‘Our men would be dashed to pieces in this,’ Rob conceded.

  ‘Scipio promises me that tomorrow the wind will change.’ Adam said it lightly, but there was a gleam of intent in his eye.

  Scipio was another man Rob had helped free from slavery on the same plantation as Phoebe. With Angus and Phoebe, Scipio had stayed with Rob throughout his career, until Adam moved to his first ship. Then Scipio had joined Adam, and served wherever he was posted ever since.

  ‘If Scipio says the weather will change, then it assuredly will.’

  Scipio had grown up on the great river deltas of West Africa. Later, he had served as a boatman in the mazy coastal swamps of South Carolina. He could sniff out wind and weather three days away.

  ‘Will you bring the army back?’

  Rob shook his head. ‘General Beresford is in command of the army. I have to defer to him.’

  ‘Now you sound like a desk-bound admiral,’ Adam chided him. ‘Waging war with protocol and pieces of paper.’

  ‘I am an admiral,’ said Rob, a touch of petulance in his voice. In truth, he was as eager as Adam for a quick, decisive strike. ‘It is a great deal more complicated being an admiral than a sloop captain, haring over the horizon and engaging every ship you see.’

  ‘Then I hope I never get promoted.’

  Rob was about to give a sharp retort. Then he remembered himself and smiled.

  ‘I believe I said the same when I was your age. But . . . circumstances change.’ He sighed. ‘Everything catches up with us in the end.’

  ‘Then let us drink to good times and good friends, and pray I never get old like you.’

  ‘An excellent idea.’

  Adam led Rob aft towards his cabin.

  ‘You remember that French schooner I captured off Marseilles? Her captain was fond of claret. He kept a hold full of the finest Margaux wine. I managed to save a few bottles.’

  ‘I will gladly swap them for a bottle of the fine cognac I took from Admiral Gaspard when I accepted his surrender.’

  Deep in conversation, father and son headed below. Two men watched them with deep affection. One was Angus, who had come aboard with Rob. The other, a strongly built African with ritual scars on his face and his hair tightly cropped, was Scipio.

  ‘It is good to be back together,’ said Scipio.

  ‘It is that,’ answered Angus.

  The two men were firm friends, united by their love for the sea, and for the Courtneys.

  Scipio nodded towards the shore. Shadows were lengthening over the dunes, hiding whatever might lurk in their hollows.

  ‘It will be hot work tomorrow.’

  ‘If the weather changes.’

  ‘It will change. And he will attack.’

  ‘A rare day, seeing the admiral and his bairn in the same fight.’

  It was another – unspoken – reason why Rob and Adam did not sail aboard the same ship. Phoebe had never said a word of complaint, but Rob knew she fretted long sleepless nights about her menfolk, and the dangerous profession they had chosen. He had not dared risk both Courtneys’ lives in the same battle. Until now.

  ‘Let us hope they do not regret it.’ Scipio sounded troubled.

  Angus laughed – too loudly. Deep down, he felt the same misgivings as his friend.

  ‘It’s yon Dutchmen we should be worried for,’ he said stoutly. ‘With one Courtney coming at ’em, they wouldn’ae stand a chance. With two of ’em . . .’

  He clapped Scipio on the shoulder and led him forward.

  ‘We should celebrate. Claret and brandy may be fine for the likes of Admiral Rob and Captain Adam, and grog’s all right for them, but I need a good dram of whisky.’

  *

  The wind dropped that night, as Scipio had predicted. Next morning, it blew stiff and steady, licking the waves with crisp white foam. At first light, Rob sent a boat ashore to reconnoitre the beach. The men returned and pronounced it clear of defences.

  ‘How is the sea?’ Adam demanded.

  ‘A fair swell,’ said the coxswain. ‘Nowt we can’t handle.’

  ‘What about it, then?’ Adam asked Rob. ‘Sir,’ he added hastily, remembering there were others present. ‘We have seven thousand men in the transports. If we put them ashore now, we could cut off Cape Town from the rear. The garrison would have to come out and give us open battle, away from the castle.’

