the battle; she could not even croak out a song to him, for her tongue clove to her palate as if, while her baby drank, she were dying of thirst.
Seventeen
From HOW WE PLAYED: A FAMILY MEMOIR by Sir ' Ant ' Everard
KIT EVERARD TO THE LORD CLOVELLY, The Worshipful Company of the Hesperides, Cinnamon Alley, London
Fifteenth March, Year of Our Lord 1620
DEAR FATHER (as I hope you shall be ere long),
My letter to your Honour of the fifth January last being writ before the great events that are upon us now, would lead your judgement astray as to our progress in these fair Isles, for mighty Saturn threw his sinister shadow heavy upon me at that juncture and many untoward and grievous events had combined to cloud my spirits that now are light as a summer breeze again.
For I have news of great moment to report, viz. that on Friday last by a night when the moon shone but weakly we had intelligence that our neighbours in this land were embarked upon a most fiendish and treacherous Enterprise, namely to do every man among us fatal harm while we were still sleeping in our beds.
A villainous raid upon the Stockade where the men do lie and even upon ourselves where we dwell at Belmont would have robbed us of all we have assured thus far by the Grace of God.
Such however is the mighty Providence that guides us, we were adverted in due time withal and haply able to forestall the deadly peril to our settlement, that is still but a mewling infant scarce able to totter on bandy legs.
After fierce and bloody struggles on sea and on land in which much noble blood was spilled, alas, we were able to declare the day ours and the Battle of Sloop's Bight a chapter in the history of God's kingdom come.
In these remote parts we try and work His Will and shew His loving mercy to many of these forsaken and heathen Souls.
In the southernmost bay we engaged most valiantly with a band of savage islanders who scaled the walls of the sloop Rebecca and torched her timbers, but we consigned the greater part of them to the sea for pasture for the fishes that teem therein.
Their captain (for so I must term him  though their forces understand no battle order and hurl themselves pell-mell on us like mere animals who must quench their parched throats with blood), a certain youth who is called Dulay to his people, with a trick of the eye that makes him seem to look at you and yet not see you (and other tricks beside  I have seen this same swart creature climb a ladder into the air as if it were a tree planted there foursquare), we apprehended as he fled from our justice.
By due process of law we have sentenced him to be slit in the hamstrings to be an example to those who would follow him and make him a hero to the people.
Nought but a rabble he had gathered together on the fair island that lies to the east  of buccaneers and booty hunters and ruffianly runaways from the slaveships that are plying these waters most usefully.
These fugitives that are Negroes go by the name of Maroon, whilst the renegades to the King's laws are called by the common sailors red legs (that being the colour our white skins take on in the heat of the sun in these regions).
Our prisoners are kept safe in the bilboes you were prescient to despatch, and I would have had this Dulay hanged but that he might in death prove a beacon to this same rabble and draw them on to greater reprisals against us, and we are still but few in number.
Our men fear his witchcraft.
I would entreat your Honour to muster thirty men and send them to us and put shoes on board with them, for we have committed one great error in not putting shoes on board with the last, which was occasioned by means of a dispute we had with our cobblers about the price.
But I do not like a company of bare-footed soldiers.
We still are in some necessity of joiners and coopers and any trades; for the rest, we are buying slaves from the same merchants who put in to anchor here and take on our water and our salt.
The African is as strong as a ploughox, each man can do the work in this clime of two or three of men like us.
The aforesaid captain I shall endeavour to keep beside me as my bondsman; hobbled, and under my eye, he can not do me injury.
He has a mordant wit, ' t is plain, and it diverts me to teach him our language as he serves me.
He has already learned how to curse.
Some of our men call him ' cannibal ', seeking to undo the power of his monstrousness by naming it, like to conjuring.
' T is to my mind a false notion, and I prefer the lisping usage of the children, Caliban.
We gave our permission that the women should gather up the dead and give them burial according to the fashion of this people  ' t is said they strip the flesh and griddle it for a delicacy beforetimes, but I for one do not give this credence.
I know them to be human creatures made in God's image too, the womenfolk most lovely and most temperate (for the most part), and I would not abet the evil Spaniard in his slanders.
Yet some are dangerous to our cause, and we can not brook their contumelious conspiracies against us.
Hence I keep their captain before them for a show of mastery.
And I shall have him flogged in their sight when I perceive dissension to our wise governance.
This policy is most politick, for many leave the island daily in their rough-hewn barques for other parts and thus confirm our powers here: the world is open to them, they can wander abroad at liberty until they discover those skills of civility to settle a land and make it their own.
The Good Book has taught us their image, they must be outcasts with the mark of Cain upon them, Ishmaels for whom the savage wilderness is home till they come to know the wisdom of the Lord.
I wait upon your answer and the supplies inventoried on the enclosures.
Your Lordship will smile I trust at the progress your loving son is making for the Company; to whom we are beholden for our wherewithal and our signal progress in this land.
I expect to double the yield of Tobacco this harvest, but I am sensible that you desire us to put more land under the cane, this sugar trade being the more profitable at home and the Negroes most apt to its cultivation.
(It is a most irksome toil for others.)
Your devoted son,
CHRISTOPHER EVERARD
Eighteen
WHEN THE SIGNALS to cease battle had been exchanged, and there had come a respite in the noise, and the smoke was curling lazily into the blue where clouds flocked and billowed, the islanders fell back and took stock of their situation.
The dead lay in rows under fans of palm and banana, so many dead the survivors had wept that they had been spared.
The massacre was shameful, the losses piteous.
The blood of the wounded trickled from the bank, spilling like one of the showers that freshened the earth each day, and flowed downstream towards the sea, which was not so far that its rich scarlet could diffuse before it met the waves.
The first touch of the setting sun that day, which usually misted the mirror of the sea with its pink breath, found the water already cloudy red.
From beyond the reef the big fish swam in to lap, the monsters the islanders most feared, the white Manjiku with his frilly fins and laciniated snout, the pewter-coloured smooth-bodied sharks, the huge idling skate.
Many had never shown such ferocious and shameless appetites by day before, but usually feasted invisibly and secretly by night.
Their presence made it hard for the women to rescue the corpses of the drowned, and many bodies had to be abandoned to them.
This inflicted great sorrow on their families, for without burial of the flesh, the victims would become phantoms and speak to the living without ever finding rest.
Though the ghost army would also persecute their murderers by their chatter, their relatives would have preferred that they find quiet.
The Battle of the Belmont Stockade, or Sloop's Bight, as it came to be known, was a defeat from which Liamuiga's people would not recover: more than four hundred warriors were killed, among them Tiguary, their leader, shot through the bowels.
He died, slowly, in pain, in spite of the drugs his companions administered to him to relieve it.
Dul survived, however, to be brought to trial as a ringleader, to be an example to others.
With Sycorax, the islanders were more successful in administering the proper rites, for during the treaty negotiations that followed the battle, her eldest daughter's husband, who had been wounded in the foot but survived, pleaded for the bodies of the few who had died inside the stockade.
Sycorax was lying in the common pit, alongside the cadavers of islanders who had also been caught in the fighting, and were awaiting return for burial under the terms of the peace.
They wound Sycorax's light dry spoil in two banana leaves, laid lengthwise and sewn together with dried strips of aloe, and then chose to dig a vertical grave at the foot of the saman tree, the designated place, for which they had been granted permission.
The tree was gleaming green with new foliage that had broken out from the charred branches of the first encounter between the English and the islanders.
Her papoose  not much bigger than a child of ten or twelve, so insubstantial had Sycorax become  was slid into the shaft feet first, so that Sycorax's head was nearest to the surface of the ground, slightly tilted so that she would face upwards in death, her mouth near the earth and the living who walked on it.
It was at Ariel's insistence that she was buried there in a cenote, the kind of grave the islanders reserved for their prophets, and Kit had yielded to her, even though it was well inside the stockade.
She made an offering of flowers and fruits, spurred pennants of scarlet heliconia from the rainforest, blue-blushed rue and sorrel vines with tendrils trailing, and laid it on the pit.
Then Ariel took Roukoub and clicked to Paca to follow, as Sycorax before had taken Dul and Paca's predecessor, and they embarked for Oualie.
The numbers of the settlers there grew: their community was strengthened by more maroons, escaped from the colonies, from the Spaniards' silver mines, the sugar and tobacco plantations; redlegs and pirates were joining them, some of them women.
At first, Roukoub was the only baby in their fledgling enterprise.
Ariel's offering at the foot of the saman tree was the first of many such laid there to win the intercession of the sorceress, Sycorax their mother.
The fruit and flowers and occasional small animals were offered by  who could tell?  suppliants inside the stockade, as well as the islanders outside.
Sometimes one or two of Oualie's inhabitants, on a raid for weapons or a mission of sabotage, slipped into the settlement in the dark and remembered Sycorax.
Another summer passed, and another harvest; the next ship from England, a large three-masted schooner, the Destiny, sailed with a smaller, forty-ton, four-gun pinnace, The Tyger's Whelp.
The Destiny brought three-score slaves and supplies; the smaller boat carried Mistress Rebecca Clovelly, a parson, a chest of tea, and a charter from the King to the representative of the Company of the Hesperides, Kit Everard.
After The Tyger's Whelp put in at the harbour at Liamuiga, also known as Everhope, the winter after the Battle of Sloop's Bight, the letter from the King in England to Kit was delivered to him on the verandah of the Great House at Belmont, by the captain, one Rowland Grasscocke, who was plying a regular trade between England, the West Coast of Africa and the Hesperidean chain.
It was a painted scroll, and there Kit read:
James by the grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith etc.
To all whom this epistle shall come, Greetings  Whereas we have been credibly informed by our well-beloved subject the right honourable Lord Clovelly, of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, and on behalf of our well-beloved subject Christopher Everard, Gentleman, that the said Christopher Everard hath lately discovered several Islands in the Hesperidean seas towards the continent of America, the one called Saint Thomas's, alias Everhope (though this be error), or in the native tongue Liamuiga, and another, as the savages of those parts name it, Oualie; that we are further informed that these said Islands are possessed and inhabited only by the aforementioned savages and heathen people, and are not, nor at the time of the discovery were, in the possession or under the government of any Christian Prince, state or potentate, and thereupon the said Christopher Everard, being set forth and supplied on our shores for that purpose, made entry into the said Islands for and on behalf of our dear Father in heaven, and hath since with the consent and good liking of the natives made some beginning of a plantation and colony and likewise of an hopeful trade there, and hath caused divers of our subjects of this realm to remove themselves to the said Islands with purpose to proceed in so hopeful a work: KNOW THEREFORE that the said Lord Clovelly and Christopher Everard may be encouraged and the better enabled with the more ample maintenance and authority to effect the same, We do command the said Christopher Everard to be possessed of the said Islands and all our other loving subjects under him: And of our especial great and certain knowledge have given and granted unto the said Christopher Everard during our pleasure custody of the aforesaid Islands and of every creature, man, woman and child upon them together with full power and authority for us and in our name and as our Lieutenant to govern rule and order all.
In witness thereof We have caused these our letters to be made patent.
Witnessed ourself at Southampton this thirteenth day of October...
The signatures of the Archbishop and the Chancellor followed, and the great seal of England was attached.
The parchment was illuminated: an Englishman stood waist-deep in an ocean of scalloped rills, drawing a galleon of far greater tonnage than any ship Kit had ever sailed in as if it were a child's toy boat; he was pulling it towards a pair of islands, like pease puddings, smoking from their rounded summits on the pretty dish of the sea, garnished with sea creatures: one had a spiralling tusk and frilly fins, another a crocodile's saw-toothed snout.
Tiny natives in their feathered headdresses and skirts besported themselves on the water's edge, far more ostentatiously than Kit knew them to do.
He was that Englishman, these were his islands.
It did not matter the King had refused his name ' Everhope ' for the new colony and returned to Columbus's christening; he could not mind that beside this prize, the governorship itself.
And the charter made a pretty picture.
The perusal of it swelled his heart with joy; he found he had to read it twice, and the pleasure of its proclamation left him flushed from top to toe.
On Christmas Day 1620, Kit and Rebecca were married by the parson, in the churchyard of St Blaise, as the church itself was still under construction.
Rebecca had silk slippers on her feet, with the device that the King had granted the Everards embroidered on them: it had amused her, during the serene days between squalls on the voyage from Plymouth, to sit on deck and stitch the image of the seamonster harnessed by the naked man, halfway up to his waist in water, while natives in feather skirts cavorted on the shore behind.
Kit could not tell her how he had managed to win such a victory against the local savages.
It was a unique triumph in the annals of attempted colonisation in the Americas: he had been extraordinarily well-prepared for their attack.
In other parts of the Americas, settlers had been done away with, by what means nobody later could discover, for new arrivals would find the incomers' stockade deserted, with not a sign of struggle.
They had been annihilated by stealth, it was rumoured, or even by sorcery.
The natives were treacherous people, as everyone knew, ungodly and faithless, and their early shows of friendship were nothing but a ruse to lull the pioneers into a false feeling of security, so that they could ensnare them in their false enchantments, pounce on them unawares and kill them while they slept.
Only on Everhope had the heathen met the fate they deserved.
Kit's success would make Rebecca's father rich, much richer than the family had ever been since the squandering of the fortune made in the service of the Earl of Warwick during the Hundred Years War.
