Beyond Sunrise Page 17

  Tipping back his head, Pierre Poirot stared up at her, his jaw slack with bemusement. “You are Miss India McKnight?”

  She held out her hand. “How do you do?”

  After the briefest of hesitations, Captain Poirot took the proffered hand in a limp clasp, quickly released. “And you say this man did not kidnap you?”

  “That is what I say, yes.”

  A light feminine laugh drew everyone’s attention, for a moment, to Françine Poirot. “Really, Jacques,” she said softly, her head tipping to one side in a practiced artifice that reminded Jack of a small bird contemplating a choice morsel. “I would not have thought her your type. Yet you appear to have seduced her quite effectively.”

  Pierre Poirot’s skin darkened perceptably as a muscle jumped along his suddenly tightened jaw. He did not look at his wife. “Thank you for your information, Mademoiselle McKnight. But Monsieur Ryder is still under arrest.”

  “This is absurd,” said India in her best Sunday-school teacher voice.

  A curt jerk of the commissioner’s chin brought the gendarmes in a slow advance across the compound. “You can go willingly,” he said to Jack, “or you can fight.”

  “Well,” said Jack, glancing from the gendarmes on the veranda to those still in the garden, “since you put it that way . . .” He ducked and stepped back to bring his fist up into the nose of the first gendarme who reached for him. “I guess I’ll fight.”

  There were only five of them, after all, and Jack had grown up with four older brothers who’d taught him all he needed to know about using his fists and his feet. He tripped the second gendarme, then sent the third spinning back into the first as, blood spilling down his face, the bellowing Frenchman came at Jack again in a blind, angry rush.

  Wrapping his hands around the rail, Jack vaulted off the veranda to land in a hibiscus- and fern-breaking crouch in the garden below. A roundhouse kick in the stomach sent the fourth gendarme back into the fifth, and bought Jack enough time to deal with one of the men from the veranda who came charging down the stairs with a howl of rage. Jack stopped him with left clip that caught the man under the chin and sent him sailing into a bed of rioting zinnias. Spinning around, Jack knocked down the gendarme who had just managed to come flailing out from beneath the prone body of his comrade.

  A sweat-dampened lock of hair fell into Jack’s eyes and he shook it back, assessing the distance to the open gates and the welcoming darkness of the jungle beyond. But behind him, Pierre Poirot picked up one of Georges Lefevre’s clay flowerpots and dropped it in a shower of dirt and crimson geranium petals and cracking terracotta onto the top of Jack’s head.

  He saw a flash of brilliant light, felt a stunning wave of pain. Then he saw nothing, and felt nothing.

  A cool, wet cloth touched the back of Jack’s head.

  He became aware, slowly, of the fact that he was lying on his stomach, his nose pressed against what must be a mattress, thin and noisome and thrown directly on a flagged floor. He tried to move, but his muscles were curiously unresponsive and his gut heaved alarmingly, taking away whatever inclination he might have had to move again or even open his eyes.

  He contented himself with a soft groan.

  “And you call me stubborn and stupid,” scolded a familiar, stern voice, the Scots accent unusually thick. “I’d like to know how you’d describe that stunt.”

  Jack heard a trickle of water, then the cloth touched the back of his head again, stinging like crazy. “Ouch,” he said. “That hurts.”

  “Stop whining. The flesh is broken, and there’s dirt in the wound that must be cleaned out. The last thing you can afford at this point in your adventurous and disreputable career is a tropical infection.”

  Jack opened his eyes. He had a vague, pain-filled vision of India’s tight, concerned face leaning over him. Behind her rose nondescript piles of shadowy objects and the contrastingly bright glare from a small, barred window. Then his stomach heaved again and he squeezed his eyes shut against the light. “Where am I?”

  “Locked in the storeroom of the local Chinese trader’s shop. It seems to be the most secure establishment in the settlement.”

  “It usually is.”

  “How’s your stomach?”

  “Rebelling. Why?”

  “I’m afraid you might have a concussion.”

