'It's not a smell you forget if you've once met it. I tell you, it haunted me all night.'

Marianne set down the coffee-pot with a hand that shook suddenly, so that a large brown stain spread over the tray-cloth.

'You aren't suggesting Jason is engaged in that frightful trade?'

'No because then the smell would be much stronger, in spite of any amount of scrubbing and fumigating. But it makes me wonder if he hasn't had something to do with that kind of – of transport at some time or other.'

'It's quite impossible!' Marianne cried vehemently. Don't forget, Arcadius, that six months ago the Witch was lying in Morlaix roads, where Surcouf took her and sailed her to our rendezvous. If Jason had been engaged in that foul trade, he would have smelled the smell, and I can't think he would have run the risks he did for the master of that sort of vessel. Anyway, when Jason does carry contraband, let me remind you, it's wine not human beings!'

She was trembling with indignation, so that when she put down her cup it rattled nervously in the saucer. Jolival smiled soothingly.

'No need to get so excited. In a minute you'll be accusing me of calling our friend a dirty slaver! I said nothing of the kind. Although, at the risk of disappointing you, if Surcouf had noticed anything, he wouldn't have objected. He's carried "black ivory" in his own vessels before now. A good shipowner can't afford to be over-nice. All the same, like you, I find this odd smell very surprising.'

'Perhaps it's not what you think. After all, you only smelled it once.'

'It's not the kind of thing you forget,' Arcadius said grimly. 'Nor the kind that can be got rid of by washing, and unless this vessel has had an epidemic of yellow fever aboard her—'

'That's enough, Arcadius. You're upsetting me. You're probably imagining things. I expect it's just a dead rat somewhere. Where is Jason at the moment?'

'Forward in the chart room. Are you wanting to pay him a call?'

There was a faintly anxious note hovering somewhere at the back of the light, ironic voice but Marianne poured herself another cup of coffee calmly enough. The rich scent of the scalding beverage filled the tiny cabin, overcoming the insidious odour.

'Should I?'

'Not necessarily. Unless you want to edify the ship's company with another passage of arms like last night's. Our skipper would appear to be in an extremely bad temper. Before retiring to shut himself up forward he rocked the poop with an astonishing tirade on the subject of the defective stowing of a cask.'

Marianne wiped her mouth with unusual concentration, a proceeding which enabled her to keep her long curling lashes prudently lowered, yet there was a lift to her brows that struck Jolival as more insubordinate than ever. However, her voice, when she answered, was miraculously soft and gentle.

'Then I have no intention of putting myself in his way. All I want to do is stretch my legs on deck and get a breath of air.'

'The weather's overcast, it's raining and there's a sea running.'

'So I saw. But I must have air. We'll take a stroll together, Jolival, if you'll be kind enough to come and collect me here in half an hour's time. I can see by your face that you're going to find some other horrid reason to stop me going out – such as that Agathe and I are the only women aboard among a hundred men! Well, the last thing I mean to do is to spend all my time cooped up in this hole, particularly when I know quite well that Jason will never so much as cross the threshold. Am I right?'

Jolival refrained from answering. Delivering himself of a fatalistic shrug, he began to steer an erratic course towards the door, negotiating the half-open trunks with their overflow of ribbons and furbelows.

When he had gone, Marianne looked round for her maid but Agathe had disappeared. Her call was answered only by a feeble groan. Stepping quickly to the communicating door, she found the wretched Agathe collapsed on her bed, retching spasmodically into her starched apron. All her prim flirtatiousness had vanished and there remained only a little girl, very green in the face, who looked up at her mistress out of hollow eyes.

'Good gracious, Agathe! Are you as ill as this? Why didn't you tell me?'

'It – it came over me all of a sudden. When I was bringing your tray… I didn't feel very well and then, just as I got here… It must have been the smell of the fried eggs and bacon – oooooooh!'

The mere mention of these items was enough to bring on another spasm and the little abigail disappeared again into her apron.

'Well, you can't go on like this,' Marianne said firmly, substituting a basin for the apron as a start. There's a doctor on board this beastly vessel and I'm going to find him. He's a Friday-faced creature but surely he can do something to help.'

She bathed Agathe's face briskly with cold water and eau-de-Cologne, gave her a bottle of salts and then, having first buttoned a close-fitting coat of honey-coloured cloth securely over her nightgown, she tied a scarf round her head and sallied forth in the direction of the companion-way leading up to the main deck. Climbing the steps to the deck proved something of a problem but eventually she emerged into the deck-housing between the mainmast and the mizzen.

At that moment, the brig encountered a squall. The sea fell away from the bows and she had to cling to the steps to keep herself from sliding down again on her face. When she came out on deck she found the wind astern and the strength of it took her unawares. The loosely-tied scarf was whipped from her head and her long, dark locks writhed about her like some wild creeping plant. The empty deck rose and fell. She turned towards the poop and received the wind full in her face. The ship was running before the squall. There were white caps to the waves and all around was the singing in the shrouds and the crack and murmur of the sails. She saw the helmsman on the poop, which was reached from the lower level of the deck by a flight of steep, ladderlike steps. In his heavy canvas jacket, he looked like a part of the ship, standing there with legs braced wide apart and big hands anchored firmly on the wheel. Looking up, Marianne saw that the better part of the duty watch were perched on the yards, frantically engaged in taking in topgallants, topsails and mainsail, hauling down the main jib to bear away down wind under foresail and fore staysail, according to the orders that came booming through the loud-hailer from the poop.

