A Falcon Flies (3 page)

It changed the mood between them instantly, and she was able at last to lean close to her brother and pour out all her frustrations. He listened sympathetically, reaching across the table to squeeze her hand so that she went on quietly but with utter determination.

‘Zouga, I have to get back to Africa. I'll die if I don't. I just know it. I will shrivel up and die.'

‘Good Lord, Sissy, why Africa?'

‘Because I was born there, because my destiny is there – and because Papa is there, somewhere.'

‘I was born there also.' Zouga smiled, and when he did so it softened the harsh line of his mouth. ‘But I don't know about my destiny. I wouldn't mind going back for the hunting, of course, but as for Father – don't you often think that Papa's main concern was always Fuller Ballantyne? I cannot imagine that you still harbour any great filial love for him.'

‘He is different from other men, Zouga, you cannot judge him by the usual yardstick.'

‘There are many who might agree with that,' Zouga murmured drily. ‘At the L.M.S. and at the Foreign Office – but as a father?'

‘I love him!' she said defiantly. ‘After God, I love him best.'

‘He killed mother, you know.' Zouga's mouth hardened into its usual grim line. ‘He took her out to the Zambezi in fever season and he killed her as certainly as if he'd put a pistol to her head.'

Robyn conceded after a short, regretful silence, ‘He was never a father nor a husband – but as a visionary, a blazer of trails, as a torchbearer . . .'

Zouga laughed and squeezed her hand.

‘Really, Sissy!'

‘I have read his books, all his letters, every one he ever wrote to mother or to us, and I know that my place is there. In Africa, with Papa.'

Zouga lifted his hand from hers and carefully stroked his thick side whiskers. ‘You always had a way of making me feel excited—' Then, seemingly going off at a tangent, ‘Did you hear that they have found diamonds on the Orange river?' He lifted his glass and examined the lees in the bottom of it attentively. ‘We are so very different, you and I, and yet in some ways so much alike.' He poured fresh wine into his glass and went on casually. ‘I am in debt, Sissy.'

The word chilled her. Since her childhood she had been taught a dread of it.

‘How much?' she asked at last quietly.

‘Two hundred pounds.' He shrugged.

‘So much!' she breathed, and then, ‘You haven't been gambling, Zouga?'

That was one of the other dread words in Robyn's vocabulary.

‘Not gambling?' she repeated.

‘As a matter of fact, I have,' Zouga laughed. ‘And thank God for that. Without it I would be a thousand guineas under.'

‘You mean you gamble – and actually win?' Her horror faded a little, became tinged with fascination.

‘Not always, but most of the time.'

She studied him carefully, perhaps for the first time. He was only twenty-six years old, but he had the presence and aplomb of a man ten years older. He was already a hard, professional soldier, tempered in the skirmishes on the border of Afghanistan where his regiment had spent four years. She knew they had been cruel encounters against fierce hill tribes, and that Zouga had distinguished himself. His rapid promotion was proof of that.

‘Then how are you in debt, Zouga?' she asked.

‘Most of my brother officers, even my juniors, have private fortunes. I am a major now, I have to keep some style. We hunt, we shoot, mess bills, polo ponies—' He shrugged again.

‘Will you ever be able to repay it?'

‘I could marry a rich wife,' he smiled, ‘or find diamonds.'

Zouga sipped his wine, slumped down in his chair, not looking at her, and went on quietly.

‘I was reading Cornwallis Harris's book the other day – do you remember the big game we saw when we lived at Koloberg?'

She shook her head.

‘No, you were only a baby. But I do. I remember the herds of springbok and wildebeest on the trek down to the Cape. One night there was a lion, I saw it clearly in the light of the campfire. Harris's book described his hunting expeditions up as far as the Limpopo – nobody has been further than that, except Papa, of course. A damned sight better than potting pheasant or black buck. Did you know that Harris made nearly five thousand pounds from his book?'

Zouga pushed his glass away, straightened up in his seat and selected a cigar from his silver case. While he prepared and lit it, he was frowning thoughtfully.

