66 The Love Pirate Read online

  “I love him!” she whispered. “I love him and I always will.”

  *

  It was a week after Bertilla had arrived at the Mission House that she had an experience that left her trembling and afraid.

  Two of the older children had been quarrelling and had started to fight, clawing at each other’s hair, although Bertilla was sure that it was more in fun than in anger.

  But coming out onto the playground her aunt had taken a different view of it and had started to scream furiously at the Dyak woman who was in charge.

  She worked herself into a frenzy of anger, screaming abuse, then inevitably beating her with the thin stick that was never far from her hand.

  The woman turned to run away and, unaccountably or perhaps she was pushed, fell down.

  She was therefore at the mercy of Aunt Agatha and, as she struggled and writhed on the ground, the stick fell violently and continuously on her shoulders, on her head, on her back and in fact on every part of her body.

  She was so much smaller than the tall elderly Englishwoman that Bertilla thought it was almost as if she saw her aunt beating one of the children.

  Instinctively, hardly realising what she was doing, she ran forward.

  “Stop, Aunt Agatha!” she cried. “Stop it at once! It is too much – it is cruel! You have no right to hit anyone like that.”

  Her aunt appeared not to hear her and in an obvious frenzy she went on striking the fallen woman.

  “Stop!” Bertilla cried again.

  Then, as she put out her hands to catch hold of her aunt’s arm, the stick came down on her own shoulders and, having struck her twice, her aunt pushed her out of the way and continued punishing the woman on the ground.

  The respite had gained the Dyak woman the chance to get to her knees and now, still enduring the whipping, which was making her scream at the top of her voice, she began to crawl away.

  Bertilla had also fallen when her aunt pushed her.

  Now on the ground, she watched the Dyak woman running towards the sanctuary of the hut she shared with the two other teachers.

  Suddenly in the thick bushes behind the hut Bertilla saw a face.

  It was the face of a man and there was no need for her to be told he was a Dyak.

  She could see the blue tattooing on his body and the plumes in his dark hair.

  But she had only a glimpse of him, his face contorted with anger. Then the leaves of the bushes closed around him.

  Later, when her own back was aching from the few blows her aunt had inflicted on her and she thought with commiseration of how much agony the other woman must be suffering, she wondered if she should tell her aunt what she had seen.

  It was the first time since she had come to the Mission that there had been any sign of a native man.

  She could not help thinking it was strange that the women stayed and endured the treatment that was meted out day after day.

  This whipping had been more severe than any that she had seen before and that night Bertilla found it hard to recapture the magic sounds of the frogs and beetles.

  She had thought that they were the only inhabitants of the jungle round them.

  But now she knew there were Dyak warriors, whose most valued possessions were the dried smoked heads of those they had decapitated.

  *

  Lord Saire arrived in Kuching in a gunboat.

  He had realised that he would have to wait a fortnight after Bertilla had left for the steamer that sailed between Singapore and Kuching.

  This he had no intention of doing if it could possibly be avoided.

  As part of his mission was to meet the Captains of the warships based at Singapore, it was easy for him to ask for a gunboat to carry him to one of the islands.

  He knew it had caused some surprise that Sarawak was first on his list.

  There was a certain amount of trouble taking place on all the islands and each one had its own problems.

  It was expected that in his official capacity Lord Saire should help them in every way he could and he found that at Singapore alone there was an enormous amount of people wishing to see him.

  They all seemed to have complaints that he was expected to convey to the British Government and there was also an extensive programme of official functions at which he was expected to be present.

  But he swept all this aside with an imperious wave of his hand, saying that before he did anything else he wished to be conveyed to Sarawak.

  He was too used to getting his own way, especially where officials were concerned, for there to be any real opposition.

  It was only a question of time before he could go aboard the gunboat and feel with a sense of relief that at last he was able to follow Bertilla.

  He had deliberately been careful not to let anyone know the real object of his visit, so as to ensure that Bertilla was not the subject of gossip by the women he most disliked.

  As she had suffered from it already, he had no intention of subjecting her to it again.

  He therefore on arrival at Kuching arranged that the ship should anchor close to the steps that led to the Astana Palace.

  The arrival of a gunboat was an event of great excitement. The crowds tore down to the riverside and long before the ship let down its anchor the banks were lined with people.

  Several officials were there to meet Lord Saire and to escort him and the Captain of the gunboat into the Palace.

  The exterior of the building was long and white with sloping roofs and a great stone tower where a sentry was always on guard.

  Inside there were enormous rooms stretching the whole length of the Palace, which were, Lord Saire was amused to note, a fantastic medley of beauty and bad taste.

  There was, Lord Saire thought, nothing wrong with their proportions, but the Rajah had filled them with an appalling confusion of reproduction furniture from every period of English and French history.

  Early Victorian mahogany was arranged stiffly against the walls, mirrors were dotted about on tin-legged tables and Dresden figures held caskets in their chipped and broken hands.

  At a glance Lord Saire realised however that the ceilings were beautiful. Heavily carved with gorgeous dragons and flowers of plain plaster, they had been designed and executed by Chinese workmen.

