A Falcon Flies

Wilbur Smith - A Falcon Flies

Synopsis:

A single ball came through at deck level. It struck a burst of sparks from the steel hull, like Brocks Fireworks at Crystal Palace, brilliant Orange even In the strong sunlight, and the hole It tore through Black Joke's plating was fringed With Bare jagged tongues of metal like the petals of a silver sunflower. In search of the father they barely remember, Zouga- and Dr. Robyn Ballantyne board Mungo St. John's magnificent clipper to speed them to Africa. But long before they sight that mighty Continent. Robyn knows that she and Mungo will Battle with all the fury of natural enemies - and Love with all the desperation of those unable to evade the commands of fate. For if she can bring hope and healing to Africa's fever-ridden shores, he, a lawless trader in human cargo, will possess any man - or woman - he chooses.

Wilbur Smith - A Falcon Flies

Antionette 1860

Africa crouched low on the horizon, like a lion in ambush, tawny and gold in the early sunlight, scared by the cold of the Benguela Current.

Robyn Ballantyne stood by the ship's rail and stared towards it. She had been standing like that since an hour before dawn, long before the land could be seen. She had known it was there, sensed its vast enigmatic presence in the darkness, detected its breath, warm and spicy dry, over the clammy cold exhalations of the current on which the great ship rode.

It was her cry, not that of the masthead, which brought Captain Mungo St. John charging up the companionway from his stern quarters, and the rest of the ship's company crowding to the ship's side to stare and jabber. For seconds only, Mungo St. John gripped the teak rail, staring at the land, before whirling to call his orders in the low but piercing tone which seemed. to carry to every corner of the ship. "Stand by to go about!" Tippoo the mate scattered the crew to their duties with knotted rope-end and clubbed fists. For two weeks, furious winds and low, sullen skies had denied them a glimpse of sun or moon, or of any other heavenly body on which to establish a position. On dead reckoning the tall clipper should have been one hundred nautical miles further west, well clear of this treacherous coast with its uncharted hazards and wild deserted shores.

The Captain was freshly awakened, the thick dark mane of his hair tangled, rippling now in the wind, his cheeks lightly flushed with sleep, and also with anger and alarm beneath the smooth darkly tanned skin. Yet his eyes were clear, the whites contrasting starkly against the golden-flecked yellow of the iris. Once again, even in this moment of distraction and confusion, Robyn wondered at the sheer physical presence of the man, a dangerous, disturbing quality that at the same time both repelled and attracted her intensely.

His white linen shirt had been stuffed hastily into his breeches, and the front was unfastened. The skin of his chest was dark and smooth also, as if it had been oiled, and the hair upon it was crisp and black, tight whorls of it that made her blush, reminding her too clearly of that morning early in the voyage, the first morning that they had run into the warm blue waters of the Atlantic Ocean below latitude 35" north, the morning which for her had been the subject of much torment and troubled prayer since. That morning, she had heard the splash and drum of water on the deck above her, and the clank of the ship's pump. She had left the makeshift desk in her tiny cabin on which she was working at her journal, slipped a shawl over her shoulders and gone up on to the maindeck, stepping unsuspectingly into the bright white sunlight and then stopping aghast.

There were two seamen working the pump lustily, and the clear sea water hissed from its throat in a solid jet.

Naked, Mungo St. John stood beneath it, lifting his face and his arms towards it, the water sleeking his black hair down over his face and neck, flattening his body hair over his chest and the muscled plane of his belly.

She had stood and stared, completely frozen, unable to tear her eyes away. The two seamen had turned their heads and grinned lewdly at her while they kept the handles pumping the hissing water.

Of course she had seen a man's naked body before, laid out on the dissection table, soft white flesh collapsing over bone, and with belly pouch slit open and the internal organs spilling out of it like butchers" offal, or between the grubby blankets of the fever hospital, sweating and stinking and racked with the convulsions of onrushing death, but never like this, not healthy and vital and overwhelming like this.

This was a marvelous symmetry and balance of trunk to long powerful legs, of broad shoulders to narrow waist.

There was a lustre to the skin, even where the sun had not gilded it. This was not an untidy tangle of masculine organs, half-hidden by a bush of coarse hair, shameful and vaguely revolting. This was vibrant manhood, and she had been struck with sudden insight as to the original sin of Eve, the serpent and the apples, here offered again, and she had gasped aloud. He had heard her and stepped from under the thundering jet of water, and flicked the hair from his eyes. He saw her standing near, unable to move or tear her eyes away, and he smiled that lazy, taunting smile, making no move to cover himself, the water still streaming down his body, and sparkling like diamond chips on his skin.

"Good morning, Doctor Ballantyne," he had murmured. "Perhaps I am to be the subject of one of your scientific studies?" " only then had she been able to break the spell, to whirl and rush back to her smelly little cabin. She expected to be greatly disturbed, as she threw herself on the narrow planks of her bunk, waiting to be overwhelmed by a sense of sin and shame, but it did not come. Instead, she was confused by a contraction of her chest and lungs that left her breathless, and a remarkable warmth of her cheeks and the skin of her throat, a prickling of the fine dark hairs at the nape of her neck, and the same warmth of other parts of her body which had so alarmed her that she flung herself hurriedly off the bunk and on to her knees to plead for a proper sense of her own unworthiness and a true understanding of her essential baseness and irretrievable wickedness. It was an exercise she had undertaken a thousand times in her twenty-three years, but seldom with so little success.

For the thirty-eight days of the voyage since then, she had tried to avoid those flecked yellow eyes and that lazy taunting smile, and had taken to eating most of her meals in her cabin, even in the daunting heat of the equator, when the taint of the bucket behind the canvas screen in the corner of the cabin had done little to pique her appetite. Only when she knew that heavy weather would keep him on deck did she join her brother and the others in the ship's small saloon.

Watching him now as he conned his ship off the hostile coast, she felt that disturbing prickle once again, and she turned away quickly to the land that was now swinging across the bows. The tackle roared through the blocks and the yards creaked and crackled, the canvas flogged and then filled again with a crash like cannon.

At the sight of the land she almost overcame those earlier memories and was instead filled with such a sense of awe, that she wondered if it were possible that the land of birth could call so clearly and so undeniably to the blood of its children.

It did not seem possible that nineteen years had passed since as a four-year-old waif, clinging to her mother's long skirts she had last seen that great flat-topped mountain that guarded the southernmost tip of the continent sink slowly beneath the horizon. It was one of the only clear memories of this land that she retained. She could still almost feel the coarse cheap stuff that a missionary's wife must wear and hear the sobs that her mother tried to stifle and feel them shake her mother's legs beneath the skirts, as she clung closer. Vividly she recalled the fear and confusion of the little girl at her mother's distress, understanding with childlike intuition that their lives were in upheaval, but knowing only that the tall figure that had been up to that time the centre of her small existence was now missing. Don't cry, baby, her mother had whispered. "We will see Papa again soon. Don't cry, my little one. " But those words had made her doubt that she would ever see her father again, and she had pushed her face into the coarse skirt, too proud even at that age to let the others hear her wail.

As always it had been her brother Morris who had comforted her, three years her senior, a man of seven years, born like her in Africa, on the banks of a far wild river with a strange exotic name, Zouga, which had given him his middle name. Morris Zouga. Ballantyne she liked the Zouga best and always used it, it reminded her of Africa.

She turned her head back towards the quarterdeck, and there he was now, , tall but not as tall as Mungo St. John, to whom he was speaking excitedly, pointing at the lioncoloured land, his face animated. The features he had inherited from their father were heavy but strong, the nose bony and beaked and the line of the mouth determined, harsh perhaps.

He lifted the glass to his eye again and studied the low coastline, scanning it with the care that he took with any project from the smallest to the greatest, before lowering it and turning back to Mungo St. John. They spoke together quietly. An unlikely relationship had developed between the two men, a mutual, though guarded respect each for the other's strengths and accomplishments. But if the truth be told, it was Zouga who pursued the relationship most assiduously. Always one to profit by any opportunity, he had milked Mungo St. John of his knowledge and experience. He had done it with an exercise of charm, but since leaving Bristol harbour he had drawn from the Captain most of what he had learned in many years of trading and voyaging along the coasts of this vast savage continent, and Zouga had written all of it down in one of his calf-bound ledgers, storing knowledge against the day.

In addition to this, the Captain had genially undertaken to instruct Zouga in the mystery and art of astronomical navigation. Each day local apparent noon would find the two of them huddled on the sunny side of the quarterdeck with brass sextants poised, waiting for a glimpse of the fiery orb through the layers of cloud, or, when the sky was clear, eagerly sighting it, swaying to the ship's motion, to hold the sun in the field of the lens as they brought it down to the horizon.

At other times they cut the monotony of a long tack with a contest of arms, taking turns at an empty corked brandy bottle thrown over the stern by a crewman, using a magnificent pair of percussion duelling pistols that Mungo St. John brought up from his cabin still in their velvet-lined case, and loaded with care on the chart table.

They shouted with laughter, and congratulated each other as the bottles burst in midair in an explosion of shards bright as diamond chips in the sunlight.

At other times Zouga brought up the new Sharps breechloading rifle, a gift from one of the sponsors of the expedition, "the Ballantyne Africa Expedition', as the Standard, that great daily newspaper, had named it.

The Sharps was a magnificent weapon, accurate up to the incredible range of 800 yards, with the power to knock down a bull bison at a thousand. The men who were wiping out the great herds of buffalo from the American prairie at this very time had earned the title Sharpshooters" with this weapon.

Mungo St. John towed a barrel at the end of an 800 yard length of cable to act as a target, and they shot for a wager of a shilling a bout. Zouga was an accomplished marksman, the best in his regiment, but he had already lost over five guineas to Mungo St. John.

Not only were the Americans manufacturing the finest firearms in the world (already John Browning had patented a breech loading repeating rifle that Winchester was evolving into the most formidable weapon known to men), but the Americans -were also far and away the finest marksmen. This pointed up the difference between the tradition of the frontiersman with his long rifle, and that of massed British infantry firing smooth-bore muskets in strictly commanded volleys. Mungo St. John, an American, handled both the long-barrelled duelling pistol and the Sharps rifle as though they were an extension of his own body.

Now Robyn turned away from the two men, looked back at the land and felt a small dismay to see it already sinking lower into the cold green sea.

She yearned towards it with a quiet desperation, as she had ever since that day of departure so long ago. Her whole life in the intervening years seemed to have been a long preparation for this moment, so many obstacles overcome, obstacles made mountainous by the fact she was a woman; there had been so much struggle against temptation to give in to despair, a struggle that others had read as wilfulness and vaunting pride, as stubbornness and immodesty.

Her education had been eaned with such toil from the library of her uncle William, despite his active discouragement.

"Too much book learning will only plague you, my dear. It is not a woman's place to trouble herself with certain things. You would do better to assist your mother in the kitchen and learn to sew and knit" "I can do both already, Uncle William."

Later, his reluctant and grumbling assistance changed only slowly into active support when he at last assessed the depth of her intelligence and determination.

Uncle William was her mother's eldest brother, and he had taken in the family when the three of them had returned almost destitute from that far savage land. They had only the father's stipend from the London Missionary Society, a mere 150 per annum, and William Moffat was not a wealthy man, a physician at Kings Lynn with a small practice, hardly sufficient for the ready-made family with which he found himself saddled.

Of course, later, many years later, there had been money, a great deal of money, some said as much as three thousand pounds, the royalties from Robyn's father's books, but it had been Uncle William who had shielded and sustained them through the lean times.

William had somehow found the money to purchase Zouga's commission in his regiment, even selling his two prized hunters and making that humiliating journey to Cheapside and the moneylenders to do so.

With what William could raise, it was perforce not a fashionable regiment, and not even the regular army, but the 13th Regiment of Madras Native Infantry, a line regiment of the East India Company.

It was Uncle William who had instructed Robyn until she was as advanced in formal education as he was himself, and who had then aided and abetted her in the great deception of which she could never bring herself to be ashamed. In 1854 no hospital medical school in all of England would enrol a woman amongst their student body.

With her uncle's help, and active connivance, she had enrolled, using his sponsorship and the assertion that she was his nephew at St. Matthew's Hospital in the east end of London.

It helped that her name needed only changing from Robyn to Robin, that she was tall and small-breasted, that her voice had a depth and huskiness that she could exaggerate. She had kept her thick, dark hair cropped short, and learned to wear trousers with such panache that ever since, the tangle of petticoats and crinolines around her legs had irritated her.

The hospital governors had only discovered the fact that she was a woman after she had obtained her medical qualification from the Royal College of Surgeons at the age of twenty-one. They had immediately petitioned the Royal College to withdraw the honour, and the ensuing scandal had swept the length and breadth of England, made more fascinating by the fact that she was the daughter of Doctor Fuller Ballantyne, the famous African explorer, traveller, medical missionary and author. "in the end, the governors of St. Matthew's had been forced to retreat, for Robyn Ballantyne and her Uncle William had found a champion in the small, rotund person of Oliver Wicks, editor of the Standard.

With a true journalist's eye, Wicks had recognized good copy, and in a scathing editorial had called upon the British tradition of fair play, ridiculed the dark hints of sexual orgies in the operating rooms and pointed up the considerable achievement of this bright and sensitive young girl against almost insurmountable odds. Yet even when her qualification had been confirmed, it was for her only a short step along the road back to Africa, on which she had determined so long ago.

The venerable directors of the London Missionary Society had been considerably alarmed by the offer of the services of a woman. Missionary wives were one thing, were indeed highly desirable to shield the missionaries themselves against physical blandishments and temptations amongst the unclothed heathen, but a lady missionary was another thing entirely.

There was a further complication which weighed heavily against Doctor Robyn Ballantyne's application. Her father was Fuller Ballantyne, who had resigned from the Society six years previously before disappearing once again into the African hinterland; in their eyes he had completely discredited himself. It was clear to them that the father was more interested in exploration and personal aggrandizement than in leading the benighted heathen into the bosom of Jesus Christ. In fact, so far as they were aware, Fuller Ballantyne had made only one convert in all his thousands of miles of African travel, his personal gunbearer.

He seemed to have made himself a crusader against the African slave trade, rather than an emissary of Christ. He had swiftly changed his first missionary station in Africa into a sanctuary for runaway slaves.

The station at Koloberg had been on the southern edge of the great Kalahari Desert, a little oasis in the wilderness where a clear, strong spring of water gushed from the ground, and it had been founded with an enormous expenditure of the Society's funds.

Once Fuller had made it a slave refuge, the inevitable had happened. The Trek Boers from the little independent republics which ringed the mission station to the south were the original owners of the slaves to whom Fuller Ballantyne gave sanctuary. They called "Commando', the medium through which the Trek Boers dispensed frontier justice. They came riding into Koloberg an hour before dawn, dark swift horsemen, a hundred of them, dressed in coarse homespun, bearded and burned by the sun to the colour of Africa's dark earth. The bright flashes of their muzzle-loaders lit the dawn, and then the burning thatch of the buildings of Fuller Ballantyne's mission station made it bright day.

They roped the recaptured slaves together with the station servants and freedmen into long lines, and drove them away southwards, leaving Fuller Ballantyne standing with his family huddled about him, a few pathetic possessions which they had managed to save from the flames scattered at their feet, and the smoke from the smouldering, roofless buildings drifting in eddies about them.

It had confirmed in Fuller Ballantyne his hatred of the institution of slavery, and it had given him the excuse for which he had unwittingly been searching, the excuse to rid himself of the encumbrances which had until then prevented him from answering the call of the vast, empty land to the north.

His wife and two small children were packed off back to England for their own good, and with them went a letter to the directors of the-London Missionary Society.

God had made his will clear to Fuller Ballantyne. He was bidden to journey to the north, to carry God's word across Africa, a missionary at large, no longer tied to one small station, but with the whole of Africa as his parish.

The directors were greatly troubled by the loss of their station, but they were further dismayed by the prospect of having to mount what seemed to be a costly expedition of exploration into an area which all the world knew was merely a vast desert, unpeopled and unwatered except around the littoral, a burning sand desert which stretched to the Mediterranean Sea four thousand miles northward.

They wrote hurriedly to Fuller Ballantyne, uncertain where exactly the letter should be addressed, but feeling the need to deny all responsibility and to express their deep concern; they ended by stating strongly that no further funds other than his stipend of 150 per annum. could be voted for Fuller Ballantyne's highly irregular activities. They need not have expended their energy and emotions, for Fuller Ballantyne had departed. With a handful of porters, his Christian gunbearer, a Colt revolver, a percussion rifle, two boxes of medicines, his journals and navigational instruments, Fuller Ballantyne had disappeared.

He emerged eight years later, down the Zambezi river, appearing at the Portuguese settlement near the mouth of that river, to the great chagrin of the settlers there who, after 200 years of occupation, had pushed no further than 100 miles upstream.

Fuller Ballantyne returned to England and his book A Missionary in Darkest Africa created a tremendous sensation. Here was a man who had made the "Transversa', the overland passage of Africa from west to east coast, who had seen, where there should be desert, great rivers and lakes, cool pleasant grassy uplands, great herds of game and strange peoples, but most of all he had seen the terrible depredations of the slave-raiders upon the continent, and his revelations rekindled the anti-slavery zeal of Wilberforce in the hearts of the British people.

The London Missionary Society was embarrassed by the instant fame of their prodigal, and they hurried to make amends. Fuller Ballantyne had chosen the sites for future missionary stations in the interior, and at the cost of many thousands of pounds they gathered together groups of devoted men and women and sent them out to the selected sites.

The British Gbvernment, prevailed upon by Fuller Ballantyne's description of the Zambezi river as a wide roadway to the rich interior of Africa, nominated Fuller Ballantyne Her Majesty's Consul, and financed an elaborate expedition to open this artery of trade and civilization to the interior.

Fuller had returned to England to write his book, but during this period of reunion with his family, they saw almost as little of the great man as when he was in the depths of Africa. When he was not locked in Uncle William's study writing the epic of his travels, he was in London hounding the Foreign Office or the directors of the L. M. S. And when he had gained from these sources all that he needed for his return to Africa, then he was travelling about England lecturing in Oxford or preaching the sermon from the pulpit of Canterbury cathedral.

Then abruptly he was gone again, taking their mother with him. Robyn would always remember the feel of his spiky whiskers as he stooped to kiss his daughter farewell for the second time. In her mind her father and God were somehow the same person, all-powerful, allrighteous, and her duty to them was blind, accepting adoration.

Years later, when the missionary sites chosen by Fuller Ballantyne had proved to be death-traps, when the surviving missionaries had stumbled back to civilization, their fellows and spouses dead of fever and famine, killed by wild animals and by the wilder men whom they had gone out to save, then Fuller Ballantyne's star had begun to fade.

The Foreign Office expedition to the Zambezi river, led by Ballantyne, had faltered and failed upon the terrible rapids and deep falls of the Kaborra-Bossa gorge through which the Zambezi crashed and roared, dropping a thousand feet in twenty miles. Men wondered how Ballantyne, who had claimed to have followed the Zambezi down from its source to the sea, could have not known of such a formidable obstacle to his dreams. They began to question his other claims, while the British Foreign Office, parsimonious as ever, was considerably miffed by the waste of funds on the abortive expedition and withdrew the title of Consul.

The London Missionary Society wrote another of their lengthy letters to Fuller Ballantyne, requesting him in future to confine his activities to the conversion of the heathen and the propagation of God's word.

Fuller Ballantyne had replied by posting them his resignation, thereby saving the society 150 per annum. At the same time he had penned a letter of encouragement to his two children urging them to show fortitude and faith, and sent the manuscript, in which he vindicated his conduct of the expedition, to his publisher. Then he had taken the few guineas that remained from the huge royalties that his other books had earned and had disappeared once more into the interior of Africa. That was eight years previously and no one had heard from him since.

