Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (93 page)

Such opinion as remained after the arguments had been abandoned was divided opinion. Could the vessel possibly have been the Macartneys’
Hope
? Was this Captain Fawcett who had brought Saul Macartney ashore Captain Fawcett, the pirate? Had Captain Saul Macartney really thrown in his lot with freetraders, or was such a course unthinkable on his part?

The yarn which Captain Fawcett had spun in Le Coq d’Or seemed the reasonable explanation – if it were true. In the face of the fact that no other counter-explanation had been definitely put forward by anybody, this version was tacitly accepted by St Thomas society; but with the proviso, very generally made and very widely held, that this fellow must have been
the
Captain Fawcett after all. Saul Macartney had either been fooled by him, or else Saul’s natural gratitude had served to cover, in his estimation of the fellow, any observed shortcomings on the part of this rescuer and friend-in-need.

Camilla Macartney made no allusion whatever, even within the family circle, to the story Saul had told
her
. She was not, of course, called upon to express any opinion outside. She was quite well aware that both versions were falsehoods.

She faced bravely, though with a sorely empty and broken heart, all her manifold social obligations in the town. Indeed, somewhat to distract her tortured mind, wherein that seed of hate was by now growing into a lusty plant, the heiress of the Macartney fortune engaged herself rather more fully than usual that summer season in the various current activities. She forced herself to a greater pre-occupation than ever in her attention to her occult pursuits. She even took up afresh the oil painting, long ago abandoned by her, which had been one of her early ‘accomplishments’.

It was during this period – a very dreadful one for her, succeeding as it did, abruptly upon her momentary happiness at her cousin Saul’s restoration to the land of the living which had dissipated her acute and sustained grief over his presumptive loss at sea in the
Hope
– that she undertook, with what obscure premonitory motive derived from curious skill in the strange and terrible arts of the black people can only be darkly surmised – another and very definite task.

This was the painting of a panoramic view of the town as seen from the harbor. At this she toiled day after day from the awninged afterdeck of one of the smaller Macartney packet vessels. This boat had been anchored to serve her purpose at the point of vantage she had selected. She worked at her panorama in the clear, pure light of many early summer mornings. Before her on the rather large canvas she had chosen for this purpose there gradually grew into objectivity the wharves, the public buildings, the fort, the three hills with their red-roofed mansions, set amid decorative trees. Her almost incredible industry was, really, a symptom of the strange obsession now beginning to invade her reason. Camilla Macartney had suffered a definite mental lesion.

The scrupulous courtesy of the St Thomians, that graceful mantle of manners which has never been allowed to wear thin, was unobtrusively interposed between the respected Macartneys and the dreadful scandal which had reached out and touched their impeccable family garment of respectability. By no word spoken, by no overt act, by not so much as a breath were they reminded of Captain Macartney’s recent visit ashore or his hasty and irregular departure. Captain McMillin, therefore, as a guest of Camilla’s father, heard nothing of it. He sensed, however, a certain indefinite undercurrent of family trouble and, yielding to this sure instinct, ended his visit with all the niceties of high breeding and departed for Santa Cruz.

Just before he left, on the morning after the farewell dinner which had been given as a final gesture in his honor, the captain managed to convey to Camilla the measure of his appreciation. He placed, as it were, his sword at her disposal! It was very nicely made – that gesture of gallantry. It was not to be mistaken for the preliminary to a possible later offer of marriage. It was anything but braggadoccio. And it was somehow entirely appropriate to the situation. The handsome, upstanding captain left with his hostess precisely the impression he intended; that is, he left her the feeling that he was an adequate person to depend upon in a pinch, and that she had been invited to depend upon him should the pinch come.

A third of the way up one of the low mountains north-ward and behind the three gentle hills on the southern slopes of which the ancient city of St Thomas is built, there stood – and still stands – a small stone gentry residence originally built in the middle of the eighteenth century by an exiled French family which had taken refuge in this kindly Danish colony and played at raising vanilla up there on their airy little estate overlooking the town and the sea.