Kit was a lessee of the Lord Clovelly's company, his daughter had brought him a dower of part shares in its wealth, as a reward for a feat of arms unrivalled in the territory.
One afternoon Kit told James Lariot as they paced the border of the new fields where the sugar cane was shooting, sturdy and green, ' I was warned. '
' You were warned  you mean, a spy? '
' My dear James, ' Kit laughed.
' This may feel like home to you by now, but this isn't our fair native land where spies abound.
We have none here: how could we? '
He pointed to his hair and to his skin and gave a merry chuckle, again.
' Spies on our side could hardly pass unnoticed. '
' You may laugh, Kit, but there are renegades, you know that, among the ruffians on Oualie... '
Kit interrupted, ' Oualie, no longer, but Little St Thomas's, a Christian name for a Christian place.
As it will be, soon, if we have our way and God is on our side...
I have a campaign planned.
We 'll invest the island; it will be a harder struggle, but with the men drilled and ready, we shall overcome that rabble  some of their force are mere chits of girls, who would do better to wear petticoats than breeches! '
James nodded, pleased.
' And when do we plan to visit Little St Thomas's? '
' In the coming spring, we 'll be ready.
Soon.
As I say, we are like Cadmus and the field of Thebes, we 'll plant dragon's teeth there and raise up Christian gentlemen. '
' I hardly think the Thebans were of our faith. '
' Oh James, how nice you are! '
' But you were telling me you had been warned, the night of our God-given victory. '
' No more, I leave you to imagine; in all honour, I can not say. '
' Honour comes into it? '
' Honour, ' repeated Kit, a smile dancing mischievously in the corner of his lips, giving him for a moment the look of a sprite, a red-gold Puck no stranger to mischief.
' Aha! ' said James.
' Your fair Amazon! '
' Shush, ' said his friend, ' and never where ladies are present, if you please. '
Nineteen
ENFANT-BATE, 1700
SYCORAX SITS HUNCHED under the earth, her head fallen sideways, face up, on to her knees which her hands clasp; her mouth  what is left of her mouth  gapes open in the direction of the ground above.
She's a floury heap of bones and those bones are wormeaten.
Once a femur or a forearm would have played a pure note if you'd used one for a pipe, but the pieces would whistle harsh and offkey now from the holes bored into them by the efficient mandibles of her companions in the vertical grave, the cenote where they placed her after the battle, during the truce.
Her long death has barely begun, however, for she can still hear the prayers of those who come to bring garlands of pink and white hibiscus and poui flowers and golden allamanda and nectar-laden frangipani, as well as the gnarled soursop and the smooth-skinned mango.
They push a tack into the bark of the saman tree and make a wish, they whisper their pleas to the spirit inhering in the tree, as they imagine, rightly (though Sycorax has no power, nor ever had, except in dreaming).
The sea breeze blows in Enfant-Bate and turns the tropical heat to balm of an evening, it stirs the jade-like waxy foliage above the elephantine trunk and picks up these entreaties made by islanders who come here with their offerings: the tack or nail, made of tin or brass or iron or copper, supplied by the goods store at sharp expense, one of the manufactures that are sent from the mother country in return for sugar.
They drive one into the bark as they utter the wish, which has been properly formulated, with the conventional phrases of worship and respect, so that the loa deep inside the tree will not take offence and will grant what they wish.
They know the formulae, they have been transmitted from generation to generation down the years.
But even so, only someone with greater powers, who enjoys intimacy with the loas, can assure the efficaciousness of their prayers.
They remember that the guardians of the tree run back through time to the one who only sang and never spoke, who used to keep vigil by the tree, where the sorceress Sycorax (but they have forgotten her name) lies deep with her grave goods.
To her daughter who came sometimes to weep silently and only opened her mouth to sing tonelessly after... well, after many things the details of which are best forgotten.
Beyond them they can see other mighty divinities, Jesusmary-andallthesaints, Peterandpaul, Mathewmarklukeandjohn.
They sometimes fancy they pick up the voices of the past, answering their prayers, and after presenting their gifts of flowers and fruit, they come away filled with hope that the great loas have agreed to grant whatever they were being implored to do.
The slaves pressing their tintacks into the tree whisper:
 their love of a man, their love of a woman
 their love of a child
 their hopes of reprieve from punishment
 their thanks for surviving punishment
 their fear of being burned alive on a barbecue like the young slave who ran away last week and was caught and tried and sentenced to death by this method
 their terror of having a foot chopped off for stealing (some of them have been stealing)
 their trust that their little boy will recover from the quartan fever.
Some women ask for:
 a fertile womb (they also ask for a barren womb sometimes).
Many pray, on the death of the master:
 that the new one may not be worse.
They imagine torments more atrocious for the bakkra (which is what the bosses are called) than they have themselves received at the order of mistresses who wear bonnets and corsets and use the civilised manners of Liverpool or Birmingham or London ;
They think of their children's warm squirming bodies and entreat that as they grow up they will not be hurt as they have been ;
They beg to be protected against partings, disease, death and sorrow ;
They also ask to send the ball singing over the Stockade at Flinders ;
And Sycorax hears them, her teeth chatter and through her wasted lips there comes a sigh ;
Over and over she utters her lament:
 Oh airs and winds, you bring me stories from the living, rustle of leaves and heave of branches, you speak to me of pain, and you, streaming magma from the belly of Adesang and cold rivers too spouting from down below, you swollen sea where Manjiku glides, and you, shining pale moon, and you, oh bright sun of the zenith and green glittering star, HEAR ME!
I once governed you [ for so she thinks ] and you did as I wanted, you let me deliver Dul, my wonder, my child, a hero to our people, from death by water, I healed the barren and the sick and granted the silly dreams of lovers, and much other magic besides, so HEAR ME NOW, now that I only hear groans and Dul hobbles on slit ankles as he rails and Ariel is captive again and croons over Roukoub and does not speak.
Turn back your currents in their course, the stiff breeze and the gentle wind, pull back the tide and send the sun, the moon, and the stars spinning in the churn of the heavens  so that we can return to the time before this time.
 I would know then, once back in those days before everything changed, that my power is of little weight and not worth using.
I would abjure my art then and there, leave off cursing, leave off binding fast and loose with spells.
But the soft messages in the air still come to her and flick around the bones of her long-vanished ears, for she can not set limits on her powers, neither then nor now.
Only the faithful who pray to her and draw on her strength can do that.
She can not abjure, give up, control the force by which she is possessed.
On her own, she can not stop the churn from tumbling round and round.
But she overestimates herself, and she does not know better than to blame herself.
She and the island have become one; its hopes come to her in the wind bending the palm fronds on the beach, making the halyards sing against the masts in the bay, in the tree frogs' piping, the rattle of the fleshy leaves of the saman.
She breathes her lament into the earth filling her mouth, saying over and over, for the habit of power has made her take the past on her shoulders, ' If I could return to that time, I would no longer change men into beasts as I did, and then find myself unable to change them back into men. '
The isle is full of noises.
p 214: BLANK
SERAFINE II
p 216: BLANK
Twenty
KENSINGTON, 1951
' CRIK! '
' CRAK!
' TRIK! '
' TRAK! '
' COCORICO! '
This is what Miranda remembers, how Serafine began a story, and how at the age of nine or so, she would answer, more quietly, in chorus with Xanthe, both wanting to hear Feeny:
' Cocorico! '
And this is a story that Serafine Killebree tells:
 On the leeward side of my island, the water's often calm and heavy as syrup, the breath of the wind sweet and shallow like a young girl sleeping, a?ah!
There, in the mouth of the stream where it meets the sea and its sweetness gets mixed up with the salt, a fisherman I used to know set his traps.
Those were distant days, when the fishermen on my island had long woven baskets like loaves of bread.
They'd let them sink down to the bottom and drift there with the long-haired weeds ;
Serafine sways with her hands, Xanthe follows, imitates gigglingly, but Miranda is too grown up for such playschool ways.
She feels too old to be sharing a tub with Xanthe, but she is staying the night at her grandfather 's, as often happens, and this is the drill, bath-time, bed-time, together.
 Going now one way, now the other  (says Serafine)  Up and down, with the flow, on the tide.
 The fisherman had a wife then.
Her name was Amad, and it was she wove the baskets.
She cut palm fronds from the palms.
Tore them up into strips.
Then dried them, up on the roof of their small house.
Their whole house was no bigger than this bathroom ;
She looks around, describes the space with her hands.
Xanthe's bathroom is raspberry and cream, with toile de Jouy curtains of shepherds and shepherdesses with crooks and ribbons fluttering from them, and Feeny's sitting beside them in her flowered pinafore by the tub, on the stool with matching toile de Jouy cover and frill.
 This little house they lived in was made of strips of palm too and tied together with the tough liana ropes.
It was like a bigger basket!
The hill people cut the palms down in the forest and brought them to the shore for fish.
The islanders didn't have money then, and as they didn't have money they didn't know what ' poor ' meant.
No, nor ' rich ' neither.
So they were happy as can be.
Oh yes.
 The fisherman was called Amadou.
He baited his baskets and set them in the water, he was so cunning!
He put a little fish to swim inside, looking like it's wriggling free.
But he'd made it swallow a hook beforehand  (Serafine opens her mouth and wiggles her little finger inside, and both Xanthe and Miranda squirm at the sight of her soft tongue, imagining the laceration, the capture.)  And this little hook's at the end of a thread, and the thread's attached to a trapeze of sticks hanging above.
It was so clever, his way of catching fish!
The trapeze hangs lightly from a toggle, the toggle hangs from the end of a proper fishing line, the line passes over a springy pole to the door over the mouth of the basket where the little fish's wriggling so free.
Such temptation!
The big fish, seeing the little one there, glides into the basket to gobble him up.
He goes in, he trips the toggle, the toggle jiggers the trapeze, the trapeze lets go the springy pole, it whips back, it pulls up the door to the basket... the big fish is the prisoner now.
How did it happen?
How? ;
She is tickling them, pretending to be a fish; the little girls respond fiercely, their hands jab at hers, they snap open and shut trying to catch Feeny's in the water, they are laughing, they don't need to hear every word, they've heard this story before.
 The sea round my island teems.
Oh so many creatures.
Some of them fish, with fins and tails.
What fish: tunny the size of small islands themselves.
Flying fish.
Sunfish.
Swordfish.
Sculpin.
Flounder.
Stargazers.
Eel.
Hatchetfish.
Grouper.
Skate.
Stingray.
PIRANHA  (She snaps her teeth, laughs.)  Every one a monster, whiskers, jaws, fanning and lurking.
After the fishes there come other sorts of creatures: sponges  (This is the signal for washing, the little girls reach obediently for their sponges.)  and long-streamered squids  (She squeezes Xanthe's sponge, whooshes it through the water, making siphon noises, then begins to wash her back and neck.)  Seashells swim about as well.
Spreading their skirts, like they were dancing and billowing.
Weeds too, join in and shake their waists, wave their long arms, flicking their hands ;
Sometimes Feeny will rise and sway, humming, with her arms above her head waving, remembering carnival's forbidden dancing, sashaying down the streets of Jamieston in the wake of the bands weaving like a single creature on a hundred legs, through the alleys and in and out of the back yards.
But tonight she doesn't, she soaps Xanthe, urges Miranda to rub and rinse, then helps Xanthe up and lifts her clear of the edge of the tub, on to the mat, and wraps her in a pale green towel and sits her on her lap, spreading her knees to fit her on, as Xanthe is getting big for this babying, but still enjoys it, as does Serafine.
 Of all the creatures in the ocean, there's none so terrible as... ;
' Manjiku! '
Miranda shouts out the name and then covers her face, giggling; Xanthe turns, buries her head in Feeny's breast.
 Manjiku's got a snout like a crocodile, Manjiku's got pointed green teeth arranged in double rows, and a mane of spikes like sea urchins, and a forked tail with razor edges he uses to slice up his food.
And cut his enemies to pieces!
Anything that gets in his way, slash, slash.
He can work up the ocean to scuds of foam when he's cross.
Manjiku's pale, pale, he can't bear the light of the sun, it burns his pale skin, his pale flesh, it leaches the life out of him in blisters and wens.
You can see his bones through his warty hide, like a jellyfish, like an X-ray.
He's lived that long in the sea he glows in the dark.
Phos-phor-esc-ence ;
She almost hisses, and Xanthe and Miranda understand this word because one of Miranda's special treasures, which she keeps in her treasure drawer under lock and key, but has shown Xanthe in a moment of love, is a figure of Jesus on the cross which glows greeny-white under the bedclothes if you've shone a torch on it beforehand and saturated it with light.
 What Manjiku wants  more than food, more than drink, more than sweet life itself  is to have a child of his own.
Yes!
Not just to have it, like a father  no, he wants to be a mother, to bring the child out of his mouth, spit out a little Manjiku, think of that!
For Manjiku is a monster, a seadragon, he sets fear in the heart of every man.
Yet he wants nothing better than to be a woman ;
And Serafine laughs.
' You 'll find out, children, that in this world, people burn to have things they can't have, and strange things at that. '
She is patting Xanthe softly now, dreamily, and she stands her up and drops the nightdress with the rabbits over the little girl's head, and turns her to fasten the top pearl button at the back.
