Laura Kinsale (20 page)

She had some vague hope that she was mistaken in their intention, but when they stopped to take leave of the host, that cheerful illusion vanished. On the strength of all she had learned in London, Tess managed to hide her wretchedness long enough to finish the dance, and then she went straight to Mahina and said she was exhausted.

Mahina gave Tess a searching look, and then left to gather Mr. Fraser and call for the carriage. Tess had been overjoyed to see her friend again, but it was strange to find that the girl who had been so wild and carefree almost a decade before was now the wife of an English merchant and the mother of three. She looked hardly any older, her figure unmarred and her face still smooth. She still laughed just as much, showing white teeth against sun-darkened skin, and her dark eyes still danced with mirth. In all, it was a change in name only, as far as Tess could see. Mr. Fraser, an older, bearded man, hardly seemed to pay her any mind beyond an indulgent smile and a shake of his head as she tried to detach him from his group of business associates.

So Tess and Mahina went home by themselves. As soon as Hina had clucked to the horse and started them on their way, she turned, and said, “You and this captain—did you fight?”

Tess looked at her friend in surprise. “Do you mean Captain Bush? Of course not.”

Hina made a face, just like when they had been children together. “Captain Bush,” she said scornfully. “He’s nothing. I don’t know why you danced with him so much. You let Mamua steal the other without even trying.”

Tess felt herself blushing in the cool night air. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Hah. You haven’t changed. Remember when you fell in love with Tavi, and Ana Dodd took him away from under your nose? They got married, after you and your father left, and now Ana is the mistress of one of the Queen’s guards. Tavi divorced her. He says sleeping with her was like sleeping with a fighting cock—just feathers and claws and crowing.”

This little discourse brought back vividly all the miseries of Tess’s first serious venture into romance, at the age of fourteen. She had lost out to the more wanton Ana, because puppy love in Tahiti was a bit more than just stolen kisses behind the barn, and her father had managed to arrange an expedition to another island before Tess could receive clear instructions on just what was required to lure the swaggering young Tavi into her camp.

“Your captain,” Hina went on wisely, “he’s just what Mamua wants. She thinks he is
purotu roa.
She’ll start feeding him papayas and rubbing his back, and pretty soon you won’t even have a way to get off this island, because he’ll desert his ship and stay.”

The idea that Hina’s cousin thought Gryf “very hand
some” was not comforting to Tess, nor was the picture of his idyllic future in Mamua’s generous arms. She dropped her pretense of unconcern and said in a small voice, “But what can I do? He hates me.”

Hina turned an unbelieving glance in Tess’s direction. “Hates you! All he did was stare at you!”

“Did he?”

“What makes you think he hates you?”

“Well—” Tess searched for an explanation. “He owes me money, in a way. It makes him angry. And there are…some other things.”

Hina shook her head. “Money. Does he drink?”

“No. Not really.”

“Does he keep some other woman?”

“I-I don’t think so.”

“Then what did he need your money for?”

“To repair his ship.”

“Oh.” Hina sounded puzzled. “Why don’t you just tell him to keep the money?”

“It wouldn’t help. It’s like—oh, as if I had given him a gift. And he doesn’t have anything as good to give back.”

“I see.” The principle of reciprocal generosity was something the Tahitian girl understood clearly. “He was very foolish, then, to ask for more than he could return.”

“He didn’t ask for it,” Tess admitted slowly. “I tricked him into taking it.”

“Tete!” Hina used Tess’s Tahitian name in a scandalized voice. “That was very bad! No wonder he’s angry. And you said there was more besides? What else?”

Tess bit her lip. “I said that I would marry him, and then I—changed my mind.”

Hina clucked disapprovingly. “And now you’ve changed it back again? You have; I could tell as soon as
I saw you with him. And yet you treat him as if he were some lowborn. Your captain has a proper pride in his lineage, and that’s why he’s angry with you.”

The fact that Hina spoke from the strictures of Polynesian rather than European culture did not make her any less correct in her assessment. Tess bowed her head. “I suppose so. But it’s too late now to change it.”

Hina shook her head sadly, as if in agreement, and then suddenly broke into a laugh. “No—I don’t think it is! He may be angry, and I don’t really blame him, but he still wants you. He looked at you all the time, like a hungry dog. Poor man, that’s probably why he went off with Mamua, to prove you haven’t gotten the better of him!”

“Do you think so?” Tess brightened a little, but not much.

“It could be. And you don’t want Mamua to steal him, do you? Like Ana stole Tavi? No, you don’t want to make that mistake again. You have to give this captain back his
mana.
If you’re going to beat Mamua, you’ll have to think like a Tahitian instead of an old missionary.”

