Free Jane by Robin Maxwell Page B

out?”
    Father looked at me. “My girl, you look like a sleeping dog who’s just been pecked in the ass by an angry goose. Say something.”
    I was so stunned and breathless it was hard to get the brief sentence out. “May I go, Father?”
    “Well, if I can convince your mother you won’t be sold off into white slavery or eaten by cannibals, it’s all right by me.”
    “Let me talk to your mother,” Conrath said. “I’ll remind her of Hilda Petrie.” He clapped Father on the shoulder. “You leave Mrs. Porter to me. In no time at all we’re going to be seeing eye to eye. Trust me.”
    I took Father’s arm. “Will you promise to do everything in your power to make this happen?”
    “Scout’s honor.”
    I loved it when my father said that. It was so American. And it reminded me of what Archimedes Porter must have been like as a young boy.
    I was absolutely sure we would have been the best of friends.

The Nest
    I looked up to see the scarlet-tailed grey parrot waddle in a comical pigeon-toed gait down the fig limb. He hung upside down like an acrobat from a smaller branch to take a drink from the coconut shell, then resumed his course till reaching a limb above my feet. Here he stopped and watched me silently for a long moment before ripping off a piece of bark and holding it in the grip of his claws. He began nibbling daintily, letting pieces fall on my toes. This was not the first time the hookbill had come visiting. Tarzan had said the bird’s name was Lu-lu , but I saw the creature not as a French cancan dancer but as a distinguished professorial gentleman in a frock coat, and had taken to calling him “Mr. Grey.”
    I had known such a bird in Cambridge, as my neighbor, Mrs. Rys Willis, had kept one as a pet, mentioning endlessly that Henry VIII had had one like it. It had bitten my finger once, drawing blood, and as I had recently been so misused by a wild animal, I was not eager to tangle with Mr. Grey, no matter how small or how sweet and docile he appeared.
    It was clear that my new protector, Tarzan, had entrusted my care to his avian friend. There were times when the young man had had to leave the nest to gather food. Every morning before first light he would climb straight up the fig and mysteriously disappear into its thick branches. Whenever Tarzan was gone, Mr. Grey would come to stand sentinel, calling out in a shrill two-part whistle if anything more threatening or untoward than a lizard came near my still largely immobile person. If the whistle sounded, Tarzan would be at my side in an instant. I could only imagine with what strength and agility he had climbed the tree to arrive at such short notice. I marveled at the bird’s power of discernment. Other birds or small monkeys coming to call elicited no alarms, nor did a snorting wild pig at the base of the trunk, but an immense red-and-black spider had. And a small viper slithering toward me had sent Mr. Grey into a frenzy of whistling and the shouting of a word that sounded much like “hister!” Tarzan had returned posthaste with blood in his eye and hacked the head from the snake in a display both horrifying and deeply appreciated.
    While I had heard the bird speak to Tarzan in words unintelligible to me as yet, Mr. Grey had not deigned to converse directly to me, as though he had found me an unworthy partner in conversation. True, I had said very little to him, finding myself more shy with the parrot even than the man.
    And the man was shy with me.
    Tarzan and I had continued a sort of rudimentary communication. I’d begun enunciating body parts and the objects around me that I recognized, and he had dutifully—no, enthusiastically—repeated and quickly learned them in his lovely deep voice. He was, as my father called his best anatomy students, “a quick study.” Less adept was I at the strange language Tarzan employed (from what tribe could it have come?), for it was spoken with gruff, grating undertones. Speaking his words for