by Eli Brown
I was heartened, this afternoon, to hear the bosun call for “A Bible in every hand!” I should have guessed that, upon this ship, “Bibles” refer to the large white stones they use to scrub the decks. These little disappointments wear at me more than they should.
As the men chased my boots about the deck with their scrubbing, I overheard them talking again, with fear in their voices, about the corsair ship La Colette.
“She’s fast enough to creep up and burn us to the waterline at dawn.”
It was then that it struck me. “Who is the captain of La Colette?” I asked.
“The devil Laroche,” was the answer.
Could it be the same Laroche whose accent made me nostalgic for my younger days in France? It had to be.
“Hah! I know the man!” I blurted, but even as the words left my mouth I knew I should not have uttered them aloud. It was an oafish mistake, but when Mr. Apples came to lock my cell tonight, there was no sign that my slip had raised any alarms.
Years ago I had been excited to have the legendary Laroche in the house, though I suspected that he was the fictional product of unscrupulous writers looking to sell more papers. The moment I saw his overcast eyes, however, and the restless intelligence therein, I thought, It may all be true.
I had pieced the scandalous story together from various places; parts of it I had read in the papers, parts of it were whispered by maids and footmen. Alexandre Laroche had had some terrible luck. The locket about his neck, they said, carried the cameo of an heiress, his fiancée for a time—could her name have been Colette? This detail I believed, and it endeared me to the man, for I had my own heart’s grief hidden in a locket. But other bits seemed rather incredible: He graduated from the Sorbonne at the age of fourteen and, during his apprenticeship with Lavoisier, had facilitated many of the great scientist’s breakthroughs before becoming one of the youngest officers of Napoleon’s navy. For a time, Laroche was the hope of France. A mint was spent on his plans for a ship that would move under the waves like a fish. When I first heard about it I laughed outright, but he’d built a working prototype, or so the story went; the thing could rise, fire a broadside, then disappear again beneath the surface. With the ports of Europe blockaded, Napoleon needed a marvel, and Laroche was going to give it to him.
These kinds of tales, always delivered in a frightened half whisper, and describing how terrifically close England came to invasion or defeat, are as common as the boasts of the fearless heroics that saved us—inseparable as the soldier and his shadow. In this particular tale, our salvation came in an unlikely form. Laroche was demonstrating his disappearing ship to some officials, an admiral, and a cousin of Napoleon, I believe, when they were attacked by none other than the pirate Mabbot, becoming another casualty of her roving bloodlust. The air bladders, or whatever kept the thing afloat, were ruptured and everyone drowned except Laroche. Some will tell you that this was the decisive battle of the war, and indeed I shudder to think what would have become of us if such a ship had made it to Trafalgar. The loss of the ship ruined Laroche’s career, and he was court-martialed to account for the lives of the officers aboard. His assets were seized and he was imprisoned. Only when Napoleon was exiled did Laroche walk from the jailhouse, his head bursting with new ideas. Colette, needless to say, had not waited for him; she had married a duke.
Despite his genius, Laroche slept under worktables in grimy warehouses, spending outrageous sums on new inventions and signing away his patents to settle his debts. He had fled France and lectured at universities on a variety of subjects but had never taken positions, preferring to spend all of his attention on new inventions. It was when he came to visit Ramsey, at the country manor in Somerset, that I met the man.
His arrival was quite the event. Naturally the staff had been whispering. Some had read transcripts of his lectures, and we had all heard his outlandish theories: that the weather could be controlled with magnets, providing they were large enough; that certain birds could be taught to speak and understand French but not English; that gold could be distilled from urine. I had seen an illustration of his proposal to send people across the channel in cannonball carriages. The carriage would be righted in the air with fins like a shuttlecock’s. One rumor was confirmed shortly after his arrival: that he chewed every bite of his food exactly twenty-four times.