  By clenching his teeth, Jack was able to summon up the courage to roll over and open his eyes. A dusty ceiling swam sickeningly overhead, then the world righted itself, and he sighed. “What happened to Georges? Did anyone say?”

  India dipped her cloth in the water again, and laid it on his forehead. It felt cool, and so good he changed his mind about telling her to stop fussing over him. “I gather he was recalled to France. Something about a duel.”

  “And the powers that be decided to replace him with Napoleon Poirot.” Jack gave another low laugh. “Now, how’s that for irony?”

  “I thought the commissioner’s name was Pierre.”

  “It is.”

  “Huh.” She stood abruptly and went to stand by the window. “Madame Poirot tells me her husband limps because you shot him.”

  He wished she’d come away from that damned window. The light hurt his eyes, and he had to twist around in an awkward angle to see her. “He challenged me to a duel.”

  She swung to face him, her elbows cradled in her palms, her features in shadow. “Are all French trade commissioners so enamored of the practice of dueling, or only the ones who have the dubious distinction of encountering you?”

  Jack sighed. “Georges Lefevre wasn’t trying to kill me. Napoleon Poirot was.”

  “Why? For calling him Napoleon, or for sleeping with his wife?”

  Jack slewed around on the torn, filthy mattress to stare at her, but he still couldn’t see more than the sun-dazzled outline of her head. “How the hell did you know that? Did she tell you?”

  “Do you think she needed to?”

  “Obviously not.”

  “One might have expected even you to have more sense than to seduce the French commissioner’s wife.”

  “He wasn’t a commissioner at the time. And you’ve got it all wrong. She seduced me.”

  She let out another one of those scornful huffs of hers, like she didn’t believe him or something. And it came to him in a kind of wonderment that she was jealous. He might even have smiled about it, if the back of his head hadn’t felt as if he’d been scalped. He rolled gingerly onto his side. “Come away from that damned window, would you? The sun hurts my eyes.”

  “The wages of sin,” she said crisply. But she came away from the window.

  She was still wearing her Expedition Outfit, although she had washed her face, and wound that glorious fall of thick, chestnut-shot hair back up into its customary neat, controlled chignon. “How long have I been in here?” he asked suddenly.

  “Less than an hour. The Barracuda is expected after six, when the tides change.”

  Jack nodded. The tides here in the South Pacific were solar, cresting regularly at midnight and noon. “I’m surprised Napoleon let you in to see me.”

  “He didn’t want to. But I reminded him that you were a British subject, and as the only other British subject currently on the island, I had a responsibility to see to your needs.”

  “I wouldn’t have expected that argument to impress him much.”

  “It didn’t.” Her lips curled into that slow, secret smile that he liked, the one that had first told him she wasn’t nearly as proper and starchy as she chose to appear. “So I thought it best to let him know about the chapter I was thinking of adding to my book, the one about the shocking corruption and abuse of power prevalent among the French colonies in the South Seas. That convinced him.”

  Jack laughed softly. “You’re a dangerous woman, Miss McKnight.”

  Her smile faded slowly, leaving an intensely earnest expression in its place. “Does the Admiralty really mean to hang you?”

  Jack met her gaze squarely. �
��They do indeed.”

  “For causing the sinking of your ship, and the death of all those men?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you do it?”

  He looked away, his chest lifting as he sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Those men who died . . . they were my shipmates, my friends. And yet . . .” He paused, his jaw hardening. “I was glad to see them die. Yes.”

  She came to kneel on the hard, dirty floor beside him, her features pinched with an unexpected sadness. “They had just killed your wife, and your unborn child,” she said softly, her hand coming out to touch his shoulder, briefly, before drifting away. “I can understand that you might in your grief have found some grim satisfaction in what happened to them.” She paused. “But did you cause it?”

  He swung his head sideways to look at her. “And if I said I didn’t, would you believe me?”

  She didn’t even blink. “Yes.”

  “Not many would.”

  “Perhaps.” She held his gaze steadily. “Did you deliberately sink that ship?”

  He swallowed, as if he could somehow swallow the old, old pain that welled up from deep within him. “I was responsible, yes.”

