The House on Hummingbird Island Read online

  Idie turned, surprised for she’d not noticed anyone else still about on that part of the deck.

  A tall, dark-skinned man approached and said, ‘It is not safe. Come, miss, I take you back inside.’ His voice was slow and sing-song and strange to her, but Idie considered him and concluded he had the kind of uprightness about him that was desirable in an adult. ‘You are going home.’

  It was part question, part statement. She scowled, cross that he, like everyone else, knew about her, and said through her teeth, ‘It’s NOT home.’

  ‘Miss Grace, it is a fine place.’

  He knew her name too.

  ‘It is good you are going home,’ he repeated.

  ‘Pomeroy is my HOME,’ said Idie sullenly.

  ‘That house is tall and grey and –’ he paused, searching for the right word – ‘big and cross and frownin’ at the world.’

  Idie started. He knew Pomeroy. It was him – the man who’d come with the letter for Grancat, the letter that said she had to leave, the one that had changed everything and meant that nothing would ever be the same again.

  ‘Your home, Miss Grace, Bathsheba –’

  ‘Bathsheba,’ breathed Idie.

  ‘It is white and low and the sun always there like she shining only for it, and it lying there, just smiling back at the world.’

  Idie considered the notion of smiling houses and frowning houses and conceded that there might be an advantage to a house that smiled, but not if it were troubled by ghosts, so she asked, ‘Why do they say it’s haunted?’

  He shook his head. ‘It is a fine place, with creeks and gullies and hummingbirds . . .’

  Creeks and gullies and hummingbirds. Idie considered these. Well, of course there would be hummingbirds, and hummingbirds would be a positive, but he hadn’t mentioned monkeys, so she asked, ‘Are there monkeys?’

  He smiled. ‘Plenty of monkeys, plenty of mon­gooses . . . Oh yes, miss, it is a fine, fine place. You needed there, Miss Grace. Is good you goin’ home.’

  The ship lurched and plummeted into the valley of a wave, flinging Idie against him. He caught her and led her back to the lower-deck stairs and paused there, and she asked, ‘Does it have ghosts?’

  ‘Ghosts everywhere, for those that look.’ He smiled, yet his tone was serious. ‘Don’t you go lookin’ for them, Miss Grace; don’t you go searching.’

  She looked at his face, remembering how he’d stopped under the turkey oak to shelter from the rain and stretched a hand over the railing to the horses huddled there. It was perhaps because of that, because he was the kind of man who talked to horses in the rain, that Idie asked, very quietly, ‘My mother . . . Did you know her?’

  He looked then right into her eyes and nodded. Idie’s heart turned over,

  ‘Tell me – what was she like?’

  ‘Your mother she planted the trees, she fill all the inside and the outside with flowers –’

  ‘And . . . ?’ Idie’s voice was barely audible.

  ‘She was strong and kind and capable and all the things a mother needs to be.’

  The door to the lower deck opened and Numbers stood before them. He started with shock and said, ‘Ah, Miss Grace, there you are, and Nelson, I see –’

  Idie saw he was alarmed to find her with the man called Nelson, and the mischief in her bobbed like a cork to the surface and she said, ‘Yes, here I am. And I have been having a MOST interesting conversation with Nelson.’

  ‘Good night, Miss Grace, Sir,’ said Nelson, and slipped away.

  The wind roared, the waves grew tall as trees, the captain cursed, women screamed, plates smashed. Treble wept, prayed and vomited.

  ‘We’re going to a fine place,’ Idie told Homer to console him, ‘with gullies and monkeys and hummingbirds.’ In her book she wrote:

  My mother was a BEAUTY.

  I am going to her house.

  It is white and smiling.

  It is called Bathsheba, which is a very nice name for a house.

  She filled it with flowers.

  She was strong and kind and capable and all the things a mother needs to be.

  Those words were, for a long time after, a light to live by, a little fire at which to warm her hands.

  3

  Hummingbird Island was shimmering and strange as a fairy tale. The emerald-skirted hills stretched their violet crowns into fleecy lilac cloud. Some careless eruption of the seabed had perhaps thrown them up and left them there together in a happy cluster, as if just floating on the silvery sea.

  Idie whispered to Treble, ‘Myles says they’ll drain our blood for ink and dry our skin to parchment.’

