The House on Hummingbird Island Page 6

  Idie crept upstairs. On the landing she hesitated, then took the corridor to the left. She found a bedroom, the furnishings faded but sweet and comfortable and full of paintings and vases and pretty things. She tiptoed in and opened the doors and drawers. All were empty. She went to the next room and the next and again all were empty. She turned back, crossed the landing, passed her own door, stopped at the next and pushed, and found the room strewn with garments in the spectrum of colours that fill hanging baskets outside public houses, so she knew that room was Treble’s. A red ribbon trailed from a drawer and, because that was the colour you needed for hummingbirds, Idie crept across the room and pocketed it and slipped guiltily out.

  A cool breeze came from the far end of the corridor and she turned and went that way. The house opened up there to the sea and sky in a sort of open loggia or portico. Stencilled palmate leaves trailed along the cornice and skirting. A small bamboo writing table, a cane chair and a sewing table inlaid with mother of pearl stood together in the centre. Idie sat at the table and placed her hands on the handle of the drawer. The drawer was empty but for a pile of worm dust and a pen, the nib of it tarnished, the clip broken. The other drawer held only a large glass paperweight, a purple orchid preserved inside. She cupped the smooth warm glass in her palm and held it there a while for it had surely been her own mother’s.

  She sighed, thinking that she’d go and see Baronet because she felt the need just then for the common sense and decency inherent in a good English horse. They’d go swimming, they’d find the turquoise pool high up in the clouds, for she, Idie Grace, didn’t need Austin nor anyone else to help her.

  She stood and turned and found herself face to face with Celia. How long had Celia been there? They stood a second facing each other, staring, and it became like the staring game she used to play with Myles – Myles would always win, but once he’d told Idie that the trick of it was to talk to yourself, so hard and fast that you never thought about blinking at all, so Idie stared and things came into her mind about Celia and she said to herself:

  She’s here just because she’s here

  Just because this is the only place she knows

  The shutters of my house must be shut

  for Aunt Celia

  Just because once they were always shut

  She’s simple as a moon

  Slippery as glass

  She has pale eyes

  And moves like a cat

  Her body is wavery

  Her insides are watery

  She might be a white witch –

  It was Celia who broke first, and Idie felt guilty for Celia looked startled and fearful.

  ‘Aunt Celia –’ began Idie, turning the paperweight around in her hands – ‘did my mother sit here? Was this hers?’ She held it out.

  Celia stared at it. Lost in a reverie she slowly stretched out her arm. Her hand went not to the paperweight but to Idie, hovering as if in a trance over Idie’s hair, then above the skin of Idie’s cheek.

  Mayella came out on to the loggia just then, took Celia’s hand to lead her away and said over her shoulder to Idie, ‘Your governess has gone to lie down. The heat is too hot, the sun is too sunny, the trees are too green and the birds too full of song.’

  13

  The stables stood a little higher than the house, their stone walls enclosing a welcome shade, a breeze singing from front to back.

  ‘Hello!’ Idie called.

  ‘Hello!’ she called again, going to Baronet’s box. She bent and sniffed a handful of the sweet-scented kus-kus grass, pleased that he had such a good deep bed. Idie settled Homer on the water trough where he’d be safe while she was out and went to look for Sampson. She found him in the forge, hammering a set of iron shoes.

  ‘Mistress Grace,’ said Sampson.

  ‘I’d like Baronet saddled,’ instructed Idie.

  As Sampson fetched the saddle, Idie asked, ‘Does anyone else sleep in the house, Sampson? Apart from Miss Treble and me, upstairs, and Phibbah in the back kitchen?’

  ‘Oh no, missus, no one goes in the house when it comes dark.’ His eyes widened and his happy face set and grew serious. ‘Oh no, nobody go in there. Only the night-walkers, the duppies. The lady ones –’ Sampson stretched his arms out and tiptoed a fairy circle in his big boots – ‘they like the soft beds and soft drapes of the windows.’

