He had known for some time that he would have to find another situation. The problem was not that Dame Alice was mad. All women were mad, after all. But her madness had such an insidious plausibility that he was starting to believe it himself
As presumably her present correspondent did. And the letter to him would be addressed to 'His Royal Highness...'
In most places the trees grew down to the water's edge, denser for being able to take sunlight from the side as well as from above. The margins of the shallow backwaters spread after each rain into sheets thick with vegetable richness and as black as the skins of those who lived along them. In drier hours there were sandbanks and easy expanses on which to trade with the forest folk.
Gomes's dugout had already slid back into the slough, leaving in the sand the straight gouge of its keel centred in the blur of bare footprints. A score of natives still clustered around Kaminski's similar craft, fondling his bolts of bright-patterned cloth or chatting with his paddlers. Then the steamship swung into sight around the wooded headland.
The trees had acted as a perfect muffler for the chuffing engine. With a haste little short of panic, the forest dwellers melted back into concealment. The swarthy Portuguese gave an angry order and his crew shipped their paddles. Emptied of its cargo, the dugout drew only a few inches of water and could, had there been enough warning, have slid up among the tree roots where the two-decked steamer could never have followed.
Throttled down to the point at which its stern wheel made only an occasional slapping, the government craft edged closer to Gomes. On the Upper Kasai it was a battleship, although its beamy twenty-four meters would have aroused little interest in a more civilized part of the world.
Awnings protected the hundreds of askaris overburdening the side rails. The captain was European, a blond soft-looking man in a Belgian army uniform. The only other white man visible was the noncom behind the Hotchkiss swivelmounted at the bow.
'Messieurs Gomes and Kaminski, perhaps?' called the officer as the steamship swung to, a dozen yards from the canoe. He was smiling, using his fingertips to balance his weight on the starboard bridge rail.
'You know who we are, de Vriny - damn you,' Gomes shot back. 'We have our patent to trade, and we pay our portion to your Soit Cosmopolite. Now leave us!'
'Pay your portion, yes,' de Vriny purred. 'Gold dust and gold nuggets. Where do you get such gold, my fine mongrel friends?'
'Carlos, it's all right,' called Kaminski, standing in his grounded boat. 'Don't become angry - the gentleman is doing his duty to protect trade, that is all.' Beneath the sombrero which he had learned to wear in the American Southwest, sweat was boiling off Kaminski. He knew his friend's volcanic temper, knew also the reputation of the blond man who was goading them. Not now! Not on the brink of the success that would gain them entree to any society in the world!
'Trade?' Gomes was shouting. 'What do they know about trade?' He shook his fist at de Vriny and made the canoe rock nervously, so that the plump Angolan woman he had married a dozen years before put a calming hand on his leg. 'You hold a rifle to the head of some poor black, pay him a ha'penny for rubber you sell in Paris for a shilling fourpence. Trade? There would be no gold coming out of this forest if the tribes didn't trust us and get a fair value for the dust they bring!'
'Well, we'll have to explore that,' grinned the Belgian. 'You see, your patent to trade was issued in error - it seems it was meant for some Gomez who spelled his name with a "z" - and I have orders to escort you both back to Boma until the matter can be resolved.'
Gomes's broad face went saffron. He began to slump like a snow figure on a sunny day. 'They couldn't take away our patent because of a spelling mistake their own clerks made?' he whined, but his words were more a sick apostrophe than a real question.
The Belgian answered it anyway. 'You think not? Don't you know who appoints the judges of our Congo oh-so-Free State? Not Jews or nigger-wenching Portuguese, I assure you.'
Gomes was probably bracing his sagging bulk against the thwart, though he could indeed have been reaching for the Mauser lying across the pack in front of him. Presumably that was what the Baenga thought when he fired the first shot and blew Gomes into the water. Every Forest Guard with a rifle followed in a ragged volley that turned the canoe into a chip dancing on an ornamental fountain. Jets of wood and water and blood spouted upward.
'Christ's blood, you fools!' de Vriny cried. Then, 'Well, get the rest of them too!'
Kaminski screamed and tried to follow his paddlers in a race for the tree line, but he was a corpulent man whose boots punched ankle-deep into the soft sand. The natives had no chance either. The Hotchkiss stuttered, knocking down a pair of them as the gunner checked his range.
Then, spewing empty cases that hissed as they bounced into the water, the machine gun hosed bullets across the other running men. Kaminski half turned as the black in front of him pitched forward haemorrhaging bright blood from mouth and nose. That desire to see his death coming preserved the trader from it: the bullet that would otherwise have exited through his forehead instead drilled through both upper maxillary bones. Kaminski's eyes popped out as neatly as oysters into a gourmet's silver spoon. His body slapped hard enough to ripple the sand in which it came to rest face up.
The firing stopped. Capsized and sinking, Gomes's shattered dugout was drifting past the bow of the steamer. 'I want their packs raised,' de Vriny ordered. 'Even if you have to dive for them all day.
The same with the packs onshore - then burn the canoes.'
'And the bodies, master?' asked his Baenga headman.
'Faugh,' spat the Belgian. 'Why else did the good Lord put crocodiles in this river?'
They did not take Kaminski's ear because it was white and that would attract comment. Even in Boma.
Time passed. Deep in the forest the ground spurted upward like a grapefruit hit by a rifle bullet.
Something thicker than a tree hole surged, caught at a nearby human, and flung the body, no longer distinguishable as to sex or race, a quarter mile through the canopy of trees. The earth subsided then, but in places the surface continued to bubble as if made of heated tar.
Five thousand miles away, Dame Alice Kilrea stepped briskly out of her solicitors' office, having executed her will, and ordered her driver on to the Nord DeutscherLloyd Dock. Travelling with her in the carriage was a valise containing one ancient book and a bundle of documents thick with wax, ribbons, and gold foil those trappings and the royal signature beneath. On the seat across from her was the American servant she had engaged only the week before as she closed her London house and discharged the remainder of her establishment. The servant, Sparrow, was a weaselly man with tanned skin and eyes the frosty colour of lead cast in too hot a mould. He said little but glanced around frequently; and his fingers writhed as if with separate life.
Occasionally chance would merge the rhythm of mauls and axes splitting wood in a dozen parts of the forest. Then the thunk-thunk-THUNK would boom out like a beast approaching from the darkness. Around their fire the officers would pause. The Baengas would chuckle at the joke of it and let the pounding die away. Little by little it would reappear at each separate group of woodsmen, finally to repeat its crescendo.
'Like children,' Colonel Trouville said to Dame Alice. The engineer and two sergeants were still aboard the Archiduchesse Stephanie, dining apart from the other whites. Colour was not the only measure of class, even in the Congo Basin. 'They'll be cutting wood - and drinking their malafou, wretched stuff, to call it palm wine is to insult the word "wine"- they'll be at it almost till dawn.
After a time you'll get used to it. There's nothing, really, to be done, since we can only carry a day's supply of fuel on the steamer. While they of course could find and cut enough dry wood by a reasonable hour each night, when one is dealing with the native mind...'