  Rob studied the shore through his one good eye. If the wind turned, or rose again, the boats would be trapped in a nexus of currents, waves and rocks, with no escape. The high dunes behind the beach offered cover for marksmen or artillery if the Dutch managed to bring them up.

  ‘What do you say, Scipio? Will the weather hold?’

  Scipio nodded. ‘For a few hours.’

  Still Rob hesitated. ‘I do not like the look of that reef. The current will draw the boats on to it.’

  ‘We can run one of our sloops aground against it,’ said Adam. ‘The Bluebell’s hull is so rotten she would never survive the journey home in any event.’

  ‘That is an excellent plan.’ Rob swung around to his flag lieutenant. ‘Mr Jones! Signal the fleet. We will commence landing forthwith. The troop ships will disembark their men, while the bigger ships lay down a bombardment.’

  ‘There is no one ashore to hit,’ objected Jones.

  ‘Then let us keep it that way.’

  The men jumped to their orders. A string of signal flags was hoisted to the masthead. Adam hung back.

  ‘General Beresford will not be happy when he learns he has made a two-hundred mile round trip to assault a fort we have already taken.’

  ‘That presumes we will have taken it.’

  Rob checked the wind again.

  Does it feel stronger already?

  Seven thousand men’s lives depended on the decision he had taken.

  Adam grinned. ‘With Lucky Courtney leading us, how can we fail?’

  My luck will run out one day, Rob wanted to say.

  Every time he heard his nickname, he felt a twinge of superstition. His instincts, his courage, his seamanship and his judgement, he trusted absolutely. But luck, like fate, was a capricious goddess. It could turn at any moment.

  He would show no self-doubt.

  ‘Death to the French,’ he said loudly.

  ‘And confusion to our enemies,’ chorused his officers.

  The men on deck huzzahed and threw their hats in the air. A cannon’s roar split the sky. The sixty-four gun Diomede had already begun the bombardment of the beach.

  ‘You will not regret this,’ Adam promised.

  Boats were lowered, troops mustered and weapons checked. The deck was a frenzy of activity as the crew attended to their allotted tasks: to an outsider it would have looked like chaos, but in reality it was highly ordered and disciplined. Rob stood still on the quarterdeck, the eye of the storm, observing the commotion he had unleashed. Thousands of men were moving to a purpose – some maybe to their deaths – because he had given the word.

  ‘Over there, sir.’

  Jones, the flag lieutenant, saw them first. Riders, galloping over the crest of the dunes, reining in as they saw the flotilla making for the beach. Through a telescope, Rob could see they were not uniformed as regular soldiers, but civilians: sober-suited farmers. Each carried a long rifle holstered by his saddle.

  ‘Not enough to make a fart’s difference,’ sniffed Angus.

  As he said it, a cannonball from the frigate struck one of the riders square on. Rob saw his torso torn in two. The Dutchman’s head and shoulders cartwheeled across the ground. The panicked horse galloped away across the beach, the rider’s legs and waist still held in the saddle by the stirrups, fountaining blood.

  ‘That’ll learn ’em,’ said Angus.

  ‘They’ll bring others.’

  Three of the riders turned and spurred back towards Cape Town. The others dismounted. They tethered their horses out of sight, then took up position on the back of the dune ridge, where the bombardment could not reach them. Rob glimpsed the flash of a spyglass.

  ‘More will be here soon.’ The tension was building inside Rob. He hated being out of the action. Against his better judgement, he felt himself giving in to the red mist. ‘I am going ashore to reconnoitre.’

  ‘Sir?’ said Adam in shock.

  ‘I will not ask my men to face dangers while their admiral sits in comfort in his flagship.’

  ‘But that is your job. What has got into you?’

  Rob was silent. Maybe it was older age that was prompting him – goading him to emulate the fearlessness of his youth, to recover the spark of being truly alive.

  ‘I will accompany you,’ said Adam.

  ‘No. I need you at your post commanding the ship. If the Dutch bring up troops, we will need to react quickly.’