Miranda is lying on her tummy for she has the bath to herself, and she's pretending she's swimming, thinking of it getting dark and Manjiku rising, rising from the deep, tracking her.
Serafine slaps her bottom, softly, with a chuckle, and tells her, ' out now. '
She pulls out the plug, and the water drains, so Miranda can not swim any more, and lies there, feeling the water suck away from her.
' Come on out now, Miss Miranda, ' says Feeny.
' The bath's no place to lie catching cold. '
Later, when they are both tucked in, one at each end of Xanthe's bed tickling toes together on purpose, they beg her
' Story!
Story! '
' What do you say, then, my little ladies? '
' Crik! '
' Crak! '
' Trik! '
' Trak! '
Feeny laughs, whispers, ' Cocorico '; they whisper back and she takes up the thread where she left off back in the bathroom:
 Manjiku specially likes to eat women: juicy, dark women full of blood, the way we are when we get old enough to be mothers.
Manjiku thinks he 'll have a baby himself if he eats enough women, especially women with babies inside them waiting to be born ;
The girls shiver in spite of the warm white cellular blankets that cover them.
They curl up, hugging themselves, but their eyes shine.
To check her fright, Miranda cuts in quickly, ' You had a baby once, Feeny, didn't you? '
She really does want to hear again about Feeny's daughter, who she left in Enfant-Bate long, long ago.
And she also wants to quell the excitement leaping under her ribs.
' Hush, ' says Feeny.
' one story at a time.
Listen. '
 One evening, Amadou goes to check the trap and in it, what does he find?
A beautiful silver starfish, with points of light all over its body, sapphire and rose-pink and silver.
He picks it up and sees that it's a tiny silver woman, with hair like spun silk and blue eyes like pieces of the sky come down to earth ;
Xanthe likes this bit, she has blue eyes and fancies they're like the sky.
(Miranda's are buttonbrown, like her teddy bear 's, like her father Kit Everard 's.)
 Amadou has never seen a beautiful white starwoman like this, and she speaks to him in a soft low voice like the south breeze stirring in the palms, like it does just before the sun sets.
She asks him, ' Where am I? '
She's far from home, you see, she's strayed into tropical waters.
She has no business to be there, but this is the way the story goes  (And Serafine sighs.)
 Amadou doesn't take her home to show to Amad.
He keeps her a prisoner in a fish pond where he stores the catch.
He shades the rock pool with a rush mat, so she doesn't overheat, for she looks delicate, as if the sun on the water'd get too much for her.
He fishes for oysters and leaves them for her lunch.
He doesn't want anyone to see her.
He wants her for himself.
He's like Manjiku, all men are, aha!
He says nothing to Amade'.
Amad notices, just the same, something's taken hold of her man, eaten into his heart.
She can almost see the sickness there, like a worm in a nut.
 The days pass, Amadou thinks of nothing but his glittering starfish, of pleasing her, of taking care of her.
He forgets Amad and their life together.
It's a spell, you see, the mermaid has the power to cast spells.
With her white hair, her eyes like bits of the sky.
 One day, Amad follows him in stealth to his fish ponds, and she sees him  well  she sees him loving and petting his new love, and she feels her heart inside breaking.
' I know about her, ' she tells him later.
He cries salt tears, he doesn't want to hurt Amad on purpose, no, he doesn't.
But that's the way of things.
 One day Amadou returns from the shore, and Amad sees he's crying: his care's got him nothing, the silver girl's dead.
A sunstroke did for her, and he found her floating, with her hair fanning out around her, her jewelled skin still sparkling like she's alive ;
Serafine tips Miranda back against the pillows in the position of sleep, and gently pulls the thumb out of her mouth, shaking her head and smiling, ' No ', then turns to Xanthe, smooths her hair, for she is already drifting, eyes half-closed.
 Now Amad isn't just clever at making traps and baskets: she's a wisewoman, that too, you know, she understand plants and stones, and what they can do.
And once, a little while before, she was with her brother in the forest hunting game for supper, when he saw the leaves flicker.
Quick as a flash, he shoots an arrow, but when he runs forward, he finds nothing but a stringy tree-rat.
He curses them, as young men do  but not young ladies  he pulls out the arrow roughly, then leaves the creature there where it lay down and died.
 Amad looks on the rat's body with sorrow, she's soft-hearted, you know that, when the rat wife come running out, eyes left and right, watching out, a red flower in her teeth, and she makes passes over the dead creature from tip of tail to tip of nose.
Once, twice, three times until, yes, it goes and opens its eyes and gets right up, right as rain ;
She pauses, she is thinking of this scene; Xanthe's eyes widen.
' Go on, ' she orders with her frown.
' I don't want to go to sleep. '
 Amad knows the flower, which one it is, and now she needs it, she goes in search of it.
And when she's found it, she goes to the fish pond, where Amadou's sitting, head in his hands, grieving over the silver stargirl he's lost.
She's beginning to foul the air a little, she's that dead.
Amad gives her man the flower  it's called by my people the flower of Adesang, the red god, of fire and life, who lives in the volcano of the island ;
The children like this part, when the mermaid comes back to life, they quiver with pleasure at the strong magic of it.
 Then Amad says, ' I understand loving, so here's your love back. '
She passes the flower over the floating corpse, turns away from the scene she can't bear to watch.
 That night, a perfect night for Manjiku, when he goes prowling in his hunger, under a moon that's big as the sun, Amad slides her body into the sea and feels chilled with terror, though the water's not really cold, the sun shines on it all day.
She hopes Manjiku 'll come soon to eat her, and out she swims.
The sea falls from her arms.
in green and black and silver, the emeralds of Manjiku burst like stars in the bubbles on her limbs, and she's amazed they're so beautiful, for she's not been in the water at night before.
 When Manjiku comes, she shuts her eyes and lets herself fall down his throat past the barbed teeth and come down to land in the foul bilgewater in his gut.
He begins to shake, she's rocked from one side to the other as she feels the tail thrash at the sea and Manjiku rear and toss.
She opens her eyes, all is white, snow-white, she can not see, but she puts up her hands to stop falling down, still the roll and pitch goes on, she's thrown about and her head bursts into stars against the whiteness till all at once he splits open and there's no more night blindness nor blind whiteness neither, but the good hot yellow sun up above.
She's cast up ashore and a man's standing before her, waiting for her to open her eyes.
He's a handsome man, oh yes, brown and glossy, with a light in his eye, and a smile on his lips and a way with him  (Feeny smiles to herself)  and he says to Amad, ' Lady, you've set me free.
I 'll serve you forever. '
 For Manjiku was under a curse, you know  (Serafine is talking softly, very softly.)  Only a woman who knew what real loving is could undo its power.
And Amad it is understands real loving ;
Serafine stops, pauses for the silence to settle, then whispers,
' Goodnight, Miss Xanthe.
' Goodnight, Miss Miranda. '
But they're too fast asleep to reply to Feeny.
She sits for a while beside them, her arm laid alongside the nightlight on the table; the shoe of the Old Woman, with a pink bulb inside, lifts the shadows in a comforting way.
The stories of Manjiku she had heard on the island, when she was herself a girl, had not had happy endings: Manjiku continued to raid the inland waters for women, his hunger was not to be appeased, his need to have babies of his own still raged.
Sometimes in the morning, the tideline was strewn with translucent green pearls: sea emeralds, the Batois called them, dropped by Manjiku as a promise of more treasure to the women, the future mothers he was trying to lure into the waters, for these jewels only appeared overnight, and could not be fished from the sea by day.
Manjiku had taken Mr Anthony's first wife, the island wife, the one that died by drowning.
And many others, before her, natives: Manjiku has an appetite for them especially.
But this savage story isn't seemly for the little English girls, so Serafine has adapted it, as storytellers do.
There's another story with a happy ending they know, not just from Serafine; it's traditional in their family, and in the history books in which the Everards have a mention.
How the first Kit Everard won the love of an islander and how she saved him and his brave band of pioneers.
It's come down through the years, this story.
From first-hand sources, authenticated.
Serafine knows it; all her family, working on the Everard lands, knew it; they passed it on:
Long ago, when the colony was flourishing and sugar was being shipped in quantities of menhir-shaped loaves to the storerooms and the kitchens and the taverns and the parlours of the capitals of Europe, a French missionary priest, one Pre Labat, wrote one of the first comprehensive travel books about the new world of the islands, chronicling the natives and their customs (as far as he could) as well as the way of life the settlers had developed, with their fine mansions and wide verandahs, ornamented with brattishings and cool with shutters and fringed jalousies.
He reported that he had met a survivor from the heroic days, an ancient Indian hag, he said, bald as a vulture and wizened as a walnut, with one black tooth left in her head.
She could not speak, indeed, it was said she had not spoken for decades, though once she had been a singer and made up songs that others learned after her and still sang.
(He gave examples in an Appendix, for he was a scholar of the age of the Enlightenment and frankly admired the arts of the native peoples of the islands.)
He was taken to meet her, for she was a famous character: the concubine of Kit Everard, she had redeemed the savagery of her people.
She was living then, according to the observant father, in a ramshackle but tidy palm-leaf cabin by the saman tree ' which these primitive people in their ignorance still worship, studding its gnarled trunk with nails of tin or brass to register their desires.
She has been the guardian of this wishing tree in the English churchyard since anyone alive can remember, though before that, the rumour was that she had lived in a wild state, before the islands were properly civilised.
' Mme Verard, ' he wrote, ' for so they called her, in order to pay her that honour due to her staunchness and fidelity (though the union had never been blessed in God's sight), had heard among her people that they planned to fall upon the settlers and massacre them in their beds one moonlit night.
And hearing this, out of the great love she bore the founder of the island, Sir Christopher Everard, and on behalf of the lovechild she had borne him, she raised the alarm.
' Thus, the enemy forfeited the advantage of surprise, and they found the English heroes ready for them when they struck.
Some Christian lives were lost, but after a bloody conflict, the night was theirs.
One thousand savages fell in that struggle, which is called today the Battle of Sloop's Bight, after the first engagement in that cove, where a Christian ship, the Rebecca, was fired in a daring sortie.
These great events took place in the year of Our Lord 1620, and after that time, though there were disturbances from some of the remaining natives, there was no more profound danger, and the colony could begin to nourish as it does today.
' Mme Verard was in her hundredth year or more when I was fortunate enough to take in mine the hand that proved the loyal instrument of God's will for this pagan place and its people.
She was the last person living to speak the language of the native islanders, so it was a pity that she could no longer use her tongue, except now and then to rasp out a harsh fragment of a song.
' Her example proves the nobility of soul the native can possess when tutored in the ways of godliness and truth.
She was a lamp of truth to her people. '
One of Ariel's songs which he appended went like this, and sometimes Serafine sang it, and Xanthe and Miranda both enjoyed singing it with her, calling it the song of Manjiku:
The juice of the green melon is sweet
The yellow is sweeter, I know,
And there's a fruit that's still riper.
I can't tell you its name,
I won't show you its face,
Or I shan't ever eat it no more, no more.
GOLD/WHITE
PERIOD QUOTATION OMITTED; p 228: BLANK
Twenty-one
PARIS, 196
HOWEVER MUCH THE hotel maid sprinkled her lemon scouring powder, the salle de bains (so designated by a chipped blue-and-white oval enamel plaque) still smelled of stagnant drains, as if it functioned as an extension of the narrow street outside, where a section of the gutter exuded a steady reek of staleness, sweetish-sour, and not entirely unpleasant to Miranda.
She had rinsed out the tub, and lowered the big and tarnished metal plug into the hole.
The water began to trickle down its old tearstains below the taps: she hoped there'd be enough hot to wash her hair.
She pulled a strand under her nose and sniffed; the smoke from the blondes she'd sumptuously smoked the night before saturated it.
Again, sweetish, not unpleasant; she was in that time of her youth when ripeness in any form spelt pleasure.
It was half an hour past noon, when the corner hotel was quiet; an hour when Marie-Angle could let her slip into the bathroom with her pass key without telling Madame, who would otherwise charge her four hundred francs (anciens) for the tubful of hot water.
In return, Miranda did not mention the occasional missing pair of stockings, headband, hairslide, and, on one occasion, she was almost sure, British Home Stores knickers she'd had since school, where they had been modestly itemised as' linings' in the list of uniform requirements and had her school number scrawled on the waistband by Astrid with a linen marker of indelible ink (the other girls had Cash's name tapes in cursive script or small capitals).
Such items seemed a fair exchange for free baths.
Then, just as she was about to step into the water, Marie-Angle's's voice rose in a shrill whisper at the door.
' Madame! ' she called, and Miranda quickly bundled up her clothes and streaked across the landing, as the proprietress came heaving up the curving stair, the rail quaking in her grasp.
Marie-Angle met her, deflected her; they spoke, and Madame turned to descend again.
There was a caller for Miranda downstairs, reported Marie-Angle.
' Un monsieur. '
(This was why he had not been allowed up to seek out Miranda in her room  though she had managed on several occasions to sneak some of her new friends past the desk; while at night, there was no porter and she had her own key to the wrought-iron and glass front door.)
But Madame Davenant kept a clean and respectable and quiet private hotel, which is why it had been chosen for Miranda and why she liked it, on the whole.
