by Wilbur Smith
‘Tom Courtney?’ she said, and he looked up in surprise.
‘Ana Duarte?’ he responded, and her face flushed with pleasure.
‘You remember me!’
‘How could I ever forget you? In fact, my brother and I were just this instant recollecting the day we met. But I did not know you were here in Cape Town.’
‘My ship arrived two days ago from Madras.’
‘I hope you had an easier crossing than the last time.’
She touched a silver cross that hung at her throat. ‘Thankfully, yes!’
Suddenly Tom thought of the green flash. Though he was not superstitious, he wondered if perhaps it had portended this unexpected meeting.
‘You must dine with us,’ put in Dorian. ‘Sarah and Yasmini would be delighted to see you again.’
‘I would like that very much.’ She smiled. ‘In fact, I was hoping for it. I have a proposal for you.’
The Courtneys’ boarding house was at the far end of town, just under the walls of the Dutch East India Company’s garden. The Malay housekeeper, Mrs Lai, kept it spotless. The food she cooked was simple yet delicious, a unique blend of spices from the Indies with the flavours of the English recipes Tom insisted on.
Tom poured wine from a decanter. Dorian, as usual, drank only fresh fruit juice.
‘No wine for you?’ Ana noticed.
‘I am a Muslim.’
‘Are there many Muslims in England?’
‘It is a long story.’
‘But a good one,’ put in Tom.
‘Then I would be glad to hear it,’ said Ana.
So Dorian explained how he had been captured by Arab pirates as a boy of eleven, enslaved, bought by a Prince of Oman because of the red colour of his hair, the same as the prophet Mohammed, and raised in his household as an adopted son. Ana urged him to tell her more, so he told her how he had grown to manhood as a warrior of Islam, and how finally he had embraced that faith.
Ana listened in total absorption to the story of his life. When he was done she asked quietly, ‘Is there a man around this table who does not have a price on his head?’
Tom started. ‘How do you know?’
‘I have many contacts with the East India Company factors in Madras. From them I learned that the Governor of Bombay was a man named Guy Courtney. So I followed up and learned that you are related.’
Tom and Dorian exchanged a look that was fraught with meaning.
‘Guy is our brother,’ Tom admitted. ‘So far as he knows, Dorian died in Oman, and I disappeared somewhere in the African wilderness.’
‘You have not informed him that you are both very much alive?’
‘That news would give Guy no great pleasure. Frankly, he would prefer us both dead.’
Ana sipped her wine, as if this news was the most natural thing in the world. ‘I will not ask what came between you,’ she murmured.
‘It was a woman,’ Dorian said flatly.
‘And the woman was my sister,’ said Sarah, speaking up for the first time. ‘We were passengers on that fateful voyage, when Dorian was captured by pirates. I was still a child but my elder sister, Caroline, was in full flower. Silly thing; she was much too free with her charms. She went to Tom’s bed only too willingly.’
‘I believe it was actually the powder magazine,’ said Dorian with a grin. ‘It was the only place on the ship they could find privacy.’
‘It was my fault,’ said Tom, embarrassed to have this history raised in front of Ana. ‘I should have realized that Guy was in love with her.’
‘Guy was not in love with Caroline,’ said Sarah flatly. ‘Guy wanted only to possess her, like he would a horse or a cargo or a chest of gold. As soon as he had married her, she no longer was of any value to Guy. You forget, I lived with them as Guy’s ward for years after they were husband and wife. I saw the way he treated her.’ She closed her eyes. ‘He did not love her, God knows.’
‘Yet even though he married her, he could not forgive you?’ Ana asked Tom.
‘It was more than that. There was …’ Tom broke off. There were some things he could not discuss with Ana.
What have I done? he asked himself. One brother I killed, and another wants me dead. The two greatest mistakes of my life, and there is nothing I can do to atone for them.
He thought again of the green flash on the horizon the night before. God grant me wisdom.
Ana nodded gravely. ‘All families have their secrets.’
‘I think you are very brave,’ Sarah told her, lightening the mood with her bright voice, ‘coming to dine with these two wanted scallywags.’
