He raised his sword. The line of soldiers readied their muskets.

  ‘Surrender! Otherwise . . .’

  Adam hesitated. He could see the intent in the major’s eyes. He was not bluffing. If Adam did not surrender now, his crew would be massacred.

  The silence over the courtyard was so profound, you could hear the sparks hissing off the gunner’s linstock.

  And then the Requin fired. A full broadside, every gun brought to bear, that broke the silence like a thunderclap. Yet, though the timing was in perfect unison, the aim was curiously awry. The balls shrieked over the heads of the Diamond’s crew on the wharf. Some dipped into the line of French infantry in the courtyard; others went higher and slammed into the gunners on the rampart. One scored a direct hit on the cannon, throwing it off its carriage.

  ‘What is going on?’ screamed the major. His moment of victory had turned to carnage. ‘Cease firing!’

  The Requin fired again. She had adjusted her aim: her broadside went lower this time, but it did the French no good. The Diamond’s sailors on the wharf had dropped to the ground, so the balls passed over them again. The full weight of the broadside slammed into the French infantry. Lined up, they made an unmissable target.

  Adam did not understand what was happening, but this was his chance. Gathering his men around the edge of the gateway, he set up a barrage of musket fire against the French soldiers. Twice that night, the garrison had suffered a surprise attack. They did not have the strength to fight any more. They broke ranks and ran.

  ‘After them!’ Adam called. ‘We must find the land gate.’

  ‘Wait!’

  Hurrell, the boatswain, grabbed his sleeve and pointed back. Three longboats had set off from the Requin and were pulling towards the wharf. They moved swiftly, the men on the oars bending their backs to speed them on.

  Adam paused. The Requin’s guns had fallen silent. And in the stern of the lead boat, standing by the tiller, he saw a familiar figure silhouetted against the silvered sea.

  ‘Dock ahoy!’ came Angus’ voice. ‘Would you be needing a way out of the castle?’

  Adam could hardly believe it, but as the longboats glided out of the darkness towards the wharf, there could be no doubt. The Diamond’s men scrambled down into the boats, reunited with their comrades who had earlier escaped by swimming through the sewer.

  Adam was the last to leave. There was barely space in the boats for all the men: some had to go in the water and hang on to the gunwales. But they made room for Adam, and soon the boats were hurrying towards the Requin.

  ‘You are a miracle worker,’ Adam told Angus.

  ‘I have my wee ways,’ Angus agreed.

  ‘How did you do it?’

  ‘I had a feeling you’d mebbe need a route out of the castle,’ said Angus. ‘Young Bheka here’s a handy fellow, knows how to handle a boat. Together we cut out a small ketch. Then when some of the lads started popping up in the water, we thought we’d need summat a wee bit bigger. So we took the ketch and paid a call on the Frenchie frigate. There was a skeleton crew – the rest’d gone ashore. They gave us nae bother.’

  ‘And Lesaut?’

  ‘Safe and sound in his own brig. I picked him up after you’d given him that whack on the head.’

  The longboats came alongside the Requin. The men scrambled aboard and up the rigging to prepare the sails.

  ‘I fear we have outstayed our welcome.’

  On shore, Adam could see soldiers hurrying about the town, riders galloping between the castle and the governor’s house. It would not take them long to piece together what had happened.

  ‘Take us out to sea.’

  ‘An’ the Diamond?’

  Adam looked across the water. The Diamond lay at anchor where Lesaut had towed her, a dismasted hulk. Even if they could board, they would never sail her out of the harbour.

  ‘Leave her.’

  He ached to abandon his command. But the Requin was a fair compensation, bigger and more heavily armed. Adam could feel the power in her timbers, matched with speed as the Diamond’s crew loosened her sails and caught the night breeze.

  ‘Put men on the guns,’ Adam ordered.

  They were not out of harm’s way: there were two batteries guarding the mouth of the bay. A few well-aimed shots with heated cannonballs could end their escape.

  The Requin gathered pace. Adam held his breath. He could see the gunners on the batteries watching them, their faces lit in the glow of lanterns and slow matches.

