Trade Wind by M. M. Kaye Read Free Book Online

looked the prettier for it. “Yes, indeed. Do you know, your wife is the first person who ever called me ‘honey’? Papa never called me by pet names. I was always ‘Hero’ to him. He said it was a beautiful name: and it is, I guess. But…sometimes I missed the pet names.”
    Her face was suddenly as wistful as her voice, and she gave a sharp sigh, and then remembering what it was that she had come to ask him, said more briskly: “Captain Thaddaeus, how much longer is this going to last? This weather, I mean? We don’t seem to be moving at all. Mr Stoddart says he does not believe we have advanced more than a mile these last two days, and that at this rate we shall not reach Zanzibar within the month.”
    “Maybe not,” agreed Captain Fullbright placidly. “But there ain’t nothing we can do about it, that’s for sure. Unless Mr Stoddart cares to try a bit of rowing! You tell him that he’ll soon get all the movement he wants. And maybe a sight more.”
    “Why do you say that?” asked Hero, interested. “Do you mean we shall have a wind soon?”
    “I wouldn’t be surprised. Glass is falling.”
    “But you said that yesterday, and it’s still as calm as a duckpond.”
    “And the glass is still falling. There’s dirty weather brewing, and I don’t like it I’ll sure be mighty glad to see Zanzibar, and that’s a fact.”
    “Yes, indeed!” agreed Hero warmly. “It’s the one place I have always meant to see, ever since my father showed it to me on a globe when I was quite young—five or six…”
    She turned to look out across the hot, sun-baked deck and the motionless shadows of the mast and the standing rigging, and thought of that long ago day. And of other things too: the lamplit kitchen at Hollis Hill with its dark, beamed ceiling and rows of copper pans, and the whispering voice of old Biddy Jason who had told her her fortune.
    For years Hero had believed whole-heartedly in those mysterious predictions; though once free of the schoolroom she had pretended to laugh at them. Yet now they were actually coming true! Or had she herself made them come true because of what old Biddy had told her? It was a debatable point. But at least one thing was certain. Here she was, sailing half way round the world to an island full of black men, where there must be plenty of work for her to do: and Clayton Mayo to help her do it!
    She turned impulsively to the Captain: “You’ve been to Zanzibar several times, Captain Thaddaeus. What is it like? Will you tell me about it, please?”
    “Well, now: it’s no more’n half the size of Long Island—around fifty miles long by ten wide, I’d say—and it lies near enough to the mainland for folk in the city to see the hills of Africa on a clear day. Its nearest neighbour is an island called Pemba which is even smaller and a heap wilder, and—”
    Hero shook her head and said: “No, those are not at all the sort of things I want to hear about. I want to know what it’s like.”
    Captain Fullbright replied unhelpfully that she’d soon be finding that out for herself and, for his part, he preferred to let people get their own impressions instead of handing them his spectacles to look through. But Miss Hollis was not to be fobbed off so easily, and seating herself with some deliberation, she announced calmly that in her opinion looking through other people’s spectacles could be very instructive, since it would often show one a viewpoint that was totally different to one’s own: “And I find it interesting to know how other people see things. You have to know, if you’re going to do any good in this world.”
    Captain Fullbright raised a pair of bushy eyebrows and looked faintly surprised: “Good? What sort of good?”
    “Helping people. Setting things to rights.”
    “ Humph . What sort o’ things?”
    Miss Hollis sketched a small impatient gesture: “Slavery. Ignorance. Dirt and disease. I don’t believe in sitting around with folded hands and saying