His composure was upright and solemn, like a candle flame in a still cell. I did not expect the celebrated scientist to dress like a funeral mourner, but black was his everyday color. Indeed he would have passed for a shadow in the hall save for the one piece of light he allowed himself: the faded cravat that needed starching and made him look as if his head had been served on a bed of wilted escarole. Even his suede gloves were jet and delicate as a woman’s. He wore them, the waitstaff reported, throughout breakfast, and when Ramsey remarked upon it, the Frenchman’s reply was this: “Some of my instruments require the utmost finesse. I cannot squander my sensitivity on the mundane abrasions of the world.”
I had hoped to impress him that evening with my coq au vin (my secret was a sauce inspirited with ground andouille sausage), but, as it turned out, my time near Laroche would be less than pleasant for both of us.
The grounds to the east of the manor were little more than a green and gently sloping lawn, bounded by hedges. Its farthest edge was the boundary of Jessop’s Wood, where the hounds were released in the spring. The hunting parties, sounding their bugles like the angels of the apocalypse, turned the green into a battlefield of ankle-twisting divots and slick mud, which the gardeners spent months trying to repair. In early fall, though, it was an almost meditative place, overlooking the ember hues of the forest.
As the manor was far from a good butcher shop, I had insisted on replacing the tough Tamworth hogs in the pens with spotted Saddleback shoats that I knew would provide tender ham and bacon positively tatted with fat. I wouldn’t have bothered if I had known what was to become of them.
There was to be a demonstration of some kind that afternoon, and our distinguished guest had given me occasion to open some aged Gloucester cheese that had a wonderful caramel spirit lurking behind its peppery surface. My plan was to serve it at tea with currant jelly and manchets hot from the oven. But I never got the chance; the butler informed me that Ramsey wished me to help “provide our Laroche with an authentic target.”
There is something about the power of an order. I was no soldier, and yet, though it seemed for a moment that my employer planned to shoot at me for fun, still I washed my hands and went out—such is the urge to be a sport, a good and willing man. When I presented myself, however, Ramsey sent me and another to wrangle the pigs from their pen out onto the green. We tugged and prodded them to the far end, just fifty yards from the edge of the forest. They were frightened, and we had to hammer a steel post deeply into the ground to keep them from yanking it free with their head-wagging. I had been feeding them apples and figs all week to sweeten their meat, and we struggled not to slip on their excrement.
Laroche, meanwhile, was overseeing the placement of a cannon upon a platform not far from the windows of the guest rooms.
Between the pigs and the cannon, most of the staff had muddied themselves in one way or another and stood in clusters near the house, whispering and giggling at the strange events of the day. After changing into clean pants, I stood with them, though I could not share their festive mood.
“Is it target enough,” teased Ramsey, “or shall we put the geese out there as well?”
“It is sufficient,” muttered Laroche, as he peered at his target through a glass and made adjustments to a sextant.
The learned Frenchman was indulging in what I thought was a theatrical display of fastidiousness. But I would come to learn that his precision was born of acute economy; he had but two of his peculiar cannonballs and could not afford to waste them on imprecise shots. As it turned out, one shot was sufficient.
The wait only heightened the staff’s anticipation. The women clucked
and covered their faces, while the men placed bets and offered their guesses at the nature of the missile. I took the opportunity to express my dismay to Ramsey. “I see we won’t be having pork cassoulet next month,” I said.
Ramsey was watching Laroche closely and muttered, “Rather we’ll be having it tomorrow, I should say.”
With that I was dismissed and considered retiring to my cheese but, like the rest of the crowd, I was too fascinated by the spectacle, especially when I considered this: Ramsey never missed an opportunity to invite friends and investors to his manor for an afternoon of fun. Except for Laroche, though, no one of import was there. We were witnessing something of a secret.
Laroche proceeded to tamp and prime the cannon with swift, clean strokes. Then, with a magician’s timing, he opened a box to reveal an iron sphere couched in coarse felt. The cannonball was riddled with boreholes, perhaps two dozen of them, set at regular intervals across its surface. He inserted a key into one of the holes, and the ball began to tick like a clock. He poured a glass of water over the sphere, then delivered it into the cannon as solemnly as a sleeping baby into a cradle.
