Ranulph still couldn’t walk without difficulty and so spent his time recording and investigating the site on the beach. The evidence showed that the indigenous people had very early Dutch delft vessels which could only have come from pirates or some such. This indicated that the two groups must have co-operated, which had never been known of before.
‘I’d feel bad spending so much time there,’ Ranulph said at supper one night, ‘only I still can’t walk well enough to do anything useful.’
Cass also spent time helping Ranulph when she wasn’t doing things for Bastian or Delphine. She was there the following morning sketching the site with Austin. Ranulph was halfway up the beach with a camera, when suddenly Austin said, ‘Oh, who’s this?’
Coming along the beach was a group of people led by a woman a little older than Cass. Ranulph looked up and suddenly the woman started running towards him, hampered by the soft sand.
‘Ran!’ she called.
Ranulph held out his arms.
Cass felt as if she was seeing the end of a romanticfilm and looked away before the couple met. She didn’t want to witness their meeting. But Austin, next to her, said, ‘Boy, is he pleased to see her!’
Cass didn’t wait to be introduced to the little group, but instead fled back to the house as quickly as she could. Now it was she who was floundering in the soft sand, only she wasn’t running towards Ranulph, she was going in the opposite direction.
Only very briefly did she wonder if Austin had told her how pleased Ranulph had been to see that woman in order simply to hurt her. Could he have guessed how she felt about Ranulph? She’d always been so careful to be ‘casual, just friends, no one special’ around him. She didn’t want anyone to know and if Delphine had guessed it was because she had got to know Cass well as they cooked together. That said, Austin also had a knack of knowing things no one had told him, of finding out things that others had intended to keep hidden.
She found Delphine in the kitchen. ‘There may be extra people for supper tonight,’ she said. ‘Ranulph has met an old friend.’
‘A woman?’ Delphine also had a knack for knowing things.
‘Yes.’
There was only the tiniest crack in Cass’s voice as she said this, but Delphine enveloped her in a hug anyway. ‘Oh, honey,’ she said.
Cass stayed there for a few moments and then freed herself. ‘I knew he had friends here. And word of an archaeological site like that is bound to get around, even when there’s no internet or telephones.’
‘Quite right,’ said Delphine. ‘And everyone who gets to hear about it will turn up at Bastian’s house expecting a meal.’ Delphine didn’t seem put out by this. Cass reckoned it must be a fairly frequent occurrence. ‘Peel me some yams? Just as well Bastian has plenty of provisions.’
Cass knew that ‘provisions’ also meant the starchy vegetables, including yams, sweet potatoes and dasheen. Amongst similar things, these were the backbone of Caribbean food. With them at hand, meals could be made to stretch.
Becca was the life and soul of the party, thought Cass a little later, although there were four archaeologists in all. Of course she and Bastian knew each other and chattered away about mutual friends and how they had fared in the hurricane.
Becca was also very attractive, thought Cass, with short, dark hair, elegantly cut, making her look a little French. And while she had been outdoors, grubbing in the earth, doing whatever archaeologists did, she still managed to look professional and quite smart. She was supremely knowledgeable about everything, it seemed to Cass, with interesting things to say about every subject likely to fascinate Bastian, Austin and of course Ranulph.
She and ‘Ran’, as she called him, had obviously known each other very well. Cass found this so upsetting that she could barely look at Ranulph, dreading to see love in his eyes when he looked at her.
‘He wouldn’t have gone away if he loved her somuch,’ said Delphine, reading Cass’s mind as they scraped plates in the kitchen before getting out the fruit course. ‘Don’t worry about her, girl.’
‘I don’t care about Ranulph; he and I are just travelling companions,’ she wanted to say but couldn’t. Delphine would know she was lying anyway.
Cass was desperate not to engage in conversation and wouldn’t have joined everyone at the table if Delphine hadn’t said ‘Sit down and eat your dinner’ in a very strict way. It was all she could do to look pleasant and not pick at her food like a heartsick teenager.
‘So, Cass,’ said Becca pleasantly, ‘how do you come to be in Dominica so soon after a hurricane? I would have known if you’d been here before.’ She laughed. ‘The grapevine works well in Dominica!’
‘Well,’ said Cass. ‘It’s a bit of a complicated story—’ She might have imagined that she saw Becca’s eyes glaze over. ‘To cut it short, my father was friends with Bastian’s father and so when we heard there’d been a hurricane, we came out to help.’
‘Great!’ Becca paused, obviously framing her question in her mind. ‘And what did – I mean – what special skills did you bring with you?’ She smiled warmly and her teeth looked very white against her tan.
‘Cass has been invaluable,’ said Bastian quickly. ‘I don’t know what we’d have done without her. She can throw my pick-up around our roads like a local—’
‘And she can cook,’ said Delphine.
‘And she sewed my leg up,’ said Ranulph, giving Cass a look which made her heart leap and then subside again.
‘She’s also very good at map-drawing,’ said Austin, ‘although she does sometimes make mistakes.’
‘I didn’t make any mistakes, Austin,’ Cass said firmly. She hoped she sounded convincing. She hadn’t made a mistake; she had deliberately altered the map.