This place was still known by its original name of Ma Folie – a title early bestowed upon it by Mme la Marquise, who had looked up at it through a window in her temporary apartment in the Hotel du Commerce, in the town, while the roofing was being placed upon her new house, there and then assuring herself that only perched upon the back of one of those diminutive burros which cluttered up the town streets could anyone like herself possibly manage the ascent to such a site.

Ma Folie was now one of the many Macartney properties. It belonged to Camilla, having come to her as a portion of her maternal inheritance, and upon it she had re-established the vanilla planting, helped out by several freshly cleared acres in cocoa. No donkey was required nowadays to convey a lady up the tortuous, steep, little trail from the town to Ma Folie. A carriage road led past its unpretentious square entrance posts of whitewashed, cemented stone, and when Camilla Macartney visited her hillside estate the English barouche carried her there, the long climb causing the heavy coach horses to sweat mightily and helping, as the coal-black coachman said, to keep them in condition.

It was up here that she had long ago established what might be called her laboratory. It was at Ma Folie, whose village housed only Negroes selected by herself as her tenant-laborers, that she had, in the course of years, brought the practice of the ‘strange art’ to its perfection. She had for some time now confined her practise to meeting what might be called charitable demands upon her.

Talismans to protect; amulets to attract or repel; potent ouangas – only such modest products of the fine art of Voodoo as these went out from that occult workshop of hers at Ma Folie – went out into the eager, outstretched hands of the afflicted whose manifold plights had engaged Camilla Macartney’s sympathy; to the relief of those abject ones who called upon her, in fear and trembling, as their last resort against who knows what obscure devilish attacks, what outrageous charmings, wrought by that inimical ruthlessness of one Negro to another which Caucasians hardly suspect.

No vanilla pod, no single cocoa bean, had been stolen from Ma Folie estate since Camilla Macartney had planted it afresh nine years before . . .

It was at about ten o’clock in the morning of a day near the middle of August that a kind of tremor of emotion ran through the town of St Thomas, a matter of minutes after a report of the official watcher and the many other persons in the town and along the wharves whose sustained interest in shipping matters caused their eyes to turn ever and anon toward the wide harbor mouth. The
Swallow
, which three months before had literally run away, ignoring all the niceties of a ship’s departure from any port and even the official leavetaking, was coming in brazenly, lilting daintily along under the stiff trade, her decks visibly swarming with the many members of her efficient and numerous crew.

She came up into the wind like a little man-o’-war, jauntily, her sails coming down simultaneously with a precision to warm the hearts of those ship-wise watchers, her rigging slatting with reports like musket shots, the furling and stowing of canvas a truly marvelous demonstration of the efficiency which now reigned aft.

These details of rapid-fire seamanship, swiftly as they were being handled, were as yet incomplete when the long-boat went straight down from its davits into the water and Saul Macartney followed his boat’s crew over the side and picked up his tiller ropes.

The
Swallow
’s anchorage this time was closer in, and it seemed no time at all to the thronging, gaping watchers on the jetty before he sprang ashore and was up the steps. There was no rum shop for the boat’s crew this time. Without their officer’s even looking back at them over his shoulder the oarsmen pushed off, turned about and rowed back to the
Swallow
.

Saul Macartney was, if possible, even more debonair than ever. His self-confident smile adorned his even more heavily bronzed face. He was hatless, as usual, and his handsome figure was mightily set off by a gaily sprigged waistcoat and a ruffled shirt of fine cambric which showed between the silver braided lapels of the maroon-colored coat of French cloth with a deep velvet collar, the pantaloons of which, matching the coat’s cloth, were strapped under a pair of low boots of very shining black leather.

The throng on the jetty was plainly in a different mood as compared to the vociferous, welcoming mob of three months before. They stayed close together in a little phalanx this time and from them came fewer welcoming smiles.

