She was wise enough to choose not an elaborate gown but a very simple one in case she should offend Madame Boisset.
But the plain muslin could not disguise the curves of her breast or the tininess of her waist.
It also threw into prominence the clarity of her pink and white skin and made the gold of her hair seem even more startling than a more elaborate gown might have done.
When she came down to the salon, she was as tinglingly aware of the Comte, as she knew he was of her, even though he merely said politely,
“Bonsoir, mademoiselle.”
“Bonsoir, monsieur.”
He did not look at her and she did not look at him.
“I hope, mademoiselle, you have given Rose-Marie some proper lessons this afternoon?” Madame Boisset said tartly.
“Oh, yes, madame,” Melita replied. “We have done a little history and we have looked up in an atlas the position of Martinique as regards the rest of the world. It was quite a comprehensive geography lesson for a small girl.”
“Tomorrow you must concentrate on arithmetic,” Madame Boisset said. “The sooner Rose-Marie understands the value of money the better! It is an instinct that is lamentably lacking in some of her relatives.”
She glanced at the Comte as she spoke and Melita thought uncomfortably that they were in for a meal when everything Madame Boisset said would have a barbed and unpleasant meaning.
She was not mistaken.
Although the food was excellent and Melita fancied that the Head Chef had excelled himself in an effort to please the Comte, everything was spoilt by the fact that Madame Boisset was obscurely offensive in everything she said to her and to the Comte she was openly hostile.
Only when they moved into the salon after dinner and Melita was wondering whether it would be correct for her to withdraw immediately did the Comte say,
“I am planning tomorrow to visit our land near Ajoupa Bouillon. I understand you have not been there for some time?”
“No,” Madame Boisset replied abruptly.
Then she added in a different tone of voice,
“Are you really taking an interest in the estate, Étienne? If so, there are several matters I would like to discuss with you.”
“I would be interested to hear them.”
Madame Boisset looked at the Comte as if she could hardly believe what she had heard. Then she turned towards Melita and said sharply,
“You may withdraw, mademoiselle. I shall not need to see you again this evening.”
Melita curtseyed.
“Bonsoir, madame. Bonsoir, monsieur.”
The Comte bowed, but he did not speak, and Melita knew that he was fighting an inclination to tell Madame Boisset not to address her in such a rude manner.
She closed the door behind her and almost fearfully, as if she might overhear what was being said between them, she ran up the stairs to her room.
As soon as they were alone, Madame Boisset turned towards the Comte.
“You have come back, Étienne?” she asked. “Do you really mean to stay?”
“I hope I shall be able to,” the Comte replied gravely.
“You know that is what I want,” Madame Boisset said, “and the first thing we must do, if you intend to honour me with your presence, is to be rid of that milk-faced girl! She is quite useless. Send her back to England and the quicker the better!”
“I have no intention of doing that,” the Comte answered. “I brought her here to be with Rose-Marie and I think she will not only teach my daughter in the way I wish her to be taught but also will have an excellent influence upon her.”
“Suggesting that mine is the opposite!”
“I did not say so, Josephine,” the Comte replied. “But you have many other matters to occupy you and I think that a young person like Mademoiselle Cranleigh with new interests and ideas is exactly what Rose-Marie needs.”
“You know that I am prepared to look after Rose-Marie as if she is my own child,” Madame Boisset said, “and what she really needs, as you well know, Étienne, is brothers and sisters.”
She took a step towards the Comte as she spoke, then she said in a voice vibrant with emotion,
“Marry me, Étienne. Marry me and I will give you other children, a son to carry on the name and you will have all the money you need to improve the estate.”
The Comte gave a deep sigh and walked across the room to stand at the window looking up at the darkening sky.
“We have been through all this before, Josephine.”
“Yes, we have talked about it before,” Madame Boisset agreed, “but all the talk, prevarication and delay do not make you any richer.”
The Comte did not answer and she went on,
“That house of yours in St. Pierre is crumbling into decay. You can have all the money you need to do it up and we can go there whenever you become bored with being here.
“We could go abroad, to Paris, to any part of Europe, to the United States, to South America, if it pleases you. Why must you be so perverse? Why must you continue to fight me, when in the end you will give in simply because you have no alternative?”
“I don’t wish to discuss the subject of marriage,” the Comte said.
“Then if you will not marry me,” Madame Boisset said in a voice which told him she was losing her temper, “why should I go on feeding you, your child, your fancy Governess – or the slaves for that matter?”
In a rising tone she continued,
“If I left and took my money with me, what do you suppose you would eat? Bananas? Because there would be very little else.”
“I think we would manage.”
Madame Boisset laughed scornfully.
“Do you know how much this place costs to run? Do you know how much the food for the slaves alone costs every year? Or have you forgotten while you idled away your days in St. Pierre that money is a necessity, even though you chose to pretend you are not interested in it.”
“I had not forgotten,” the Comte said quietly.