  But the news that night had been confused; the gun crews could not be sure of anything. The Requin was Lesaut’s command, and they knew his reputation too well. To open fire on his ship would be to risk court martial, or worse. Besides, she was flying the tricolore.

  So they let the Requin pass out into the ocean. Only when he was well out of range did Adam strike the tricolore and raise the Union Jack he had found in Lesaut’s flag locker. It was the Diamond’s old ensign, which Lesaut had taken as the spoils of victory. The men cheered to see it flying over their prize.

  They were not the only things Lesaut had kept. In his cabin, Adam found the oilskin bundle with the Neptune sword, the tiger dagger and the sketch of Mary. He felt the familiar tingle run through his wrist and up his arm as he held the sword, and tried to forget the men who had died in the storm and at the castle in the cause of his revenge.

  They had escaped. That was enough.

  *

  By next morning, Île de France was a speck on the far horizon. Adam scanned the sea behind them, but there was no sign of pursuit. That did not surprise him. He had seen few ships in Port Louis that could outpace the frigate, and none that could bring her to battle.

  When Adam was satisfied that his crew had had their injuries tended, and been fed, he fetched Lesaut to the cabin. The French captain was a sorry spectacle. He had lost his wig, leaving only a bare scalp covered in grey stubble. His cheeks sported a day’s ragged beard, and the lace cuffs of his shirt were torn.

  Adam showed him the Neptune sword.

  ‘I am taking this back,’ he said. ‘As for your sword, I will not offer you parole. I know you too well.’

  Lesaut shrugged. ‘I did not expect it. But . . .’ Unbidden, he settled into a chair upholstered in fuchsia silk. ‘I am willing to buy my freedom.’

  Adam pretended to consider the offer seriously.

  ‘With what? I have your ship, your crew, everything you own.’

  His men had searched the hold and found five strongboxes. It had taken Angus and three other men two hours to break them open with boarding axes, but it had been worth the effort. They contained a small fortune in gold, gems and coins.

  Lesaut took a pinch of snuff from a box on the table.

  ‘A farmer does not keep all his chickens in one henhouse, and Jean Lesaut does not keep all his riches on his ship. I have treasure hidden in secret places everywhere around this ocean.’ He sneezed prodigiously. ‘A fine ransom, non?’

  ‘Ransom?’ Adam spat the word back at him. ‘I did not bring you here to ransom you.’

  ‘Pourquoi, alors?’

  ‘Nativity Bay. Where you called, three years ago. I want to know what you really did.’

  A glint came into Lesaut’s eyes, the look of a merchant scenting a bargain to be struck.

  ‘You wish to know what happened to your family.’

  ‘I want to know why you killed them.’

  ‘I assure you, monsieur, I am guilty of many things. But not that.’

  ‘Why did you leave that message on the wall? “J’aura mon revanche.” Revenge for what? What was your quarrel with the Courtneys?’

  ‘I did not write those words.’

  ‘What other Frenchman was there? Who else could have written it?’ Adam leaned forward. ‘If you do not tell me, you will not live to care.’

  The threat made no impact.

  ‘You cannot kill me. I am too valuable.’

  Their eyes locked. Lesaut yielded nothing. He might dress like a fop, Adam reminded himself, but he was a merciless killer who had sent countless men to their deaths. It would take more than empty threats to break his confidence.

  ‘What you forget,’ said Adam, ‘is that I do not fight for money. I am not interested in your value as a hostage.’

  He beckoned the sentries forward.

  ‘Lash him to the bow chaser.’

  Before Lesaut could protest, the sentries grabbed his arms and dragged him from the cabin. By the time Adam had followed them on deck, Lesaut was trussed like a chicken. One of the long thirty-two pounders in the bow had been hauled in on her tackles. Lesaut was stretched over the barrel like a prisoner on a rack, his hands tied to one of the trucks and his feet to the other, with the muzzle pressing against his belly. In the tropical sun, the metal was hot enough to scald off his skin.

  ‘Is the gun loaded?’

  The gun captain knuckled his forehead.

  ‘Aye, sir.’