  Sampson had seemed perfectly sensible on other occasions. He was good with horses, and that in Grancat’s view was a sign of good character, but now it seemed he too believed in spirits that flew in and out of cupboards and candles. Perhaps everyone here was superstitious, however commonsensical in other respects. Grancat said if you lived in certain wet and sticky places, County Kerry for example, or Cornwall or an Outer Hebride, you were bound to believe in fairies and things. In which case every right-headed person in the Indies might believe in duppies, because the Indies were sort of sticky too, not wet-sticky but hot-sticky. Idie was silent while thinking about all this until it occurred to her that there was another more important thing she must ask Sampson.

  ‘Did you know my mother?’

  ‘Yes, mistress.’

  Idie’s heart leaped, for he had not flinched nor turned away. ‘What was she like?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘I only knowed her afterward – after . . .’ Sampson hesitated, ‘I never knew her when . . .’

  ‘After what? When what?’ asked Idie.

  ‘Is not for me to talk of, mistress,’ he answered.

  ‘Why? Why will no one tell me anything?’

  After a fidgety silence he said, ‘Is best sometimes not to know everything.’

  ‘Is it now?’ asked Idie, arch. Seeing Sampson begin to back away from her she adopted another line of questioning. ‘All right, tell me about Nelson then. Why doesn’t he work here any more?’

  ‘He get good work in the shipyard. He won’t come back these parts no more.’ Sampson waited to see if that might be answer enough.

  Idie said, ‘Go on.’

  ‘He don’t get along too good with Carlisle; that also why he go.’

  ‘I see,’ said Idie, who did see why someone would not get along with Carlisle.

  As she mounted Baronet, Sampson asked, a little anxious, ‘Where you going, mistress?’ He’d gathered his arms and legs together in a line and looked long and narrow as a pencil.

  ‘Oh, I thought we might go swimming.’

  Sampson’s face tightened. ‘Don’t go to the creek, mistress. Nobody goes to Black Water Creek.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Idie, to tease him because he looked so serious, ‘I was thinking of doing just that. I very much do want, you see, to go to Black Water Creek where nobody goes, because in fact I want to find out why nobody does go there.’

  Sampson grew agitated and began to say something, then closed his mouth and then began again, a little desperately, as though he’d just happened upon a warning that would really deter a child from going where it was not supposed to. ‘The devil walks about there in the night.’

  ‘But it is the day,’ said Idie, trying to keep a straight face.

  ‘Is for your own good I say that.’

  Sampson looked so deeply hurt that Idie answered gently, ‘It’s all right, I’m going to the turquoise pool high up in the gully.’ She paused before asking, ‘What did happen at the creek, Sampson?’

  ‘Nobody knows. The people, they say things, but nobody knows for certain and everybody they scared of that place, but anyway, to the pool is all right. It’s that way there.’ Sampson indicated with both arms in what looked like all directions at once and Idie wasn’t sure which way he’d meant at all.

  14

  The sun was hot and Idie had no hat, and after a while she let Baronet choose his way along the shady places where the light was fractured and the air cool. Treble’s red ribbon was tied around Idie’s wrist and for a while she held her arm out in the hope of hummingbirds.

  The trees started to grow close and tall, the sun stabbing the leaf
canopy in glinting flashes, and Idie drew her hand in, giving up on the hummingbirds on the grounds a red ribbon was not nearly so good as a red shirt. After an hour or so, she grew certain that they were not on Sampson’s path at all. From high above, vines dangled like tresses and rooted on the ground. Wizened things, half root, half branch, ran across the path like snakes.

  Strange flowers stretched from their rotting beds, and seemed to bloom not according to the month but just as the feeling took them, not at all in the orderly manner of sensible English plants. The air was dense and still. Vines and trailing things hung like cloaks around her. The waterfall couldn’t be so far away as this, nor so difficult to reach.

  At last there was open sky ahead. The path was less tangled and Idie paused to look about. Somewhere a branch snapped. She waited and listened, then went on. In any case, she told herself, if there was someone there, she could ask how to get back to Bathsheba. The ground grew wetter and softer underfoot. There were now pools of standing water and tall rush, flattened in places, and footprints. She went on, following the flattened, muddied places.

  There was a movement in the tall rushes and Idie glanced ahead.