“Then marry me, Étienne. Marry me because I love you! I have always loved you! Cécile meant us to marry, you know she did.”
“Let’s leave Cécile out of this,” the Comte countered harshly.
“Why should I?” Madame Boisset demanded. “She loved me – she loved you too and she wanted us to be married. Stop being a fool, Étienne, and face facts. You cannot manage without me.”
“I am sorry, Josephine,” the Comte said wearily. “I had hoped we could discuss matters without inevitably returning to the subject of marriage.”
“Then if you are not prepared to pay your way, you can get out and stay out!” Madame Boisset exploded furiously. “And take that woman with you! I cannot bear to see her smug English face.”
The Comte would have retorted angrily, but with an effort he managed to say,
“I think we would be wise to postpone this discussion for another time, Josephine. I am leaving early in the morning and tomorrow evening when I return I shall undoubtedly be tired. The following day I am going to St. Pierre.”
“To stay?”
The question was sharp.
“No. I shall come back,” the Comte answered. “Then, after I have returned, we must have a sensible discussion about the future. I am very conscious, Josephine, that we cannot drift along as we have been doing in the past.”
He looked at her as he spoke and saw a sudden hope in her eyes that after all he might be capitulating to her desires.
Because he did not wish to make trouble for Melita while he was away, he said again gravely and very quietly,
“Let’s leave everything until the weekend. There will be time then to talk over many things.”
“Yes, of course, Étienne.”
Madame Boisset moved towards him and put her hand on his arm.
“I love you, Étienne – I love you! Kiss me! Make love to me as you have made love to so many other women and let me show you what we can mean to each other.”
&nbs
p; There was such emotional intensity in her words that it sounded almost as though she hissed them at him and the Comte resisted the impulse to shake himself free of her restraining hand.
With an effort he managed to lift it quietly from his arm to his lips and to say as he kissed it perfunctorily,
“Forget all these problems for the moment, Josephine. I have already said, we will talk about them when I return.”
He bowed and, although she would have reached out her hands towards him again, he moved quickly from the room. She heard him cross the hall and open the door into the garden, then close it behind him.
She stood staring after him, before she said gloatingly,
“I have won! He is giving in because he can do nothing else!”
She turned with a flurry of her full skirts to stare at herself in the big gilt-framed mirror that stood at the end of the salon.
For a moment she saw her own dark triumphant eyes and then, almost as if a picture was superimposed upon it, she saw a head of golden hair, a white skin and a pair of softly curving lips.
Her eyes narrowed.
*
Melita found it impossible to sleep.
It was a very hot night and the breeze, which usually came at sunset, had died away to leave the air almost stifling.
She had a feeling that there might be a thunderstorm later. In the meantime she tossed and turned and finally rose to walk to the window to look out. The moon was rising in the clear sky with the stars glittering like diamonds beside it.
Now there was only silence where in the daytime there was always the distant babble of voices, the songs of the slaves or the creak of the watermill.
What had happened after she had come to bed, Melita wondered. Her thoughts shied away from thinking of the Comte and Madame Boisset together.
Instead she recalled the wonder when he had held her in his arms beneath the Pomme d’amour and she had known an ecstasy that was not of this world.
How perfect it had been, how wonderful!
She felt as if her heart called to him. Then, almost as if she heard her own heartbeat, there was a sound she could not at first identify.
It seemed to come not from the darkness of the garden but from within her.
She thought she must be imagining it and she moved from the window, which overlooked the garden in front of the house, to one at the side of the room.
From here she looked out over the plantation towards the sea and now unmistakably she realised that she had heard not her own heart but the beat of a drum that sounded as if it came from far away.
She listened but it was so soft that she thought she must have imagined it and then again it was there.
“Come to me! Come to me!” it seemed to be repeating over and over again so that Melita found herself saying the words first in French, then in English.
“Venez chez moi. Come to me. Venez chez moi.”
A drum, she decided finally, but why?
It drew her.
She listened and had an irresistible craving to obey the sound it made.
She went on listening and finally, because the rhythm of it seemed to beat not only in her mind but also in every nerve of her body, she knew she must find out what it was.
She had no sense of fear as she put on a satin dressing gown that she had worn in England, but which had proved to be too warm for Martinique.
With her feet in heelless slippers she opened the door of her room.
Here it was impossible for her to hear the drum and yet the message it conveyed still held her captive.
Very very carefully, almost without making a sound, she crept down the stairs.
The garden door was not locked, only bolted, and it was easy to pull back the bolts to feel the night air on her cheeks.
Outside she could hear the drum clearly and, without really considering what she was doing, she walked across the lawn and down into the orchard where she had been with the Comte that afternoon.
Out of sight of the house she turned left.
The silver moonlight was casting an ethereal unearthly beauty over the fruit trees, making it easy for Melita to see her way between them. She moved downhill until they grew denser and were interspersed with tropical plants and pine trees.
Now the drum was growing louder and still louder.
