Wind Raker - Book IV of The Order of the Air by Melissa Scott, Jo Graham Page A

Ethiopia, but there were certainly places where so much as speaking to a white woman could only end with a death. Not all of them were hundreds of miles from Cambridge, either.
    Of course going the other way was more acceptable. There were men who scouted the jazz clubs of Harlem and the South Side the way he had scouted Times Square, who took up with dancers in the jazz revues the way he might take up with a Broadway chorus boy. But it was the same thing, a peculiar vice. A kink. A dubious and dangerous taste, whether one liked Josephine Baker in high camp or golden-haired boys in drag. A white woman married to a brown-skinned man was an enormous exception in good society, and their position would never be entirely secure. He wondered how it was in Hawaii, where there were so many races mingling in such close quarters, imagined it could go either way.
    Bea was still watching him, her expression intent. “I truly don’t disapprove,” Jerry said. “One of my best friends…” And then he stopped, coloring, aware of how it sounded. “My roommate all through college…” And that was no better, but Bea only smiled.
    “One of my best friends, too. Peter and Margaret are dear friends. And I don’t mean to be rude. I may be just a little protective of them.”
    “I understand,” Jerry said. Certainly anyone who was rude to Iskinder would never be a friend of his.
    Her face relaxed a little, and she stepped out into the relative darkness of the lanai, its rafters strung with lanterns. Jerry followed, unsure what the invitation meant, but glad they were fully out of Margaret’s hearing.
    “If Dr. Radke is going to be difficult, don’t invite him,” Bea said. “Margaret doesn’t need to hear anything about German racial theories.”
    “Certainly not over a meal,” Jerry said. She couldn’t avoid them in academia, no one could, but one did not have to have them at the dinner table. “I don’t actually know what Radke’s politics are, but of course I won’t bring him if there’s any chance of him being unpleasant.”
    “No, I know you won’t,” Bea said. She tugged a dead leaf from one of the plants along the railing. “That’s what my book is about. The one that’s out next year. It’s a love story with an interracial couple.”
    “It must have been hard finding a publisher,” Jerry said. He frankly couldn’t imagine that a single New York house would touch a book like that.
    “You have no idea,” Bea said. “It’s being published by a small press here in Hawaii. My first book was only published in France. I translated it myself because no American house would take it.” She took a sip of her drink, looking out into the palm fronds stirring in the night breeze. “This one is about an Englishman who is left in Hawaii in the eighteenth century and his Polynesian wife. Not that they’re ever married in the Church of England, or that she accepts his god except as one more truth among many. It’s about their twenty-five years together, and how they do and don’t reconcile their cultures.” She glanced at him sideways, a smile playing about her lips. “Most people would consider it a very immoral book.”
    “I don’t think so,” Jerry said, startled into more truth than usual. “Love is always sacred. Love is love.”
    She smiled at him again, the corners of his eyes crinkling, and he wondered if he’d said far too much. “Love is so big. It doesn’t belong in a little box. Any relationship between adults who consent to it is no one else’s business.”
    Jerry froze for a fraction of a second, then made himself take a drink of George’s lethal cocktail. Did she know about Radke, about him? Was it his behavior, or a lucky guess? Clairvoyance? He wouldn’t put that past her. Or was it simply a Free Love platitude, and he fled like a guilty man?
    “But I won’t have Dr. Radke being rude to Margaret,” she said briskly. “I just won’t stand for that.”
    “No, indeed,” Jerry said,