‘You saved my life, all of you!’ said Ana, addressing the whole table. ‘You were in no danger. Your ship could have sailed on and left us to our fate. Ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have done that.’
‘Ninety-nine men out of a hundred do not have Yasmini and Sarah telling them what they must do,’ grinned Dorian. ‘The choice was not ours.’
The conversation moved on. After supper, they retired to the parlour, where Sarah entertained them on her harpsichord, playing arias from William Babell’s Book of Lady’s Entertainment. Tom had ordered the new harpsichord shipped all the way from England.
‘Tom threw the first one I had into a river,’ Sarah confided to Ana, in between pieces.
‘In fairness, you should mention we were stuck on a sandbank in an overloaded ship, pursued by an army of Arab swordsmen who wanted to murder us, and I was near to death,’ said Dorian, sitting on the floor on an ornately embroidered cushion.
‘I am sure Miss Duarte could not conceive it could have been otherwise,’ said Yasmini.
Sarah played some more, ending with a flourish. The others applauded. Sarah took a seat next to Tom.
‘Miss Duarte,’ Tom began. ‘When we met yesterday you said you had a proposal for us.’
She smoothed her skirts. She was the youngest person in the room by at least a dozen years, but she carried herself with calm assurance.
‘What do you know of India?’ she asked Tom.
Tom swirled wine in his glass, staring at the dregs. ‘What I hear on the waterfront. The traders say it is a dangerous country since the old emperor died.’
‘Since old Aurangzeb died two years ago, India has become a battlefield,’ Ana agreed. ‘His three sons are contesting the succession, and while they fight each other, every other prince and nabob makes war on his neighbour. In the west, the Marathas have been fighting the Mughals from their mountain fortresses for thirty years. On the Malabar Coast, the pirate Angria has established his own kingdom, ruled from the impregnable fortress of Tiracola. In the south, the Nawabs are in open revolt. The Mughal Empire is tearing itself apart.’
‘Bad for trade,’ said Dorian.
Tom waited while Ana hesitated, as if unsure how to proceed.
‘Before I explain my proposal, I must tell you something of myself and my family. My father was a Portuguese merchant from a family that had settled in Goa; my mother was Indian, the daughter of a local Mansabdar. Neither family approved their marriage, so they fled together to the British settlement at Fort St George – Madras. They began with nothing, but they worked hard. Soon, they had a thriving business in the cloth trade. They bought calicoes from the weavers around Madras, and shipped them to Europe. At first, they sold them to the East India Company, but the Company was greedy: they cheated us on the price. So my father resolved to find another way. He contracted with a Danish sea captain to carry his cargo.
‘Guy Courtney, the president of East India Company, learned of this. You know what they call these men, private traders who threaten their monopoly? Interlopers.’ She almost spat the word out. ‘The East India Company believe these private traders are nothing more than snakes in the walled garden of Eden which they imagine they have built. So the president informed the pirates when our ship would be sailing. They fell upon her near Cape Cormorin. There were no survivors.
‘My father had put everything he ow
ned into that voyage. Even so, he knew the risks. If it had been an act of God, he would have borne the hardship. But President Courtney wanted to gloat. He summoned us to his house and told us to our faces what he had done, as a warning to ourselves and to others. There was nothing we could do, no hope of justice. The president is the judge and the jury.
‘My father died a few months later, brokenhearted and ruined.’ A tremor shook her voice; Sarah laid a hand on her arm. ‘I took on his affairs. That is why I was aboard the Dowager. The captain charged me a terrible fee to take my cargo, but I thought I would be safe on an Indiaman.’
‘Do you think the pirates we met had been alerted to your coming?’
‘No. That was just a stroke of bad luck.’
She pressed her fingertips together. ‘This is my proposal. I am a merchant, like you. I want to transport my goods to the market at the least cost, to sell for the best price. To pass safely from Madras to Cape Town, you need a pass from the British, a pass from the Dutch, a pass from the pirates and a pass from the Mughal emperor. Even if I bought my own ship, I could not afford to defend her. The crew to man the guns, the protection money I would have to pay … It is impossible.’
