Reev.”
“Yes, of course.”
“I told you it had lettering on it, half eaten away by sand.
“Yes, go on.”
With the fork I scratched on the butter, using it as a slate.
“- w N L-.” I drew in - the lettering that had been chased into the bronze.
“That was it,” I said. “It didn’t mean anything then - but now-“Quickly I completed the letters, “DAwn LIGHT’, And she stared at it, nodding slowly as it fitted together. “We have to find out about this ship, the Dawn Light
“How?”
“It should be easy. We know she was an East Indiaman there must be records - Lloyd’s - the Board of Trade? She took the letter from my hand and read it again. “The gallant colonel’s luggage probably contained dirty socks and old shirts-“She pulled a face and handed it back to me.
“I’m short of socks,” I said, Cherry packed a case, and I was relieved to see that she had the rare virtue of being able to travel light. She went down to speak to the tenant farmer while I packed the bags into the Chrysler. He would keep an eye on the cottage during her absence, and when she came back she merely locked the kitchen door and climbed into the Chrysler beside me.
“Funny,” she said. “This feels like the beginning of a long journey.”
“I have my plans,” I warned and leered at her.
“Once I thought you looked wholesome,” she said sorrowfully, “but when you do that—2 “Sexy, isn’t it?” I agreed, and took the Chrysler up the lane.
I found a doctor in Haywards Heath. Sherry’s hand had now blistered badly, fat white bags of fluid hung from her fingers like sickly grapes. He drained them, and rebandaged the hand.
“Feels worse now,” she murmured as we drove on northwards, and she was pale and silent with the pain of it. I respected her silence, until we were into the suburbs of the city.
We had better find some place to stay,” I suggested. “Something comfortable and central.”
She looked across at me quizzically.
“It would probably be a lot more comfortable and cheaper if we got a double room somewhere, wouldn’t it?”
I felt something turn over in my belly, something warm and exciting. “Funny you should say that, I was just about to suggest the same.”
“I know you were,” she laughed for the first time in two hours.
“I saved you the trouble.” She shook her head, still laughing. “I’ll stay with my uncle. He’s got a spare room in his apartment in Pimlico, and there is a little pub around the corner. It’s friendly and clean - you could do worse.”
“I am crazy about your sense of humour,” I muttered.
She Phoned the uncle from a call box, while I waited in the car.
“It’s fixed up,” she told me, as she climbed into the passenger seat. “He’s at home.”
It was a ground-floor apartment in a quiet street near the river.
I carried Sherry’s bag for her as she led the way, -and rang the doorbell.
The man that Opened the door was small and lightly built. He was sixtyish and he wore a grey cardigan, darned at the elbows. His feet were thrust into carpet slippers. The homely attire was somehow incongruous, for his iron-grey hair was neatly cropped as was the short stiff moustache. His skin was clear and ruddy, but it was the fierce predatory glint of the eye and the military set of the shoulders that warned me. This man was aware.
“My uncle, Dan Wheeler.” Sherry stood aside to introduce us.
“Uncle Dan this is Harry Fletcher.”
The Young man you were telling me about,” he nodded abruptly. His hand was bony and dry and his gaze stung like nettles. “Come in. Come in, both of you.) “I won’t bother you, sir-” it was quite natural to call him that, an echo of my military training from so long ago, “I want to find digs myself. Uncle Dan and Sherry exchanged glances and I thought she shook her head almost imperceptibly, but I was looking beyond them into the apartment. It was monastic, completely masculine in the severity and economy of furniture and Ornaments-Somehow that room seemed to confirm my first impressions of the man. I wanted as little to do with him as I could arrange while seeing as much of Sherry as I possibly could.
“I’ll pick you up in an hour for lunch, Sherry,” and when she agreed I left them and returned to the Chrysler. The pub that Sherry recommended was the Windsor Arms, and when I mentioned the uncle’s name as she suggested, they put me in a quiet back room with a fine view of sky and television aerials. I lay on the bed clothed, and considered the North family and its relatives while I waited for the hour to run by. Of one thing only was I certain that Sherry North the Second was not going to pass me silently in the night. I was going to keep pretty close station upon her, and yet there was much about her that still puzzled me. I suspected that she was a more complicated person than her serene and lovely face suggested. It was going to be interesting finding out. I put the thought aside, sat up and reached for the telephone. I made three phone calls in the next twenty minutes. One to Lloyd’s Register of Shipping in Fenchurch Street, another to the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich and the last to the India Office Library in Blackfriars Road. I left the Chrysler in the private parking lot behind the pub, a car is more trouble than it is worth in London, and I walked back to the uncle’s apartment. Sherry answered the door herself, and she was ready to leave. I liked that about her, she was punctual.
“You didn’t like Uncle Dan, did you?” she challenged me over the lunch table and I ducked.
“I made some phone calls. The place that we are looking for is in Blackfriars Road. It’s in Westminster. The India Office Library. We will go down there after we’ve eaten.”
“He really is very sweet when you get to know him.”
“Look, darling girl, he’s your uncle. You keep him.”
“But why, Harry? It interests me.”
“What does he do for a living - army, navy?” She stared at me.
“How did you know that?”
“I can pick them out of a crowd.”
“He’s army, but retired - why should that make a difference?”
“What are you going to try ” I waved the menu at her. “If You take the roast beef, I’ll go for the duck,” and she accepted the decoy, and concentrated on the food.
The India Office Archives were housed in one of those square modern blocks of greenish glass and airforcenue steel panels, Sherry and I armed ourselves with visitor’s passes and signed the book. We made out way first to the Catalogue Room and thence to the marine section of the archives. These were Presided over by a neatly dressed but stern, faced lady with greying hair and steel-rimmed spectacles.
I handed her a requisition slip for the dossier which would include material on the Honourable Companys ship Dawn Light and she disappeared amongst the laden ceilings high tiers of steel shelving.
It was twenty minutes before she returned and placed a bulky dossier on the counter top before me.
“You’ll have to sign here,” she told me, indicating a column on the stiff cardboard folder. “Funny!” she remarked. “You are the second one who has asked for this file in less than a year.”
I stared at the signature J.A. Nard, in the last space. We were following closely in Jimmy’s footsteps, I thought, as I signed’RICHARD SMITH, below his name.
“You can use the desks over there, dear.” She pointed across the room. “Please try and keep the file tidy, won’t you, then.”
Sherry and I sat down at the desk shoulder to shoulder, and I untied the tape that secured the file.
The Dawn light was of the type known as the Black’wall frigate, characteristically built at the Blackwall yards in the early nineteenth century. The type was very similar to the naval frigates of that period.
She had been built at Sunderland for the Honourable English East India Company, and she was of 1330 net register tons. At the waterline her dimensions were 226 feet with a beam of twenty-six feet. Such a narrow beam would have made her very fast but uncomfortable in a stiff blow.
She had been launched in 1832, just the year before the Company lost its China monopoly, and this stroke of illfortune seemed to have dogged her whole career.
Also in the file were a whole series of reports of the proceedings of various courts of inquiry. Her first master
