Call of the Raven

by Wilbur Smith

  Chester fell, arms and legs flailing like a broken insect, and landed in the water below. As the ripples spread across the surface, dark shapes surged from the banks, converging where he had fallen. The water began to boil.

  Mungo did not see it. He was kneeling by Camilla, cradling her in his arms, stroking her face, calling her name again and again as her blood soaked into his shirt. Tears flowed down his cheeks and fell on her face. She did not move.

  A thin line of blood ran over Mungo’s hand and curled around his wrist.

  Camilla was free.

  After the battle, Mungo sat on the front stairs alone, staring at the ponds and the empty cotton fields beyond. Wisi and his men were bringing out bodies from the house and piling them up like firewood on the drive. Smoke rose away to his right, but it was only cooking fires in the slave village. As soon as the fighting finished the slaves had returned, going back to their homes and their chores as if they had never been interrupted. For them, nothing had changed.

  A song came from the village and drifted over the fields. A low, sad lament. Mungo had heard the tune at Windemere and he knew what the words said.

  O Satan told me not to pray, he want my soul at Judgement Day.

  Somewhere in the bottom of one of those ponds, what remained of Chester Marion would be settling into the ooze. Mungo had done what he set out to do. He remembered the promise he had made to Solange. I will dismantle every brick of the edifice he has built his fortune on, until he is left naked in the ruins of his life. Now that he was sitting in the desolation of Chester’s life, it seemed a hollow boast.

  He grasped the locket that hung around his neck. With a jerk of his arm, the chain broke; the silver heart came away in the palm of his hand. With trembling fingers, he undid the little clasp and stared at the picture inside. It was not even a very good likeness. He had drawn it himself by lamplight in the Windemere observatory. He had never been a good artist, and had struggled to make the picture small enough to fit the locket. But he had captured something of the life in Camilla’s eyes, her smile and her beauty. He remembered her giggling as he drew it: he trying to make her sit still, she trying to distract him, impatient to get back into bed.

  ‘This is important,’ he’d told her. ‘When I go to Cambridge, this is all I will have to remember you by.’

  He could not bear to look at it now. With a sudden spasm, he snapped the locket shut and hurled it away. The moment it left his hand he wanted to take it back, but it was too late. The locket soared through the air, flashing for a moment in the sun, then fell in the pond and sank.

  He was still staring at the ripples it had made when he heard the clop of horses’ hooves, and the rattle of wheels on gravel. A carriage was coming up the drive, drawn by four white horses. The coachman reined just in front of the pile of bodies, jumped down and opened the door.

  Solange’s head peered out. She took in the scene: the corpses; the guns and bullets littered over the ground; the pockmarks in the walls and the smell of powder in the air. She did not look terribly surprised.

  She walked across the causeway, stepping delicately around the pools of blood and the spent cartridges. She stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked up at Mungo.

  ‘Why are you here?’ His voice was barely more than a croak.

  ‘To inspect my new home. Thanks to you, I have become the new owner of this property.’ She put her finger in a bullet hole in the balustrade. ‘Though it will need some work. It is not in as good condition as you promised.’

  Mungo did not smile. Solange squinted at him.

  ‘Did you kill him?’

  Mungo nodded.

  ‘Then it is done. You have achieved your heart’s desire.’ She cocked her head. ‘It does not seem to have made you happy.’

  ‘Camilla is dead.’

  The words came out of him as a tortured howl, torn from his soul. He gazed at the ground, wanting it to swallow him up, but Solange would not let him. She stared at him, until the strength of her gaze forced him to look up. Her almond eyes held his.

  ‘I am sorry.’

  She came up the steps and sat down beside him, ignoring the dust that stained her dress. She put her arm around his shoulders and held him close.

  ‘You cannot stay here,’ she said. ‘Not after what you have done.’

  ‘Who will care that I killed a slave?’

  Mungo tried to pull away from her, but she gripped his arm tight, digging her nails into him.

  ‘Chester Marion was the most powerful man in the state. They will care about him.’

  ‘I challenged him to a duel in front of half of New Orleans. They do not prosecute for that.’

  ‘They prosecute for waging a private war. Even in Louisiana, that is frowned on.’ She pointed to the pile of blue-jacketed corpses. ‘And you cannot pretend all these men never existed. Someone will want to know how they died.’

  Mungo said nothing.

  ‘We will tell the authorities there was a slave revolt,’ Solange decided. ‘They were overwhelmed – Chester died in the fighting.’

  Mungo nodded.

  ‘But you cannot be here when they arrive.’ She pointed to Wisi, standing guard at the top of the steps. Stripped to his waist and with his stabbing spear in his hand, he looked like a vision from a slave owner’s nightmare. ‘It would go hard on your men.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Go away for a time. Go to Texas, or California. There are fortunes to be made there.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Only for a time,’ she said. ‘I want you to come back. Remember the bargain we made. The money I gave you was a loan, not a gift. I will expect repayment.’

  ‘You will get your money back,’ Mungo promised.

  He had seen what debt had done to his father, and then to Chester. He would never be beholden to any man or woman. He would pay what he owed, whatever he had to do.