‘You want to go to Africa for spiritual reasons. I probably need to go to Africa, for much better reasons, for blood and for money. I make you a proposal. The Ballantyne Expedition!' He lifted his glass to her.

She laughed then, uncertainly, thinking he was joking, but lifted her own glass which was still almost full. ‘My word on it. But how? Zouga, how do we get there?'

‘What was the name of that newspaper fellow?' Zouga demanded.

‘Wicks,' she said, ‘Oliver Wicks. But why should he help us?'

‘I'll find a good reason why he should.' And Robyn remembered how, even as a child, he had been an eloquent and persuasive pleader of causes.

‘You know I rather think you might.'

They drank then, and when she lowered her glass, she had been as happy as she could ever remember being in all her life.

I
t was another six weeks before she saw Zouga again, striding towards her through the bustle of London Bridge Station as she clambered down from the carriage. He stood tall above the crowd, with the high beaver top hat on his head and the threequarter length paletot cloak flaring from his shoulders.

‘Sissy!' he called, laughing at her, as he lifted her from her feet. ‘We are going – we really are going.'

He had a cab waiting for them, and the driver whipped up the horses the moment they were aboard.

‘The London Missionary Society were no use at all,' he told her, still with his arm around her shoulders as the cab clattered and lurched over the cobbles. ‘I had them down on my list for five hundred iron men, and they nearly had apoplexy. I had the feeling they would rather Papa stayed lost in darkest Africa, and they would pay five hundred to keep him there.'

‘You went to the directors?' she demanded.

‘Played my losing tricks first,' Zouga smiled. ‘The next was Whitehall – actually managed to see the First Secretary. He was damned civil, took me to lunch at the Travellers', and was truly very sorry that they were not able to give financial assistance. They remembered Papa's Zambezi fiasco too clearly, but he did give me letters. A dozen letters, to every conceivable person – to the Governor at the Cape, to Kemp the Admiral at Cape Town, and all the others.'

‘Letters won't get us far.'

‘Then I went to see your newspaper friend. Extraordinary little man. Smart as a whip. I told him we were going to Africa to find Papa – and he jumped up and clapped his hands like a child at a Punch and Judy show.' Zouga hugged Robyn tighter. ‘To tell the truth, I used your name shamelessly – and it did the trick. He will have all the story rights to our diaries and journals, and the publishing rights to both books.'

‘Both books?' Robyn pulled away from him and looked into his face.

‘Both.' He grinned at her. ‘Yours and mine.'

‘I am to write a book?'

‘You certainly are. A woman's account of the expedition. I have already signed the contract on your behalf.'

She laughed then, but breathlessly. ‘You're going too far, much too fast.'

‘Little Wicks was in for five hundred, and the next on the list was the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade – they were easy. His Royal Highness is the Society's patron, and he had read Papa's books. We are to report on the state of the trade in the interior of the continent north of the Tropic of Capricorn, and they came up with another 500 guineas.'

‘Oh Zouga, you are a magician.'

‘Then there was the Worshipful Company of London Merchants Trading into Africa. For the last hundred years they have based all their activities on the west coast, I convinced them that they needed a survey of the east coast. I have been appointed the Worshipful Company's Agent, with instructions to examine the market in palm oil, gumcopal, copper and ivory – and they have come up with the third and last 500 guineas – and a presentation Sharps rifle.'

‘One thousand five hundred guineas,' Robyn breathed, and Zouga nodded.

‘We are going back home in style.'

‘When?'

‘I have booked passage on an American trading clipper. We sail from Bristol in six weeks, for Good Hope and Quelimane inMozambique. I have written asking leave from my regiment for two years – you will have to do the same with the L.M.S.'

I
t had all happened with dreamlike rapidity after that. The directors of the L.M.S., perhaps relieved that they were not to pay for her passage nor the expense of relocating Robyn in the African interior, in a flush of extravagance decided to continue her stipend during the period she was away, and made a guarded promise to review the position at the end of that time. If she proved herself capable – then there would be a permanent post in Africa thereafter. It was more than she had ever expected, and she had thrown herself wholeheartedly into assisting Zouga with the preparations for departure.