  ‘Quite so, quite so.’ Treble was busy adjusting her bonnet, but as Idie’s words registered she spun round. ‘What did you say child? No, no, that cannot be so.’

  The harbour was a kaleidoscope of steamers and schooners, carriages and cranes, masts and palms, awnings and warehouses, casks and crates, a mesmerizing rainbow of brilliant otherness, greener, yellower, pinker, than any greens or yellows or pinks Idie had ever seen.

  Baronet was led, snorting, down the ramp. He struck the cobbles and roared with joy as if the island had appeared there in the sea especially for him. Dazed by the swooning heat, Idie waited on the dock. Dark, bare-backed men walked past, sheaves of cane on their heads. A line of turbaned ladies followed, baskets on their heads, and Idie marvelled that everyone carried things on their heads instead of in their hands and wondered if she could soon go about in such a way.

  Treble, her feet finally on ground that did not shift, shuddered. ‘Mr Webb, this is most unsuitable. Have no arrangements been made for us?’ Treble was turning pinker by the minute in the heat, and all her ringlets were unravelling.

  Numbers put his hat on, took it off, put it on again. ‘Yes, yes, there will be someone – Gladstone will come.’ He cast about and beckoned vaguely across the sea of straw hats and parasols.

  ‘Miss Grace, Gladstone Mayley, your foreman, has managed the estate at Bathsheba most loyally and for some forty years.’

  ‘Whoever he is, he’s late, Mr Webb, and it is most unsatisfactory,’ said Treble. Ruffled by the sun and the unsatisfactory unsuitability of everything, she was wavering like a blancmange, putting Idie in mind of Myles, who’d said, ‘It’ll be vile and horrid and you’ll melt like wax.’

  Idie gave a wicked smile to think of Treble subsiding into a pinky-peachy puddle between the casks of rum.

  ‘Ah, there’s Gladstone with Nelson.’ Numbers raised his hat in the direction of two men bent in close conversation.

  Treble looked their way and flinched as if with shock. ‘No, no, that cannot be so.’

  Gladstone, the older of the two men, made his way towards Idie’s group, but Idie’s eyes were on Nelson, the man who’d known her mother, the man who’d gone all the way to Pomeroy and been turned away at the door. He’d had no overcoat then, Idie remembered, and in that rain his clothes would have been wringing wet.

  ‘Gladstone Mayley is Nelson’s father, Miss Grace. The Mayleys have always been good and loyal. Unfortunately Nelson no longer works at Bathsheba, though two or more of his children do.’

  ‘I see,’ said Idie.

  Gladstone stood before Idie and bent a little, raising a hand to his hat. ‘Miss Grace?’

  ‘There’s some mistake surely,’ Treble hissed at Numbers.

  ‘I am Gladstone Mayley, mistress, your foreman,’ the man said to Idie, lifting his hat.

  Treble started and blinked with shock that the people of such a place should speak with so educated and English an intonation.

  Gladstone looked at the large bird on the small girl’s arm and a broad grin breached his solemn face.

  ‘This is Homer, and this is Baronet,’ said Idie proudly, gesturing to them both, and with a quicker sweep of her hand she indicated, ‘Mr Webb, my lawyer, whom I believe you know, and Miss Treble, my governess.’

  ‘There’s some mistake, Mr Webb,’ Treble hissed again. ‘I did not
expect—’

  ‘Miss Treble, what exactly did you expect?’ asked Numbers, a touch sharp.

  ‘Here comes Sampson with the handcart,’ said Gladstone.

  Sampson was young and sort of long and his suit stood nervously and separately about him as if on its first outing.

  ‘I may faint,’ announced Miss Treble. Idie noticed with mild curiosity that in the heat Treble had indeed grown still more unsteady and sort of liquescent.

  ‘Mistress, I am Sampson Sealy,’ Sampson said, smiling broadly. ‘Welcome.’

  He looked at Baronet and rubbed the soft parts of Baronet’s nose, ‘This horse is happy to be here.’ Sampson took sugar from his pocket and held his palm flat.

  ‘See, I told you, Baronet. I told you there’d be sugar,’ Idie whispered, wondering if everyone here went about with sugar in their pockets every day.