  ‘Of course, I have Bannerfield. That is worth something – though not as much as it was.’

  Mungo did not care. ‘Burn it down and add it to my account,’ he said savagely. ‘I never want to see this place again.’

  She stroked his arm. ‘You will think differently later, when your wounds are not so raw.’

  My wounds will never heal, he wanted to say. She seemed to read it in his face.

  ‘All our cuts turn to scars eventually,’ she said. ‘And a scar is only skin. We do not have to show what is beneath.’

  She got up and beckoned to where Tippoo and Wisi had been waiting. They came forward and helped lift Mungo to his feet. Together, they descended the stairs.

  At the foot of the steps Mungo remembered something. He turned back and called to Solange.

  ‘There is a child somewhere in the house. An orphan. See to him’

  ‘I am sure you have made many orphans today.’

  ‘This one is different. He is Camilla’s son.’

  An unreadable look crossed Solange’s face.

  ‘Then you had better find a good home for him.’

  Mungo did not go to California. He and his men went to New Orleans, smuggled downriver on a coal barge. In the dead of night, they went aboard the Raven and slipped her cable. No one saw them go. The only cargo they loaded was a long, lead-lined box they had brought from Bannerfield. They sailed to Chesapeake Bay, up the James River, and anchored by a little island in the mouth of the creek at Windemere. The path had long since grown over, but Tippoo and Wisi cut a way so they could carry the casket up to the observatory.

  They buried Camilla in the soft earth of the clearing. Mungo and Tippoo dug the grave. Mungo placed no marker, for the land was not his. Instead, he scattered roses over the freshly turned soil, and planted a dogwood tree where its blossoms would fall on the grave in spring.

  Then the Raven headed out onto the ocean.

  The world had little sympathy for a fallen hero. Edwin Fairchild had discovered to his cost how fickle the public could be. The same illustrated newspapers that had once carried pictu
res of him standing defiant on the Blackhawk’s deck, surrounded by blood-curdling cut-throats, now printed cartoons of him lying at the bottom of a hole, while a trio of monkeys sat in a tree and laughed at him. By gad, said the caption, these termites are a bigger nuisance than the slavers. To his eternal mortification, Fairchild had become a laughing stock.

  But he would not be deterred. He still had his faith – in God, in his cause – and that gave him strength. For months, he haunted the corridors and anterooms of the Admiralty, begging any man he could find for a ship. He had used every family connection he could lay claim to, called in favours from Cambridge friends. He had even considered proposing marriage to a young woman whose uncle sat on the Admiralty Board.

  Sense – and the lady’s indifference – had quashed that particular plan. But in the end, his persistence had prevailed. Now, through the window of his room at the boarding house, he could see his reward lying at anchor in Portsmouth harbour: a handsome little sloop of sixteen guns, ready to take the fight to the slavers once more.

  All he needed was a crew. His fall from grace meant there were fewer men eager to join him, even without the hardships of the West Africa station to deter them. But there were a few who believed in the cause and were willing to serve under his command. One of them was standing in front of him now. He was an odd-looking child. His hair was angelic gold, his skin pasty white, except where it erupted in the angry red pimples that covered his adolescent face.

  Fairchild glanced down at the letter of recommendation the boy had brought from his father.

  My son has never been to sea, but he burns with the zeal for the liberty of mankind. You will find him a willing apprentice, and in time I venture he will make a fine officer.

  ‘You wish to serve aboard the Wanderer?’

  The boy nodded vigorously.

  ‘It is a hard life,’ Fairchild warned. He felt a twinge in his leg, and winced. It had not healed properly; for the rest of his days he would walk with a limp. ‘There is disease, privation, the hazards of the sea . . . To say nothing of the dangers of battle.’

  ‘All I want is to free the slaves.’

  The boy was so young his voice had not yet broken. The words came out with an ungainly screech. Even so, you could not miss the strength within him.

  ‘Then I am glad to have you in my crew. Congratulations . . .’ Fairchild’s eyes drifted down to the letter, to remind himself of the boy’s name. ‘Midshipman Codrington.’

  Despite his age, the boy’s handshake was firm as a grown man’s. The blue eyes fixed Fairchild with a purpose so intense that even Fairchild found it unnerving.

  ‘Thank you, sir. I will not—’

  A knock at the door interrupted him.

  ‘Come in!’ called Fairchild. ‘It is probably the sailing master,’ he told the young midshipman. ‘I asked him to call. He will be in charge of your instruction.’

  But it was not the sailing master who stepped through the door. It was two people Fairchild had never seen before in his life. One was a woman, with grey hair and a kindly face, bundled up in a travelling cloak. The other, clutching her hand and peeking out from behind her skirts, was a small boy. He had tousled black hair, a little bow mouth and olive skin. He could barely be three years old.

  Wordlessly, the woman extracted a letter from inside her cloak and gave it to Fairchild. It was written on heavy paper, embossed with a crest and the name ‘Bannerfield’.

  The boy who accompanies this letter was a slave who came into my possession. I have set him free. As an admirer of your deep commitment to the emancipation of the negro races, I have chosen you to be his guardian. I trust you will take care of him and see he receives a proper education.

