Ryman, Rebecca (31 page)

Olivia
hesitated. Her uncle's latest disaster might be common knowledge, but
considering his opinion of poor Freddie it would be unwise to make him privy to
whatever else had happened, as something obviously had. She shook her head.
"I think not, Freddie, although it is kind of you to offer. It might be a
. . . private matter."

He
accepted that with his characteristic good humour. "Right ho, until
tomorrow then? Same time, same place?"

Olivia
sighed. "Yes, I guess so."

At
the river bank to which the youth guided her, a
dhoolie
boat waited.
Another youth stepped out from the trees to take charge of her horse and a
third helped her onto the boat. The
Daffodil,
having arrived only
recently from England, was anchored close to the opposite shore, being unloaded
and refurbished for the return voyage scheduled two weeks from now. Through the
silent journey across the Hooghly, Olivia's thoughts raced; what new calamity
had necessitated this early-morning summons? As the creaking, bobbing row-boat
threaded its way between the hulks of scattered vessels, there was another
thought in Olivia's mind; it was of poor Freddie's final muttered words to her
as he mournfully helped her mount Jasmine: "In my own inept fashion I do
love you, Olivia ..." She sighed heavily; there was something essentially
decent about Freddie, for he had so few pretensions.

They
seemed to weave their way interminably among schooners,
cutters,
men-of-war, Royal Navy frigates and sloops before the
dhoolie
showed
some signs of arriving at a destination. Out of the diaphanous vapours
shrouding the river a hull loomed ahead and the little row-boat slid alongside.
A wooden stairway threaded on rope snaked its way down and dangled in front of
them. Two Lascars, gripping either side of the ladder, helped Olivia climb her
way on board. It was her first visit to a ship since she had arrived in India
and, in spite of her worry, her spirits soared. There was something elating,
intoxicating almost, about the smell of water and grease and jute and holystone
and lingering salt that went with seagoing ships, something that spelt
adventure and derring-do.

It
was only when she was half way up the ladder that a tear in the mist and a
sudden shaft of buttery sunshine through it dazzled her with a sharp, metallic
explosion of light. Olivia shut her eyes in a swift reflex and by the time she
opened them again, an instant later, what she had seen mounted on the prow had
registered in her consciousness.

It
was a golden trident.

"You
frightened me out of my
wits
—I thought something terrible had happened
to my uncle!" Olivia's immediate reaction was one of chagrin.

"Sadly,
no." Still holding her hand in the clasp that had pulled her aboard, Jai
Raventhorne smiled acidly. "As far as I know, your uncle is in bed with
health quite unimpaired."

She
snatched her hand out of his. "You had no business playing such a
despicable trick on me!"

"I
have as much business as you have to traipse the countryside with that idiot
loon in tow. Do you have to make such a spectacle of your hunt for a
husband?"

Breathing
heavily, furious now, Olivia leaned back against the rail and crossed her arms.
"Why should any spectacles, as you call them, I make be your unwanted
concerns? Evidently, your genius for espionage exceeds those alleged social
graces you seem so proud of!"

"Espionage,
hah!"
He threw his arms in the air, spun on his heel and walked off
in a huff. "It hardly needs genius to follow
your
blatant
cavortings," he flung back over his shoulder.

"And
why need my blatant cavortings worry you, pray?" Striding
after him,
still angry, Olivia struggled with parallel elation at so unexpectedly meeting
him again.

He
stopped and turned to glower at her. "They need not but they do!" he
snapped. "For whatever my sins might have been."

"Might
have
been?"

He
breathed in deeply and combed his hair with impatient fingers. "Are you
going to stand there wasting time in petty argument or do you want to see my
ship?"

Olivia
suddenly remembered where she was—aboard the
Ganga!
Anger fizzling, she
felt a rush of renewed exhilaration; she was actually on the
Ganga
with
Jai Raventhorne! "I want to see your ship, of course," she murmured
meekly enough.

"I
thought you would. As first visitor aboard you should be honoured. She only
docked at midnight."

"Oh,
I am honoured," Olivia assured him lightly as they walked side by side
down the deck and she looked around with avid interest, "even though I
have no idea why I should be so singularly privileged."

"Haven't
you?" His churlishness returned as his pace increased. "For a girl as
intelligent as you I find that remark unforgivably stupid."

Heavens,
he
was
in an odious humour this morning! But she was in no mood to
retaliate. His unexpected proximity, the daring of his ruse and the personal
risk she faced in being here at all, scuttled all taste for debate. Besides,
there was much that was exciting to see. "So, this is the refitted clipper
causing so many waves in town!"

He
scowled. "I don't see why. I much preferred her the way she was. Well,
will you have breakfast first or be conducted around?"

He
was so certain of her coming he had even arranged breakfast? "I would like
to be conducted around," she said with suitable docility. "I wouldn't
want you to think I'm not duly appreciative of the honour."

He
merely grunted.

Despite
his pique, however, his pride of possession was fierce. Understandably. The
Ganga
was an extraordinarily elegant vessel with grace, beauty, speed and power
written into every line of her sleek body. The ugly "cod's head and
mackerel tail" of the tea wagons was nowhere in evidence. Her curved stem
lengthened the bow above the water-line, and her raking masts carried tier upon
tier of sail (thirty-three in all, she was told), now furled with neat
cross-bands. She was three hundred and fifteen
feet long, an astonishing
dimension; the shining white hull was adorned with gold scroll-work, the wood
all burnished Spanish mahogany with gleaming brass fittings. Being scoured and
scrubbed even now as they watched from the quarter-deck were the long, pine-boarded
decks holystoned further into pristine paleness by teams of Lascars on their
knees armed with mops and buckets of sloshing water. Each of the
Ganga
's
twenty-eight guns, of sparkling brass, was capable of firing at thirty-second
intervals, a feat of ballistic superiority not to be scorned, Olivia was
informed with forgivable arrogance.