  Carlisle Quarterly.

  A few feet away, half concealed in the rush, he stood, waiting, as if for her, his thumb hooked into the pocket of his tweed weskit. His nails were long and white and there was a menacing energy in the drumming of his fingers on the plaid cloth. His face was lean and taut, eyes dark as tunnels. The tweed weskit was an odd choice, Idie thought, given the temperature. His stare was intense and discomforting and his voice, when he spoke, curling.

  ‘Good afternoon, Miss Grace.’

  There was a sudden gusting sound and Idie looked up. The sky was filled with swooping forms, a thousand thousand tiny birds, heads outstretched, necks outstretched, legs outstretched, were coming in to land. The air vibrated with the rushing of their wings. Idie gasped and stared up in wonder. Myles, she thought, Myles, if only you were here. Their tail feathers were deeply forked like swallows’, their beaks and feet the red of an English postbox.

  ‘Tern!’ she breathed, for he’d once shown her an Arctic tern in a book, The Birds of the Greater Antilles. He’d dug that book out of the library secretly and he’d pored over it, trying to learn, in his own way, through the birds, about where Idie was going, just as she had taken other books to the attic and pored over them.

  Carlisle had picked up a gun. Idie’s gorge rose in her throat. With javelin-speed he cocked it, raised it, aimed and fired. The birds screeched in alarm. A tiny body thudded to the ground and another, and it seemed the air was turning to clods, the heavens falling in.

  ‘No, no, no!’ she screamed at the skies, but they’d come from the frozen Arctic, they’d flown twenty thousand miles, and were too exhausted to go elsewhere. Carlisle loaded and fired again.

  The air screamed with the shrieking ke-arr, ke-arr, ke-arr of the birds. The gun cracked and the water spurted as they fell and Idie was torn to pieces with horror. Carlisle swigged from a flask, then reloaded and fired, quick and keen and accurate.

  Idie flapped her arms at the sky and screamed, ‘Go away. Go somewhere else! Don’t land here!’

  Carlisle watched the small girl waving at the heavens and laughed. He raised his gun, and a tiny thing, seconds ago living and weightless and airborne, thudded dully to the ground a foot or two away from Idie.

  Nauseous, she fell to her knees and held its warm silvery body and stroked the black cap on its head and held it close.

  ‘Was there a storm at sea?’ she whispered through her tears, wiping the dribble of red blood from its white cheek. ‘Was that why you had to stop here? Were you so tired you had no choice?’

  When the spasmodic jerking of its wings stilled, Idie looked up. She stared at Carlisle and saw how the silverwork of his gun flashed in the sun. It was an English double-barrelled shotgun, like the one Grancat kept under his bed to repel invaders such as Vikings. This one was just the same as Grancat’s; even the silver crest was the same. That gun wasn’t his.

  Consider the lie of the land before you make a move.

  This had been one of Grancat’s rare pieces of advice. Carlisle Quarterly was her employee, but so far there’d been no indication that he intended taking orders from her or anyone. On top of that he was a grown man and twice her size. It would be a commonsensical precaution to keep a large horse at one’s side if one was only small and in a sticky situation, so Idie laid the tern aside in a bed of rush and went to Baronet. Leading him, she walked slowly towards Carlisle.

  ‘Quarterly, I command you to stop. This instant.’

  Carlisle bent down to a box and filled his pockets with cartridges. Idie moved closer still, her eyes drawn again to the silverwork of his gun.

  ‘I have told you to stop.’

  ‘And if I don’t, Miss Grace, what then? What will you do?’ he asked as he loaded the gun.

  Deeply shocked, Idie hesitated. Silent had never spoken to Grancat in such a way.

  Consider the lie of the land. Consider your options.

  Idie looked about and saw the box and kicked at it, kicked and kicked again till all the green and gold cases lay scattered and half buried in the rush, the empty box on its side. Carlisle cursed and knelt to scoop them up. The gun across his knees and cursing still, he searched about for cartridges, then put aside the gun and fumbled for them with both hands, all the while glancing anxiously up at the sky.

