The Pearlkillers Page 14

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Anyway, hurry up, will you? We don’t have much time. And I want a drink first.’ He ran on down the stairs, moving easily, his head up, not having to look down at his feet, which she always had to do on staircases.

  She went to her room and began to pack. She started with the dresser drawers and the medicine chest in the bathroom. After that, it was only her two dresses and the trousers and extra skirt.

  She opened the wardrobe door and stepped back. A mound of shiny white material bounced out at her – part of the lower half of a very long dress. It was like uncovering a light. And there seemed so much more of it than should belong to a single dress. She tried to push it in again, so that she could get to her clothes. The voluminous heaps of it sprang back at her. The whole garment reminded her of a filled parachute and a newsreel she’d once seen, that had shown a landed airman who’d had to fight with his still-billowing chute. It was all over her. But as she reached up to squash some of the material into place, she caught sight of the bodice, still on the hanger, and stopped. She’d never seen anything like it: delicate lace, interwoven with tiny pale jewels in leaf and flower patterns, criss-crossed by knotted and curled ribbons in all shades of creamy white: tinted in pastel colours like the dawn.

  As she stood there examining the workmanship of the dress, there was a knock at the door and Regina stepped into the room. ‘I’ll help you with it,’ she announced. ‘You’ll need someone to snap up the inside straps, otherwise the folds won’t lie right. The others are no use – they always get so hysterical about parties.’

  ‘This must have taken years to make,’ Carla murmured. ‘Hundreds of people must have worked on it.’

  ‘Only about ten, I think.’

  ‘Where does it come from?’

  ‘From here. It’s been in the family for generations.’

  ‘When was it –’

  ‘Hurry up,’ Regina ordered. ‘Take off your clothes.’

  The door opened again. Kristel and the housekeeper, Maria, burst in. Kristel looked even more sickly than usual – her skin was almost like a cheese going bad; but Maria was grinning with excitement. She made a grab at the buttons of Carla’s blouse. Carla pulled away.

  ‘Calm down, Maria,’ Regina said. ‘Here, hold the train free.’

  Carla began to undress. She kept her underclothes on, and her sandals. Regina and Maria stood on chairs and lifted the dress down over her head.

  ‘The shoes,’ Kristel pointed out.

  ‘Nobody’s going to see the shoes,’ Regina said. ‘The dress is too long on her, anyway.’

  ‘And the Treasure. My God, how could we have forgotten it?’

  ‘I didn’t forget,’ Regina said. ‘Hold her hair up, will you?’

  They dragged her hair up and back, and began to stick hairpins into it. They jammed the veil comb on top and batted the netting out of the way; it floated backward like a ghostly shadow of herself. Kristel turned around and took a bottle and glass from a bag she’d left near the door. She poured out a liquid that looked like sherry, and handed the glass to Carla. ‘Drink this,’ she said. ‘It’s traditional.’

  Carla was reluctant, but the drink smelled good.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Regina told her. ‘Be careful not to spill.’

  Carla drank.

  She drank three glasses while the other women fussed over her – shoving rings on to her fingers, skewering diamonds into her sleeves, pinning and clipping sapphires across the headband of her veil. When they were ready at last, she felt drunk. They guided her out of the room, holding her skirts to protect them as she squeezed sideways through the doorway. They led her along a corridor, down a staircase and to a landing bordered by a balustrade. Down below she could see a congregation of people and heard the hum of their voices. Far off in the background she picked out Carl, who was talking to her great-uncle Theodore. She felt like yawning. Over in the right-hand corner a group of men with musical instruments sat in chairs. Such a large gathering, she thought: what was it about? And what was she doing there at all, surrounded by these weird old women? She should be at home, designing toys. Any minute now she’d begin laughing the silly laugh that came over her when she hit the best stage of inebriation – the first, where she felt terrific.

  ‘You wait here with her,’ Regina said. ‘I’ll be right back.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ Carla asked.

