A Falcon Flies (23 page)

Part of his vision had died upon the terrible torrents and rapids of the Kaborra-Bassa gorge.

With a sneaking sensation of disloyalty Robyn admitted to herself that there was probably some shred of justification in the accusation, for she had as a child seen her father in the grip of a malarial fever brought out by the cold of an English winter. It had not seemed as mild as a common cold then. Despite this, there was no one in the medical profession who doubted that Fuller Ballantyne was probably one of the world's leading authorities on the disease and that he had a real talent in diagnosing and treating it. So she followed his dictates faithfully, administering the daily five grains of quinine to herself, to Zouga and under protest to Captain Codrington. She had no success with Zouga's Hottentot musketeers, however. At the first dose Jan Cheroot had begun staggering in circles, clutching his throat and rolling his eyes horribly, crying to all his Hottentot gods that he had been poisoned. Only a tot of ship's rum saved him, but none of the other Hottentots would touch the white powder after that. Not even the thought of a tot of rum would tempt them, which was a measure of their opposition to the cure. Robyn could only hope that they possessed the resistance to the fever that her father spoke of.

Her store of quinine was meant to last for the duration of the expedition, possibly as long as two years, so she had reluctantly to refrain from pressing any of it on
Black Joke
's seamen. She stilled her conscience with the fact that none of them would be spending a night ashore, therefore they would not be exposed to the dangerous airs. She prevailed upon Clinton Codrington to anchor in the outer roads where the onshore breeze kept the air sweet and, as an added attraction, the distance offshore prevented the swarms of mosquitoes and other flying insects from coming on board during the night.

The first night at anchor, the sound of music, of drunken laughter and the shrill cries of women at play and at work carried across the still waters to the nine Hottentot musketeers in their corner of the forecastle, and the lights of the bordels and bars along the waterfront were as irresistible to the nine as a candle to a hawk moth. Temptation was made unbearable by the weight and heat of the golden sovereign that each of them carried in some secret place upon his person, the princely advance that Major Ballantyne had made against their salaries.

Sergeant Cheroot woke Zouga a little before midnight, his features a mask of outrage.

‘They are gone.' He was shaking with anger.

‘Where?' Zouga was still more asleep than awake.

‘They swim like rats,' stormed Cheroot. ‘They all go drinking and a-whoring.' The thought of it was insupportable. ‘We must catch them. They will burn their brains out on smoke and pox themselves—' His rage was mixed with an equal portion of raw envy, and once they were ashore his enthusiasm for the chase was almost a frenzy. Cheroot had an unerring instinct that led him directly to the lowest dives on the waterfront.

‘You go in, Master,' he told Zouga. ‘I'll wait around the back,' and he twitched the short oaken club in his hand with gleeful anticipation.

The tobacco smoke and the fumes of cheap rum and gin were like a solid wall, but the musketeers saw Zouga the moment he stooped through the doorway into the yellow lantern light. There were four of them. They overturned two tables and smashed a dozen bottles in their eagerness to depart, jamming in a solid knot in the doorway to the rear alley before bursting out into the night beyond.

It took Zouga half a minute to push and wrestle his way through the crowd. The women of a dozen rich shades between gold and ebony reached out to pluck shamelessly at the more private areas of his anatomy as he passed, forcing him to defend himself, and the men deliberately blocked his path until he drew the Colt revolver from under his coat tails – only then they sullenly opened a way for him to pass. When he reached the back door Sergeant Cheroot had the four Hottentots laid out in a row in the filth and dust of the alley.

‘You haven't killed them?' Zouga asked anxiously.

‘
Nee wat
! They got heads of solid bone.' Cheroot tucked the club back in his belt, and stooped to pick up one of the bodies. The strength of his wiry little body was out of all proportion to its size. He carried them down to the beach one at a time as though they were bags of straw, and dumped them head first into the waiting whaler.

‘Now we find the others.'

They ferreted them out, singly and in pairs from the fan-tan parlours and the gin hells, tracking down the ninth and last to the embrace of an enormous naked Somali lady in one of the shacks of mud walls and corrugated iron roofs behind the waterfront.

