Henderson's Spear

by Ronald Wright

  I was a tyro lover. Years before, still children, Ivry and I had tiptoed to the brink of love, with sighing and hugging and a little pressing of one another’s bulges (explorations that would not be resumed until we married, so many years later). I’d lain with a woman for the first time at seventeen, when I patronized a brothel with fellow midshipmen in Cadiz. The escapade was more educational than I’d bargained for; my initiation into the mysteries of Venus being followed some days later by worrisome discharges, which required painful ramroddings of my homunculus with a tincture of poisonous metals. The experience had kept me chaste till now.

  Tiurai was an expert; she delighted in teaching, and I in being taught. There was a freedom and innocence to her world-liness that one never finds among the civilized. For those few golden hours in the downpour, the romance of the South Seas seemed nothing less than truth.

  Oh happy place! I cried aloud to the sky, my mouth filling with rain. And I showed Tiurai the one advantage my civilization possessed over hers in things of love: I taught her how to kiss.

  Upon returning from the waterfall, I found Eddy sheltering in his quarters with his new-found friend. The Prince seemed greatly relieved to be away from matters of state, adjourned for an afternoon siesta. “Ah, Jackdaw! Have you two met? The vahine doesn’t speak much English I’m afraid.”

  I acted the prig. Perhaps I wanted my love for Tiurai to stay unique and pure, far from the taint of P.E.’s murky lusts. I told Eddy that though I had little authority over him here, I should nevertheless be much obliged if he would give me five minutes in private, right away

  “Do you realize what sort of creature your ‘vahine’ is?” I demanded. “Have you no concern for your reputation? What if Dalton finds out? Worst of all—what if the French do? What if they’re spying on you as we speak?”

  “‘Course I realize, dear fellow. Wasn’t born yesterday. So what?” Eddy was the worse for drink. “As for reputations, I saw you slipping off with a vahine yourself. A real one. Tut-tut! Whatever will Nelly say?” (Nelly was a nickname Prince George had coined for Dalton, from Neale, his middle name.)

  “Never mind Dalton. Think of your grandmother, P.E. To say nothing of your father.”

  “My father!” Eddy shot back. “How dare you speak for my father!” He tried on a fierce look, but his expression soon wilted to one of peevishness. “Do you know what my father was doing last I heard, Henderson?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you. He was in Paris. His apartments at the Chabanais. A very expensive bordello near the Bibliothèque Nationale, in case you don’t know. And do you want to know what he was doing in the Chabanais?” I began to splutter, but there was no stopping him. “My father was consulting with a rather clever furniture maker about a special chair he’s having made to his own design. A chair with stirrups, handles, and ball-bearings which will allow a man of his bulk to enjoy three women at once in comfort. When he wasn’t doing that he was bathing in a marble tub filled with trollops and champagne.” Eddy paused. “You see, Jackdaw—he has his affairs and I have mine.”

  I was dumbfounded. Here was an Eddy I didn’t know: cynical, worldly, contemptuous, royal. His tone accomplished exactly what he intended: Who was I, a lowly sub-lieutenant, to pry into the personal affairs of a future King of England?

  I was not privy to the political talks held throughout the day between Dalton, the island patriot, and Eddy (when he could be torn away from his bed). I saw only what passed at dinner that evening, before our visit was cut short by acts of God and men. Teraupoo was a man of few words and little ceremony by Polynesian norms. Eddy’s role was that of a talking dummy on a ventriloquist’s knee, and the fluency of Dalton’s ventriloquism was dealt a blow by Eddy’s intoxication and the islander’s knowledge of English. As for the divinity that hedges kings—that was a damp squib. These Tahitians certainly esteemed birth and chieftainship, but their sour experience of royalty meant that Eddy carried little of the symbolic weight he’d had in Fiji.

  How much Dalton had prepared the Prince for this episode in his education, I cannot reliably say. My impression is that he’d been told relatively little, since its purpose was to awaken his initiative. The idea was for him to discover things for himself, as if he were the prime mover in momentous affairs. On this far-flung island Eddy might shine, as he had begun to shine with Thakombau.

