Excerpt from Monsoon by Wilbur Smith, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

'I'm going to beat you until you bleed, and until you tell me what you were doing in the chapel when you should be in the scullery with your greasy pots and pans.' William was smiling easily, enjoying himself

'I didn't do no harm, sir.' Mary lowered her hands to plead with him, and could not lift them again fast enough to meet the next blow that caught her full in the face. She howled and the blood rushed into her swollen check to colour it flaming scarlet. 'Please. Please don't hurt me any more.' She buried her injured face in her hands and rolled over in the grass trying to get away from him, but her skirt was rucked up under her.

William smiled again as he saw that she was naked beneath it and his next blow was delivered with relish across the soft white skin of her buttocks. 'What were you stealing, bitch? What were you doing in there?' He hit her again, and left a scarlet weal across the back of her thighs- Her scream struck Tom just as cruelly as the crop had sliced into her flesh.

'Leave her, damn you, Billy,' he blurted out, struck by an overpowering sense of responsibility and pity for the tortured girl. Before he had even thought about what he was doing he was over the wall and racing to Mary's rescue.

William did not hear him coming. He was absorbed in the sharp, unexpected pleasure he was experiencing from punishing this little slut. The sight of the scarlet lines on her white skin, her flailing, naked limbs, her wild shrieks, the unwashed animal smell of her all roused him keenly. 'What were you up to?' he roared. 'Are you going to tell me, or shall I beat it out of you?' He could hardly restrain his laughter as he laid a vivid scarlet stripe across her bare shoulders and watched the muscles beneath the soft skin spasm in agony.

Tom crashed into him from behind. He was a strapping lad for his age, not much shorter in height or less in weight than his older brother, and he was strengthened by his outrage and his hatred, by the injustice and cruelty of what he had watched, and by the memory of a thousand hurts and insult he and his brothers had suffered at Black Billy's hands. And he had the advantage this time of complete surprise.

He struck William in the small of the back, just as he was balanced on one leg, in the act of kicking the girl into a better position to receive the next blow from the riding-crop. He was flung forward with such force that he tripped over his victim and went sprawling, rolled over once and crashed head first into the bole of one of the apple trees. He lay there stunned

Tom bent down and yanked the trembling, blubbering girl to her feet. 'Run!' he told her. 'As fast as you can!' He gave her a push. Mary needed no urging. She went off down the path, still weeping and howling, and Tom turned back to face the wrath of his brother.

William sat up in the grass. He was not yet certain who or what had knocked him down. He touched his scalp, pushing two fingers into the dark wavy hair, and brought them out smeared with blood from the small cut where he had hit the tree. Then he shook his head and stood up. He looked at Tom. 'You!' he said softly, almost pleasantly. 'I should have known you'd be at the bottom of this devilry.'

'She's done nothing.' Tom was still too buoyed up by his anger to regret his impulse. 'You might have wounded her sorely.'

'Yes,' William agreed. 'That was my purpose. She deserved it well enough.' He stooped and picked up the crop. 'But now she's gone, it's you I shall wound sorely, and take the deepest pleasure in doing my duty.'

He cut left and right with the weighted crop, which made a menacing hum in the air. 'Now tell me, little brother, what it was that you and that little whore were playing at? Was it something foul and dirty that our father should know about? Tell me now, before I have to whip it out of you.'

'I'll see you in hell first.' This was one of their father's favourite expressions, but despite his defiance Tom was bitterly regretting the chivalrous impulse that had propelled him into this confrontation. Now that he had lost the element of surprise he knew himself hopelessly out-matched. His elder brother's skills were not confined to his books. At Cambridge he had wrestled for King's College, and all-in wrestling was a sport without rules, except that the use of deadly weapons was frowned upon. At the fair in Exmouth last spring Tom had seen William throw and pin the local champion, a great ox of a man, after kicking and punching him half out of his mind.

Reprinted from Monsoon by Wilbur Smith, a St Martin's Press publication, by permission of St Martin's Press. © 1999 by Wilbur Smith