  ‘To get the Treasure.’

  ‘Better hurry up, before I fall asleep.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have given her the third glass,’ Regina said to Kristel. ‘Idiot.’ She stomped away, turning abruptly and entering a room just beyond the corner. The band started to tune up. Kristel snivelled miserably; she muttered that her hands were hurting.

  Carl looked up. Although he was so far away, Carla could tell that he was staring at her with an especially expectant, approving look. Some of the other people below had also caught sight of her, or rather, of the dress. The band gave out a few screeching chords, pulled itself together and swung into a jaunty tune. Regina came swishing back around the edge of the bannisters. She was holding a box covered in black velvet. She handed it to Carla, saying, ‘Here. Put it on.’

  Carla lifted the lid. It snapped open so that the contents were hidden from the others, but she could tell that in any case their attention was all on her face. She stared downward. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘The largest pearl ever discovered,’ Regina said importantly. ‘Absolutely perfect, unique, and – of course – priceless.’

  Carla smiled drunkenly down into the box, at the black velvet stand, the heavy, glittering linked chain, the elaborate gold and enamel setting, and inside it the large sunken blob of shrivelled brown matter that resembled a piece of burned meat.

  ‘Well?’ Regina said.

  ‘Wonderful,’ she answered. ‘Priceless.’

  Captain Hendrik’s Story

  Captain Hendrik’s property extended to the bay. In the twilight of dawn or evening you could imagine the house as a large, white ship stranded there from another age. Far behind it began the dense pinewoods that covered all the islands of the archipelago. Nearer to the house were ornamental lakes populated by ducks and swans. And in between lay what had once been famous sunken gardens full of exotic plants that generations of Hendriks had brought back from the New World when it was still considered new.

  They had been explorers for hundreds of years. An offshoot of the family had even been related to the Dane, Vitus Bering, after whom the Bering Strait was named, and who – while in the service of Peter the Great – had proven that the landmasses of America and Asia were separated from each other. Hendriks had discovered rivers, islands, animals, fish, orchids, trees, and given them names as Adam is said to have done in Paradise. They were, of course, the men of the family. The women stayed at home.

  The women were brought up to be good listeners. From childhood they were used to seeing great-uncles push the saltcellars and pepperpots around the tablecloth in order to give a picture of where the cavalry had been or how the ship had come about close to a treacherous sandbar lying just off the hidden rocks. They learned how to do all the secondary work: making neat copies of the notes and logbooks, mounting the sketches, collating the figures, planting the tubers and bulbs. They were glad to do it. They admired their manly, adventurous relatives.

  And for a long while all branches of the family flourished, as did the transplanted tropical seedlings. But then, suddenly, there was a period of financial experimentation which turned out badly, unrestrained speculation to gain back what had been lost, and subsequent safe investments that diminished every year. Some of the land was sold. Huge tracts of the mainland went, to be forested by lumber companies and turned into paper. Many fine pieces of furniture and silverware, and also paintings, were taken from the house to the auction rooms.

  And the great source of wealth, the men, came to a stop. All at once the family produced only daughters.

 
It was at this point that Captain Anders Hendrik decided to mount his own expedition. He was thirty-eight years old, had a young wife, Lina, and two small daughters, ten and eight years old. His mother, her two sisters, and his two great-aunts – sisters of his grandfather – all still lived in the house, together with his widowed sister, Elsie, and her nine-year-old daughter, Erika. After plans for the voyage had been drawn up, his wife’s younger sister, Louise, joined them, and his own cousin, Sophie; both of the girls were attached to young men who would be accompanying the captain. That made twelve: twelve female members of the family in one house. In addition to them, there were six maids, a cook, a butler, a gardener and a gardener’s boy, and – farther away, out in the forest – three gamekeepers.

