As they half ran along the sands, Joseph said, “This house should have been
Ours: the people of Bow Island.
His restlessness on the subject of the museum struck Jemima anew since her conversation with Coralie Harrison. What would a man — or a woman, for that matter — do for an inheritance? And there was more than one kind of inheritance. Wasn’t a national heritage as important to some people as a personal inheritance to others? Joseph Archer was above all a patriotic Bo’lander. And he had not known of the change of will on the morning after Miss Izzy’s death. She herself had evidence of that. Might a man like Joseph Archer, a man who had already risen in his own world by sheer determination, decide to take the law into his own hands in order to secure the museum for his people while there was still time?
But to kill the old lady who had befriended him as a boy? Batter her to death? As he strode along, so tall in the moonlight, Joseph was suddenly a complete and thus menacing enigma to Jemima.
They had reached the promontory, had scrambled up the rocks, and had got as far as the first terrace when all the lights in the house went out. It was as though a switch had been thrown. Only the cold eerie glow of the moon over the sea behind them remained to illuminate the bushes, now wildly overgrown, and the sagging balus- trades.
But Joseph strode on, helping Jemima up the flights of stone steps, some of them deeply cracked and uneven. In the darkness, Jemima could just see that the windows of the drawing room were still open.
There had to be someone in there behind the ragged red-brocade curtains which had been stained by Miss Izzy’s blood.
Joseph, holding Jemima’s hand, pulled her through the center window.
There was a short cry like a suppressed scream and then a low sound, as if someone was laughing at them there in the dark. An instant later, all the lights were snapped on at once.
Tina was standing at the door, her hand at the switch. She wore a white bandage on her head like a turban — and she wasn’t laughing, she was sobbing.
“Oh, it’s you, Jo-seph and Je-mi-ma Shore.” For the first time, Jemima was aware of the sing-song Bo’lander note in Tina’s voice. “I was so fright-ened.”
“Are you all right, Tina?” asked Jemima hastily, to cover the fact that she had been quite severely frightened herself. The atmosphere of angry tension between the two other people in the room, so different in looks yet both of them, as it happened, called Archer, was almost palpable. She felt she was in honor bound to try to relieve it.
“Are you all alone?”
“The police said I could come.” Tina ignored the question. “They have finished with everything here. And besides—” her terrified sobs had vanished, there was something deliberately provocative about her as she moved toward them “why ever not?” To neither of them did she need to elaborate. The words “since it’s all mine”
hung in the air.
Joseph spoke for the first time since they had entered the room.
“I want to look at the house,” he said harshly.
“Jo-seph Archer, you get out of here. Back where you came from, back to your off-ice and that’s not a great fine house.” Then she addressed Jemima placatingly, in something more like her usual sweet manner. “I’m sorry, but, you see, we’ve not been friends since way back. And, besides, you gave me such a shock.”
Joseph swung on his heel. “I’ll see you at the funeral, Miss Archer.”
He managed to make the words sound extraordinarily threatening.
That night it seemed to Jemima Shore that she hardly slept, although the threads of broken, half remembered dreams disturbed her and indicated that she must actually have fallen into some kind of doze in the hour before dawn. The light was still gray when she looked out of her shutters. The tops of the tall palms were bending — there was quite a wind.
Back on her bed, Jemima tried to recall just what she had been dreaming. There had been some pattern to it: she knew there had.
She wished rather angrily that light would suddenly break through into her sleepy mind as the sun was shortly due to break through the eastern fringe of palms on the hotel estate. No gentle, slow-developing, rosy-fingered dawn for the Caribbean: one brilliant low ray was a herald of what was to come, and then, almost immediately, hot relentless sunshine for the rest of the day. She needed that kind of instant clarity herself.
Hostility. That was part of it all — the nature of hostility. The hostility, for example, between Joseph and Tina Archer the night before, so virulent and public — with herself as the public — that it might almost have been managed for effect.
Then the management of things: Tina Archer, always managing, always a schemer (as Coralie Harrison had said — and Joseph Archer, too). That brought her to the other couple in this odd, four-pointed drama: the Harrisons, brother and sister, or rather
More hostility. Greg, who had once loved Tina and now loathed her. Joseph, who had once also perhaps loved Tina. Coralie, who had once perhaps — very much perhaps, this one — loved Joseph and certainly loathed Tina. Cute and clever little Tina, the Archer Tomb, the carved figures of Sir Valentine and his wife, the inscription. Jemima was beginning to float back into sleep, as the four figures, all Bo’landers, all sharing some kind of common past, began to dance to a calypso whose wording, too, was confused:
An extraordinarily loud noise on the corrugated metal roof above her head recalled her, trembling, to her senses. The racket had been quite immense, almost as if there had been an explosion or at least a missile fired at the chalet. The thought of a missile made her realize that it had in fact been a missile: it must have been a coconut which had fallen in such a startling fashion on the corrugated roof. Guests were officially warned by the hotel against sitting too close under the palm trees, whose innocuous-looking fronds could suddenly dispense their heavily lethal nuts. COCONUTS CAN CAUSE INJURY ran the printed notice.
That kind of blow on my head would certainly have caused injury, thought Jemima, if not death.
Injury, if not death. And the Archer Tomb: my only wife.
At that moment, straight on cue, the sun struck low through the bending fronds to the east and onto her shutters. And Jemima realized not only why it had been done but how it had been done. Who of them all had been responsible for consigning Miss Izzy Archer to the graveyard in the sun.
The scene by the Archer Tomb a few hours later had that same strange mixture of English tradition and Bo’lander exoticism which had intrigued Jemima on her first visit. Only this time she had a deeper, sadder purpose than sheer tourism. Traditional English hymns were sung at the service, but outside a steel band was playing at Miss Izzy’s request. As one who had been born on the island, she had asked for a proper Bo’lander funeral.
The Bo’landers, attending in large numbers, were by and large dressed with that extreme formality — dark suits, white shirts, ties, dark dresses, dark straw hats, even white gloves — which Jemima had observed in churchgoers of a Sunday and in the Bo’lander children, all of them neatly uniformed on their way to school. No Bow Island T-shirts were to be seen, although many of the highly colored intricate and lavish wreaths were in the bow shape of the island’s logo. The size of the crowd was undoubtedly a genuine mark of respect. Whatever the disappointments of the will to their government, to the Bo’landers Miss Izzy Archer had been part of their heritage.
Tina Archer wore a black scarf wound round her head which almost totally concealed her bandage. Joseph Archer, standing far apart from her and not looking in her direction, looked both elegant and formal in his office clothes, a respectable member of the government. The Harrisons stood together, Coralie with her head bowed.
Greg’s defiant aspect, head lifted proudly, was clearly intended to give the lie to any suggestions that he had not been on the best of terms with the woman whose body was now being lowered into the family tomb.
As the coffin — so small and thus so touching — vanished from view, there was a sigh from the mourners. They began to sing again: a hymn, but with the steel band gently echoing the tune in the background.
Jemima moved discreetly in the crowd and stood by the side of the tall man.
“You’ll never be able to trust her,” she said in a low voice. “She’s managed you before, she’ll manage you
