A Falcon Flies (7 page)

Zouga had also been infected by the strangely festive air of the dinner, and he protested as vigorously as St John when suddenly Robyn declared herself to be exhausted and stood up from the board, but she was adamant.

In her cabin she could still hear the occasional shouts of laughter from the saloon, as she went quietly about her preparations. She slid the locking bar into place to assure her privacy. Then she knelt beside her chest and wormed her way down to the bottom layers, from which she retrieved a pair of man's moleskin breeches, a flannel shirt and cravat, with a high-buttoned monkey jacket to go over them, and well-worn half boots.

This had been her uniform and her disguise as a medical student at St Matthew's Hospital. Now she stripped herself naked, and for a moment enjoyed the wicked freedom of the feeling, even indulging herself to the extent of gazing down at her nudity. She was not too certain if it was a sin to enjoy one's own body, but she suspected that it was. Nevertheless she persisted.

Her legs were straight and strong, her hips flared with a graceful curve and then narrowed abruptly into her waist, her belly was almost flat with just an interesting little bulge below the navel. Now here was definitely sinful ground – of this there was no doubt. But still she could not deny the temptation to let her gaze linger a moment. She understood fully the technical purpose and the physical workings of all her body's highly complicated machinery, both visible and concealed. It was only the feelings and emotions which sprang from this source which both confused and worried her, for they had taught her none of this at St Matthew's. She passed on hurriedly to safer ground, lifting her arms to pile the tresses of her hair on to the top of her head and hold them in place with a soft cloth cap.

Her breasts were round and neat as ripening apples, so firm as hardly to change their shape as she moved her arms. Their resemblance to fruit pleased her and she spent a few moments longer than was necessary in adjusting the cloth cap upon her head looking down at them. But there was a limit to self-indulgence, and she swept the flannel shirt over her head, pulled the tails down around her waist, stepped into the breeches – how good they felt again after so long in those hobbling skirts – and then, sitting upon the bunk, she pulled on the half-boots and buckled the ankle straps of the breeches under the arch of her foot, before standing to clinch the belt at her waist.

She opened her black valise, took out the roll of surgical instruments and selected one of the sturdier scalpels, folded out the blade and tested it with her thumb. It was stingingly sharp. She closed the blade and slipped it into her hip pocket. It was the only weapon available to her.

She was ready now, and she closed the shutter on the bull's-eye lantern, darkening the cabin completely before climbing, fully dressed, into her bunk, pulling the rough woollen blanket to her chin and settling down to wait. The laughter from the saloon became more abandoned, and she imagined that the brandy bottle was being cruelly punished by the men. A long while later she heard her brother's heavy, uneven footsteps on the companionway past her cabin and then there was only the creak and pop of the ship's timbers as she heeled to the wind, and far away the regular tapping of some loose piece of equipment.

She was so keyed, with both fear and anticipation, that there was never any danger of her falling asleep. However, the time passed with wearying slowness. Each time that she opened the shutter of the lantern to check her pocketwatch, the hands seemed hardly to have moved. Then, somehow, it was two o'clock in the morning, the hour when the human body and spirit are at their lowest ebb.

She rose quietly from her bunk, picked up the darkened lantern and went to the door of her cabin. The locking bolt clattered like a volley of musketry, but then it was open and she slipped through.

In the saloon a single oil-lamp still burned smokily, throwing agitated shadows against the wooden bulkheads, while the empty brandy bottle had fallen to the deck, and rolled back and forth with the ship's motion. Robyn squatted to pull off her boots and, leaving them at the entrance, she went forward on bare feet, crossed the saloon and stepped into the passageway that led to the stern quarters.

Her breath was short, as though she had run far, and she paused to lift the shutter of the bull's-eye lantern and flash a narrow beam of light into the darkness ahead. The door to Mungo St John's cabin was closed.

She crept towards it, guiding herself with one hand on the bulkhead and at last her fingers closed over the brass doorhandle.

‘Please God,' she whispered, and achingly slowly twisted the handle. It turned easily, and then the door slid open an inch along its track, enough for her to peep through into the cabin beyond.

