‘You . . . here?’

  ‘Yes. A thousand times yes.’ He stroked her cheek. The black humour that had festered all these weeks suddenly transmuted to golden light overflowing inside him. ‘Will you marry me?’

  She hugged him tight. ‘Yes. Yes.’

  Pressed against her, Paul felt a change come over her body. A quivering beneath her dress that he had not felt before. He felt his own body responding, rising to meet her.

  This time she did not back away. Instinct overtook them both, urgent and irresistible. Abasi pressed her mouth against Paul’s with renewed passion.

  ‘We cannot do it here.’

  ‘Where can we go?’

  ‘My house,’ said Paul.

  He had never dared take her there. But Abasi’s sister had gone, and Lefebvre would be working in the headquarters until late in the evening.

  Abasi’s cheeks were flushed, and her scarf had slid back, leaving a dark lock of hair falling over her face.

  ‘Yes.’

  They ran through the streets like children, heedless of the gazes they attracted. Into the house – the servants might gossip, but Paul did not care – and upstairs. Abasi was as eager as Paul. The moment they were in his room, she undid his shirt, almost ripping the buttons in her haste. She stepped out of her dress and stood naked before him. Paul drank in her beauty: her pouting lips; her firm young breasts with the nipples like two dark rosebuds; her slender legs and smooth thighs.

  He pushed her onto the bed. She spread her thighs willingly, drawing him down on top of her. Paul buried his face in her breasts. When he slid himself into her, he almost climaxed at once, but he forced himself to hold back. He never wanted this moment to end.

  It was so different from what Lefebvre did to him. The moment he had the thought he banished it, angry with himself for allowing Lefebvre to sully the purity of the moment. Abasi saw the flash of anger on his face and shrank under him.

  ‘You do not like it?’

  He stroked her hair from her cheek and kissed her face to reassure her.

  ‘This is all I ever want.’

  She relaxed again. She wrapped her arms around him and pulled him down, deeper inside her. Her movements became rhythmic, drawing him on. He could feel the sap rising inside him, desire bursting to get out. He wanted to pour himself into her, like the floodwaters of the Nile breaking its banks and surging eternally towards the sea.

  Lost in bliss, senses stupefied by the taste of Abasi on his lips and her soft moans in his ear, he didn’t hear the footsteps on the stairs. He did not notice the door open. He could feel his climax coming, surging on, on . . .

  Abasi screamed. Paul’s eyes opened. Abasi sat up, dislodging Paul just as he came. His seed disgorged over her naked stomach and down her thighs.

  Lefebvre stood in the doorway with a pistol in his hand.

  ‘So this is what you have been doing,’ he hissed.

  His face was white with fury, as angry as Paul had ever seen him.

  ‘I . . .’

  Paul stood, still naked. He snatched his breeches and pulled them on. On the bed behind him, Abasi whimpered and covered herself with the sheet.

  ‘To betray me, after everything I have done for you . . .’ Lefebvre’s eyes blazed at Paul. He had hardly looked at Abasi. ‘You are my creature.’

  His finger curled around the trigger. Paul wanted to hurl himself at Lefebvre, disarm him and blow his brains out. But if he moved he would be dead before he had gone two paces.

  ‘I told you I would not share you,’ said Lefebvre.

  The pistol shot thundered around the room. A hot breath blew across Paul’s naked torso. His body jerked instinctively, before his brain could register that he was unhurt.

  On the bed, Abasi toppled over without a sound, her dead hand still clutching the sheet to her chest.

  Paul felt a hole open in his heart, as if the bullet had passed through him as well.

  ‘You murdered her.’

  ‘Ca n’importe rien.’ A fly was buzzing around Lefebvre’s head. He flicked it away with the smoking pistol barrel, catching it mid-flight and sending it crashing into the wall. ‘What will you do? Report me for killing a local who broke into my home?’

  Paul simply gaped at him. Abasi’s blood flooded across the bedsheet, but what he saw was his mother’s golden hair lying amid the splattered blood on the scaffold in Paris. He could not breathe. The silent scream that had been trapped inside him that day was still in his lungs. He wanted to attack Lefebvre and smash his face to pieces, but when he tried to step towards him, his legs would not move.