“Well,” Tess said doubtfully, “how?”

“Oh, don’t worry. You have a Tahitian on your side. I’m already thinking of a plan!”

It was a week after the
Arcanum
’s arrival in Tahiti when Hina presented her plan to Tess. Though the scheme was based on Hina’s eminently Polynesian interpretation of the order of things, it seemed to Tess to make considerable sense. The plan was twofold: first, to restore Gryf’s
mana,
which she understood to be a sort of mystical combination of pride, power, and influence, and secondly, to enable him to repay her “gift” with something of equal value.

Step number one would require a clear-cut declaration on Tess’s part that she respected and loved him. Tess had protested at first that she had already told him so, in her letter, but Hina discounted his rejection as only the first in a series, the length of which would be determined by Gryf’s own assessment of just how much he had to forgive.

The second step caused Hina a bit more difficulty. Her eyes widened when Tess told her the magnitude of the money paid to repair the
Arcanum
and retire Gryf’s other debts. Tess saw herself fall a little further in the island girl’s estimation for placing such an impossible burden on Gryf’s personal prestige. But like a true friend, Hina rallied. After considerable thought, she decided on the only possible nonmonetary gift of equivalent value.

Gryf would have to save Tess’s life.

Tess faltered a little at this announcement. She was prepared to go a long way, but she wasn’t sure she was prepared to stake her life on Gryf’s inclination to save it, especially since she was fairly certain that he would not see the connection between the rescue and the money he supposedly owed her. On the other hand, she well-remembered his reaction to Stark’s dropping the marlinespike. Hina recognized the little smile of pleasure that crept onto Tess’s face as she recalled the incident.

“You think it will be enough!” Hina exclaimed cheerfully. They were sitting in the shade of a cluster of coconut palms on a Sunday afternoon, watching her children play in the lagoon. “So do I. Now—we only have to arrange the thing.”

“Yes! Without getting me killed, thank you! Just how do you propose to manage that?”

“We’ll have to trick him, of course,” Hina said. “I was thinking, maybe you could be stranded on Miti Popoa’a, and he could find you.”

Miti Popoa’a was the tiny atoll some twenty miles south of Tahiti where Tess and Mahina had spent many happy adolescent days. “How is that saving my life?” Tess demanded. “It’s a perfectly safe place.”

“We know that. Does your captain know that? Suppose you had no food.”

“I’d catch fish.”

“Suppose you ran out of water.”

“I’d break coconuts.”

Hina giggled. “You’re awfully hard to kill. Suppose there was a big storm.”

“I’d wish I were somewhere else, but I could live through it. Besides, why would I go to Miti Popoa’a, and how would he know to come and save me?”

Hina was silent for a moment, deep in thought. Then she said, “We need to get rid of Mr. Sydney. You say to him, walk across the center of the island—”

“Hina! Not by himself. It took Papa and me a week.”

“I’ll find someone to go with him. He’ll be happy; you know he will—all those plants up there in the mountains. Anyway, then you pack up some things and I take you to Miti Popoa’a and leave you there. Then I come back and go to your captain and tell him you’re lost. It would be best, I think, if we waited until after a storm. I’ll let him look around for a little while, and then I’ll remember that you said something about going to Popoa’a to do some collecting. He’ll do the rest.”

“What if he doesn’t?”

“Well, you’ll just have to drink coconut milk for a few days! But he’ll go. I’m sure of it.”

“I don’t know—”

“Tete!” Hina said severely. “Don’t forget Mamua!”

Tess squinted out at the bright water of Papeete’s harbor, where the
Arcanum
rested quietly at anchor. Each morning, Tess had looked anxiously to see that the
ship was still there. There was activity on her decks, as there had been every day, but it was apparently no more than a good cleanup and new coat of paint. Tess wondered if Gryf was aboard, or ashore having his back massaged by Mamua. The image was enough. Tess turned to Hina and said, “All right. I suppose it can’t hurt to try.”

The proper moment to put Hina’s plan into execution came much sooner than Tess expected. For two weeks, she saw little of Gryf, for her time was spent with Mr. Sydney making methodical collections of flowering beach plants. Although it was the season for heavy rains, the weather had been pleasant and drier than usual. She was awakened early one morning at the Frasers’ house by the sound of a rising breeze, and went immediately to her bedroom window, as she always did, to look down the hill past the roofs and neat coral-dust streets of the town out over Papeete’s harbor.