  It is my belief that even had things gone well, the tutor was not in a position to offer the islanders much beyond some boxes of guns and a promise to press their suit in London. In Fiji he had stood on Thurston’s shoulders. Here he was on his own, and among islanders whose knowledge of Englishmen was of beachcombers, schooner captains, Cockney evangels.

  Subsequent events have borne out the sincerity of Teraupoo himself. He was what he claimed to be, and paid a heavy price for it when the French eventually caught him, years after our visit. Our misfortune cannot be blamed on him; the treachery (if it was treachery) did not lie there. But can it be blamed on some hostile agency sent to destroy us? Or was the seed of our destruction carried with us from the start, in Dalton’s dreams and Eddy’s weaknesses? I still do not know. I can only set down what I saw and heard that fateful night in the hills.

  The cyclone Skinner had dreaded for days broke upon us. By midafternoon the ground about the huts was waterlogged, even though their situation wasn’t low-lying. Rain simply fell faster than it could run away through the undergrowth. Men were busy outside, throwing ropes over buildings to hold the roofs down, lashing these to great stakes driven into the earth. Teraupoo did not reside in Thakombau’s barbaric splendour, surrounded by carved wood and whale ivory. His headquarters were adequate but simple, offering no prize for the French. Doubtless he had several camps like this, hidden in the mountains.

  I remember that it became difficult to listen at dinner over the peculiar din of the gale. In our northern clime a wind of this order whistles and moans; but here the sound produced was a deafening hiss like that of steam escaping from a boiler, rising and falling but never relenting, as the rain tore sideways through the jungle with such velocity that any boughs not snapped were blasted bare of leaves.

  Confined inside the leaders shivering house, with conversation all but impossible, we drank far into the night. Skinner’s keg of calibogus (borrowed by Eddy for his dalliance with the mahu) at last ran dry but our host substituted a local arrack, distilled in gunbarrels from palm toddy. The women, including the mahu, were not present. My thoughts dwelt on Tiurai. I worried for her safety, consoling myself that she would know what to do in such weather. But my thoughts of her went far beyond worry. There was nowhere on Earth I wanted to be but in her arms. I hoped the talks would be slow, drawn out for a week at least, and dreamt of going to the waterfall with her every day. I wondered where she lived, whether there was a way for us to spend these precious nights together. In short, I was in love.

  Some time after midnight the hissing abated a little, and the moment was judged propitious for each to retire to his own quarters. Eddy was the first to leave, reeling but bipedal, and that was the last we saw of him for some hours. I suppose Dalton understood by then the true nature of his wards companion. If so, he must have rued the day he thought a Polynesian affaire would be the very thing to straighten Eddy’s heart.

  I found myself shaken awake by an agitated Dalton, who had just realized that the form on the mat beside him was not a sleeping Prince but a bundle of clothing with a coconut for a head. Dalton ordered Skinner and myself to dress at once and search through the stormy woods. His greatest fear was that the Prince might have fainted or tripped and be drowning awash on the ground. So the three of us fanned out as best we could through the wet and darkness. It was an impossible task. No lantern or torch could be lit; the night was pitch black, though now and again great sheets of lightning threw the settlement into stark relief against a weird tracery of shadow. Several times I tripped over guy ropes rigged to buildings.

  I had an idea where
Eddy was—warm and dry with his beloved, as I should like to be. So I made my way in the direction where I believed both Tiurai and the mahu might be living, rather hoping to stumble upon my darling girl.

  I found a hut—or it found me, its rattan wall slapping me in the face. I groped round to the door, which swung open to my knock. Inside a candle guttered in a jar. It is difficult to reconstruct my thoughts, for they came on a tide of panic. The scene, however, is clear, a horrible tableau like an instant of battle lit up by a starshell, as lightning filled the doorway: the man-woman, his wrists tied behind him, his painted face pale and strangely restful, drained of its coquetry, a dark creek of blood ebbing from his naked body, congealing on the floor like molten iron.