  There was a boat alongside, ready to ferry men ashore. Before Adam could argue further, Rob shinned down the ladder, as nimble as the topman he had once been. The men on the oars began to protest as he squeezed between them, then hurriedly knuckled their foreheads when they saw who it was. Broad grins broke out on their faces. They were going into battle with Lucky Courtney.

  The landing was in full spate now as the ships disembarked their troops. The boats crowded the bay. The rowers had to feather their oars, trying to find pockets of water among the press to make progress. Steering was out of the question. They moved en masse, as the boats knocked and bumped one another forward.

  Rob crouched and scanned the beach. There were rocks close to the surface that would capsize the overloaded boats in an instant if they struck. With no steerage way, there would be nothing the crew could do to avoid them. Worse still was the danger from the beach. If the Dutch brought up artillery, they could cut bloody swathes through the landing flotilla.

  The beach was clear for the moment. But what lurked in the undulating dunes beyond?

  *

  Coenraad Voorhees cursed the British. Then, for good measure, he cursed the Dutch governor, General Janssens. It was hard to say whom he hated more: the British invading his homeland, or the government, who had summoned him from his farm on the Zuurveld frontier, on the colony’s eastern border, to fight in the militia.

  He had almost refused. He had a wife, eight children, a hundred head of cattle and eighteen Negro slaves on his farm. The Xhosa tribesmen on the other side of the Fish River were always looking for a chance to cross and steal his livestock, while the governor ordered the Boers to stay behind a line that some official in Amsterdam had drawn on a map. As if the blacks had any right to that land when it was so fertile and ripe for grazing. When the blacks got too uppity, Coenraad and his fellow farmers would form a commando and traverse the river. They would slaughter a few of the Xhosa menfolk, burn their villages, and give their women a lesson they would not soon forget.

  That was what it meant to be a Boer. You defended yourself and your property, whatever the law demanded.

  And that was why he had answered the governor’s call now. Not out of loyalty to the government, but to defend his land. He scrambled up the back slope of the dune, holding his rifle clear of the ground to prevent sand from fouling it. It was a beautiful weapon, though immensely heavy: so long that you could rest its butt on the ground while sitting on horseback and reload without having to dismount. He had carved the stock himself from stinkwood, curving the butt like the thigh of a male baboon.

  He had cast the bullets himself, too, tempering the lead with tin to make it hard enough to penetrate even the toughest animal hide. He was wasting them on men – human skin was a soft target – but he wanted to hurt these men. He wanted the bullets to smash their bones and organs and come out the other side to strike the man behind as well.

  If you provoked the Boer, kicked sand in his eyes, he would put a knife in your guts.

  He edged to the ridge of the dune. To his right, a crew of Malagasy slaves were manhandling a gun into the emplacement they had dug out of the sand. They made too much noise – if they had been his slaves, he would have given them a lash of his sjambok – but the crash of the surf hid the sound from the men who were staggering ashore on the beach. They were Scotsmen, kilts flapping in the breeze and bagpipes wailing. They looked like seasoned fighters, but that didn’t worry Coenraad. The joy of the hunt was pitting yourself against a worthy adversary. And if he missed the landing party, there were always the men in the boats behind, packed so tight it would be like shooting cattle in a kraal.

  He laid out the cartridges and his powder horn on the sand, and sighted his rifle. He unwrapped the cloth from the lock. This was the moment he enjoyed most – the power of holding a man’s life in your hand, the power of the hunter over his prey.

  There.

  An officer, with a weathered face and plenty of gold lace on his uniform jacket. He would be a fine kill for Coenraad’s bag.

  Coenraad closed one eye. He nestled the stock against his cheek, wrapped his finger around the trigger – then squeezed.

  The gun spat flame, smoke and lead. His aim was true. The hardened ball hit the officer below the ribbons on his chest and flung him backwards into the water.

  That was what happened when you fought the Boer, Coenraad thought. Try to take his property, his land, and he would take your life.

  *

  Even above the roar of the surf, Rob – out in the landing flotilla – heard the shot. His head snapped up, homing in on the source. He saw everything in an instant: a puff of white smoke from the sand dune, and, on the beach, a Highland colonel staggering back into the surf, clutching his chest. The gold braid on his uniform coat had made him an obvious target.