  Anders expected to be gone for at least two years. He was counting on that. Before anything happened, therefore, the lies had started: he lied about simply wanting to be free from so many women. And they lied about not being hurt by his actions. Without anyone saying anything on either side, it was understood that the women were prepared to forgive him if he managed to make them proud of him. That would mean success, and one which probably ought to entail some kind of replenishment of the family coffers.

  He was taking five other men with him. Martin Brandt, a friend from his schooldays, had gone into the navy with him as a cadet and then changed his mind and become an astronomer instead. He had suffered a series of reverses and misfortunes during the past three years and had seized on the idea of the expedition as his last hope for an active life. Anders’ sister-in-law, Louise, was engaged to one of the younger men, a scientist named Ib, interested principally in the history of medicine, who saw in the trip a good opportunity to establish a name for himself. The Germans and English had long since sent out explorers, who had reported back that Central and South America were virtually untapped, even unstudied. Perhaps the Indians in the part of the world they were going to had drugs and potions unknown to Europe and the north of the continent; he would be able to try out new cures. He would have plenty to do, even though his field would not embrace so much new information as that of Cousin Sophie’s young Count, Johann Hellstrom, who was the botanist of the company. He was bringing along many large and splendid manuscript books and boxes of paints, as well as a great store of tubs and protective crates for the collecting of specimens.

  The crew had been picked by Martin, so they were all right. And the ship was of a very dashing appearance – just like the white seabird of Anders’ dreams. He had insisted on the look of romance, despite the fact that the yacht had steam power. Actually it had both sail and steam. It had everything. But it seemed to be exactly as if it had come from the boatyards a hundred years before. You had to look carefully, and in the right places, to see just how modern and scientific the design was.

  When Anders first saw her, his heart turned over. Already he imagined her anchored off tropical shores or racing before the winds. His mother had told him, ‘It’s like the boats in your grandfather’s day’, yet everything was as fresh as the instant. To see such a ship in the water was like being present at the return of an exiled ruler.

  His officers approved. And they liked the combination of the out-of-date, which was lovely, and the brand new, which would be safe and efficient: the result disappointed no one. But the builders had been chosen by Anders’ cousin, Gustav, and everybody should have known better than to depend on any object or person of his choice.

  Gustav was charming. Everyone liked him. He’d been a beautiful child, and extremely alert – so bright and clever, in fact, that it was a long time before anyone realized that he wasn’t really very intelligent. He’d start an idea and drop it half-way through. It was generally held that that was a sign of frivolity – that Gustav was a natural dilettante; but it would have been truer to say that his mind, his heart, his attention just didn’t have the staying-power. Single-handedly he had run his fortunes into the ground; luckily the rest of his family were a good-looking and attractive set of people who found no difficulty in making friends, so that before he ruined everyone completely, the other men acquired professions and the women husbands; they had their small apartments and houses, although the great estates were gone, as was the old mansion up in the north, which had been – of all the houses the captain had ever visited – his favourite. He himself still enjoyed Gustav’s company; he would ordinarily never have considered taking him on any voyage, but Gustav had written to him and asked especially: he was in some sort of trouble again, naturally. They were the same age, but Gustav had had three wives and nearly a dozen children, all of whom always needed money, and as soon as they had realized that application to Gustav was useless, they had transferred their attentions to any relatives who would listen. Hendrik’s wife, Lina, was of the opinion that Gustav’s ménage was partly responsible for the fact that their own bank balance was sinking. But one couldn’t, he kept saying, let people starve.

  Gustav arrived five days before the expedition was set to depart. He brought too many belongings, which he insisted were essential to his comfort, as well as a servant – a dark, curly-haired, gypsy-like boy named Sten. Sten, it appeared, was also indispensable. Room would have to be made for him on board.

  ‘This is a scientific expedition, Gustav,’ the captain told him. ‘Everything we take with us has to be used. If we transport a jar, it should contain food on the way out and seeds on the way back. We’ve got to take drinking-water. We don’t have room for extra boxes – certainly not for another person, who’s going to be eating and drinking all the way across the Atlantic.’