Plainly sensing this, Saul Macartney bestowed on this riffraff of the wharves no more than a passing glance of smiling raillery. He passed them and entered the town with rapid, purposeful strides as though intent on some very definite business and, utterly ignoring the hum of released though muted conversation which rose behind him as though from an aroused swarm of bees, entered the main thoroughfare, turned sharply to his left along it, proceeded in this direction some forty feet, and turned into the small office of one Axel Petersen, a purveyor of ships’ stores.

Blond, stout, genial Axel Petersen stared from his broad, comfortable desk at this entrance and allowed his lower jaw to sag. Then he rose uncertainly to his feet and his four neatly garbed mulatto clerks rose from their four respective high stools with him and, in precise conformity with their employer’s facial reaction, their four pairs of mottled-iris eyes rounded out altogether like saucers, and their four lower jaws sagged in unison.

Saul Macartney threw back his head and laughed aloud. Then, addressing Petersen: ‘Axel, Axel! I couldn’t’ve thought it of ye! ’Tis but stores I’m after, man – vast stores, the likes of which ye might be selling in the course of a week to five vessels, if so be ye had the fortune to get that many all in one week!’ Then, a shade more seriously,
‘
’Tis pork I want; beans, coffee in sacks, limes by the gunny sack – a hundred and one things, all of them written down to save ye trouble, ye great, feckless porker! And here – beside the list which I’m handing ye now – is the reassurance – ’

And Saul Macartney, thrusting his list of ship’s supplies neatly printed on a long slip of paper under the nose of the stultified Petersen, slapped down upon the desk top beside it the bulging purse which he had hauled out of the tail pocket of his beautiful, maroon colored French coat.

‘There’s two hundred and fifty English sovereigns there forninst ye, Axel. Ye can have it counted out or do it yourself, and if that does not suffice to cover the list, why, there’s another shot in the locker behind it, ye
omadhoun
– ye fat robber of pettifogging ships’ stewards!’

And before the protruding, bemused blue eyes of portly Axel Petersen Saul Macartney shook banteringly a thick sheaf of Bank of England ten pound notes. By the time he had returned these to the same capacious pocket, he was at the door, had paused, turned and, leaning for an instant nonchalantly against its jamb, remarked – ‘Ye’re to have the stores piled on your wharf not an instant later than two o’clock this day.’ Then, the bantering smile again to the fore, and shaking a long, shapely forefinger toward the goggling dealer in ships’ stores, he added, ‘Ye’ll observe, Axel, I’m not taking your stores by force and arms. I’m not sacking the town – this time!’

Then Saul Macartney was gone, and Axel Petersen, muttering unintelligibly as he assembled his scattered wits and those of his four clerks, the heavy purse clutched tightly by its middle in one pudgy hand, and the long list of the
Swallow
’s required stores held a little unsteadily before his nearsighted blue-eyes, methodically began the process of getting this enormous order assembled.

It was with a perfectly calm exterior that Camilla Macartney received her cousin Saul a quarter of an hour later. The turmoil beneath this prideful reserve might, perhaps, be guessed at; but as the art of guessing had never formed any part of Saul Macartney’s mental equipment, he made no effort in that direction.

He began at once with his usual self-confident directness upon what he had come to say.

‘Camilla,
acushla
, I’ve come to ye in haste, ’tis true, and I’m asking your indulgence for that. ’Twas gracious of ye, as always, to be here at home when I chanced to arrive.

‘I’ll go straight to the point, if so be ye have no objections to make, and say in plain words what I well know to have been in the hearts of the two of us this many a year. I’m askin’ ye now, Camilla – I’m begging ye with my whole soul to say that ye’ll drive down with me now, Camilla, to the English Church, and the two of us be married, and then sail with me for the truly magnificent home I’ve been establishing for ye over on Andros.’