The doctor puts a date in his mouth and lets its sweetness dissolve. It is, he has to admit, heavenly. ‘Have you got any water?’
Wellsted pulls the goatskin from his belt. ‘Of course. Stupid of me. Sorry.’
He opens the cap and helps the doctor drink. The sound of gulping is desperate at first but slows to a gentle sip.
‘Thank you.’
‘We’re a week from the coast and then we will sail back to Muscat,’ the lieutenant says, planning ahead. His mind is racing. There will be boats for hire, surely, that can take them south. Arab vessels are sewn with coconut or date palm fibre, hardly the cut of His Majesty’s finest, but they will do the job. In Muscat they’ll pick up the first navy ship that docks. Wellsted only hopes that the doctor will survive. He doesn’t have to see him to realise how frail Jessop has become physically, even if he still has the spirit to rag him about Haines and that stupid fight over the manuscript. Yes, that’s a good sign, of course. Jessop is humming as he sucks the date.
‘Wellsted, is it Christmas yet?’ he asks.
‘Not quite, old man. By my reckoning we’re just about into November though.’
The doctor’s mind has clearly been affected, but some decent food and care and Jessop will dine in Bombay yet.
‘I must go now,’ Wellsted whispers. ‘They mustn’t find me with you. I only wanted to know you were here. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’
He pulls away, but Jessop finds he cannot let go his grip. His fingers form an iron vice around the lieutenant’s forearm.
‘Promise,’ he says. ‘Swear it.’
‘I swear,’ Wellsted tells him solemnly. ‘We’ll sail into Muscat inside of a fortnight, three weeks at most. Whatever it takes. We’ll have a Christmas dinner, if you like. Early. Goose and a plum pudding. I promise. Once we’ve made passage and we know we’re safe.’
Despite being a naval man, Wellsted has always con sidered the sea a barrier. In fact, he has come to think of it as the barrier between him and his desires – the thing that must be overcome. Now he knows it is the unrelenting ocean of sand that is the true barrier and that crossing a league of saltwater, even in choppy weather, is far less of a challenge than any measure of these desolate sands.
‘A ship.’ Jessop is smiling, Wellsted can hear it in his voice. The doctor lets go. ‘I wish you could take Jones and bury him.’
‘I know, old man. I know.’ Wellsted reaches out and squeezes the doctor’s shoulder. It isn’t pleasant – none of it.
Slowly, he backs out of the tent into the clean air of the evening and is gone.
Rolling back down the sandbank in the dark, his heart thumping with excitement, a grin spreads over Wellsted’s face. This is his adventure. Since he was a child he has been pushed and prodded to achieve something of significance, to rise. He is almost there. It is a shame about Jones, of course, but if he can bring Jessop home, he’ll be the toast of Bombay, if not London. He’ll be a hero who can lecture at the Royal Society and he’ll be promoted, certainly – all the things he’s dreamed of are tantalisingly close. He im agines returning to Molyneux Street an officer and a gentleman, and proudly shaking his father’s hand, the old man’s eyes shining at the beauty of a plan that has come off. After all the years, this is it! He’s here. By hook or by crook, just like old Thomas predicted.
As he rounds the clump of palms he takes his eyes off the starry sky and he stops a moment for he can see some movement near the emir’s tent. There is music – a drum – and the sound of men clapping. A whistle of excitement from one of the lower bred slaves and three children running in circles like dogs who have gone mad in the sun.
That will give me cover,
he thinks happily, and cherishes the thought that though Jones is lost, at least the doctor is in good spirits, all told. The man will recover well, Wellsted is sure of it.
Wellsted traces his route through the darkness and decides to re-emerge into the light of the campfire and the
naft
lamps on the other side of whatever is going on. The music, he thinks vaguely, must be a celebration of the deal the slavers have done on Jessop’s behalf. Yes, that will certainly be it – the whole affair is almost over. He hauls himself up, brushes the sand off his
jubbah
and makes to saunter through the blackness and stroll unnoticed into the throng. But as he approaches, his blood suddenly runs cold, for he can see that the drum is beating for a purpose and Zena, divested of her
burquah,
is dressed again in the wisp she was wearing when Mickey gave her away, all those weeks ago.
