The House of Hardie

ANNE MELVILLE

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Part One
An Oxford Romance

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Part Two
A Proposal of Marriage

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Part Three
The Great Adventure

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Epilogue

A Note on the Author

‘Boy!'

Gordon Hardie hauled himself to his feet and staggered towards the cabin, clutching at every handhold as he went. His erratic course was caused partly by the rolling of the ship but even more by his own weakness. He had not eaten – had not
wanted
to eat – for three days of sickness and misery. The books which tempted him to run away to sea had described marvellous adventures in exotic places but had omitted to mention the spitefulness of the sea itself.

‘Boy!' The naturalist's voice was fiercer this time, reflecting his impatience. Fortunately for Gordon, even the great Sir Desmond Langton had succumbed to seasickness in the Bay of Biscay, requiring no meals and very little service from his cabin boy. But to judge by the bellowing of his voice as he repeated the summons for a third time, he had found his sea legs now. Gordon presented himself groggily at the cabin door.

Ten minutes later, Sir Desmond appeared to be approaching the end of his tirade. ‘A pigsty!' he shouted. ‘Can you give me a single reason why I shouldn't order the mate to give you a whipping that you'll never forget?'

Gordon licked his dry lips and pressed them together to prevent them from quivering. With his hands behind his back he grasped the frame of the door lest hunger and fear should combine to make him collapse. Sir Desmond, who had been pacing up and down the cabin, turned to
stare at him when his question elicited no answer. White-faced, Gordon stared back.

‘Hm,' said Sir Desmond. ‘Been ill, have you?'

‘Yes, sir. I'm very sorry, sir. I'll try to do better.'

‘See you do, then. I want this cabin shipshape by noon. To start with, clean my boots so that I can step along to the captain.'

‘Right away, sir.' Gordon set to work with as much energy as he could summon, breathing and brushing and buffing. Aware that he was being watched, he kept his eyes down. But his master's silence made him uneasy. Slowly he raised his head.

‘When did you last clean a pair of boots?' demanded Sir Desmond.

‘They're very damp, sir.'

‘Answer my question.' But the answer must have been obvious, because he gave an exaggerated sigh and sat down. ‘Leave that alone and look at me,' he commanded. ‘Now then. When that boy of mine broke his leg in Southampton and you appeared at the last minute like a gift from the gods, you told me that you were sixteen years old but small for your age. For good measure, you added that you were an orphan. You said that for two years you'd been employed at an inn, doing general work around the place. All lies, I take it, and more fool me to be taken in by it, just because you looked willing and not completely stupid.'

‘I
am
willing, sir.'

‘That's not enough. You need competence as well. Now then, let's start again. How old are you?'

‘Fourteen,' mumbled Gordon.

‘Speak up. Orphaned?'

Gordon shook his head.

‘Family know where you are?'

‘I wrote from Southampton with the name of the ship. I said I'd be away for three years and they weren't to worry.'

‘Fat lot of comfort that will be to your weeping mother. Why did you want to run away from home?'

‘I'm not running
away
from anything. I'm running
to
something.' With this positive statement Gordon straightened his back and raised his head. It was time to put behind him the misery of the past few days. He had been homesick as well as seasick, but that was something he had no intention of admitting. On the day he signed up for this voyage to the South Seas he had put his childhood behind him, and from now on he must behave like a man.

‘Running to what?' asked Sir Desmond. ‘Not just to life as a cabin boy, I take it.'

‘I want to be an explorer.'

Gordon had never said that to anyone before. At home, in Oxford, it was taken for granted that he would one day own and manage the family business. Had he ever hinted that he had other ambitions, he would have been regarded as both foolish and disloyal. He could never have hoped for permission to take even a short period off for adventure.

For as long as he could remember he had been a wanderer. His very first memory was of the day when – only just able to walk – he had tottered away from his nursemaid as she sat mending his clothes in the shade; across the lawn, through the rose garden, around the shrubbery and to within a foot or two of the River Cherwell, which bounded the grounds. Snatched to safety by a gardener, he had been puzzled by his mother's extravagant hugging and the tears of his nursemaid, whom he never after that day saw again. Even at that early age he had formed the impression that when he wanted to
stretch the boundaries of his small world and explore some new territory, it was better not to let anyone find out. But Sir Desmond Langton was himself an explorer. He, surely, would understand.

Certainly by now the anger had faded from the botanist's expression, but he looked curious rather than sympathetic. ‘What put that idea into your mind?'

‘I've always wanted … I read a book, years ago. About Marco Polo.' For months as a seven-year-old Gordon had repeated silently to himself the phrase ‘The Great Silk Road', thinking the words to be the very stuff of romance. ‘It made me want to go to China.'