  I bent over him, and it took some moments to discover the ghastly, hidden wound and the nature of his death, a death unspeakably cruel and vile. A cutlass—it seemed the kind used for cutting sugarcane—had been plunged into his fundament. The blade must have severed his internal organs. Only its wooden handle could be seen. He was thoroughly dead but still warm.

  Who had done this? Who would be capable of such a thing? Had an assassin stolen into camp under cover of the storm? Where was Eddy? Had the two of them been ambushed? Eddy too, I feared, was somewhere dying, having crawled off like a maimed cat. He might be out there under the thrashing palms—so loud they were!—his life-force, which always seemed in short supply, draining into the flood. I blundered out, searching by lightning, by a succession of magnesium photographs that made no sense. Was that a shadow or a corpse? Was that Eddy bent in pain, or an enemy, or a fallen branch? Who was out there in the dark and the rain? Where was Tiurai?

  It was Dalton found him, not half-dead as I’d imagined, but sitting in a wicker chair in their own hut, a cigarette smouldering between his fingers. I shall never forget Eddy’s face: the face of a man watching a lantern show—rapt and faraway, the eyes glassy in the candlelight. Words made no impression on him. Dalton took away the cigarette and shook him by the shoulders; his head lolled like that of a rag doll. Above the hiss outside came a regular smack of heavy drips. I thought it was blood, but it was only a leak falling from the ridgepole onto the mat. What I’d seen minutes ago in that other hut might have been an hallucination. Yet its reality was plain enough from the blood on Eddy’s shirt—a long nightshirt, its front stiffening with blood, his calves bare and scratched and pale.

  “My God, he’s wounded!” I shouted.

  “It’s not his blood,” Dalton replied. He thought Eddy had merely been the victim of a prank, that he’d been daubed with pigs blood. The tutor hadn’t seen the mahu.

  I pulled Dalton aside and described what I’d found. It took a long time to make him understand that a grisly murder had occurred. The unspoken question that remained was whether Eddy had had a lucky escape from the same fate or—heaven forfend—had somehow been the perpetrator. I have never believed the Prince capable of violence, but it was clear from Dalton’s reaction that the tutor was not so sure. He rambled incoherently about Eddy’s drinking and fragile state of mind, of wildness, of “unnatural provocations.” Then he abruptly checked himself, as if he’d only just remembered who I was, and took a more cautious tack.

  “Don’t you see, Henderson?” he hissed. “It’s a traitor’s death. The death of Montezuma! They’ve done this to incriminate the boy.”

  “Who?”

  “The French!” He railed against the mahu, saying his very presence here was proof of treachery. He was a French spy, disguised as a prostitute. Or a Tahitian agent, engaged by a Pomarist faction. Or a republican, a hireling of Dissenters intent on blackening the monarchy and Church of England. And as for the mahu’s killer, well, there was the master-stroke; the creature had been intended from the start for double duty, to work his wiles, then perish as a sacrifice.

  I said we’d better fetch someone.

  “Who would you fetch?” asked Dalton, suddenly weary. He seemed utterly exhausted. He went over to Eddy with the candle, passing his hand back and forth to throw light and shadow into the Princes eyes. There was no response.

  “Oh dear boy! My poor, poor darling boy!” Dalton was quite overcome. He fainted away, his breathing coming very hard and his face glowing like a coal. I loosened his clothing, threw water on him. When he came round he didn’t know who I was or where he was. He raved for a long time—snatches of conversations, scenes from the Princes’ boyhood and his own. Shoot me! Eddy, shoot me! Then suddenly his eyes looked into mine, and he said, “Good Lord! The strangest dream! I was running through the woods at Sandringham with antlers on my head—I do that for fun with Eddy and Georgie, you know. I gave them bows and arrows for Christmas. They shoot at me as I dodge through the woods. Only Eddy was all grown up, and he’d really shot me and I was lying here in my own blood.…” Then a look of terror seized him. “Who are you? Why is there blood on your clothes? Answer me, man! Don’t kill him!” At that, mercifully, he passed out again.

  It must have been three or four in the morning when Skinner burst in, followed by my beloved Tiurai. Dalton’s reason seemed to be returning, and Eddy was conscious enough to resume smoking his cigarettes—like a tramp, down to the butt, as if each breath of tobacco might be his last.

