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stern with a beam of fifteen metres and a foremast as tall as the hull was long, and with a triangular mainsail the shape and colour of a snow-covered Alp 210 metres square.
    Liberty was frustrated that her mate Maya MacArthur was at the helm while she had been trapped into lunching in comfort and giving TV interviews instead of sailing her baby across the bay. But she had known for all of her twenty-five years that these little frustrations just came with the territory. And this race against Robin in
Katapult
was, after all, all about publicity.
    Although, at twenty-five, Liberty was a graduate student now, she still fitted in well with the UBC undergrads who had waited like fans after a rock concert outside the Royal Yacht Club while she did lunch and interviews. Except that she was taller, wiser and far more experienced than any of them. Together with her still-youthful potential, Liberty was blessed with an aristocratic beauty. Coupled with smoky-blue eyes and an extravagance of honey-coloured hair, this made it all too easy for her to get her face on the front of magazines as widely separated as
Vanity Fair
and
Forbes
in the States,
Elle
and
The Economist
in the UK – and
Yachting Monthly
all over the world. Not that Liberty ever stopped for long enough to think about herself as a celebrity, let alone a pin-up. To think much about herself at all, in fact. She was usually far too wrapped up in whatever she was doing. And in her time she seemed to have done quite a lot. Under normal circumstances, she hardly ever thought about her past, but the speeches she had just sat through had brought half-forgotten details into unusually sharp focus.
    Liberty’s earliest memories were a footloose mixture of maids and nannies, hotels and houses all over the world as she had followed her parents while they took over the reins of Greenbaum Oil, expanding it into Greenbaum Petrochemical and then Greenbaum International. An itinerant childhood centred on her grandparents’ rambling old mansion in Hyannis Port, because it was here that Grandpa Greenbaum had taught her to sail in the long, lazy summer vacations she had enjoyed with him. At the ripe age of five she had skippered her first vessel – a tiny skiff – out on the seeming vastness of Nantucket Sound.
    By the age of seven, the reed-thin, iron-willed Liberty was at Amberley, an exclusive little private school in the south of England. England, because her parents were now settled in Mayfair, where they oversaw the rapid expansion of the Greenbaum International into Europe and all points east. At Amberley she first met William and Mary, the Mariner twins, immediate friends though some years her junior. And, through William and Mary, she gained access to the Heritage Mariner facilities in Southampton where, over the years on the Solent, her grandfather’s lessons in distant Nantucket had been expanded exponentially as first Doc Weary then his daughter Florence had taken her up from dinghies through Lasers to keelboats and yachts. Single, double and multihull. From simple little inshore sloops to ocean-going schooners.
    By the time Liberty left Amberley for Hunter College High on E94th Street, New York, aged thirteen, she had crewed
Katapult
on her Fastnet trials around the Isle of Wight and risen from a pampered mascot to a valued team member. And she had sprouted from five feet in her socks to five foot eight with muscles as unyielding as her determination. Her progress had brought the Mariner and Greenbaum families and business empires together. She had also captained the school hockey team, the fencing team and the debating team during their most successful year in Amberley’s history. But she had had enough of pampered private school life. She wanted to try a new mix of academic excellence and broad-based acquaintance. Her mother had been unhappy, but her father talked her round. Something he could not have managed with Liberty herself.
    At Hunter College