  Flee, screamed a voice inside him. Flee.

  He had to be away. He had to get out of there, or he would explode like Bonaparte’s flagship.

  He took three paces back from Lefebvre and hurled himself out of the open window.

  NATIVITY BAY, 1806

  R

  ob lay on the table in the Valiant’s cabin. With his ashen skin, he looked like a corpse that had already been embalmed.

  ‘He has suffered apoplexy,’ said the surgeon. ‘Paralysis caused by stroke. I have taken some blood to release the pressure. There is little else I can do for now.’

  ‘Will he recover?’ Adam asked, almost choking with emotion.

  ‘It is not impossible . . . with time.’ The surgeon would not meet his eye. ‘But I caution you, there may be damage to the nervous system, or a palsy that will not heal.’

  Adam had to fight back his tears. He had never feared either hardship or danger – but the thought of his father living life as a cripple made him a little boy again.

  Angus was giving him an inscrutable look.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your father wouldn’ae want you sitting by his bedside like a wee girl.’

  ‘He may wake at any moment. What else can I do?’

  Angus pointed through the cabin windows, to the ruins of Fort Auspice.

  ‘That didn’ae happen by accident. Some’un came here to kill the Courtneys.’

  ‘You think I do not know that?’ Adam blurted out. His voice was loud, but Rob did not move. ‘It happened years ago. I cannot change it.’

  ‘No more you could,’ Angus agreed. ‘But you doon’ae have to change summat to make it right.’

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘That’s for you to answer.’ Angus rose. ‘But I do ken if your father was awake, he’d say, “Let’s find them and make ’em pay.”’

  *

  Searching through the rubble was the most agonising hour of Adam’s life. In the depths of the African wilderness, the Courtneys had kept an immaculate home, filled with treasures and mementoes of their adventures. Now everything was ruin.

  Adam felt the grief opening in his heart ready to swallow him. Grief for the family he had never properly known, grief for the father he might already have lost. He forced it back. It would do his family no good if he succumbed to despair.

  Instead, he drew strength from thoughts of revenge. Again and again he asked himself the same question. Who did this?

  The marks on the walls caught his eye again. There were many. Some were mould or damp; some were scorch marks where the attackers had tried to burn the house down; others were blood. He stayed away from those. But the mark he was looking at now was different from all of them.

  ‘Do you remember those Spanish frigates off Havana?’ he asked Scipio.

  The memory brought a rare smile from Scipio. Adam had been a midshipman, only thirteen years old; Scipio had been a boatswain. Their ship, the Phoenix, had met a Spanish frigate before sundown and engaged her. In the heat of the action, and with night falling, they had not realised there was a second ship approaching. The Phoenix had grappled her enemy; most of her crew had boarded her. Adam, as the junior midshipman, had been left behind with a handful of men to keep watch on their own ship.

  The second frigate had come up on the Phoenix’s other side. Adam did not have enough men to resist her boarding party. Instead, he had hidden below, letting the Spanish think the Phoenix was deserted. He had led his men through the gunports onto the second frigate’s lower deck, surprising her crew from the rear. He could still feel the claustrophobia of it: squeezing through the gunport, the low ceilings, the night lit only by slow matches and linstocks. A Spanish lieutenant had surprised them. Adam had not hesitated. He had raised his pistol and shot the man.

  It was the first time he had killed anyone. He still remembered the awful echo of the gun in that confined space. The way the lieutenant’s eyes dilated as the life left him. And the starburst residue that the black powder, fired at such close quarters, left on the bulkhead.

  ‘It was a good day,’ said Scipio proudly.

  Adam’s surprise counter-attack had caused chaos aboard the Spanish frigate. The confusion had given the Phoenix’s crew time to meet the new threat. When the smoke cleared, it was the red ensign that flew over all three vessels.

  Adam scratched the black starburst on the wall. The smell had faded long ago, but he could still pick out the individual grains of gunpowder embedded in the plaster.