The girl is the focus of everyone’s attention: lithe, barefoot and dancing fluidly around the fire. Her body quivers like a leaf on a tree that is swaying in the breeze. She has a haughty expression on her face, or perhaps she is only lost in the rhythm, for she is moving like a dervish, her hands high above her head and her pace somehow both frantic and elegant at once as the cobweb of an outfit floats like smoke around her. An older man, the emir, he supposes, has come out of the tent with the slavers to watch. He is richly dressed and from the expression on his face, it is evident that he is entranced. Hell, every man in the settlement is practically salivating. Bar Ibn Mohammed and Kasim, of course, whose faces bear the stony expressions of slight amusement that has been contained as Zena demonstrates her body’s flexibility by bending over backwards and flipping head over heels. When she recovers her balance she moves hypnotically once more in time to the beat of the drum, kicking up her heels and stamping. He can just make out the defiant flash of her eyes. She is not happy to be dancing for the emir’s pleasure, he has no doubt of that.
‘Damn it,’ Wellsted swears under his breath, his pulse quickening in anger as he heads towards the light. ‘What are they doing?’
After everything they have done to keep her hidden, it makes no sense. After all, Kasim ordered him to keep the girl out of harm’s way. The sand is soft and difficult to run through and the lieutenant almost trips in his haste to get down into the settlement, cover her up and sort it out, but just as he breaks into the crowd, the music ends and there is a flurry of clapping and ululation from the women, cheers and jeers from the men. Zena is motioned towards the emir, who lays his hand on the girl’s head while he talks to Kasim and Ibn Mohammed. There is no chance of hearing a word of what is said and Wellsted only sees the men nodding as they take Zena back into the tent. Slaves rush here and there fetching hot water for coffee and the men of the camp squat once more around the fire, leaving the lieutenant standing alone, staring furiously at the tent flap that has closed in his face with his heart pounding.
Robert Townsend Farquhar finds that he is settling in. It has taken some time but becoming a Member of Parliament has kept him well occupied and he likes the little constituency of Hythe in Kent that he has taken on. That and his director-ship of the East India Company mean that he is never bored. Of an evening, Townsend, for he has dropped his real surname from common usage and instead assigned it to the baronetship he was honoured with in 1821, likes to walk from his mansion in the city down to the line of the river as far as Westminster Bridge. It pleases him to see the old Palace of Westminster – the very symbol, he thinks, of immoveable power. There is something quintessentially English about strolling through Whitehall at sunset, muffled against the cold; the view of the river at dusk sums up everything about England Townsend enjoys and after years in the tropics – Madras and Madagascar, Reunion and Muscat – he has come to love London and its reliable coolness in all things. The hub of the whole operation, he calls it. His erstwhile appointments in the colonies seem like paddling in the backwaters when here, not a mile from where he is standing, for that matter, not a mile from where he started at school in Westminster, he can dine with the Prime Minister of England and attend the opera where from his box he is habitually greeted by the King.
Townsend does not know it, but he has only a few weeks to live – he will keel over in his bedroom three Thursdays from this very day. If he was privy to this knowledge, it is uncertain if he would be quite so interested in the survey of the Arabian Peninsula that is currently being undertaken by the officers of the Indian Navy. He might, for example, choose to spend his last days with his wife, Maria, an heiress from Madras who he married for her money then found he loved to distraction despite it. Or his son, Walter, who, with a genuine regret that cannot be credited to every premature heir, will inherit the title of baronet in a mere twenty-four days. However, like all of us, Townsend has no idea what the future holds three weeks on Thursday and when he bumps into his friend and fellow company director, William Thornton Astell, who is in town from the far-flung Surrey village of Clapham, the conversation turns to business. Once, that is, they have had the inevitable discussion everyone has with their acquaintances the first time they meet them after the nation’s bereavement for Wilberforce’s death has cast a shadow that will keep London consoling itself for months on end.
‘Damn shame about Wilberforce,’ Townsend nods.
Astell knew Wilberforce most of his adult life and shared the great man’s views on abolition from the very early days when many considered the ardent campaigner’s liberal open-mindedness the dangerous ravings of a radical and the men were accused of threatening the social order put in place by God Almighty Himself. For a while, Wilberforce and his associates were even nicknamed the Clapham Sect, though the maligning of The Cause has diminished over the passing years – in fact, their views are now considered thoroughly respectable and generally
right
. Astell has found it difficult to sleep in the months since the funeral, for Wilberforce’s death, a loss as it is, has served to remind him of his own mortality. The two men were as close in age as they were political outlook.
‘He was a wonderful man,’ he says simply, keeping his upper lip as stiff as possible.