Miranda could tell that Madame Davenant was not angry that she had had to climb five floors to Miranda's chambre, la quatorze, on the level just below the mansarde, where Marie-Angle had her quarters, for the maid looked cheerful as she nodded in the direction of the salle de bains and promised, ' Une autre fois. '
As Miranda was halfway down the dark and narrow stairwell, she realised who it was who had so disarmed Madame that she had not scolded Marie-Angle (for not being downstairs to hand, to run the message up to Mlle Everard), or waited to reproach Miranda herself for allowing visitors to call without appointments and cause all this trouble to her hostess in the Hotel Davenant.
For it wasn't the first time this had happened, by no means.
Paris  or to be precise, the Paris made up of Montparnasse, St Germain and the Mouffetard  was like a party: meeting someone on the street in that quadrant did not constitute a pickup.
Miranda Everard had been raised always to avoid pickups.
She was almost certain it would be the tall man with the unseasonal yellow gloves with pearl buttons, so personable and well-spoken, who bore the name of a well-known apritif.
She had met him in the Coupole the night before when she was sitting with her friends from the atelier, and he'd known one of them and come over.
They ordered calvados and played canards, dipping the sugar cubes in the tawny liquid so that the surfaces just met, the liqueur drawn up through the sugar, flushing and softening it until at just the right moment, a split second before the sweetness might dissolve and fall into the drink and spoil it, you tipped your head back and took the lump on your tongue and either let it melt there, or gnashed the singingly sweet grit of the sugar grains.
And then again, but this time on a coffee spoon, with the other half of the sugar cube.
The calvados did not flow like fire if taken with sucre en morceaux like this: it just gave a funny kick in the area of her chest, and made her gurgle with the heat of it.
She was remembering how this M. Apritif looked at her ; the French, especially d'un certain age, were such mooncalves when it came to flirting, rolling eyes and winking shamelessly; she was in consequence smiling to herself when she reached the hall.
To the left, opposite the reception desk, in the parlour with the rubber plant and the lace half-curtains, where she sometimes had her breakfast (if she was up before ten when Madame stopped serving it), she saw her grandfather, Sir Anthony Everard, erect against the window, with her young aunt his daughter beside him, Xanthe Everard, Miranda's nursery playmate.
' Didn't you receive my letter?
I wrote, my dear  oh, a week ago. '
Miranda reached to peck him back and felt the smooth skin on his chin, smelled the lotion he used on his hair (not bay rum, not like her father, but a sweeter perfume, limewater and rose).
Then she turned to Xanthe whom she could avoid kissing, to keep her unbathed body away from the young girl's groomed presence as far as she was able without coldness.
She held Xanthe at arm's length, to look at her, and revolved her, almost prancing to distract attention from herself, and exclaimed, ' Everyone must say this, but you look amazing. '
Her father said, ' Yes, Goldie's no longer a little girl! '
' Goldie? '
' Yes.
Goldie  I don't like being called Xanthe.
It's my new name. '
Like a child in an eighteenth-century aristocratic portrait, Xanthe, now eleven verging on twelve, was not dressed in children's clothes, but in doll-like versions of her mother's couture style: a sage-green fitted jacket with narrow lapels and a large and fancy button at the nipped-in waist, a wheel of a skirt, the hem hanging straight, over strong legs in pale seamed stockings.
Even in her confusion, Miranda noticed this, the workmanship involved in hemming without a droop, the quality of Xanthe's hose.
' All right, Goldie it is, why not?
Plain English. '
Miranda tried not to make a face.
Sir Anthony too was all bon ton, a grey flannel suit, with a striped tie in pale green and pink, signalling membership of a desirable club, a deeper crimson in the handkerchief casually thrust into his breast pocket, and light shoes of a complementary oyster sheen.
His face too was a paler, healthy pink, and so close-shaved that he looked, with his blade-like glance, as pristine as the shoot from a bulb in spring.
Her grandfather had written to her, she had forgotten.
He was always punctilious; she did not have a diary; today must be the day she had thought so far off when he had proposed meeting Kit and Astrid in Paris and then taking all of them out for lunch.
She was confused, one of her friends was picking her up at the studios that afternoon, not M. Apritif, but a doe-eyed Persian who was  he said  training to be an engineer.
He was going to walk her to her other job in the bar, across the Jardin du Luxembourg; perhaps they'd sit in the late sunshine, near the thin young naked girl who looked exposed and hence signified Truth, the inscription said.
' I haven't been well, ' she stuttered.
' I lost track of the days.
But this is fantastic.
To see you here! '
' We hadn't heard. '
' Oh, I didn't tell anyone.
It wasn't serious.
Besides, I wouldn't have wanted to worry you. '
Sir Anthony asked, ' Where are your parents now, by the bye? '
He spoke into the air, as if inconsequentially.
Miranda faced him and schooled her features.
' In Le Touquet, it's the championship. '
Her voice was firm, gay, just as she would wish.
' I had a postcard yesterday.
Of a miniature golf course  you have to get your ball over a lunar landscape... ' she made a gesture of a hop and curve or a spinning ball.
' They're coming back. '
It was ten days ago that she'd heard from Le Touquet, and that series of games must be over by now, she knew.
But she held fast under her grandfather's look, which lifted past her, reflectively, intent on the pigeonholes where the room keys lay in their niches.
' Soon?
I hope so. '
' Oh yes, absolutely... '
She glanced over at Madame.
' Everyone here is very kind. '
' Meanwhile, you've everything you need? '
' Oh, it's bliss... ' she began, then noticed Xanthe's delicate widening of her eyes and a slight wrinkle of pale nose, like white jade, and noticed that on her fair curls she was wearing a small moulded felt cap, with a slantwise spray of fluffy feathers ; egret?  curving into her nape.
Miranda faltered, ' I 'll just get changed to go out  I was about to.
Sorry. '
She looked around the vestibule, suddenly aware that this room where she ate a brioche and drank milky coffee as if at a feast of the gods on those mornings when she managed to get up in time was a mere dingy parlour, the curtains grey with city smuts, the tables pocked and charred by cigarettes.
She began to wave to a seat, but stopped herself  she realised it must look grimy to them as well.
She could see her grandfather was keeping his hands to himself, standing quiet and still, as if he wanted to make the least contact possible with the room.
Madame raised her crackling voice from the large brown desk where she presided in the hall beyond, and asked them with unusual largesse if they would like some refreshment.
' De la grenadine, pour les demoiselles? '
Sir Anthony's lips slid over his small teeth in what passed for his public smile, and he accepted, without waiting for their answer.
Miranda began, again, addressing herself to the young girl, ' While I 'm getting ready, would you like to come up and see my room? '
Two glasses of grenadine appeared, bright carmine, with whorls of lighter tint where the thick syrup was melting into the water.
' Offert de la part de la direction. '
Madame's smile showed the effort of her boon.
Sir Anthony thanked her, his lean form bending in a half bow with discreet and final grace that did not allow further conversation.
She sighed, but departed not entirely ungratified, and took her position by the keys.
Upstairs, Miranda pulled the bedclothes up to tidy the bed and patted the lumpy result, beckoning to Xanthe to sit down there; there wasn't anywhere else.
' So how's London?
It must be the holidays  how's your ma?
And Feeny?
Go on, tell.
I want all the news. '
Xanthe spread out the soft folds of her skirt and looked at them as Miranda quickly splashed water into her armpits, round her neck, on her face, muttering, ' I wish I'd just had time to wash my hair. '
' Serafine's hip's getting worse  with the winter coming, she gets stiff, you know, and it makes her lame.
She's wheezy, too.
Otherwise everything's fine, I think.
She sends you much love, of course. '
' Goldie ' Everard sounded as if she were delivering an elocution exercise.
' I don't see her much any more.
She doesn't, exactly, look after me any more, you know. '
She added, in a different, child's voice.
' Her room smells funny, like an old jar with something sticky and brown in it you can't tell what it is. '
' I must write to her. '
Miranda had swung out the bidet now from under the basin and was rapidly dunking her feet in it, a procedure Xanthe watched in surprise.
' Sorry to hold you up, but I feel filthy  you know I 'm serving in a caf  ' (she said ' caf ', it sounded right.
Though it was really a bar, Le Rosebud, down a side street in Montparnasse).
I just fall into bed any old how, it's sometimes so late when I get back. '
Xanthe shivered slightly, as Miranda dabbed and ran on, ' Will you or your ma promise to read her the letter if I write her one?
You know, in the past... ' she trailed off, she could sense that she'd better not squat on the bidet to wash between her legs in front of Miss Goldilocks.
' I 'll hurry up, ' she said instead and took her best dress from behind the flowered cotton curtain on the bendy wire that served as a wardrobe.
It was a bit summery for the weather, but had the same small waist as Xanthe's tailored number, in a kind of light-green figured gauze over a satin underskirt, with a broad belt and wide lighter-coloured lapels, with a big perspex buckle like bottle glass.
She found a pair of stockings, passed her hand through to check for runs, discovered a small one near the heel and dabbed it with the bar of soap to hold it; put on her two-tone coffee and cream high-heel shoes, then looking close in the mirror, applied some eyeliner with the flick of a tail in the corner and painted pale lipstick on her mouth.
Xanthe was still talking, perseveringly, at her hands folded in her lap.
' Mummy nearly came with us.
But at the last minute, she had too much on. '
' That's a shame, ' said Miranda and gave her hair three strokes backwards with her brush to make it puff.
' There, I 'm ready.
How do I look?
Will your pa approve? '
Xanthe nodded, with a swallow.
Miranda had a skewed air, her dark curls sprang up on her head so that the younger girl noticed little black hairs running down the vertebrae of her neck to the nape; there was a feral shine and speed to her too, something uncontained, and it scared the younger girl.
Xanthe had caught snatches of her parents talking in London before they left.
There was trouble, always trouble stirring in the air round Kit and round Astrid.
 Miranda, who's considering Miranda?
 Us, of course.
The ball always ends up in our court.
 They left her where?
 In a hotel on the Left Bank?
 She's eighteen, just turning nineteen.
 Well, if there's nothing wrong.
 But alone in Paris?
 I mean.
 I know what you mean.
The voices grew even lower, then, when money came into the question.
 I've forked out before, and I 'll be forking out again, no doubt.
 You're generous to a fault.
 But I couldn't cover his marker  why should I?
 He should have learned by now.
Let them look after themselves.
 You're the one who's generous, my dear.
Who's understanding of my peccadilloes.
Lord, what a mistake that was.
 You were a young man.
Once!
Besides, as you say, noblesse oblige.
 Still am, when I look at you.
 Ooh, you wolf.
Tramp was a word Xanthe had learned from her mother.
Also tart.
And callgirl.
And courtesan.
She liked the sound of these words, even delivered with her mother's genteel sneer, but Miranda didn't match any of these, they were too glamorous.
Except a tramp.
Her room was so grubby too, with nothing but a bed in it and that bidet and that bit of rag for a curtain over the small old propped-up suitcase and some clothes.
Had Kit and Astrid stayed here too, before they left her behind?
It was so different from the rooms Xanthe and her father had taken in a former h?tel particulier of a family of the ancien rgime, round a courtyard off the Rue St Honor, with ormolu chests of drawers, lace-trimmed bolsters and a chiming clock on the writing desk in the small, light sitting room where stood striped chintz chairs with gilded lyre backs and a matching silk-covered settee.
Xanthe's mother is saying to her father:
 She should learn a skill.
 I believe she wants to study art.
She shows some talent, or so I've been told.
 That family thinks money grows on apple trees.
Her father is sighing, agreeing.
Then he asks:
 What's a girl like her do these days?
 Shorthand typing, pharmacy, stablegirl, acting, oh, really, you know the kind of thing.
 She has a good head on her shoulders.
 She's no fool, I know.
But she's awfully swarthy.
Do you think employers would take to her?
It might put off likely customers.
 Really, Gillian.
 Well, I mean.
 She's not very dark.
There's many Welsh darker-eyed than her.
 She's not Welsh, Ant darling.
 What do you mean, dearest?
Think of Cleary, the dear fellow, and Pindi and...
I could go on.
All first-rate chaps, friends.
 They were Flinders friends, darling.
Players of the Game.
This is different.
 You don't have to tell me, my dear.
I know girls are a special case.
Girls are different from chaps, I do know that.
But everything's changing, all the time.
My word, that's one thing that stays the same, at least.
(And Ant laughs, good-humouredly,; her father is never cross, never ruffled, never at a loss.)
' Go on, how do I look?
Am I different? '
Xanthe stood up in the narrow space between the bed and the door in Miranda's room, and said, ' You look rather ' beatnik '.
Xanthe spoke the word carefully, caressingly, Miranda noted, as if it might snap at her if she didn't handle it well.
Miranda grinned back.
' And? '
' You're thin. '
' I am. '
She whispered, close to Xanthe's cheek and the younger girl sniffed the sweet tobacco on her breath.
' I 'm having a fantastic time. '
Then on the stairs, she turned to say to Xanthe, who was behind her, going more slowly, unfamiliar with the shallowness of the treads and their tight twist, unlike Miranda who'd had weeks of running up and down them, ' But don't let on to your pa.
