I screamed. The shepherd screamed. His sheep screamed (or rather bleated), and ran away up the hill. The man stumbled back and fell on his butt.

‘What is happening here?’ Mr Ambrose appeared behind me, gun raised, ready to shoot. At the sight of the gun, the shepherd stopped screaming, and his eyes widened to the size of saucers.

‘No, don’t! Don’t shoot!’ I grabbed Mr Ambrose’s arm, pointing it away from the man. Or…no. Not a man. He was really only just a boy, I realised as I studied his face more closely.

Karim appeared beside Mr Ambrose, his gun drawn as well.

‘Put that away, will you?’ I hissed. ‘You’re frightening the poor boy.’

Karim ignored me.

‘What is he doing here, Sahib?’ he demanded, jerking his firearm towards the frozen figure of the shepherd boy. ‘How did he get up here with those beasts?’

‘I have no idea,’ Mr Ambrose said coldly. ‘But I intend to find out!’

He snapped a few brief phrases in Portuguese. The boy stared at him uncomprehendingly. So Mr Ambrose tried again, this time in Spanish. This time, the boy’s eyes lit up and he started to chatter. I was pretty fluent in Portuguese, by now, but my Spanish was still restricted to words like ‘bastard’ and ‘donkey’s arse’. I didn’t understand a word of what was going on. But by the look in Mr Ambrose’s eyes I could tell it wasn’t going the way he expected. Not at all.

Karim didn’t look too pleased, either. ‘What in the name of…’ He uttered a few unpronounceable words in his mother tongue. ‘What is the brat rambling on about, Sahib? I thought…’

‘Yes.’ Mr Ambrose’s voice was hard as steel. ‘So did I.’

‘She said…’

‘Yes. She did.’

Slowly, very slowly, Mr Rikkard Ambrose turned towards me, the icy cold of the entire arctic wasteland gathered in his deep, dark eyes.

Uh-oh…

‘Can you explain something to me, Mr Linton?’

His voice was deceptively calm.

‘Um…I’ll try to. If I can.’

‘How very kind of you. Well, then, explain this to me: this boy says there is a perfectly good, easy path down the mountain on the other side. So easy to use, in fact, that the people in the neighbourhood often drive their sheep up here to let them graze. He saw us climbing up the rock cliff and was quite surprised we would risk falling to our deaths when it is so perfectly easy to get up here.’

‘Oh.’

‘Oh indeed, Mr Linton. And that’s not all. Do you know what he also told me?’

‘Not really, no.’

‘He told me that to the west, in the direction of his village, it is only a few miles to the ocean. Imagine that, Mr Linton. We are only a few miles away from the sea. It makes one wonder why a certain someone would send us hacking through hundreds of miles of jungle, including a deadly warzone.’

I cleared my throat. ‘The directions in the manuscript didn’t say anything about coming from the west coast.’

‘And were these instructions by any chance old enough to have been written before the passage to the west coast of this continent around its southern tip was discovered?’

I cleared my throat again. ‘Err…they might be.’

‘Ah. And you didn’t see fit to mention this fact because…?’

‘I, um…might not have noticed.’

His calm façade vanished. Fiery ice blazed in his eyes. He took a step towards me, a muscle in his jaw twitching.

‘You…you…’ He was trying to come up with a bad enough word to describe me. I was about to help out (after all, I had learned quite a lot of interesting swear words on this journey), but he found one without my help. ‘You…female! You sent us all this way through the jungle for nothing?’

And suddenly, inexplicably, a grin tugged at the corners of my mouth. I probably should have been scared. I mean, he was a big man and pretty near to the edge, apparently. But all I could do was smirk.

‘Really, Sir? Nothing?’

My hand reached out, gently caressing his face, then moving over his chest and down, down, down. He jerked, and stiffened.

‘Well…’ Suddenly, his voice, although still cold, sounded a bit strained. ‘Maybe “nothing” was the wrong word.’

‘That’s what I thought, too. So…how about we start getting the gold off this bloody mountain, now?’

‘Adequate idea.’

‘And then, maybe, we can do a bit more of the “nothing” we did in the jungle.’

‘Indeed. Yes.’

*~*~**~*~*

Getting the gold down the mountain wasn’t difficult at all, it turned out - not once we had got the help of the villagers. They weren’t the least bit interested in the heaps of cursed yellow metal lying around up in the old ghost city. But they were interested in sheep. Very interested indeed. Once Mr Ambrose had promised to double their herds, they were more than willing to help us cart the stuff down the mountain, pack it up, and bring it into the next city, where Mr Ambrose had both an agent and several of his fleet of merchant ships.

At first, when Mr Ambrose stormed into the captain’s cabin and demanded that he throw overboard his cargo of salted fish, the man was less than willing. However, once he had understood that this tall, dark, cold individual in front of him was the man who owned the company that owned the company that owned the company that owned his arse, and if he didn’t do as he was told he was the one who was going to be thrown overboard, he hastened to comply.

From then on, it all went so fast I felt slightly dizzy. The treasure was labelled ‘salt fish’, and snuck onto the ship in the middle of the night. When I suggested to Mr Ambrose that we should perhaps report to the authorities that we were removing historic artifacts from their soil, he gave me a look that shut me up in a flash.