  He, however, had little time to look round before the White Rajah, Sir Charles Brooke, received him.

  He was certainly a very distinguished-looking man with heavy white moustaches and curly grey hair above a high forehead.

  He also had prominent white eyebrows, bags beneath his eyes, a wrinkled, turtle-like neck and a bulky cleft jaw.

  But his haughty expression and his cold austerity to everyone he had dealings with was that of a man who makes his own rules and expects everybody to comply with them.

  Like Bertilla, Lord Saire had already been told that the White Rajah had a passion for the French.

  He was steeped in the glamour of Napoleon and knew all his campaigns by heart.

  He had little faith in the English newspapers and his knowledge of world politics was based on his careful reading of Le Figaro, which he received when it was four or five weeks old.

  To get into the White Rajah’s good graces Lord Saire with his usual diplomatic skill had brought with him as a special present two books recently published in France.

  One described Napoleon’s battles and the other was an expansive description of the addition of some new pictures to the Louvre.

  He had been fortunate enough to buy one of them in Singapore and to purloin the other from the Governor’s secretary the moment it arrived in a consignment of books from Europe.

  The Rajah was delighted and he spoke to Lord Saire in not quite such a dictatorial way as he addressed other people.

  Lady Brooke had been beautiful in her youth and adored gaiety, but she had suffered a great tragedy in her life.

  Her first three children, a girl and twin boys, returning to England on the P. & O. steamer Hydaspes in 1873, had all
died within a few hours of one another.

  One day they were quite well, the next they were gasping for breath in the heat of the Red Sea. No one knew for certain what had caused their deaths, cholera, heatstroke and a tin of poisoned milk – all were suggested later.

  The children were buried at sea and for the rest of his life the Rajah avoided travelling on P. & O. steamers.

  With fantastic courage the Ranee had returned to Sarawak and started a new family.

  She had a dull lonely life with a husband who worked to a timetable, who never listened to her opinions and who never took her advice. She was never allowed to dance with another man or to wear low-cut dresses.

  Lord Saire charmed her with his good manners and his considerate attention from the first moment they met.

  That evening, as they sat at dinner in the great dining room lit by hanging oil lamps with Dyaks waving palm leaves beside each guest, the table laid with silver and crystal, Lord Saire found it hard to believe that he was on an isolated barbaric island.

  The Rajah was wearing his green and gold uniform, his chest blazing with decorations.

  Everyone in the European community had been invited to meet Lord Saire and all the Officers from the gunboat were present.

  Lord Saire noticed that the Rajah had arranged for the best looking woman present to sit at his side.

  He had spoken about women to Lord Saire before they went into dinner and confided as one man to another,

  “A beautiful woman, a thoroughbred horse, and a well-designed yacht are the greatest joys in life.”

  Lord Saire agreed and was quite certain that the Rajah never deprived himself of any of those joys.

  It was when dinner was over and Lord Saire was sitting beside the Ranee that he found the opportunity of speaking about what was uppermost in his mind.

  “I hear you have a Missionary here in Sarawak,” he said, “called Miss Agatha Alvinston.”

  The Ranee held up her hands as if in dismay.

  “We have indeed, Lord Saire! A most tiresome woman! I cannot tell you the trouble she causes my poor husband one way or another. But how could you have heard about her?”

  “Her sister-in-law, Lady Alvinston, is a frequent guest at Marlborough House.”

  “Oh, of course! I had forgotten,” the Ranee said. “But then, I am sadly out of touch with the social life in England. You must tell me about it.”

  “Lady Alvinston is very beautiful.”

  “Which is something you cannot say about her sister-in-law. She is a most hideous woman and I cannot help thinking as the years pass that she is growing a little mad.”

  “Mad?” Lord Saire questioned.

  “She does such outrageous things and one hears very unpleasant tales about her treatment of the Mission children.”

  The Ranee sighed.

  “I only wish Missionaries would leave the Dyaks alone. They are sweet and gentle if left to themselves and my husband has made so many improvements.”

  She saw the question in Lord Saire’s eyes and laughed.

  “Yes, they still headhunt to a certain extent, but it is not half as prevalent as it was, and the pirates – the Sea Dyaks – have really behaved extremely well this last year. And that, I know, is one of the things which you will be investigating, Lord Saire.”

  “Of course,” he agreed.

  But, determined not to be side tracked from what he wished to say, he went on,

  “I don’t know if you are aware of it, but Lady Alvinston’s daughter has come out to Sarawak to stay with her aunt?”

  “Good heavens!” the Ranee exclaimed. “So that is who it was! I was told that a white girl had arrived on the steamer at the beginning of the week!”

  She made a gesture with her fan and continued,

  “I had expected her to be staying with one or another of our European community, but they are all here tonight and, when they did not ask to bring a guest with them, I realised that I must have been wrong.”

  “Miss Alvinston was on the Coromandel with me,” Lord Saire explained.

  “Oh, the poor child, she must have been terrified by the fire, but I hear that everyone was rescued.”