He might make me come back to London, and I couldn't bear it.
Ugh. '
 You could take Goldie  show her the sights.
 It'd be a good opportunity, she's old enough now to appreciate it, the Orangerie, the Louvre, the Caf de Paris.
She'd held her breath, hoping they'd agree.
 Why don't we go, the three of us?
 No, my dear, I 'll stay here and hold the fort.
Take Goldie, go ahead.
Show her Paris.
I've seen it.
' Well, shall we make our way?
Are you all prepared? '
Sir Anthony was addressing Miranda, though he wasn't looking at her.
His gaze was fastened on his daughter's last careful steps down the stairs, as if he could barely restrain himself from running forward to hold out a hand to her.
He'd always had such courtesy, could make a frump feel like a star, so Gillian used to say, a little ruefully.
She quoted him: on one occasion when the Princess had waved him away, pleading a cold, he had breathed back at her, ' It would be a privilege to catch a cold of yours. '
Gillian snorted as she repeated her husband's gallantry, but it was plain she took some pleasure in it too.
' We'd better drink Madame's offering, ' he added, directing Miranda to the glasses of brilliant cordial; she sipped and made a face.
' So sweet. '
Xanthe stole a look at the reception desk, then passed behind her father and tipped hers into the rubber plant's garish jardinire, stifled a giggle and beckoned Miranda to do likewise.
' You're a naughty girl, ' said Sir Anthony, aglow, when they were in a taxi, heading for Le Grand Cond.
He patted both Xanthe and Miranda on the hand, chuckled, and went on, ' How delightful to have both my girls with me '  giving Miranda's a special squeeze  ' I 'm all ears, my dear.
I want to hear all about your life here.
Every detail! '
Through her time of growing up, Miranda had had to talk so loud to interrupt the brawling, crying, canoodling jag that was her parent's marriage, to entertain so insistently in order to divert them from the partying, bickering, kiss-and-make-up affair that absorbed them totally, that she had become as deaf to tremors and to nuances as her former games mistress shouting ' Bombs Coming Over ' or ' Scrub the Decks' through a megaphone in the gym at the dim convent Miranda had been sent to for those three years of her childhood when the family had been in funds.
When Astrid asked her daughter a question, Miranda would rush to reply, as fully and as dazzlingly as she could: her mother liked to be amused and was easily distracted by something else.
When her father reached for a cigarette, Miranda intercepted his hand as it searched for his lighter, and touched the flame to the tip to make contact with him.
If she had learned to be self-effacing, cultivated a mysterious absence or aloofness they might forget her altogether, or so she feared deep down, not openly, not admitting to herself this appalling possibility.
So when asked by her grandfather to tell all, she plunged in, heedless of the need for caution which Xanthe, at an early age, had grasped should always be observed with parents, and especially her father.
Miranda sensed her family had come to the rescue, and she was only keen to show that she was striking out boldly, freestyle, not sinking.
Once Astrid had taken her shopping (she was about four at the time) and set her down on a stool by a counter when she tried on earrings in a round mirror on a stand; a salesgirl with a promotional tray of perfumes approached her and Astrid turned and extended her wrist to sample it.
Later, Miranda imagined that the salesgirl was offering a discount to customers who bought a certain range of cosmetics  for her mother had wandered off.
Miranda had remained quietly on the stool looking at her fat knees, as if she were happy doing so, until one of the shopgirls in costume jewellery leaned over the counter and said, through scarlet lips, ' Where's your mummy gone to then? '
At which Miranda had burst into tears, and continued sobbing, holding on to the store detective's hand as she heard the announcement: ' Would Miranda's mummy please come to Lost and Found.
On the First Floor. '
Astrid was laughing when she came running up, coat and scarf flying, shopping bags like gibsails billowing, her pretty mouth with little teeth making her seem to shine all over.
' Oh God, it's so awful of me!
I forgot I'd brought you! ' she exclaimed as the store detective pushed Miranda into her mother's sleek legs, only to provoke a little skipping step to the side.
' Careful!
My best nylons! '
The invisibility that threatened her drove her to perform to attract attention, so she had done well at school, been picked for the hockey and the swimming teams.
She had taken after her father, Astrid said, that dogginess  always going after a stick, leaping high to please the thrower, waggingly racing back with it and repeating the action as long as it pleased.
She flung herself at friendship and blurted her thoughts and feelings, jokes and secrets till she had no flora in the lining of her inner spaces to help her absorb her experiences slowly, nutritiously.
So she had no idea, when her antics were effective, how she was using herself up in her efforts to ward off her disappearance from the world, in her girlish desire to please.
At school, she had been considered something of a ' character '  a freak by her enemies, an eccentric by those loyal to her, or touched by the high voltage of her need.
Her attention-seeking bore the outward marks of sincerity, in spite of the gush  and Miranda's exclamations, declarations, confessions and other self-revealing speeches seemed filled with inadvertencies, guileless admissions and a heroic individuality of voice and response.
Yet all this frankness was fundamentally an act: to fill the silence that she feared in others, to ward off the invisibility she feared in herself.
Her father laughed softly at her sometimes, throwing his head back and exhaling lazily: ' What a chatterbox you are!
You don't get it from me. '
Round him, she was talkative in order to provoke him into replying, and the attempt made her a habitual confessor, though she would have been amazed if she had been charged with talking about herself all the time.
They were driving down the Boulevard St Germain towards the river; the Seine's fast-flowing current, parted hard against the piers of the bridges, seemed to Miranda's eyes to capture the pace and temperament of this city where she felt so happy, where she wanted to stay.
She began, excitedly, plunging into her strategy of convincing her grandfather she was prospering.
' oh, I 'm learning such a lot  it's a piece of luck.
Rob  he started it all, oh, ten or more years ago  he lets me do odd jobs around the studios in return for  well  anything I want to do, it's fabulous.
I can use the presses, he even lets me have paper free.
I do a bit of modelling, sweeping up, errands, fetch orders of croque-monsieurs, grands crmes... '
She laughed, catching the shadow on Anthony's forehead.
' oh, I don't model in the nude!
We do lots of different drawing exercises, drapery and still life and other stuff  and we take it in turns to pose. '
He looked relieved, as if he believed her gratefully.
The cab swerved into the Place de la Concorde, she felt them whirling as they joined the vortex round the obelisk as if in a fairground swing as it lifts and spins.
' Rob's a fantastic teacher  people come from all over the world to study with him.
I 'm really lucky, honestly.
He says I 'm doing well, too.
I've been concentrating on my technique, so soon I could try working straight on to the plate.
I 'm terribly excited about it, I 'm learning every day. '
' And today?
What were you learning today? '
Miranda tried to ignore this, and pressed on, ' We have guest speakers, and we've had lectures on Pollock and Kandinsky... ' she turned to speak to Xanthe, ' one woman talked about female beauty and art.
Shaving your temples and sticking out your tummy versus binding your breasts to flatten them and pulling out your teeth. '
She giggled. '
' Beauty is power ', that's what she said, ' If Cleopatra's nose had been a little shorter...
'... it would have changed the face of the world. '
I know. '
Xanthe touched her own neat nose.
' I think that's stupid, actually.
Cleopatra was a queen, and rich, and pretty clever too, I think, she knew what was what. '
Miranda was silent for a beat.
' But she was the most beautiful woman in the ancient world. '
Xanthe looked out of the taxi windows at the throng swinging down the pavement, the broad plane leaves shifting and the jackets still unfastened, panels loose, in these first mild days of autumn.
' I think they just say she was beautiful, ' said this new Xanthe Miranda had not known before, this precocious, sharp-witted little girl in the chic outfit.
' To explain away what she managed to do. '
Miranda waited, to hear more.
How smug she is, she thought viciously.
Her father, too, smiling into his smooth, pink chin.
The taxi swerved out of the Champs Elyses, down the Avenue George-V and came to a sudden halt on the corner.
Anthony Everard looked at the meter with his customary care with sums, however small, and began to unfold a ten-thousand-franc note from a small gold clip, then hesitated, and looked again.
Xanthe stiffened by his side, when he plucked her by the sleeve and nodded to the meter, ' Look at that. '
The driver turned and said, worried now, ' Mille neuf cent soixante francs, monsieur. '
' If I 'm not mistaken, ' said Anthony Everard, ' today's the first of September, 1960  no? '
He paid, and still looking thoughtful, escorted the young girls through the mahogany and brass revolving doors into the burgundy-coloured, upholstered, mirrored and gilded interior of Le Grand Cond, where in heaps of rosy cumulus, nymphs with come-hither looks and not a stitch on except a few blue satin ribbons frolicked between the mirrored panels on the walls and ceiling.
Ant Everard pulled a small leather-bound notepad from his breast pocket and wrote out for them, ' 1/9/60 '.
' You see, the fare's the same as the date and the date as the year  I'd already noticed that, of course.
But this fare's a numerical coincidence, by God, of a rare sort.
A moment more, a moment less, a foot more, a foot less, and the meter would have given a different reading.
Auspicious, I'd say, without a doubt. '
He touched Miranda on the elbow as he steered them towards the lectern where the table reservations ledger stood.
' Do you think I should tell your father  in Le Touquet?
The odds against such a thing are... incalculable. '
The head waiter came towards them, and Anthony gave another name, not his, and they were ushered to a table in the window, overlooking the terrasse where a few customers were sitting in the open, a glass or two in front of them in the freshening air.
' Look, ' whispered Sir Anthony, ' but don't look as if you're looking. '
His eyes swept the terrasse's clientle and an eyebrow twitched as his glance passed one of them in a way that directed attention to the woman sitting there, with her back to the street, facing them through the glass.
' Marlene Dietrich, ' he said.
' Now, she is one of the most beautiful women in the world, if not the most.
Famous.
For her legs in particular. '
Miranda and Xanthe looked at her, and at her legs, which were pale and sheeny and crossed and held together, aslant to the chair, to one side of the caf table, as if her wicker chair were seagirt rock and she a siren with a fish's tail.
On her head she wore a green felt hat, with a pin stuck through it like a bodkin.
She wasn't speaking to the men who were sitting with her; she sat completely still, with a pale glass of something ; Vichy water?  untouched in front of her.
The two girls were looking hard, till Ant Everard restrained them with a cough.
The menus were presented, mauve ink in loops formed unfamiliar words, to Miranda too, for she was more accustomed to caf fare, a sandwich au jambon, a croque-madame.
Or, if she was feeling bingey, a feuillet de champignons au porto, which was the single cheapest item on the Coupole's menu.
Miranda, from her advantage of a month in the city, struggled to interpret for her young aunt.
' Raped carrots, what are they? '
' Crudities! '
They began giggling.
Miranda was relieved that in some ways Xanthe could still be her age.
She countered, smilingly behind the menu: ' The French have a different attitude to rape: resistance is the salt on the dish, you know. '
Xanthe's eyes went wide again, in that way that didn't betoken innocence, but her ability to weigh a piece of intelligence against another heard before.
Sir Anthony hushed them and then rose, smiling his quiet and pleasant smile with one hand extended in salutation as a plump and dark-haired man came bouncingly to join them.
' Cher Ma?tre! '
Sir Anthony cried in greeting, at the same time as the Frenchman bowed to each of them in turn and took the empty seat opposite Sir Anthony.
Xanthe made a face at Miranda, and she was disappointed, she had indeed hoped to have her grandfather and her old childhood companion to herself, to pour out more of her news about her life in Paris.
But the Frenchman was murmuring to him, a quick flow of English mixed with French, about nothing much, but Miranda could tell it was some business they had together.
With some advice from his acquaintance, Maitre Perreyve, Anthony ordered the plat du jour, a boeuf en daube a la mode, for the two young mesdemoiselles.
(' A classic dish  and you can't really ever go wrong with the plat du jour. ')
The Frenchman suggested barquettes  la Neptune, or the soupe  l'oseille, to begin with, but Xanthe looked at her father and wheedled, ' Can't I have an artichoke?
I do love them. '
' Of course, my little woman, ' said her father.
Artichaut sauce vinaigrette it was for both the girls.
In the Ladies, where they went to explore and while away the length of time a restaurant meal always took, Miranda began, ' Who's that man then? '
Xanthe answered ' Oh one of Poppa's old friends, I expect.
Mummy calls them his worshippers  he has to have at least one of them around. '
Miranda, surprised, changed the subject.
' So, what did you think of Marlene? '
' I've just about heard of her, but I could tell she's famous, just by the way she sits and holds her head and moves. '
Xanthe was shaking out and smoothing her full skirt.
' I don't know, ' Miranda put in.
' She's like a bit of laundry that's been left out to dry too long, till it gets bleached and stiff. '
It felt risqu being so unkind.
' But she doesn't look as if she feels like that.
And that makes all the difference.
She's got an aura round her, you see that first, like a glow.
A kind of halo.
She's saying, ' Here I am, it's me, it's really me. '
Xanthe was now adjusting her hat with gestures of adult prinking.
' To me, she looks like something preserved in a bottle. '
But Miranda didn't like this cruelty she was expressing; where was it coming from?
Something to do with the upset she felt, down below, squashed, but bubbling up, at Xanthe's composure and her grandfather's advent.
' She just knows everyone's looking at her, all the time. '
Xanthe pressed her lips together and stuck her chin up in a pose.