We set sail that very same night. My heart was pounding as we drifted out of the harbour. I thought that any moment a hue and cry would go up, and the Navy would be after us, trying to recapture stolen national treasures. But nothing of the sort happened. We sailed out into the darkness with nothing but the whisper of the wind as company, and soon were out on the open sea, bound for England. Bound for home.

The days passed. I’m not going to waste time describing another sea voyage, because one is pretty much like another. And besides, I’ve been reliably informed that knowledge is power is time is money. I wouldn’t want to waste any of the above, now, would I?

‘Land ahoy!’

The call from the top of the mast brought me out of my cabin. And indeed, there it was: just a faint white line, as yet, but I could already recognize the cliffs of Dover. My heart sped up, and I glanced at Mr Ambrose, who stood next to me at the railing, like a stone monument to masculinity.

‘So…we’re back home.’

‘Indeed.’

‘Back in England.’ Where it is not usual to run around half naked covered in mud all the time.

‘Indeed.’

‘Are you happy to be back?’

Silence.

Well, I suppose it was a stupid question. In order to be happy to be back, you would first have to know what it means to be happy.

‘When you’re back in London, are you going to publish your discovery? Are you going to write about our adventure? I’m sure the Royal Geographical Society would be interested.’

He turned his head an inch or so in my direction, inquiringly. ‘What profit would that bring?’

‘Fame! Publicity! Scholarly recognition!’

‘How much is that in pounds sterling?’

‘Hrumph.’

‘Besides, I doubt the government back in South America would agree with my personal “finders keepers” philosophy.’

Well, he was probably right about that.

My eyes were drawn back to the Cliffs of Dover, and all thought of discoveries and adventures vanished from my mind. This was England. I would have bigger things to worry about than whether or not my name appeared in the journals of the Royal Geographical Society. Glancing sideways at Mr Ambrose, I tried to detect one crack in his armour, one little hint that he wasn’t as perfectly cool and composed as he appeared to be. There was nothing.

He hadn’t touched me once on the journey back from South America. He hadn’t even tried. True, a stifling little cabin that smelled of salted fish wasn’t exactly an environment conducive to violent romantic passion, but still…I had expected at least something to happen. At the very least, I had expected him to say something. Instead, all I had got was…

Can you guess?

Yep. Silence.

Really very extraordinarily silent silence. How surprising.

I wondered what would happen if I were suddenly to grab him by the ears and plant a big, fat, fiery kiss on him. And then I wondered why I was wondering these things. I was a feminist, bloody hell! I should have got this annoying habit of plastering my lips to those of my chauvinistic employer out of my system by now! Even if I wanted anything to do with men - which I most definitely absolutely and totally did not, no, never, thank you very much for not bothering me with it and going to hell right now! - he and I were about as well-suited to each other as a Siberian tiger and a firebird!

And yet, and yet…

I glanced at Mr Ambrose again, and as I did, something contracted around my heart, squeezing painfully.

Oh no.

My tastes leaned more towards adventure novels. But I had read enough romances to know what that feeling meant.

There it went again! One look at Mr Ambrose, one painful squeeze around my heart.

Oh, no, no, no, never in a thousand million billion years! It was simply impossible! And even if it were possible, it was completely and utterly intolerable! I would rather drown myself in the Thames or go into exile in the Sahara than admit that I might actually be…that I might feel…for him? No! No, no, and triple no!

My hand clenched around the railing. I stared ferociously forward, towards the white Cliffs of Dover, trying to make them explode with the force of my glare alone. It didn’t work.

No! This can’t be happening! This can’t be happening! This can’t be hap-

Something touched my hand, and my thoughts fizzled out like a wet fuse. My eyes darted down, and with horror I watched Mr Rikkard Ambrose’s hand closing over mine.

He was holding my hand.

He was holding my hand.

He was holding my hand.

And what was worse, I didn’t even try to slap him for it! I didn’t even want to, because it felt…good.

My mind flashed back to that day in the Chapel Royal. He had held my hand while the minister pronounced the wedding vows.

Not yours! I thought, fiercely. They weren’t your wedding vows!

No. Not yet.

It took me a few moments, but then I realised: hang on, what had that traitorous mind of mine just thought? Not yet? As if…as if this might lie in my future?

My ears started to burn. I felt sure that if Mr Ambrose looked my way, he would be able to read every single little stupid thought on my stupid face. But he didn’t look my way. He just stared straight ahead, and I, too, stared straight ahead. But our hands didn’t part.

*~*~**~*~*

I suppose you’d think there was a big fuss when I suddenly returned home after a few months of mysterious absence, and I suppose, in a way, there was. If she could have, my aunt would have had me up in front of a hanging judge for disappearing just when she had found a nobleman to marry me off to. Since not marrying rich people was fortunately not a hanging offence, she instead dragged me into my uncle’s study, so he could visit his worst punishments on me.

And what did my uncle do?

Well, our conversation went something like this:

Uncle Bufford (raising his eyebrows threateningly): ‘Where have you been, girl?’

