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immediately, his blood seeping into the dirt of a Durban street as the rest of the crew stood over him in helpless silence. Knowing that his first love hadalways been the sea, they had taken his body back to the Katipo , wrapped him in a weighted sail and lowered him into the ocean the following day.
    So now they were a crew member short, but Rian wasn’t in a hurry to take anyone else on—waiting, Kitty suspected, until the wound left by Sharkey’s death was a little less raw. Even she missed him, and Sharkey had been the only one of the Katipo ’s crew she had never really taken to.
    They had been all over the world during the past three years, buying, selling, trading and doing a little bit of smuggling when the situation made the opportunity worthwhile. Rian never referred to it as smuggling, though. He liked to say that they were providing a service to those in need by furnishing at a competitive price certain items that various authorities frowned upon, such as alcohol, tobacco and firearms. It had long since ceased to bother Kitty, as Rian was always fairly circumspect regarding whom he supplied with what, and never did anything his conscience could not live with. If pioneers and settlers wanted to drink and smoke themselves into a stupor, then who was he to deny them? But if they insisted on actively forcing their rule onto the natives of the lands in which they had settled, then he felt morally obliged to supply those natives with the means to fight back. It was a matter of principle, he had said to Kitty on several occasions.
    Their life together had so far been all she could have hoped for. Despite Rian’s initial worries, she had never grown bored with being at sea, and spent much of her time learning the craft of sailing and helping out on deck whenever possible. And even if she had wanted to do those dull domestic things a wife was supposed to do, like cook for her husband, Pierre wouldn’t let her into the Katipo ’s tiny galley, unless he was specifically teaching her how to prepare a certain dish. And the rest of the crew, being true sailors, were very tidy and did all their own cleaning andwashing, so there was nothing for her there either. She read, and sewed and embroidered occasionally, but mostly she was up on deck, learning what she could about the world’s great, wide, beautiful oceans. And she loved Rian now more than ever, even though they still argued on a fairly regular basis. They fought above decks, below decks and in the mess-room, but never in bed, which was the one place where they put their differences of opinion aside and revelled in the passion, excitement and comfort of each other.
    The only thing that saddened her was that there had been no babies so far. She didn’t know why. Her courses had been late on four or five occasions over the past few years, but had always arrived eventually, albeit a little heavier than normal, and a little more painful. Sometimes she wondered, as she washed out her napkins in a bucket of sea water, whether she was rinsing away the beginnings of a new life, but there was no one to ask, and she wasn’t sure she really wanted to know.
    And she had to admit that, until a year or so ago, her desire to become a mother hadn’t exactly been all-consuming. But if a baby had come along she was sure she could have managed very happily. Lately, though, something inside her seemed to have changed and she found herself thinking more and more about what it would be like to have a child of her own. And sometimes the daydream became an actual yearning, an ache she felt somewhere deep in her belly and in her heart. It was as though her body were starting to clamour for something it needed, without even bothering to consult her consciousness.
    It also bothered her that Rian had been rather evasive on the rare occasions she had raised the matter, although she knew of course that his first wife and child had been lost at sea, and attributed his reticence to that. All he