Just as Jemima was adapting to this surprise, she discovered the figure of Miss Archer herself to be equally astonishing. That is to say, having adjusted rapidly from free and easy Tina to the moldering, somber house, she now had to adjust with equal rapidity all over again. For the very first inspection of the old lady, known by Jemima to be at least eighty, quickly banished all thoughts of Miss Havisham. Here was no aged, abandoned bride, forlorn in the decaying wedding-dress of fifty years before. Miss Izzy Archer was wearing a coolie straw hat, apparently tied under her chin with a duster, a loose, white, man’s shirt, and faded blue-jeans cut off at the knee. On her feet were a pair of what looked like child’s brown sandals. From the look of her, she had either just taken a shower wearing all this or been swimming. She was dripping wet, making large pools on the rich carpet and dark, polished boards of the formal drawing room, all dark-red brocade and swagged, fringed curtains, where she had received Jemima. It was possible to see this even in the filtered light seeping through the heavy brown shutters which shut out the view of the sea.
“Oh, don’t fuss so, Tina dear,” exclaimed Miss Izzy impatiently — although Tina had, in fact, said nothing. “What do a few drops of water matter? Stains? What stains?” (Tina still had not spoken.) “Let the government put it right when the time comes.”
Although Tina Archer continued to be silent, gazing amiably, even cheerfully, at her employer, nevertheless in some way she stiffened, froze in her polite listening attitude. Instinctively Jemima knew that she was in some way upset.
“Now don’t be silly, Tina, don’t take on, dear.” The old lady was now shaking herself free of water like a small but stout dog. “You know what I mean. If you don’t, who does — since half the time I don’t know what I mean, let alone what I say. You can put it all right one day, is that better? After all, you’ll have plenty of money to do it. You can afford a few new covers and carpets.” So saying, Miss Izzy, taking jemima by the hand and attended by the still-silent Tina, led the way to the farthest dark-red sofa. Looking remarkably wet from top to toe, she sat down firmly in the middle of it.
It was in this way that jemima first realized that Archer Plantation House would not necessarily pass to the newly independent government of Bow Island on its owner’s death. Miss Izzy, if she had her way, was intending to leave it all, house and fortune, to Tina. Among other things, this meant that Jemima was no longer making a program about a house destined shortly to be a national museum — which was very much part of the arrangement that had brought her to the island and had, incidentally, secured the friendly cooperation of that same new government. Was all this new? How new? Did the new government know? If the will had been signed, they must know.
“I’ve signed the will this morning, dear,” Miss Archer pronounced triumphantly, with an uncanny ability to answer unspoken questions.
“I went swimming to celebrate. I always celebrate things with a good swim — so much more healthy than rum or champagne. Although there’s still plenty of that in the cellar.”
She paused. “So there you are, aren’t you, dear? Or there you will be. Here you will be. Thompson says there’ll be trouble, of course. What can you expect these days? Everything is trouble since independence. Not that I’m against independence, far from it. But everything new brings new trouble here in addition to all the old troubles, so that the troubles get more and more. On Bow Island no troubles ever go away. Why is that?”
But Miss Izzy did not stop for an answer. “No, I’m all for independence and I shall tell you all about that, my dear”—she turned to Jemima and put one damp hand on her sleeve—“on your program.
I’m being a Bo’lander born and bred, you know.” It was true that Miss Izzy, unlike Tina for example, spoke with the peculiar, slightly sing-song intonation of the islanders — not unattractive to Jemima’s ears.
“I was born in this very house eighty-two years ago in April,”
went on Miss Izzy. “You shall come to my birthday party. I was born during a hurricane. A good start! But my mother died in childbirth, they should never have got in that new-fangled doctor, just because he came from England. A total fool he was, I remember him well. They should have had a good Bo’lander midwife, then my mother wouldn’t have died and my father would have had sons—”
Miss Izzy was drifting away into a host of reminiscences — and while these were supposed to be what Jemima had come to hear, her thoughts were actually racing off in quite a different direction.
Trouble? What trouble? Where did Greg Harrison, for example, stand in all this — Greg Harrison who wanted Miss Izzy to be left to
“die in peace”? Greg Harrison who had been married to Tina and was no longer? Tina Archer, now heiress to a fortune.
Above all, why was this forthright old lady intending to leave everything to her companion? For one thing, Jemima did not know how seriously to treat the matter of Tina’s surname. Joseph Archer had laughed off the whole subject of Sir Valentine’s innumerable descendants. But perhaps the beautiful Tina was in some special way connected to Miss Izzy. She might be the product of some rather more recent union between a rakish Archer and a Bo’lander maiden. More recent than the seventeenth century, that is.
Her attention was wrenched back to Miss Izzy’s reminiscing monologue by the mention of the Archer Tomb.
“You’ve seen the grave? Tina has discovered it’s all a fraud. A great big lie, lying under the sun — yes, Tina dear, you once said that.
Sir Valentine Archer, my great great great—” An infinite number of greats followed before Miss Izzy finally pronounced the word
“grandfather,” but Jemima had to admit that she did seem to be counting. “He had a great big lie perpetuated on his tombstone.”
“What Miss Izzy means—” This was the first time Tina had spoken since they entered the darkened drawing room. She was still standing, while Jemima and Miss Izzy sat.
“Don’t tell me what I mean, child,” rapped out the old lady; her tone was imperious rather than indulgent. Tina might for a moment have been a plantation worker two hundred years earlier rather than an independent-minded girl in the late twentieth century. “It’s the inscription which is a lie. She wasn’t his only wife. The very inscription should have warned us. Tina wants to see justice done to poor little Lucie Anne and so do I. Independence indeed! I’ve been independent all my life and I’m certainly not stopping now. Tell me, Miss Shore, you’re a clever young woman from television. Why do you bother to contradict something unless it’s true all along? That’s the way you work all the time in television, don’t you?”
Jemima was wondering just how to answer this question diplo-matically and without traducing her profession when Tina firmly, and this time successfully, took over from her employer.
“I read history at university in the UK, Jemima. Genealogical research is my speciality. I was helping Miss Izzy put her papers in order for the museum — or what was to be the museum. Then the request came for your program and I began to dig a little deeper.
That’s how I found the marriage certificate. Old Sir Valentine did marry his young Carib mistress, known as Lucie Anne. Late in life — long after his first wife died. That’s Lucie Anne who was the mother of his youngest two children. He was getting old, and for some reason he decided to marry her. The church, maybe. In its way, this has always been a God-fearing island. Perhaps Lucie Anne, who was very young and very beautiful, put pressure on the old man, using the church. At any rate, these last two children of all the hundreds he sired would have been legitimate!”