Now here was this man's daughter, already nearly. as notorious as the father, demanding admission to the Society as a working missionary.

Once again, Uncle William had come to Robyn's aid, dear mild bumbling Uncle William with his thick pebble spectacles and wild grey bush of untarnable hair. With her he had gone before the board of directors and reminded them that Robyn's grandfather, Robert Moffat, was one of the most successful of all African missionaries, with tens of thousands of conversions to his credit.

indeed the old man was still working at Kuruman and had only recently published his dictionary of the Sechuana language.

Robyn herself was dedicated and devout, with medical training and a good knowledge of African languages taught her by her now deceased mother, daughter of the same Robert Moffat, and by virtue of the reverence with which the said Robert Moffat was regarded by even the most warlike African king, Mzilikazi of the Ndebele, or as some people called them, the Matabele, the granddaughter would find immediate acceptance amongst the tribes.

The directors had listened stonily.

Then Uncle William had gone on to suggest that Oliver Wicks, the editor of the Standard who had championed the girl against the attempt by the governors of St. Matthew's Hospital to deprive her of her medical qualification, would be interested in their reasons for refusing her application to the Society.

The directors sat up and listened with great attention, conferred quietly and accepted Robyn's application. They had then seconded her to another missionary movement who in turn sent her to the industrial slums of northern England.

It was her brother Zouga who had found the way back to Africa for both of them.

He had returned from India on leave, a man of considerable achievement, already a major in the Indian army, promotion that he had won in the field, with the reputation of being a soldier and military administrator of great promise for one so young.

Despite this, Zouga was every bit as dissatisfied with his lot as was Robyn. Like their father, they were both lone wolves, responding badly to authority and regimentation. In spite of the promising start to his military career, Zouga recognized the fact that he had already made powerful enemies in India, and he had begun to doubt that his future lay on that continent. Like Robyn, he was still a searcher, and they had greeted each other after the parting of years with a warmth that they had seldom displayed during their childhood.

Zouga took her to dinner at the Golden Boar. It was such a change from Robyn's daily surroundings that she accepted a second glass of claret and became gay and sparkling. By God, Sissy, you really are a pretty thing, you know, he had told her at last. He had taken to swearing now, and though it had shocked her at first, she had grown accustomed to it quickly enough. She had heard a lot worse in the slums where she worked. "You are too good to spend your life amongst those ghastly crones."

It changed the mood between them instantly, and she was able at last to lean close to her brother and pour out all her frustrations. He listened sympathetically, reaching across the table to squeeze her hand so that she went on quietly but with utter determination.

Zouga, I have to get back to Africa. I'll die if I don't.

I just know it. I will shrivel up and die. "Good Lord, Sissy, why Africa? "Because I was born there, because my destiny is there and because Papa is there, somewhere. "I was born there also. " Zouga smiled, and when he did so it softened the harsh line of his mouth. "But I don't know about my destiny. I wouldn't mind going back for the hunting, of course, but as for Father, don't you often think that Papa's main concern was always Fuller Ballantyne? I cannot imagine that you still harbour any great fatherly love for him. "He is different from other men, Zouga, you cannot judge him by the usual yardstick. "There are many who might agree with that, Zouga murmured drily. "At the L. M. S. and at the Foreign Office but as a father? "I love him! she said defiantly. "After God, I love him best. He killed mother, you know. " Zouga's mouth hardened into its usual grim line. "He took her out to the Zambezi in fever season and he killed her as certainly as if he'd put a pistol to her head."

Robyn conceded after a short, regretful silence, "He was never a father nor a husband, but as a visionary, a blazer of trails, as a torchbearer.. ."

Zouga laughed and squeezed her hand. Really, Sissy! "I have read his books, all his letters, every one he ever wrote to mother or to us, and I know that my place is there. In Africa, with Papa."

Zouga lifted his hand from hers and carefully stroked his thick side whiskers. "You always had a way of making me feel excited-" Then, seemingly going off at a tangent, "Did you hear that they have found diamonds on the Orange river? " He lifted his glass and examined the lees in the bottom of it attentively. "We are so very different, you and I, and yet in some ways so much alike. " He poured fresh wine into his glass and went on casually. I am in debt, Sissy."

The word chilled her. Since her childhood she had been taught a dread of it.

How much? " she asked at last quietly.

Two hundred pounds. " He shrugged. So much! " she breathed, and then, "You haven't been gambling, Zouga? " That was one of the other dread words in Robyn's vocabulary.

Not gambling? " she repeated. As a matter of fact, I have, Zouga laughed. "And thank God for that. Without it I would be a thousand guineas under. "You mean you gamble, and actually win? " Her horror faded a little, became tinged with fascination. Not always, but most of the time."

She studied him carefully, perhaps for the first time.

He was only twenty-six years old, but he had the presence and aplomb of a man ten years older. He was already a hard, professional soldier, tempered in the skirmishes on the border of Afghanistan where his regiment had spent four years. She knew they had been cruel encounters against fierce hill tribes, and that Zouga had distinguished himself. His rapid promotion was proof of that.

Then how are you in debt, Zouga? " she asked. Most of my brother officers, even my juniors, have private fortunes. I am a major now, I have to keep some style. We hunt, we shoot, mess bills, polo ponies -" He shrugged again. Will you ever be able to repay it? "I could marry a rich wife, he smiled, "or find diamonds."

Zouga sipped his wine, slumped down in his chair, not looking at her, and went on quietly. I was reading Cornwallis Harris's book the other day - do you remember the big game we saw when we lived at Koloberg? " She shook her head. No, you were only a baby. But I do. I remember the herds of springbok and wildebeest on the trek down to the Cape. One night there was a lion, I saw it clearly in the light of the campfire. Harris's book described his hunting expeditions up as far as the Limpopo, nobody has been further than that, except Papa, of course. A damned sight better than potting pheasant or black buck.

Did you know that Harris made nearly five thousand pounds from his book? " Zouga pushed his glass away, straightened up in his seat and selected a cigar from his silver case. While he prepared and lit it, he was frowning thoughtfully. You want to go to Africa for spiritual reasons. I probably need to go to Africa, for much better reasons, for blood and for money. I make you a proposal. The Ballantyne Expedition! " He lifted his glass to her.

She laughed then, uncertainly, thinking he was joking, but lifted her own glass which was still almost full. "My word on it. But how? Zouga, how do we get there? "What was the name of that newspaper fellow? " Zouga demanded. Wicks, she said, "Oliver Wicks. But why should he help us? "I'll find a good reason why he should. " And Robyn remembered how, even as a child, he had been an eloquent and persuasive pleader of causes. You know I rather think you might."

They drank then, and when she lowered her glass, she had been as happy as she could ever remember being in all her life.

It was another six weeks before she saw Zouga again, striding towards her through the bustle of London Bridge Station as she clambered down from the carriage. He stood tall above the crowd, with the high beaver top hat on his head and the three-quarter length paletot cloak flaring from his shoulders. Sissy! " he called, laughing at her, as he lifted her from her feet. "We are going, we really are going."

He had a cab waiting for them, and the driver whipped up the horses the moment they were aboard. The London Missionary Society were no use at all, he told her, still with his arm around her shoulders as the cab clattered and lurched over the cobbles. "I had them down on my list for five hundred iron men, and they nearly had apoplexy. I had the feeling they would rather Papa stayed lost in darkest Africa, and they would pay five hundred to keep him there."

You went to the directors? " she demanded. Played my losing tricks first, Zouga smiled. "The next was Whitehall, actually managed to see the First Secretary. He was damned civil, took me to lunch at the Travellers', and was truly very sorry that they were not able to give financial assistance. They remembered Papa's Zambezi fiasco too clearly, but he did give me letters. A dozen letters, to every conceivable person, to the Governor at the Cape, to Kemp the Admiral at Cape Town, and all the others. "Letters won't get us far. "Then I went to see your newspaper friend. Extraordinary little man.

Smart as a whip. I told him we were going to Africa to find Papa, and he jumped up and clapped his hands like a child at a Punch and Judy show."

Zouga hugged Robyn tighter. "To tell the truth, I used your name shamelessly, and it did the trick. He will have all the story rights to our diaries and journals, and the publishing rights to both books. "Both books? " Robyn pulled away from him and looked into his face. Both. " He grinned at her. "Yours and mine I am to write a book? "You certainly are. A woman's account of the expedition. I have already signed the contract on your behalf."

She laughed then, but breathlessly. "You're going too far, much too fast. "Little Wicks was in for five hundred, and the next on the list was the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade, they were easy. His Royal Highness is the Society's patron, and he had read Papa's books. We are to report on the state. of the trade in the interior of the continent north of the Tropic of Capricorn, and they came up with another 500 guineas. "Oh Zouga, you are a magician.

"Then there was the Worshipful Company of London Merchants Trading into Africa. For the last hundred years they have based all their activities on the west coast, I convinced them that they needed a survey of the east coast. I have been appointed the Worshipful Company's Agent, with instructions to examine the market in palm oil, gum-copal, copper and ivory, and they have come up with the third and last 500 guineas, and a presentation Sharps rifle. "One thousand five hundred guineas, Robyn breathed, and Zouga nodded.

We are going back home in style."

When? "

I have booked passage on an American trading clipper.

We sail from Bristol in six weeks, for Good Hope and Quelimane in Mozambique. I have written asking leave from my regiment for two years, you will have to do the same with the L. M. S."

It had all happened with dreamlike rapidity after that.

The directors of the L. M. S perhaps relieved that they were not to pay for her passage nor the expense of relocating Robyn in the African interior, in a flush of extravagance decided to continue her stipend during the period she was away, and made a guarded promise to review the position at the end of that time. If she proved herself capable, then there would be a permanent post in Africa thereafter. It was more than she had ever expected, and she had thrown herself wholeheartedly into assisting Zouga with the preparations for departure. There was so much to do that six weeks was barely sufficient, and it seemed only days had passed before the mountain of the expedition's equipment was being swayed down into the holds of the big graceful Baltimore clipper.

The Huron proved as swift as she looked, another wise choice by Zouga Ballantyne, and under Mungo St. John's skilful navigation she made good her westings before attempting to cross the belt of the doldrums at their narrowest point. They were becalmed not a single day and sped across the line at 29" west and immediately Mungo St. John put her on the port tack to stand down across the south east trades. Huron clawed her way southwards with the flying fish sailing ahead of her, close on the wind until she broke from their grip at last with 11ha da Trinidade on the horizon. The north-wester came howling at them and Huron fled before it, under low, sullen, scudding skies day after day that denied them sight of sun or moon or stars, until she almost hurled herself ashore 200 miles up the west coast of Africa from her destination at the Cape of Good Hope. Mr. Mate! " Mungo St. John called in his clear carrying voice as Huron settled down to reach across the wind, pulling swiftly away from the land. Captain! " Tippoo bellowed back from the foot of the mast great blurt of sound from the bull chest. Take the name of the masthead watch."

Tippoo ducked his cannon-ball head on its thick neck like a bare-knuckle fighter taking a punch, and looked up the mast, slitting his eyes in the heavy folds of flesh. Twenty minutes more and he would have had us on the beach. " St. John's voice was cold, deadly. "I'll have him on the grating before this day is out, and we will get a peep of his backbone."

Tippoo licked his thick lips involuntarily, and Robyn, standing near him, felt her stomach heave. There had been three floggings already on this voyage and she knew what to expect. Tippoo was half-Arab, half-African, a honey-coloured giant of a man with a shaven head that was covered with a mesh of tiny pale scars from a thousand violent encounters. He wore a loose embroidered, high-necked turdc over his huge frame, but the forearms that protruded from the wide sleeves were thick as a woman's thighs.

Robyn turned quickly to Zouga as he came down the deck towards her. We had a good look at the land, Sissy. Our first definite fix since 11ha da Trinidade. If this wind holds we will be in Table Bay in another five days. "Zouga, can't you intercede with the Captain? " she demanded, and Zouga looked startled. He is going to flog that poor devil. "Damn right too, Zouga growled. "The man nearly had us on the rocks. "Can't you stop him? "I wouldn't dream of interfering with his running of this ship, and nor will I allow you to. "Do you have no humanity at all? " she demanded of her brother coldly, but there were bright hot spots of anger on her cheeks, and her eyes snapped clear angry green. "You call yourself a Christian. "When I do, I speak softly though, my dear. " Zouga made the reply he knew would annoy her most. "And I don't flaunt it at every turn in the conversation."

Their arguments were always sudden as summer thunderstorms on the African veld, and as spectacular.

Mungo St. John sauntered forward to lean his elbow on the railing of his quarterdeck, a long Havana cheroot of coarse black tobacco held between white teeth. He mocked her silently with those flecked yellow eyes, infuriating her further, until she heard her own voice going shrill and she turned from Zouga, and rounded on him. The man you had flogged last week could be crippled for life, she shouted at him. Doctor Ballantyne, how would you like Tippoo to carry you down and lock you in your cabin? " Mungo St. John asked. "Until you regain your temper and your manners."

You cannot do that, she flared at him. I can, I assure you, that and much more. "He's right, Zouga assured her softly. "On this ship he can do virtually anything he wants. " He laid his hand on her upper arm. "Steady now, Sissy. The fellow will be lucky to get away with the loss of a little skin."

Robyn found she was panting with anger and a sense of helplessness. If you are squeamish, Doctor, I will excuse you from witnessing punishment, Mungo St. John mocked her still. "We must make allowance for the fact that you are a woman. "I have never asked for consideration on that score, not once in all my life. " She tried to get her anger back under control, and she shook off her brother's hand and turned away from them.

She walked with stiff back and squared shoulders up into the bows, trying to maintain an aloof dignity, but the ship's motion was awkward and her damned skirts fluttered around her legs. She realized she had thought the word, and she would ask forgiveness later, but not now, and suddenly she said it aloud. Damn you, Captain Mungo St. John, damn you to hell! " She stood in the bows, and the wind pulled her hair out of the neat chignon at the nape of her neck and flicked it in her face. It was her mother's thick silken dark hair, shot with tones of russet and chestnut, and as a pale ray of greenish sunlight at last broke through the cloud cover, it turned to a glowing halo around her small neat head.

She stared ahead angrily, hardly noticing the hellish beauty of the scene about her. The co green waters, smoked with mist banks, opened and closed about the ship like pearly curtains. Wisps of mist trailed from the sails and yards as though she was on fire.

In patches, the surface of the sea simmered and darkened, for these waters were rich in microscopic sea life, which supported vast shoals of sardine that rose to the surface to feed, to be fed on in turn by flocks of shrieking seabirds that plunged upon them from high above, hitting the water in little cotton puffs of spray.

A thicker bank of mist took the tall ship in its damp cold grip so that when Robyn glanced back she could only just make out the ghostly figures of the Captain and her brother on the quarterdeck.

Then just as suddenly they plunged out again into open sea, and sunny skies. The clouds which had covered them for all these weeks rolled away towards the south while the wind itself increased in strength and veered swiftly into the east, whipping the tops from the waves in graceful ostrich plumes of curling spray.

At the same moment Robyn saw the other ship. It was startlingly close, and she opened her mouth to shout but a dozen other voices forestalled her. Sail oh! "Sail fine on the port quarter."

She was close enough to make out the thin, tall smoke stack between the main and mizzenmasts. Her hull was painted black with a red line below her gunports.

gain each side.

The black hull had a sinister air to it, and the pile of her canvas was not shimmering white as that of Huron, but was sullied dirty grey by the belchings from her smoke stack.

Mungo St. John played the field of his telescope swiftly over her. Her boilers were unlit, there was not even a tremble of heat from the mouth of her stack. She was under easy canvas only. Tippoo! " he called softly, and it seemed that the mate's bulk appeared beside him with the magical speed of a genie. Have you seen her before?

Tippoo grunted and turned his head to spit over the lee rail. Lime-juicer, he said. "I seen her last in Table Bay eight years back. She called Black joke. "Cape Squadron? " Tippoo grunted, and at that moment the gunboat bore up sharply and at the same time her colours; broke out at the masthead. The crisp white and bright scarlet of her ensign shrieked a challenge, a challenge that all the world had learned to heed, and heed swiftly. Only the ships of one nation on earth need not heave to the instant that challenge was flowri. The Huron was immune, she had only to hoist the Stars and Stripes, and even this importunate representative of the Royal Navy would be forced to respect it, But Mungo St. John was thinking swiftly. Six days before he sailed from Baltimore Harbour, in May, 1860, AbrAham Lincoln had been nominated presidential candidate for the United States of America. If elected, as seemed highly likely, he would be invested early in the New Year, and then one of his first actions would surely be to grant to Great Britain the privileges agreed by the Treaty of Brussels, including the right of search of American ships upon the high seas which previous American presidents had so steadfastly denied.

Soon, perhaps sooner than he expected, Mungo St. John might have to run his clipper in deadly earnest against one of these ships of the Cape Squadron. It was a heavensent opportunity to match his ship, and to observe the capabilities of the other.

He swept one last glance about him, that took in the sea, the wind-driven lines of foam upon it, the piled white pyramids of canvas above him and the evil black hull to leeward, and then his decision was made easier.

On the wind came the thud of a gun and a long feather of gunsmoke spurted from one of the gunboat's bowchasers, demanding instant obedience.

Mungo St. John smiled. "The insolent bastard! " To Tippoo he said, "We'll try him on a few points of sailing, " to the helmsman beside him, softly, "Put the helm down. " And as Huron paid off swiftly before the wind, beginning to point directly away from the threatening black ship, "Shake out all reefs, Mr. Mate. Set fore and maintop, hoist studding sails and skysails, crack on the main royal, yes, and flying jib too. By God, we'll show that grubby little coal-guzzling lime-juicer how they build them down Baltimore way! " Even in her anger, Robyn was thrilled by the manner in which the American worked his ship. With his crew swarming out across the yards to the reefing points, the Insails swelled out to their full extent, dazzling white in the sunshine, and then high above, seemingly at the very base of the aching blue heaven itself, new unfamiliar-shaped sails popped open like over-ripe cotton pods and the ion& graceful hull reacted instantly to the pressures thrust upon her. By God, she sails like a witch, Zouga shouted, laughing with excitement, as she knifed into the crests of the Atlantic rollers and he hustled his sister back from the bows before the first green sheets of water came aboard and swept Huron's decks.

More and still more canvas burst open, and the thick trees of her masts began to arch like drawn longbows under the unbearable pressures of thousands of square feet of spread sails. Now Huron seemed to fly, taking off from the crest of each roller and smashing into the face of the next with a crash that shocked her timbers and jarred the teeth of her crew in their skulls. A cast of the lo& Mr. Mate, Mungo St. John called, and when Tippoo bellowed back, "A touch better than sixteen knots, Cap'n! " the Captain laughed aloud, and strode to the stern rail.

The gunboat was falling astern as though she was standing still, although every inch of her grey canvas was spread. Already she was at extreme cannon range.

Again powder-smoke bloomed briefly on her black bows, and this time it seemed that it was more than merely a warning, for Mungo St. John saw the fall of shot.

It struck the crest of a roller two cable lengths astern and skipped across the green torn. waters, before plunging beneath the surface almost alongside Huron's tall side. Captain, you are endangering the lives of your crew and passengers. " The voice arrested him and St. John turned to the tall young woman who stood beside him, and he raised one thick black eyebrow in polite enquiry. That is a British man-of-war, sir, and we are acting like criminals. They are firing live shot now. You have only to heave to, or at the very least show your colours. "I think my sister is right, Captain St. John Zouga stood beside her. "I do not understand your behaviour either."