  ‘Plenty of sugar.’ Sampson’s smile was still there, as if it would now stay happily on his face forever. His skin was pitted and gnarled by some childhood disease. His arms hung sort of accidentally about his sides as though they might come loose at any minute and Idie wanted to bind all the bits of smiling Sampson Sealy together with tape in case he came apart.

  ‘I may faint,’ Treble repeated in a trembling voice.

  Gladstone started forward. ‘Quick, help the lady, Sampson.’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Treble, adding forcefully, ‘Mr Webb, lend me your arm.’

  Sampson had strapped the luggage to a trap. Baronet, harnessed alongside, was expressing by the high carriage of his head his superiority over the trap ponies. Numbers murmured to Treble that he regretted he could not see them safe to Bathsheba, it being such a long way there and the hour growing late.

  ‘It’s quite all right,’ said Idie promptly. ‘Baronet is just as good at looking after me as you are.’

  ‘I’ll come by on Monday,’ he answered.

  ‘Yes, yes, do, dear Mr Webb. Do come by on Monday,’ said Treble, and Idie was mortified by Treble’s simpering and by the straining apricot frock that was probably inappropriate on a governess. Numbers and Gladstone conversed quietly, then Gladstone mounted and Numbers waved them off.

  They passed a ladies’ lyceum, some quaint Regency-style houses, a statue of Lord Nelson and a cricket pitch.

  ‘Oh! It’s all just like a little England,’ murmured Treble.

  A white country track curved through stately palms with swaying feathery tops and fields of high, whispering leaves.

  Gladstone gestured. ‘Sugar cane, mistress.’

  ‘There are monkeys, aren’t there?’ asked Idie, disappointed she hadn’t yet seen one.

  ‘Plenty of monkeys,’ Sampson assured her in his slow, smiling way.

  ‘Are we nearly there?’

  ‘Soon.’

  They inched down a steep rough track into a densely wooded cleft and up past a straggling settlement of wooden houses on stilts, all in shades of sherbet and candy-floss and sweet as dolls’ houses. Bright-eyed children stared, the girls fingering the looped braids and ribbons of their hair. The road dropped down along a strand of dazzling white and a sky-coloured sea, then climbed again to lush, unfenced hills carpeted in coarse hummocky grass. Dumbed by the heat and humidity, Idie drifted into sleep.

  When she woke the sun was low and saffron and resting on the water as if she too were hot and tired and was considering taking a swim. Just then the sun did, in fact, decide to do just that, and with a final blaze of scarlet and amber, sank into the silver sea.

  ‘Mistress.’ Gladstone turned and in his face was pooled all the gold of the sinking sun and he smiled a slow smile that made Idie think of surf breaking over a silent beach. ‘You are home.’

  PART II

  May 1912

  4

  The ponies pulled up before a pair of white stone pillars all tufted with ferns. In the half shadow beyond the iron curlicues of the gate, the sweep of a long drive glowed whitely. The only house Idie had ever known or wanted was Pomeroy and she eyed those white stone pillars a little warily.

  No place for a young girl . . . so large and remote . . . haunted . . . well, it would be, after what happened there.

  Sampson bellowed, ‘Enoch! Come, Enoch. The missus is home.’

  Enoch appeared from a stone gatehouse. On his head he wore what was no more than the relic of a hat, straws poking up at all angles from the crown like plumage. He ran towards them in a stiff, rolling kind of way, and Idie thought that he might be very old; as old, quite possibly, as his hat.

  ‘Mistress, Enoch Quarterly,’ said Enoch, touching a hand to the derelict hat, and Idie thought it was a mercy he didn’t lift it for it might disintegrate.

  Homer looked at Enoch with interest and announced in the lilting intonation of the place, ‘THE MISSUS IS HOME.’

  Enoch’s old face crinkled into a smile and, chuckling, he saluted the bird.

  A double avenue of palms, tall and straight as the columns of a county cathedral, stood sentinel along the drive. Idie caught her breath and looked up in wonder at their plumes and thought how like feather dusters they were, and how they were high enough to tickle the violet sky. Beyond on either side, low, spreading sorts of trees dotted the ground, giving the impression of English parkland.

