CHAPTER ONE

TABLE BAY

Wednesday, 4th August 1688

White sails against a grey sky. Salt air and wind, the slap of water against the hull of the ship. Singing in the rigging and the snap of the red, white and blue flag of the United Provinces atop the three masts and prow. Two o’clock in the afternoon on the fourth day of August in the year 1688. Winter in the south, a time of storms and rough seas. Gulls shrieking overhead to guide the China into Table Bay.

Suzanne Joubert stood with both hands on the taffrail, trying to imagine how it would be to feel the earth beneath her feet. No longer the sway of the ship, the ever-changing vastness of the ocean, but solid, unshifting ground. How it would feel to no longer be confined to a few hundred feet of deck or the squalid sleeping quarters down below. The seasoned mariners, who’d sailed this route before, warned her she would feel land-sick at first, as if it was the world that could not stay still. She hoped she would be all right, but she gripped the rail more tightly all the same.

After the excited chatter when the coast of Africa had first been sighted, the passengers were mostly silent now. In a ship of more than three hundred souls, seafarers and soldiers, there were twenty-eight passengers, including Suzanne and her grandmother. This was the place they were to learn to call home, as different from the villages of Provence or the canals of Amsterdam as could be. A ‘wild and desolate land’, Jan van Riebeeck, the first commander of the Cape, had called it in his writings.

Suzanne thought it majestic: the sheer scale and the size of the vista coming into view, the endless sky and the dwellings dotted on the plain as tiny as children’s toys in the nursery. Rocks to one side, sandy beaches to the other. Most of all, the mountains. Though the ship’s cook had described it, Suzanne had still gasped when Table Mountain came into view and she saw the famous floating white drape of cloud, crisp like a laundered linen tablecloth, lying across it. Beside it, she could make out the summit said to resemble a lion sleeping and the ragged outline of the formation known as Devil’s Peak.

‘Laat het anker zakken.’ Drop anchor.

Suzanne registered the shudder as the chain rattled, then began to grind and stutter as it started to unwind. Slowly at first, then fast and faster as it gathered momentum under its own weight, until the huge metal hook found the sea bed. She felt a lurch, then a coming-to-rest as the anchor bumped along the bottom. Finally, a sharp jolt when it found purchase.

The China rocked on its chain. Suzanne heard the whistle confirming the ship was secure and the shouted orders and sounds of the crew clambering up the masts to furl the sails. Still, she did not turn round. She kept her gaze fixed upon the shore, as if it might disappear if she looked away.

The China gave a gun salute, covering the deck in a cloud of white smoke. Foreign ships were obliged to discharge all their weapons on entering harbour but, for a VOC ship coming into a VOC harbour, a single shot would suffice. An answering salute came from the shore, and the crew cheered. Even Captain van Groll was smiling.

At last Suzanne felt she could breathe more easily. The voyage was over and, with it, all the heartbreak and the wonder, the friendships and the moments of joy. The stories of exile and despair, of experience and hope. She’d seen a wedding on board and a birth, the black sky scattered silver with stars below the Equator. The solitude of the night watch.

She thought of the waves, white-crested like frosted hills in winter, the shifting colours of green and blue; leaping silver-flanked sword-fish and dolphins racing alongside; sea dogs, and translucent jellyfish hovering below the surface of the water; ugly creatures with gaping mouths. Suzanne had never before seen such sights outside the pages of a book or the painted surface of a seafarer’s globe.

Perhaps here, in the Cape, she would learn to feel joy again?

Her feeling of relief faded as the darker events of the voyage came back to her. Suzanne blinked away the memory of the bodies wrapped in dirty shrouds – refugees, sailors and soldiers, children too – twenty dead in all, each thrown overboard in tarpaulins weighted with stones:

‘Een, twee, drie, in Godsnaam . . .’ One, two, three, in the name of God.

She remembered the stench below deck, the lack of fresh food and the crust of salt upon their skin. The storms, with the ship rearing and plunging through the rutted depths until it seemed as if the China would crack in two. Waves as high as a house. Later, the eerie times when they were becalmed or suffocated by burning red sands blown from the coast of West Africa. She could still hear the silent weeping of the Dutch orphan girls sent to be married to settlers they had never met and see the despair of the young Frenchmen when they remembered the villages they would never see again: La Motte d’Aigues; Saint-Martin-de-la-Brasque; Cabrières d’Aigues. Mothers, fathers, cousins, brothers, wives, sisters, all praying they would find kindness and tolerance in this distant Christian corner of the world. A place to lay their heads without fear of persecution.