Huron staggered violently to a larger crest, driven wild by the mountainous press of sail, Robyn lost her balance and fell against the Captain's chest, but instantly pulled away, colouring fiercely at the contact. This is the coast of Africa, Major Ballantyne. Nothing is what it appears to be. Here only a fool would accept a strange armed vessel at its face value. Now if you and the good doctor will excuse me, I must attend to my duties."

He strode forward to gaze down at the maindeck, judging the mood of his crew and the wild abandon of his ship. He unhooked the keyring from his belt and tossed it to Tippoo. "The arms chest, Mr. Mate, a pair of pistols to you and the second mate. Shoot any hand who attempts to interfere with the setting of the sails. " He had recognized the fear which gripped the crew. Most of them had never seen a ship driven like this, there might easily be an attempt to shorten sail rather than have her run herself under.

At that moment Huron put her shoulder into the Atlantic and took it aboard in a solid roaring green wall.

One of the topmast men was not quick enough on to the rat-lines. The water plucked him up and flung him down the length of the deck, until he crashed into the side, and lay huddled against the bulwark like a clump of uprooted kelp on a storm-driven beach.

Two of his fellows tried to reach him, but the next wave drove them back as it came pouring aboard waistdeep and then cascading in a roaring white torrent over the side, and when it was gone the fallen topmast man was gone with it and the deck was empty. Mr. Tippoo, look you to those skysails, they are not drawing as they should."

Mungo St. John turned back to the stern rail, ignoring Robyn Ballantyne's horrified and accusing glare.

Already the British gunboat was hull down and her sails were barely discernible among the grey beards of the breaking Atlantic rollers, but suddenly Mungo St. John saw something change, and he reached quickly for the telescope in its slot under the chart table. There was a fine black line, as though drawn in Indian ink, extending from the tiny cone of the Englishman's sails for a short way across the bumpy horizon. Smoke! She has her boiler fired at last, he grunted, as Tippoo appeared at his shoulder, with the pistols thrust into his belt. One screw. She no catch us. " Tippoo nodded his round s en ea NNo, not downwind in a full gale, Mungo St. John agreed. "But I'd like to try her on the wind. We'll harden up now, Mr. Mate, on the port tack again. I want to see if I can run up to windward of her and pass her out of cannon shot."

The unexpected manoeuvre caught the gunboat commander completely off-guard, and he was a few minutes slow in altering course to cut the shorter leg of the triangle and prevent the Huron wresting the weather gage from him.

Huron went streaming past him at extreme cannonshot hard on the wind, her yards sheeted around as closehauled as she would sail. He tried a shot across her dipping, plunging bows with no visible fall of shot, and then he came around to follow her into the wind, and immediately the flaws in the design and construction of his ship were pointed up as clearly as they had been while both ships were running before the wind.

In order to accommodate the heavy boiler and machinery to drive the big bronze screw under her counter, serious compromise had been made with the design of her masts and the amount of canvas she could carry.

Within five miles it became clear that with all sail set and the boilers belching a solid greasy slug of coal smoke over the stern the Black lake could not point as high into the wind as the beautiful tall ship ahead of her. She was drifting steadily away to leeward, and although the difference in their speeds was not as dramatic as when running before the wind, yet Huron was headreaching on her steadily.

The gunboat's commander pointed her higher and higher, trying desperately to hold the bigger ship directly over his bows, but all his sails were shaking and luffing before he could do so.

In a fury of frustration, he took in all his canvas, stripping his poles bare and relying only on the drive of his steam boiler pointed up directly into the very eye of the wind, much much higher than Huron could sail. But the gunboat's speed bled away when her screw received no help from her sails. Even though her mast and rigging were bare, the storm whistled and howled head-on through them, acting as a great drogue that slowed her further and Huron forged ahead more swiftly. A bastard contraption."

Mungo St. John watched her battle with all his attention, judging her performance at every point of the wind. "We are toying with her. As long as there is a breath of wind we'll romp away from her."

Astern, the gunboat's commander had abandoned his attempt to run the clipper down with steam power alone, and had come back on to a fine reach with all his canvas set, plugging along stubbornly in Huron's streaming wake, until abruptly, with no warning at all, Huron sailed into a deep hole in the wind.

The line of the gale was di-own clearly across the surface of the sea.

On one side, the water was darkened and furrowed by the talons of the wind, on the other, the humped backs of the rollers in the calm had a polished velvety gloss to them.

As Huron crossed that line of demarcation, the clamour of the wind which for week after week had battered their ears, fell to an eerie unnatural silence, and the ship's motion changed from the vital charge of a living, straining sea creature, to the patternless rolling and wallowing of a dead log.

Overhead her canvas volleyed and flapped in the directionless eddies created by her own rolling and pitching, and her tackle crashed and clattered so that it seemed that she might roll her masts clean out of her hull.

Far astern, the black-painted gunboat scrambled on eagerly, swiftly begining to narrow the distance between them, the bloc k column of coal smoke now rising straight up into the stillness of air, giving her a jubilant and menacing air.

Mungo St. John ran to the forward rail of the quarterdeck, and stared over his bows. He could see the wind two or three miles ahead clawing at the sea and ruffling it to a sombre shade of indigo, but between them was the oily undulating surface of the calm.

He swung back and the gunboat was closer, sending her smoke spurting high against the bright windswept blue of the sky, so certain of herself now that her gunports were swinging open and the stubby barrels of her 32-pounder cannon protruding from the black sides of her hull, the churning wash of her screw tumbling out from under her counter and sparkling whitely in the sunlight.

With no way upon Huron, the helmsman could not hold any course, and the clipper drifted around broadside to the on-rushing man-of-war putting her bows directly into the rollers.

They could make out the individual figures of the three officers on the gunboat's bridge now. Again the bow-chaser fired, and the shell lifted a tall column of water so high and close under the Huron's bows that it collapsed upon the deck and streamed out through the scuppers.

Mungo St. John took one last despairing sweep of the horizon, hoping even now for a resurgence of the wind, and then he capitulated. Hoist the colours, Mr. Tippoo, he called, and as the gaudy scrap of cloth drooped from the mainyard in the windless air, he watched through the lens of his telescope the consternation it caused upon the gunboat's bridge. That was the last flag they had hoped to see.

They were now close enough to discern the individual expressions of chagrin and alarm and indecision of the naval officers. There'll be no prize money for you, not this time around, Mungo St. John murmured with grim satisfaction, and snapped the telescope shut.

The gunboat came on and then rounded up to Huron, within easy hail, showing her full broadside, the long 32pounder cannon gaping menacingly.

The tallest officer on her bridge seemed also the oldest, for his hair was white in the sunlight. He came to the gunboat's near rail and lifted the voice trumpet to his mouth. What ship? "Huron, out of Baltimore and Bristol, Mungo St. John hailed back. "With a cargo of trade goods for Good Hope and Quelimane. "Why did you not answer my challenge, sir? "Because, sir, I do not acknowledge your right to challenge ships of the United States of America on the high seas."

Both captains knew just what a thorny and controversial question that reply posed, but the Englishman hesitated only a second. Do you, sir, accede to my right to satisfy myself as to your nationality and your ship's port of registry? "As soon as you run in your guns you may come aboard for that purpose, Captain. But do not send one of your Junior officers."

Mungo St. John was making a fine point of humiliating the commander of the Black joke. But inwardly he was still seething at the fluke of wind and weather which had allowed the gunboat to come up with him.

The Black joke launched a longboat on the heavy swell with an immaculate show of seamanship, and it pulled swiftly to Huron's side. While the Captain scrambled up the rope ladder, the boat's crew backed off and rested on their oars.

The naval officer came in through the entry port, so lithe and agile that Mungo St. John realized his error in thinking him an elderly man. It was the white-blond hair that had misled him, he was evidently less than thirty years of age. He did not wear a uniform coat, for his ship had been cleared for action, and he was dressed in a plain white linen shirt, breeches and soft boots. There were a pair of pistols in his belt and a naval cutlass in its scabbard on his hip. Captain Codrington of Her Majesty's auxiliary cruiser Black joke, he introduced himself stiffly. His hair was bleached in silver white splashes from the salt and the sun, with darker streaks beneath and it was tied with a leather thong in a short queue at the nape of his neck.

His face was weathered to honey-golden brown by the same sun, so that the faded blue of his eyes was in pale contrast.

Captain St. John, owner and master of this vessel.

Neither man made any move to shake hands, and they seemed to bristle like two dog wolves meeting for the first time. I hope you do not intend to detain me longer than is necessary. You can assure yourself that my government will be fully apprised of this incident. May I inspect your papers, Captain? " The young naval officer ignored the threat, and followed St. John on to the quarterdeck. There he hesitated for the first time when he caught sight of Robyn and her brother standing together at the far rail, but he recovered immediately, bowed slightly and then turned his full attention to the packet of documents that Mungo St. John had ready for his inspection on the chart table.

He stooped over the table, working swiftly through the pile until with a shock of discovery he straightened. Damn me, Mungo St. John, your reputation precedes you, sir. " The Englishman's expression was strained with strong emotion. "And what a noble one it is, too. " There was a bitter sting in his voice. "The first trader ever to carry more than three thousand souls across the middle passage in a single, twelve-month period, small wonder you can afford such a magnificent vessel. "You are on dangerous ground, sir, Mungo St. John warned him with that lazy, taunting grin. "I am fully aware of the lengths to which the officers of your service will go for a few guineas of prize money. "Where are you going to pick up your next cargo of human misery, Captain St. John? " the Englishman cut in brusquely. "On such a fine ship you should be able to pack in two thousand. " He had gone pale with unfeigned anger, actually trembling slightly with the force of it. If you have finished your investigation-" St. John's smile did not slip, but the naval officer went on speaking. We have made the west coast a little too hot for you now, have we? Even when you hide behind that pretty piece of silk, the naval officer glanced up at the flag on the mainyard, "so you are going to work the east coast now, are you, sir? They tell me you can get a prime slave for two dollars, two for a io-shilling musket. "I must ask you to leave now. " St. John took the document from his hand, and when their fingers touched, the Englishman wiped his hand on his own thigh as though to cleanse it of the contact. I'd give five years" pay to have the hatches off your holds, he said bitterly, leaning forward to stare at Mungo St. John with those pale fierce eyes. Captain Codrington! " Zouga Ballantyne stepped s the group. "I am a British subject and an officer toward in Her Majesty's army. I can assure you that there are no slaves aboard this vessel. " He spoke sharply. If you are an Englishman, then you should be ashamed to travel in such company. " Codrington glanced beyond Zouga. "And that applies equally to you, madamV You overreach yourself, sir, Zouga told him grimly. I have already given you my assurance."

Codrington's gaze had flicked back to Robyn Ballantyne's face. Her distress was evident. . . ie accusation had shattered her, that as, the daughter of Fuller Ballantyne, the great champion of freedom and sworn adversary of slavery, she, the accredited agent of the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade should be travelling aboard a notorious slaver.

She was pale, the green eyes huge and liquid with the shock of it. Captain Codrington, her voice was husky and low, my brother is right, I also assure you that there are no slaves aboard this ship."

The Englishman's expression softened, she was not a beautiful woman, but there was a freshness and wholesomeness about her which was difficult to resist. I will accept your word, madam."

He inclined his head. "Indeed, only a madman would carry black ivory towards Africa, but, and his voice hardened again, if only I were able to enter her holds, I'd find enough down there to run her into Table Bay under a prize crew and have her condemned out of hand at the next session of the Court of Mixed Commission."

Codrington swung on his heel to face Mungo St. John again. Oh yes, I know that your slave decks will be struck to make way for your trade cargo, but the spare planks are aboard and it won't take you a day to set them up again, Codrington almost snarled, "and I'll wager there are open gratings under those hatch covers, he pointed down at the maindeck, but without taking his eyes from Mungo St. John's face, "that there are shackles in the lower decks to take the chains and leg irons-, Captain Codrington, I find your company wearying Mungo St. John drawled softly. "You have sixty seconds to leave this ship, before I have my mate assist you over the side."

Tippoo stepped forward, hairless as an enormous toad, and stood a foot behind Codrington's left shoulder.

With a visible effort, the English captain retained his temper, as he inclined his head towards Mungo St. John. May God grant we meet again, sir. " He turned back to Robyn and saluted her briefly. May I wish you a pleasant continuation of your voyage, madam. "Captain Codrington, I think you are mistaken, she almost pleaded with him. He did not reply but stared at her for a moment longer, the pale eyes were direct and disturbing, the eyes of a prophet or a fanatic, then he turned and went with a gangling boyish stride to Huron's entry port.

Tippoo had stripped off the high-necked tunic and oiled his upper body so it gleamed in the sunlight with the metallic lustre of the skin of some exotic reptile.

He stood stolidly on flat bare feet, balancing effortlessly to the Huron's roll, his thick arms hanging at his side and the lash of the whip coiled on the deck at his feet.

There was a grating fixed at the ship's side and the sailor who had been at the masthead lookout when they had raised the African coast, was spread-eagled upon it like a stranded starfish on a rock exposed at low tide.

He twisted his head awkwardly to look back over his shoulder at the mate, and his face was white with terror.

You were excused witnessing punishment, Doctor Ballantyne, " Mungo St. John told her quietly. I feel it my duty to suffer this barbaric-"As you wish, he cut her short with a nod, and turned away. "Twenty, Mr. Tippoo. "Twenty it is, Cap'n."

With no expression at all Tippoo stepped up behind the man, hooked his finger into the back of his collar and ripped the shirt down to the belt. The man's back was pale as suet pudding, but studded with fat purple carbuncles, the sailor's affliction, caused by salty, wet clothing and the unhealthy diet.

Tippoo stepped back and flicked out the lash so that it extended to its full length along the seamed oak planking. Ship's company! " Mungo St. John called. "The charge is inattention to duty, and endangering the ship's safety."

They shuffled their bare feet, but not one of them looked up at him. "The sentence is twenty lashes."

On the grating the man turned his face away and closed his eyes tightly, hunching his shoulders. Lay on, Mr. Tippoo, Mungo St. John said, and Tippoo squinted carefully at the bare, white skin, through which the knuckles of the spine showed clearly. He reared back, one thickly muscled arm thrown high above his head, and the lash snaked higher, hissing like an angry cobra, then he stepped forward into the stroke, pivoting the full weight and force of his shoulders into it.

The man on the grating shrieked, and his body convulsed in a spasm that smeared the skin from his wrists against the coarse hemp bonds.

The white skin opened in a thin bright scarlet line, from one side of his ribs to the other, and one of the angry purple carbuncles between his shoulder blades erupted in a spurt of yellow matter that ran down the pale skin and soaked into the waistband of his breeches. One, " said Mungo St. John, and the man on the grating began to sob quietly.

Tippoo stepped back, shook out the lash carefully, squinted at the bloody line across the white shuddering flesh, reared back and grunted as he stepped forward into the next stroke. Two, said Mungo St. John. Robyn felt her gorge rise to choke her. She fought it down, and forced herself to watch. She could not allow him to see her weakness.

On the tenth stroke the body on the grating relaxed suddenly, the head lolled sideways and the fists unclenched slowly so that she could see the little bloody half-moon wounds where the nails had been driven into the palms. There was no further sign of life during the rest of the leisurely ritual of punishment.

At the twentieth stroke, she almost flung herself down the ladder to the maindeck and was feeling for the pulse before they could cut the body down from the grating. Praise be to God, " she whispered as she felt it fluttering under her fingers, and then to the seamen who were lifting the man down, "Gently now! " She saw that Mungo St. John had got his wish, for the white porcelain crests of the spinal column were jutting up through the sliced meat of the back muscles.

She had a cotton dressing ready and she placed it across the ruined back as they laid him on to an oak plank and hustled him towards the forecastle.

In the narrow, crowded forecastle, thick with the fumes of cheap pipe tobacco and the almost solid reek of bilges and wet clothing, of unwashed men and mouldering food, they laid the man on the mess table and she worked as best she could in the guttering light of the oil-lamp in its gimbals overhead. She stitched back the flaps and ribbons of mushy, torn flesh with horsehair sutures and then bound up the whole in weak phenol solution, treatment which Joseph Lister had recently pioneered with much success against mortification.

The man was conscious again and whimpering with pain. She gave him five drops of laudanum, and promised to visit him the following day to change the bindings.

As she packed away her instruments and closed her black valise, one of the crew, a little pockmarked bosun, named Nathaniel, picked it up and when she nodded her thanks, he muttered with embarrassment, "We are beholden, missus."

It had taken all of them time to accept her ministrations. First it had been only the lancing of carbuncles and sea-boils, calomel for the flux and the grippe, but later, after a dozen successful treatments, which included a fractured humerus, an ulcerated and ruptured eardrum and the banishing of a venereal chancre with mercury, she had become a firm favourite amongst the crew, and her sick-call a regular feature of shipboard life.

The bosun climbed the companionway behind her, carrying the valise, but before they reached the deck, an idea struck her and she stooped to him, placing a hand on his shoulder. Nathaniel, she asked urgently, but in a low voice, "is there a way of entering the ship's hold without lifting the maindeck hatches? " The man looked startled, and she shook his shoulder roughly. "Is there! she demanded. Aye, ma'am, there is. "Where?

How? " Through the lazaretto, below the officers" saloon there is a hatchway through the forward bulkhead. Is it locked? "Aye, ma'am, it is, and Captain St. John keeps the keys on his belt."

Tell nobody that I asked, she ordered him, and hastened up on the maindeck.

At the foot of the mainmast, Tippoo was washing down the lash in a bucket of seawater that was already tinged pale pink; he looked up at her, still stripping the water off the leather between thick hairless fingers, and he grinned at Robyn as she passed, squatting down'on thick, brown haunches with his loin cloth drawn up into his crotch, swinging his round bald head on its bull neck to follow her.

She found herself panting a little with fear and revulsion, and she swept her skirts aside as she passed him.

At the door of her cabin she took the valise from Nathaniel with a word of thanks, and then slumped down upon her bunk.

Her thoughts and her emotions were in uproar, for she had still not recovered from the sudden avalanche of events that had interrupted the leisurely pattern of the voyage.

The boarding by Captain Codrington of the Royal Navy overshadowed even her anger at the flogging or her joy at her first view of Africa in nearly two decades and now his accusations rankled and disturbed her.

After a few minutes" rest she lifted the lid of her travelling-chest that filled most of the clear space in the tiny cabin, and had to unpack much of it before she found the pamphlets from the anti-slavery society with which she had been armed in London before departure.

She sat down to study them once again, a history of the struggle against the trade up to the present time. As she read, her anger and frustration reawakened at the tale of unenforceable international agreements, all with built-in escape clauses: laws that made it an act of piracy to indulge in the trade north of the equator, but allowed it to flourish unchecked in the southern hemisphere; treaties and agreements signed by all nations, except those most actively engaged in the trade, Portugal, Brazil, Spain. Other great nations, France, using the trade to goad their traditional enemy, Great Britain, shamelessly exploiting Britain's commitment to its extinction, trading political advantage for vague promises of support.

Then there was America, a signatory to the Treaty of Brussels which Britain had engineered, agreeing to the abolition of the trade, but not to the abolition of the institution of slavery itself. America agreed that the transport of human souls into captivity was tantamount to active piracy, and that vessels so engaged were liable to seizure under prize and condemnation by courts of Admiralty or Mixed Commission, agreed also to the equipment clause, that ships equipped for transport of slaves, although not actually with a cargo of slaves on board at the time of seizure, could be taken as prize.

There was America agreeing to all of this, and then denying to the warships of the Royal Navy the right of search. The most America would allow was that British officers could assure themselves of the legality of the claim to American ownership, and if that was proven, they could not search, not even though the stink of slaves rose from her holds to offend the very heavens, or the clank of chains and the half-human cries from hertween decks came near to deafening them, still they could not search.

