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 pa.s.senger 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 pa.s.s 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 gla.s.s and airforcenue steel panels, Sherry and I armed ourselves with visitor's pa.s.ses 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 gloried in the name of Hogge and on her maiden voyage he piled the Dawn Light on to the bank at Diamond Harbour in Hooghly River. He was found by the court of inquiry to be under the influence of strong drink at the time and stripped of his command.

"Made a pig of himself," I observed to Sherry, and she groaned softly and roled her eyes at my wit.

The trail of misfortune continued. In 1840 while making pa.s.sage in the South Atlantic the elderly mate who had the dog watch let her come up, and away went her masts. Wallowing helpless with her top hamper dragging alongside, she was found -by a Dutchman. They cut away the wreckage and she was dragged into Table Bay. The Salvage Court made an award of 12,000 pounds.

In 1846 while half her crew were ash.o.r.e on the wild coast of New Guinea they were set upon by the cannibals and slaughtered to a man. Sixty-three of her crew died.

Then on the 23rd September, 1857, she sailed from Bombay, outward bound for St. Mary's the Cape of Good Hope, St. Helena and the Pool of London.

"The date." I placed my finger on the line. "This is the voyage that Goodchild talks of in the letter."

Sherry nodded without reply, I had learned in the last few minutes that she read faster than I did. I had to restrain her from turning each page when I was only three-quarters finished. Now her eyes darted across each line, her colour was up, a soft flush upon her pale cheeks, and she was biting her underlip.

"Come on," she urged me. "Hurry up!". and I had to hold her wrist.

The Dawn Light never reached St. Mary's - she disappeared. Three months later, she was considered lost at sea with all hands and the underwriters were ordered by Lloyd's to make good their a.s.surances to the owners and shippers.

The manifest of her cargo was impressive for such a small ship for she had loaded out of China and India a cargo that consisted of.

364 chests of tea 494 half-chests of tea 101 chests of tea 618 halfchests of tea 577 bales of silk 26 boxes various spices 72 tons on behalf of Messrs Dunbar and Green.

65 tons on behalf of Messrs Simpson, Wyllie & Livingstone.

82 tons on behalf of Messrs Elder and Company.

4 tons on behalf of Col. Sir Roger Goodchild.

6 tons on behalf of Major John Cotton.

2 tons on behalf of Lord Elton.

2 tons on behalf of Messrs Paulson and Company.

Wordlessly I laid my finger on the fourth item of the manifest, and again Sherry nodded, with her eyes shining like sapphires. The claim had been settled and the matter appeared closed until, four months later in April, 1858 the East Indianian Walmer Castle arrived in England, carrying -aboard the survivors from the Dawn Light.

There were six of them. The first mate, Andrew Barlow, boatswain's mate, and three topmast men. There was also young woman of twenty-two years, a Miss. Charlotte Cotton, who had been a pa.s.senger making the homeward pa.s.sage with her father, a Major in the 40th Foot.

The mate, Andrew Barlow, gave his evidence to the Court of Inquiry, and beneath the dry narrative and the ponderous questions and guarded replies lay an exciting and romantic story of the sea, an epic of shipwreck and survival.

As we read I saw the meagre sc.r.a.ps of knowledge I had sc.r.a.ped together fit neatly into the story.

Fourteen days out from Bombay, the Dawn Light was set upon by a furious storm out of the south-east. For seven days the savagery of the storm raged unabated, driving the ship before her. I could imagine it clearly, one of those great cyclones that had torn the roof from my own shack at Turtle Bay.

Once again Dawn Light was dismasted, no spars were left standing except the fore lower mast, mizzen lower mast, and bowsprit. The rest had carried away on the tempest and there was no opportunity to set up a jury mainmast or send yards aloft in the mountainous seas.

Thus when land was sighted to leeward, there was no chance that the ship might avoid her fate. A conspiracy of wind and current hurled her down into the throat of a funnel-shaped reef upon which the storm surf burst like the thunder of the heavens.

The ship struck and held, and Andrew Barlow was able with the help of twelve members of his crew to launch one of the boats. Four pa.s.sengers including Miss. Charlotte Cotton left the stricken ship with them, and Barlow, with an unlikely combination of good fortune and seamanship, was able to find a pa.s.sage through the wild sea and murderous reefs into the quieter waters of the insh.o.r.e channel.

Finally they ran the boat ash.o.r.e on the spindrift smothered beach of an island. Here the survivors huddled for four days while the cyclone blew itself out.

