she flared, then as swiftly veiled her anger and smiled again the smile that always softened his heart. “But I think of you also.” She crossed to stand beside his chair, and placed her hand on his shoulder. “If you come with us, Father, the girls and I will go.”
“I cannot, Becky. My duty is here. I am Her Majesty’s consul general. I have a sacred trust. My place is here in Khartoum.”
“Then so is mine,” she said simply, and stroked his head. His hair was still thick and springing under her fingers, but shot through with more silver than sable. He was a handsome man, and she often brushed his hair and trimmed and curled his moustache for him, proudly as her mother had once done.
He sighed and gathered himself to protest further, but at that moment a shrill chorus of childish shrieks rang through the open window. They stiffened. They knew those voices, and they struck at both their hearts. Rebecca started across the room, and David sprang up from his desk. Then they relaxed as the cries came again and they recognized the tone as excitement, not terror.
“They are in the watch tower,” said Rebecca.
“They are not allowed up there,” exclaimed David.
“There are many places where they are not allowed,” Rebecca agreed, ‘and those are where you can usually find them.” She led the way to the door and out into the stone-flagged passage. At the far end a circular staircase wound up the interior of the turret. Rebecca lifted her petticoats and ran up the steps, nimble and sure-footed, her father following more sedately. She came out into the blazing sunlight on the upper balcony of the turret.
The twins were dancing perilously close to the low parapet. Rebecca seized one in each hand and drew them back. She looked down from the height of the consular palace. The minarets and rooftops of Khartoum were spread below. Both branches of the Nile were in full view for miles in each direction.
Saffron tried to pull her arm out of Rebecca’s grip. “The Ibisl’ she yelled. “Look! The this is coming.” She was the taller, darker twin. Wild and headstrong as a boy.
“The Intrepid this,” Amber piped up. She was dainty and fair, with a melodious timbre to her voice even when she was excited. “It’s Ryder in the Intrepid this.”
“Mr. Ryder Courtney, to you,” Rebecca corrected her. “You must never call grown-ups by their Christian names. I don’t want to have to tell you that again.” But neither child took the reprimand to heart. All three stared eagerly up the White Nile at the pretty white steamboat coming down on the current.
“It looks like it’s made of icing sugar,” said Amber, the beauty of the family, with angelic features, a pert little nose and huge blue eyes.
“You say that every time she comes,” Saffron remarked, without rancour. She was Amber’s foil: eyes the colour of smoked honey, tiny freckles highlighting her high cheekbones and a wide, laughing mouth. Saffron looked up at Rebecca with a wicked glint in those honey eyes. “Ryder is your beau, isn’t he?” “Beau’ was the latest addition to her vocabulary, and as she applied it solely to Ryder Courtney, Rebecca found it pretentious and oddly infuriating.
“He is not!” Rebecca responded loftily, to hide her annoyance. “And don’t be saucy, Miss Smarty Breeches.”
“He’s bringing tons of food!” Saffron pointed at the string of four capacious flat-bottomed barges that the this was towing.
Rebecca released the twins’ arms and shaded her eyes with both hands against the glare. She saw that Saffron was right. At least two of the barges were piled high with sacks of dhurra, the staple grain of the Sudan. The other two were filled with an assorted cargo, for Ryder was one of the most prosperous traders on the two rivers. His trading stations were strung out at intervals of a hundred miles or so along the banks of both Niles, from the confluence of the Atbara river in the north to Gondokoro and far Equatoria in the south, then eastwards from Khartoum along the Blue Nile into the highlands of Abyssinia.
Just then David stepped out on to the balcony. “Thank the good Lord he has come,” he said softly. “This is the last chance for you to escape. Courtney will be able to take you and hundreds of our refugees downriver, out of the Mahdi’s evil clutches.”
As he spoke they heard a single cannon shot from across the White Nile. They all turned quickly and saw gunsmoke spurting from one of the Dervish Krupps guns on the far bank. A moment later a geyser of spray rose from the surface of the river a hundred yards ahead of the approaching steamer. The foam was tinged yellow with the lyddite of the bursting shell.