There was so much to do that six weeks was barely sufficient, and it seemed only days had passed before the mountain of the expedition's equipment was being swayed down into the holds of the big graceful Baltimore clipper.

The
Huron
proved as swift as she looked, another wise choice by Zouga Ballantyne, and under Mungo St John's skilful navigation she made good her westings before attempting to cross the belt of the doldrums at their narrowest point. They were becalmed not a single day and sped across the line at 29ï¿® west and immediately Mungo St John put her on the port tack to stand down across the south-east trades.
Huron
clawed her way southwards with the flying fish sailing ahead of her, close on the wind until she broke from their grip at last with Ilha da Trinidade on the horizon. The north-wester came howling at them and
Huron
fled before it, under low, sullen, scudding skies day after day that denied them sight of sun or moon or stars, until she almost hurled herself ashore 200 miles up the west coast of Africa from her destination at the Cape of Good Hope.

‘Mr Mate!' Mungo St John called in his clear carrying voice as
Huron
settled down to reach across the wind, pulling swiftly away from the land.

‘Captain!' Tippoo bellowed back from the foot of the mainmast, a great blurt of sound from the bull chest.

‘Take the name of the masthead watch.'

Tippoo ducked his cannon-ball head on its thick neck like a bare-knuckle fighter taking a punch, and looked up the mast, slitting his eyes in the heavy folds of flesh.

‘Twenty minutes more and he would have had us on the beach.' St John's voice was cold, deadly. ‘I'll have him on the grating before this day is out, and we will get a peep of his backbone.'

Tippoo licked his thick lips involuntarily, and Robyn, standing near him, felt her stomach heave. There had been three floggings already on this voyage and she knew what to expect. Tippoo was half-Arab, half-African, a honeycoloured giant of a man with a shaven head that was covered with a mesh of tiny pale scars from a thousand violent encounters. He wore a loose embroidered, high-necked tunic over his huge frame, but the forearms that protruded from the wide sleeves were thick as a woman's thighs.

Robyn turned quickly to Zouga as he came down the deck towards her.

‘We had a good look at the land, Sissy. Our first definite fix since Ilha da Trinidade. If this wind holds we will be in Table Bay in another five days.'

‘Zouga, can't you intercede with the Captain?' she demanded, and Zouga looked startled.

‘He is going to flog that poor devil.'

‘Damn right too,' Zouga growled. ‘The man nearly had us on the rocks.'

‘Can't you stop him?'

‘I wouldn't dream of interfering with his running of this ship – and nor will I allow you to.'

‘Do you have no humanity at all?' she demanded of her brother coldly, but there were bright hot spots of anger on her cheeks, and her eyes snapped clear angry green. ‘You call yourself a Christian.'

‘When I do, I speak softly though, my dear.' Zouga made the reply he knew would annoy her most. ‘And I don't flaunt it at every turn in the conversation.'

Their arguments were always sudden as summer thunderstorms on the African veld, and as spectacular.

Mungo St John sauntered forward to lean his elbow on the railing of his quarterdeck, a long Havana cheroot of coarse black tobacco held between white teeth. He mocked her silently with those flecked yellow eyes, infuriating her further, until she heard her own voice going shrill and she turned from Zouga, and rounded on him.

‘The man you had flogged last week could be crippled for life,' she shouted at him.

‘Doctor Ballantyne – how would you like Tippoo to carry you down and lock you in your cabin?' Mungo St John asked. ‘Until you regain your temper and your manners.'

‘You cannot do that,' she flared at him.

‘I can, I assure you – that and much more.'

‘He's right,' Zouga assured her softly. ‘On this ship he can do virtually anything he wants.' He laid his hand on her upper arm. ‘Steady now, Sissy. The fellow will be lucky to get away with the loss of a little skin.'

Robyn found she was panting with anger and a sense of helplessness.

‘If you are squeamish, Doctor, I will excuse you from witnessing punishment,' Mungo St John mocked her still. ‘We must make allowance for the fact that you are a woman.'

‘I have never asked for consideration on that score, not once in all my life.' She tried to get her anger back under control, and she shook off her brother's hand and turned away from them.