  There was no signature – only three initials: M.S.J.

  Fairchild felt faint. His leg throbbed. He stared at the paper, reading and rereading it.

  ‘Where did you come from?’ he asked the woman in a whisper.

  ‘From New Orleans. We arrived this afternoon aboard the Raven. We—’

  She did not get the chance to finish. Leaving the woman, the boy and the midshipman in astonishment, Fairchild tore out of the room and down the stairs as fast as his aching leg could carry him. The landlady was cleaning the doorstep; he almost knocked her over as he barged through the front door.

  He ran all the way to the harbour master’s office.

  ‘The Raven!’ he gasped. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘There.’

  A clerk pointed out of the window, where a sleek Baltimore clipper was beating her way out of the channel. Fairchild felt a stab of memory, more painful than the wound in his leg, at the sight of her.

  ‘She has sailed already?’

  The clerk nodded. ‘Arrived this morning, and put out again on the afternoon tide.’

  There was a terrace outside the office, where the comings and goings in the harbour could be observed more easily. Fairchild went out and leaned on the rail, staring after the departing ship.

  What had Mungo done? Why on earth had he sent the boy to him? In truth, Fairchild was not at all sure how he could discharge the duty. He had no wife who would know what to do. And then there was the question of the boy’s race. How could he raise a black child as his own?

  But for the moment, all those considerations were forgotten in the righteous joy of being proved right. There had been good in Mungo. He had seen the error of his ways and repented. He, Fairchild, had redeemed him.

  ‘God bless you, Mungo St John,’ he whispered to the departing ship.

  A squall was approaching. Fairchild turned to go back into the warmth of the office, and almost bumped into the clerk, who had emerged carrying a large ledger.

  ‘I have the ship’s manifest, if you would like to see it.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Fairchild spread the ledger on the balcony rail and read the entry the clerk showed him.

  ‘What . . . ?’

  Fairchild’s joy turned suddenly cold as he ran his eye down the cargo manifest. Iron ingots. Glass beads. Trade cloth. All the goods that England’s factories turned out in such abundance to satisfy the market in West Africa, where they could be readily exchanged for human lives.

  Fairchild stared at the receding ship, silhouetted against the horizon. Black clouds bruised the sky; the wind blew stinging spats of rain against his cheek.

  ‘Damn you, Mungo St John!’ he shouted into the storm. ‘Damn you to Hell!’

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  ON LEOPARD ROCK

  The first ever memoir from the Number One global bestselling adventure author

  Wilbur Smith has lived an incredible life of adventure, and now he shares the extraordinary true stories that have inspired his fiction.

  From being attacked by lions to close encounters with deadly reef sharks, from getting lost in the African bush without water to crawling the precarious tunnels of gold mines, from marlin fishing with Lee Marvin to near death from crash-landing a Cessna airplane, from brutal school days to redemption through writing and falling in love, Wilbur Smith tells us the intimate stories of his life that have been the raw material for his fiction. Always candid, sometimes hilarious, and never less than thrillingly entertaining, On Leopard Rock is testament to a writer whose life is as rich and eventful as his novels are compellingly unputdownable.

  AVAILABLE NOW

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Wilbur Smith is a global phenomenon: a distinguished author with an established readership built up over fifty-five years of writing with sales of over 130 million novels worldwide.

  Born in Central Africa in 1933, Wilbur became a fulltime writer in 1964 following the success of When the Lion Feeds. He has since published over forty-one global bestsellers, including the Courtney Series, the Ballantyne Series, the Egyptian Series, the Hector Cross Series and many successful standalone novels, all meticulously researched on his numerous expeditions worldwide. His books
have now been translated into twenty-six languages.

  The establishment of the Wilbur & Niso Smith Foundation in 2015 cemented Wilbur’s passion for empowering writers, promoting literacy and advancing adventure writing as a genre. The foundation’s flagship programme is the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize.

  For all the latest information on Wilbur visit www.wilbursmithbooks.com or facebook.com/WilburSmith

  Also by Wilbur Smith

  “Non-Fiction

  On Leopard Rock:

  A Life of Adventures

  The Courtney Series

  When the Lion Feeds

  The Sound of Thunder

  A Sparrow Falls

  The Burning Shore

  Power of the Sword

  Rage

  A Time to Die

  Golden Fox

  Birds of Prey

  Monsoon

  Blue Horizon

  The Triumph of the Sun

  Assegai

  Golden Lion

  War Cry

  The Tiger’s Prey

  Courtney’s War

  King of Kings

  Ghost Fire

  The Ballantyne Series”

  “A Falcon Flies

  Men of Men

  The Angels Weep

  The Leopard Hunts in Darkness

  The Triumph of the Sun

  King of Kings

  The Egyptian Series

  River God

  The Seventh Scroll

  Warlock

  The Quest

  Desert God

  Pharaoh

  Hector Cross

  Those in Peril

  Vicious Circle

  Predator

  Standalones

  The Dark of the Sun

  Shout at the Devil

  Gold Mine

  The Diamond Hunters