HF - 04 - Black Dawn (47 page)

Ellen's frown deepened. She laid her parasol on the table, sat in the chair next to his. 'You've quarrelled with Judith?'

'Oh, be sensible.' He refilled his glass.

'You
are the one who will soon be in
sensible. Whatever is the matter?'

He glanced at her, peered into the glass. 'We must leave.' He drank, and made an attempt to square his shoulders. 'Aye. There is a ship in the harbour. We must leave. You'll pack, and we'll go into town tonight.'

'Are you utterly mad?' Ellen inquired, her voice assuming that brittle texture he knew, and feared, so well.

'Suppose . . .' He licked his li
ps. 'Suppose I told you I
had
seen a ghost?'

'I would repeat, you have gone mad. Or that is not your first bottle.'

'But this ghost,' Tony went on, half to himself, 'fives and breathes and speaks. And acts. Dick.' Ellen's frown returned. 'Whatever are you talking about?' 'Dick. He is in Kingston. I think.'

'Dick? Dick is dead. You told me he was dead. He was drowned.'

'He is in Kingston, I tell you.' 'You saw him?'

'I . . .' He drank some more rum. 'I think so.' She gazed at him for some moments, then got up. 'You had best come with me.' 'Where?'

'Somewhere that scoundrel Boscawen cannot overhear us.' She walked down the steps, waited.

Tony finished his glass, looked at the bottle reluctantly, then rose and followed her. She walked in front of him, away from the house, into the cemetery. Here they would see anyone

approaching them long before they could be heard. 'Now try,' she said, 'to talk some sense.' 'Reynolds sent for me.' 'Reynolds
sent
for
you!’

'Well . . .' Tony flushed. 'He sent a message that the matter was urgent. So I went to his office, and this . . . this man was there.'

'This man? Just now you said it was Dick.' 'Well
...
he claimed to be Dick.'

'Oh, for God's sake,' she cried, at last revealing her own anxiety. 'Don't you know your own brother?'

'Ah,' he said. 'There's the point. This man has had some sort of an accident. You really should see him. His face is quite disfigured. Hideous.'

'Dick's face?' she asked in a lower tone.

'It could be anyone's face.'

'He spoke to you?'

Tony shrugged. 'It could be anyone's voice.'

'Oh, you really are a
fool,'
she declared. 'Why did you not just have the scoundrel arrested?'

'Well, he remembers things
...
he had Morrison with him, and a woman. A Frenchwoman, who seems to be his wife.'

'His wife?' Ellen inquired, her voice becoming softer still.

'Aye. A pretty woman. Well, striking more than pretty. Aye. But the fact is, Morrison thinks he is Dick.'

'And who,' Ellen asked, with great patience, 'is Morrison?'

'Oh, I'd forgotten
...
the captain of the
Green Knight.
The ship which brought us out here.'

'Twenty years ago?'

'Aye. There is the point. This man remembers much of what happened on that voyage.'

'He remembers the duel, I have no doubt at all,' Ellen said. 'And the name of the woman involved. Joan Lanken. Am I not right?'

'Indeed you are. But. . .'

'I remember them too, you se
e. And I was not there. But you
have told me about it. Once. I think.' 'That thought occurred to me also,' Tony said, 'But. . .' 'Where did this man come from?' 'Well, from Haiti.' 'Haiti?' she cried. 'Cap Haitien, in point of fact.' 'A white man?'

'Well, it seems he has been fighting with the blacks. Oh, he is a right soldier of fortune. Big, and strong, and violent of temper. His manners are as terrible as his looks.'

'And you suppose such a man to be Dick?'

'Aye, well, it is incredible. But yet, the ship was supposed to go down off Haiti.'

'And this proves it did. It may even prove that Dick reached the shore, and may have lived for some time. And no doubt confided much of his past to this fellow. Thus he has waited this long to begin his charade. For as he
has
begun his charade, you may be sure that Dick is certainly dead.'

'But,' Tony said again.

'And you'd run away from a fraud,' she said scornfully. 'Are you so afraid of your own deception? I supposed I had married a man, not a coward. Or are you afraid of the man himself? Big, you say. Terrible. Strong. And you the most feared duellist in all Jamaica. You must be suffering from the heat. Have the man arrested, and put an end to it.'

Tony chewed his li
p. He walked to Robert Hilton's grave, stood above it, looking at the headstone, fists opening and shutting.

Ellen watched him for some moments. 'Or is there something you haven't told me?'

Tony inflated his lungs, let them collapse again. It could hardly be called a sigh; more it was a gesture of despair. 'He assaulted me,' he muttered.

'Assaulted you? This creature dared lay a finger on you? You broke his head, I hope.'

'Just for a moment,' Tony said. 'He held me close. He made me stare into his eyes. My God, Ellen. Those eyes. They belonged to Dick. I swear it. The man had Dick's eyes.'

The dining room of the Park Hotel in Kingston was a quiet place. John Mortlake liked it so. For too long the establishment had been little better than a brothel, but since the end of the war he had worked hard on improving his reputation along with its cuisine and decor. The decor remained a trifle garish; Mr Mortlake had a weakness for red, on walls and ceiling, to which he added gold-coloured curtains. But the waitresses, slave girls dressed in white and with red sashes and caps, were carefully taught to move as silently as their bare feet would permit, and woe betide any young woman who rattled a cup or clattered a fork.