It was just past dawn. She had to search a moment to pick the
Arcanum
out of the blue-gray background, and caught her breath as she saw the clipper’s tall masts, their rake unmistakable among more mundane craft, moving in a slow, stately progression past the other anchored ships. Fear leaped in her. He was leaving! She turned away from the window to grab her peignoir, with a half-formed idea of racing down to the waterfront to stop him, when a stronger gust of wind blew in the open window, raising the curtains and knocking over a little vase.

She paused, realizing that the wind was not the steady northeast trade, but out of the west. She ran to the window again, and saw what the early morning dullness had obscured: the sky was overcast, and the ragged leaves of palm trees fluttered and rotated in odd direc
tions. Tess was enough of a sailor to recognize those signals. A storm was coming, and from a direction which left the northwest-facing harbor at Papeete largely unprotected.

Now that she took the time to look, other ships showed obvious signs of preparations to get under way. The
Arcanum
was halfway to the reef entrance, under tow by hardworking figures in the quarter boat, one of the first of several vessels that were struggling against the brisk wind toward the safety of the open sea. Tess watched as the clipper approached the break in the reef, where the growing storm swell began to overpower the efforts of the men at the oars.

Just when it seemed to Tess that the
Arcanum
was about to run upon the reef and be broken to bits, the headsails and topsails broke free. She came smartly about onto the port tack, ninety degrees from her former heading, and lay on enough sail to carry her to freedom, clearing the northern point of the reef with room to spare.

From her vantage point, Tess clapped her hands in solitary appreciation of that neat piece of seamanship. Then she turned and dressed hurriedly, and skipped downstairs to find Hina.

T
he
Arcanum
returned to Papeete’s harbor five days after she had been chased out by the storm. She could have come back much sooner; the weather had not lasted more than two days, but Gryf had spent the last three sailing aimlessly among the Leeward Islands, telling himself all the reasons why he shouldn’t go back and asking himself why the hell he still wanted to. The decision was finally made when the lookout raised Tahiti on the horizon, and Gryf pretended not to wake up from a nap in the shade of the foreword deckhouse. When he finally opened his eyes, they were close enough to the island to make it seem ridiculous to turn back out to sea.

They were barely at anchor before a high-pitched hail reached him, and he turned to find Tess’s friend Mahina Fraser climbing aboard from an outrigger canoe.

“
Capitaine,
” she greeted him in breathless French. “You’ve been so long coming back, I was despairing of you!”

He looked beyond her, expecting Tess, but the island girl was alone.

“You must come,” she went on, not giving him time to answer. “You must help me. Tete has disappeared!”

He frowned at her. “Tete—”

“Oh, yes—Lady Tess,” she said impatiently. “We call her Tete. Captain, she is gone! She didn’t come back after the storm.”

It took him a full second to comprehend what Mahina was saying, and then cold fear flooded his veins. “Have you looked?” he asked, and realized the stupidity of the question as soon as he said it. “I mean—where would she have gone?”

“Anywhere,” Mahina cried, with an expansive wave of her hand. “The beach, the mountains—She sent Mr. Sydney across the top, and he hasn’t come back either, but he had two guides with him. Tete went off on her own. Oh, Captain, you must help me find her. I tried to go to the police, but they’re French—no good at all to search the island.”

He pictured Tess, alone and hurt in some remote valley, or worse…His mind balked, not willing to follow that thought. He swallowed the panic that rose in his throat, fought it down, trying to think. “Where was she supposed to go?” he demanded. “Has anyone seen her at all?”

Seventy-two hours later, he was still asking the same question, and still receiving the same answer: silence, and an eloquent shrug. As Mahina had predicted, the local authorities were unconcerned—they wanted to attribute the disappearance to a lovers’ quarrel, and asked Gryf several times if he had beaten his wife so that she had run away. On learning that Tess wasn’t his wife, they lost interest entirely, and told him to find another mistress, that there would be any number of willing parties on the island. He gave up on the police. He and Mahina organized their own search, with his pitifully small pool of manpower, and spread out over the island.

After three fruitless days and nights, he was sitting on the rough stump of an old palm in some village whose name he could not pronounce. Across from him, the white spire of a church glistened amid the lush greenery, and a pig rustled and snorted softly in the underbrush. Mahina was nearby, carrying on a lengthy conversation with an old man mending fish nets. Gryf understood not a word of it, but he knew it would be futile, as they all had been. One by one, his crew had come back, reporting nothing. No sign, no glimpse, no single lead. For eight days Tess had been lost.

Eight days.

