Ransvestia

She counted every party she had missed since their 'expedition' had begun and calculated openly the number of days that it would take for them to return to 'civilization.'

"I think the plantation house was up that track," Jim Porter called to Kate. He was pointing to the path that went by the huts and into the forest. He was as brown as a berry after four days at sea, his tan deep, rich and healthy. His grey hair revealed his age but his body, despite a bulging at the midriff, was powerful and full of force.

"Do we have to change, Mom?" Greg's white teeth flashed against his bronzed skin. He was 19 and his idea of clothes rarely amounted to more than cut-off blue jeans and occasionally a tee-shirt. Now he was in his cutoffs, his lithe, muscular body flushed from the ocean sun.

"Of course," said Kate curtly. "We are visiting the dead." The stern set of her face and the brutal manner with which she stated the purpose of their visit brooked no argument. The smile disappeared from Greg's face and he stepped back onto the boat with a little shrug. Cathy had still to unfold her arms as she followed her brother into the cabins. Her stiff back spoke eloquently of her general dis- agreement with her mother's words.

Eleanor Porter had never married, though she had had many lovers. She didn't know and didn't care who the father of her young son, Kenneth, had been. She had been a radical flouter of convention at a time when the observance of custom and convention was the byword of British Caribbean culture.

Ostracized by almost every segment of society, despite the wealth of the Porter family, the final blow to Eleanor's own belief in herself had come with the death of the father on whom she doted. He had left all the family's wealth to be divided between his son, James Jr., and the younger Porter daughter, Elizabeth, who had 'married well' into a titled English family. To Eleanor, he had left just a small yearly income, and that totally under the surveillance of Jim Porter. Her brother, however, had at once approached his eldest sister with an offer of further moneys, houses and freedom to do as she liked.

Kate could still hear Eleanor's strident voice taunting her brother about revealing all she knew about him, and her accusations that Jim was just trying to buy her off, for what reason Kate never found out.

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