‘You want us to carry your trade?’
‘This is not just for myself. The Indian Ocean is crawling with pirates. The East India companies, the Dutch and the English, they can afford the ships to see them off – but they make their suppliers pay for the protection they give them. But there are other merchants, syndicates and traders in London, Amsterdam, Ostend, a dozen cities I have never seen, who could finance the trade and offer better terms, if only they could manage the shipping.’
‘The East India Company has a monopoly on the India trade,’ Tom pointed out. ‘Lord Childs has threatened to hang any man he finds breaking it.’
‘It has a monopoly on the “out and back” trade – from England to the Indies. The country trade, between the ports of the Indian Ocean, is open to all. Divide the journey in two, by trans-shipping the cargoes in Cape Town, and the monopoly does not apply. That is how I persuaded Captain Inchbird to carry my cargo. The European merchants would pay you handsomely to bear the risks of the Indian Ocean, while the factors in India would sell their best wares to you because you would pay more than the Company, and still make a handsome profit.’
‘The VOC, the Dutch East India Company, controls all the trade in Cape Town.’
‘And they will smile on any venture that weakens their hated English rivals.’
‘That would still mean we had to contend with the pirates,’ mused Tom.
‘I have seen how you deal with pirates. And why just India?’ She turned to Dorian. ‘You said your adopted father was the Caliph of Oman. There must be men in the Arab ports – at Lamu, Muscat, Mocha and Gombroon – who trust you. You speak their language and you pray to their God.’
‘The old Caliph was my adopted father. The new Caliph is my adopted brother, and he hates me every bit as much as Guy hates Tom.’ Dorian stroked his red beard. ‘But … there are other men I know.’
‘If you go about it in the right way, you could own the trade of a whole ocean.’
The proposition hung there, dangling between them.
‘We will think on it,’ Tom said. ‘Tomorrow, I will give you our answer.’
Dorian walked with Ana to escort her back to her lodgings. From the veranda of the boarding house Tom watched them descend the hill. He had eaten and drunk his fill, but it had not dulled his mind. He needed air, and space to think.
‘I am going to take a turn in the gardens,’ he told Sarah.
‘Don’t let the lions gobble you up. Take your sword.’
‘I don’t need it,’ he retorted. ‘I kill lions with my teeth, didn’t you know?’
Leaving the house, Tom didn’t notice the single figure lurking in the shadows of the cottage across the road. He walked briskly, whistling ‘Spanish Ladies’ softly to himself, and reached the nearest gate into the botanical gardens of the VOC. The gate was purely ornamental. On the other three sides, the gardens were open, with only a low ditch to keep wild animals out as the ground rose towards the slopes of Devil’s Peak. Sarah’s quip about the lions had not really been a joke.
The VOC had built the gardens for the pleasure of the residents of Cape Town. They had spent heavily when laying them out but recently they had been neglected. The further Tom went, the more derelict they became. Hedges soared twenty feet high, blocking the moonlight and overhanging the paths, which were overgrown with weeds. The sunken ponds had fallen in, becoming slimy holes filled with mud and rubble. The few flowers that had survived grew in sparse, sporadic clusters.
But Tom ignored his surroundings. Ana’s proposal had set his mind on fire. Twenty years ago, he would have agreed to it right there in the parlour. Now, older and wiser, he knew enough of himself to pause before leaping in.
But why not? The Courtneys were a restless family: it was their nature to move on to new lands, new adventures. We have been ploughing the same old furrow much too long, he thought. This is the opportunity I have been waiting for. Why not?
Out in the night, he heard the crazed giggling of a pack of hyenas, scavenging in the colony’s rubbish heaps.
Because of Guy, the more cautious part of his mind answered him. Because if you do this, you will be tweaking the East India Company’s tail, and sooner or later Guy will get to hear of it. Because the last two times you met, he tried to kill you, and if you meet a third time you know one of you will probably die.