' That's her power. '
' You look fabulous, you know, ' said Miranda, deciding to take the part of generosity over envy.
It gave her a rush of reeling noble, which on balance hurt less than letting her dismay at Xanthe's poise work its sharp point into her.
' Goody, ' said Xanthe.
They looked at the picture in the mirror of themselves side by side.
Miranda taller, with her bushy hair and colouring that the Italians whose paintings she'd been looking at in the Louvre rendered by priming the canvas with a copper-based green paint, creating a complexion that draws light in rather than gives it out; Xanthe beside her with her candy radiance of pink and gold, and rounder too, more neatly assembled, wrist to hand, neck to shoulders, ankle to foot.
All these junctures in Miranda were knobblier and more angular.
Miranda thought of M. Apritif last night, and decided she would let him go further when she next saw him, in spite of the lizard darting of his small and oddly hard tongue in the kiss she'd allowed him at the door of the hotel.
It excited her to feel a man like him shudder as he pressed himself against her, to feel his weakness underneath all that Parisian aplomb.
She knew what she could do to him, things she bet porcelain Xanthe would never know.
Xanthe for her part considered her image beside the young woman she'd been brought up with, and thought how sorry she felt for her.
Miranda would always look a bit cheap, just as her mother said, because she never looked altogether clean.
It must be hell to be her, with her crazy parents who were always on the scrounge, though she didn't seem even to be aware of her situation.
Which really made matters worse.
Yet Xanthe's tidy existence felt mussed in Miranda's company; she experienced a sudden, vivid awareness of prohibitions hedging her about, and with the awareness, a desire to break them.
They smiled at each other in the mirror, and Miranda said again, ' You do look so beautiful and grownup, it's amazing to me! '
Still, in spite of the assiduous attentions which M. Apritif and others paid her, Miranda would have liked Xanthe to make some reassuring remark in return.
Men always had an obvious motive, so their compliments didn't mean anything; a woman's was more honest, usually.
But none was forthcoming from Xanthe, and the silence, like so many in Miranda's experience, quickened her panic and her urge to make her mark.
Behind them Madame Pipi, in black dress and white bib and apron, ostentatiously returned from the cubicles they had used and flourished the cloth with which she had wiped the seats.
Xanthe looked at Miranda.
' Have you something to tip her? '
Xanthe didn't carry money, in this respect at least she was still a child.
Miranda shook her head, and Madame blew her disgust through her teeth, and sat down with a magazine with a cover picture of the future Queen Fabiola of Belgium smiling on the arm of her optician's pin-up of a fianc.
They pushed through the padded door, back towards the dining room, and Miranda confided, ' When I 'm really on the breadline and someone's taking me out, I sometimes tell them I haven't any change for Madame Pipi  they give me something.
If I do that two or three times I can make about half the cost of the room per day at the hotel  honestly. '
' Don't they think it funny you have to go so often? '
' Maybe, but you can't ask about things like that. '
Xanthe sucked each leaf of her artichoke thoroughly, leaving precise teeth marks above the fleshy pad, then laid each one down on a plate in overlapping circles until she'd formed a rosette, a second artichoke that looked almost untouched.
She and Miranda talked; Xanthe was at dayschool in London, but riding was her passion, she was learning dressage on a black mare with a white star and three white pasterns.
' Actually, Rob says he knows you!
Robert Brett-Haynes?
I think it was because of you he took me on. '
Miranda was addressing her grandfather.
' He's been in Paris donkey's years but he's still awfully English  mad about Flinders.
He saw you play, one summer when you occupied  was it a Figtree? ; before the break for tea  nobody'd done that before.
The ball sailed over the Stockade, he said, and the crowd's sigh followed its arc the whole way.
He's never forgotten it. '
Sir Anthony acknowledged her, and smiled at Maitre Perreyve.
' Flinders is a complete mystery to the Gallic mind, n'est-ce pas? '
The Frenchman was a lawyer, and Sir Anthony was on the board of the building firm which Gillian's father mostly owned; air traffic was increasing, bonanza time, and the company had appointed Anthony to be their emissary on a proposal for a joint venture on a new terminal.
' My granddaughter, she's studying in Paris. '
Sir Anthony had concluded his business with the plump lawyer as far as he was able to overcome his distaste for discussing deals or mentioning money, and he was holding back the brambles for her, as it were, letting her into their company, and she butted through, a young dog again, let out for a walk.
She'd had a glass or two of wine, and it had helped to float her off.
She began to boast, the people she'd met, about M. Apritif, how comic men were with their courtesies and snapping lit-up eyes.
' I learned this word, draguer, ' she said.
' There's no equivalent in English.
It's an entirely French idea.
A way of making friends.
Everyone in Paris is trying to make friends, and some of them with me. '
' And where are you staying, chre mademoiselle? '
Maitre Perreyve asked her.
A muscle moved in Everard's cheek when Miranda replied.
' That's an excellent location, ' said the lawyer, ' Near the lovely Jardin du Luxembourg, the loveliest park in Paris, in my view.
' Oh yes, ' said Miranda, ' I walk across it every evening to my job... '
She trailed off.
' My other... well, to make ends meet. '
When the bill came, Maitre Perreyve paid it cheerfully, and Anthony Everard, demurring to begin with, finally capitulated with a gracious closing of the eyes in acknowledgement.
' It's not up to me to ask you what you think you're up to, ' her grandfather began, when they were once more alone together with Xanthe in the sitting room of their hotel suite.
' Nor is it your fault, of course. '
He sighed.
' You've no idea where they are, have you? '
Miranda began to cry.
Everard stood up, embarrassed by her lack of control; the family trait had skipped him by, but it had surfaced in Kit with a vengeance, and of course, as he might have expected, been compounded in Kit's daughter by Astrid's capriciousness.
' I think I might make inquiries, try to trace them.
After all, we can't leave you living like this. '
' Why not?
I 'm so happy.
There's nothing wrong, nothing at all. '
She was beseeching him.
' What?
You've been seeing men, men you don't even know.
You're modelling in an artist's studio.
And working in a bar.
Living off tips. '
The italics in the mild voice were shrieking at her.
' And quartered in that shabby place.
You say nothing's wrong.
Tell me, young woman, what is right about this way of life?
Tell me what you get up to on your own like this?
Tell me, though I don't think I want to hear.
Goldie, you'd better leave the room.
Go down to the lobby and see if you can find me a copy of...
The Times.
It should have arrived by now. '
Xanthe looked pinched, but went without a word.
' Has anyone, laid a finger... um... kissed you? '
He was still turned away, his back as braced as a victim at a flogging stake.
Miranda then found herself half-laughing through her tears.
If he turned and looked at her, she might have to give a straight reply, but to his narrow back, which could have been the back of a much younger man, she began to tease, in the way that she had learned so many of her new friends liked, when they made similar inquiries too, like the painter who'd lain on her bed and asked her earnestly if she'd ever experienced simultaneous orgasm, or the musician who'd volunteered he'd show her a ' perversion ' he was sure nobody would have demonstrated to her before, and began nuzzling between her legs.
How they always wanted to know what other men did.
How they puffed themselves up to outstrip others in their pleasure-giving powers, how they boomed when they protested they'd avenge assaults on her innocence by others.
' No, never!
Honest.
What do you think? '
She checked a giggle of hysteria.
' one does call me his tulipe noire, you know. '
' Blood will out, ' Gillian had said.
' Blood is thicker than water, ' he had replied.
' They say passionate things to me, but absolutely nothing more, oh no.
Another says I smell of the sea, like oysters, fresh and salty. '
Miranda giggled.
' Another told me he had a dream, there was a fountain and it had a name, clear as a bell in his dream: Jouvence.
He was dipped in it by me.
Oh, I 'm an exotic to them  being a bit of a ' musty ', as Feeny used to call it, isn't anything to deny here in Paris.
Everyone loves me for the very things that you want me to cover up!
Only the Persian engineer with the sloppy eyes doesn't see me as exotic, because he's that way himself. '
She wasn't crying or laughing any more; numbness was taking over.
Anthony turned to look at her; his eyes were kind, she had moved him, he'd perhaps remembered something, her grandmother, his boyhood.
He brushed a hand across his forehead.
' You all grow up too quickly, nowadays. '
He paused.
' If I can't find your father and talk to him, I must ask you, my dear child  you are still a child, appearances to the contrary  to come home with us of your own accord. '
She went towards him, for he seemed suddenly spent, a man getting old far out to sea, trying to swim.
' I was contacted  by the consul in Monte  oh, I shouldn't tell you these things, but... '
He looked at her with his blue eyes that made you feel you were in the far distance and he was bringing you into focus gradually, like a ball magnetised to drop into his outstretched hand, be clasped by his fingers.
' There was some trouble.
You know the kind of thing, I think.
My dear, I can't tell you how sorry I am. '
She quivered, then his gaze travelled past her, and she was able to say with quick energy, ' Daddy 'll climb right up again, he always does.
He's a brilliant player. '
' One of the best. '
He paused.
' It would be such fun for Goldie, too, if you came back and stayed with us.
She's so attached to you.
And you to her, I know. '
Miranda dropped her head.
She was now trying not to cry.
' Mum and Dad want me to be here, I know.
To wait for them. '
Anthony came up to her, handed her the spruce crimson silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and touched her hair, awkwardly.
But she felt the tentativeness in his touch, the memory of something at his fingertips.
He sighed, ' Soon I 'll be having to cope with Goldie too, I suppose. '
Very soon, thought Miranda, looking up at him, irises bruised from all the emotion, ' oh, Goldie 'll have no problems, I could swear to that. '
She pushed a smile into the corners of her mouth.
' I don't have any, either.
This is the life. '
She tried the clich, then smiled at its failure.
' You could come out.
Gillian and I'd be glad to help with that  Queen Charlotte's ball, you could wheel the cake, wear white samite, you know the kind of thing, a garden party at the palace, plenty of young men.
And the right sort of young men, too. '
He could not continue to look her in the face.
' Do the season, the works.
We couldn't afford a dance for you  I've Goldie's to consider, in four years' time, not so far off.
If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well.
So maybe another kind of gathering for you  a tea party somewhere nice, maybe even in the Assembly Rooms at the Stockade, they've been hired before now.
What do you say? '
' Are women allowed in? '
' There's a special bit for entertaining.
Come, what d' you say? '
' That'd be next summer, no? '
Miranda said slowly, calmer now, for she saw the clouds clearing ahead.
' Yes, I suppose so, yes. '
' I could stay here till then? '
There was a knock on the door, and Miranda jumped to let in Xanthe, carrying a crinkly air-mail-paper version of The Times, and a copy of Paris-Match with a photograph of Bardot, which she held up for Miranda to see.
Bardot appeared three-quarters view, in a pink gingham dcolletage, frilled with broderie anglaise, and spike heels of white kid on the end of her round legs.
The light slanted across her skin in such a way the tiny blonde hairs showed like fair fluff.
' I 'm trying to persuade Miranda to come back with us to London, ' began her father.
Miranda pleaded, ' I 'm sure Mum and Dad 'll be back soon.
You know them.
They're expecting me to stay here. '
' Yes, I do know them, ' said her grandfather, and took the paper with a fond sad smile at Xanthe and sat down.
' And I think you'd better come home. '
' I 'm sure Miranda's looking after things really well while they're gone, ' said Xanthe, giving her a steady look.
Her father's habitual mild-manneredness, which usually protected him from responding, became brittle and porous when he was in contact with his daughter: Miranda could see that he reacted to Xanthe's silkiness as if she weren't a clear, sparkling water, but a fiery solvent that he, for all his well-preened feathers, could not resist.
He was listening to her, as she pressed on.
' Uncle Kit and Aunty Astrid are bound to surface again.
They always do.
It's not a good idea to leave Miranda all on her own, so why don't we keep her company?
Daddy, why don't we stay on, just until they do? '
She was her accomplice, and Miranda sat, quite still, amazed.
Ant Everard put down his paper, looked at his daughter, his face a supplication of mercy from her; he looked back again at Miranda, and his concern turned into a frown, and he came visibly to a decision.
' Goldie, ' he said.
' You are still too young for Paris. '
He flinched at the stoniness in her sky-coloured eyes.
' Poppa!
Think, we could go to the Louvre, and I could practise my French  Miranda's French is smashing  you heard her talk to that old stick-in-the-mud at lunch, and we could visit Versailles...
There's so much to do here.
I've hardly ever left London.
Honestly, please let me stay. '
Miranda held her breath.
Ant Everard was smoothing the tissue Times with the flat of his hand.
' The omens have been rather strong today, ' he said.
' That taxi fare... very strange.
Once in a while, the numbers fall, the abacus clicks into a pattern.
Perhaps the Maitre was offering an opportunity I shouldn't let pass...? '
' Oh yes, Daddy, yes.
You can do business and we 'll... we, 11 study together. '
' The question is always interpretation, however.
The augur's skill didn't consist in luck with the omens, but in reading them right.
That's what sorted out the sheep and the goats.
My famous bump of Flinders savvy, my sangay tells me... '
He was trying to joke, and Miranda's spirits dimmed.
' Oh yes, it's a lucky day for you  and for me, for us. '
Xanthe was still pressing him.