Robyn dropped one pamphlet back into her chest, and selected another publication from the society.

ITEM, in the previous year, 1859, estimated 169,000 slaves had been transported from the coasts of Africa to the mines of Brazil, and the plantations of Cuba, and to those of the Southern States of America.

ITEM, the trade in slaves by the Omani Arabs of Zanzibar could not be estimated except by observation of the numbers passing through the markets of that island.

Despite the British Treaty with the Sultan as early as 1822, the British Consul at Zanzibar had counted almost 200,000 slaves landed during the previous twelve-month period. The corpses were not landed, nor were the sick and dying, for the Zanzibar customs dues were payable to the Sultan per capita, live or dead.

The dead and those so enfeebled -or diseased as to have little hope of survival were thrown overboard, at the ed e of the deep water beyond the coral reef. Here a permanent colony of huge man-eating sharks cruised the area by day and by night. Within minutes of the first body, dead or still living, striking the water, the surface around the dhow was torn into a seething white boil by the great fish. The British Consul estimated a forty-percent mortality rate amongst slaves making the short passage from the mainland to the island.

Robyn dropped that pamphlet and before picking up the next, she reflected a moment on the sheer multitudes involved in the whole grisly business. Five million since the turn of the century, she whispered, "five million souls. No wonder that they call it the greatest crime against humanity in the history of the world."

She opened the next pamphlet and skimmed quickly over an examination of the profits that accrued to a successful trader.

In the interior of Africa, up near the lake country where few white men had ever reached, Fuller Ballantyne had discovered - her father's name in print gave her a prickle of pride and of melancholy, Fuller had discovered that a prime slave changed hands for a cupful of porcelain beads, two slaves for an obsolete Tower musket that cost thirteen shillings in London, or a Brown Bess musket that cost two dollars in New York.

At the coast the same slave cost ten dollars, while on the slave market in Brazil he would sell for five hundred dollars. But once he was taken north of the equator, the risks to the trader increased and the price rose dramatically, a thousand dollars in Cuba, fifteen hundred in Louisiana.

Robyn lowered the text, and thought swiftly. The English Captain had challenged that Huron could carry 2,000 slaves at a time. Landed in America, they would be worth an unbelievable three million dollars, an amount which would buy fifteen ships like Huron. A single voyage would make a man rich beyond mundane dreams of greed, all risks were acceptable to the traders to win such vast wealth.

But had Captain Codrington been justified in his accusations ? Robyn knew the counter-accusations that were made against the officers of the Royal Navy, that their zeal arose from the promise of prize money rather than a hatred of the trade and a love of humanity. That every sail they raised was considered a slaver, and that they were swift to apply the Equipment Clause in the widest possible interpretation.

Robyn was searching for the pamphlet that dealt in detail with this Equipment Clause and she found it next on the pile before her.

To enable a ship to be seized as a slaver under the clause, she need only satisfy one of the stipulated conditions. She could be taken if her hatches were equipped with open gratings to ventilate her holds; if there were dividing bulkheads in her holds to facilitate the installation of slave decks; if there were spare planks aboard for laying as slave decks; if she carried shackles and bolts, or leg irons and cuffs; if she carried too many water casks for the number of her crew and passengers; if she had disproportionally large numbers of mess tubs, or her rice boilers were too big, or if she carried unreasonable quantities of rice or farina.

Even if she carried native matting that might be used as bedding for slaves, she could be seized and run in under a prize crew. These were wide powers given to men who could profit financially by seizure.

Was Captain Codrington one of these, were those pale fanatical eyes merely a mask for avarice and a desire for personal gain?

Robyn found herself hoping they were, or at least that in the case of Huron he had been mistaken. But then why had Captain St. John put down his helm, and run for it the moment he sighted the British cruiser?

Robyn was confused and miserable, haunted with guilt. She needed comfort and she slipped a lace Stuart cap over her head and shoulders before venturing out on to the deck again, for the wind had risen to an icy gale and Huron was always a tender ship, she heeled heavily as she beat southwards, flinging spray high into the falling night.

Zouga was in his cabin, dressed in shirt-sleeves and smoking a cigar as he worked over the lists of the expedition's equipment that would still have to be obtained once they reached Good Hope.

He called to her to enter when she knocked, and rose to greet her with a smile. Sissy, are you well? It was a most unpleasant business, even though unavoidable. I hope it has not unsettled you. "The man will recover, she said, and Zouga changed the subject as he settled her on his bunk, the only other seating in the cabin. I sometimes think we would have been better off with less money to spend on this expedition. There is always such a temptation to accumulate too much equipment.

Papa made the Transversa with only five porter loads, while we will need a hundred porters at the least, each carrying eighty pounds. "Zouga, I must speak to you. this is the first opportunity I have had."

An expression of distaste flickered across the strong, harsh features as though he sensed what she was about to say. But before he could deny her she blurted out, "Is this ship a slaver, Zouga? " Zouga removed the cigar from his mouth and inspected the tip minutely before he replied. Sissy, a slaver stinks so you can smell it for fifty leagues downwind, and even after the slaves are removed there is no amount of lye that will get rid of the smell.

Huron does not have the stench of a slaver. "This ship is on her first voyage under this ownership, Robyn reminded him quietly. "Codrington accused Captain St. John of using his profits from previous voyages to purchase her. She is still clean. "Mungo St. John is a gentleman.

" Zouga's tone had an edge of impatience to it now. "I am convinced of that. "The plantation owners of Cuba and Louisiana are amongst the most elegant gentlemen that you could find outside the court of St. James, she reminded him. I am prepared to accept his word as a gentleman, Zouga snapped. Are you not a little eager, Zouga? " she asked with a deceptive sweetness but his tone had kindled sparks in her eyes like the sheen lights in an emerald. "Would it not seriously impede your plans to find ourselves shipped on board a slaver? "Damn me, woman, I have his word. " Zouga was getting truly angry now. St. John is engaged in legitimate trade. He hopes for a cargo of ivory and palm oilHave you asked to inspect the ship's hold? "He has given his word. "Will you ask him to open the holds?

Zouga hesitated, his gaze wavered a moment, and then he made his decision. No, I will not, he said flatly. "That would be an insult to him and quite rightly, he would resent itAnd if we found what you are afraid to find, it would discredit the purpose of our expedition, she agreed. As the leader of this mission. I have made the decision-, Papa would never let anything stand in his way either, not even Mama or the family-'Sissy, if you still feel that way when we reach the Cape, I will arrange for passage on another vessel to Quelimane. Will that satisfy you? " She did not reply but continued to stare at him with a flat accusing gaze. If we did find evidence, he waved his hands with agitation, "what could we do about it? "We could make a sworn deposition to the Admiralty at Cape Town. "Sissy, " he sighed wearily at her intransigence, "don't you understand? if I were to challenge St. John, we could gain nothing. If the accusation is unwarranted we would place ourselves in a damned awkward position, and if in the very unlikely event that this ship is equipped for the trade, we would then be in considerable danger. Do not underestimate that danger. Robyn. St. John is a F determined man. " He stopped and shook his head decisively, the fashionable curls dangling over his ears. "I am not going to endanger you, myself or the whole expedition. That is my decision, and I will insist that you abide by it."

After a long pause, Robyn slowly dropped her gaze to her hands, and inter-meshed her fingers.

Very well, Zouga."

His relief was obvious. "I am grateful for your confidence, my dear.

" He stooped over her and kissed her forehead. "Let me escort you to dinner."

She was about to refuse, to tell him she was tired and that, once again, she would dine alone in her cabin, and then an idea struck her, and she nodded.

Thank you, Zouga, she told him, and then looked up with one of those sudden smiles so brilliant. so warm and so rare as to disarm him completely. "I am fortunate to have such a handsome dinner companion."

She sat between Mungo St. John and her brother, and had her brother not known better, he might have suspected her of flirting outrageously with the Captain. She was all smiles and sparkles, leaning forward attentively to listen whenever he spoke, recharging his glass whenever it was less than half filled with wine and laughing delightedly at his dry sallies.

Zouga was amazed and a little alarmed by the transformation, while St. John had never seen her like this.

He had covered his original surprise with an amused half-smile. However, in this mood Robyn Ballantyne was an attractive companion. Her stubborn, rather sharp face softened to the edge of prettiness, while her best features, her hair, her perfect skin, her eyes and fine white teeth, gleamed and flashed in the lamplight. Mungo St. John's own mood became expansive, he laughed more readily and his interest was clearly piqued. With Robyn plying his glass, he drank more than on any other night of the voyage, and when his steward served a good plum duff he called for a bottle of brandy to wash it down.

Zouga had also been infected by the strangely festive air of the dinner, and he protested as vigorously as St. John when suddenly Robyn declared herself to be exhausted and stood up from the board, but she was adamant.

In her cabin she could still hear the occasional shouts of laughter from the saloon, as she went quietly about her preparations. She slid the locking bar into place to assure her privacy. Then she knelt beside her chest and wormed her way down to the bottom layers, from which she retrieved a pair of man's moleskin breeches, a flannel shirt and cravat, with a high-buttoned monkey jacket to go over them, and well-worn half boots.

This had been her uniform and her disguise as a medical student at St. Matthew's Hospital. Now she stripped herself naked, and for a moment enjoyed the wicked freedom of the feeling, even indulging herself to the extent of gazing down at her nudity. She was not too certain if it was a sin to enjoy one's own body, but she suspected that it was. Nevertheless she persisted.

Her legs were straight and strong, her hips flared with a graceful curve and then narrowed abruptly into her waist, her belly was almost flat with just an interesting little bulge below the navel. Now here was definitely sinful ground, of this there was no doubt. But still she could not deny the temptation to let her gaze linger a moment. She understood fully the technical purpose and the physical workings of all her body's highly complicated machinery, both visible and concealed. It was only the feelings and emotions which sprang from this source which both confused and worried her, for they had taught her none of this at St. Matthew's. She passed on hurriedly to safer ground, lifting her arms to pile the tresses of her hair on to the top of her head and hold them in place with a soft cloth cap.

Her breasts were round and neat as ripening apples, so firm as hardly to change their shape as she moved her arms. Their resemblance to fruit pleased her and she spent a few moments longer than was necessary in adjusting the cloth cap upon her head looking down at them.

But there was a limit to self-indulgence, and she swept the flannel shirt over her head, pulled the tails down around her waist, stepped into the breeches, how good they felt again after so long in those hobbling skirts and then, sitting upon the bunk, she pulled on the halfthe ankle straps of the breeches under boots and buckled the arch of her foot, before standing to clinch the belt at her waist.

She opened her black valise, took out the roll of surgical instruments and selected one of the sturdier scalpels, folded out the blade and tested it with her thumb. It was stingingly sharp. She closed the blade and slipped it into her hip pocket. It was the only weapon available to her.

She was ready now, and she closed the shutter on the bull's-eye lantern, ddarkening the cabin completely before climbing, fully dressed, into her bunk, pulling the rough woollen blanket to her chin and settling down to wait.

The laughter from the saloon became more abandoned, and she imagined that the brandy bottle was being cruelly punished by the men. A long while later she heard her brother's heavy, uneven footsteps on the companion way past her cabin and then there was only the creak and pop of the ship's timbers as she heeled to the wind and far away the regular tapping of some loose piece of equipment.

She was so keyed, with both fear and anticipation, that there was never any danger of her falling asleep. However, the time passed with wearying slowness. Each time that she opened the shutter of the lantern to check her pocket-watch, the hands seemed hardly to have moved.

Then, somehow, it was two o'clock in the morning, the hour when the human body and spirit are at their lowest ebb.

She rose quietly from her bunk, picked up the darkened lantern and went to the door of her cabin. The locking bolt clattered like a volley of musketry, but then it was open and she slipped through.

In the saloon a single oil-lamp still burned smokily, throwing agitated shadows against the wooden bulkheads, while the empty brandy bottle had fallen to the deck, and rolled back and forth with the ship's motion.

Robyn squatted to pull off her boots and, leaving them at the entrance, she went forward on bare feet, crossed the saloon and stepped into the passageway that led to the stern quarters.

Her breath was short, as though she had run far, and she paused to lift the shutter of the bull's-eye lantern and flash a narrow beam of light into the darkness ahead.

The door to Mungo St. John's cabin was closed.

She crept towards it, guiding herself with one hand on the bulkhead and at last her fingers closed over the brass door-handle. Please God, she whispered, and achingly slowly twisted the handle. It turned easily, and then the door slid open an inch along its track, enough for her to peep through into the cabin beyond.

There was just light to see, for the deck above was pierced for a repeating compass so that even while in his bunk the master could at a glance tell his ship's heading.

The compass was lit by the dull yellow glow of the helmsman's lantern and the reflection allowed Robyn to make out the cabin's central features.

The bunk was screened off by a dark curtain and the rest of the furnishings were simple. The locked doors of the arms chest to the left, with a row of hooks beyond from which hung a boat cloak and the clothing that St. John had been wearing at dinner. Facing the door was a solid teak desk with racks to hold the brass navigational instruments, sextant, straight edge, dividers, and on the bulkhead above it were affixed the barometer and the ship's chronometer.

The Captain had evidently emptied his pockets on to the desk top before undressing. Scattered amongst the charts and ship's papers were a clasp knife, a silver cigar case, a tiny gold inlaid pocket pistol of the type favoured by professional gamblers, a pair of chunky ivory dice Zouga and St. John must have fallen to gaming again after she left them, and then most important, what she had hoped to find, the bunch of ship's keys, that St. John usually wore on a chain from his belt, lay in the centre of the desk.

An inch at a time Robyn slid the door further open, watching the dark alcove to the right of the cabin. The curtains billowed slightly with each roll of the ship, and she screwed her nerves tighter as she imagined the movement to be that of a man about to leap out at her.

When the door was open enough to allow her to pass through, it required a huge effort of will to take the first step.

Half-way across the cabin she froze; now she was only inches from the bunk. She peered into the narrow gap in the curtaining and saw the gleam of naked flesh, and beard the deep regular breathing of the sleeping man. It reassured her and she went on swiftly to the desk.

She had no way of learning which keys fitted the lazaretto and the hatch to the main hold. She had to take the whole heavy bunch, and realized that it would mean returning to the cabin later. She did not know if she would have the courage to do that, and as she lifted the bunch her hand shook so it jangled sharply. Startled, she clutched it to her bosom and stared fearfully at the alcove. "There was no movement beyond the curtains, and she glided back towards the door on silent bare feet.

it was only when the door closed again that the curtains of the alcove were jerked open, and Mungo St. John lifted himself on one elbow. He paused only a moment and then swung his legs out of the bunk and stood up.

He reached the desk in two quick strides and checked the top. The keys! " he hissed, and reached out for his breeches hanging on the rack beside him, pulling them on swiftly and then stooping to open one of the drawers in his desk.

He lifted the lid of the rosewood case and took out the pair of long-barrelled duelling pistols, thrust them into his waistband, and started for the door of the cabin.

Robyn found the correct key to the lazaretto on the third attempt and the door gave reluctantly, dragging on the hinge with a squeal that sounded to her like a bugle call commanding a charge of heavy cavalry.

She locked the door behind her again, feeling a rush of relief to know that nobody could follow her now and she opened the shutter of the lantern and looked about her swiftly.

The lazaretto was no more than a large cupboard used as a pantry for the officers" personal stores. Sides of smoked ham and dried polonies hung from hooks in the deck above, there were fat rounds of cheese in the racks boxes of tinned goods, racks of black bottles with waxed stoppers, bags of flour and rice, and, facing Robyn, another hatch with the locking bar chained in place by a padlock the size of her doubled fists. The key, when she found it, was equally massive, as thick as her middle finger, and the hatch so heavy that it took all of her strength to drag it aside. Then she had to double over to get through the low opening.

Behind her, Mungo St. John heard the scrape of wood on wood and dropped silently down the steps to the door of the lazaretto. With a cocked pistol in one hand, he laid his ear to the oak planking to listen for a moment before trying the handle. God's breath! " he muttered angrily as he found it locked, and then turned away and raced on bare feet up the companionway to the cabin of his first mate.

At the first touch on his thickly muscled shoulder, Tippoo was fully awake, his eyes glistening in the gloom like those of a wild animal. Someone has broken into the hold, St. John hissed at him, and Tippoo reared up out of his bunk, a huge dark figure. We find him, he grunted, as he bound the loin cloth around his waist. "Then we feed fish with him.

The main hold seemed vast as a cathedral. The beam of the lantern could not reach into its deepest recesses, and a great mass of cargo was piled high, in some places as high as the maindeck fifteen feet above her.

She saw at once that the cargo had been loaded in such a way that it could be unloaded piecemeal, that any single item could be identified and swung up through the hatches without the necessity of unloading the whole. This, of course, must be essential in a ship trading from port to port. She saw also that the goods were carefully packaged and clearly labelled. Flashing the lantern around her she saw that the cases of equipment for their own expedition were packed here, "Ballantyne Africa Expedition" stencilled in black on the raw, white wood.

She clambered up the rampart of cases and bales and balanced on the peak, turning the lantern upwards towards the square opening of the hatch, trying to see if there was an open grating, and immediately she was frustrated for the white canvas cover had been stretched around the lower surface also. She stood at full stretch to try and touch the hatch, to feel for the shape of a grating under the canvas, but her fingertips were inches short of the hatch and a sudden wild plunge of the ship under her sent her flying backwards into the deep aisle between the piles of cargo. She managed to keep her grip on the lantern, but hot oil from its reservoir splashed over her hand, threatening to blister the skin.

Once again she crawled up and over the mountains of cargo, searching for the evidence that she hoped not to find. There was no dividing bulkhead in the hold, but the main mast pierced the deck above and came through the hold to rest its foot on the keel, and there were stepped wedges fixed to the thick column of Norwegian pine.

Perhaps they were there to hold the slave decks. Robyn knelt beside the mast and sighted across the hold to the outward curved side of the ship. In line with the wedges on the mast were heavy wooden ledges, like shallow shelves, and she thought that these might be supports for the outer edges of the slave decks. She guessed that they were between two and a half and three feet apart, which she had read was the average height of the between decks in a slaver.

She tried to imagine what this hold might look like with those decks in place, tiers of low galleries just high enough for a man to crawl into doubled over. She counted the shelves and there were five of them, five piles of decks, each with its layer of naked black humanity laid out sardine fashion, each one in physical contact with his neighbour on either side, lying there in his own filth and that of the slaves above him which leaked through the seams of the deck. She tried to imagine the heat of the middle passage when the ship lay becalmed in the baking doldrums, she tried to imagine 2,000 Of them vomiting and purging with seasickness as the ship reared and plunged in the wild seas where the Mozambique current scoured the Agulhas bank. She tried to imagine an epidemic of cholera or smallpox taking hold of that mass of misery, but her imagination could not rise to the task, and she pushed the hideous images aside and crawled on over the heaving cargo, flashing her lantern into each corner, searching for more solid evidence than the narrow ledges.

if there was planking on board it would be laid flat upon the deck, below this cargo, and there was no way in which Robyn could reach it.

Ahead of her she saw a dozen huge casks bolted to the forward bulkhead. They could be water barrels, or they could be filled with trade rum, or the rum could be replaced with water when the slaves were taken on board. There was no means of checking the contents, but she knocked on the oak with the hilt of her scalpel and the dull tone assured her that the casks contained something.

She squatted down on one of the bales and slit the stitching with the scalpel, thrusting her hand into the opening she grasped a handful and pulled it out to examine it in the lamp light.

Trade beads, ropes of them strung on cotton threads, a bitil of beads was as long as the interval between fingertip and wrist, four bitil made a khete. These beads were made of scarlet porcelain, they were the most valued variety called sam sam. An African of the more primitive tribes would sell his sister for a khete of these, his brother for two khete.

