Shadow Play (2 page)

friends, Norman Sheffield, the heir to one of the largest steel industries in the north of England.

The bells of the Episcopalian church pealed mournfully as the coffin was carried out of the chapel and the funeral procession moved slowly through the heart of Georgetown. The people crowded the narrow streets—English, Dutch, Indian, and Negro—openly sobbing, tossing orchids into the path of the hearse drawn by high-prancing, black Arabian stallions. They pressed closer as Sarah walked by. She was as close to royalty as they would ever come. They had revered her as a child, and many knew her only as "Princess. '' The young women of British Guiana, no matter what race, had looked to Sarah St. James as someone to emulate, and though many had viewed her with envy, no one had ever spoken an unkind word about her.

Despite the threat of rain, all of Georgetown turned out at the graveyard. By the time the
last mourner had left the cemetery, daylight had turned to dusk. Only then did

Sarah approach her father's crypt. Pressing her cheek against the coffin, she closed her
eyes.

The servant Kanimapoo moved up behind her. Despite his fearsome history—as the chief of a once hostile tribe of Caribbee Indians—he had been not only a trusted employee of Chester St. James, but also his friend. As he placed his hand on Sarah's shoulder, she whirled, buried her face in his chest, and let the tears flow in earnest.

"Oh, Kan. Whatever shall I do without him?"

The Indian wrapped his arms around her. ' 'Hush, Missy Sarah, everything will work out."

"But it won't. Nothing will ever be right again."

"Kan will help you."

"There is nothing you can do. There's nothing anyone can do."

"Kan will help you," he repeated more forcefully.

She pulled away and shook her head. "You don't understand—"

"I understand," he interrupted, silencing her.

She stood very still as the heat of the evening pressed in on them. In a low voice, the Indian said, "There is someone who may help you, Missy Sarah."

"No one can help, Kan. My father is dead and I shall never see him again!"

"There is a man who lives near the river. He has great magic and bravery. He will keep you safe from the
Kanima,
the spirit of evil. He has been to the green hell and returned." Kan bent nearer and his voice was urgent as he spoke again. "He is the
boto!"

She gasped and stepped back. As the heel of her shoe sank into the dirt of the grave, the smell of earth rose. "How can you speak of myths now, Kan? Fables of dolphins revered for their magic—"

"Your father speak to him before he die. Governor offer him much money to go to Japura—"

"Hush!" Sarah glanced around. The vicar stood some distance away, his surplice and cassock billowing in the wind as he spoke to the cemetery attendant. "Never speak of the matter aloud, Kan. Should anyone learn of my father's involvement in such a scheme, it would bring ruin to his name and all he worked for." Turning away, she looked beyond the burial-ground gates to the ocean. "I don't wish to discuss it further. Not now. Not ever. Promise me, Kan!" He did not respond, but took her arm and led her toward the waiting carriage. At the last moment before boarding, he pressed a paper into her hand, helped her into the seat, then climbed onto the driver's bench and took up the reins. As Kan steered the conveyance back toward town, Sarah slowly unfolded the paper and read the words aloud:

10 Tobacco Row the american

The sun had not yet risen as Sarah gazed over the colorless sea. Both hands lay in her lap; in one she gripped a letter from her father. She was frightened, exhausted, angry, and so very alone for the first time in her nineteen years.

She closed her tear-swollen eyes and turned up her face, allowing the punkah to cool her cheeks. Already the stagnant heat was growing intense. Soon the rush screens would be lowered around the veranda, but for now the room was open to the sweet smell of hibiscus and bromeliads. For years she had found pleasure in sitting in this very place, watching Georgetown come to life. Her father would often gently scold her for rising so early. Then he would gather her in his lap, brush her hair from her face, and kiss her forehead.

Her father...