  Idie grabbed her chance. She snatched up the gun and raised it, struggling a little for it was long and heavy. Only the tip of her forefinger reaching the trigger, she said, ‘I hold a loaded shotgun. It is pointing at your head, Carlisle Quarterly. The silver crest tells me that this is a Grace family gun and therefore does not belong to you. So I advise you to do AS I SAY, WHEN I SAY, FROM NOW ON.’ It was rather fun using the words adults used on children; they sounded so much more satisfactory when used this way around.

  Still on his knees, Carlisle dropped the cartridges he held and looked up.

  ‘Good,’ said Idie. ‘Now, you will start by telling me which is the quickest direction home.’

  To herself she said, triumphant, Forty-fifteen, Carlisle.

  15

  ‘I was worried, mistress, thinking you had gone down to the creek, and nobody want to go there to find –’ Sampson broke off in alarm when he saw the shotgun lying across the small girl’s knees.

  Idie thrust Baronet’s rope into his hand and said, ‘This place is TOPSY-TURVY. MOST TOPSY­TURVY.’

  ‘Where did you go? You go by the lake? Who was there? Somebody there shooting?’ Sampson’s eyes darkened.

  ‘As it happens, the butler was there. Shooting, on a Tuesday afternoon.’ She handed Sampson the gun. ‘I don’t believe this belongs to him.’

  ‘You see him? You see Carlisle there?’

  Idie nodded.

  ‘Carlisle . . . You take good care, mistress, if he’s about the place. He thinks he’s the master here.’

  ‘Yes, that does seem to be rather the case.’

  ‘Missus! Missus! Sampson, you seen the missus? Where the missus?’ Mayella called. She came up running, saw the gun in Sampson’s hands and her eyes widened. She turned to Idie. ‘Mistress – there you are. I’ve been looking everywhere for you and now the dinner is cold.’

  Idie collected Homer from the water trough and, bearing him on her arm like a shield, followed Mayella towards the house. She sighed noisily to see that the shutters were closed. All right, she thought, the shutters will be a game between myself and Aunt Celia.

  She placed Homer on the back of a chair and he made his way claw over claw along it and peered between the candelabra at the bread basket.

  Mayella lowered her voice and whispered, ‘Carlisle, he scared of animals. He don’t like that pigeon.’

  Pick your battles, Idie. Pigeon, parakeet, does it matter? So she plucked a slice of bread from Homer’s claw, and replied only, ‘Homer doesn’t think much of Carlisle Quarter
ly either.’

  Mayella laughed. ‘Oh no, none of the animals out of the ark like Carlisle. This pigeon sees Carlisle and he trembles and his crown shakes like all of God’s wrath is in him.’

  Idie thought about this and came to the conclusion that Mayella had given her a golden key to dealing with the problem of the butler.

  ‘That is precisely why Homer and Baronet will live in the house, in here, with me, always from now on.’

  ‘The horse? Oh Lord.’

  ‘Mm-hmmm,’ responded Idie.

  ‘And must I feed the horse also?’ asked Mayella as she placed a soup tureen on the table. ‘Oh my word, the new missus, she think she Noah himself, and she going to make this house her ark . . .’

  16

  For the first time in a while, Idie encountered Treble.

  Treble tended to emerge, on what she saw as the high-risk venture from her room to the dining room, at precisely the three times a day that a meal was likely to be forthcoming. Today, however, her hair had been coaxed into ornate loops about her face and there was such a swaying to her walk and such a floating to her dress that she appeared to be wafting through the corridor. She’d become at the same time somehow less substantial and more voluminous, and Idie watched her in wonder, thinking that Treble was prone to growing vaporous at tropical temperatures. In any case, it was good that she hadn’t said anything about the missing ribbon.

  ‘When dear Algernon comes,’ Treble giggled, ‘then, have no fear, I will take everything in hand.’

  ‘Dear Algernon? And who is he?’ Idie asked, noting now that Treble’s lips were a violent shade of pink.

  ‘Mr Webb, my dear, Mr Webb.’

  And what on earth could he do?

  Idie despaired of them all. Aside from Grancat, all grown-ups were apparently no help at all. She’d go and find some hummingbirds instead.