There was just light to see, for the deck above was pierced for a repeating compass so that even while in his bunk the master could at a glance tell his ship's heading. The compass was lit by the dull yellow glow of the helmsman's lantern and the reflection allowed Robyn to make out the cabin's central features.

The bunk was screened off by a dark curtain and the rest of the furnishings were simple. The locked doors of the arms chest were to the left, with a row of hooks beyond from which hung a boat cloak and the clothing that St John had been wearing at dinner. Facing the door was a solid teak desk with racks to hold the brass navigational instruments, sextant, straight edge, dividers, and on the bulkhead above it were affixed the barometer and the ship's chronometer.

The Captain had evidently emptied his pockets on to the desk top before undressing. Scattered amongst the charts and ship's papers were a clasp knife, a silver cigar case, a tiny gold inlaid pocket pistol of the type favoured by professional gamblers, a pair of chunky ivory dice – Zouga and St John must have fallen to gaming again after she left them – and then most important, what she had hoped to find, the bunch of ship's keys that St John usually wore on a chain from his belt, lay in the centre of the desk.

An inch at a time Robyn slid the door further open, watching the dark alcove to the right of the cabin. The curtains billowed slightly with each roll of the ship, and she screwed her nerves tighter as she imagined the movement to be that of a man about to leap out at her.

When the door was open enough to allow her to pass through, it required a huge effort of will to take the first step.

Half-way across the cabin she froze; now she was only inches from the bunk. She peered into the narrow gap in the curtaining and saw the gleam of naked flesh, and heard the deep regular breathing of the sleeping man. It reassured her and she went on swiftly to the desk.

She had no way of learning which keys fitted the lazaretto and the hatch to the main hold. She had to take the whole heavy bunch, and realized that it would mean returning to the cabin later. She did not know if she would have the courage to do that, and as she lifted the bunch her hand shook so it jangled sharply. Startled, she clutched it to her bosom and stared fearfully at the alcove. There was no movement beyond the curtains, and she glided back towards the door on silent bare feet.

It was only when the door closed again that the curtains of the alcove were jerked open, and Mungo St John lifted himself on one elbow. He paused only a moment and then swung his legs out of the bunk and stood up. He reached the desk in two quick strides and checked the top.

‘The keys!' he hissed, and reached out for his breeches hanging on the rack beside him, pulling them on swiftly and then stooping to open one of the drawers in his desk.

He lifted the lid of the rosewood case and took out the pair of long-barrelled duelling pistols, thrust them into his waistband, and started for the door of the cabin.

R
obyn found the correct key to the lazaretto on the third attempt and the door gave reluctantly, dragging on the hinge with a squeal that sounded to her like a bugle call commanding a charge of heavy cavalry.

She locked the door behind her again, feeling a rush of relief to know that nobody could follow her now and she opened the shutter of the lantern and looked about her swiftly.

The lazaretto was no more than a large cupboard used as a pantry for the officers' personal stores. Sides of smoked ham and dried polonies hung from hooks in the deck above, there were fat rounds of cheese in the racks, boxes of tinned goods, racks of black bottles with waxed stoppers, bags of flour and rice, and, facing Robyn, another hatch with the locking bar chained in place by a padlock the size of her doubled fists.

The key, when she found it, was equally massive, as thick as her middle finger, and the hatch so heavy that it took all of her strength to drag it aside. Then she had to double over to get through the low opening.

Behind her, Mungo St John heard the scrape of wood on wood and dropped silently down the steps to the door of the lazaretto. With a cocked pistol in one hand, he laid his ear to the oak planking to listen for a moment before trying the handle.

‘God's breath!' he muttered angrily as he found it locked, and then turned away and raced on bare feet up the companionway to the cabin of his first mate.

At the first touch on his thickly muscled shoulder, Tippoo was fully awake, his eyes glistening in the gloom like those of a wild animal.

‘Someone has broken into the hold,' St John hissed at him, and Tippoo reared up out of his bunk, a huge dark figure.