  ‘But Sten is my right-hand man,’ Gustav said. He smiled in the same agreeably infectious way in which he’d greeted Anders when they had met for school vacations at their parents’ houses. He said he was writing a ‘history of the world’, but that he could never arrange his thoughts satisfactorily until he’d first explained them out loud to Sten. Sten was the perfect listener: he’d changed Gustav’s life. ‘You can’t turn him away,’ he added. ‘He’s had such a hard life. You can’t imagine how he was mistreated before I hired him. It’s no fun to be a servant in this world, Anders, you know that. You and I have been fortunate.’

  ‘Yes,’ Anders agreed. Gustav could always bring up the right subject at the crucial time. Sten looked at the two of them as they stood talking at a distance from him. His mournful, small-featured face showed patient hopelessness.

  ‘He was a circus boy,’ Gustav said. ‘They trained him brutally, to be able to do all the tricks. They broke his back, Anders.’

  ‘Is that possible?’

  ‘To make him capable of doing those running back-bends – you’ve seen them. All his joints. His own father did it. It was a large family – they needed the money. And when they moved on, they sold him. He stayed with the circus in Hungary. He’s never had a friend, Anders.’

  The captain had reached the stage of nervous excitement and physical exhaustion where he had stopped measuring and counting and wondering if one more of this or that would make a difference. If his friend, Martin, had been there, neither Sten nor Gustav would have set foot on the boat; as it was, Anders finally allowed both of them to come along. And all their luggage was stowed, too.

  He didn’t want a big ceremony. ‘Let the celebrations wait for the homecoming,’ he said to Lina, but she insisted. All the children in the district had been looking forward to it for weeks, she told him – and particularly his two little daughters, Hannah and Astrid, and their cousin, Erika.

  A gigantic quayside party was arranged. It went on for three days. The whole of the town seemed to be there, including every newspaper reporter in the country. Waiters and waitresses distributed food, beer and wine. The captain couldn’t imagine who was paying for it all.

  He was unhappy about the festivities. If people wanted to go off and enjoy themselves, that was fine, but in the meantime, let him get away to the New World without fuss. It was always a mistake to drum up interest like that for a departure; after everyone got re
ady, there was sure to be a delay – sometimes it could be a matter of days or weeks, depending on the ship, the winds, the settling of the cargo.

  But this time everything went beautifully. The yacht pulled away from the harbour like a swan gliding across the surface of a lake, and all the relatives, reporters, tavernkeepers and other townspeople waved frantically. The band played, voices sang, handkerchiefs were held up and fluttered, people cried. The weather was perfect; the day all blue and white, sunlit and sparkling. And the captain soon got over the sadness that had come upon him as he’d said goodbye to his children. His younger daughter, Astrid, who usually liked the ritual of farewell just as much as that of greeting, had begun to cry piteously into his neck and to tell him over and over again in a heartbroken voice, ‘I don’t want you to go.’

  *

  He was away for years, during which time the family fortunes fell even lower. The great quayside party had, of course, been paid for by Anders himself, although he had known nothing of the arrangements. Lina and his mother had organized everything with the help of the bank, who were very glad to give them a loan. Before the ship had disappeared over the horizon, the women had spent all their extra money for emergencies and some that should have been used for repairing the house. The ordinary running costs would be taken care of, but there would be no summer holiday, no treats nor new clothes, fresh tutors for the children, trips into town to see the theatre, parties for friends. They still thought the voyage would last between two and three years. They expected news within four months at the latest. But nothing came; and nothing, and nothing.

  *

  The silence lasted ten years. Anders’ mother died, and her sisters, his two aunts. The two old great-aunts lived on, but the middle generation was gone from the house. One of the gamekeepers got an infected foot and he too died. Two of the younger housemaids married and moved away. The family quarrelled with all of Gustav’s relatives and severed communications with them. After the first three years, the Hendriks seldom heard from anyone connected with the other men who had sailed on the voyage.