by Roxane Dhand
He smiled. ‘It’s stifling inside the supper room. I have been dancing with the delightful Miss Montague and came out to cool my heels. Perhaps I could fetch the drink for you?’
‘That would be kind. I’m not sure where my husband has gone, but then I ought to be used to that by now.’ The alcohol was loosening her tongue.
‘It seems that some of the gentlemen are difficult to track down this evening. Miss Montague has mislaid her father too.’ Cooper offered a wry dip of his eyebrows. Mocking, but is he mocking me?
She waited but he did not move. ‘A gin martini, perhaps?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Allow me a few minutes to the bar and back.’
Maisie laughed lightly. ‘Take your time. There’s absolutely no rush.’
Blair Montague stretched back on his wicker chair in the room reserved for Masonic meetings and rolled his cigar between his palms. ‘You heard anything from the Pearlers’ Association, Mait?’
Seated next to him, Maitland Sinclair picked his nose. ‘No. Have you?’
‘Nothing yet, but they know I’m only standing in as president and I’ve talked you up as much as I can. Things take time. The wheels grind slowly, but no news is good news.’
‘What do you reckon my chances are?’
‘You’re doing all the right things, but you need to quash the rumours. Exercise a little self-restraint.’
‘Doing all of the above, Blair.’
Blair stopped to light his cigar. ‘Good. Tongues wag, Mait, and we need to keep things tight. You need to inject some respectability into your life – or at least the semblance of it. I told you before. Now you’ve got the English wife, hump her and get her pregnant. Play the devoted family man, like I am. When the time comes, take your son swimming and fishing. Just divert the beam of suspicion from your door. Otherwise you are wasting your time. The Bay will never accept you properly and never vote you in.’
‘They accepted you.’ He flicked the contents of his nose into the air.
Blair’s nostrils flared. ‘I played by their rules. They saw what they wanted to see: devoted family man with wife and child.’
‘Maisie isn’t pregnant.’
‘Jesus, Mait. Use some imagination. What about Mason? He’s a horny bugger and is always round your place when he’s not out with his fleet. If you can’t manage it yourself, then get him on the job. Invite him over, get him to spend the night. He’ll get himself inside your wife’s knickers in no time.’ Blair rubbed his eye with one finger, and let out a low, defeated sigh. ‘The Wet won’t last forever. We’ll need to get the English boys out on the luggers. Show willing.’
‘I’ve been thinking about that.’
The mayor extracted his handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed the corner of his eye. ‘Oh yes?’
‘I’m going to send Cooper out on the Sharky when the time is right. Training run, you could say.’
‘That lugger’s barely seaworthy, Mait.’
‘That’s the whole sodding point. It hasn’t had a refit and the sails are full of rot. If there’s a sudden blow it’ll sort out the problem.’
‘You can’t make it too obvious.’
‘I’m not a total tosspot. I’m keeping my eye on the barometer. As soon as we get a dip and an easterly wind I’ll send the lugger out for two, maybe three, days with a skeleton crew. Cook, Squinty, Cooper and his tender, and one of the bolshy Jap divers to teach him what to do. They don’t need a shell-opener. We can sort that out if they get back in. Might have to sacrifice the boat and crew, but it should be enough to make it look legit.’
‘You got insurance on that old crate?’
‘You insure any of yours?’
Blair rolled the tip of his cigar round the ashtray. ‘Fair point, but I can afford to write off a lugger or two.’
‘I’m not on my uppers, you know. I’ve got fingers in other pies. And let’s face it: given the current climate, who’s going to regret a brown face or two?’
Blair nodded. ‘There’s still a lot of men in town looking for work. I can always help you out if you’re short.’
The annual intake of indentured workers took place in February, and the numbers were supposed to be strictly controlled according to the number of work permits held by each of the pearlers. At the end of a three-year contract – if the immigrant worker lived that long – the government decreed that the coloured alien must return to his country of origin. The vast majority did not, even though the official paperwork suggested that they had.