  The gun crew stood around, leaning on their ramrods and worming irons. The rest of the crew gathered behind to watch. Every one of them bore the mark he had branded into them. None felt a crumb of sympathy for him now.

  ‘Tell me what happened at Nativity Bay,’ said Adam.

  Lesaut gritted his teeth against the pain of the burning iron.

  ‘Not until you free me.’

  ‘You know I will not do that until you speak the truth.’

  ‘Then we are at an impasse.’

  If Adam hadn’t been so desperate to know the fate of his family, he would have admired Lesaut’s coolness. Instead, he felt a wave of frustration.

  ‘Fetch a light,’ he ordered.

  Smoke coloured the air as the gun captain lit the wick of his linstock. Lesaut’s face twisted with pain, but the defiance in his eyes remained unbroken.

  ‘You cannot kill me.’

  ‘Light the match.’

  The gun captain grinned. He touched the linstock to the end of the match-cord that led into the gun’s touch hole. The cord began to smoulder.

  ‘If you do this, you will never know what I could have told you,’ said Lesaut.

  His words dug into Adam’s mind. What Lesaut said was fact, and now they were locked in this battle of wills, he could not back down.

  If he spared Lesaut, the Frenchman would know all Adam’s threats were empty.

  The match-cord fizzed sparks onto the deck and turned the air blue with smoke. The gun captain, knowing Adam’s intention, had rigged a good length, but it had already burned more than halfway down.

  Adam and Lesaut stared at each other, unblinking.

  ‘Maybe your gun is not loaded?’ said Lesaut.

  ‘You will find out when it puts a hole in your belly,’ said Adam tightly.

  The match burned down, seemingly faster every second.

  ‘Wait.’

  The voice cut through the tension that gripped the deck, sudden and unexpected. It was Angus, hurrying up the companionway with a book in his hand. One of the midshipmen was beside him, panting from running up to the deck.

  ‘We don’t need him to tell us. We’ve found it.’

  The flame was vanishing into the touch hole. Adam stepped forward and pinched it out. Belatedly, he saw the sweat streaming off Lesaut’s face.

  Angus spread the book on the capstan drum. It was a logbook, filled with columns of numbers for bearings, positions, dates and weather observations, and all the other happenings of her voyages. All the entries were in French – but some facts were the same in any language. Angus pointed to a string of numbers on the page.

  ‘That is the position of Nativity Bay.’

  Adam knew the numbers by heart. But that was not all. On the line above, written in capital letters and underlined so there would be no mistaking it, was a name that Adam had seen before. SEVEN SISTERS.

  ‘This was when they sighted her?’ said Adam.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘I did not know you could read French.’

  ‘No more I can, sir. But Mr Enstone’ – he pointed to the midshipman he had brought – ‘he reads it like a Froggie.’

  ‘Then tell me, for God’s sake.’

  Adam could have worked out what the French meant, but his head was too full of rage and impatience.

  Enstone stepped forward, swallowing hard. He was barely thirteen, his body a collection of gangly parts bundled up in his midshipman’s uniform, his face cratered with acne. But he was bright and hard-working, Adam knew, a clerk’s son determined to make his way in the Royal Navy.

  ‘“We encountered the East India ship Seven Sisters, bound for Cape Town and London. From her we bought five hogsheads of peas and three casks of brandy.”’

  ‘That cannot be right,’ Adam snapped. ‘Talbot said he fled the Requin. That is why he put into Nativity Bay.

  ‘It is not what the log says, sir,’ said Enstone.

  ‘But the Seven Sisters was an Indiaman, fully laden on her return voyage with valuable goods. A man like Lesaut would never let such a rich prize slip through his fingers.

  He glanced at Lesaut, still bound to the cannon. His face was set rigid, but the corners of his lips twitched.

  ‘The date, sir,’ said Angus softly.

  Adam read it. ‘23 Vendémiaire An XII.’

  It was written in the new format that the French had adopted during the revolution. The revolution aries had been so thorough, they had tried to revolutionise time itself. The old calendar, with its irregular months and irrational timings, filled with archaic saints’ days, had been abolished. Instead, the revolutionaries had decreed a new order. Every month would be three weeks, every week ten days, and every day should be ten hours of one hundred minutes each. The months would have new, literal names that reflected the character of the seasons, rather than old gods and emperors. Rational time, for a new rational French republic.