Gravel crunched on the path behind him. Tom spun around. A figure stood behind him. Shadows from the wild hedges hid his face, but enough light seeped through to gleam on the naked sword in his hand. Tom was unarmed.
‘Are you Thomas Courtney?’ said an English voice.
‘I am he.’ Tom began to relax. He stepped forward, but the man lunged at him with sword in his right hand.
The morning after the Prophet anchored in Cape Town bay, Francis Courtney took a bumboat ashore. He stood in the bows and gazed at the high peaks cradling the bay, the rolling surf and the few houses clinging to the fringe of this great continent. As a child, he used to pull out the old charts in the library and pore over the strange names and distant shores. In his schoolbooks, he would draw his own maps and imagine exploring those undiscovered countries. And, at last, now he was here.
He went to the harbourmaster’s office to register his arrival.
‘Name?’ asked the clerk. Ink dripped from his pen.
He reached into his coat pocket and produced the false papers that Childs had given him. ‘My name is Frank Leighton.’
From the harbourmaster’s office, he walked along the shore to the fort. It stood about a musket shot from the town, commanding the harbour and the landing areas. Francis stared at it, trying to imagine his great-grandfather labouring in the heat. Growing up in High Weald, Francis had been surrounded by the memories of his ancestors: their effigies in the chapel crypt, their coats of arms in the stained glass, their portraits lining the walls. One by one, those portraits had disappeared: he remembered the first time he’d run down the long gallery and seen a gap on the wall, and the ache each time another painting disappeared to cover Sir Walter’s debts.
Yet here he was. His great-grandfather, the man in the portrait with the stern face and great mane of black hair, had stood on this very ground. So, according to the stories his mother told him, had his grandfather Hal. He imagined them now as they must have been: no longer flat on oil and canvas, but as living, breathing men.
A tremor went through him. He felt the presence of his ancestors, as if all the portraits in the long gallery had come alive, stepped out of their frames and crowded around him, impressing upon him the full weight and expectation of the Courtney name.
If he killed Thomas, would he be any better than the man he killed? A man who murdered his own family.
‘I owe it to my father,’ he told himself, trying not to think of the reward of
five thousand pounds Sir Nicholas Childs had promised him. It seemed a mean motive for an act of such enormity.
He realized the sentry at the castle gate had started to take an interest in him. Francis turned, and hurried back to the waterfront where he found a tavern. This early in the morning it was almost deserted, but he needed a drink.
The beer was deep red in colour, flat and sour. Francis took one sip, and thought of the mornings he had come downstairs to find his stepfather already halfway through a bottle of wine.
A woman came over and sat on a stool at his table. She had bright red lips, and almost enough powder on her cheeks to smooth out the wrinkles that lined them.
‘Looking for something, dearie?’ She played with the ribbon that laced the neck of her blouse. ‘I can help you with whatever you want.’
Francis blushed furiously as he realized what she was offering. For a moment, he could hardly speak. Growing up in High Weald, rarely venturing far, he had never encountered such a person, though he had occasionally heard of them in whispered speculation with other boys.
‘I’m looking for Thomas Courtney,’ he mumbled. And then, seeing the recognition light her eyes, ‘Do you know him?’
He put a coin on the table. The woman snatched it up. She polished it on her skirts, and then slipped it into a pouch which she tucked inside her bodice.
Francis waited. ‘Well?’
‘Aren’t you going to buy me a drink?’ she wheedled. ‘A proper gentleman always buys a lady a drink.’
Awkwardly, Francis called the barmaid, who fetched the woman another glass of beer. She gave Francis a pitying look as she put it on the table.
‘First time, dearie?’ said the prostitute, slurping her beer. ‘A big, handsome lad like you? I don’t believe it.’
‘I’m looking for Thomas Courtney,’ Francis insisted.
‘He won’t do the things I can do for you.’ Under the table, her foot rubbed against his calf. Francis hastily pulled it away.
She grinned at his discomfort. ‘Got any more of those silver coins in your purse? For another one of those, I’ll not just tell you where to find him. I’ll show him to you.’