Raventhorne
fondly patted the snout of one of the guns. "To sail without broadsides is
plain suicide. There are as many pirates on water as there are brigands on land.
The
Ganga,
as you can see, is a formidable adversary. There's no
contingency she isn't prepared for." In recounting the virtues of his
ship, his manner had improved appreciably. He actually smiled.

Feeling
wonderfully light-headed, Olivia abandoned her nervousness to follow him down a
narrow companion-way. The prospect of being with him even an hour was insanely
intoxicating, the element of risk spicing rather than subtracting from her
enjoyment. Emboldened by his turn of temper, she pulled out a snippet from
Estelle's fat dossier of gossip. "I believe you once had a price on your
head?"

"Once?
You do me a disfavour! The Chinese put prices on the heads of most foreigners,
prices that vary with the weather and are quite harmless. The English offer
bounty for heads they believe will look good on their walls mounted alongside
their game trophies. Whatever its worth, they considered mine would have been a
handsome addition."

"Then
how did you escape being mounted?"

"The
bounty I offered them
not
to was more tempting."

"You
mean, you bought yourself a pardon?"

"Why
not?" He waggled a finger in her face. "Together with opium, the
Company also makes generous profits out of selling respectability, when it
suits them to do so."

At
the mention of opium, Olivia struggled inwardly. Should she now demand an
explanation for the consignment he had looted from her uncle? Then she decided
against it. However cutthroat prevailing business rivalries, they really were
no concern of hers. Washed over with emotions that defied identification, logic
or control, in her state of mental limpness she let the matter rest. Instead
she remarked drily, "I doubt if anyone thinks of you as particularly
respectable, pardon notwithstanding!"

At
that he laughed. "I'm as respectable as I'm ever likely to be, I suppose.
I don't aspire to be more, not being a . . ." He hesitated.

"A
gentleman?"

He
laughed again. "Yes, that too. Come," he touched her hand as they
stood watching two seamen coil a giant rope with such expertise that they
seemed like precision machines, "let us go farther below."

En
route he explained at great length the working of the
Ganga"
s Kew
barometer, that most invaluable aid of all sailors, this modern English model
the most accurate one on the seas. Olivia did not understand everything about
the bewildering nautical data he dispensed with such fluency—"dead rise
amidships," "breadth of beam," "belaying-pins,"
"hawards and halyards"—but it didn't matter a jot. She understood
that the vessel was a masterpiece of naval architecture and performance (if she
could forget the fleeting sight of an unpleasant little eyesore on deck in the
shape of a smoke funnel), and for the rest it was enough just to be where she
was, in the company of a man breathtakingly dynamic, and the pox on his scruples!
Merely listening to his voice, rich and resonant, she felt vibrantly alive. His
exuberance stimulated her beyond belief, almost beyond tolerance; she was no
longer embarrassed by what was indeed magnetic between them—that affinity!
Unashamed, Olivia savoured it fully. Yes, she was captivated by Jai
Raventhorne, spellbound by his personality. She could not help herself, nor did
she want to now.

"When
she was launched a year ago from the Smith and Dimon shipyard in New York, not
many believed she would ever sail successfully.
Hah!"

"Why
ever not?" She ran a palm down a spar, smooth as silk, varnished so that
she could see her face in its surface.

"Because
of her revolutionary bow line. The English scoffed louder than anyone else,
until she docked in Southampton with an eighty-one-day run from Hong Kong under
her belt.
Then
they sang a different tune! They confessed they had never
seen anything like her, nor had hoped to. They wrote paeans to her in their
newspapers, calling her a wonder of construction. The final accolade was a
leader in the London
Times."
His smile turned even more complacent.
"And she certainly had many extremely worried, I can tell you
that!"

"But
surely the English too will build clippers of their own soon?"

"Oh
yes, they've already started, having to stay in the race." He knocked
solidly on a panel of wood with his knuckles. "But they will never match
John Willis Griffiths, who designed this. He's the best they have in your
country." With his palm he caressed the satin-smooth wooden panelling in
which their reflections shone. "The
Ganga
is not only a ship,"
he said softly, "she is poetry in motion." His brief show of emotion
quickly turned into ill temper again. "All right. Enough about her beauty.
Now let me show you some of the ugliness on board; then you will understand why
I am like a bear with a sore head this morning."

"Ugliness?"
She almost ran behind him to keep up with his rapid pace as he swung down
another companion-way. "I cannot imagine any ugliness amidst such
perfection!"

"No?
Well, you will see."

The
bowels of the ship were dark and below sea level. They wound their way through
a maze of corridors and climbed into a huge, shell-like capsule of a chamber in
which, presently dormant, was a tangle of black boilers, pressure gauges,
cranks and rods, all horribly encrusted with oil and soot. Facing them was the
cavernous mouth of a coal furnace, now fireless but still belching noxious
gases. Gone was the fresh saltiness of the sea, the reviving tang of clean air,
the smell of varnish and newly washed decks; their nostrils stung with the
odium of burnt oil, blistering paint and stale coal. Olivia started to cough.