  The Captain was frightened but still thinking clearly. He’d found that hut and seen what I had seen. He thought killers might still be lurking about, ready to pick us off one by one. (This hadn’t occurred to me.) Our only hope was to make for the ship at once. The girl, he said, knew a way. She would guide us down the mountain. Tiurai looked at me imploringly. Come! Come! she seemed to say. I took charge, making Dalton and Eddy gather some essentials, herding them out into the storm.

  Somehow we got down to the coast, by a shorter, steeper route than our ascent, blundering and sliding through the darkness, over boulders and fallen trees, through mud and waist-deep floodwater, following the course of a stream, perhaps the very one in which Tiurai and I had frolicked only that morning. Those quiet hours in her arms already seemed a year ago.

  First light was breaking when we reached the cove, to find the ship riding at her anchors, smoke fleeing from her funnel. Oputu had stuck to orders; steam was up. While the gig put out to get us, Tiurai and I shared one last embrace, a rending moment that has haunted me for years. I tore off a shirt-tail and scribbled my address in charcoal. One day, perhaps, the wars would cease; high commissioners and consuls and battleships would tame this corner of the ocean, and a mail steamer would call here twice a year, and she would have the deacon read my letters, and he would set down her far-off words to me.

  I folded the cloth inside the only pretty thing I could bestow on her—the cigarette case given me by Eddy. This I put in Tiurai’s hand, closing her fingers over it. I drew her against me and said my farewells with a kiss.

  Skinner got us out at dawn. No other captain and no other ship could have done it, even though the cyclone was abating, visible now as a great galactic arm sweeping off to the southeast. Had the winds come the other way—from their prevailing direction—we should have been bottled up in that cove for days. But we shot out smartly under full steam and a pocket handkerchief of jib. Once in deep water, Skinner set out sheet anchors and kept in the island’s lee until evening. Then, with the gale fallen to Force Eight, he steamed for Bora Bora and the western Pacific. A week later we made a nocturnal rendezvous with Bacchante in the ocean wastes of Micronesia.

  Dalton and I never spoke of these events again. Nothing of our excursion was entered in Bacchantes log (the eighteen days of our absence being covered by a slow run to Yokohama). Later, the whole sorry mess was diligently buried under Dalton’s monumental history of the voyage, as if beneath twin tombstones of great weight. And so it might have remained, had not those Whitehall hyenas somehow got a whiff of it. Someone must have talked, though who, when, and where is still impossible to say. Perhaps it was Carny Skinner, but I hardly think so; a rogue he may have been, but he was a man whose life depended upon secrecy. His life was bri
ef enough in any case. I heard he involved himself in the Pacific War between Peru and Chile, selling guns to both sides; one of his clients paid the bill with a firing squad. My view is that French agents are the most likely source, and that they passed information to republican sympathizers in London.

  For some time, on our way Home, I wondered whether Dalton had questioned Eddy about what happened in that hut, though I doubt that he did. The Princes mental and emotional states were delicate. He avoided me as much as possible. The ground he’d made in Fiji was lost and never recouped. At best, his level of development returned to the unsatisfactory state that had prompted the tutors desperate move in the first place.

  The rest of the voyage—Japan, Singapore, Egypt—passed quickly, a mere nine months for half the world. Whatever some bluejackets might have wondered about our comings and goings on the high seas, such thoughts were soon forgotten in the thrill of going home, and overshadowed near the cruises end by trouble at Alexandria during the Arabi revolt.

  I am certain Dalton himself locked these things away in his mind forever. He stood to lose most from their disclosure—everything, his whole life’s work. Indeed, I’d wager he lost all recollection of them, except perhaps in nightmares.

  Nothing might have surfaced from the South Sea débâcle had Prince Eddy’s name not been linked, however unfairly, with other scandals less easily suppressed, and had he not died so suddenly (and to some suspiciously) in 1892. I also fear, given the misfortunes in my own life which I mentioned at the outset, that the person or persons responsible may still be active.