Storm Tide Page 9

  Dartmouth was still as he followed Hugo’s gaze.

  ‘What sword?’ he asked, in a voice that suggested he was capable of murder.

  Hugo wiped his brow. ‘It is only a superficial resemblance.’

  ‘What sword?’ Dartmouth slammed his fist on the desk and the hookah pipe toppled over. The smouldering coal landed on a piece of paper and set it alight. Dartmouth ground out the fire with his golden hand. ‘Is it true? After all these years, has a Courtney arrived in London with the Neptune sword?’

  Hugo could not tell if Dartmouth expected an answer, or if he was speaking to himself. He flinched as the black eyes fixed on him again.

  ‘I must know everything. Where he lives, how he came here, who else is with him and what he wants.’

  ‘Yes, my Lord,’ Hugo croaked. He did not want to betray his friend, but at that moment he would have said anything Dartmouth wanted to hear, if he could only get out of there.

  Dartmouth had not finished with him yet. ‘There is more in the letter from your father.’ He tossed the paper across the desk. ‘Read it.’

  Hugo took the paper and held it up to the light. His face, already pale, seemed to grow white; his hand shook as if with a palsy.

  ‘He says he will cut me off,’ he whispered. ‘All my allowance. What will I do?’

  Dartmouth smiled evilly. ‘Go on.’

  ‘He means to buy me a commission as a lieutenant in the army and have me posted to the garrison in the East Indies.’ Hugo dropped the paper. ‘Those are fever islands. No man stationed there lives six months.’

  ‘Your father has heard enough of your debauches, the way you squander the fortune he worked so hard to build. It is time you became a man.’

  Hugo hugged his arms to himself, as if curling into a ball.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But . . .’ Dartmouth let the word hang in the air, dangling like a hook. ‘Your father and I have a long association. I flatter myself he respects my counsel. If I were to put in a good word for you, perhaps I could soften his opinion of you. Maybe I could even change his mind from this course of action.’

  Hugo bowed his head. ‘What do you want from me?’

  Dartmouth did not speak for a moment. All the time he had been speaking to Hugo, a deeper part of his mind had been turning rapidly. When he had received the letter from Hugo’s father alerting him that a boy named Courtney had arrived from Africa, he had almost dismissed it as happenstance. But he had not risen to the heights of power by being careless – and some inner instinct had warned him he should look into it. Now there was no doubt.

  His left hand fingered his right wrist, where the golden hand was buckled on to the stump of his arm. The arm still ached, but that was nothing compared to the pain in his heart when he thought of the Neptune sword. It was the greatest heirloom the Courtney family possessed. Almost seventy years earlier, he had held it – and Tom Courtney had cut it out of his hand. In the years since, Dartmouth had made himself the richest man in India, perhaps the richest in the British Empire. He had amassed more gold, land and titles than any Courtney before him. Only one trophy had eluded him. And now the tides of fate had brought it to his doorstep, in the hands of an ignorant boy. Tom Courtney’s grandson – it could be no one else – had come to London.

  He leaned forwards across the desk, taking a small pleasure from the way Hugo shrivelled into his seat. He had waited years for this moment. And now this snivelling creature would be the instrument of his vengeance.

  ‘This is what you will do . . .’

  ‘Y

  ou look very pale,’ Rob said. ‘Was the meeting with your father’s friend so dreadful?’

  He and Hugo were sitting together, taking a late breakfast. Rob tucked enthusiastically into his plate of devilled kidneys, but Hugo barely touched his food. His face was grey, his eyes dark-rimmed. He looked as if he was on the verge of tears.

  Hugo pressed his fork into one of the kidneys. Blood oozed from its smooth flesh. Something seemed to be knotted up inside him.

  ‘What is wrong?’ Rob asked.

  ‘Dartmouth gave me a letter from my father.’ The words rushed out of Hugo’s mouth. ‘He means to cut me off without a penny.’

  ‘Is this because of me?’

  ‘It is nothing to do with you. He has always despised the way I live. His friends write to him and whisper poison in his ear. Now his patience has snapped. He will buy me a commission in the army and send me to the fever islands.’