She had arrived in Georgetown only three days before, expecting to be greeted joyously by her parent. She had news she was certain would please him, for she had recently become engaged to Lord Norman Sheffield of Sheffield Steel Industries. She had hoped her papa would accompany her to England to give her away. Instead, she had been met by grim-faced officials who had relayed the news of his death.

At first she had refused to believe it. Her father dead? There must be some mistake. Even when those severe strangers had escorted her back to the house and briefly opened the closed coffin to allow her a glimpse at his face, she had refused to accept it. It wasn't until she sat alone in her room that reality had finally hit her. She had returned to the coffin and demanded it be opened again. She had touched her father's hand and kissed his fingers.

Only after her shock had subsided somewhat was she forced to face more awful realities.

Her father's associates had first informed her that he had been killed accidentally by his own gun. But when the problem arose of his being allowed a Christian burial, they reluctantly admitted that the fatal injury might have been
intentionally
self-inflicted.

Dear God, she couldn't believe it. She
wouldn't
believe it. She had stood before the vicar and denounced his suspicions of suicide as absurd! Her father cherished life too dearly, and he would never have hurt her in that heinous fashion. The gun
must
have gone off accidentally, she had argued fiercely, and the uncomfortable priest had finally accepted her word and allowed Chester St. James to be buried in consecrated ground.

Desperate to believe that her father had not committed suicide, she returned time after time to the letter that had precipitated her journey back to Guiana, looking for some hint that he might be considering such a drastic act. He had invested too much and too often in the many get-rich-quick schemes abounding in this land of plenty. Anxious to make the money back, he had approached Sir Clements Markham, a well-known South American historian and personal friend, with his problem. Markham had suggested a plan. They would devise a way to take seeds from the
Hevea brasiliensis
species of rubber tree out of the country and back to En- gland. Brazil held the world monopoly on fine rubber, forcing all other countries to pay exorbitant prices. Sir Joseph Hooker of Kew Gardens in London would propagate the seedlings and transplant them to Malaya or Ceylon, in time breaking Brazil's hold on the supply of latex. Numerous British investors, including her fiance, had paid a great deal of money into the venture, a very risky undertaking since there was an unwritten law against removing the
Hevea
seeds from Brazil. But her father had guaranteed their investments with his own capital, though it was money he didn't actually have.

He had approached a rubber planter in the Japura section of Amazonia, deep in the very heart of Brazil where the
Hevea
flourished. He offered the planter, Rodolfo King, a sizable fortune for some seventy thousand seeds. King, renowned for his questionable business practices, had agreed, but when couriers delivered the money they received not seeds, but bullets in their backs. Their bodies had been found some days later floating far down the Japura River.

Her father had considered going to the authorities. To do so, however, would have meant admitting his role in the affair, an end to his governorship, and personal ruin.

Sarah drew in a long breath and left her chair, crushing the letter in her hand. She yearned to hurl it over the wall, but dared not. It was all she had left of him. Soon even the house where she had grown up and her dear mama had died would be relinquished to some unknown diplomat who would arrive from England with his family and move into these cherished walls, as if Chester St. James and his daughter had never existed, had never laughed and played on this very veranda, had never gazed into the night sky and traced the fiery fall of shooting stars across the horizon.

Fresh tears stung her eyes. She struggled to fight them back, knowing how close she was to hysteria.

She spent the rest of the day wandering the house, reminiscing about the happy years she had spent here enjoying her father's success. Few other men in Guiana or England had done as much as he to better the plight of the Indians and free blacks, for Chester St. James had considered men of all colors equal in the eyes of God, law, and mankind. He had done much to nurture the growth of education and religion. Recently there had been talk of his being knighted. Now, because of an error in judgment, his reputation would be destroyed.

And she would be left with... nothing.

The thought stopped her. She had been too stunned by grief in the past days to realize the consequences of her father's indebtedness. The sum of his liabilities mentioned in his letter had been staggering. In addition to his own obligations, the amount he owed to the
Hevea
investors was enough to wipe out not only their Georgetown properties but their home back in England and small shipping business as well. She would be left with little more than the dress she was wearing.