  Adam was not familiar with the new format, how the dates translated into the proper months and years the English calendar used.

  Enstone, however, knew it by heart. ‘The years begin on the autumn equinox, and are numbered from 1792,’ he explained. ‘That would make year twelve 1803.’

  He saw Adam’s look of surprise.

  ‘My father worked for a wine merchant who imported French wines. Even in the midst of war, his clients never stopped demanding the wares he brought across the Channel. I used to help him with the books. We had to learn the calendar, otherwise we would not know when our shipments were due.’

  ‘Go on,’ Adam said impatiently.

  ‘Vendémiaire is the grape harvest month, the first month after the equinox,’ Enstone continued. ‘So the twenty-first of Vendémiaire . . .’ He counted on his fingers. ‘Round about the sixteenth of October.’

  ‘Just after the Seven Sisters had quit Nativity Bay.’

  The events in the logbook were backwards. Had the Requin met the Seven Sisters before or after she visited Nativity Bay? Had she attacked Fort Auspice, or traded?

  ‘What was the date again?’ Adam asked.

  ‘The sixteenth of October, 1803.’

  ‘We were not at war.’

  The realisation stunned him. Britain and France had been fighting for so long, it was easy to forget there had been a brief pause to the hostilities. Only for a year, and then only so that the two nations could repair their ships and replenish their armouries for another round of war. But there had been peace, while it lasted.

  He rounded on Lesaut with fury.

  ‘You met them during the Peace of Amiens.’ Even a privateer needed war to give her piracy the fig-leaf of legality. ‘That is why you did not attack her.’

  Lesaut’s expression had not changed. But he could not deny it. All the details were there in the logbook.

  ‘So why did Captain Talbot say he was fleeing from you? That you threatened his ship and you did not meet?’

  Again, the answer was so obvious it did not need to be said.

  Talbot had been lying.

  ‘It appears, monsieur, that your efforts to find the real villains have been wasted,’ said Lesaut.

  Adam was furious with himself for being tricked. He grieved the crew who had been lost in the storm and the battle because he had not seen through Talbot’s lie. He would have to make sure they had not died for nothing.

  Angus had followed his train of thought.

  ‘Back to Cape Town, sir?’

  ‘Talbot will have sailed by now,’ said Adam. ‘There is nothing to gain patrolling the sea lanes, we would never find her. But there was another chance, and they had to pursue it. ‘When I last spoke to Talbot he said the Seven Sisters was bound for Calcutta. We will have to follow her there.’

  A thousand thoughts crowded Adam’s mind. But in his tumult, he noticed Midshipman Enstone trying to say something.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There is more about Nativity Bay in the logbook.’

  ‘Then tell me, damn you.’

  The midshipman flinched at the curse.

  ‘Yes . . . yes, sir. Two days after she met the Seven Sisters – “We anchored in a sheltered bay to replenish our fresh water supply. The place was formerly inhabited, but no longer when we arrived. The house had been attacked, the evidence of the violence on every inch of the homestead. We found five graves – and many dead.”’

  He paused, looking uncertainly at Adam.

  ‘Keep reading,’ said Adam.

  ‘“The corpses were recently dead, not yet decomposed. We took what we needed for our ship and left quickly.”’

  Adam looked balefully towards Lesaut.

  ‘You knew all along. This information was no use to you. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Information is valuable. I do not give it away.’

  ‘You thought you could make me buy it from you? That it was one more commodity to be traded?’

  Adam took the linstock from the gun captain, still burning.

  ‘What you will never comprehend,’ he went on, ‘is that some causes are worth more than any sum of money.’

  Adam put the linstock to the touch hole. The fuse had burned so low, Lesaut had no time to scream. His face began to twist in horror; then his body was blasted in two by a thirty-two-pound cannonball passing through at point-blank range. A spray of blood and smoke and powder grains fanned over the water. Lesaut’s legs and his upper body, still bound by the ropes but no longer attached to each other, flopped lifeless to the deck.