  Rob had never heard him so heartbroken. All the time he had known Hugo, his friend had been bursting with energy and good humour. To see him like this now was like seeing a hunting dog with its legs broken.

  ‘It does not matter what your father thinks,’ he said, consoling Hugo. ‘Remember what we agreed yesterday? You will be free of your father’s purse-strings. We will be trading on our own account.’

  ‘But that is what I mean,’ said Hugo. ‘Without my allowance, I have nothing with which to buy our cargo for India.’

  Rob considered the question. He had the money from the wager, but that would not go far enough. He certainly did not have enough to pay Hugo’s share as well.

  Some of Hugo’s despair began to colour his own thoughts.

  ‘Is there nothing we can do?’

  ‘You should go ahead without me,’ said Hugo. ‘I will take my fate.’

  ‘No.’ Rob could not fail his friend. ‘You have been so generous to me. I will pay for both of us.’

  ‘I cannot let you do that.’

  ‘You staked me the money to bet on Alcmaeon,’ Rob reminded him. ‘It is the same thing. Consider it an investment in our future fortune.’

  Hope began to dawn on Hugo’s face. ‘Do you have enough? For both of us, I mean.’

  ‘Another month or two and I will certainly earn it.’

  Hugo bit his lip. ‘That is too long. My father will be home in a fortnight, and then I will be powerless.’

  Rob’s optimism faded. He stared at Hugo, trying to convey to him how much he wanted to help, though his mind could think of nothing.

  As their eyes met, an idea seemed to occur to Hugo. He put down his fork; his eyes sparkled.

  ‘Perhaps there is a way.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I will show you.’

  He made Rob dress in his finest clothes, and insisted he bring the Neptune sword. Rob was reluctant.

  ‘Are we going to steal the money?’ he asked.

  Hugo laughed. ‘I knew you had a pirate’s instincts,’ he said. ‘But this will be a more sedate transaction.’

  ‘You know I will not sell the sword.’

  ‘I would never ask you to do that,’ Hugo reassured him. ‘But you must trust me. It is a curious fact of money, that it is very hard to come by unless you have it already. And then it is ridiculously easy.’

  They took the carriage to a trading house on Cornhill. A man named Spinkley with a gold tooth welcomed them into his office.

  ‘Spinkley is my father’s agent,’ Hugo explained. ‘He handles all his financial arrangements. And mine, too.’

  ‘Is your father in the sugar interest, too?’ Spinkley enquired of Robert unctuously.

  ‘Robert’s family have interests in Africa,’ said Hugo, before Rob could speak. ‘Extensive trading business.’

  Spinkley peered over the tops of his glasses. He smiled.

  ‘I confess, I am not aware of the family.’ He mused for a moment. ‘Courtney. You are not by chance related to Baron Dartmouth?’

  ‘I don’t believe so, sir,’ said Rob uncertainly. He was uncomfortable with the conversation. He felt as if he was playing a part in a charade, without any idea what he was supposed to do.

  But Hugo had a way of making doubts disappear.

  ‘My family and the Courtneys are the greatest of friends. My father would vouch for Rob in an instant.’

  ‘If he were here,’ said Spinkley, ‘and not five thousand miles away in the West Indies.’

  ‘He will return,’ said Hugo, airily. ‘And when he does, you would not want him to find out you did not make my friend welcome. It might cause him to question whether you valued his own custom.’

  ‘I never meant to imply . . .’ Spinkley blinked rapidly. ‘I can have my clerk to draw up a contract this instant.’ A sly tone came into his voice. ‘Of course . . . you have collateral?’

  Rob barely understood what he was talking about. Hugo nudged him in the ribs.

  ‘The sword,’ he whispered.

  Unwillingly, Rob took out the Neptune sword and laid it on the desk. Spinkley’s eyes bulged so far Rob thought they might drop in his teacup.

  ‘This . . . ah . . . puts a very different complexion on matters,’ he said. ‘This will be perfectly satisfactory.’