Robyn crawled on, examining crates and bales, bolts of cotton cloth from the mills of Salem, called merkani in Africa, a corruption of the word "American" and the chequered cloth from Manchester known as kaniki.

Then there were long wooden crates marked simply "Five Pieces', and she could guess that they contained muskets. However, firearms were common trade goods to the coast, and no proof of the intention to buy slaves, they could just as readily be used to purchase ivory or gumcopal.

She was tired now with the effort of climbing and blundering around over the heaving slopes and peaks of cargo, and with the nervous tension of the search.

She paused to rest a moment, leaning back against one of the bales of merkani cloth, and as she did so something dug painfully into her back, forcing her to change her position. Then she realized that cloth should not have hard lumps in it. She shuffled around and once again slit the sacking cover of the bale.

Protruding from between the folded layers of cloth, there was something black and cold to the touch. She pulled it out and it was heavy iron, looped and linked, and she recognized it instantly. In Africa they were called "the bracelets of death'. Here, at last, was proof, positive and irrefutable, for these steel slave cuffs with the light marching chains were the unmistakable stigmata of the trade.

Robyn tore the bale wider open, there were hundreds of the iron cuffs concealed between layers of cloth. Even if it had been possible, a perfunctory search by a naval boarding party was highly unlikely to have uncovered this sinister hoard.

She selected one set of cuffs with which to confront her brother and she started aft towards the lazaretto, filled suddenly with desire to be out of this dark cavern with its menacing shadows, and back once more in the safety of her own cabin.

She had almost reached the entrance to the lazaretto when suddenly there was a loud scraping sound from the deck above, and she froze with alarm. When the sound was repeated, she had enough of her wits still about her to douse the snuffer of her lantern, and then immediately regretted having done so for the darkness seemed to crush down upon her with a suffocating weight and she felt panic rising up to take possession of her.

With a crash like a cannon shot the main hatch flew open, and as she swung back towards it she saw the white pin-pricks of the stars outlined by the square opening. Then a huge, dark shape dropped through, landing lightly on the piled bales beneath, and at almost the same instant the hatch thudded closed again, blotting out the starlight.

Now Robyn's terror came bubbling to the surface.

There was somebody locked in the hold with her, and the knowledge held her riveted for long, precious seconds, before she plunged back towards the lazaretto hatch, suppressing the scream that choked up into her throat.

The shape she had glimpsed for a moment was unmistakable. She knew that it was Tippoo in the hold with her, and it spurred her terror. She could imagine the great hairless toadlike figure, moving towards her in the darkness, with repulsive reptilian swiftness, could almost see the pink tongue flickering out over thick cruel lips, and her haste became uncontrolled. She lost her footing in the darkness and fell heavily, tumbling backwards into one of the deep gullies between banks of cargo, cracking the back of her skull on a wooden case, half stunning herself so that she lost her grip on the extinguished lantern and could not find it when she groped for it. When she scrambled to her knees again, she had lost all sense of direction in the total blackness of the hold.

She knew that her best defence was to remain still and silent until she could place the man who was hunting her, and she crouched down in a crack between two crates. Her pulse beat in her ears like a drum, deafening her, and her heart seemed to have crammed up into her throat so that she must fight for each breath.

It took many minutes and all her determination to bring herself under control, to be able to think again.

She tried to decide in which direction lay the lazaretto hatch, her only means of escape, but she knew that the only way she would be able to find it would be to grope her way to the ship's wooden side and follow it around.

The prospect of doing this, with that grotesque creature hunting her in the darkness, was appalling. She shrank down as far as she could into the narrow space and listened.

The hold was filled with small sounds that she had not noticed before, the heave and creak of the ship's timbers, the shifts of the cargo against its retaining ropes and netting, but then she heard the movement of a living thing close behind her and she caught the shriek of terror before it reached her lips, as she lifted her arm to protect her head. Frozen like that, she waited for a blow which never came.

Instead she heard another movement pass behind her turned shoulder, a whisper of sound, yet so chilling that she felt all power of movement drained from her legs.

He was here, very close in the blackness, toying with her, cruel as a cat. He had smelt her out. With some sort of animal sense, Tippoo had found her unerringly in the darkness, and now he crouched over her ready to strike and she could only wait.

Something touched her shoulder, and before she could jerk away it swarmed up over her neck, brushed her face.

She flung herself backwards and screamed, striking out wildly with the steel chain and handcuffs which she still held in her right hand.

The thing was furry and quick, and it squealed sharply, like an angry piglet as she struck again and again. Then it was gone, and she heard the scamper of small feet across the rough wood of the crate and she realized that it had been one of the ship's rats, big as a torn cat.

Robyn shuddered, revolted, but with a lift of relief that was short-lived.

There was a flash of light, so unexpected that it almost blinded her, and a lantern beam was thrown in a single swift sweep about the hold, and then extinguished, so that the darkness seemed even more crushing than before.

The hunter had heard her scream, and had flashed his lantern in her direction, had probably seen her, for she had clambered out of her niche between the crates. Now at least she knew in which direction to move, the brief flash of light had orientated her once again, she knew where to find the hatch.

She threw herself over a pile of soft bales, clawing herself towards the hatch, then checking her flight to think a moment. Tippoo must have known how she had entered the hold and would know that she would try to escape in the same direction. She must move with care, with stealth, ready for the moment when he flashed the lantern again, taking care not to rush headlong into the trap he was certainly setting for her.

She changed her grip on the iron chain, only then realizing its potential as a weapon, much more effective than the short-bladed scalpel in her pocket. A weapon! For the first time she was thinking of defending herself, not merely crouching like a chicken before the stoop of the hawk. "Robbie was always the plucky one. " She could almost hear her mother's voice, troubled but touched with pride, when she had defended herself effectively against the village ruffians, or joined her brother on some of his more hair-raising escapades, and she realized she needed all of that pluck now.

With the chain gripped in her right hand, she started stealthily back towards the hatch, crawling, slithering forward on her belly, pausing to listen every few seconds.

It seemed like a complete round of eternity before her outreaching fingers touched the solid planking of the after bulkhead. She was within feet of the hatch now and that was where he would be waiting for her.

She crouched down, with her back firmly against the planking and waited for the flutter of her heart to abate enough to allow her to hear, but any noise her hunter made was covered by the creak and pop and groan of the working wooden hull, and the thud and hiss of the sea as Huron beat up hard to the wind.

Then she wrinkled her nose at a new smell that overlaid the pervading reek of the bilges. It was the hot oil smell of a shuttered lantern burning very close by, and now when she listened for it, she thought she could hear the pinkie and tick of the heated metal of the lantern.

He must be close, very close, guarding the hatchway, ready to flash the lantern at the moment he could place her whereabouts accurately.

With the slowness of spreading oil she rose to face into the darkness where he was, she slipped the scalpel into the palm of her left hand, and she drew back her right arm with the chain and iron cuff dangling from her fist, ready to strike.

Then she pitched the scalpel with a short underhanded throw, judging the distance to drop it close enough to force him to move again, but far enough to make him move away from her.

The tiny missile struck something soft, the sound muted, almost lost in other small sounds, but then it slithered softly along the deck, like a hesitant footfall and instantly light flooded the hold.

Tippoo's monstrous shape sprang out of the darkness, huge, menacing, unbelievably close. He held the unhooded lantern high in his left hand, and the yellow light glistened on the bare round dome of his yellow skull, and on the broad plain of his back, the muscle rippling and tensing into valleys and ridges as he swung back the heavy club in his right hand, his head hunched down on the thick corded neck. He was facing away from her, but only for an instant. As he realized that there was nobody in front of him, he reacted with animal swiftness, ducking the great round head on to his chest, beginning to swing away.

She moved entirely by instinct. She swung the heavy iron manacle on the length of chain. It hummed in a glittering circle in the lamp-light, and it caught Tippoo high on the temple with a crack like a branch breaking in a high wind, and the thin layer of yellow scalp opened like the mouth of a purse with a crimson velvet lining.

Tippoo swayed drunkenly on straddled legs that started to buckle under him. She pulled back the chain and swung again with all the weight of her body and the strength of her fear behind the stroke. Again a deep red wound bloomed on the polished yellow dome of his skull and he went down slowly on to his knees, an attitude she had seen him adopt so often as he prayed on the quarterdeck, making the Moslem obeisance towards Mecca. N aw again, his forehead touched the deck, but this time with his blood dribbling into a puddle under it.

The lantern clattered on to the deck, still burning, and in its light Tippoo rolled heavily on to his side with his breath snoring in his throat and his eyes rolled up into his head, glaring ghastly white and unseeing, his thick legs kicking out convulsively.

Robyn stared at the prostrate giant, aghast at the damage she had done, already feeling the need to administer to any hurt or crippled being, but it lasted for only seconds, as Tippoo's eyes rolled back into their deep sockets, and she saw the pupils beginning to focus. The yellow gleaming body heaved, the movement of limbs was no longer spasmodic but more coordinated and determined, the head lifted, still lolling, but swinging questingly from side to side.

Unbelievably, the man was no longer crippled by those two cutting blows, had been stunned for seconds only, in seconds more he would be fully conscious and in his fury more dangerous than ever. With a sob Robyn flew at the open hatch of the lazaretto. As she passed him, cruel fingers hooked at her ankle, pulling her off balance so she almost fell before she could kick herself free and dive through the opening.

Tippoo was on hands and knees in the light of the fallen lantern, creeping towards her as she threw all her weight against the hatch. As it thudded into its jamb, she dropped the locking bar into its seating, and at that moment Tippools shoulder crashed into the far side of the hatch with a force that shook it in its frame.

Her frantic fingers were so clumsy that it took three attempts to secure the padlock and chain, and only then could she sink to the deck and sob away her fear until her relief came to buoy her up and give her renewed strength.

When she dragged herself to her feet, she was lightheaded, intoxicated with the strange fierce jubilation that she had never felt before. She knew it sprang from having fought herself out of danger, from the unfamiliar experience of inflicting punishment on a hated adversary - and she knew she would feel guilt for it later, but not now.

The keys were still in the door between the lazaretto and saloon where she had left them. She pushed the door open quickly and paused in the opening an instant, feeling the quick flare of alarm overtake her feeling of elation.

She had only an instant of time to realize that somebody had trimmed the saloon lamp, and then fingers seized her wrist from behind and swung her off balance, bearing her down heavily to the deck and holding her there with one arm twisted up between her shoulderblades. Keep still, damn you, or I'll twist your head off your shoulders. " Mungo St. John's voice was low and fierce in her ear.

Her arm holding the chain was trapped under her, and now her captor shifted his weight over her, placing his knee in the small of her back and bearing down so painfully that she wanted to Cry Out with the agony that flared up her curved spine. Tippoo flushed you out quickly enough, " St. John murmured with grim satisfaction. "Now let's have a look at you, before we stretch you out on the grating."

He reached forward and pulled off the cloth cap that covered her head, and she heard his little grunt of surprise as her hair tumbled loose in a slippery shining mass in the lamplight. His grasp slackened and the pressure of his knee into the base of her spine eased. Roughly he grasped her shoulder to turn her on to her back so he could see her face.

She rolled easily towards him and then as her trapped arm came free, she hurled the chain at his face. He threw up both hands to catch the blow. As slippery as an eel she wormed out from under him and flew at the door to the saloon.

He was quick, quicker than she was, and his fingers were steely, they caught in the thin worn flannel of her shirt and it ripped from collar to hem. She turned and lashed at him with the chain again, but now he was ready for her, and he caught her wrist, trapping it.

She kicked wildly at his shins, and succeeded in hooking an ankle behind his heel and they went down together in a tangle on to the wooden deck, and Robyn found herself carried along by a fierce uncaring madness.

She was hissing and snarling like a cat as she raked at his eyes with her nails, raising a bloody line down his neck. The tatters of her shirt flapped around her waist and the coarse dark hair of his chest rasped against the tender points of her naked breasts so that dimly in her madness she realized that he wore only breeches, and the man smell of his body filled her nostrils as he tried to smother her wild struggles with his body.

She reached up towards him with her open mouth, trying to sink her teeth into that flushed handsome face, but he caught a handful of her hair at the back'of her head and twisted it. The pain seemed to flow down through her body and explode at the base of her belly in a warm soft spasm that took her breath and crammed it down into her lungs.

He held her helplessly and she felt the strength going out of her, to be replaced by spreading languor, and she stared up into his face with a kind of wonder as though she had never seen it before. She saw his teeth were very white, his lips drawn back into a rictus of emotion, and fierce yellow eyes unfocused and smoky with a kind of madness that matched her own.

She made one last feeble effort to repel him, driving her knee upwards, aimed at the fork of his lower body, but he trapped it between his thighs and then holding her thus he reared up over her and looked down at her bared bosom. Sweet Mother of GOD! he croaked, and she saw the cords strain tight in his throat, saw the hot yellow fire in his eyes and she could not move, not even when he freed his hooked fingers from the twisted tresses of her hair and ran them slowly down her body, cupping first one tight small breast and then the other in the palm of his hand.

She felt his touch had gone, though the memory lingered on her skin like butterflies" wings. Then his fingers were back, tugging demandingly at the fastenings of her breeches. She closed her eyes and refused to let her mind consider what was about to happen. She knew that there was nothing she could do to escape, and cried out softly with the strange elation of the martyr.

But her cry seemed to touch something deep in him, the smoky yellow eyes focused for a moment, the predatory expression of the face became uncertain and then tinged with horror as he looked down at her spread white body. Swiftly he rolled away from her.

Cover yourself! " he said harshly, and she was overwhelmed with a cold avalanche of loss, followed immediately by as great a rush of shame and of guilt.

She scrambled to her knees, clutching her clothing around her, suddenly shivering, but not with cold. You should not have struggled, he said and though he was obviously fighting to control it his voice shook as hers did. I hate you, she whispered foolishly, and then it became true. She hated him for what he had aroused in her, for the sickness and the guilt that followed it, and for the sense of loss and bereavement with which he had left her. I should kill you, he muttered, not looking at her. "I should have Tippoo do it."

She felt no fear at the threat. She had rearranged her clothing as best she could, but still she knelt opposite him. Go! he almost shouted at her. "Get back to your cabin."

She rose slowly, hesitated a moment and then turned to the companionway. Doctor Ballantyne! " he stopped her, and she turned back. He had risen and now he stood beside the door to the lazaretto, the keys in his one hand, the slave cuff and chain in the other. "It would be best not to tell your brother of what you discovered tonight. " His voice was controlled now, cold and low. "I would not have the same scruples with him. We will be at Cape Town in four days, he went on. "After that you may do as you will.

Until then you will not provoke me again. One chance is already too many.

She stared at him mutely, feeling small and helpless. Goodnight, Doctor Ballantyne."

She hardly had time to pack her breeches and torn shirt away in the bottom of her chest, inspect and rub a salve on her bruises, pull on her nightdress and climb into her narrow bunk before someone pounded on the cabin door. Who is it? " she called huskily and breathless, not yet fully recovered from the night's stresses. Sissy, it's me. " Zouga's voice. "Someone has beaten Tippoo's skull in. He's bleeding all over the deck, can you come? " Robyn glowed with a fierce spark of pagan glee, which she tried immediately to suppress with less than complete success. I'm coming."

There were three men in the saloon, Zouga, the second mate and Tippoo. Mungo St. John was not there. Tippoo sat stolidly on a stool under the oil lamp, naked except for his cotton loin cloth, and his neck and shoulders ran with sheets of dark slick blood.

The second mate held a wad of grubby cotton to his skull and when Robyn lifted it away the wounds began spurting merrily. Brandy, she demanded, and rinsed her hands and her instruments in the spirit, she was an admirer and believer in the teachings of Jenner and Lister, before she probed the points of her forceps into the open wound. She gripped the vessels and twisted them closed.

Tippoo made no move, his expression never changed and she was still carried along on the pagan mood, in direct defiance to the oath of Hippocrates which she had SWOrn. Must clean the wounds, she told him, and quickly, before her conscience could prevent it, she tipped the raw brandy into the wounds and swabbed them out.

Tippoo sat still as a temple carving of a Hindu devil, making no acknowledgement of the harsh spirit burning open tissue.

Robyn tied off the vessels with silk thread, leaving an end hanging from the wounds, and then she sutured the lips closed, laying precise neat stitches and pulling them up tightly so that the smooth bald scalp came up in a sharp little peak of flesh with each tug. I will pull the thread when the vessels mortify, she told him. "The stitches will be ready to come out in a week. " She would not deplete her stock of laudanum, she decided, the man obviously was impervious to pain, and she was still in the throes of unchristian spite.

Tippoo lifted the round head. "You good doctor, he told her solemnly, and she learned then a lesson that would last her throughout her life, the stronger the purge, the more astringent or foul-tasting the medicine, and the more radical the surgery, then the more impressed with the surgeon's skill was the African patient. Yes, Tippoo nodded gravely, "you one bloody fine doctor. " And be opened one huge paw. in his palm lay the scalpel that Robyn had lost in Huron's hold. Without expression he placed it in Robyn's own unresisting hand, and with that eerie swiftness was gone from the saloon, leaving her staring after him.

Huron flew southwards, meeting the long South Atlantic rollers and spurning them carelessly, brushing them aside with her shoulder and letting them cream over her rail and then tumble away astern in a long smooth wake.

There were seabirds in company with them now, beautiful gannets with yellow throats and black diamonds painted around their eyes, coming in from the east and soaring above their wake, shrieking and diving for the galley scraps when they were thrown overboard.

There were seals too, lifting their whiskered heads high above the surface to stare curiously after the towering clipper as she burst the sea open with her sharp bows in her flight into the south.

Smeared across the brilliant blue water were long serpentine trails of sea-bamboo, torn from the rocky shoreline by the gales and storms of this uneasy and troubled sea.

All these were indications of the land which was always just below the eastern horizon, and Robyn spent many hours of each day alone at the port rail staring towards it, longing for another glimpse of it, smelling the dryness and the spiced aroma of its grass and herbs on the wind, seeing its blown dust in the marvelous reds and glowing gold of the sunsets, but denied sight of it by the offing that St. John was making before coming back on to the starboard tack for the final run into Table Bay.

However, as soon as Mungo St. John appeared on his quarterdeck Robyn would hurry below without another glance in his direction and she locked herself in her cabin, brooding there alone so that even her brother sensed that something troubled her. He tried a dozen times to draw her out. She sent him away each time, refusing to open the cabin to him. I'm all right, Zouga. I just want to be alone."

And when he tried to join her in her solitary vigils at the ship's rail, she was short and unbending, exasperating him so that he stamped away and let her be.

She was afraid to talk to him, afraid that she would blurt out her discovery of slaving equipment in Huron's hold and put him in deadly danger. She knew her brother well enough not to trust his temper and not to doubt his courage. Neither did she doubt Mungo St. John's warning.

He would kill Zouga to protect himself, he could do it himself, she had seen him handle a pistol, or he could send Tippoo to do the work in the night. She had to protect Zouga, until they reached Cape Town, or until she did what she had to do. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. " She had found the passage in her Bible and studied it carefully, and then she had prayed for guidance which had not been given and she had ended more confused and troubled than she had begun.

She prayed again kneeling on the bare deck beside her bunk until her knees ached, and slowly her duty became clear to her.

Three thousand souls sold into slavery in a single year - that was what the Royal Naval Captain had accused him of. How many thousands before that, how many thousands more in the years to come if Huron and her captain were allowed to continue their depredations, if nobody could prevent them ravaging the east coast of Africa, her land, her people, those peoples whom she was sworn to protect and minister to and to lead into the fold of the Saviour.