' I 'm not sure, little lady. '
Miranda could see by his grip on the newspaper, the thinness of his lips, and above all how he directed his words to her, not to his daughter, how much it cost him to refuse her anything.
' Besides your mother would never agree.
Would she now? '
' Tell her, just tell her.
I want to stay here.
Please. '
' Tonight, we 'll do something special, and then... ' he pulled the paper up to hide his face.
' We shall all three take the night train out  tomorrow.
I expect Miranda can be packed by then.
Xanthe's face flushed, but she did not cry, unlike Miranda, who began to beg, in a mess of tears and mucus and smeared makeup until her grandfather, two high spots of vexation colouring his cheeks, ordered her to return to her hotel.
At the door, Xanthe took her by both hands and held her so hard Miranda felt her nails cut into the palms and her eyes met hers with a pale blue flare, as clear as her father 's, and as unassailable, as she breathed out, holding Miranda by her side, and turned to face her father across the room.
' I hate you, ' she said, ' I hate you. '
' Really, Goldie! '
Anthony Everard tried to laugh away his daughter's fury.
' We 'll do something utterly delightful today, and even tomorrow: take a bateau mouche, ride the lift to the top of the Eiffel Tower  what do you say to that? '
' No, ' said Xanthe.
' No. '
The voice, so accustomed to obedience, continued in courtesy, but its ring of conviction was sharpening, and Miranda sensed that Anthony Everard had reached the point when, if he could not phrase a command as a request, he would assert his authority undisguised.
' It's only for your good, my little ladies, ' he was saying.
' I know the world, more's the pity. '
' No, ' said Xanthe again.
' I want to stay here longer. '
Anthony Everard sighed.
' There will be time enough, later in your life.
Plenty of chances for you when you're older.
But not now, not this time, little woman.
It's for the best, trust me. '
Twenty-two
LONDON, 196
MIRANDA WAS ALONE in the compartment and glad of it, as it was an old-fashioned commuter train, with no corridor, just a door opening straight on to the line.
She wasn't scared of the company who might join her on the journey, for fright was not a condition she admitted; she only wanted to study her surroundings without discretion, and such intensity made strangers feel uneasy.
The train was passing through a part of the city she did not know; it jolted along slowly, so she could not draw.
But it gave her a clear view into the houses backing on to the tracks, the private mess usually tidied out of sight, the outside lavatories with unhinged doors, the laundry racks flimsy as the skeleton of a bird's wing, with trousers and underwear like broken feathers hanging; a burst, sodden mattress.
A CND sign was scrawled on a shed, with ' She loves you, Yeah Yeah! ' alongside; more, newer anatomies of obsolete equipment, prams, tin bath tubs, hutches, lay tipped beside coal bunkers in some back plots.
She lowered the window by the leather tab and clicked the lip into the groove of the embrasure to hold it down so she could take some photographs; several boys climbing over the fence on the railway banks hooted at the sight of her camera and posed, arms akimbo, pretence starlets.
The famous film director from France could speak no English, and so Miranda was being sent to do the interview as well as provide the paper's weekly caricature; she had the address of the location, a newsagent's in the High Street of a part of the city she had never heard mentioned before, Giblett Park, though she had lived in London most of her life; the Press Office had said that he would give her ten minutes between takes, or more if she were lucky and the filming was going well and Jean-Claude Meursault was feeling mellow.
The paper's usual film reporter would write the story from Miranda's notes; he'd already attended several days' shooting of the new, as yet untitled film, the first Meursault to be made in Britain, which was a supreme sign that the decade was making all the difference to the world's view of the country, and its relation to the avant-garde.
' It's a gas, ' the journalist told her.
' There's this young girl in a Mao tunic and a red star on her cap  she's Jean-Claude's latest  and she's sitting on a bookcase, high up, legs swinging.
It's in a porn shop, so there's bums and tits hanging out all around her, and she's reading aloud from Gramsci, fantastic stuff about seizing the time, the end of oppression  power to the people!
It was fabulous, seeing her sitting in that heap of consumer capitalist garbage, pure, unmoved, like a flame, burning for the cause. '
The film buff was a slim young man, with long hands and feet and fair hair in a thin veil to his shoulders.
He worked as one of the cooperative who ran Blot, the alternative newspaper where Miranda often published  though Blot in her view was well-named, for every page was printed in several coloured inks and a variety of types, and then overprinted in palimpsest.
Any image, black-and-white or colour, was always worsted in this optical smorgasbord.
It was hard work getting paid, as well.
Still, she liked one or two of the collective, Xanthe had put some money in (actually five hundred pounds, a fair whack) when Miranda had asked her to, so she felt bound to give the paper some support in kind, and the office was fun  she liked pitching in with headings, sidebars, suggested stories, and pasting up till the small hours, with the help of ciggies and carafe wine; the sex gossip was the best in town, which made up for the coffee (though they could afford dope, they couldn't rise to real coffee, and had at one time even resorted to the bitter brown syrup Camp, with the turbaned lascar on the label).
She reached the address; there was no sign of activity.
The window was full of magazines, lying edge to edge and hanging in yellowed cellophane wrappers from clothes-pegs: she was reminded of playing shop as a child, and lining up the tins of food and boxes of soap flakes and bags of flour, all in miniature.
The models behind the sun-baked cellophane smiled with shining teeth or pushed out kissing pouts or let their dewy bottom lip drop; they arched and twisted and perched, strategic stickers interrupted the full view of their parts, spotted animal skins here and there hinted at biting beasts on the loose.
She tried the door.
It did not open; she found a bell, hesitated about ringing it, then did so.
It tinkled, an old-world merriness.
The shopfittings had not been changed since it had been a High Street draper 's, or a confectioner's perhaps?
A man came to open it: he looked, Miranda thought, as if warnings against self-abuse might be true after all: whey-faced, with a camel's twitchy nose, though he was probably not much older than she was.
' The film? ' he repeated.
' They messed up the shop, terrible it was.
I've been picking up after them all night and all morning.
There's some people in the world should be kept in the zoo. '
He rubbed his forehead; he was wearing a rubber thimble with spikes.
' How should I know where they are? ' he went on.
He wasn't letting her in, she could see racks of magazines behind and a dark wooden counter, bare.
Lines of eyes peeping and ogling, rows of breasts hoisted and nipples tweaked and Vaselined; reddened mouths gaped at her, naturists demonstrated star-jumps, plump pink bottoms poked, arch looks pinned her down, and fingers crested with scarlet points beckoned.
Miranda began to feel curious for a closer look.
At the OK Corral  as she preferred to call what some of its visitors termed her quim (the phrase struck her as useful after she'd seen the Western)  some men proved themselves and others came to grief, and both kinds had male competitors on their mind and wanted to outgun them.
But meanwhile the OK Corral continued, and it was keeper of her own wild troop of horses, whom she knew how to handle, unlike some of the sharpshooters and champions and wildmen exhibiting their prowess.
Sex in Miranda's experience wasn't a matter of spectacle, but of darkness and touch, magnified by her senses' usually exacerbated state, the extremes of the night, of smoking and drinking and hunger and tiredness, and she was a blind swimmer through walls of warm water, and knew nothing of the practice and technique of the models in the pictures crammed edge to edge in the shop.
She was used to seeing men's bodies; but she had never seen a woman's strike the poses of these images.
She wondered, ' Do I do it wrong?
I never do any of this and haven't any of the underwear either.
Perhaps she wasn't a real woman, after all, with the proper innate grasp of communicating with the Opposite Sex.
She faltered, how would such a very real woman cope with this situation?
She tried a smile, showing her teeth, ' You don't know where they went? '
She raised her voice just enough to hint at domination.
The seller of specialist magazines grimaced when she smiled and as he pushed the door shut to the frisky chiming of the bell he grunted, ' Try the showroom, they might know.
Or the pub. '
A homebody's disgust with the restless owners of fast cars, a temperate man's contempt for drinkers were impacted into this begrudged advice.
When she eventually tracked down the location, Miranda was speeding on a mix of excitement and anxiety.
She found the wrecker's yard down an alley just behind the station, about an hour and a half after she had first arrived there on the train.
A girl in a mackintosh and low-heeled pumps, pale stockings, and a short glossy bob was running across the dirt floor of the yard; the hulks of cars were heaped behind her, the record of fatal crashes scored legibly in their twisted driveshafts, passenger doors stove in, and disembowelled interiors where plugs and levers hung from strings like fallen teeth on the ends of nerves.
Oil glinted prettily in puddles like mussel shells.
In some of the wrecks other young women were sitting: Miranda only saw then one naked girl in dark glasses leaning back on the banquette-style front seat of a big old Rover, thin white legs in heels just touching the cinder-strewn wasteground.
She was reading aloud, a man holding a boom mike was registering her voice; she was declaiming from Soul on Ice:
I hate you
Because you're white.
Your white meat
Is nightmare food.
White is
The skin of evil.
Loving you thus
And hating you so,
My heart is torn in two.
The words spoke truth; shivered up and down inside her, earthing right down to the OK Corral.
Later, when she watched the scene during the shooting, she'd find more girls in the pile of smashed-up cars: one putting on lipstick high in a lorry's cab, another lying on the bonnet like a mascot, face to the car's prow, giving a feline look as she too read aloud, from a French philosopher who later in a fit of madness pushed his wife under in the bath, and held her there till there were no more bubbles.
Their pale flesh in that wreckage made her shiver; it stirred morbid thoughts of the fragile membrane retaining blood inside the body, the tender transitions between limb and limb, the throbbing larval transparency of scientific diagrams showing the foetal development of... infant salmon, infant monkeys, infant anything.
The woman in the mack was running, a camera on tracks was following her, a group of men clustered around it, pacing, several attached to it, one on a high seat, another underneath the lens, Jean-Claude Meursault on foot at their flank.
She recognised him at once from the blunt-nosed profile and pepper-and-salt hair en brosse and the large tinted lenses of his glasses, and the way he hooked his head to one side and forward like a boxer butting.
She would have no trouble catching him on paper, but she took some photographs just to make sure.
Then he lifted his arm and brought it down, hard and fast, and suddenly from behind the cars rose three freedom fighters in terrorist gear, black berets at an angle over their brows, black tracksuits, lace-up boots on their long shins, bandoliers slung oblique, rifles in one hand.
They leapt down the car wrecks and legged it across the ground towards the girl.
But too late, at another signal from Jean-Claude, the girl in the mack clutched her side and stumbled, then collapsed on the ground, and shuddering, turned over as the camera came close and moved out to hover over her face and catch her bitter smile as she died.
At least, so Miranda imagined.
They cut, and the actress scrambled up and examined her knees; a woman from Wardrobe ran up and gave her a change of mack, and bent to apply panstick to her hands where they had been dirtied by the wrecker's-yard floor; she checked her hose and brushed her hair and the actress shook her head slowly from side to side so that it fluffed.
The Black Panthers slapped one another and joshed with their weapons: Miranda took a few more photographs to draw from later.
They were standing against the light, and their profiles overlapped at close quarters, and haloed them; they made a vivid show of cock-of-the-roost virility, and she chuckled to herself with pleasure.
One of the actors then noticed her camera and hailed her.
She waved back gaily; his shoulders set haughtily and he turned away.
They were directed back to their positions by the first assistant and his megaphone, and a second take began; Miranda was now able to make some sketches of the action as well, as she knew its shape.
When the break for lunch was called the press girl came and fetched her, ' About ten minutes, okay? '
Miranda sat down beside Jean-Claude Meursault in a canvas chair.
She would have liked the brune he offered her, but couldn't cope with the tape-recorder, the paper with the questions written out in the Blot office, the unfamiliarity of speaking French after an interval, as well as Meursault's cult reputation, all at the same time as smoking.
So she declined, then immediately regretted it, because she realised it might have pleased him, made them complicit together.
He hardly looked at her, but kept his eyes trained on her hands, or on his, but now and then she caught his look behind the smoked glass of his lenses, a milky, slightly protruding glance, mild as a trout.
Later, when the interview appeared, overprinted on Miranda's scrawly, twiddly and multicoloured impressions of the shoot, it was translated and edited to read (though it was rather hard to decrypt from the graphics):
Blot: You've said, Jean-Claude, that the problem isn't making political films but making films politically.
Could you explain what you mean by that?
Meursault: We're living in an arsehole culture [ une civilisation de cul ].
Shit rules it, and what else is shit but money?
Money is politics  you try and make a film like this and you 'll discover that  and money is shit  so where does that leave politics?
Blot: That sounds as if you think we're caught in a double bind from which there's no escape.
Meursault (with a gallic shrug): What is oppression?
Us.
What is liberation?
Us.
No, I 'm not depressed.
I like shit.
Blot: In earlier films, you've suggested that female sexuality and capitalist codes of production are intertwined; with this new film you're turning your attention to the position of blacks in our society.
Do you think there's a similarity?
Meursault: If I made you suck my cock, this would be political.
If I make a black man sweep up my trash, empty my dustbins, wash the vomit from my floor and kill for me in my imperialist wars... well, what do you think?
The difference is that women collude in their subjection.
They think it's power.
The blacks don't  they don't even have an illusion of power.
(He shrugged, gestured towards the actors with the tip of his Gitane.)
Except, of course, these rebels.
