“Perhaps,” I replied, but of course my worst suspicions had been confirmed. I was convinced Mehevi had crossed with the man. “When we return to Louisville, I will no doubt be arrested and imprisoned. I fully expect to be banished from the island. While the wheel of justice turns, I’d like you to run an errand for me. See if you can learn where we can find this captain.”

Word of my return spread quickly. On the outskirts of Louisville, greatly enlarged since my departure two decades earlier, a crowd had gathered, of islanders and foreigners both, lining the streets to witness the spectacle of the surrender of the Queen of the Cannibals. We marched, Lucien and I, all the way to the old palace, now Government House, accompanied for the last portion of the journey by an escort of mounted gendarmes. As soon as we arrived, I was handcuffed and placed in the charge of two gendarmes. In theory, I was under arrest, but as there was still no prison on the island for European women, I was detained instead, as I had been nineteen years earlier, in exactly the same room at the Hibiscus. The hotel had barely altered in all that time. Only the faces of the women working by the hour had changed.

The following day, I was to be taken to see the Governor, who was also the island magistrate. But when his aide-de-camp—no longer Lieutenant Perrault, who had left long ago, but a Lieutenant Thibault—knocked at the door and saw that I was dressed only in a tapa cloth, as islander women dress, he escorted me instead—by way of the bank, where a substantial sum of money was still deposited under my name—to the clothier. There, I purchased a set of clothes worthy of a European lady: a chemise, bloomers, a corset, a busk, a corset cover, a decency skirt, a bustle, an underskirt, a suit, a taille and garniture, leather shoes, a hat, gloves, a parasol, a nightdress, a veil, and a trunk in which to store it all.

The next morning I was marched once more to Government House. The Governor, no longer the Colonel Mirabelle of nineteen years earlier but Colonel Marie-Georges Duhamel, informed me that I was to be deported at my own expense, accompanied by Lucien, on a schooner leaving Oaeetee three days hence, bound for the Sandwich Islands, and then San Francisco. I asked to see Mehevi, the former king. The Governor refused. “His Royal Majesty, Mehevi, King of Oaeetee, is not receiving visitors.”

I returned to my room at the Hibiscus and spent the next several days under lock and key. The girls working in the other rooms were banished. This time there would be no duping the guards.