  Reaching out, she touched her fingertips to his lips. “I didn’t ask if you felt responsible. I asked if you deliberately sank that ship.”

  He could hear, in the distance, the sound of the surf crashing against the offshore reef, and the rustling of the fronds of the wind-ruffled palm trees edging the beach. Even here, in the Chinese trader’s locked storeroom, he could smell the familiar, evocative fragrances of the South Pacific, of frangipani and gardenia and orange blossom, and, beneath it all, the briny breath of the sea. A strange, weightless kind of dizziness engulfed him, until along with the thrum of the surf and the whispering of the palms, he thought he heard, for one brief, heart-breaking moment, the sweet lilting of a woman’s laughter, lost all too quickly in a roar of guns and the sucking, deadly cold rush of water.

  “No,” he said at last, his lips moving against her fingers. “No, I didn’t.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  THE STORE WAS run by a tall, incredibly-thin Chinese man named Johnny Amok. He had pale, parchmentlike skin and a pair of gold-rimmed glasses he wore perched on the end of his nose, and could have been anywhere between fifty and eighty in age. While a gendarme stood guard, it was Mr. Amok who had wielded the long iron key that admitted India to Jack Ryder’s prison, and Mr. Amok who locked the thick door again when she left—all without uttering a word.

  “I should like to make a few purchases,” India said when the trader would have turned away.

  He paused, then nodded silently, leaving her to follow as he shuffled up the muddy, hibiscus- and acacia-shaded path that led to the trading post’s crooked veranda.

  Inside, the shop itself was every bit as dusty and cluttered as the storeroom that served as Jack Ryder’s prison. Looking around, India saw hemp bales and fencing wire, cook pots and tins of canned beef, all jumbled together in what appeared to be an untidy confusion. “First of all,” she said, extracting from her pocket the list she had prepared, “I require a dress. No, not that sort,” she added briskly when he held up a dark red, voluminous Mother Hubbard. They were ugly, shapeless things, Mother Hubbards, developed by the missionaries to clothe the scandalous nudity previously practiced by island women. India had never considered herself vain, but she had her limits, and she drew the line at wearing a Mother Hubbard. “What else do you have?”

  Mr. Amok regarded her unblinkingly for a moment, then turned away. After some minutes spent rummaging through an odd assortment of yellowing, smashed boxes, he held up a fine white linen shirt, meticulously worked with neat stitches and little pleats down the front. It was beautiful—but it had never been intended for a woman.

  “That’s a man’s shirt,” India said.

  Mr. Amok shrugged, and put it away. Then he turned to look at her expectantly, his hands folded into his long, flowing sleeves.

  She stared back at him. “You don’t have anything else?”

  He shook his head.

  India glanced at the next item on her list, new pantalets, and sighed. “How much is the shirt?”

  She waited, expecting him—finally—to open his mouth and say something, but he didn’t. Picking up a pencil, he scratched a figure on a slate lying on the counter, and shoved it toward her.

  She’d come to the conclusion the man simply couldn’t speak when, twenty minutes later, as he was wrapping her purchases up into a brown paper bundle, he suddenly peered at her over the rims of his glasses and said in perfect, Australian-accented English, “Are you Jack’s friend?”

  Caught in the process of opening her purse, India jerked in surprise, the movement sending a shower of coins to bounce and ring all over his counter. “Yes,” she answered unhesitatingly. “Why?”

  He regarded her steadily for a moment, his dark eyes unblinking. Then he answered her question with another question. “How good of a friend?”

  Since the trading settlement of La Rochelle lacked anything even remotely resembling a rest house, India had no choice but to accept the commissioner and his wife’s reluctantly offered hospitality in the French compound’s bungalow.

  “I would have lent you one of my own gowns to wear,” said Madame Poirot, lingering in the doorway of the small guest room while a young, dark-skinned girl in a loose-flowing gown of brightly patterned cotton hauled in bucket after bucket of lukewarm water to fill the tin hip bath, “but you are so much bigger than I, n’est pas?”