  More shots cracked from the dunes. Reinforcements had arrived. There must be a whole company of Dutch sharpshooters entrenched at that spot. But what if they were only the vanguard?

  A deep roar boomed behind Rob. The ships were returning fire, pounding the beach with the full weight of their broadsides. Cannonballs screamed overhead, throwing up high plumes of sand. The men in the boats crouched low, while the Highlanders who had already gained the beach flung themselves to the ground.

  None of the men were novices. Almost all had been in battle before. But the soldiers were out of their element, trapped in bobbing boats on a tossing sea, caught between the cannons behind and the rifles on shore. Some started to panic. Boats rocked; the rowers missed their strokes, and as soon as they faltered the current took them. It swept them sideways, pushing them east along the beach towards the reef.

  The sailors in Rob’s boat saw the danger and tried to pull away, but there was a boat butted up hard against their windward side which gave their oars no room. Now the reef was so close they could almost touch it. The sailors tried to fend it off, but their oars might as well have been toothpicks. Some snapped; others were wrenched from the men’s hands.

  The boat shuddered as it struck. Men were trapped. As the oars wedged against the rock, they jammed, pinning the men to their benches. One almost caught Rob’s knee, but he wrenched it away and managed to scrabble to his feet. Stepping over his own men, Rob lunged for the side of the vessel.

  The boat had already started to tip. Frantic soldiers were trying to climb over the side, scrambling into the neighbouring vessels. But those were overloaded, too: any more men would capsize them. Chaos would spread from boat to boat; the flotilla would be lost. With their equipment weighing them down, even the soldiers who could swim would drown.

  Rob unbuckled his sword belt, pulled off his uniform coat and leaped onto the rock. The surface was wet and worn smooth by the waves: he slid straight off it into the water. He clung on, seeking a foothold underwater. He found a crevice in the rock and wedged his foot in. If he misjudged his next actions, there would be no escape.

  The boat drifted towards him. Low in the water, she looked as huge as a whale. A splintered oar floated on the surface nearby. Rob grabbed it. Propping it against the rock, he tried to fend off the oncoming longboat. He knew he could not stop it. Instead, he bashed at the hull, trying to turn the bow away from the rock.

  The boat slid so close to his face he could taste the tar from the caulking on his lips. Men were leaning over the side, staring down at him and yelling. Water muffled his ears, so he could not hear. He held his breath. Another inch closer and the hull would grind him against the rock like a millstone.

  Behind him, he heard the hull scrape against an outcropping and for a moment he thought his time was up. The stern of the boat was swinging round towards him, inch by inch. It grazed his cheek, pushing his head back against the rock. He felt his skull begin to crack like a nut.

  Suddenly the pressure eased. He could breathe again. He had managed to push the boat away; a small pocket of space opened out on the water. But another boat, caught by the current, was already bearing down on him.

  ‘Grab hold of the painter!’

  He had to shout to be heard. Salt water swept into his mouth and made him gag, but he spat it out and shouted again, waving frantically. He saw an oar sweeping low over the water towards him. He duck-dived a second before it would have stoved in his head.

  Resurfacing, he saw a man in the bow of the second vessel take a rope and throw it to the boat ahead. The line was taken in and went taut.

  Past the rock, free of the crowded flotilla, the lead boat was able to manoeuvre. Her crew worked the few oars that hadn’t broken, pulling clear. They dragged the trailing boat away from danger. That allowed the second boat’s crew to row, opening more space. The jammed flotilla began to drift apart.

  As quick as a squall, the panic that had threatened to engulf the men subsided. Sailors dug in their oars and sent their vessels cruising forward. Highlanders found their balance. They kneeled on the thwarts and poured a brisk fire at the beach, while the ships behind pounded the dunes with their cannons.

  In the confusion, Rob had been left on the rock. But he was a strong swimmer. He kicked his foot free and turned towards the beach.

  There was a shadow in the water.

  Shark, said a voice in his head – he had seen them often enough, growing up – but no sooner had he thought it than he realised he was wrong.