Blair Montague had far more permits than he was entitled to and had the sub-collector of customs on his payroll. He hired out his surplus labour, indentured or otherwise, in the manner of a recruitment agency. The workers did as they were told; the threat of deportation was a powerful rod.
‘Cooper has that new motor air compressor with him. You prepared to lose that too if the lugger goes down?’
‘Same thing, Blair: not my worry. The Japs won’t use them. Bottom of the sea’s the best place for it, if you ask me.’
‘Okay. So, supposing there’s no blow?’
‘They come back, we offload the shell and send them out again with the rest of the fleet at the back end of the month. What we normally do. Totally above board.’
Blair leaned across the table for the ashtray and parked his cigar. ‘Then what? Have you got anything else in place if that doesn’t work?’
Maitland took a gulp of brandy and rolled it round his teeth. ‘We keep all the English boys apart. We’ll get them diving on the beds where the shell is gone, already worked out. Send them away from the rest of the fleet. I’m getting the Hornet ready and putting Maisie on board. She’ll run it out to them so they can’t get back into town to compare notes. You’ll have to make sure that Espinell, Hanson and Mason, anyone else who’s got white divers, are in on the plan.’
Blair pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket and scanned his notes. ‘Yes, those are the blokes with the white boys. We’ll get them together and put our cards on the table. And your wife – you got her trained already? Knows to keep her mouth shut?’
‘No worries there.’
Blair cracked his neck from side to side. ‘Any word from the girl’s parents?’
Maitland shook his head.
‘It’s the mother’s family with the money, isn’t it?’ Blair persisted.
‘Yes. I told you they cut her off, remember.’
Blair held up his palms. ‘Help me out, Mait, because I’m not following. Are we talking Maisie or her mother?’
‘Jesus, Blair, try to keep up. Maisie’s mother.’
‘Why’d they cut her off?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t like her husband.’
Blair scratched an itch under his nose. ‘Families, eh? Always bloody trouble.’
Maitland nodded, his face blank.
Blair looked at his watch. ‘Better get back to the dance floor and give the girls a trot round. I’ll do the presentation after supper. The collection is quite decent. We’ve got about a hundred quid. What about some gaming with the English blokes later on to win it all back?’
Maitland forced a smile but there was no joy in it. He clamped his pipe between his teeth and heaved himself up from his chair. Blair was a cunning snake, but Maitland was a slither or two ahead.
Maisie leaned back against the verandah rail and closed her eyes. She was more than halfway down a second martini and her head felt swimmy.
William Cooper was standing next to her and she could sense his eyes on her face. The concentration of his gaze made her nervous, and at least with her eyes shut she couldn’t see him stare.
Wordless, she couldn’t think how to cover the silence. In the distance they heard the hoot of a steamship.
Maisie blinked open her eyes and hoped that he would not read in them her relief. ‘I will never be able to hear that sound without thinking of weeks on board. How was your journey out, Mr Cooper?’
‘Necessary,’ he said. ‘How about your o
wn?’
Compulsory, she wanted to shout. Because my future was decided behind my back, written down on a piece of paper by your boss. Not my choice and not what I wanted by any leap of the imagination.
‘As tedious as your own,’ she said. ‘But we both had our particular reasons for travelling such a long way, did we not?’
William Cooper moved the ice round his glass with a finger.
She sailed on, navigating the awkwardness between them. ‘Which is why we both find ourselves here tonight, celebrating your arrival in the Bay and the recent fact of my marriage.’
He gave his drink another stir and waved a dripping finger at the Masonic Room. ‘I see the two missing gentlemen have been located.’
Liquid fell from his finger and raised little puffs of dry dust from the floorboards. Maisie turned to look at him and attributed the fluttering in her chest to the gin.
‘Thank you for the drink, Mr Cooper.’ She handed him her glass. ‘If you will excuse me, however, I had better rejoin my party.’
