by Wilbur Smith
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 slammed 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 mocking, 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 winddriven 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 fing
ertip. ‘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,’ he 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 main deck 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, funnelled 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 Jackson 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.’
‘I 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 opportunity.’
‘I 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 night.’
‘And 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.