‘We find him,' he grunted, as he bound the loin cloth around his waist. ‘Then we feed fish with him.'

T
he main hold seemed vast as a cathedral. The beam of the lantern could not reach into its deepest recesses, and a great mass of cargo was piled high, in some places as high as the maindeck fifteen feet above her.

She saw at once that the cargo had been loaded in such a way that it could be unloaded piecemeal, that any single item could be identified and swung up through the hatches without the necessity of unloading the whole. This, of course, must be essential in a ship trading from port to port. She saw also that the goods were carefully packaged and clearly labelled. Flashing the lantern around her she saw that the cases of equipment for their own expedition were packed here, ‘Ballantyne Africa Expedition' stencilled in black on the raw, white wood.

She clambered up the rampart of cases and bales and balanced on the peak, turning the lantern upwards towards the square opening of the hatch, trying to see if there was an open grating, and immediately she was frustrated for the white canvas cover had been stretched around the lower surface also. She stood at full stretch to try and touch the hatch, to feel for the shape of a grating under the canvas, but her fingertips were inches short of the hatch and a sudden wild plunge of the ship under her sent her flying backwards into the deep aisle between the piles of cargo. She managed to keep her grip on the lantern, but hot oil from its reservoir splashed over her hand, threatening to blister the skin.

Once again she crawled up and over the mountains of cargo, searching for the evidence that she hoped not to find. There was no dividing bulkhead in the hold, but the main mast pierced the deck above and came through the hold to rest its foot on the keel, and there were stepped wedges fixed to the thick column of Norwegian pine.

Perhaps they were there to hold the slave decks. Robyn knelt beside the mast and sighted across the hold to the outward curved side of the ship. In line with the wedges on the mast were heavy wooden ledges, like shallow shelves, and she thought that these might be supports for the outer edges of the slave decks. She guessed that they were between two and a half and three feet apart, which she had read was the average height of the between decks in a slaver.

She tried to imagine what this hold might look like with those decks in place, tiers of low galleries just high enough for a man to crawl into doubled over. She counted the shelves and there were five of them – five piles of decks, each with its layer of naked black humanity laid out sardine fashion, each one in physical contact with his neighbour on either side, lying there in his own filth and that of the slaves above him which leaked through the seams of the deck. She tried to imagine the heat of the middle passage when the ship lay becalmed in the baking doldrums, she tried to imagine 2,000 of them vomiting and purging with seasickness as the ship reared and plunged in the wild seas where the Mozambique current scoured the Agulhas bank. She tried to imagine an epidemic of cholera or smallpox taking hold of that mass of misery, but her imagination could not rise to the task, and she pushed the hideous images aside and crawled on over the heaving cargo, flashing her lantern into each corner, searching for more solid evidence than the narrow ledges.

If there was planking on board it would be laid flat upon the deck, below this cargo, and there was no way in which Robyn could reach it.

Ahead of her she saw a dozen huge casks bolted to the forward bulkhead. They could be water barrels, or they could be filled with trade rum, or the rum could be replaced with water when the slaves were taken on board. There was no means of checking the contents, but she knocked on the oak with the hilt of her scalpel and the dull tone assured her that the casks contained something.

She squatted down on one of the bales and slit the stitching with the scalpel, thrusting her hand into the opening she grasped a handful and pulled it out to examine it in the lamp light.

Trade beads, ropes of them strung on cotton threads, a
bitil
of beads was as long as the interval between fingertip and wrist, four bitil made a
khete
. These beads were made of scarlet porcelain, they were the most valued variety called
sam sam
. An African of the more primitive tribes would sell his sister for a
khete
of these, his brother for two
khete
.

Robyn crawled on, examining crates and bales – bolts of cotton cloth from the mills of Salem, called
merkani
in Africa, a corruption of the word ‘American' and the chequered cloth from Manchester known as
kaniki
.Then there were long wooden crates marked simply ‘Fire Pieces', and she could guess that they contained muskets. However, firearms were common trade goods to the coast, and no proof of the intention to buy slaves – they could just as readily be used to purchase ivory or gumcopal.