CHAPTER 9
MAISIE WAS TIRED, HER head pounded and she longed for their guests to be gone. Every evening, for the handful of weeks she had been living in the Bay, Maitland had surrounded himself with people. He stacked them up like a wall. She’d dined with the bank manager, who spoke to her as if she had learning difficulties; the English doctor, who, Miss Locke had said, was a closet drunk; the bespectacled bishop with his tartan-clad wife; and, over and over, the hardcore drinking cronies who clinked glasses till the small hours. Maitland slipped in late and did everything he could to ensure they were never alone. By the time they had eaten supper, he was either so sleepy or so drunk that he went straight to his bed.
She knew all about avoidance – keeping out of the way, suppressing her thoughts, clamping her mouth shut and dodging blows. She had played the role of someone else so often it was second nature. It never turned off the inner monologue though.
The memory of their wedding night still gave her pause. She wished she had Mrs Wallace to talk to, with her trunkful of worldly wisdom, to unburden herself about that area of her married life she could never mention to anyone in the Bay. Good as her word, Mrs Wallace had sent the marriage-guidance book but it had given her no clues. Maitland still had made no attempt to claim his conjugal rights. Maybe he was being a gentleman and giving her time to adjust? She shook her head. No. That wasn’t like Maitland at all. But this was not the normal way of married life, surely, if babies were to be made? There was also something else niggling at her about that frightful first night, but she couldn’t bring it to the surface.
She’d once asked Maitland why he’d brought her to the Bay, but he’d never bothered to say. In fact, she hardly saw him. By breakfast each day, he was gone. By early afternoon, it was siesta time. Maitland did not reappear for lunch but returned before that same draining time of the day when nothing with legs moved in Buccaneer Bay. Only Duc’s ancient goat – possibly the town’s only resident with fewer brains than Dorothea Montague – was upright at that hour; even the angry blowflies sought the shade.
The supper guests were predominantly male. Maisie knew that networking with business colleagues was important. Her father brought his colleagues home on occasion and she had sat with her mother, silent spectators at the dinner table until it was time to retire, leaving cigars and port to the men. The women sipped their scalding coffee in her mother’s icy parlour. Hot and cold: it was the way her mother blew.
Maisie shielded her mouth with her hand, disguising a yawn that almost cracked her jaw. Tonight, for the umpteenth time, it was the Montagues, a father-and-daughter combination she found particularly tedious.
The mayor, she thought, looked like a medieval page and larded his dinner conversation with fragments of schoolboy French. She had seen pictures of his relatives in her history books. A lute, doublet and hose, and he would have been all set for life in fifteenth-century England. The black-haired Blondel (as she thought of him) was an oily parvenu. Dorothea, as shallow as a bedpan, was all curls and froth and personified the ridiculous idea of Englishness in their tiny settlement. Maisie knew it was mean-spirited of her and that she should have tried harder to make a friend of the mayor’s daughter, but the reality was they had no common glue to bind them.
The residents she had met seemed to be trying to copy an ancient British class system they thought they could emulate but had no rulebook to follow. It seemed to Maisie the new-wave impostors were pouring all their financial resources into the appearance of possessing class without having the first idea what that meant.
Blair Montague bent towards her, an elbow glancing off the edge of the table. He repositioned his arm, stabilised it with his left hand and cupped his chin in his right palm.
‘Eh bien, Mrs Sinclair. Do you hear often from your parents?’
Maitland’s teeth chattered on his pipe stem.
Maisie held back another yawn. ‘No, Mr Montague. I haven’t heard from my parents. I suspect it has to do with the vagaries of the postal service.’
‘But you write to them, non?’
‘Religiously. I write to Mrs Wallace and she writes back every week using the postal steamer. Perhaps it’s because England is so much further away that more things are apt to go wrong.’
Dorothea frowned and tapped her glass. ‘It’s very circumstantial that all your letters to England are unanswered. One might suspect a little sabotage, do you not think?’
‘I think that’s highly unlikely, mon trésor.’ Blair put his hand on his daughter’s wrist, and leaned forward to Maisie. ‘And in the letters that Dorothea fears may have been spirited away by a malfeasant, what does Madame Sinclair tell her parents about her new life in Buccaneer Bay?’