  They waited while the clerk produced the contract. It seemed a long document. Rob began to read it, though with its talk of encumbrances and replevin and compound interest it might as well have been written in French.

  ‘You are too assiduous,’ Hugo teased him. ‘Do you mean to read every word? Just sign the damn thing and take the money, before Mr Spinkley gives it all away to a deserving orphan.’

  Rob signed. They left the bank with a fresh purse of coins, and a letter of credit for more. Most importantly, Rob still had the sword clutched tight in his hand.

  ‘You are certain he cannot take it,’ he asked Hugo, for the third time.

  ‘Only if you do not pay him back. But that is not something to worry about.’

  Rob did not entirely share Hugo’s confidence. Any risk to the sword, however trivial, alarmed him. But at that moment, they stepped out of the building and were suddenly confronted by a small crowd who had gathered there holding sheaves of handbills. A man wit
h hollow cheeks and a pointed chin saw Rob coming down the steps and thrust a leaflet into his hands.

  ‘Do you tolerate slavery, sir? Then you tolerate inhumanity itself.’

  Rob was so surprised he took the leaflet. He looked up. The man’s burning blue eyes seemed to bore through his soul. Rob felt naked.

  Hugo took the man by the lapels and almost threw him down the street.

  ‘Away with you and your vile slanders!’ he roared. ‘Let honest men go about their business, or I will tan your face so black you could pass for a Negro.’

  The hollow-cheeked man dusted himself off. He gave Rob and Hugo a look of disgust. Then he turned away to accost another customer going into the building.

  Rob had to hold Hugo back to stop him striking the man again. He had never seen his friend so angry. He steered him to a coffee house and ordered coffee with brandy. It was only then that he realised he was still clutching the pamphlet in his fist. He flattened it out.

  The cover showed a black man kneeling, wrapped in chains and staring up at the heavens. The legend above said, ‘Am I not a man and brother?’ Inside was a picture of a naked black woman hung from a gibbet by her ribs. Her tongue lolled out; her arms and breasts had been cut off.

  ‘Who can deny the nature of that disgraceful branch of commerce, the purchasing of our fellow-creatures from the coast of Africa to supply our West Indian sugar islands . . .?’

  Before Rob could read any more, Hugo snatched it from his hands. He held it over the candle on their table and let it burn to ash.

  ‘What was that?’ said Rob, astonished. ‘Who were those people?’

  ‘Abolitionists,’ said Hugo venomously. ‘Anti-slavery campaigners.’

  ‘But what has that to do with us?’ Rob could not shake the image of the mutilated woman from his mind.

  ‘Because we use slaves on the plantations.’

  Robert stared at him in horror. ‘Slaves?’

  ‘Of course. Cutting cane is beastly work. How else would we get it done?’

  ‘But . . .’ Robert could not think what to say that would not mortally offend his friend. He remembered what his grandmother Louisa had said. No human being should ever have to suffer that.

  ‘Is it not monstrously cruel?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Hugo. ‘You sound like one of those abolitionist lunatics. We treat the slaves like our own children. And the blacks are quite helpless, you know. If we did not feed and clothe them, and direct their labour, they would starve to death.’

  The Africans Robert had known at Nativity Bay were not like that. They were resourceful, brave, and had taught the Courtneys everything they needed to know to survive in the unforgiving landscape.

  Hugo saw his doubts. ‘Have you ever been to the West Indies?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I have. I promise you, for the Negroes it is the best life they could hope for.’

  Hugo sounded so certain. Perhaps the blacks in Jamaica came from some different tribe from the sturdy warriors around Fort Auspice.

  ‘I did not mean to offend you,’ Rob said humbly.

  ‘In any event, that is my father’s business. Soon I will have no part of it.’

  T

  he next fortnight passed in a blur of activity. Rob spent his days in the city, haggling and purchasing and racking his brains for every scrap of information he had heard about conditions in India from the sea captains who had passed through Nativity Bay. It seemed that steel blades and muskets were much sought after in Bombay, and also tobacco and spirits.