Blot (Miranda had missed a beat as she translated back in her head the French phrase ' sucer ma queue ', which M. Apritif and others of her circle had not used  in conversation.
She thought, listening to the famous film director, that she had not had an experience of oppression, of violence, at least she had not experienced her life in those terms): Your interpretation of women sees them as objects of desire, images in advertisements, pin-ups  how are you going to express the inner thoughts of Black Panthers?
Isn't the consciousness of the blacks even more closed to us than women 's?
Meursault: I don't think there's a way of entering inside someone's head.
The interior is a hall of mirrors  a sequence of traps, lies.
You know that, about yourself.
(She had started, but kept on scribbling notes.)
No, the way to interpret the inside is by assembling the exterior with all the means you have: you will find that this aesthetic process yields the moral.
Or the lack of moral.
Ethics and aesthetics can not be held apart.
(At this point, Meursault looked up at her for a moment, seemed to appraise her, then back down to his hands, and commented, ' With such good French, there's a man in the story. '
Miranda let it pass, though his assumption of a single owner rather riled her.
He went on, he was now in free flow):
The great lie of the last two hundred years has been the mistaken idea that realism is a way of telling the truth.
Is Shakespeare realistic?
I like it very much when Othello says, ' Rude am I in my speech ', and then speaks like eloquence itself.
That is Art.
That is the essence of Art.
Do you think Hamlet the Dane spoke such beautiful English?
And Racine's Phdre, organising her sentences in such poised alexandrins, does she talk like a woman driven mad for love?
My films never pretend to be anything but artefacts  they're unnatural, contrived, fashioned, unrealistic, on purpose.
They're directed.
I make dramatic tableaux.
Like this one.
Not vrit photographs  pretending there isn't a mind behind the camera or a finger on the button.
(Jean-Claude Meursault leaned over, and tweaking the sheet of questions from Miranda, continued): But this is boring as shit.
People always talk to my reputation.
It's a bore.
I 'm making this film now because...
I couldn't get the money for the film I wanted to make.
I do not know  I could not tell you or...
Blot what my film means.
I make a montage.
You might say reality is stranger than fiction.
I say, fiction is always much stranger than reality.
(Meursault drew on his butt and looked down at his hands, clasped in his lap.)
' Now we have to shoot again, ' he said, and stood up.
' Great stuff, Miranda, ' the thin fair man would say, when she handed in the transcript.
' Shame it's small pickings, though. '
He turned the two sheets as if hoping to find them double-sided.
Miranda did not tell him why she had not had the nerve to buttonhole Meursault again, in a later break in the filming.
The
Blot editor understood, he said, giving her a spacey grin, ' He was abrasive, hell, no shit.
I can see he made it tough for you. '
He almost winked, he liked the man's upfrontness, this was the era when honesty was prized above all virtues.
So she did not tell him that she was too shaky later to resume the conversation for a different reason; she did not describe to him  or to the readers of Blot  what ensued.
For it turned out that she felt protective towards the actor George Felix and preferred to keep their encounter private.
And she had an incoherent sense that he and she together were being pushed in squares of black-and-white across the game board, and she didn't want to comply with the games masters by speaking aloud, let alone complaining, of the antagonisms they orchestrated.
When the interview ended, and Jean-Claude Meursault had risen, shaken her hand gravely, and then quickly joined the group around the camera at the end of the track to Miranda's right, she began sketching in her small pad and taking the occasional photograph when the noise levels permitted.
The scene began again: the drone of the invective started up as one actor read:
' A cult of death, /need of the simple striking arm under/the street lamp.
The cutters, from under/their rented earth.
Come up, black dada/nihilismus.
Rape the white girls.
Rape/their fathers.
Cut the mothers' throats. '
The girl in the mack was scrambling again through the puddles in the dirt of the wreckers' yard; the invisible and soundless shots from out of frame felled her at a signal from Jean-Claude and the partisans rose from the auto hulks, their own guns blazing.
After the call came, ' Print ', Miranda stayed focused on the group of three actors.
She'd work from the photographs later: one of them was chunky, the full lines of his mouth emphasised by the trim of his moustache and beard.
The other two men were taller, one lanky, with slow flapping hands as he walked ; Miranda guessed he had not lived in London long.
The third was the youngest, square-set, and of the three, looked most like an actor dressed up in costume for a part.
She was becoming excited by what she was getting, she could develop it later into an almost sculptural grouping of their limbs and heads, when the third Panther broke from his two companions and came striding towards her.
She was caught up in her work, in the looking it required, a gaze that was intense and scrutinising without allowing any personal exchange of feeling to take place, when he was all at once bearing down on her, shouting, his right fist tight around his weapon, his left hand hitting the air and pointing at her with accusing index finger.
She dropped the camera from her face as the lens filled with his anger, and he receded to a safe distance from her; but he was still bearing down, yelling, ' What the fuck is going on?
Who gave permission for this?
I want you to know round here that if anyone's taking pictures, you better ask George Felix before. '
He was getting closer and still shouting: ' No jumped-up photographer comes to this set and uses my image without my saying so, you hearing me, you hearing me right?
' Some bitch exploiting me, joining in the fucking imperialist adventure, selling my image... '
He thumped his chest with his gun.
' Oh baby, you just go right ahead and grab what you can when you can. '
She was waving her hands at him to deny what he was saying; the press girl was running up, but Jean-Claude, she realised later, as she reconstructed the scene in her mind, was leaning up against the cameraman's steel chair on the travelling rig and smoking, his hands cupped over his mouth as he did so, like a wise monkey hiding his speaking, his eyes half-closed behind his glasses, more lizard now than trout.
She said to George Felix, ' I 'm from Blot. '
' What shit, Blot?
Who wants to know about Blot? '
He reached her, he was face to face with her, the press girl Annabel was plucking at his clinging black roll-neck's sleeve gingerly, with her fingertips.
' George, keep cool, okay?
Blot's an alternative paper.
They're doing a story on Jean-Claude  I should have asked you.
I didn't, it's my fault.
I 'm sorry. '
He shook her off, with a toss of the head; Miranda saw all of a sudden the theatricality of the gesture, and something inside her relaxed.
George Felix was surely in a rage, but he was also enjoying being angry, and that was something that never happened to her father, whose rages had made anger such a familiar monster.
If only Kit could enjoy the scenes he made, she thought, instead of being eaten alive with remorse, and she stuttered in response to the Panther's exaltation, ' I 'm with you, I didn't want to do anything you wouldn't like. '
She made a gesture of pledging, her hand hovering over her heart.
' I didn't have a moment to ask... '
' You hear that, the fuck you hear that, one and all? '
He flung both arms out, the one with the gun aloft, and bowed in the direction of his two companions.
They were idling uncomfortably behind him, neither reinforcing his fury, nor retreating from support altogether.
The older man shook his head slightly, his mouth made a round shape, ' Aw, come on, cut it out, man, ' (but not loud enough to be heard).
And George Felix plunged on, ' Aha, Whitey just didn't get a chance to ask.
And isn't that just the case with everything you gone and done over the centuries of black oppression?
You never had the chance to ask ; the slaves, the chain gang, the artists who got burned out making entertainment for you and looking real pretty for you, taking Whitey's junk, the white pigs' white junk.
Oh baby, you're one hell of a fantastic heap of self-delusion, you say you're on my side.
You bourgeois liberals  you're the pits.
I'd rather have a racist straight up and on the rocks any day.
You don't know shit. '
He threw out his hands again and set a grin through clenched teeth on his burning face.
' Aw, shit, just take my picture!
Go right ahead, don't ask me how I feel. '
He hadn't hit her, or snatched her camera, but stood square to her, holding his hands up as if he knew not to, bouncing on the balls of his feet, while Jean-Claude and his group looked on, keeping very still, and Miranda wondered, for a moment, if the camera were rolling, for she felt on display under George's attack.
She was trembling, hot tears sprang to her eyes, she wanted to cover her face with her hands, but did not dare attempt such a defending gesture for it would have seemed a patent provocation; besides she knew how to stand in the face of anger.
And at the same time the racing of her blood was only partly fear, and she could see that he knew it, that he had discovered this power and tuned it to performance pitch, that the insults were a kind of invitation, the display of force a plea turned upside down, and she also wanted, because she longed to please, to take off her clothes then and there and let him down from his prideful pose, and soothe him with her obedience to his rage.
She was like a young dog, the kind her mother scorned, and she could only leap and lick after a blow such as he had fetched her.
' You might like the results, I turn them into drawings, I don't just use them as photographs. '
Childhood in the wings of her mother and father's raging had taught her a degree of courage; she never ran away from anger.
He snorted.
She kept on, her fatuousness was her gift to him, a kind of amends, to prove him right.
' You could see them beforehand  of course we wouldn't publish anything without showing you. '
Her voice sounded tinkly to her ears, tinkly and absurdly well-brought up; his own voice was vibrant, an actor's timbre, trained to come from deep in the diaphragm, while his accent slid around, hinting at American films and North London schooling and drama classes, and beneath these layers, the islands' underswell rose.
So that from the sound of him she grasped the archaeology of his life.
His eyes opened wide at her.
' Aw, shit, you think I care? '
He made a fist and shot it in the air by her cheek.
She dropped her gaze, flinched, she wanted to say, again, absurdly, ' I 'm with you, all the way.
I 'm on your side, I 'll always be on your side.
I can't tell you how bad it feels to be one of them; besides, I've not chosen...
I don't want to be a member of the... to be bourgeois. '
She knew she was foolish, she heard herself clearly.
It was the end of the decade, and she was labelled with the name of the criminal class.
She couldn't defend herself without rousing him to greater ferocity; she knew that in the moment of conflict, an enemy can never protest to be a friend and be believed; she had seen the distrust Kit's sudden switches of mood inspired.
Indeed, she would have liked to tell him about her father who was called Nigger Everard at school and spurned in his own family because his mother had been Creole; she wanted to tell him about Feeny whom she loved; how she herself was a musty, couldn't he see it?
She didn't because the moment was not right; she did not yet know that she could not plead from her position of privilege that she had suffered too  ' So you want to annex our wrongs as well, do you? ' he might well have answered to her in just bitterness.
This, Miranda did not yet understand.
That day, she only realised that nobody wants their special enemy, chosen with care and attacked with force, to renounce the role and throw down arms and instead bare their breasts for an embrace.
Jean-Claude joined them, made a puffy sound through his smoke and laid a hand on the arm of George Felix.
' Let's make movies, huh? ' he said in English, and gave Miranda a smile from the corner of his mouth as he steered the actor away.
Her knees were weak, and she sat down on a chair the press rep brought over for her; she could not have trusted her legs to walk over to it.
She felt vaguely flattered, it was odd.
Jean-Claude's sidelong half-smile had felt congratulatory.
She took the cup of tea she was offered and did not stop Annabel spooning sugar into it.
' Two, three? '
' That's fine, thanks. '
She drank it, it was consoling.
Her father's bouts of fury weren't strategic, they never achieved anything but trouble for him: there were some houses, she knew, where he had played and was no longer welcome because he'd made a scene.
Never about bad cards, of course, he was much too professional for that, never about the fall of the dice in backgammon; he had himself under control  just  when his bridge partner made a miscalculation and played unnecessarily into an opponent's finesse.
But he could be touchpaper, and a spark from a fancied slight, a disagreement over politics, a moment of heedlessness from someone, and he would catch and soon the conflagration was at full blast consuming everything in its path: new friendships, old friendships, new clients, his reputation, his wife's love, even that.
Astrid, who had once found him such fun, was fed up with his tinder temper.
She wouldn't stop at his side any more to watch him play, though he liked her to, for she was his lucky charm, and her presence concentrated his mind wonderfully.
Or so Kit said.
Annabel's briskness brought Miranda back to herself; she'd had it easy, and besides, in her case, when people had noticed the caramel flavour of her looks, as they had in Paris, it had worked to her advantage.
She really wasn't a beautiful young woman, not like Xanthe; her features were irregular and plumpish, however thin the rest of her body became.
But the touch of the exotic in her appearance improved the effect she made.
She hadn't suffered injury or contempt; she had no reason to blaze, unlike George Felix.
To others she merely looked a bit different, and it lent her glamour, but to him, she was as different as anyone who wasn't black.
She looked across at the scene as once again the actress ran and fell and the gunmen rose from the car wrecks where the nudes lay or sat reading aloud.
She wanted to tell someone how it had counted for her rather than against her; how in that dimming world of the Left Bank nearly ten years before, she'd set lovers adrift on Gauguinesque, and Baudelairean voyages of luxe, calme et volupt.
Then she thought, But I should declare my allegiance now.
' You okay then? ' inquired Annabel.
' Don't give it a thought.
He's just a bit uptight  filming's tough.
We've been at it since six. '
' I can't help feeling guilty, though.
Classic liberal guilt ; would like to do something, but can't think what. '
' Not true, no way, ' Annabel smiled firmly.
' We're changing everything!
Look at the movies  think of Jean-Claude's movies!
They're just unimaginably different from anything that's happened before and they're changing everything.
There aren't any barriers, no holds barred, nothing we can't do now!
' You only have to want it and want it enough. '
Then she added, giving Miranda's arm a squeeze, ' Just do it, darling, like the man says.
Do it! '