Maisie tilted her head to one side and considered the question. In the lamplight, Maitland had taken on the appearance of a laboratory exhibit. His eyes glittered and the hot, cloying air had left a sweaty sheen on his pitted face. She shuddered. My life as his wife? She longed to tell someone how it really was: that he showed no interest in her; that he was a narrow-minded bigot; that his manners were studied and his behaviour was gross; that he must have a mistress – how else to explain his long absences from home and his lack of physical interest in her? Not to mention his cruelty; that he had almost murdered their gardener.
Maisie produced the lie. ‘I say that I am settling in well, adjusting to married life in this trying climate and have made new friends.’
‘And is Maitland keeping you busy?’
‘In what respect?’
Blair Montague gave a nasty laugh. ‘Running his beautiful home, looking after the staff and seeing to his needs.’
‘And more besides, Mr Montague. I am not sure that looking after one’s husband’s needs is necessarily a cause for ridicule, however. Inside or outside the home, I am busy. Indeed, I am to run the Hornet supply schooner as soon as the Wet is over, and I am cultivating other interests.’
If Dorothea had noticed that Maisie had taken a stand against her boorish father, she made no show of it. ‘Oh gosh, Mrs Sinclair. How thrilling. I’d love to sail away to distant lands on a schooner. Dada and I sometimes have picnics on board our schooner but we don’t put out to sea. Dada gets terribly seasick and he likes to be here to oversee everything from his offices. He has one office at the packing shed and one in our house, and he’s always doing business, even after I have gone to bed. No wonder he gets tired and grumpy! I heard someone calling him a “verandah pearler” once.’ She turned to her father, her eyes moist, like a puppy. ‘I thought it summed you up perfectly, Popsie.’
The mayor’s expression closed. Maisie had heard the term ‘verandah pearler’ too; Miss Locke had explained it behind a gloved hand. It wasn’t complimentary. It referred to someone who conducted his pearling business from the safety of the shore, while his workforce risked all on the ocean floor to make him rich.
Maitland lurched for the port. ‘Yes, Blair likes to run his business from his verandah with
a whisky-and-soda in his hand.’
A look of slight enlightenment flickered across Dorothea’s face. ‘Mrs Sinclair, I have the perfect solution for you with your letter-writing conundrum. Why not send a cable! We have the cable-station office now, which connects us to the rest of the world via the colony of Java.’
This fact, casually introduced by Dorothea, threw all three of them into a spin. Maitland and Blair simultaneously reached for the grog. Maisie swallowed too quickly and gave herself hiccoughs.
‘Yes. I think a cable would be the perfect answer.’ Dorothea seemed determined to steer the conversation back to where she felt secure. ‘What you should do is go along to Cable House and ask for Wayne Ramsey. He’s a clerk there. I know him a little bit.’ She looked quickly at her father. ‘Not socially, of course, because he isn’t one of us. But he’s a really sweet boy and rather good at croquet. I met him last year at one of Mrs McMahon’s afternoons because he is a friend of Miss Locke’s, and he was terribly proficient with his mallet.’ Dorothea babbled on. ‘I think that Wayne could tell you what you would need to do to send a cable. Uncle Maitland sent a cable when he decided that marrying you would be the icing on the cake. I heard him tell Dada.’
Blair Montague tightened his grip on his daughter’s wrist. ‘I’m not quite sure you understood what Uncle Maitland meant, chérie.’
‘Oh I did, Dada. I distinctly heard Uncle say it.’
‘I believe I wrote to Maisie’s parents, asking for their permission,’ Maitland said. ‘I send a lot of cables, Dorothea, for work. That’s probably what you overheard.’
Dorothea pouted and looked across at Maisie. ‘You must be so anxious to know if your parents are in good health and have received your letters. And I am sure they must be concerned about you and long to tell you their news. Should I call for you tomorrow and take you to the cable office in my sulky?’
Maisie held back a small sigh. Her mother had not received a cable from Maitland. There had been a letter. She had sat in the chilly presence as the contents had been read out. The girl was a nitwit.
