by Peter Tonkin
‘I know,’ he said equally gently. ‘I’m getting too old now. I’ll leave it to the younger chaps.’
The quiet admission caused her heart to swell painfully within her but this time she had no fear of falling lifeless onto Connaught Road and leaving her darlings parentless.
‘Come here,’ she said throatily, and she pulled him upright. He turned towards her and she swept him into her arms, thinking how much easier life would be now with Richard working nine to five in Heritage House and the family wandering contentedly between Ashenden, Summersend and Cold Fell. Thinking how little she would miss the adventures, the separation, the stress.
And, as she thought these contented thoughts, Richard swung Robin round and locked her in his arms. His face swooped down and their lips crushed together. In a cocoon of contentment, she closed her eyes and allowed the sensations of love and security to wash over her, and the feeling was utterly glorious.
But even as he kissed her, Richard’s eyes were tempted away. Just across the road stood the great skyscraper of Jardine house. During the last few weeks the Heritage Mariner offices had moved up from the fourth floor to the sixteenth. Where would they move during the next few years? Here was the most exciting business community in all the world and he and Charles Lee had got their foot in the door. True, everything was under new management, but here was a company ready to play by its rules.
The old Noble House had made its fortune, its face and its position out of the prosecution of the first Opium War. Why could the next one not establish its beginnings in the destruction of the second Opium War — Victor Lee’s Opium War? Richard crushed Robin to his chest and crushed his lips most passionately to hers. She pulled away for an instant to whisper, ‘You promise? No more ships? No more commands?’
‘I promise, darling,’ he whispered back, but he hardly heard what he was saying.
For Richard was looking past Robin’s tumbled, golden curls and he was thinking, we can do it; we have the position, the time, the opportunity. The next Noble House. The first Noble House under Chinese rule. Good Lord, they even sound the same: Jardine Matheson — Heritage Mariner! We can do it, I know we can! God, it was so exciting!
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Acknowledgements
The Pirate Ship is quite long enough without the addition of Authorities and Book Lists — but I cannot complete it without a short list of acknowledgements. It is the longest book I have ever written and it took the longest to plan and research. Firstly, therefore, I must thank those intrepid travellers who went where I could not: Richard Atherton, Kendall Page and Anne West all selflessly and shamelessly rifled tourist booths in Singapore and Hong Kong on my behalf. The amount of literature they amassed is largely responsible for such vividness as I have been able to bring to my descriptions of those two vibrant cities. I must thank Ursula Price, the librarian at the Hong Kong Government offices, for her help and advice. I must also thank John Murr for boldly going through the Channel Tunnel on my behalf to bring back literature and detail about the experiences which Robin could expect. Of my colleagues at The Wildemesse I must particularly thank Ron Herbert, not as Headmaster but as the A Level Law tutor for guiding me through the system which Richard could expect to experience. I must further thank Peter Scurfield who was, in effect, my armourer and supplies officer. Every piece of hardware in The Pirate Ship came from him, I believe; and much of the information as to what, precisely, such hardware might be expected to do to people. It was also his edition of Sun Tsu to which I referred at all times. Finally, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Richard Atchley who read the typescript (all 192,000 words of it) in the middle of an extremely heavy work-load in a range of courts and found time to annotate it in great detail, steering me right on legal and technical terms, and every piece of procedural minutiae that might be expected to happen in the process of arresting and bringing to trial a man such as Richard Mariner accused of such a crime in such a place at such a time. Once again, Richard, I really could not have done it without you — or your Archbold. Half a case was nowhere near enough!