How could her father have done this to himself, and to her?

Dinner was served on the veranda, but she had no appetite. It had been so long since she'd last eaten or slept properly that her clothes were loose, and the very idea of food made her stomach queasy. Instead, she again queried the servants.

She learned that on the night of her father's death he'd returned home from a late meeting, ordered dinner in his office, and closed the door behind him. At ten o'clock he had released the servants from their duties. Just after midnight Kan had heard a single shot and found him dead on the floor, the gun clutched in one hand, a paperweight bearing the royal crest gripped in the other.

Suddenly she rose from the table and went to the hall outside her father's office. The door was closed. She had not yet allowed herself to enter. The room, with its leather- bound books lining the shelves and Turkish carpet on the floor, was so much a reflection of Chester St. James that she wasn't certain she could cope with it all. Yet she had to for perhaps she would find something there that would help her come to terms with her father's tragic demise.

The room was casual, yet elegant. Its walls of native letterwood wrapped warmly around her and made her, for a moment, feel as if her father were smiling up at her from behind his desk. The carpet had been removed. Then the realization of why it was missing hit her with a force; she began to tremble as the hysteria she had struggled against threatened to surface.

She did her best to push those thoughts from her mind, to concentrate on more lighthearted memories. Yet she couldn't. The hours she'd spent reading in a chair or peering out the French doors toward the gardens while her father worked had been obliterated by a bullet. Death loomed at her from every corner, as black and suffocating as the ground in which they'd buried Chester St. James.

She avoided the area where the servants had found him and stepped behind the desk, gripping the leather chair almost desperately, doing her best to visualize her father's twinkling blue-green eyes so like her own, the cheerful ring of his laughter, the way he'd nicknamed her "Sunshine" because he vowed the room glowed when she entered it. How could the man who had taught her that nothing was so bad that it couldn't get better with a little work and a lot of faith have reached a point of such hopelessness that he was compelled to take his own life?

She eased herself into the chair. The emptiness inside her was swiftly filling with both anger and a refusal to accept the manner of his death—no matter what the authorities and servants told her. She was certain the gun had accidentally discharged. Yet why would her father have had his gun out in the first place?

He had been holding the gun... and a paperweight when his body was discovered.

She scanned the desktop. There were stacks of correspondence, ledgers, papers with notes jotted in his nearly illegible scrawl, a pen thrown upon a partially written re- minder he'd made to himself, and finally ...

She lifted the paperweight, balanced it in the palm of her hand. The half sphere was heavy, the crystal magnifying the royal crest of Her Majesty's court. She placed it back on the desk and reached in her pocket for her father's letter. She read it again, then laid her head on the desk and rested.

She saw the grim faces of die men who had met her at the dock.

She saw the coffin and mourners, heard the vicar eulogize "a great man whose ideals have enriched the lives of so many..."

She recalled Kan moving up behind her and whispering:
"There is someone who may help you, Missy Sarah."

No one can help, she thought. Her only chance to save herself and her father's reputation was to go to Japura and take those seeds her father had paid a fortune for, only to be swindled out of them by that cold-blooded murderer... King.

But she was only a woman. How could she possibly hope to travel to the heart of Amazonia and confront a man as notorious as Rodolfo King?

"There is a man who lives near the river. He has great magic and bravery... He has been to the green hell and returned... Your father speak to him before he die. Governor offer him much money to go to Japurie
—"

Suddenly she could see her father lying dead on the floor, a gun in one hand and the royal crest in the other.

The royal crest.

King. Rodolfo King. He was a known murderer. Could it be that King had somehow murdered her father as well? Is that why her father had been found clutching the royal crest?

She heard Kan walk to the door. The servant waited in the silent hall.

"Kan?" she asked without looking up.

"Yes, Missy Sarah."

"Perhaps we should discuss this American once the others have been dismissed for the night."