It was almost dawn when Zouga climbed wearily out of the whaler on to
Black Joke
's deck and booted the ninth Hottentot down the forecastle ladder. He started for his own cabin, red-eyed and irritable, aching with fatigue when it occurred to him that he had not noticed Sergeant Cheroot amongst the dark figures in the whaler, and his penetrating voice and biting sarcasm had been silent on the return from the beach.

Zouga's mood was murderous as he landed once again, and picked his way through the narrow filth-choked alleys to the mud and iron shack. The woman made up four of Jan Cheroot. She was a mountain of polished dark flesh, gleaming with oil, each of her widespread thighs thicker than his waist, her great mammaries each as large as his head, and Jan Cheroot's head was buried between them as though he was drowning himself in exotic and abundant flesh so that his ecstatic cries were almost smothered.

The woman looked down at him fondly, chuckling to herself as she watched Sergeant Cheroot's upended buttocks. They were skinny and a delicate shade of buttercup yellow, but they seemed to blur with the speed of movement, and the shock waves they created were transferred into the mountain of flesh beneath him, creating ripples and waves that undulated through the woman's belly and elephantine haunches, travelling up to agitate the pendulous folds that hung from her upper arms, and at last breaking in a wobbling heaving surf of gleaming black flesh around Sergeant Cheroot's head.

On the final return to the gunboat, Sergeant Cheroot sat, a small dejected figure, in the bows of the whaler. His post coital tristesse considerably enhanced by the buzzing in his ears and the ache in his head. Only Englishmen had the alarming habit of bunching up a hand suddenly, and then hitting with more effect than a man wielding a club or hurling a brick. Sergeant Cheroot found his respect for his new master increasing daily.

‘You should be an example to the men,' Zouga growled at him as he hoisted him up the ladder by the collar of his uniform jacket.

‘I know that, Master,' Cheroot agreed miserably. ‘But I was in love.'

‘Are you still in love?' Zouga demanded harshly.

‘No, Master, with me love don't last too long,' Cheroot assured him hurriedly.

‘
I
am a modestly wealthy man,' Clinton Codrington told Robyn seriously. ‘Since my days as a midshipman I have saved as much of my pay as I did not need to live by, and of recent years I have been fortunate in the matter of prize money. This, together with the legacy of my mother, would enable me to care very comfortably for a wife.'

They had lunched with the Portuguese Governor at his invitation and the
vinho verde
that had accompanied the meal of succulent seafood and tasteless stringy beef had given Clinton a flush of courage.

Rather than returning immediately to the ship after the meal, he had suggested a tour of the principal city of the Portuguese possessions on the east coast of the African continent.

The Governor's dilapidated carriage rumbled over the rutted roads and splashed through the puddles formed by the overflow from the open sewers. A raucous flock of ragged child-beggars followed them, dancing in their dirty rags to keep pace with the bony, sway-backed mule that drew the carriage, and holding up their tiny pink-palmed hands for alms. The sun was fierce but not as fierce as the smells.

It was not the appropriate setting for what Clinton Codrington had in mind, and with relief he handed Robyn down from the carriage, scattered the beggars by hurling a handful of copper coins down the dusty street, and hurried Robyn into the cool gloom of the Roman Catholic cathedral. The cathedral was the most magnificent building in the city, its towers and spires rising high above the hovels and shacks that surrounded it.

However, Robyn had difficulty in concentrating on Clinton's declaration in these popish surroundings, amongst the gaudy idols, saints and virgins in scarlet and gold leaf. The reek of incense and the flickering of the massed banks of candles distracted her even though what he was saying was what she wanted to hear, she wished he had chosen some other place to say it.

That very morning she had been taken by a sudden spell of vomiting, and a mild nausea persisted even now. As a physician she knew exactly what that heralded.

Before the courtesy visit to the Portuguese Governor's mouldering palace, she had tentatively decided that she would have to take the initiative. That attack of vapours had convinced her of the urgency of the situation, and she had pondered how she could induce Clinton Codrington to stake some sort of claim to the burden she was convinced she was carrying.