His imagination had supplied abundant possibilities of what might have happened. Everywhere he looked in this gentle paradise he saw dangers. There were cliffs to fall from, surf to drown in, places so remote and unfrequented that a twisted ankle could mean slow starvation. There were sharks, and deserters from ships, men who recognized no law or decency; mutineers, slavers, murderers…

He stood up suddenly, and walked across the small clearing, up the steps and into the church. The interior was cool and sweet-smelling, last Sunday’s flowers still fragrant on the altar. He sat down, gazing aimlessly at the white-washed coral walls and dark wood. It was silent in the church, except for the sound of the gentle wind and a faint echo of Mahina’s clear voice outside. After a minute, he slid off the bench onto his knees on the rude plank floor. He buried his face in his arms and did something he had not done in fifteen years. He began to pray.

It wasn’t an orthodox prayer. It wasn’t even addressed to God, except as a kind of despairing hope that there was someone who might listen, who might answer, who would take in trade his feeble promises and
give him back her life. I’ll do anything, he prayed. Only let her be alive. Let her not be dead or hurt or afraid.

For a long time he prayed. Everything faded before the intensity of his plea. He did not know Mahina had come into the church until she touched his shoulder.

“Rifone,” she said softly, her tongue slurring his name into islander’s syllables. “Do not worry. You will find her.”

He looked up, and got off his knees self-consciously. She smiled at him as he rose, a peculiar little smile, and said, “I think Tete is very lucky that you care so much.”

He ignored that, not knowing how to answer. “Did you learn anything?”

“Yes.” Her brown eyes remained steadily on his.

“What?” he demanded, when she did not go on. He could not tell from her expression if the news were good or bad. Good, he told himself. It had to be good. But there was something very strange about the way she looked at him.

“The old man—he loaned her a canoe a week ago. He said she hasn’t brought it back.”

“A week—” Gryf’s hand tightened on the back of the pew. “After the storm?”

She hesitated, and then said, in a stifled voice, “No. Before.”

He felt the blood drain out of his face. “Does he know where she went?”

Mahina frowned at the floor, and he felt her reluctance to speak like a knife in his belly. “Please—” he said unsteadily. “Just tell me.”

She sighed, and flung her dark hair back, facing him with a level stare. “He says she was going to Miti Popoa’a. It’s an atoll, to the south. It isn’t far—maybe twenty miles.”

“Someone went with her, then.”

“No.”

“No! You’re telling me she went off on a twenty-mile voyage in an outrigger canoe by herself just before a storm? I can’t believe she could even sail one of those things across the harbor, much less twenty miles on the open ocean.”

“Why not?” Mahina sounded almost defensive. “I do. And maybe she didn’t realize a storm was coming.”

“Didn’t realize—Good God,” he snapped, driven to anger by his dismay. “She may be foolish, but she isn’t that stupid. Are you sure this old man was telling the truth?”

“Of course!” she cried. “Why would he make that up? What you don’t know, Rifone, is that Miti Popoa’a is a—a cursed place! If she wanted to go there, she’d have to go alone. No one would take her. She might be there right now, stranded, with no food or water!”

“But why the devil would she go somewhere like that?”

“Oh, she said often that she wanted to collect there. In fact—yes, I remember now! She said she wanted a special flower that her father told her was there. It only blooms after the rains. Yes, yes, that would explain why she went before the storm! I’m sure that’s where she is, Rifone. I’m certain of it!”

There was something forced about Mahina’s enthusiasm. Gryf thought perhaps she was trying to raise his spirits by overstating the case; it was something the kindhearted island girl would do.

“You must go and get her,” Mahina said, taking his arm and urging him outside and down the steps. “The old man said she took water and food, but just enough for a few days. She’s stranded—otherwise, she surely would have come back by now.”

“If she ever made it in the first place,” Gryf said dully.
With each added detail of information, it became harder to deny the possibility that she had gone. His mind chased after horrors again: sharks, the storm surge…Lord, it must have been running twenty feet or more at the height. He said, “It’ll be tomorrow before we can get there, by the time I find the crew and get back to the ship.”

“Oh, no,” Mahina exclaimed. “You can’t go in your ship. There’s no anchorage, and you’d never get your boat in. They say it’s hard even for a canoe to get through the reef. I said no one would go there, but it isn’t quite true. The old man—his grandfather was the priest who had the temple there—I think, if we offered him enough, he would take you.”

Gryf glaced at the leathery Tahitian, who sat calmly mending his nets in the shade with a cockeyed garland of flowers and leaves around his forehead. “No doubt,” Gryf said dryly. “How much is enough?”

“Five francs.”

“I guess you’ve already discussed it with him?”

“Oh, yes. I knew you would want to go.”

He hesitated. He didn’t want to; not really. He didn’t want to arrive at this atoll and find that Tess wasn’t there, because then the weight of dread that hung over him, that he had fought off for three days, would descend. He would be out of places to look. But he was out of places anyway. He turned to Mahina. “Tell him he’s got his five francs. Tell him I want to go now.”