Conversation, too, was encouraged in whispers. Mr Mortlake himself sat at a table in the corner of the room, and was liable to gaze with a forbidding frown at anyone who raised his or her voice so that it could be heard at even the next table. The Park Hotel's reputation
had
improved. Not only was it the place in town to stay—the number of the rooms having been doubled by the addition of an annexe—but it had also become a place to dine. And on a Saturday night it was invariably full, every table displaying a couple in evening gown and dark broadcloth sack coat, regardless of the heat, and laden with the best food and the best wine Kingston could provide, while in the corner an orchestra, consisting mainly of fiddles, scraped away to make each conversation even more private. Saturday night was an occasion to gladden any hotelier's heart, especially as on this most special night in the week Mr Mortlake felt entirely justified in doubling his prices.

Yet he was not a happy man, this Saturday night. He occupied his usual place in the corner, and looked across the tables and his customers, watched his girls scurrying about their duties, and attempted to listen to as little of the poorly played Mozart as possible. And watched the couple on the far side of the room, aware that every other person in the room was doing the same, equally surreptitiously, but with equal interest.

He had no reason to complain about them, certainly. The man might be as disfigured as a nightmare, but his clothes were good, and he had paid for his room, as he would pay for his dinner, in gold coin. And he was a quiet-spoken, reserved fellow. The woman was quite charming, her colouring a delight to the eye as the candlelight sparkled in her titian hair, her gown, in royal blue silk, the most expensive in the room. She wore no jewellery, not even a wedding ring, but that was her choice, surely her choice. No one could doubt she could afford it if she wished. Her children were noisy, but by eight o'clock on a Saturday night were already in bed.

Looked at in a purely commercial sense, they were the most promising customers the Park Hotel had entertained for some time. But Mr Mortlake worried. Rumours were sweeping the town. They had certainly reached the ears of all of his other guests. As they had reached him. He did not know whether to believe them or not. He only knew, as he dipped his spoon into the soft green flesh of his avocado pear, the most delicate and digestible of vegetables, that his stomach seemed filled with a leaden sense of foreboding.

What did they discuss? For the first time in his life he wished to overhear a customer's conversation. The man smiled, and the woman smiled in return. When she smiled she was beautiful. When he smiled he was the most terrible thing Mortlake had ever seen. But not, apparently, to his wife. And they seemed happy. And confident. Yet they could not be unaware of the rumours, having started them.

He scraped the last of his avocado, raised his head with the spoon, and swallowed before the food actually reached his mouth. The lead in his stomach redoubled its weight, so that he felt quite incapable of rising.

He looked through the opened doors of the dining salon into the hotel lobby, and thus could see anyone who entered the hotel from the street. As Mr and Mrs Anthony Hilton had just done. And as now one, and then another, of his guests, had also just noticed. Heads were beginning to turn, and the whisper of conversation was beginning to become a murmur, rising above even the scrape of the fiddle bows.

Mr and Mrs Hilton had dined elsewhere, it seemed. Mrs Hilton wore a crimson gown beneath a white cape; her hair was up, and there were diamonds at her throat and hanging from her ears. Mr Hilton wore black. Nor were they alone. Two other couples entered the lobby behind them, both also planters, the Treslings of Orange Lodge, and the Evans of Green Acre. They also wore evening dress.

Mortlake put down his spoon, hastily rose to his feet. 'Play,' he growled, as he passed the orchestra. 'Play, damn it.'

The fiddles recommenced their wail. Mortlake reached the doorway. 'Mrs Hilton,' he said. 'What an honour. Mr Hilton, welcome, sir, welcome. Harvey. Harvey. Prepare a table for Mr Hilton and his guests. Why, Mrs Tresling, how good to see you. Mr Tresling, sir, you are looking well. Mrs Evans . . .'

‘I
would see the monster,' Ellen Hilton said, speaking in her loudest voice.

'Eh?' Mortlake realized to his horror that the fiddles had again stopped.

Gwynneth Evans gave a high pitched giggle. 'We've come especially, Mortlake. To see the monster.'

'The monster,' Grace Tresling cried. 'The monster.'

Mortlake scrabbled for his handkerchief. Three of the leading planters' wives in all Jamaica, and every one drunk. Well, at least, two were drunk. He did not feel Ellen Hilton was anything less than deadly sober.

'It will be entertainment,' she declared, and swept into the d
i
ning room, her husband at her elbow, her friends spreading out to form a flanking movement. The other diners stared at her. Mortlake dared not look across the room, but even from the corner of his eye he observed that the man with the disfigured face had risen.

'My God.' Ellen Hilton pointed, her fan forming an extension of her fingers. 'It
is
a monster.'

'A monster, a monster,' chanted Gwynneth Evans.

'Gad,' John Tresling remarked. 'What a horrible looking
Mow.'

Ellen crossed the room, her skirts swinging, causing the other diners hastily to pull their chairs closer to their tables. One couple got up and left the room. Mortlake wished he could do the same.

'Ellen,' Dick said. 'My God, Ellen Taggart. How simply splendid to see you. Why did not someone tell me you were still in Jamaica?'

'My God,' Ellen said, coming to a halt before them. 'It
is
a monster.' She glanced at Cartarette. 'Are you the creature's minder?'

Cartarette watched Dick.

'Tony?' he asked. 'What farce is this? When did Ellen return?'

'I'll trouble you to mind your tongue, fellow,' Tony said, also speaking very loudly. 'You are addressing Mistress Hilton, of Hilltop.'

Dick gazed at Ellen for a moment, and then could not stop himself laughing. Once, he remembered, he had feared she would look like her mother, as time went by. He had been pessimistic. Her face had hardened, and become more gaunt, her teeth were prominent. But her wealth, her arrogance, shrouded her in splendour.

'Mistress Hilton, of Hilltop? Well, well. So you achieved your ambition after all. And I must say, my dear Ellen, the position does suit you. What a pity you will have to give it up.'