Rebecca clapped her hand over her mouth to stifle a cry of alarm, and David remarked drily, “Let’s pray their aim is up to the usual standard.”
One after another the other guns of the Dervish batteries burst into a long, rolling volley, and the waters around the little boat leapt and boiled with bursting shells. Shrapnel whipped the river surface like tropical rain.
Then all the great drums of the Mahdi’s army thundered out in full-throated challenge and the ombeya trumpets blared. From among the mud buildings, horsemen and camel riders swarmed out and galloped along the bank, keeping pace with the this.
Rebecca ran to her father’s long brass telescope, which always stood on its tripod at the far end of the parapet, pointing across the river at the enemy citadel. She stood on tiptoe to reach the eyepiece and quickly focused the lens. She swept it over the swarming Dervish cavalry, who were half obscured in the red clouds of dust thrown up by their racing mounts. They appeared so close that she could see the expressions on their fierce dark faces, could almost read the oaths and threats they mouthed, and hear their terrible war cry: “Allah Akbar! There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet.”
These riders were the Ansar, the Helpers, the Mahdi’s elite bodyguard. They all wore the jibba, the patched robes which symbolized the rags that had been the only garb available to them at the beginning of this jihad against the godless, the unbelievers, the infidels. Armed only with spears and rocks the Ansar had, in the past six months, destroyed three armies of the infidels and slaughtered their soldiers to the man. Now they held Khartoum in siege and gloried in their patched robes, the badge of their indomitable courage and their faith in Allah and His Mahdi, the Expected One. As they rode they brandished their double-handed swords and fired the Martini-Henry carbines they had captured from their defeated enemies.
During the months of the siege Rebecca had seen this warlike display many times, so she swung the lens off them and turned it out across the river, traversing the forest of shell splashes and leaping foam until the open bridge of the steamboat sprang into sharp focus. The familiar figure of Ryder Courtney leant on the rail of his bridge, regarding the antics of the men who were trying to kill him with faint amusement. As she watched him, he straightened and removed the long black cheroot from between his lips. He said something to his helmsman, who obediently spun the wheel and the long wake of the this began to curl in towards the Khartoum bank of the river.
Despite Saffron’s teasing Rebecca felt no love pang at the sight of him. Then she smiled inwardly: I doubt I would recognize it anyway. She considered herself immune to such mundane emotions. Nevertheless she experienced a twinge of admiration for Ryder’s composure in the midst of such danger, followed almost immediately by the warming glow of friendship. “Well, there is no harm in admitting that we are friends,” she reassured herself, and felt quick concern for his safety. “Please, God, keep Ryder safe in the eye of the storm,” she whispered, and God seemed to be listening.
As she watched, a steel shard of shrapnel punched a jagged hole in the funnel just above Ryder’s head, and black boiler smoke spurted out of it. He did not glance round but returned the cheroot to his lips and exhaled a long stream of grey tobacco smoke that was whipped away on the wind. He wore a rather grubby white shirt, open at the throat, sleeves rolled high. With one thumb he tipped his wide-brimmed hat of plaited palm fronds to the back of his head. At a cursory glance, he gave the impression of being stockily built, but this was an illusion fostered by the breadth and set of his shoulders and the girth of his upper arms, muscled by heavy work. His narrow waist and the manner in which he towered over the Arab helmsman at his side gave it the lie.
David had taken the hands of his younger daughters to restrain them, and leant over the parapet to engage in a shouted conversation with someone in the courtyard of the consular palace below.
“My dear General, do you think you might prevail on your gunners to return fire and take their attention off Mr. Courtney’s boat?” His tone was deferential.
Rebecca glanced down and saw that her father was speaking to the commanding officer of the Egyptian garrison defending the city. General “Chinese’ Gordon was a hero of the Empire, the victor of wars in every part of