  ‘This was not the work of a local tribe,’ he said. ‘They were well armed.’ He moved down the corridor, pointing out similar patches. ‘See here . . . and here . . .’

  The more he looked, the more signs of battle he found. Musket and pistol balls, loose on the floor or dug into the walls. There was an ebony walking cane that had been cut in two by a sharp blade. A discarded pistol that had misfired, and the tip of a sword that had snapped. Adam collected them all in the dining room.

  ‘It must have been quite a battle,’ he said, eyeing the number of spent bullets.

  ‘The Courtneys do not surrender easily,’ said Scipio.

  ‘No.’ But something bothered Adam. In the entire compound, only the outer walls had been left intact. ‘Why were they fighting in the house? It is almost as if they did not bother to defend the walls.’

  ‘They left the gates open?’

  ‘My grandfather was a cautious man. It would have been unlike him.’

  ‘If only the bones could talk,’ said Scipio.

  The most gruesome sight of all was the bones that littered the house. Jackals and hyenas, vultures and blowflies had stripped off every scrap of flesh, jointed the carcasses and scattered the bones among all the wreckage in the house. It was impossible to step anywhere without crushing or stumbling on bones underfoot. Some of the larger remnants testified to the violence that had befallen them. In a corner, among fragments of a broken vase, they found a skull with a bullet hole punched through its forehead.

  ‘Let us hope my family sold their lives dearly.’

  Adam hoped the bones were those of the attackers, though he guessed others must have been the Courtneys’ servants. They would have fought as warriors of Africa, fearless and loyal to the end.

  Suddenly, something caught the corner of Adam’s eye. He went to it. It was a fragment of paper, almost buried under the rubble. He dug it out with care, not wanting to damage it, and blew off the dust so he would not smudge it. It was a portrait of a young woman, so beautiful she could hardly have been real, but so vividly drawn that surely no imagination could have invented her. She looked as if she had recently grown to womanhood, her long hair falling around her shoulders, and her eyes wide with the innocence of someone who did not yet know her own beauty.

  Adam turned it over. On the back was pencilled in tiny letters, ‘Mary Jansen, 11 October 1803.’

  Adam remembered her. She had been his cousin – Adam’s aunt, Susan, Rob’s sister, had married a Dutchman named Jansen. The Mary in the picture was much grown from the young girl Adam remembered from his childhood visit to Fort Auspice. They had spent all their days having adventures together from dawn to dusk, climbing trees, finding birds’ nests and feeding monkeys with nuts. They had read game spoor, argued about its freshness and followed the tracks far into the wilderness. One time, they had found a herd of grazing elephants; there were so many of the magnificent beasts that Adam gave up counting. He was transfixed in awe of their power, their dignity and rugged beauty.

  Now most likely Mary’s lovely face was a skull buried outside.

  Adam folded the paper and tucked it inside his shirt. He could not show it to Rob yet.

  He wondered who had drawn it. Courtneys were not known for their artistic ability and this was clearly the work of a master. Perhaps an artist had visited Fort Auspice?

  He moved back to the main living room. The sun had come around. It shone through the broken roof on to the far wall, which had previously been in shadow.

  Adam stared. A creeper had grown up the wall, covering it with leaves: but underneath, picked out in the shafts of sunlight, was faded writing. Large letters, daubed in dark brown fluid that might have been paint, or blood. It was still readable under the bright natural sunlight.

  ‘J’aura mon revanche.’

  Adam had learned French almost as soon as he learned English, from a French clerk named Pottier his father had captured. After the battle, it emerged that the man had been press-ganged and had no love for the revolution. He had been happy to swap sides and served as Rob’s secretary.

  ‘If you understand your enemy’s language, you understand how he thinks,’ Rob had told Adam.

  It had been no consolation to Adam, who had spent hours in the cabin with Pottier – whom he’d nicknamed ‘Potty’ – learning verbs when he would rather have been running up the rigging.

  Later, he was grateful for it. And now it meant he could read the writing as fluently as his native tongue, though it gave him no comfort.

  ‘What does it mean?’ said Scipio.

  ‘“I will have my revenge,”’ said Adam.

  Terrible as it was, it also perplexed him.