To preserve Astell’s dignity, Townsend takes a sudden interest in a Thames skiff piloted by a fisherman who is most definitely the worse for wear. The little boat is dodging its way to the east and the man is alternately swigging from a pottery bottle and singing a lewd song, the lyrics of which, in Townsend’s opinion, should not be heard in public. There could, at any time, be a lady nearby. The skiff skites off towards the bridge and narrowly escapes crashing into one of the stone archways and then into a larger brig coming in the opposite direction.
‘Damn fellow,’ he says.
Astell recovers himself. ‘Where are you off to?’ he enquires.
‘Oh, just taking a stroll, you know. Thinking about this business with the French.’
‘In Egypt?’
‘Well, if they get antsy again it might not be so easy next time. Touch and go, one of our officers called it. This survey of ours is taking a long time. Tricky coastline of course, but still. It’s an investment really. We lost too many for lack of a chart. In this day and age too. The Prime Minister thinks that the bally Frogs are still trading slaves despite the embargo, under their own damn flag too. He’s got some evidence now. A ship that was caught on the hop – wrong place, wrong time and definitely wrong cargo. They are an immoral bunch. So the chart, well, it’s vital to our interests. “Best get on with it,” he said to me, and when Charles Grey has spoken, we must all jump to action, what? Next thing we know they’ll have their beady eye on India. Besides, if they are still slaving, well that just isn’t on, is it? Never mind simply protecting ourselves from the beasts.’
Astell nods in agreement. The slaving is an abomination. The French are ingrates to continue. His wife, an ardent abolitionist since the early days, idolises her husband for his part in the political and moral sea change and Astell takes the French ignoring the embargo as personally as if they had propositioned an indecency with his good lady, for if she hears of it she will be just as distraught. However, there are more important matters than even that. An experienced politician, he is well aware that a very great deal comes down to the pounds, the shilling and the pence, and having abolished the slave trade, British ingenuity must make up the financial deficit left in its wake.
‘It’s vital work, I agree, Townsend. Besides, if we can find a direct passage, well, it’s worth a fortune to us,’ he says.
Though Astell is a man of the world in many senses, he has never been further than Brighton. He is, however, both astute and curious about what goes on beyond the English Channel and he keeps himself well informed.
‘Damn tricky, the Arabs anyway, are they not? Law of the jungle.’
Townsend ignores the fact that there is no jungle on the Peninsula and simply nods. He enjoyed Muscat when he was stationed there, but the situation was inflammatory. The children of Islam are not the easiest natives he’s ever had to deal with and they are proving unbiddable. The Arab temperament, he is often heard to remark, is painted in black and white. There are no shades of grey.
‘I’m not sure that people here really understand the difficulties. Our fellow members often think that if we’ve won once, then it will naturally be that way again. It was touch and go, Astell, I don’t mind telling you.’
The older man considers a moment. ‘Wilberforce always said in these matters it is knowledge that counts. When people know the situation they will make the right decision. Back the right horse, as it were. That’s why he brought former slaves to London. Horse’s mouth and all that. It certainly worked. No question of it.’
Townsend pauses for a moment. ‘Well, I can say it till I am blue in the face,’ he observes, ‘but perhaps it will take more than just me.’
‘One of the chaps in the field, you think?’
Townsend smiles, the idea forming. ‘Yes indeed. That might be the thing. A promising officer. Brave. Bold. British.’
‘I might know just the chap.’ Astell is excited at the prospect – for if he can contribute here to stopping the slave traffic upon which the French are so abominably engaged, it will be most gratifying – a fitting memorial for dear Wilberforce. Astell is always delighted when he can help. He wishes his contribution had been more all along. ‘I had dinner with that publisher fellow, Murray, the other evening and he was talking about some chap – one of ours. Been to an island. Written a book that Murray is going to publish. Now, he’d fit your bill. Surveyor to trade I understand. We need to get someone like that back and put him in committee in the Palace of Westminster. Royal Society too perhaps. Let the doubters ask him whatever they want. He’ll know the Peninsula, and damn sure he will have been on ships that are taking part in the embargo. He can testify to all of it. Murray will be delighted, I’m sure. All to the good of England. Apparently the book is quite excellent. Exceptional plan all round, don’t you think?’
‘Capital. Yes. You’re right. Quite right. Leave it with me.’ Townsend shakes Astell’s hand. ‘I’ll see what I can do. Eyewitnesses, nothing like them, and if we can bring your young buck home on a tour of leave, well it will focus the mind. He’s going to be published, is he – one of Murray’s? A surveyor too? That adds a certain gravitas.’
That evening Townsend writes to Murray, Sir Charles Malcolm and the chairman of the Geographical Society.
We need a Champion.
He underlines the word.
Could this Wellsted fellow be our man?