A hush fell over us. Could we still hear the ominous ticking from inside the cannon, or were we only counting anxious breaths as we waited for the shot? Laroche looked to Ramsey, who nodded. Finally the moment was upon us. We all watched the gun, but Laroche had his eye on the distant, doomed animals.
Though we had been waiting for it all afternoon, the crack of the gun made us jump. Some even screamed, then laughed to cover their embarrassment.
There was a burst of grass as the ball landed two yards short of the startled pigs and sat there in the soil like a dropped meringue.
There was just time enough for snickers from the men, when WHAM! the cannonball burst from within, sending shot from its holes. Behind a haze of smoke, the pigs could be seen on the ground—one lay motionless, while the other writhed and screamed like a lost child.
“Explosive shot,” Laroche announced, “is not generally used because of the difficulty of fuses and temperament—it is as likely to destroy your own ship as the enemy’s. But this weapon is different. There is no fuse to break off or fail in the mist. It works wet or dry, as you see. Simply set the spring for as many seconds as you need and fire. A single shot, even poorly aimed, is sufficient to undo fifteen men or punch through the enemy’s magazine.”
Ramsey began the applause and the staff joined him. Then he shouted, “Well—back to business!” But even as we turned toward our various tasks, I heard my name. “Wedgwood! You can do a field dressing, can’t you? I trust you to sort what is fit for the table—the rest to the hounds.”
Before I could object that the slaughtering was usually done by others, he sidled away with Laroche to get a closer look at the carnage. With a sigh, I recruited my sous-chef and a third man, and we set out with knives, saws, buckets, and tarpaulins.
I couldn’t help but let disgust show on my face. It wasn’t only that I had better things to do—the entire scene was offensive. A cleanly butchered pig suffers little, but even after the time we took gathering our implements, one of the pigs still groaned in its puddle of blood and piss. Ribs were shattered, and it was clear that the offal was pierced and leaking into the cavities, rendering much inedible.
Ramsey, though, took no notice of my chagrin, as he was positively fascinated with the effects of the demonstration. He and Laroche had taken up field chairs not ten feet away and were awaiting tea service. Let them eat yesterday’s biscuits, I thought. Ramsey kept getting up to inspect the crater the missile had created and to peer at the pigs’ bodies. At one point he even inserted a finger into one of the wounds, like Caravaggio’s Thomas.
Returning to his chair, he placed his feet upon the still-smoldering cannonball and asked Laroche, “Is it safe?”
“As a cricket ball,” answered the sober Frenchman. “Though a secondary charge is possible, perhaps. The basic concept is da Vinci’s—the clockwork, the susciter, is entirely mine.”
Even with three of us working at it, the rude task took hours. At several points, as when my footing gave and I landed belly-down in a pile of viscera, I nearly gave up, but Ramsey had given us an order and it would not do to question him in front of the guest. Sense would have dictated that we wheel the carcasses to proper hooks and blocks, but, as I would come to see, Ramsey wanted something of a mess.
He smoked a pipe, and Laroche, who indulged in neither tobacco nor spirits, simply sat upright in his chair and looked toward the quince orchard where the bare trees turned the sky into a crackle glaze.
“After all this time,” began Ramsey, “you must still think about the pirate who sank your ship?”
“She is a blight,” said Laroche. “An égoïste—what is the word?—the worst kind of person—seducers, vandals, provocateurs—égoïstes. They ambush the passages, terrify travelers and merchants. Like those colonists who threw your tea into the harbor, no? Or the crimson mob cheering the guillotine as it minced glorious France into suet. Mabbot is one of these. I am but a sweeper. My ultimate task is to rid the world of the égoïstes. They say the era of the Crown is behind us, but these revolutionaries, they all want to be kings. A million kings? No. Our future comfort lies in the corporation, in the unity of the shared goal.”
Their tea delivered, and our hogs cleaned, finally, of offal, the gentlemen continued their interview as we began to saw off the heads.
