by Wilbur Smith
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.
‘I 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 he 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 serpe
ntine 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 marvellous 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: 19. ‘The revenger of blood himself shall slay the murderer: when he meeteth him, he shall slay him.’
Zobyn 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 main deck. 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.