“One two, three – one two, three – Come to me.”
Before the last beat was a quivering, hypnotic second of suspense. It was unmistakably primitive, entrancing, hollow, haunting!
Finally Melita could hear it very clearly as she came up against what appeared to be a fence of hibiscus shrubs.
She hesitated, then she realised that the drum was beating straight ahead of her.
She moved into the hedge itself, pushing her way slowly between the green leaves until she saw a light and, a moment later, through the branches that veiled her from sight, found what she sought.
There were a dozen black slaves sitting in a circle in a small clearing that was surrounded entirely with bushes.
The light that Melita had seen came from four candles set in the ground and in front of them there was seated Léonore, the old woman she had met when she and Rose-Marie went to find Philippe.
In front of Léonore there were several bowls and beside her a man was beating a small drum. As Melita stared, the drumming seemed to grow into an exotic cadence.
There was a sepulchral throb to its rhythm and she realised that their bodies were vibrating to the sound of it.
They moved almost imperceptibly with a beatific expression on their faces, while Léonore swayed backwards and forwards with her eyes shut.
Beside the vessels in front of her, Melita could see what she at first thought was a crumpled white cloth on the ground.
Then, as her eyes grew accustomed to the flickering light of the candles, she saw it was not a cloth but the body of a bird.
She looked closer and saw it was a dead cock, its spurs shining in the candlelight.
Then she understood and realised with a sudden constriction of her heart that what she was seeing was Voodoo!
These slaves were engaged in Voodoo, a religion they had brought with them from Africa, a religion that she had always known was to be found in Martinique.
She had been told of their meetings with the spirits, but she had never expected to see one for herself. Yet here it was – happening in front of her very eyes.
The beat of the drum now changed and Léonore began to speak.
She was calling, in a language Melita did not understand, to Yemanjá. Melita had an idea that she had once read that Yemanjá was a Goddess of Voodoo.
“Yemanjá! Yemanjá!” Léonore moaned.
There was a soft murmur from the swaying bodies on either side of her.
She called again in a voice that seemed to be pleading with Yemanjá for assistance.
Then, as she held out both her hands, Philippe, who was seated near her, bent forward and put something into them.
It was a doll.
Melita could see it quite clearly, a doll dressed in leaves – red leaves. It was a doll with a white face and dark hair.
Melita held her breath.
There was no mistaking who was personified by the doll, and now, holding it in both hands and lifting it into the air, Léonore cried again,
“Yemanjá! Yemanjá!”
The drum seemed to echo her voice. Then suddenly, quite clearly and distinctly, Léonore cried,
“Save Étienne! Save him!”
She spoke not in the voice she had used before, but in the voice of a young girl, a high child-like voice and the words were spoken in perfect French!
For a moment Melita held her breath.
Then, beset with fear that she could not control, she turned and ran away from all that she had witnessed.
She ran back through the fruit trees, finding her way instinctively back to the security of the house, because she was past thinking.
She was breathless by the time s
he reached the garden door and stood for a moment holding on to it, trying to control her panic, to think herself back into a state of common sense.
It was Voodoo or some other spiritual ritual, she told herself, but what of it?
They had sacrificed a cock and Léonore had spoken in a strange voice.
Many unusual things could happen when people, whatever their ethnicity, were in a state of trance.
That sounded quite reasonable, but, as Melita crept upstairs and into the sanctuary of her own room, she knew that the explanation she sought was not to be found.
How could Léonore, who she had spoken to in the slave quarters, an old withered woman who she suspected was Philippe’s grandmother, speak like a young girl in a French accent which might have been used by the Comte or – Melita drew in her breath – his dead wife, Cécile?
She faced her fears.
Léonore was the Priestess or Mambo of Voodoo and had been possessed, but by what or whom – a Loa, a spirit of the dead?
Melita was sure that was what they had called on their Goddess Yemanjá to bring them.
The sacrifice of the dead cock and the sacred vessels were all part of the ritual which brought the dead back to life.
Shivering, Melita climbed into bed, but the picture of what she had seen, the cadence of the drum, the movement of the black bodies, the voice of Léonore when she spoke as if she were a young girl, she could not erase from her mind.
Over and over again Melita reconstructed what had happened and everything she had ever heard or read about Voodoo came to her mind, even though she tried to disbelieve what had happened.
The Mambo had evoked the Gods and been possessed for the moment by a Loa. The participants in the ceremony would believe, even though Melita tried not to, that it was the spirit of Cécile.
When they had confronted her with the likeness of Madame Boisset in the shape of the doll, she called out to them to save Étienne, the husband she had loved.
‘It cannot be true, I must have dreamt it,’ Melita told herself.
But even as she protested, she knew that no amount of scepticism could make her doubt her own senses and her own eyes.
She longed to find the Comte and tell him what she had seen. Then she wondered whether he would laugh at her for being credulous, but she was sure he would not.
68 The Magic of Love Page 9