Her father, Fuller Ballantyne, was one of the great champions of freedom, the unrelenting adversary of this abominable trade. He had called it "the running sore on the conscience of the civilized world that must be rooted out with all the means at our disposal'. She was her father's daughter, had made her oath in the sight of God.

This man, this monster, epitomized the sickening evil and monstrous cruelty of the whole filthy business. Please show me my duty, oh Lord, she prayed, and always there was her own guilt and shame. Shame that his eyes had probed her half-naked body, that his hands had touched and fondled her, shame that he had debased her further, by stripping bare his own body. Hastily she thrust the image aside, it was too clear, too over-powering. "Help me to be strong, she prayed quickly.

There was shame and there was guilt, a terrible corrosive guilt in the fact that his gaze, his touch, his body, had not revolted and disgusted her, but had filled her instead with a sinful delight. He had tempted her to sin.

For the first time in all her twenty-three years she had encountered real sin, and she had not been strong enough. She hated him for that, Show me my duty, oh Lord, she prayed aloud and rose stiffly from her knees to sit on the edge of the bunk.

She held her well-worn leather-bound Bible in her lap and whispered again. Please give unto your faithful servant guidance.

" And she let the book fall open, and with her eyes closed placed her forefinger on the text. When she opened her eyes again she gave a start of surprise, guidance obtained by this little ritual of hers was usually not so unequivocal, for she had chosen Numbers 35: ig. "The revenger of blood himself shall slay the murderer: when he meeteth him, he shall slay him."

Robyn had no illusions as to the difficulty she would have in performing the heavy duty placed upon her by God's direct injunction, or how easily roles might be reversed and she become herself the victim rather than the avenger.

The man was as dangerous as he was wicked and time was against her. The accurate observation of the sun that Zouga had made at noon that day placed the ship within a hundred and fifty miles of Table Bay, and the wind stood fair and boisterous. Dawn the next day would reveal that great flat-topped mountain rising out of the sea. She had no time for elaborate planning. Whatever she did must be direct and swift.

There were half a dozen bottles in her medicine chest whose contents would serve, but no, poison was the most disgusting of deaths to inflict. She had seen a man die of strychnine poison when she was at St. Matthew's.

She would never forget the arching spine as his back muscles convulsed until the man stood on the top of his head and on his heels like a drawn bow.

It must be some other means, there was the big naval colt revolver which Zouga kept in his cabin. He had instructed her in its loading and discharge, or there was the Sharps rifle, but both of those belonged to her brother. She did not want to see him swinging from the gallows on the parade ground below the castle at Cape Town. The more uncomplicated and direct the plan, the greater was its chance of success, she realized, and at the thought she knew just how it must be done.

There was a polite knock on her cabin door, and she started.

Who is it? " Jackson, Doctor. " He was the Captain's steward. Dinner is served in the saloon."

She had not realized how late it had grown.

I will not be dining tonight." You must keep your strength up, ma'am, Jackson entreated through the closed door. Are you the doctor, then? " she asked tartly, and he went shuffling off down the companionway.

She had not eaten since breakfast but she was not hungry, her stomach muscles were rigid with tension.

She lay a while on her bunk, gathering her resolve and then she stood up, selected one of her oldest dresses, in a dark heavy wool. It would be the least loss to her wardrobe, and the dark colour would make it less conspicuous in the shadows.

She left her cabin and went quietly up to the maindeck. There was no one but the helmsman on the quarterdeck, his weathered brown face lit faintly by the binnacle lamp.

She moved quietly across to the skylight of the saloon and looked down.

Mungo St. John sat at the head of the table, with a joint of steaming salt beef in front of him. He was carving thin slices of meat, laughing across the board at one of Zouga's sallies. One quick glance was enough. Unless there was a call from the lookout or a need to change sail, Mungo St. John would not move for another half hour at the least.

Robyn went back down the ladder, past her own cabin and down the companionway to the after quarters. She reached Mungo St. John's quarters and tried the door.

Once again it slid open easily, she stepped through and closed it behind her again.

It took her only a few minutes to find the case of pistols in the drawer of the teak desk. She opened it on the desk top and took out one of the beautiful weapons.

The mottled Damascus steel barrels were inlaid with bright gold, a hunting scene with horses and hounds and huntsmen.

Robyn sat down on the edge of the bunk, held the weapon muzzle-up between her knees while she unscrewed the silver powder flask and measured the fine powder into the cup. It was a familiar chore, for Zouga had spent hours in her instruction. She rammed the charge down into the long, elegant barrel under the felt wad, and then selected a perfect sphere of lead from the ball compartment of the case, wrapped that in an oiled patch of felt to give it a close fit in the rifled barrel and then rammed it down on top of the powder charge.

Then she reversed the pistol, pointing it down at the deck while she fitted one of the copper percussion caps over the nipple of the breech, drew back the hammer until it clicked at full cock, and laid it on the bunk beside her. She did the same with the other pistol, and when they were both loaded and cocked, she placed them on the edge of the desk, butts towards her, ready for immediate use.

Then she stood and, in the centre of the cabin, lifted her skirts around her waist and loosened the draw string of her drawers. She let them fall to the deck, and the air was cool on her naked buttocks so that she felt the little goose pimples rise on her skin. She dropped her skirts and picked up the cotton under-garment. Holding it across her chest she tore it half through and threw it across the cabin, then she took the fastenings of her bodice in both hands and ripped them down almost to her waist, the hooks and eyes hung on the torn threads of cotton.

She looked at herself in the polished metal mirror on the bulkhead beside the door. There was a lustre in her green eyes and her cheeks were flushed.

For the first time in her life, she thought her image beautiful, not beautiful, she corrected herself, but proud and wild and strong as an avenger should be. She was glad he would see her like this before he died, and she lifted her hand and rearranged one of the thick tresses of hair that had broken free of its retaining ribbon.

She sat back on the bunk and picked up a loaded pistol in each hand, she aimed first the one and then the other at the brass handle of the door, and then laid them in her lap and settled down to wait.

She had left her watch in her own cabin so she could not tell how long she waited. The voices and laughter from the officers" saloon were completely muffled by the closed door, but every time a plank creaked or some part of the ship's gear clattered, her nerves sprang tight and she lifted the pistols to cover the doorway.

Then suddenly she heard his footsteps, there was no mistaking them for any other man aboard. They reminded her somehow of a caged leopard pacing its bars, quick, light and alert. He was on the deck above her, but the footsteps were so close that it seemed he was in the cabin with her. She looked up at the deck, swinging her head slightly to follow his turns from one side of the quarterdeck to the other.

She knew what he was doing, she had watched him on a dozen other nights. First he would talk quietly with the helmsman, checking the slate on which the ship's course was chalked before going back to inspect the log trailing astern. Then he would light one of his thin black Havana cigars and begin pacing the deck, with his hands clasped in the small of his back as he walked, darting quick glances up at the trim of his sails, studying the stars and the clouds for signs of change in the weather, pausing to feel the scend of the sea and the run of the ship under him before pacing on again.

Suddenly the footsteps stopped and Robyn froze, the moment had come. He had paused to flip the stub of his cigar over the rail and watch it fizzle into darkness as it hit the surface of the sea.

There was still time for her to escape, and she felt her resolve weaken. She half rose. She could still reach her own cabin if she moved now, but her legs would not carry her across the cabin. Then she heard his footsteps cross the deck above her with a different tread. He was coming down. It was too late.

Almost choking on her own breath, she sank back on to the bunk and lifted both pistols. They wavered uncertainly and she realized that her hands were shaking.

With a tremendous effort she stilled them. The door slimmed open and Mungo St. John stooped into the cabin, and then stopped as he saw the dark figure and the twin barrels that menaced him. They are loaded and cocked, she said huskily. "And I will not hesitate. "I see. " He straightened slowly, so the dark head just brushed the deck overhead. Close the door, she said, and he pushed it closed with his foot, his arms folded on his chest, and that mocking half-smile on his lips. It made her forget her carefully rehearsed speech, and she stuttered slightly, and was immediately furious with herself. You are a slaver, she blurted, and he inclined his head, still smiling. "And I have to stop you. "How do you propose doing that? " he asked with polite interest. I am going to kill you. "That should do it, " he admitted, and now he smiled, a flash of white teeth in the gloom. "Unfortunately they would probably hang you for it, if my crew didn't tear you to pieces before that. "You assaulted me, she said. She glanced at her torn drawers lying near his feet and then with the butt of one pistol touched her torn bodice. A rape, by God! Now he chuckled aloud, and she felt herself blushing vividly at the word. It's no laughing matter, Captain St. John. You have sold thousands of human souls into the most vile bondage."

He took one slow pace towards her and she half rose, panic in her voice. Don't move! I warn you He took another pace and she thrust both pistols towards him, at the full stretch of her arms, I shall fire The smile never wavered on his lips and the yellow flecked eyes held hers steadily as he took another lazy pace closer. You have the most beautiful green eyes I have ever seen, he said, and the pistols shook in her hands. Here"

"he said gently. "Give them to me He took the two gold-worked barrels in one hand and turned their muzzles upwards, pointing them at the deck above them. With the other hand he gently began to open her fingers, untangling them from trigger and butt. This is not why you came here, he said, and her fingers went slack.

He took the pistols out of her hands and uncocked them before laying them back in their velvetlined nests within the rosewood case.

His smile was no longer mockin& and his voice was soft, almost tender as he lifted her to her feet. I am glad you came.

" She tried to turn her face away, but he took her chin between his fingers and lifted it. As he brought his mouth down to hers, she saw his lips opening, and the warm wet touch was a physical shock.

His mouth tasted slightly salty, perfumed with cigar smoke. She tried to keep her lips closed, but the pressure of his own lips forced them gently open and then his tongue was invading her. His fingers were still on her face, stroking her cheek, smoothing her hair back from her temples, touching lightly her closed eyelids, and she lifted her face higher to his touch.

Even when he slowly unfastened the last hooks of her bodice and eased it down off her shoulders, her only response was to feel the strength go out of her thighs so she had to lean against his hard chest for support.

Then he lifted his mouth from hers, leaving it empty, cooling after the warmth and she opened her eyes. With a sense of disbelief, she saw that his head was bowing to her breast, and she was looking down on the thick dark curls that covered the back of his neck. She knew it must stop now, before he did what she could hardly believe he was about to do.

When she tried to protest, it was only a whimper in her throat. When she tried to seize his head and thrust it away from her, her fingers merely curled into the springing crisp curls the way a cat claws a velvet cushion, and instead of thrusting him away, she drew his head down and arched her back slightly so that her breasts rose to meet him.

Yet she was unprepared for the feel of his mouth. It seemed as though he were about to suck her very soul out through the swollen, aching tips. It was too strong, she tried not to cry out, remembering that the last time she had done so, it had broken the spell, but it was too strong.

it was a sobbing choked-up little cry, and now her legs gave way under her. Still holding his head she sagged backwards on to the low bunk, and he knelt beside the bunk without lifting his mouth from her body. She arched her back and raised her buttocks off the bunk at his touch and allowed him to draw out her billowing skirts from under her and drop them to the deck.

Suddenly, he pulled abruptly away and she almost screamed to him not to go away again, but he had crossed to the door and locked it. Then, as he came back to where she lay, his own clothing seemed to fall away from his body like morning mist from mountain peak, and she came up on one elbow to stare at him openly.

She had never seen anything so beautiful, she thought. The devil is beautiful also. " A tiny inner voice tried to warn her, but it was far away and so small that she could ignore it. Besides it was too late, far too late to listen to warnings now, for already he was coming over her.

She expected pain, but not the deep splitting incursion that racked her. Her head was flung back and her eyes flooded with the tears of it. Yet even in the stinging agony of it there was never a thought to reject this stretching, tearing invasion and she clung to him with both her arms about his neck. It seemed that he suffered with her, for except for that single swift deep stroke, he had not moved, trying to alleviate her agony by his utter stillness, his body was rigid as hers, she could feel the muscles taut to the point of tearing, and he cradled her in his arms.

Then suddenly she could breathe again, and she took in air with a great rushing sob, and immediately the pain began to change its shape, becoming something she could not describe to herself. It started as a spark of heat, deep within her, and flared slowly so she was forced to meet it with a slow voluptuous movement of her hips.

She seemed to break free of earth and rise up through flames, that flickered redly through her clenched eyelids.

There was only one reality, and that was the hard body that rocked and plunged above her. The heat seemed to fill her until she could not bear it any longer. Then at the last moment when she thought she might die of it, it burst within her and she felt herself falling, like a tumbling leaf, down, down, at last, to the hard narrow bunk in a half-dark cabin in a tall ship on a wind-driven sea.

When next she could open her eyes his face was very close to hers. He was staring at her with a thoughtful, solemn expression.

She tried to smile, it was a shaky unconvincing effort. Please don't look at me like that. " Her voice was even deeper, more husky than it usually was. I don't think I ever saw you before, he whispered and traced the line of her lips with his fingertip. "You are so different. "Different from what? "Different from other women. " His reply gave her a pang.

He made the first movement of withdrawing from her, but she tightened her grip on him panic-stricken at the thought of losing him yet. We will only have this one night, she told him, and he did not reply. He lifted one eyebrow, and waited for her to speak again. You don't dispute it, she challenged. There was that mocking little smile beginning to curl his lip again, and it annoyed her. No, I was wrong, you are like all other women, he smiled. "You have to talk, always you have to talk."

She let him go, as punishment for those words. But as he slithered free of her she felt a terrible emptiness and she regretted his going fiercely, beginning to hate him for it.

You have no God, she accused him. Isn't it strange, he chided her gently, "that most of the worst crimes in history have been committed by men with God's name upon their lips."

The truth of it deflated her momentarily, and she struggled into a sitting position. You are a slaver. "I don't really want to argue with you, you know. " But she would not accept that. You buy and sell human beings. "What are you trying to prove to me? " He chuckled now, further angering her. I'm telling you that there is a void between us that can never be bridged. "We have just done so, convincingly, and she flushed bright scarlet down her neck on to her bosom. I have sworn to devote my life to destroy all you stand for, she said fiercely, pushing her face close to his.

Woman, you talk too much, be told her lazily, and covered her mouth with his own, holding her like that while she struggled, gagging her with his lips so her protests were muffled and incomprehensible. Then when her struggles had subsided he pushed her easily backwards on to the bunk and came over her again.

In the morning when she woke, he was gone, but the bolster beside her was indented by his head. She pressed her face into it and the smell of his hair and of his skin still lingered, though the heat of his blood had dissipated and the linen was cool against her cheeks.

The ship was in the grip of intense excitement. She could hear the voices from the deck above as she scurried down the empty passageway to her own cabin, dreading meeting a member of the crew, or more especially meeting her brother.

What excuse could she have for being abroad in the dawn, with her cabin unslept in and her clothing torn. and rumpled?

Her escape was a matter of seconds only, for as she locked and leaned thankfully against the door of her cabin, Zouga beat upon it with his fist from the far side. Robyn, wake up! Get dressed. Land is in sight. Come and see!

Swiftly she bathed her body with a square of flannel dipped into the enamelled jug of cold sea water. She was tender, swollen and sensitive and there was a trace of blood on the cloth. The trace of shame, she told herself severely, but it was difficult to sustain the emotion. Instead she felt a soaring sense of physical well-being and a hearty appetite for her breakfast.

Her step was light, almost skipping as she went up on to the maindeck and the wind tugged playfully at her skirts.

Her first concern was for the man. He stood at the weather rail, in shirt-sleeves only, and immediately a storm of conflicting feelings and thoughts assailed her, the chief of which was that he was so lean and dark and devil-may-care that he should be kept behind bars as a menace to all womankind.

Then he lowered the telescope, turned and saw her by the companionway and bowed slightly, and she inclined her head an inch in reply, very cool and very dignified.

Then Zouga hurried to meet her, laughing and excited, and took her arm as he led her to the rail.

The mountain towered out of the steely green Atlantic, a great grey buttress of solid rock, riven and rent by deep ravines and gullies choked with dark green growth.

She had not remembered it so huge, seeming to fill the whole eastern horizon and reaching up into the heavens, for its summit was covered in a thick shimmering white mattress of cloud. The cloud rolled endlessly over the edge of the mountain like a froth of boiling milk pouring over the rim of the pot, but as it sank so it was sucked into nothingness, disappearing miraculously to leave the lower slopes of the mountain clear and close, each detail of the rock-face finely etched and the tiny buildings at its foot as startling white as the wing feathers of the gulls that milled the air about the clipper. We'll dine tonight in Cape Town, "Zouga shouted over the wind, and the thought of food flooded Robyn's mouth with saliva.

Jackson, the steward, had the hands spread a tarpaulin to break the wind and they breakfasted under its lee, in the sunshine. It was a festive meal, for Mungo St. John called for champagne and they toasted the successful voyage and the good landfall in the bubbling yellow wine.

Then Mungo St. John ended it. "The wind comes through there, tunnelled down that break in the mountain. " He pointed ahead, and they saw the surface at the mouth of the bay seething with the rush of it. "Many a ship has been dismasted by that treacherous blast. We'll be shortening sail in a few minutes. " And he signalled to Jackon to clear away the trestles that carried the remains of their breakfast, excused himself with a bow and went back to his quarterdeck.

Robyn watched him strip the canvas off the upper yards, taking in two reefs in the main and setting a storm jib so that Huron met the freak wind readily and ran in for Table Bay, giving Robben Island a good berth to port.

When the ship had settled on to its new heading, Robyn went up on to the quarterdeck. I must speak with you, she told him, and St. John cocked his eyebrow at her. You could not have chosen a better time-" and with the eloquent spread of his hands indicated wind and current and the dangerous shore close under their bows. This will be the last opportunity" she told him , quickly. "My brother and I will be leaving this ship immediately you drop anchor in Table Bay."

The mocking grin slid slowly from his lips. If you are determined, then it seems that we have nothing more to say to each other."

I want you to know why. 1I know why, he said, "but I doubt that you do She stared at him, but he turned away to call a change of heading to the helmsman and then to the figure at the foot of the mainmast. Mr. Tippoo, I'll have another reef on her, if you please He came back to her side, but not looking at her, his head tilted back to watch the miniature figures of his crew on the mainyards high above them. Have you ever seen sixteen thousand acres of cotton with the pods ready for plucking? " he asked quietly. Have you ever seen the bales going down river on the barges to the mills? " She did not answer, and he went on without waiting. I have seen both, Doctor Ballantyne, and no man dare tell me that the men who work my fields are treated like cattle. "You are a cotton-planter? "I am, and after this voyage I will have a sugar plantation on the island of Cuba, half my cargo to pay for the land and half of it to work the cane. "You are worse than I thought, she whispered. "I thought you were merely one of the devil's minions.

Now I know you are the devil himself. "You are going into the interior. " St. John looked down at her now. "When you get there, if you ever do, you will see true human misery. You will see cruelties that no American slave-owner would dream of. You will see the slaughter of human beings by war and disease and wild beast that will baulk your belief in heaven. Beside this savagery, the barracoons and the slave quarters are an earthly paradise. "Do you dare suggest that by catching and chaining these poor creatures you do them favour? " Robyn demanded, aghast at his effrontery. Have you ever visited a Louisiana plantation, Doctor? " Then answering his own question, "No, of course, you have not. I invite you to do so. Come down to Bannerfield as my guest one day and then compare the state of my slaves to the savage blacks you will see in Africa, or even to those dAmned souls that inhabit the slums and workhouses of your own lovely little green island."

She remembered those raddled and hopeless human creatures with whom she had worked in the mission hospital. She was speechless. Then suddenly his grin was wicked again. "Think of it only as forced enlightenment of the heathen. I lead them out of the darkness into the ways of God and civilization, just as you are determined to do, but my methods are more effective. "You are incorrigible, sir.