Miti Popoa’a was a familiar place to Tess. The white sand and shady groves of coconut within the calm, clear waters of the lagoon had been a special hideout for her and Mahina as adolescents. The lagoon was large, but the island itself was so tiny that few Tahitians bothered with it, preferring instead the bigger groups of atolls to the north for recreational grounds.

Tess had set up camp in the central part of the island, where abundant shrubs provided some protection from the constant breeze. After the storm, rain showers had been frequent, and she had added a layer of palm fronds to the little canvas tent, which kept the interior completely dry. She caught rainwater in a tin tub, and had enough dried fish, bananas, and breadfruit to last a good while. At first, she ate well, having nothing to do but wait and cook for herself and wander along the sparkling beach. After a week, she was looking at the whole situation differently. She began to ration her fish and, using the net and hooks she had brought, to wade in the lagoon looking for more. The skills she had learned so many years before were slow to return. She caught an eel, after considerable effort, and later a few small schooling fish in the net.

The activity, at least, kept her mind off the fact that no one was coming to find her. Or it did until midafternoon, when she had worn herself out wading in the lagoon with her skirt hiked up to her waist, and the sun drove her into the shade of the coconut grove. She had long since decided that this escapade was among the stupidest she had ever tried, and only hoped that Hina would come back for her before she really was reduced to coconut milk and minnows, for it was clear that Gryf wasn’t coming.

She dried her feet and put her stockings and boots back on, then spent an hour cleaning and cutting up the eel into a marinade of wine vinegar. Afterward, she sat gloomily in the shade near the edge of the beach, feeling like Robinson Crusoe and wondering if she would ever see civilization again. She tried to keep a lookout, but tired muscles, the steady murmur of the surf out on the reef, and the rustle of palms lulled her into sleep.

She wakened to a shout and scrambled to her feet,
looking wildly up and down the beach. Some fifty yards down the stretch of sand, she saw the fluttering sail of a single canoe. Two male figures, both naked from the waist up, splashed over the side and ran the outrigger onto the beach. One she did not recognize, but Gryf’s blaze of golden hair was unmistakable.

Tess froze. Instead of elation, she felt a surge of panic. Her first thought was to run back into the bushes and hide. But he had already seen her. He abandoned the canoe and the other man and ran toward her, up the beach, his bare feet slipping in the deep sand. She stood rooted to the spot, too petrified to appear relieved.

He came near her and stopped, breathing hard, looking at her as if she were some apparition come to life. Tess stared back helplessly. He said, “You goddamned little fool!” and pulled her roughly into his arms.

He held her so tightly that her ribs hurt. Tess leaned against him, returning the embrace in a confusion of joy and guilt. She had not thought—She had not really expected—Oh, it was awful, to have tricked him so, and yet…She pressed her cheek against his chest, too happy to castigate herself further.

He loosened his hold finally, not quite letting go of her, and said, “You’re all right?”

Tess nodded shyly, unable to bring herself to raise her eyes above the level of his throat. She could see his pulse, beating steadily beneath the tanned skin. She had a strong urge to touch her tongue to the scattered grains of sand that clung there.

He half-turned, looking back down the beach toward the canoe, and exclaimed suddenly, “What the deuce—
Wait!
”

It was his shipboard bellow, and the volume made Tess jump backward. Beyond him she saw the outrigger, afloat again, turn under the guidance of the native’s
paddle and head back toward the fringing reef. The light craft was already almost beyond earshot, but at Gryf’s shout the man waved and called something in Tahitian.

“That bastard,” Gryf said in a voice of profound disbelief. “He’s leaving!”

Tess cleared her throat. “He said he was coming back.”

“Coming back—Where’s he going?”

“Back to Tahiti, I think.”

“What?”

“He said he would come back tomorrow,” she answered quickly, turning away before her nervousness betrayed her. Now—now he’ll get angry, she thought. And she was right.

“Tomorrow!” he cried, grabbing her arm before she could get away. “What the hell is wrong with today?”

“Um…” The story of superstitious curses that she and Hina had concocted seemed ridiculous now that Tess was faced with quoting it. “I don’t know. Perhaps he misunderstood what you wanted.”

“He couldn’t have. I never said a word to that old witch doctor. Your friend Mahina did all the…” His voice trailed off. He looked at Tess: a sudden, probing stare. “How did you get here?”

She took a breath, and said, too fast, “In a canoe.”

“Where is it?”

She pulled her arm away. “The storm. It—washed the canoe off the beach.” She was not a good liar. Even to herself, it sounded weak.