Children of the Storm

niches, harsh, sharp, a mysterious monolith against the sweet Caribbean horizon, almost a sentient creature lying in wait on the brow of that tropic hill. She began to wonder, more seriously than before, if her old college roommate had been right about the dangers in coming to this place…
        “You'll like it,” Peterson said.
        She said nothing.
        “This is God's country, in the true sense,” Peterson said, still anxious to repair her mood, which he felt responsible for damaging. “Nothing bad can happen here.”
        She wished she could be sure of that.

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    TWO
        
        Henry Dalton, the house butler, came down to the small boat dock to meet them, pushing an aluminum luggage cart over the uneven boards of the little pier. He was sixty-five, but looked ten years older, a slight man with snow white hair, a grizzled face, hard black eyes that looked far too young for the bushy white eyebrows that arched above them like senior citizen caterpillers. Though he must have been nearly six feet tall, he seemed smaller than Sonya's five-feet, four-inches, because he drew in on himself, shrank himself, like a dried fruit, as if he could protect himself from any further aging merely by rolling up and letting the world pass over him.
        When he spoke, his voice was tight and dry too, almost quarrelsome. “Henry Dalton,” he said, not offering her his hand.
        She smiled and said, “Sonya Carter.” And she did offer him her hand.
        He looked at it as if it were a snake, wrinkled his face even more, until he was in danger of losing his eyes and mouth altogether in some sharp crease of flesh. But at last he reached out and took her hand, held it briefly in his long, bony fingers, then merely dropped it as a man might drop a curious seashell he had lifted from the beach and studied and grown bored with.
        He said, “I came to get your luggage.”
        Bill Peterson had already carried her bags from the Lady Jane, and now he carefully stacked them on the metal cart, his brown arms bunched with muscle, his thick hair falling slightly forward, into his eyes, as he bent to the task.
        “This way, then,” Henry said when the cart was loaded. He turned, gripping the wheeled cart, and led them back toward the mansion, walking ramrod stiff. He was wearing dark slacks and a white, short-sleeved shirt made to be worn outside his trousers. Though a gentle breeze mussed Sonya's hair, it did not stir the hem of Henry's white shirt -almost as if Nature herself were wary about disturbing the old man's dignity.
        Sonya and Peterson fell back a few steps, out of the butler's hearing, and she said, “You didn't warn me about him!”
        Peterson smiled and shook his head. “Most of the time, Henry's as pleasant an old coot as you could meet. Occasionally, though, he seems to vent all his stored-up antagonisms, and he has a bad day. Everyone avoids him on a bad day, and it's like it never happened. Unfortunately, he's chosen your first day here as his first bad day in weeks.”
        They reached the front porch steps, where Peterson and Henry worked together to maneuver the cart onto the porch floor, and then they went into the foyer of the Dougherty house, through a heavy screen door and a heavier mahogany door, into air conditioned coolness that was sweeter than the false relief of the passenger terminal at the docks of Pointe-a-Pitre.
        “How lovely!” Sonya said, without reservation.
        And the foyer did seem to promise a marvelous house beyond. It was paneled in the darkest teak wood imaginable, almost black, carpeted in a rich red shag that made her feel as if she were in the dark chamber of a furnace with hot coals beneath her feet and, paradoxically, cool air all around her. Original oil paintings, of many different schools, were tastefully arranged on the walls of the small room, the pieces of naturalism and surrealism somehow blending when they should not have, complementing one another when they should have clashed. The foyer ceiling, and the ceiling of the corridor which led from it, were high and open-beamed, also of that same very dark teak, quite in contrast with what one expected in a house in the tropics, but nonetheless effective for their striking anachronism.
        Henry lifted her luggage from the cart and placed it on the flat bed of an open escalator platform at the bottom of the steps. He punched a button in the wall, which