When the girl had gone and the door closed behind her, Matthew let out a long exhalation of breath and had to sit down on the bed, damp breeches be damned. The room seemed to be rocking on the Atlantic waves. He had his doubts about staying aboard a horse very long, but the offer of a guided tour of Pendulum Island was too good to reject. If he toppled from horseback, at least his excuse would pass Minx Cutter’s judgment. He stood up, went to the washbasin, poured water into it from a pitcher and splashed some into his face. Then he wet a portion of a towel and used it to cool the hot whipsting on his neck. It wasn’t so bad, but he could do with a little poultice of honeysuckle to calm the fever. He needed to get out of these clothes and…what?…send them downstairs to be cleaned? He imagined it would be that simple.
He thought of how many things could go wrong on his excursion with the girl. But then again…he had to have faith in himself. He had played parts before, notably as Michael Shayne with Lyra Sutch or, more correctly, in her own guise as Gemini Lovejoy. It occurred to him that Professor Fell had faith in him. Then he thought he must be going mad to be affirming the professor’s questionable attributes, or possibly it was the island’s sultry air clouding his mind.
He dressed in his other suit, this one of a velvety forest green, with a white shirt and white stockings. When he’d finished fastening the last shirt button he was aware of a shrill calling of seagulls from outside, and therefore he strolled out upon the balcony to have a look at what was stirring the birds up.
She was sitting cross-legged atop a large rock in the sea, her perch some twenty feet above the waves. Over her shining black hair the gulls spun around and around, perhaps disturbed at their roost being claimed by a human. She was entirely nude, her brown skin wet and glistening in the sunlight. Matthew grasped the balcony’s railing with both hands. She was sitting about forty feet below him, her chin resting on her folded hands, her face aimed seaward, her attitude remote and absolutely solitudinous in her nudity. Matthew could only stare at this display of removal from the world. Where had she disrobed and left her clothes? Obviously she was unconcerned about being an object of attention from any of the other guests…or, Matthew thought after another moment, she simply had ceased to care.
They call her Fancy, Minx had said.
Of course that was a made-up name, Matthew reasoned. A nearly-sarcastic name imposed upon her if not by the Thacker brothers then by whoever else had lured her over the Atlantic from her tribal home. He wondered how she’d fallen into their hands, and wound up between their dirty tongues.
She was such a beautiful girl, he thought. And there she sat, still alone.
He very suddenly had the sensation that the balcony had given way beneath his feet and he was falling, and yet he gripped the railing harder and he was not falling at all but still…he thought that in the space of a few startling seconds he had indeed travelled from one risky position to another equally as dangerous.
“Oh my God,” he said quietly, to himself and to whomever might be listening, even here in this place of Professor Fell’s self-worship.
He had already voiced the thought in his head, when he’d first seen the Indian girl in the coach.
It was a shame, that such a pretty girl should sit alone.
He recalled the tale of his Indian friend, Walker In Two Worlds, who had departed from this life and gone to walk the Sky Road. Walker had told him about the Indian girl called Pretty Girl Who Sits Alone. The girl who had been taken from her tribe and accompanied him and the doomed Nimble Climber in their journey across the Atlantic to England, where she had been seized by two men and put into a coach while he went on to portray a parody of the savage redskin on the lamplit English stage.
“Oh my God,” Matthew repeated, in case that entreaty to hear him had been missed the first time.
He had no idea how old the girl was who sat upon the rock below him, under her moving crown of seagulls. Walker had not told him exactly how old the girl was when they left the tribe together. We three children, Walker had said. Matthew had judged Walker’s age at around twenty-six or twenty-seven. Therefore…if this indeed might be the same Pretty Girl Who Sits Alone, then she could be the same age or younger by a few years. Or, perhaps, she was the same age as Matthew, twenty-three. In any case, it was possible…just possible…that before him was the very same Indian girl who had made that daunting voyage with Walker, and who had been removed by rough hands into a rough life that led her here, between two orange-haired ruffians who thought themselves the owners of a beautiful…yes, the word that Mack Thacker had used…squaw.
But still…certainly other Indian maidens had been brought over from the New World in all the many years since Walker’s journey. Of course. Many of them, brought over to be curiosities or servants or…whatever.
That this young woman could be the same one…
It boggled the mind.
Suddenly she must have caught a prickling sense of Matthew’s mental thornpatch, for she turned her head toward him as surely as if she had heard her name spoken, and they stared at each other seemingly not only across space, but also across time.
Fancy stood up. She rose to her full height. Brown and gleaming she took one step forward and flung herself into the air like one of Walker’s arrows leaving his bow, and as she came down into the sea she tightened her body and narrowed it and entered the churning foam with the bravery and ease of a creature born to be part of nature and perhaps desirous of a return to the childhood dream.
She did not surface. Though Matthew stood for several minutes scanning the boisterous waves there was no sign of her reemergence to the realm of air-breathers. He wondered if she was part fish, and once in the security of the blue world her fins and gills had grown, her tail had taken shape, and she had gone down with vigorous strokes to the silent bottom of the bay, where a pretty girl might once again sit alone. He had a moment of panic, thinking he should call someone to help her. But it occurred to him that no one without Indian courage would dare a dive into that deep, and if she would rather dream in the peaceful solitude of an ocean grave than be called Fancy and be tossed about like a ragdoll between two scums of the earth, then so be it.
Matthew left the balcony and closed the louvered doors. He took the key, went out of his room and locked it, then he walked along the corridor back to the stairs. A tall, slim and hollow-cheeked man with a trimmed gray beard and a smooth sheen of gray hair tied back in a queue was coming up. He was dressed in a black suit and smoking a clay pipe. The man’s eyes, equally gray in a heavily-lined and craggy face, barely registered Matthew’s presence. But Matthew registered the distinct odor of unwashed flesh.
Another bad ingredient in this odious stewpot, Matthew thought as he descended the stairs. Who might that be, and what was his role for Professor Fell?
Or…had it been Professor Fell?
Keep going, he told himself. Whatever you do, don’t look back. We don’t wish to become a pillar of salt today.
Minx was waiting for him under the flags of many plundered nations. She still wore the man’s brown breeches, the cream-colored blouse and the high-topped brown boots, but had put on a tan waistcoat decorated with small gold-colored paisleys. Matthew wondered how many knives were concealed underneath there. Her first expression upon seeing him was a frown, followed by the question, “Don’t you have any riding clothes?”
“This will have to do,” he answered, and decided to add: “Unless you’d like to loan me some of yours?”
“Hm,” she said, with a darting glance at his crotch. “No, I think you’d be too small for my breeches. Shall we go?”