Barlow alone climbed to the summit of the southernmost of the treble peaks of the island. The description was completely clear. It was the Old Men and Gunfire Reef. There was no doubt of it. This then was how Jimmy North had known what he was looking for - the island with three peaks and a barrier of coral reef.

Barlow took bearings off the sea-battered hull of the Dawn Light as she lay in the jaws of the reef, swept by each successive wave. On the second day the ships hull began to break up, and while Barlow watched from the peak, the front half of her was carried up over the reef to disappear into a dark gaping hole in the coral. The stern fell back into the sea and was smashed to matchwood.

When at last the skies cleared and the wind dropped, Andrew Barlow discovered that his small party were all that survived from a ship's company of 149 souls. The others had perished in the wild sea.

To the west, low against the horizon, he described a low land ma.s.s which he hoped was the African mainland. He embarked his party in the ship's boat once more and they made the crossing of the insh.o.r.e channel. His hopes were fulfilled, it was Africa - but as always she was hostile and cruel.

The seventeen lost beings began a long and dangerous journey southwards, and three months later only Barlow, four seamen and. Miss. Charlotte Cotton reached the island port of Zanzibar. Fever, wild animals, wild men and misfortune had whittled away their numbers - and even those who survived were starved to gaunt living skeletons, yellowed with fever and riddled with dysentery from foul water.

The court of inquiry had highly commended Andrew Barlow, and the Han. Company had made him an award of E500 for meritorious service.

When I finished reading, I looked up at Sherry. She was watching me.

"Wow!" she said, and I also felt drained by the magnitude of the old drama.

"It all fits, Sherry," I said. "It's all there." "Yes," she said.

"We must see if they have the drawings here."

the Prints and Drawings Room was on the third floor and a quick search by an earnest a.s.sistant soon revealed the Dawn light in all her splendour.

She was a graceful three-masted ship with a long low profile. She had no crossjack or mizzen course. Instead she carried a large spanker and a full set of studding sails. The long p.o.o.p gave s.p.a.ce for several pa.s.senger cabins, and she carried her boats on top of her deckhouse aft.

She was heavily armed, with thirteen black-painted gunports a side, from which she could run out her long eighteen-pounder cannon to defend herself, in those hostile seas east of the Cape of Good Hope across which she plied to China and India.

"I need a drink," I said, and picked up the drawings of the Dawn Light. "I'll get them to make copies of these for us. "What for?" Sherry wanted to know.

-The a.s.sistant emerged from her lair amongst the piled trays of old prints and sucked in her cheeks at my request for copies.

"I'll have to charge you seventy-five pence," she tried to discourage me.

That's reasonable I said.

"And we won't have them ready until next week," she added inexorably.

"Oh dear," said I, and gave her the smile. "I did need them tomorrow afternoon."

The smile crushed her, she lost the air of purpose and tried to tuck her straying wisps of hair into the side frames of her gla.s.ses.

"Well, I'll see what I can do then," she relented.

That's very sweet of you, really it is and we left her looking confused, but pleased.

My sense of direction was returning and I found my way to El Vino's without trouble. The evemning flood of journalists from Fleet Street had not yet swamped it and we found a table at the back. I ordered two Vermouths and we saluted each other over the gla.s.ses.

"You know, Harry, Jimmy had a hundred schemes. His whole life was one great treasure hunt. Every week he had found, almost found, the location of a treasure ship from the Armada or a sunken Aztec city, a buccaneer wreck--? she shrugged. "I have a built-in resistance to believing any of it. But this one-" She sipped the wine.

"Let's go over what we have," I suggested. We know that Goodchild was very concerned that his agent receive five cases of luggage and put it into safe keeping. We know that he was going to ship it aboard Dawn Light and he sent advance notice, probably through a personal friend, the captain of the naval frigate Pandker."

"Good,"she agreed.

"We know that those cases were listed on the ship's manifest.

That the ship was lost, presumably with them still on board. We know the exact location of the wreck. We have had it confirmed by the ship's bell."

"Still good."

"We only do not know what those cases contained."

"Dirty socks,"she said.

"Four tons of dirty socks?" I asked, and her expression changed.

The weight of the cargo had not meant anything to her.

"Ah," I grinned at her, "it went over your head. I thought so.

You read so fast you only take in half of it She pulled a face at me.

"Four tons, my darling girl, is a great deal of something whatever it is."

"All right,"she agreed. "Figures don't mean much to me, I admit.

But it sounds a lot."