Without warning, a dozen or so barefoot monkeys dropped from above and began running about the deck. One of them cannoned into her so sharply that she was sent reeling towards the poop ladder. She flung out her hands and managed to grab hold of it in time to prevent herself from sprawling headlong, while the sailor pursued his way aft without a backward glance.

'Your ladyship must forgive him. I do not think he saw you,' said a deep voice gravely in Italian. 'Are you hurt?'

Marianne hauled herself upright, flinging back the hair that blinded her, and stared with a kind of shocked surprise at the man before her.

'No,' she said automatically… 'no, thank you.'

He moved away at once, with an easy gait that seemed to fit itself effortlessly to the irregular pitching of the ship. Marianne watched him go, petrified, for some reason she could not explain, but with a curious mixture of fear and admiration. Her season in hell was still too fresh in her mind for the sight of a black skin to inspire her with anything but alarm, and the sailor who had spoken to her, though not so dark as Ishtar and her sisters, was black, like them. Damiani's three slaves had been the colour of ebony whereas this man seemed to have been moulded in a kind of golden bronze, and despite an instinctive shudder based chiefly on the association of remembered fear and dislike, Marianne readily admitted that she had rarely beheld a more splendid figure of a man.

He was barefoot, like all the crew, his lower limbs encased in tight canvas trousers, and he had the disturbing physical perfection of the great cats. To see him springing up the shrouds to stow a sail with all the lithe grace of a bronze leopard was an unforgettable experience. Nor did a brief glimpse of his face in any way disgrace the whole.

She was still lost in these reflections when a hand grasped her arm and hauled rather than helped her up the steps to the poop.

'What are you doing here?' yelled Jason Beaufort. 'What the devil do you mean by coming out in such weather? Do you want to be swept overboard?'

He sounded furious but Marianne noted, to her private satisfaction, a note of real concern underlying the rebuke.

'I was looking for the doctor. Agathe is dreadfully ill and must have help. She was very nearly sick bringing me my breakfast.'

'Then why was she bringing it? Your maid has no business in the galley, Princess. There are servants on board, thank God, whose duty it is to attend to such matters. Ah, there is Toby, now. He has orders to see that you want for nothing.'

Another black man had emerged from the galley regions, carrying a pailful of vegetable peelings. This one had a cheerful moon face surmounted by a circle of wiry, grizzled hair from the midst of which his bald crown rose in well-polished nakedness to confront the elements. His face split open in a beaming smile at the sight of his master, revealing a snowy crescent of white teeth.

'Go and tell Dr Leighton there's a patient for him in the deck house,' Beaufort called.

There was a faint frown in Marianne's eyes and she was unable to stop herself asking: 'Have you many negroes on board?'

'Why? Don't you like them?' Jason snapped back, for her look had not escaped him. 'There are plenty of them where I come from. I thought I had told you that my own nurse was black. It's not something people in France or England are accustomed to, I grant you, but in Charleston and anywhere in the South it's perfectly normal and natural. But, to answer your question: I have two, Toby and his brother Nathan. No, I was forgetting. I've three, now. I took on another at Chioggia.'

'At Chioggia?'

'Yes, an Ethiopian. The poor devil had been a slave of your friends the Turks and had escaped. I found him adrift in the port when I was taking on water. You can see him up there astride the tops'l yard.'

A creeping chill which had nothing to do with the weather, though it was cool for the time of year, stole over Marianne. The man whose appearance had made such an impression on her – was she dreaming, or did he really have light eyes? – was a runaway slave. And, runaways apart, what of the other two, the servants Jason had spoken of? Jolival's words returned unbidden to her mind, and because she could not bear the smallest cloud on her love she could not help asking the question that rose to her lips, although she phrased it with a little circumlocution:

'Yes, I had noticed him. Your "poor devil" is a fine-looking fellow – and very different from him.' She nodded at Toby, now engaged in emptying his bucket overboard. 'Is he another runaway slave?'

'There are as many different races of blacks as there are whites. The Ethiopians claim descent from the Queen of Sheba and her son by Solomon. Their features are in general finer and more aquiline than those of other Africans, and they have a fierce pride which does not take easily to slavery. Some of them are much lighter-skinned, too, like this one. But why should you think Toby and Nathan are runaways? They were born into my family's service. Their parents were very young when my grandfather bought them.'

The chill turned to ice. It seemed to Marianne that she was moving into a new and unfamiliar world. It had never occurred to her that Jason, a free American citizen, might regard slavery as something perfectly normal. She knew, of course, that the trade in 'black ivory', as Jolival had called it, illegal in England since 1807 and frowned on, although not actually banned, in France, still nourished in the American south where the country's wealth was largely built on black labour. She knew, too, that as a southerner, born in Charleston, Jason had been brought up among the negroes of his father's plantation. He had talked to her once, with some affection, about his black nurse, Deborah. But the problem which faced her now, in all its brutal realism, was one that she had not previously considered except in an abstract, almost disembodied light. Now she was looking at Jason Beaufort, slave-owner, discussing the buying and selling of human beings as dispassionately as if they were cattle. Obviously, this state of affairs seemed perfectly natural to him.