"No, ma'am. I am a sea-captain and a planter. I am also a trader in, and an owner of, slaves, and I will fight to the death to defend my right to be all of those things."

What right is that you speak of? she demanded. The right of the cat over the mouse, of the strong over the weak, Doctor Ballantyne The natural law of existence. "Then I can only repeat, Captain St. John, that I will leave this ship at the very first opportunityI am sorry that is your decision. " The hard fierce look in the yellow eyes softened a little. "I wish it were otherwise. "I shall devote my life to fighting you and men like you. )And what a waste that will be of a lovely woman."

He shook his head regretfully. "But then your resolve may give us reason to meet again, I must hope that is so. "One final word Captain St. John, I shall never forgive last nightAnd I, Doctor Ballantyne, will never forget it."

Zouga Ballantyne checked his horse at the side of the road, just before it crossed the narrow neck between the crags of Table Mountain and Signal Hill, one of its satellite promontories.

He swung down out of the saddle to rest his mount, for it had been a hard pull up the steep slope from the town, and he tossed the reins to the Hottentot groom who accompanied him on the second horse. Zouga was sweating lightly and there was a residual pulse of dullness behind his eyes from the wine he had drunk the night before, the magnificent rich sweet wine of Constantia, one of the most highly prized vintages in the world, but capable of delivering as thick a head as any of the cheap and common grogs they sold in the waterfront bars.

in the five days since they had disembarked, the friendliness of the Cape Colony citizens had almost overwhelmed them. They had slept only the first night at a public inn in Buitengracht Street, then Zouga had called upon one of the Cape Colony's more prominent merchants, a Mr. Cartwright. He had presented his letters of introduction from the directors of the Worshipful Company of London Merchants Trading into Africa, and Cartwright had immediately placed at their disposal the guest bungalow set in the gardens of his large and gracious home on the mountain slope above the old East India Company's gardens.

Every evening since then had been a gay whirl of dinners and dances.

Had Robyn and Zouga not insisted otherwise, the days would have been filled with equivalent frivolity, picnics, sailing and fishing expeditions, riding in the forest, long leisurely lunches on the lawns under spreading oak trees that reminded him so vividly of England.

However, Zouga had avoided these diversions and had managed to accomplish much of the work of the expedition. Firstly there had been the supervising of the unloading of equipment from Huron, in itself a major undertaking as the crates had to be swayed up from the hold and lowered into lighters alongside before making the perilous return through the surf to land on the beach at Ragger Bay.

Then he had to arrange temporary warehousing for the cargo. Here again Mr. Cartwright had been of assistance.

Still Zouga found himself fiercely resenting his sister's insistence that had made all this heavy work necessary. Damn me, Sissy, even Papa used to travel in the company of Arab slave-traders when he had to. If this fellow St. John is a trader, we would do well to learn all we can from him, his methods and sources of supply. No one could give us better information for our report to the society."

None of his arguments had prevailed, and only when Robyn had threatened to write home to the Society's directors in London, and to follow that up with a frank talk to the editor to the Cape Times, had Zouga acceded, with the worst grace possible, to her demands.

Now he looked down longingly at Huron, lying well out from the beach, snubbing around on her anchor cable to point into the rumbustious south-easterly wind. Even under bare poles she seemed on the point of flight.

Zouga guessed that St. John would be sailing within days, leaving them to await the next ship that might be bound for the Arab and Portuguese coasts.

Zouga had already presented his letter of introduction from the Foreign Secretary to the Admiral of the Cape Squadron of the Royal Navy, and been promised all consideration.

Nevertheless, he spent many hours of each morning visiting the shipping agents and owners in the port in hope of an earlier passage. Damn the silly wench, he muttered aloud, thinking bitterly of his sister and her foibles. "She could cost us weeks, even months."

Time was, of course, of the very essence. They had to be clear of the fever-ridden coast before the monsoon struck and risk of malaria became suicidal.

At that moment there was the crack of cannon shot from the slopes of the hill above him, and as he glanced up he saw the feather of gunsmoke drifting away from the lookout station on Signal Hill.

The gunshot was to alert the townsfolk that a ship was entering Table Bay, and Zouga shaded his eyes with his cap as the vessel came into view beyond the point of land. He was not a seaman but he recognized instantly the ugly silhouette and single smoke stack of the Royal Naval gunboat that had pursued Huron so doggedly. Was it really two weeks ago, he wondered, the days had passed so swiftly. Black joke, the gunboat, had her boilers fired and a thin banner of dark smoke drifted away downwind as she rounded up into the bay, her yards training around as she pointed through the wind and she passed within half a mile of where Huron was already at anchor. The proximity of the two ships raised interesting possibilities of the feud between the two captains being revived, Zouga realized, but his immediate feeling was of intense disappointment. He had hoped that the vessel might have been a trader that could have offered the expedition further passage up the east coast - and he turned away abruptly, took the reins from the groom and swung up easily into the saddle. Which way? " he asked the servant, and the little yellow-skinned lad in Cartwright's plum-coloured livery indicated the left branch of the road that forked over the neck and dropped down across the dragon's-back of the Cape peninsula to the ocean shore on the far side.

It was another two hours" ride, the last twenty minutes along a rutted cart track, before they reached the sprawling thatched building hidden away in one of the ravines of the mountain slope behind a grove of milkwood trees.

The slopes behind the building were thick with protea bushes in full flower and the long-tailed sugar-birds haggled noisily over the blazing blooms. To one side a waterfall smoked with spray as it fell from the sheer rock face and then formed a deep green pool on which a flotilla of ducks cruised.

The building had a dilapidated air to it, the walls needed white-washing and the thatch hung in untidy clumps from the eaves. Under the milkwood trees were scattered items of ancient equipment, a wagon with one wheel missing and the woodwork almost entirely eaten away by worm, a rusty hand forge in which a red hen was sitting upon a clutch of eggs, and mouldering saddlery and ropes hung from the branches of the trees.

As Zouga swung down from the saddle, a pack of half a dozen dogs came storming out of the front porch, snarling and barking around Zouga's legs so that he lashed out at them with his riding whip and with his boots, changing the snarls to startled yelps and howls. Who the hell are you and what do you want? " A voice carried through the uproar, and Zouga took one more cut at a great shaggy Boerhound with a ridge of coarse hair fully erect between his shoulders, catching him fairly on the snout and forcing him to circle out of range, with fangs still bared and murderous growls rumbling up his throat.

Then he looked up at the man on the stoep of the building. He carried a double-barrelled shotgun in the crook of his arm, and both hammers were at full cock.

He was so tall that he had to stoop beneath the angle of the roof, but he was thin as a blue-gum tree, as though the flesh and fat had been burned off his bones by ten thousand tropical suns.

Do I have the honour of addressing Mr. Thomas Harkness? " Zouga called over the clamour of the dog pack. I ask the questions here, the lean giant bellowed back. His beard was as white as the thunderhead clouds of a summer's day on the highveld and it hung to his belt buckle. Hair of the same silver covered his head and flowed down to the collar of his leather jerkin.

His face and his arms were burned to the colour of plug tobacco, and were speckled by the raised blemishes like little moles and freckles, where years of the fierce African sun had destroyed the upper layers of his skin.

The pupils of his eyes were black and bright as drops of fresh tar, but the whites were smoky yellow, the colour of. the malarial fevers and the pestilences of Africa. What is your name, boy? " His voice was strong and deep. Without the beard he might have been fifty years of age, but Zouga knew with certainty that he was seventy-three. He carried his one shoulder higher than the other and the arm on that side hung at an awkward angle to the joint. Zouga knew that a lion had chewed through the shoulder and through the bone of the upper arm, before Harkness had been able to reach his hunting knife on his belt with the other hand and stab it between the forelegs, up into the heart. That had been forty years before and the injury had become the Harkness hallmark. Ballantyne, sir. " Zouga shouted to make himself heard above the dogs. "Morris Zouga Ballantyne."

The old man whistled once, a fluting double note that stilled the dogs and brought them back around his legs.

He had not lowered the shotgun and a frown puckered his sharp features. Fuller Ballantyne's pup, is it? "That's right, sir. "By God, any son of Fuller Ballantyne's is good enough for a charge of my buckshot in the rump. Don't cock your butt when you get back on that horse, boy, for I'm a man who tempts very easily. "I've ridden a long way to see you, Mr. Harkness."

Zouga smiled that frank and wining smile of his, standing his ground.

I'm one of your greatest admirers. I've read everything that has ever been written about you and everything you have written yourself. "I doubt that, " Harkness growled, "they burned most of mine. Too strong for their lily livers. " But the hostile glint in his eyes turned to a twinkle and he cocked his head as he studied the young man before him. I have no doubt that you're as ignorant and arrogant as your Daddy, but you've got a fairer turn of speech."

And he stared again at the toes of Zouga's boots, and let his gaze move up slowly. Priest, he asked, "like your Daddy? "No, sir, soldier. "Regiment? " 13th Madras Foot. "Rank? Major."

Harkness" expression eased with each reply until his gaze once more locked with Zouga's. Teetotal? Like your Daddy?

"Perish the thought! Zouga assured him vehemently and Harkness smiled for the first time as he let the muzzles of the shotgun droop until they pointed at the ground. He tugged at the long spikes of his beard for a moment, then reached a decision. Come. " He jerked his head and led the way into the house. There was one huge central room, the high ceiling of dried reed stern s kept it cool and the narrow windows kept it gloomy. The floor was of peach-pip shells set into a plaster of mud and cow-dung and the walls were threefoot thick.

Zouga paused in the threshold and blinked with surprise at the collection of strange articles that covered the walls, were piled on every table and chair, and packed to the rafters in the dark corners.

There were books, thousands of books, cloth and leatherbound books, pamphlets and journals, atlases and encyclopaedias. There were weapons, assegai of'Zulu, shield of Matabele, bow of Bushman with its quiver of poisoned arrows and, of course, guns, dozens of them in racks or merely propped against the walls. There were hunting trophies, the beautiful zigzag-striped hide of zebra, the dark bush of the lion's mane, the elegant curved horn of harris-buck, teeth of hippopotamus and wartho& and then the Ion& yellow arcs of ivory thicker than a woman's thigh and taller than a man's head.

There were rocks, piles of rocks that glittered and sparkled, crystal rocks of purple and green, metallic nodules, native copper redder than gold, hairy strands of raw asbestos, all of it covered with a fine layer of dust and piled untidily wherever it had fallen.

The room smelled of skins and dogs and damp, of stale brandy and fresh turpentine, and there were stacks of new canvases already stretched in their wooden frames, while other canvases stood on their easels with the subjects sketched in charcoal outline, or partly blocked in with bright oil paint. On the walls were hung some finished pictures.

Zouga crossed to examine one of them while the old man blew into a pair of glass tumblers and polished them on his shirt-tail. What do you think of my lions? " he asked, as Zouga studied a huge canvas entitled "Lion Hunt on the Gariep River. Feb. 1846'.

Zouga made an appreciative sound in the back of his throat. Zouga was himself a dauber and scribbler, but he considered that the meticulous reproduction of the subject was the painter's duty, while these paintings had a guileless, almost childlike joy in every primitive line.

The colours also were gay and made no pretence to imitate nature, while the perspectives were wildly improbable. The mounted figure with the flowing beard in the background dominated the pride of lions in the foreground. Yet Zouga knew that these strange creations had remarkable value. Cartwright had paid ten guineas for a fanciful landscape. Zouga could only believe it was a fad amongst the colony's fashionable set.

"They say my lions look like English sheepdogs. "Harkness glowered at them; "What do you think, Ballantyne? "Perhaps, Zouga started, then saw the old man's expression change. "But tremendously ferocious sheep dogs! " he added swiftly, and Harkness laughed out loud for the first time. By God, you'll do! He shook his head as he half-filled the tumblers with the dark brown local brandy, the fearsome "Cape Smoke', and brought one glass to Zouga. I like a man who speaks his mind. Rot all hypocrites."

He raised his own glass in a toast. "Especially hypocritical preachers who don't give a damn for God, for truth or for their fellow men."

Zouga fancied that he recognized the description, but raised his glass. "Rot them! he agreed, and managed to suppress a gasp as the liquor exploded in his throat and sizzled behind his eyes. Good, he said hoarsely, and Harkness wiped his silver mustache, left and right, with his thumb before he demanded, Why have you come? "I want to find my father, and I think you may be able to tell me where to search. "Find him? " fulminated the old man. "We should all be extremely grateful he is lost, and pray each day that he remains that way. "I understand how you feel, sir, Zouga nodded. "I read the book that was published after the Zambezi expedition."

Harkness had accompanied Fuller Ballantyne on that ill-fated venture, acting as second-in-command, expedition manager and recording artist. He had been caught up in the squabbling and blame-fixing that had marred the enterprise from the beginning. Fuller Ballantyne had dismissed him, accusing him of theft of the expedition stores, trading on his own account, artistic incompetence, neglecting his duties to hunt for ivory, go and total ignorance of the countryside and its trails, of the tribes and their customs and had included these accusations in his account of the expedition, implying that the blame for the expedition's failure could be laid on Thomas Harkness" uneven shoulders.

Now even mention of that book brought the colour to the sun-raddled face and made the white whiskers twitch. I crossed the Limpopo for the first time in the year that Fuller Ballantyne was born. I drew the map that he used to reach Lake Ngami. " Harkness stopped and made a dismissive gesture. "I might as well try and reason with the baboons barking from the tops of the kopjes Then he peered more closely at Zouga. What do you know about Fuller? Since he sent you home to the old country, how often have you seen him?

How much time have you spent in his company? "He came home once. "How much time did he spend with you and your mother? "Some months, but he was always in Uncle William's study writing, or he was up at London, . Oxford or Birmingham to lecture. "But you, nevertheless, conceived a burning filial love and duty for the sainted and celebrated father?

Zouga shook his head. "I hated him, he said quietly. I could hardly bear the days until he went away again Harkness tilted his head on one side, surprised, speechless for a moment, and Zouga drank the last few drops of liquor in the glass. I never told anybody that before. " He seemed puzzled himself. "I hardly even admitted it to myself. I hated him for what he did to us, to me and my sister, but especially to my mother."

Harkness took the empty tumbler from his fingers, refilled it and handed it back. He spoke quietly. I also will tell you something that I have never told another man. I met your mother at Kurutnan, my God, so long ago. She was sixteen or seventeen and I was nearly forty. She was so pretty, so shy and yet so filled with a special quality of joy. I asked her to marry me.

The only woman I ever asked. " Harkness stopped himself, turned away to his painting, and peered at it. Damned sheep dogs! " he snapped, and then without turning back to face Zouga, "So why do you want to find your father? Why have you come out to Africa? "Two reasons, Zouga told him. "Both good. To make my own reputation and my own fortune."

Harkness swivelled to face him. "Dan-m me, but you can be direct. " There was a tinge of respect in his expression now. "How do you plan to achieve those very desirable ends? " Zouga explained swiftly, the newspaper sponsorship, that of the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade. You'll find much grist for your mill, " Harkness interjected. "The coast is still rife with the trade, despite what you'll hear in London town. "I am also an agent for the Worshipful Company of London Merchants Trading into Africa, but I have my own goods to trade, and 5,000 cartridges for my Sharps rifle."

Harkness wandered across the dim room and stopped before one of the gigantic elephant tusks propped against the far wall. It was so old and heavy that there was very little taper from root to tip, the point worn blunt and rounded. One third of its length was smooth and a clear lovely butter yellow colour, where it had been buried in the jaw of the beast, the rest of it was stained dark with % vegetable juices and scarred from the battles and foragings of sixty years. This one weighs one hundred and sixty pounds, its value in London is six shillings a pound. " He slapped it with his open palm. "There are still bulls like that out there, thousands of them. But take a tip from an old dog forget your fancy Sharps, and use one of the ten-bore elephant guns. They throw a ball that weighs a quarter of a pound, and though they kick like the devil himself, they drive better than any of these newfangled rifles."

There was a lightness in the worn old features, a sparkle in the dark eyes. "Another tip, get in close. Forty paces at the outside, and go for the heart. Forget what you'll hear about the brain shot, go for the heart -" He broke off suddenly and waggled his head, grinning ruefully. "By God, but it's enough to make a man want to be young again! " He came back and studied Zouga directly, and a thought occurred to him with a suddenness that struck him like a physical blow, taking him so by surprise that he almost spoke it aloud. If Helen had given me a different answer, you could be my son. " But he held back the words, and asked instead:How can I help you, then? "You can tell me where I can start to search for Fuller Ballantyne."

Harkness threw up his hands, palms uppermost. "It's a vast land, so big that you could travel across it for a lifetime. "That's why I have come to you."

Harkness went to the long table of yellow Cape deal that ran nearly the fall length of the room and with the twisted arm swept a clear space amongst the books and papers and paint pots. Bring a chair, he instructed, and when they sat facing each other across the cleared space, he recharged both their glasses and placed what remained in the bottle between them. Where did Fuller Ballantyne go? " Harkness asked, and took a silver tress from the thick beard and began to twist it around his forefinger. The finger was long and bony and covered with the thick ridges of ancient scar tissue where the recoil of overheated or overcharged firearms had driven the trigger guard to the bone. Where did Fuller Ballantyne go?

" he repeated, but Zouga realized the question was rhetorical, and he said nothing. After the Zambezi expedition, his fortune was exhausted, his reputation all but destroyed, and to a man like Fuller Ballantyne that was unbearable. His entire life had been an endless hunt for glory. No risk, no sacrifice was too great, his own or others. He would steal and lie and, even kill for it."

Zouga looked up sharply, challenging. Kill, " Harkness nodded.

"Anybody who stood in his way. I have seen him, but that is another tale. Now we want to know where he went."

Harkness stretched out and selected a roll of parchment from the cluttered table-top, checked it quickly and grunted with approval, as he spread it between them.

It was a map of Central Africa, east to west coast, south to the Limpopo, north to the lakes, drawn in India ink and the borders were illuminated by Harkness characteristic figures and animals.

Instantly Zouga coveted it with his very soul. All that Harkness had accused his father of he felt in his own heart. He had to have this, even if it was necessary to steal, or, by God, kill. He had to have it.

The map was huge, at least five feet square, handdrawn on the finest quality linen-backed paper. It was unique, the detail enormous; the notations were profuse but succinct, the observations first hand, the details precise, written in a tiny elegant script that needed a reading glass to be deciphered with ease. Here heavy concentrations of elephant herds during June to September. "Here I sampled gold reef in ancient workings at two ounces to the ton. "Here rich copper is worked by Gutus people. "Here slave convoys depart for the coast in June."

There were literally hundreds of these notations, each in a neatly numbered box, that corresponded to the exact location on the map.

Harkness watched Zouga's face, with a sly half-smile on his face, and then handed him a reading-glass to continue his examination.

It took Zouga a few minutes to realize that the pink shaded areas indicated the "fly corridors" of the high African plateau.

The safe areas through which domestic animals could be moved to avoid the tsetse fly belts. The terrible Ngana disease which the fly carried could decimate the herds.

Knowledge of these corridors had been gathered by the African tribes over hundreds of years, and here it was faithfully recorded by Thomas Harkness.

The value of this knowledge was incalculable. Here Mzilikazi's border impis kill all travellers. "Here there is no water between May and October. "Here dangerous malarial vapours during October to December."

The areas of greatest hazard were signposted, while the known routes to the interior were clearly marked, though there were few enough of these.

The cities of the African kings were marked, as was the location of their military kraals, the areas of influence of each were defined and the names of the subservient chiefs noted. Here concession to hunt elephant must be obtained from Chief Mara. He is treacherous."