  ‘It sounds a blood-curdling place,’ said Hugo, when Rob told him. ‘Do they do nothing but fight and indulge their vices?’

  Weapons were hard to come by in London, but there was no shortage of tobacco and brandy to be had. Rob contracted for as much as he could afford, and found a warehouse not far from Monsoon Dock where he could store it until Cornish was ready to load. It was an old, timber-framed building, far less sturdy than the newer brick-built warehouses around it. But it was cheap, and the foreman seemed honest.

  ‘As long as it does not fall down in the next fortnight, it will serve our purposes,’ Rob decided.

  He looked forward to the voyage. London might promise pleasures beyond counting, but after three months – impossible as it seemed – he had grown bored of it. He longed to be back at sea, feeling the ship like a living thing that needed to be loved and handled and tamed. To him, somehow, that cramped wooden world barely a hundred feet long held more freedom than all the fleshpots of London put together.

  Hugo seemed even more keen to be away. He looked constantly at the clocks, as if he could browbeat time itself into moving faster. Three times a day he would rehearse with Rob the sailing times: the loading schedule, the phases of the tides, the route downriver.

  ‘Anyone would think you were being chased away by a horde of pirates,’ Rob teased him.

  ‘My father may return any day,’ Hugo fretted.

  ‘What if he does? He cannot stop you going.’ Rob laid his hand on Hugo’s arm. ‘I know how hard it is to go against your own father. But you do not need his money, and you certainly do not need his permission. You are your own man now.’

  Hugo smiled. The words seemed to console him. ‘What would I do without you?’

  At last they exhausted the credit Spinkley had given them. The warehouse stood piled high with casks of brandy and bales of tobacco, so much that Hugo wondered if it would all fit in the Indiaman’s hold.

  ‘We will find out tomorrow when we load,’ said Rob.

  Hugo stared up at the stacked barrels. ‘How much have we spent?’

  ‘Ten thousand pounds.’

  ‘And how much do we stand to profit?’

  Rob shrugged. ‘I would hope we would clear at least as much again.’

  He knew from Cornish that when it came to haggling, the merchants in Bombay would make the factors and traders in London look like innocent lambs, but he was confident in his ability.

  ‘We should celebrate our good fortune,’ Hugo declared. ‘Our last night of freedom.’

  ‘There is a kind of freedom aboard a ship,’ Rob pointed out.

  ‘Maybe so,’ Hugo allowed. ‘But salt beef does not sate all appetites.’

  The sort of appetites he meant soon became clear. They drank, they ate, and eventually found their way to a tall house on Tenterden Street. The windows were discreetly curtained, but inside every inch of the walls was covered with gilded mirrors, and paintings of naked women being ravished by antique gods. Some of the paintings seemed to have come alive, for in every corridor and drawing room paraded young women in advanced states of undress. Their creamy breasts peeked over the tops of their dresses, which split at the waist to reveal inviting shadows between their thighs. The mirrors on the walls reflected them back endlessly from every angle.

  Rob chose one named Mary, a Dorset girl with pink cheeks and a kindly smile. When she put her hand on his manhood, he almost climaxed immediately. But she was a sensitive girl, well trained, and she knew if she gave him his money’s worth he would come back for more. She coaxed and teased him for nearly an hour before she released him. He thought he had died and gone to Heaven.

  ‘Was that your first time?’ asked Hugo, afterwards. They lounged on sofas, both naked.

  ‘No,’ said Rob indignantly.

  He was not entirely inexperienced. At Nativity Bay, one of the servant girls used to take him, giggling, behind the storehouse and let him touch her breasts while she rubbed against him. On the Dunstanburgh Castle, he had picked up a colourful and wildly extravagant impression of sex from the sailors’ conversations. But never anything like this.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ said Hugo. ‘Not with that enormous smile on your face.’ He lounged back on a chaise, holding a glass of sparkling champagne. ‘To our voyage,’ he toasted.

  ‘To our voyage.’

  ‘May we come back as rich as Satan.’

  Rob laughed. His mind was still in a delicious haze of Mary’s musk and champagne.