Me (smiling innocently): ‘Busy.’

Uncle Bufford: ‘Busy? What is that supposed to mean?’

Me: ‘It means I earned some money.’

Uncle Bufford: ‘Earned money? How?’

Me: ‘If I give you ten per cent of it, will you not ask that again and forget about this whole business?’

Uncle Bufford: ‘You think you can bribe me, girl?’

Me: ‘All right, fifteen per cent.’

Uncle Bufford: ‘Twenty-five, at least!’

Me: ‘Twenty, and that’s my last offer.’

Uncle Bufford: ‘Done.’

Me: ‘Let’s shake on it.’ (shaking hands)

Uncle Bufford: ‘Where did you learn to negotiate like that?’

Me: ‘I’m learning from the best, trust me.’

Uncle Bufford: ‘Good girl! And now get out of here, I have work to do.’

You know what? I really love my uncle.

My sister Ella wasn’t quite so easy to deal with. Since she actually (for some strange reason) genuinely cared for me, a cut of my monthly payment probably wouldn’t be the right approach to soothe her tears. Instead I tried a mixture of pats on the back and ‘there, there’s’. It seemed to work quite well. I decided that next time I went on a dangerous journey into the South American jungle, I should probably warn her beforehand.

Soon, my little sister was so overtaken by joy that I was not dead in a ditch somewhere that she had forgiven me for my disappearance. Normal home life resumed.

At work, too, the usual office routine was back in place. Mr Ambrose pelted me with little notes demanding for me to get this and note down that, and I ran around doing my best to soothe his tyrannical disposition. Only one thing was a little different: in my absence, a whole mountain of correspondence had accumulated. I was a bit puzzled as to why, at first - after all, we hadn’t been gone that long - until I started to dig through the pile and came across the pink letters.

Dozens upon dozens were heaped onto my desk - maybe even hundreds! With a sigh, I started to deposit them in my full-to-bursting bottom drawer. Three days later, I was still busy trying to find a place to stash the last of them so Mr Ambrose would think I had destroyed them all. I was just contemplating whether I could nail some of them to the underside of my desk when a brisk knock came from the door.

‘Y-’ I began. That was about all I got out of my intended ‘Yes, who is this?’ before the door burst open and a young woman strode into the room as if she owned the place (and the rest of the world besides).

My mouth dropped open.

She was a girl, of course, so she had curves and long hair, but apart from that…the determined, chiselled jaw, the perfect face, the dark, sea-coloured eyes with the look inside them that could freeze your butt off at fifty paces…

I swallowed, hard.

She was young, probably a bit younger than me, and her face was still too round and childlike for the resemblance to be perfect, but no matter. I knew. I just knew.

‘Where is he?’ the girl demanded, eyes blazing.

Not for one moment did I doubt to whom she was referring. Unable to manage speech, I lifted one slightly trembling hand and pointed to the connecting door to Mr Ambrose’s office, which he had (very unwisely, as I currently believed) left unlocked.

‘All right.’ The girl cracked her knuckles. I am not joking. She actually cracked her knuckles. Her gaze fell on the stack of unanswered pink letters on my desk. Her eyes flashed with anger, and then darted to the connecting door. ‘You stay here and don’t interrupt! I have a few things to say to this brother of mine!’

And, marching to the door, she tore it open and marched inside. It slammed shut behind her like a thunderbolt.

This time, unlike with his mother, I didn’t try to listen in. But that was only because this time, unlike with his mother, the whole conversation was perfectly audible through the thick stone walls. If you could call something a ‘conversation’ that rattled the windows and probably shook the building to its foundations. I winced, for the first time in my life feeling genuinely sorry for Mr Rikkard Ambrose. When the girl stormed out of the office half an hour later, I had stuffed my fingers in my ears so as not to go deaf from the noise.

She stopped at the door to the hallway and turned around one last time. ‘If you’re not there by the end of the month, I’ll come and drag you there by the ears!’ she shouted. ‘Mother is hurting! Enough is enough!’

With that, she stormed out into the hallway and slammed the door behind her.

Silence descended over the office.

It’s funny, really. In my time with Mr Ambrose I’d had plenty of experience with it, but still, I had never realised until now what a wonderful thing silence could be. Cautiously, I removed my fingers from my ears.

Even more cautiously, I glanced at the half-open door to Mr Ambrose’s office. It was quiet as the grave in there. Maybe quite literally. I wouldn’t put much past that little raven-haired vixen, including blackmail and manslaughter.

But then, to my infinite relief, I heard footsteps approaching from inside the other office. Slowly, the door creaked open, and there he stood: Mr Rikkard Ambrose, looking as cool and controlled as ever, not betraying a hint of the fact that he was just ravaged by a mad fury from hell. Except…well, his left little finger was twitching. Fast.

‘Mr Linton?’

‘Yes, Sir?’

‘Pack your bags. It appears we are going on another trip.’

‘Indeed, Sir?’

‘Yes, indeed.’ His eyes as he looked at me were as deep, dark and unfathomable as the farthest depths of the ocean. ‘It is time I pay a visit to my family.’

THE END