  Who had written it? Did it mean he would avenge the slaughter of the Courtneys – or had the murder of the family been his act of revenge?

  Probably the latter, Adam thought grimly. But revenge for what?

  ‘Cap’n Courtney,’ Angus called. Even now he could not shake the discipline of a lifetime. ‘I got summat.’

  Adam found Angus in the room that had once been the estate office. An iron lock lay on the floor in a heap of splinters where it had been prised off a strongbox. The box was empty. Someone had pulled out the papers and tried to set them alight, but they must have been interrupted at their work because some of the papers had survived.

  Angus was holding a leather-bound ledger. He spread it open on the remains of a mahogany desk and showed Adam the contents: ruled columns filled with names and numbers in a neat hand.

  ‘Any use?’

  Adam glanced down the columns.

  ‘It is a logbook. All the ships that called at Nativity Bay, their captains and their cargoes.’

  He turned the pages. Just past halfway, the entries ended in a page covered with soot and spots of blood. It must have been lying open when the attackers burst in.

  ‘Thursday 13th October, 1803,’ was the date. Two days after the date on the portrait. ‘Seven Sisters, ex Calcutta bound London. Captain Talbot. Cottons, tea etc.’

  ‘An Indiaman, by the sounds of her. That may explain the tiger-handled knife we found.’

  ‘They must’ae come as friends,’ said Angus pensively. ‘Nowt in the logbook to say different.’

  Adam scanned the rest of the page. There were no names he recognised. No French ships or pirates. No clues.

  He was still staring at it when Phoebe walked in. She was out of breath from running, her dark skin flushed. One glance at her made Adam fear the worst.

  ‘What has happened?’

  ‘Your father is awake.’

  *

  Rob sat up in the cabin, propped up by cushions on the bench across the stern windows. He kept his head turned to the left, so that the others could not see the petrified cheek on the side of his face. He was a proud man.

  Adam talked him through his discoveries – the logbook, the writing on the wall and the evidence of the battle inside the house. The drawing of Mary was the only item he held back.

  ‘“J’aura mon revanche,” Rob repeated. ‘“I will have my revenge.” But revenge for what? And why in French?’

  ‘Is there a Frenchman with a grudge against the Courtneys?’ Adam wondered.

  Angus snorted.

  ‘Every Froggie that ever sailed the high seas, for a start. Leastways, every one that ever crossed swords with Sir Robert Courtney.’

  Rob shrugged his one good shoulder. The pages of the Naval Gazette were filled with the names of Frenchmen he had bested in battle. Many had been epic duels. But none he could remember that would have left this kind of lasting hatred.

  ‘The French are often in these waters,’ he allowed. ‘Their privateers use Île de France as a raiding base.’

  ‘Perhaps they thought they could hurt you by hurting your family.’

  ‘But how’d they know this was Admiral Courtney’s home?’ Angus pointed out. ‘And there’s no mention of any Frenchie ship in the logbook.’

  ‘Perhaps slave traders?’ said Phoebe. ‘Robert’s fight against their evil trade has cost them a prodigious amount of money.’

  Angus shook his head. ‘The way they tore the house apart? This was summat deep and personal.’

  ‘What about the Seven Sisters?’ Adam asked. He showed Rob the logbook. ‘She was the last ship to call. Could she have been a Frenchman, or a pirate sailing under false colours.’

  ‘No.’ Rob shook his head, frowning. ‘I have heard of her.’ He had a sailor’s memory for ships, even ones he had only seen in port. ‘She is an Indiaman.’ His speech was slow, every word an effort. ‘I have seen her name . . .’

  He stared out of the cabin window. Even that effort made him wince. Adam wanted to tell him to stop, to recuperate – but he was desperate to know.

  ‘Where have you seen her name, Father?’

  ‘Cape Town.’ Another agonising pause. ‘The convoy.’

  ‘The supply convoy?’ Adam knew the operation to retake the Cape had been planned in two phases. First, Rob’s fleet would capture the town. A few weeks later, the East India convoy would call en route to India to resupply the new garrison to India. ‘So the Seven Sisters is sailing to Cape Town?’