Free Enemy In The House by Mignon G. Eberhart Page A

windows. Amity, half roused, listened to it, drifted back to sleep and rose at last, late. By then the birds were silent; the heat was stifling and humid.
    Grappit had ridden out early to the canefields. Neville had accompanied him. “Poor boy,” Aunt Grappit said. “But then, that is a planter’s life.” The implication was that the sooner Neville accustomed himself to the life of a Jamaican planter, the better. Amity said nothing.
    Jamey was playing in the care of the maid who had taken prompt and cheerful charge of him the night before; Amity heard their voices and found them in a grassy, hedged and shaded plot outside the back door from the lounge. She wondered where Hester was.
    Charles had disappeared, too; China didn’t know where he had gone—strolling around the place, she thought, and flung more dresses into the arms of a maid. “Be sure the iron is not too hot. Understand me?”
    “Oh, yes, lady.”
    The maid who brought her breakfast obviously understood, for she nodded cheerfully. It was not so easy to understand the oddly slurred speech of the native Jamaicans with its unexpected rhythm and emphasis.
    Before unpacking her own trunk, Amity went out to the veranda. In the sunlight the full beauty of Mallam Penn lay before her. The first Mallam to emigrate to Jamaica and settle at Mallam Penn had chosen well. She wondered vaguely who that first Mallam was; other than that he must have been a remote relative of her father’s and of Simon’s, she didn’t know and it didn’t matter, but he had done well. The entire plantation was snuggled down in a green and lovely valley among blue-tinted mountains which reared abruptly on three sides. Yet the land itself was high, too. It was obviously fertile land; great canefields stretched out behind and at both sides of the house, until they seemed almost to touch the mountains themselves. There was a long strip of forest densely entangled in vines, which went back as far as Amity could see, into another deep but narrow valley.
    The view, though, from the veranda was breathtaking in its beauty, for the valley opened there, so widely that far below, across the massed greens of trees and tangled shrubbery, there was visible a great reach of the sea. It was so blue and clear that it was as if all the blues of the world were distilled into a new color, a blue Amity had never seen nor dreamed of, that belonged to another world.
    There were no clouds; the sky was only a lighter, thinner blue than the sea. Far off there was the slow white curl of waves. It was a scene of beauty. It was also, in its immensity, in the dense tropical foliage, the enormous vine-hung trees, with their announcement of hidden depths of jungle, a little frightening.
    She wondered suddenly how near was the closest town or village; how far away was the closest, neighboring penn. It was, of course, not even a day’s journey to Kingston; Spanish Town must be fairly near Kingston. Grappit had spoken of the doctor, the clergyman, a nearby town called Punt Town. So civilization was somewhere within reach.
    She went back to her room, unpacked, made room in the great armoire for her own few dresses and was summoned to a hot and heavy second breakfast, which Madam Grappit said was the custom in Jamaica. It was far too heavy a meal, more like dinner than luncheon or breakfast: platters of chicken, ham, soup, went back in their silver dishes to the cookhouse, behind the great house. (“They call it the great house,” Aunt Grappit said, cracking nuts with her strong teeth. “Every plantation house here is called the great house. Heaven knows why!”)
    China partook heartily as she always did, belying her frail and delicate appearance. Neville, Grappit and Charles did not appear at all. After second breakfast, Aunt Grappit told them, it was the custom to rest through the heat of the day.
    “La, Aunt,” China said, “I vow the heat is monstrous oppressive,” wiped a trace of turtle soup from her pretty