  “We were indeed fortunate that it happened in the Malacca Straits,” Lord Saire replied. “It might have been a very different story if it had occurred in the Red Sea.”

  He saw a shudder pass over the Ranee’s face and realised that he had been tactless.

  “I suppose I ought to let Lady Alvinston know that her daughter is safe,” he said quickly, “and I wanted to ask you how she was settling down with her aunt.”

  “I am sorry that I cannot answer that question,” the Ranee replied, “but I will certainly visit the Mission first thing in the morning and meet Miss Alvinston.”

  She paused before she added,

  “I am rather surprised at Lady Alvinston sending her here to her sister-in-law, but perhaps the girl will not be staying long.”

  “I think that is something we could discover tomorrow,” Lord Saire said lightly.

  He had achieved what he wanted and therefore turned the conversation to other matters.

  As the Rajah rose at five o’clock in the morning to the sound of a single gun from the Fort, he did not like his guests to stay late at night.

  The European community, having enormously enjoyed the party, which was an excitement in their monotonous lives, reluctantly rose to make their farewells.

  They were all extremely effusive to Lord Saire, who promised to visit their plantations if he had time.

  He knew that the idea of entertaining him put their wives into a flutter of anxiety in case their hospitality was not good enough for him.

  He tried to reassure them by asserting that he was willing to take ‘pot-luck’ and that they must not arrange anything for him, although he was quite certain that what he was saying fell on deaf ears.

  Finally everybody had left except for the Captain, who was just about to return to his gunboat when one of the servants came hurrying into the huge reception room to whisper in what seemed an agitated manner in the Rajah’s ear.

  He listened and then said in a voice of thunder,

  “It is all that damned woman’s fault! She deserves anything that happens to her!”

  “What has occurred?” the Ranee asked.

  The Rajah’s eyes were angry under his beetling white eyebrows as he answered,

  “I am told that the Dyaks are attacking the Mission House. I suppose that means I shall have to send my soldiers to save that tiresome idiotic woman from the retribution she has brought upon her own head.”

  “Attacking the Mission House?” Lord Saire exclaimed. “Then I would like, sir, if I may, to go with them and surely we should move as quickly as possible?”

  Urged on by Lord Saire, it was only a few minutes before a number of soldiers in their white uniforms with black and red headdresses were on the way from the Palace along the road leading to the Mission.

  Lord Saire and the Captain of the gunboat went with them and, as they neared the clearing, they heard the sound of gunshots.

  The Officer in charge of the soldiers said to Lord Saire, who was marching along beside him,

  “That’ll be the old lady. She’s quite a dab hand with a gun and has killed or wounded quite a number of Dyaks who have interfered with her in the past.”

  Although Lord Saire could not see his face, he knew that the man was grinning, finding Agatha Alvinston’s resistance amusing.

  But he himself was afraid for Bertilla – more afraid than he had ever been before. He had not believed it possible that he could feel so desperate about anyone.

  How, he asked himself furiously, could he have allowed her, knowing what he did about Sarawak, to come out here alone and unprotected, and stay with an aunt whom everybody had disparaged and spoken of with contempt?

  He thought of how soft and gentle she had been when he held her in his arms.

  As he remembered the ecstasy they both felt when his
lips had touched hers, he thought that if anything happened to Bertilla through his own crass stupidity he would no longer wish to go on living.

  It was an emotional response that would have been utterly and completely inconceivable to him a few weeks ago.

  Yet he knew in his despair that he was terrified that he might be too late and that when he reached the Mission House he would find Bertilla decapitated.

  He thought he would go mad, as the road through the jungle seemed endless, the movement of the troops so slow that he wanted to cry out with frustration.

  His feeling of anxiety made him so tense and on edge that it was hard for him to control his voice and reply naturally when he was spoken to.

  ‘Bertilla! Bertilla!’

  His whole being was crying out to her and he knew that it was only a question of time before the Dyaks, even though they were armed only with their sharp carved knives, would close in and overpower one woman firing at them with one gun.

  Agatha Alvinston was still firing when at last Lord Saire heard the Officer giving the order to his men to charge.

  It had been almost too dark to see as they marched beneath the trees whose branches met over the road, forming a leafy tunnel through which the moonlight could not percolate.

  But now the Mission House could be seen as clear as daylight and, as they burst in on the children’s playground, Lord Saire saw the Dyaks run away from them back into the jungle.

  There was no mistaking that they were carrying their war weapons and wearing helmets of short tufted feathers on their heads.

  He saw the moonlight glinting on their shields and on their curved knives.

  Then, as they vanished among the trees and there was only the rattle of soldiers’ guns as they fired after them, Lord Saire ran frantically towards what he saw now was the open door of the Mission House.

  He passed through it and could see on the ground the gun that Agatha Alvinston must have been using and a number of empty cartridge cases were beside it.

  But there was no sign of her and Lord Saire hurried towards the other part of the house.

  The kitchen was empty and he felt as if an icy hand clutched at his heart.