Sir Desmond exploded into what was more of a hoot than an ordinary laugh. ‘China! You don't imagine that the
Periwinkle's
going anywhere near China!'

‘No. The South Seas. I know that. That's exciting enough to start with, while I'm learning to explore.'

‘You don't learn to explore, boy. You explore in order to learn.'

Gordon puzzled over this and failed to understand.

‘Put those boots aside and sit down,' said Sir Desmond. ‘Let me tell you about my first expedition. Ever heard of an illness called malaria?'

Gordon shook his head.

‘Unpleasant disease. Hits you in steamy, tropical kinds of places. Not in England. But our soldiers in India and Africa, they get it. Die of it. There's a medicine which cures malaria, called quinine. It's not new. We've known about it in Europe for a couple of hundred years or more, and the natives who first discovered it, in Peru, may have been using it for centuries. It's made out of the bark of a tree called the cinchona. No secret about that, either. The people in Peru have been quite happy to grow the trees and powder the bark and sell it to anyone with the money
to buy it. But they weren't going to let anyone else get into the market by establishing a cinchona forest anywhere else in the world. You following me so far?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘I went out there twenty-odd years ago, with a companion. To explore, you might say, in Peru and Ecuador. But not simply for the sake of exploring. We had a target – to find the cinchonas and collect seeds. Not just a pocketful. We brought out a hundred thousand in the end. Now, lad, I'll tell you. Every moment of that exploration was hell. We had to travel by river. Whirlpools, rapids, jagged rocks. Every time we camped at night, the mosquitoes covered us like a blanket. Snakes all over the place, as well. When the natives found out what we were after, they refused us porters; and when we pressed on, they tried to kill us. If we'd been merely exploring, we'd have given in within a month. But we knew what we were looking for, and that made all the difference.'

Gordon's black eyes were wide open with interest. ‘Did the seeds grow?'

‘Five years ago I was invited to visit India. The Nilgiri Hills, in the south. They showed me a forest of cinchonas, producing their own seeds to grow more trees still. Hundreds of lives being saved every year in the Indian Army. Thousands, perhaps. Now then, the point about all this. My companion and I, we were trained as botanists. Knew the likeliest place to find the forests we wanted – right soil, right rainfall, right altitude. We knew how to recognize the trees out of hundreds of others, and when to collect the seeds and how to store and germinate them. And at the same time we could keep our eyes open for new plants.'

‘What do you mean by a new plant, sir?'

‘A plant that's unknown in England, but might be
worth bringing back to try out. Got a garden at home, have you?'

‘Yes. My mother knows quite a lot about flowers, I think.' Gordon had never taken any great interest in the garden. The hard digging was the work of the gardener and his boy, while the planning of the beds and the cutting and arranging of flowers was women's work. Or so he had always assumed.

‘Narcissus, lilac, gladiolus, primrose – any of that kind of thing?' The botanist did not wait for an answer, probably guessing that Gordon did not know. ‘You might think that common things like that have always grown in England. Not a bit of it. Man called Tradescant found them more than two hundred and fifty years ago – some in Russia, some in Algeria, some in the West Indies. Brought them to England and settled them in.' He paused, laughing at himself. ‘Going on a bit, aren't I? Point is this. Explorers need reasons for exploring. Some of them make maps – chart coastlines, trace rivers back to their sources. Your friend Marco Polo was looking for trade. There are as many reasons as there are men – but there ought to be
something
.'

Sir Desmond Langton was, to guess from his appearance, almost fifty years old. Perhaps he had forgotten how it felt simply to see a place for the first time, to arrive somewhere new. What he had said was interesting, but somehow missed the point. When, making enquiries at Southampton, Gordon had first heard that the
Periwinkle
was about to leave on a voyage to the South Seas, his whole body had swelled with excitement and hope and determination, adding conviction to his lies and making no exaggeration of his enthusiasm necessary.

It seemed that Sir Desmond remembered the lies at the same moment as Gordon: he sighed to himself as he
considered what to do. ‘Well. Take my compliments to Captain Blake and ask if he can spare his boy for an hour to show you what you ought to know already. Cabin shipshape by noon, or you walk the plank.'

Gordon stood up, staggering slightly as the
Periwinkle
rolled. ‘Yes, sir. I'm sorry to have been a disappointment to you, sir.'

‘My fault for failing to notice that you spoke like a schoolboy and not like a bootboy. But there's no turning back. I can't pick another boy out of the ocean, so you'll have to forget those dreams of exploration and learn to use a swab. If you're not an orphan, what does your father do?'