  “N’est pas,” agreed India, unwrapping her brown paper bundle. “Fortunately, Mr. Amok was able to furnish me with a shirt and sundry other necessities.”

  Françine Poirot crinkled her little nose as India spread her purchases over the white counterpane of the high, turned-post bed. “But it is a man’s shirt. And—alors! A man’s smallclothes.”

  “I noticed that.”

  “I suppose you do not mind,” she said slowly, as if reaching to try to understand this enormous peculiarity, “since you already wear the trousers.”

  “It’s a split skirt.” Turning away, India emptied her knapsack of the few personal items she carried. “Not trousers.”

  “And do you wear it always, this split skirt?”

  “Only when trekking through jungles, or in other rugged terrain.”

  “You do this often?” The shock in the other woman’s voice was profound.

  “It’s how I make my living. I’m a travel writer.”

  “It is a strange thing for a woman to do, to willingly travel to such dangerous and unpleasant places.”

  India looked up. “I enjoy it.”

  Françine Poirot blinked at her. “You never married?”

  “No.”

  She sighed in sympathy. “C’est dommage.” It’s a pity.

  “Is it?” It struck India as a strange thing for the woman to say, given the obviously unhappy state of her own marriage. But then, for most women, an existence outside of marriage was unthinkable. They identified themselves by the man to whom they were attached, and so did society. “Tell me,” India asked, “how do you happen to know Jack Ryder?”

  A secret smile played around the other woman’s lips. “My father is the commissioner in Tahiti, at Papeete. Jacques spent some months there once.”

  Taking the pins from her chignon, India let her hair fall about her shoulders, and set to work brushing it. “And did you find him a good lover?” she asked with studied casualness.

  The boldness of the question brought a heat of embarrassment to India’s cheeks, for she was not at all the sort of woman who normally indulged in discussions of this nature. But it was obvious Françine Poirot found nothing either untoward or awkward in the topic. As India watched, the other woman’s lips parted, her half-closed eyes gleaming with the banked fires of a long-ago passion and remembered ecstasy. And India, her brush clutched forgotten in her hand, knew a swift, unexpectedly vicious stab of
emotion that left her throat feeling tight and painful.

  “Mon Dieu,” said Françine on a soft, breathy sigh, her smile turning wistful as she wrapped her arms across her breasts and hugged herself. “I have never known another such as he.”

  India stared at the other woman, and found herself struggling to suppress all sorts of improper questions that threatened to come tumbling off the tip of her tongue. What makes a man a good lover, as opposed to a bad one? How was Jack Ryder different from the other men you’ve known? And, How many have you known? Instead she said, only a slight tremble in her voice betraying the extent of her agitation, “Then why didn’t you marry him?”

  Françine’s peal of laughter was instantaneous and unforced. “Marry Jacques? Mais non.” Her open hand flashed through the air in a very Gallic gesture of dismissal. “He is an adventurer, a renegade, a penniless fugitive. Vraimant, he is dashing and exciting, but one does not marry men such as this.” She wrinkled her nose in that way she had that somehow managed to be both attractive and endearing, whereas India knew that if she tried it, she’d only succeed in looking as if she’d smelled something foul. “At the moment, Pierre’s position is not so good, but he is his uncle’s heir. One day, he will be rich.”

  Of course, thought India; in a world where a woman is identified by her husband, it made sense that the choice of that husband be guided largely by financial considerations.

  “Besides,” the Frenchwoman added, a wry smile touching her lips, “Jacques never asked me.”

  India met her gaze in the mirror. “Then why the duel?”

  Françine jerked her shoulder in a dismissive gesture. “Pierre was jealous.”

  Pierre was obviously still jealous, India thought, but she didn’t say it.

  Françine tipped her head sideways, her expression growing thoughtful as she studied India. “I would not have thought it, but I see you are a romantic, n’est pas? You would marry for love.”

  “I have no intention of marrying at all,” India said, jerking her brush through her hair in long, quick strokes.

  “But only because you have not been in love, hmmm?”