Harkness watched the young man eagerly poring over the priceless document. His expression was almost fond, and he nodded his head once as a memory passed like a shadow behind his eyes. He spoke at last. Your father would be trying to restore his reputation at a single stroke, Harkness mused. "He would have to feed that monstrous ego. There are two areas that come immediately to mind. HereV He placed his open hand across an enormous area to the north and west of the defined shape of Lake Marawi.

In this area the copious and authoritative notations were replaced by meagre, hesitant observations obtained from hearsay or native legend, and by speculation followed by a question mark. Sheikh Assab of the Omani Arabs reports River Lualaba runs north and west. Possible flow into Lake Tanganyika. " The dotted outlines of rivers, instead of crisp detail. "Pemba, the Chief of the Marakan, reports huge lake shaped like butterfly twenty-five days march from Khoto Khota. Called Lomani. Possible source of Luapula and of Herodotus fountain. " The lake was sketched in.

Question. Is Lake Tanganyika connected to Lake Albert?

Question. Is Lake Tanganyika connected to Lake Lomani? If so, Lomani is ultimate source of Nile river? " Harkness touched the two question marks with his gnarled and bony finger. Here, said Harkness. The big question marks.

The Nile river. That would attract Fuller. He spoke of it often. " Harkness chuckled. "Always with the same introductory words, "of course, the fame matters not at all to me". " The old man shook his silver head. "It mattered not less than the air he breathed. Yes, the source of the Nile river and the fame that it would bring its discoverer that would fascinate him."

Harkness stared for a long time at the empty spaces, dreaming perhaps, visions awakening behind the bright black eyes. He aroused himself at last, shaking his shaggy head as if to clear it.

There would be only one other feat that would attract as much attention, would be greeted with as much acclaim. " Harkness ran his spread hand southwards down the parchment to cover another vast void in the web of mountains and rivers. "Here, he said softly. "The forbidden kingdom of the Monornatapas."

The name itself had an eerie quality. Monomatapa.

The sound of it raised the fine hair on the back of Zouga's neck.

You have heard of it? " Harkness asked. Yes, " Zouga nodded. "They say it is the Ophir of the Bible, where Sheba mined her gold. Have you travelled there? " Harkness shook his head. "Twice I started out, he shrugged. "No white man has travelled there. Even Mzilikazi's impis have not raided that far east. The Portuguese made one attempt to reach the Emperor Monomatapa.

That was in 1569. The party was wiped out, and there were no survivors. " Harkness made a sound of disgust. As you could expect of the Ports, they abandoned any further attempt to reach Monomatapa. For the 200 years since then they have been content to sit in their seraglios at Tete and Quelimane, breeding half-castes, and picking UP the slaves and ivory that filter down out of the interior. "But still there are the legends of the Monomatapa. I heard them from my father. Gold and great walled cities."

Harkness stood up from the table with the grace of a man half his age and crossed to an iron-bound chest against the wall behind his chair. The chest was not locked but the lid required both the old man's skinny arms to lift it.

He came back with a draw-string bag made of softly tanned leather. It was obviously weighty for he carried it in both hands. He pulled the mouth open, and upended the contents on to the linen map.

There was no mistaking the lovely yellow metal, it had the deep glowing lustre which has bewitched mankind for thousands of years. Zouga could not resist the urge to reach out and touch it. It had a marvelous soapy feeling against his fingertips. The precious metal had been beaten into heavy round beads, each the size of the top joint of Zouga's little finger and the beads had been strung on to animal sinew to form a necklace. Fifty-eight ounces, " Harkness told him, "and the metal is of unusual purity, I have had it assayed."

The old man lifted the necklace over his own head and let it lie against the snowy fall of his beard. It was only then that Zouga realized that there was a pendant on the string of golden beads.

it was in the shape of a bird, a stylized falcon-like shape with folded wings. It was seated upon a rounded plinth that was decorated with a triangular design, like a row of sharks" teeth. The figure was the size of a man's thumb. The gold metal was polished by the touch of human skin over the ages so that some of the detail had been lost. The eyes of the bird were glassy green chips. It was a gift from Mzilikazi. He has no use for gold, nor for emeralds, yes, the stones are emeralds, " Harkness nodded. One of Mzilikazi's warriors killed an old woman in the Burnt Land. They found the leather pouch on her body."

Where is the Burnt Land? " Zouga asked. I'm sorry. " Harkness fiddled with the little golden bird. "I should have explained. King Mzilikazi's impis have laid waste to the land along his borders, in some places to a depth of a hundred miles and more. They have killed all who lived there and they maintain it as a buffer strip against any hostile force. The Boer commandos from the south particularly, but from any other hostile invader also. Mzilikazi calls it the Burnt Land, and it was here, to the east of his kingdom, that his border guards killed this solitary old woman. They described her as a very strange old woman, not of any known tribe, speaking a language they did not understand."

Harkness lifted the necklace from his neck and dropped it carelessly back into the bag, and Zouga felt bereft.

He would have liked to feel the full weight and the texture of the metal in his hands for a little longer. Harkness went on quietly:Of course you have heard the talk of gold and walled cities, like everybody else. But that is the closest I have ever come to corroboration."

Did my father know about the necklace? " Zouga.

asked, and Harkness nodded. "Fuller wanted to purchase it, he offered me almost twice its gold value."

They were both silent for a long while, each brooding on his own thoughts until Zouga stirred. How would a man like my father try to reach the Monomatapa? "Not from the south nor from the west. Mzilikazi, the Matabele king, will let no man pass through the Burnt Land. I feel that Mzilikazi has some deep superstition attached to the land beyond his eastern border. He does not venture there himself, nor does he allow others to do so. " Harkness shook his head. "No, Fuller would have to try from the east, from the Portuguese coast, from one of their settlements. " Harkness began to trace out the possible approach marches on the linen chart. "Here there are high mountains. I have seen them at a distance and they seemed a formidable barrier. " Outside, night had already fallen, and Harkness interrupted himself to order Zouga, "Tell your groom to off-saddle the horses and take them to the stables. It is too late to return. You will have to stay overnight."

When Zouga returned a Malay servant had drawn the curtains, lit the lanterns and laid a meal of yellow rice and chicken cooked in a fiery curry, and Harkness had opened another bottle of the Cape brandy. He went on talking as though there had been no interruption. They ate the meal and pushed the enamelled tin plates away to return to the map, and the hours passed unnoticed by either of them.

In the intimate lantern light, the sense of drama and excitement that gripped them both was heightened by the brandy they drank. Once in a while Harkness would rise to fetch some souvenir of his travels to reinforce a point, a sample of quartz rock in which the seams of native gold were clearly visible in the lamplight.

If there is visible gold, it's rich, Harkness told Zouga. Why did you never mine the reefs you found? "I could never stay long enough in one place, Harkness grinned ruefully. "There was always another river to cross, a range of mountain or a lake that I had to reach or I was following a herd of elephant. There was never time to sink a shaft, or build a house, or raise a herd."

When the dawn was rising, peeping into the huge gloomy room around the curtains, Zouga exclaimed suddenly, "Come with me. Come with me to find Monomatapa! "And Harkness laughed. I thought it was your father you were intent on finding. You know better! " Zouga laughed with him. Somehow he felt at home with the old man as if he had known him all his life. "But can you imagine my father's face when you come to rescue him? "It would be worth it, Harkness admitted, and then the laughter faded, and gave way to an expression of such deep regret, of such consuming sorrow that Zouga felt a compulsion to reach out across the table and touch the misshapen shoulder.

Harkness pulled away from his touch. He had lived alone too long. He would never again be able to take comfort from a fellow man. Come with me, " Zouga repeated, letting his hand drop to the table-top between them. I have made my last journey into the interior, Harkness said tonelessly. "Now all I have are my paint pots and my memories."

He lifted his eyes to the ranks of framed canvas with their brilliant joyous images. You are still strong, vital, Zouga insisted. "Your mind is so clear. "Enough! " Harkness" voice was harsh, bitter. "I am tired now. You must go. Now, immediately."

Zouga felt his anger rise hotly to his cheeks at the abrupt rejection, this sudden change of mood, and he stood quickly. For a few seconds he stood looking down at the old man.

Go! " said Harkness again.

Zouga nodded abruptly. "Very well. " His eyes slid down to the map. He knew he must have it at any price, though he sensed that there was no price that Harkness would accept. He must plan and scheme for it, but he would have it.

He turned and strode to the front door, and the dogs that had slept around their feet rose and followed him. Gamiet! " Zouga shouted angrily. "Bring the horses."

And he stood in the doorway rocking impatiently on his toes and heels, hands clasped behind his back, his shoulders stiff, not looking around at the thin stooped figure who still sat at the table in the lamp-light.

The groom brought the horses at last, and still without turning Zouga called roughly, "Good day to you, Mr. Harkness."

The reply was in a frail old man's quaver that he hardly recognized.

Come again. We have more to discuss. Come back in two days.

The stiffness went out of Zouga's stance. He started to turn back, but the old man waved him away with a brusque gesture and Zouga stamped down the front steps, vaulted into the saddle and whipped his mount into a gallop along the narrow rutted track.

Harkness sat at the table until long after the hoof beats had faded. Strange that the pain had receded to the very back of his consciousness during the hours that he had sat with the youngster. He had felt young and strong, as though he had suckled upon the vigour and the youth of the other.

Then it had come back with a savage rush at Zouga.

Ballantyne's invitation, almost as if to remind him that his life was no longer his, that it was already forfeit to the hyena that lived deep in his belly, each day growing stronger, bigger, as it fed upon his vitals. When he closed his eyes he could imagine it, the way that he had seen it so often in the light of a thousand camp fires, up there in the wonderful land that he would never visit again. The thing within him had the same furtive slinking presence and he could taste the fetid breath of it in his throat. Now he gasped as the full strength of the pain returned, as the beast buried its fangs deeper into his gut.

He knocked over the chair in his haste to reach the precious bottle in the back of the cabinet and he gulped a mouthful of the clear pungent liquid without measuring it into the spoon. it was too much, he knew that, but each day he needed more to keep the hyena at bay, and each day the relief took longer to come.

He clung to the corner of the cabinet and waited for it. "Please, " he whispered, "please let it end soon."

There were half a dozen messages and invitations awaiting Zouga on his return to the Cartwright estate that morning, but the one which gave him most excitement was on official Admiralty paper, a polite request to call upon the Han. Ernest Kemp, Rear-Admiral of the Blue, Officer Commanding the Cape Squadron.

Zouga shaved and changed his clothing, selecting his best jacket for the occasion although it was a long dusty ride to Admiralty House. Despite missing a night's sleep, he felt vital and alert.

The Admiral's Secretary kept him waiting only a few minutes before showing him through, and Admiral Kemp came around from behind his desk to greet Zouga amiably, for the young man came highly recommended and Fuller Ballantyne's name still commanded respect in Africa. I have some news which I hope will please you, Major Ballantyne. But first, a glass of Madeira? " Zouga had to curb his impatience while the Admiral poured the syrupy wine. The Admiral's study was decorated richly, with velvet furnishings and a fashionable profusion of ornaments, small statues, bric-a-brac, stuffed birds in glass showcases, family portraits in ornate frames and pretty ceramics, potted plants and the kind of paintings which Zouga admired.

The Admiral was tall but stooped, as though to accommodate his long frame to the limited headroom between the decks of one of Her Majesty's ships. He seemed old for the responsible appointment he held, guarding the Empire's lifeline to India and the East, but the ageing may have been caused by ill-health rather than years.

There were dark-toned pouches of skin below his eyes and other marks of sickness carved around his mouth and evident in the distended blue veins on the back of his hands as he handed a glass of Madeira to Zouga. Your good health, Major Ballantyne. " And then after he had tasted his own wine, "I think I have a berth for you. A ship of my squadron anchored in Table Bay yesterday, and as soon as she has replenished her coal bunkers and revictualled I shall detach her for independent duty in the Mozambique channel."

Zouga knew from his meetings with the directors of the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade, that one part of the Admiral's standing orders read:You are requested and required to dispose the ships of your squadron in such manner as most expediently to prevent vessels of whatever Christian nation from engaging in the slave trade on the coast of the African continent south of the equator."

Clearly Kemp intended a sweep of the eastern seaboard with elements of his squadron, and Zouga. felt awakening delight as the Admiral went on genially, "It will not need much of a diversion for my ship to call at Quelimane, and to land you and your party! I cannot thank you sufficiently, Admiral. " His pleasure was transparent, and Admiral Kemp smiled in sympathy. He had put himself out more than his usual wont, for the youngster was attractive and likeable, deserving of encouragement, but now there were other matters awaiting his attention and as he pulled out his gold hunter and consulted it pointedly he went on, You should be ready to sail in five days" time. " He returned the watch to the fob of his uniform coat. "I hope we will see you on Friday? My Secretary did send you an invitation, did he not? Your sister will be with you, I hope."

Indeed, sir. "Zouga stood in obedience to his dismissal.

And my sister and I are honoured!

In fact Robyn had said, "I do not waste my evenings, Zouga, and I have no intention of enduring the company of a fleet of tipsy sailors nor of suffering the wagging tongues of their wives."

The Cape wives were agog with the presence in their midst of the notorious Robyn Ballantyne who had impersonated a man and invaded, successfully, an exclusive masculine preserve. Half of them were deliciously scandalized, and the rest were awed and admiring. However, Zouga was certain that she would pay this price for their passage to Quelimane. Very well then. " Admiral Kemp nodded. "Thank you for calling on me. " And then, as Zouga started for the door, "Oh, by the way, Ballantyne. The ship is the Black Joke, Captain Codrington commanding. My Secretary will give you a letter for him, and I suggest you call upon him to introduce yourself and to learn the date of sailing."

The name came as a shock, and Zouga checked his stride as he thought quickly of the complication which the choice of ship might bring.

Zouga was sensitive to any threat to the expedition, and Codrington had struck him as being a hot-headed, almost fanatical character. He could not afford any slur to his leadership, and Codrington had seen him sailing in company with a suspected slaver. He could not be sure what Codrington would do.

It was a delicate decision: accept the berth and risk Codrington's denunciation, or refuse the offer of passage and perhaps wait for months in Cape Town before another vessel offered them another.

If they were delayed that Ion& it would mean missing the cooler and dryer period between the monsoons, they would have to cross the pestilential and fever-ridden coastal lowlands in the most dangerous season.

Zouga made his decision. "Thank you, Admiral Kemp.

I will call on Captain Codrington as soon as possible!

Thomas Harkness had asked Zouga to return on the second day, and the map was more important even than swift passage to Quelimane.

Zouga sent Garniet, the Cartwrights" groom, down to the beach with a sealed letter addressed to Captain Codrington and with instructions to take one of the water boats out to Black joke and deliver it personally to Codrington. It was a warnin& couched in the most polite terms, that Zouga. and Robyn would call on the Captain the following morning. Zouga had become at his sister had an effect on men quite out of aware that proportion to her physical appearance, even Admiral Kemp had asked for her personally, and he had no compunction in using her to take the edge off Codrington's temper. He would have to warn her to exert her charm, but now there was more important business.

He had mounted on Cartwright's big bay gelding and ridden halfway down the grovelled drive between the oaks, when a thought struck him and he swung the horse's head and cantered back to the guest bungalow again. The Naval Colt revolver was on the top layer of his chest, already fully loaded and with caps on the nipples. He carried it under the tail of his coat while he went back out to the tethered gelding, and then slipped the revolver surreptitiously into the saddlebag as he swung up into the saddle.

He knew he had to have the Harkness map at any price, but he deliberately refused to think what that price might be.

He pushed his mount hard up the steep road to the neck between the peaks, and gave him only a few minutes to blow before starting down the far slope.

The air of dilapidation which hung over the thatched building in the milkwood grove seemed to have deepened. It seemed totally deserted, silent and desolate. He dismounted and threw his reins over a milkwood branch and stooped to ease the girth. Then he quietly unfastened the buckle of the saddlebag and slipped the Colt into his waistband and pulled his coat over it.

As he started towards the stoep, the big ridge-backed Boerhound rose from where it had lain in the shadows and came to meet him. In contrast to its previous ferocity, the animal was subdued, its tail and ears drooping and it whined softly when it recognized Zouga.

He went up on to the stoep and hammered on the front door with his fist, and heard the blows reverberate through the room beyond. Beside him, the Boerhound cocked its head and watched him expectantly, but silence settled again over the old building.

Twice more Zouga beat upon the door, before he. tried the handle. it was locked. He rattled the brass lock and put his shoulder to the door; but it was heavy teak in a solid frame. Zouga jumped down off the stoep and circled the house, squinting his eyes at the fierce reflected sunlight from the white-washed walls. The windows were shuttered.

Beyond the farmyard stood the old slave quarters, now used by Harkness" servant, and Zouga called loudly for him, but his room was deserted and the ashes cold in the cooking place. Zouga went back to the main house and stood by the locked kitchen door.

He knew that he should go back to his horse and ride away, but he needed the map, even if just for long enough to make a copy. Harkness was not here, and in three days, perhaps less, he would be sailing out of Table Bay.

There was a pile of broken rusted garden tools in the corner of the stoep. Zouga selected a hand scythe, and carefully probed the metal point of the blade into the crack between jamb and door. The lock was old and worn, the tongue slipped back easily under the blade and he jerked the door open with his free hand.

It was still not too late. He paused in the doorway for many seconds, and then he took a deep breath and stepped quietly into the gloom of the interior.

There was a long passage leading past closed doors towards the front room. Zouga. went down it, opening doors quietly as he passed. In one room was a huge fourposter bedstead with the curtains opened and the. bed clothes in disorder.

Quickly Zouga passed on to the main room. It was in semi-darkness and he stopped to let his eyes adjust, and immediately was aware of a low sound. The hivemurmur of insects seemed to fill the high room. It was a disturbing, almost menacing sound, and Zouga felt the skin prickle on his forearms. Mr. Harkness! " he called hoarsely, and the hum rose to a loud buzzing. Something alighted on his cheek and crawled across his skin. He struck it away with a shudder of revulsion and stumbled across to the nearest window. His fingers were clumsy on the fastening of the shutters. A shaft of white sunlight burned into the room as the shutter swung open.

Thomas Harkness sat in one of the carved wingback chairs across the cluttered table, and stared at Zouga impassively.

The flies crawled over him, big metallic blue and green flies that glittered in the sunlight. They swarmed with evident glee upon the deep dark wound in the centre of his chest. The snowy beard was black with clotted blood, and blood had formed a congealed pool beneath his chair.

Zouga was rooted by the shock for many seconds, and then reluctantly he took a step forward. The old man had propped one of his big-bored elephant guns against the table le& reversing the weapon so the muzzle pressed into his own chest and his hands were still locked around the barrel. What did you do that for? " Zouga demanded stupidly, speaking aloud, and Harkness stared back at him.

Harkness had removed the boot from his right foot, and depressed the trigger with his bare toe. The massive impact of the heavy lead ball had driven the chair and the man in it back against the wall, but he had retained his death grip on the barrel. That was a stupid thing to do. " Zouga took a cheroot from his case and lit it with a Swan Vesta. The smell of death was in the room, coating the back of his throat and the roof of his mouth. Zouga drew deeply on the tobacco smoke.

There was no reason at all to feel grief. He had known the old man for a single day and night. He had come here for one reason only, to get the map the best way he was able. It was ridiculous now to have the deep ache of sorrow turning his legs leaden and stinging the backs of his eyes. Was he mourning the passing of an era perhaps, rather than the man himself? Harkness and the legends of Africa were interwoven. The man had been history itself.

Slowly Zouga approached the figure in the chair, and then reaching out drew his palm slowly down over the old face, ruined by the elements and by pain, closing the lids down over the staring black eyes.