When Zouga had still lived at King's Lynn with Uncle William, she had discovered a cheaply printed novel of a most disreputable type concealed amongst the military texts on Zouga's desk. From a furtive study of this publication she had learned that it was possible for a woman to seduce a man, as well as the other way around. Unfortunately, the author had not provided a detailed description of the procedures. She had not even been certain if it were possible in a carriage, or whether anything should be said during the process, but now Clinton was obviating the necessity for experiment by a straightforward declaration. Her relief was tinged with shades of disappointment, after having been forced into the decision to carry out his seduction, she had found herself looking forward to the experience.

Now, however, she forced herself to assume an attentive expression and, when he hesitated, to encourage him with a nod or a gesture.

‘Even though I am without powerful friends in the service, yet my record is such that I would never expect a half pay appointment, and although it might sound immodest I would confidently look forward to hoisting my own broad pennant before I am fifty years of age.'

It was typical of him that he was already thinking twenty-five years ahead. It required an effort to prevent her irritation showing, for Robyn preferred to live in the present, or at least the immediately foreseeable future.

‘I should point out that an Admiral's wife enjoys a great deal of social prestige,' he went on comfortably, and her irritation flared higher. Prestige was something she had always intended to win at first hand – crusader against the slave trade, celebrated pioneer in tropical medicine, writer of admired books on African travel.

She could not contain it longer, but her voice was sweet and demure. ‘A woman can have a career as well as being a wife.'

Clinton drew himself up stiffly. ‘A wife's place is in the home,' he intoned, and she opened her mouth, then slowly closed it again. She knew she was bargaining from weakness, and when she was silent Clinton was encouraged. ‘To begin with a comfortable little house, near the harbour in Ports-mouth. Of course, once there are children one would have to seek larger premises—'

‘You would want many children?' she asked still sweetly, but with colour mounting in her cheeks.

‘Oh yes, indeed. One a year,' and Robyn recalled those pale drabs with whom she had worked, women with brats hanging from both breasts and every limb, with another one always in the belly. She shuddered, and he was immediately concerned.

‘Are you cold?'

‘No. No, please go on.' She felt trapped, and not for the first time resented the role that her sex had forced upon her.

‘Miss Ballantyne – Doctor Ballantyne – what I have been trying to say to you – is that I would be greatly honoured if you could find it in yourself to consent to become my wife.'

Now when it came she was not really ready for it, and her confusion was genuine.

‘Captain Codrington, this comes as such a surprise—'

‘I do not see why. My admiration for you must be apparent, and the other day you led me to believe—' He hesitated, and then with a rush, ‘you even allowed me to embrace you.'

Suddenly she was overcome with the urge to burst out laughing, if only he had known her further intentions towards him – but she skittered away from the subject, her expression as solemn as his.

‘When would we be able to marry?' she asked instead.

‘Well, on my return to—'

‘There is a British consul at Zanzibar, and you are bound there, are you not?' she interrupted quickly. ‘He could perform the ceremony.'

Clinton's face lit with slow, deep joy. ‘Oh Miss Ballantyne, does that mean – can I take it that—' He took a pace towards her, and she had a vivid image of the tiny house in Portsmouth bursting at the seams with little blond replicas of himself, and she took a quick pace backwards and went on hurriedly.

‘I need time to think.'

He stopped, joy faded and he said heavily, ‘Of course.'

‘It means such a change in my life, I would have to abandon all my plans. The expedition – it's such a big decision.'

‘I could wait a year, longer if necessary. Until after the expedition, as long as you wished,' he told her earnestly, and she felt a flutter of panic deep in her belly.

‘No, I mean I need a few days, that is all,' and she laid her hand on his forearm. ‘I will give you an answer before we reach Quelimane. I promise you that.'

S
heikh Yussuf was a worried man. For eight days the big dhow-rigged vessel had lain within sight of land, the single, huge lateen sail drooped from the long yard, the sea about her was velvet smooth during the day and afire with phosphorus during the long moonless, windless nights.