Friends, now.

Suzanne was not like them, despite the empathy she felt for all they had lost. She felt exhilaration, not dread. Although she and her grandmother, Florence, had also been forced to flee their home in La Rochelle, they were the last remaining members of one of the great Huguenot families of France. They had bought passage on a ship sailing from the Île de Ré to Nantes, then travelled overland to Chartres, avoiding the King’s soldiers hunting Huguenots for sport, making it to Reims and into the Spanish Netherlands, and on until they were safe.

Once in Amsterdam, the elegant van Raay house in Warmoesstraat had been waiting for them. They had shelter and they were safe. They might have stayed – perhaps they should have stayed – except Suzanne knew that she would never have been able to settle. She was a traveller, not a refugee. She had boarded the China with a heart full of anger, and a mission.

Besides, wasn’t the sea in her blood?

Suzanne had grown up hearing stories about her cousin, Louise Reydon-Joubert, a woman who had lived and died many years before she was born. Louise had bequeathed her house in La Rochelle to her uncle – Florence’s father – as well as a wine business in which she had an interest and Suzanne herself had been born in the elegant building in the rue des Gentilshommes.

During the winter in Amsterdam, trying to bury the memories of what had happened in La Rochelle, Suzanne had found Louise’s prison diary and read her account of being put on trial for murder. After that, thoughts of Louise had become Suzanne’s constant companion in her fractured life. She had scoured the records from the old van Raay shipping offices now archived in the library in Warmoesstraat and found the evidence of Louise’s ownership of a fluyt, a trading ship, called the Old Moon. Even now, such a thing would be extraordinary, but then? A woman who lived on her own terms in a man’s world, a woman of courage and principle. A woman who had turned pirate, a she-captain, hunting down slaver ships on the high seas.

A history written in blood and betrayal.

The Old Moon had left Gran Canaria bound for the Cape of Good Hope in October 1621. Louise’s friend, Gilles Barenton – rumoured to be her husband – was on board, as was Louise’s half-brother, a man by the name of Phillipe Vidal. They had dropped anchor in Table Bay seven months later. That much was on record. But neither Louise herself – nor her two companions – had ever been heard of again.

No word, no story, no grave.

The Old Moon had been sailed back to Amsterdam by Louise’s first lieutenant, on her instruction, but the Englishman maintained to his dying day that he had no idea where his lady-captain had been headed nor why she had forsaken the ship she loved. It was he who’d handed the prison diary into the keeping of Louise’s elderly aunt, Alis, in Warmoesstraat sixty-five years ago. The diary Suzanne carried with her now.

Her hand slipped to her leather satchel containing not only the diary, but also a Tarot card, wrapped in a piece of threadbare white linen. It was a constant reminder of what she had come to do. She was on a quest, as much as Achilles or Hercules ever had been.

‘Next!’

Suzanne jolted back to the present, as the ship’s first officer called out the names of the passengers to be taken ashore in the rowing boats. She hoisted her satchel higher across her shoulder, then moved to stand beside her grandmother.

‘Remember, petite,’ Florence murmured, ‘you must try to speak Dutch now.’

‘I know.’

She stood patiently in line, waiting while her grandmother was helped down into the boat. Despite the dull day, Suzanne’s copper hair shone bright. Broad and powerful in stature, her colouring linked her to the Dutch side of the family. Only her unusual eyes, one blue and one brown, spoke to generations of Joubert women whom she resembled in spirit – Minou, Marta, Louise, Florence – adventurers, all.

‘Suzanne Joubert?’

‘Hier ben ik,’ she replied clearly. I’m here.

Holding her portmanteau tight, Suzanne climbed down into the boat and settled herself on the wooden bench beside her grandmother. She took a deep breath, feeling her nerves singing with excitement. Apprehension, too. The sea was choppy, but she was accustomed to the roll and swell of the waves.

As the oarsmen started to row, Suzanne smiled.

‘J’arrive,’ she muttered under her breath, as the gulls continued to screech above their heads. ‘I’m coming. I’m coming to find you.’