  Baronet whinnied for joy at the grass, but Idie looked doubtfully at the coarse, spiky tufts that served in these parts instead of lawn and thought of the rich clover of Devon, but she put a brave face on for the sake of Baronet and said, ‘See, Baronet, there’s grass. We didn’t know if there’d be grass, did we?’

  The drive wound on and on. At Pomeroy, the drive, while impressive, had not been so long, nor had the trees reached up so far, nor had they had so many sorts of green in them.

  The night was racing in – not down from the sky as sensible English nights do but rushing up from the ground.

  No place for a young girl.

  The whispers she’d heard on the ship batted about in her head, flapping their large wings like crows trapped in there. Disquieted and anxious, she said, ‘It’s a very long drive.’

  All around from every leaf and blade of grass rose a swelling, humming chorus of tiny numberless night things.

  ‘Tree frogs, mistress,’ said Sampson, smiling.

  ‘Do the frogs here live in trees?’ asked Idie.

  ‘Yes, an’ they tiny as my tiniest toe an’ they sing crac-crac-crac, high in the fustic trees.’ Sampson turned, smiling, to her, and Idie wondered if he’d stopped smiling at all ever since Georgetown.

  Stars appeared, star after star, second by second, as if to flood the sky. Idie’s wonder at the strange, warm night unfurled. She stretched out a hand. She could reach up and touch the stars – they were so low that they might’ve come close to earth only for her. A tiny red pinprick of light appeared at the tip of her finger and Idie started and recoiled; then they were all around, about her head and in between the trees, and flashing in and out of the very air, a million million lights, sudden and darting and angular.

  ‘Fireflies, mistress.’ Sampson’s smile grew wider.

  Night birds flashed between the trees and it was as though everything had been asleep and Idie’s small hand had touched it all to life. She peered about in amazement, breath held.

  Still the white drive wound on between the tall palms. The moon appeared and tipped a white radiance over the garden. The tree frogs, as if at a command, fell quiet, and the sudden silence clutched at Idie’s throat. There were rustles and fleeting shadows and all the beauty of the place was suddenly grown uncanny, every dark space vibrating with tremulous shadows.

  Strange things happened there.

  Leaves flashed in the moonlight and there was malice and mockery in their rustling. The ferns grew grotesque and strange; there was a soft, sinister laughter in the rustle of the leaves that curdled Idie’s blood.

  No place for a young girl.

  Her heart pounded. She shook Treble’s arm to wake her, but her governess merely grunted and turned
her head aside.

  The chorus of tiny chirping things started up once more and Idie peered ahead and tried to still the heaving of her heart.

  5

  A white, two-storey house lay before them. Low handsome trees stood around, waxy blooms strung about their dark leaves like flocks of moons. Pink and orange flowers lay carelessly about the bushes. The air was soft and still as if once a spell was cast over the house that had forever enchanted it and left it there in shimmering dream-like beauty. A veranda ran the length of it, a mass of feathery vines trailing along its roof. Candles flickered on the curved stone steps. The shingles of the roof were silvered by moonlight and the white house seemed, as Nelson had said, to be smiling and to be waiting there specially for Idie.

  Male staff, perhaps forty or more, lined the circular stone forecourt. Either side of the steps to the porch stood the house staff in white frilled bonnets and pinnies. So many of them, thought Idie. She stroked Homer’s nape, grateful for the fact of a magnificent parakeet on her arm so as to keep her end up, being only small and only twelve and the mistress of so large a payroll.

  Treble blinked and looked about, her bonnet askew, lank ringlets clinging damply to her cheeks, and Idie felt a little ashamed. She saw the proud carriage of Baronet’s head and thought how good it was to have a fine English thoroughbred and a parakeet at your side if you were a lady of property coming to your house for the first time.

  This will be my home, these the people I live among and I their mistress, Idie said to herself, and then whispered to Gladstone, ‘Do they all work here?’

  ‘Yes, missus,’ he answered, smiling broadly. ‘Some work on the cane, the cacao, the coffee.’

  Idie lifted her chin and stood up straight. So they had come because they wanted to see the new mistress. Well, here she was, standing before them; a small, tired girl in a white dress, with a large sulphur-crested parakeet on her arm and a fine horse at her side.

  A young boy raised his cap to Idie, then stepped forward to Baronet. ‘Reuben Sealy, missus.’