Addressing Laroche in somber tones, Ramsey said, “It’s a fine speech to deliver at parties. But if we are to work together, I would need an accounting of your personal motivations. Our arrangement will lack the safeguards of tradition. I must trust you as I trust myself, so I’ll be perfectly blunt—”
“You wish to see my clockwork,” Laroche said. “Are the springs and gears aligned? Are there hidden switches?”
“Just so.”
“My casing is open; fasten your calipers to anything you like.”
“A man of your talents should have his own fortune to rely on by now, I should say.”
“I have not drunk or gambled my prospects away,” said Laroche. “It is no secret that my future, my very name, has been sabotaged by Mabbot. It is no small thing to rescue a reputation, indeed to write oneself twice into history. It may sound like hubris, but would God have given me these gifts if He had intended me to fix clocks? No, tools are made for a particular purpose. It is an offense to heaven to misuse them. Since I left France I have spent all of my energies refining my designs, analyzing tactical methodologies—I am here at last because I am ready.”
“It is this particular confidence that intrigues me so,” said Ramsey. “How would you guarantee results?”
“The losses your company suffers yearly from piracy are a matter of public record. The cost of my expedition is but a fraction of that annual toll. If you had more promising options, you would take them.”
“Don’t mistake me,” said Ramsey. “I’ve looked at the plans, and if they work as well as this toy here, your modifications will make for an impressive ship. But explain to me why should I spend on your one vessel what would buy me three warships?”
Laroche replied without a pause: “Pendleton gunships can blockade a harbor or shell a fortress, but one does not use a lathe to pound a nail. Mabbot defends neither port nor country—she takes her orders from the wind, spits on the rules of engagement. Your navy cannot hope to defeat what it cannot comprehend. If it could, you would not be considering my proposal. You see, I speak not from pride but from the courtesy of clarity. I am no beggar, Lord Ramsey, I am simply the right tool for the task.”
“I’ve learned, though,” said Ramsey, “that matters of the heart are not particularly reliable investments.”
“Heart doesn’t enter into it. If a wolf eats your lambs, it is nonsense to hate the wolf. Only proceed out at once with a gun.”
“But Mabbot robbed you of your reputation, your prospects,” said Ramsey. “And am I mistaken, or did your fiancée leave yo
u for a less disgraced man?”
Laroche sat stock-still, gazing out at the orchard where a flock of magpies suddenly lifted like a veil into the breeze and, with a distant clatter, settled again. He was so rapt in his meditation that for a moment it seemed he hadn’t heard Ramsey’s words.
Finally, he cleared his throat and said, “It is true, once Mabbot is dead, I will move into brighter days, but so will you—so will all civilized men. The wounds Mabbot inflicted are a gift to me. They are a daily spur to keep me from falling into sloth. You will back me not because I am the only man who hates her as much as you do, nor for my ingenuity, but because I am—”
“The right tool. Yes, you’ve said that.”
They were quiet then, listening to the wet work of the butchering. We had been forced to make impromptu cuts to accommodate the shattered limbs and ribs. I had been taught that there is no knuckle too base for a stewpot, but in my ocher-slicked frustration, I sent pounds of good meat to the dogs that day.
Ramsey, knocking his pipe against his boot, said, “You paint the very picture of capability, Laroche. But how does a man poised over the precipice of total ruin sit so composed? Your name is hardly mentioned but a pack of creditors comes baying for your blood. I’ll say it plainly: if I reject you, don’t deny it, your next bed will be in a debtors’ prison. You’re so deeply in arrears that even the patent for this extraordinary weapon would buy you only, perhaps, a high window in your cell. I have seen men with better prospects on their knees, their cheeks shining with tears. You see, I know everything about you, except where your pride comes from.”
Here, at last, I saw the Frenchman’s composure flag—it was only in the tilt of his head and the pitch of his voice, ever so slightly strained. He stretched his neck as if it pained him. “What you call pride is but determination, and not fortune’s caltrops, nor slander’s whip, can slow me in my pursuit—”
“Dying of consumption in a crowded cell would slow you right down, I should say.”
