Вайолет Уинспир - Dragon Bay

She looked at him and wondered what it was he wanted of her, a stranger without the prettiness that might attract a casual affair. A girl on the run from all those who knew how she had worshipped a tall boy with black hair and a gay, lopsided smile.

She gazed with inquiring eyes at this man whose memories were more ruthless than her own. She knew about the myths that could surround a strong and picturesque personality; how they could grow from threads into cords that strangled the real truth. What was the real truth? Was this man so savage … or did he guard a heart as broken as his brother’s body?

‘Next week I go home to Dragon Bay,’ he said. ‘Why not stay until then, Kara, and let me show you around Fort Fernand?’

In the breeze along the shore, a lovelock danced on her forehead. Her throat tightened, for something in his voice had got to her and shaken her resolve to leave the Isle de Luc.

‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose I shall find anything more or less on any other island. The sun will shine as bright, the palms will bow to the same wind-gods, and the sea will be as good to bathe in.’

‘Did you know,’ said Lucan Savidge, as they turned in unison to walk back towards the town, ‘that all islands are supposed to be flung up by wrathful sea-gods?’

She smiled and listened to the sea-talk within the conch-shell he had given her. Angry, a roar in it, like the waters of Dragon Bay. She was still carrying the shell when they paused outside her room at the Hotel Victoire. ‘The number 9 has been nailed back into position on your door,’ she said.

‘So I noticed.’ His smile made creases at either side of his mouth, there was a winged devilry to his brows, a wickedly amused gleam in his eyes.

Kara unlocked her door and withdrew inside. ‘Thank you for taking me to the Painted Lantern,’ she spoke rather breathlessly. ‘It was an unusual experience.’

‘Because of the food, the fortune, or the company?’ He leant forward and flicked his eyes over her face. ‘Well, Kara?’

Her fingers tightened on the handle of her door and she wanted to ask him why he wanted her company. Was he just amusing himself with an unsophisticated girl, or did he need her friendship? If only she could be sure, but Lucan Savidge had a face that was not easy to read. A lean, hard face, with a whip scar on the right cheekbone, and eyes that changed in different lights from green to the colour of stone.

‘You think too much, do you know that?’ He laughed, and it seemed to her that he laughed carelessly, as though it didn’t really matter to him whether she stayed tomorrow or left.

‘You are a man who sets one thinking,’ she rejoined. ‘I have the feeling that you treat everyone as a game — what game, Mr. Savidge, are you playing with me?’

‘The game of guide and tourist, Miss Stephanos,’ he replied. ‘Don’t you fancy to stay, after all? Are you afraid of me — of getting involved with a man instead of a boy?’

‘Oh—’ Colour came into her cheeks. ‘You really are a devil!’

‘I am merely honest. Far more so than young men who make promises and then break them. If you stay on the Isle de Luc, I can’t promise to make you glad you stayed. It is up to you, Kara. Take a chance, but be warned that you can’t turn the tide, or change the leopard’s markings.’

A silence fell between them, and then he let his hand touch her shoulder and drift to her wrist, where he fingered the little unicorn on her wrist-chain. He examined the unicorn.

‘Creature of myth,’ he murmured. ‘Like yourself, Kara, with your face that one might see peering through leaves in a woodland.’

She felt his touch, and the acute sensitivity of her own skin. She drew her wrist away from his fingers, and it was an effort, as though she fought a magnetism in them.

‘The hotel is quiet — everyone must be asleep,’ she said. ‘I bid you kale nichta, Mr. Savidge.’

‘Good night, Miss Stephanos.’ As he drew away, the wall light struck across the whip scar on his cheekbone, and then he gave her a faintly mocking bow that revealed the Gallic blood in him … from the mother who had marked him as Cain.

K ARA had been on the Isle de Luc almost a week, and on Friday morning she slipped out of the hotel alone and made her way to the waterfront market, where she hoped the bustle would divert her thoughts for a while.

She wandered about, a seemingly carefree young figure in a sea-island shirt and trews, amused by the market mammies in big straw hats perched raffishly on bright bandanas, presiding over piles of island fruits and vegetables. There was a tang of spices and coffee beans, sea-wet quay stones, and salt fish.

Men of the sea, with high-boned faces and voices rich as dark honey, were unloading boat loads of conch in the shell, crawling lobsters, and red snapper. Huge primitive masks were on sale beside leaning towers of straw hats, and fetishes. Kara stroked the shiny carapace of a turtle, and listened to the excited talk aroused by the carnival that was taking place the following day, when out would come the masks, the drums, and the satyrs who collected money for various charities.

There would be turtle feasts around driftwood fires down on the beach. The people of Fort Fernand would go on the spree for a day and a night, and couples would fall in and out of love.

‘You like funny-face nut?’ A big brown hand thrust a coconut at Kara, who asked laughingly that it be cut open. The young Negro swung a cutlass that lopped off the top of the nut and with a dazzling grin he handed Kara the cup of milk. She tipped the cup and drank. The milk was icy, with a tang of the sea in it.

‘Merci.’ She smiled at so sweet a bribe, and obligingly took a look at the carnival favours the young man was selling. She bought a string of beads made from coloured seeds, and couldn’t resist a frilled mask of polka-dot silk.

‘This one ver’ fierce. You like?’

‘No,’ Kara said, and then took another look. It was of dark crimson and would fit a man to the mouth. Kara took hold of it and pictured the mask half covering the face of Lucan Savidge, his lips beneath it curling into the smile that was so devilish at times.

‘You buy?’

‘Yes.’ She smiled, and then caught her bottom lip between her teeth. How would Lucan react to the mask, would he wear it for the carnival, or scorn it? There was no telling. After almost a week she was still unsure with him, like a small girl who bears constantly in mind the warning that it is dangerous to try and touch the leopard through the bars of his cage.

She wandered on, the beads around her neck and the masks in her shoulder-strap bag. People bellowed and bargained and laughed richly, and over all hung the smells of firestick coffee, brown sugar, ginger cookies, and tropical fruits bursting with a lush ripeness.

The turbulence of the old days still lingered in Fort Fernand. The overhanging galeries of the side-street houses seemed haunted by the Creole beauties of long ago, clad in flame skirts and frilled blouses, big hooped earrings glittering beneath horned turbans. The town was time-weathered, its scars concealed by masses of bougainvillea. And there was the old slave-square, where jungle warriors were handled long ago like cattle, and lithe brown girls were sold to the merchants and the plantocrats.

Kara tried to imagine what it must have been like to be a slave, the possession of a man who cared nothing about your feelings. If you rebelled, you were whipped. If you ran away, you were hunted by big black dogs let loose in the cane fields and the forests. Awful, unimaginable, and Kara hurried from her thoughts down a sloping, cobbled street that led to the shore, where shrimping boats lay on their sides, draped with fishing nets.