by Eli Brown
With all the boats gone to shore except Mabbot’s pinnace, the deck was nearly deserted. Jeroboam, wheezing in anticipation, said, “Now’s the moment, Quincy. Now!”
With a fierce yank, he broke through the weakened rail and nearly mangled my wrist in the doing. Off he went in a mad dash and I was compelled to shadow him, thinking, as I went, This is the plan? We ran flat-out toward the stern, heading for Mabbot’s personal pinnace, which hung behind the ship, her little sails furled coyly. The elegant script on her stern read Deimos.
We scrambled from the quarterdeck to the poop, and I was beginning to imagine what trouble sailing even that small boat would be for a pair so shackled when Jeroboam stopped in his tracks, stood straight at attention, and fell on his face. Though I tried, I could not hold him up, and, as he fell, he yanked me to my knees. His monocle broke with a pitiful sound. A short slender blade had pierced the back of his neck. Feng, who had thrown it, called for the captain, who emerged scowling.
She nudged Jeroboam with her boot, then turned a wry smile on me. “And you, Mr. Wedgwood, are you unhappy with our hospitality too?”
“No, ma’am,” I quavered.
“Nothing you need?”
“Nothing, thank you, Captain.”
She returned the blade to Feng, who cleaned it on the hem of his pants.
The weight of Jeroboam’s arm pulled on me, and I was obliged to kneel near him. A breeze carried his palm-leaf hat over the rail. It danced for a moment in the air before dropping.
I was left alone. Occasionally a flurry of gunshots sounded from the prison above us, but they seemed distant and unrelated to me. The plan, whatever it had been, was horribly bungled. Things were far worse now, irredeemable. What folly to have put my hope in Jeroboam, whom I could no longer bring myself to look at. When I tried to stand and get some distance from the heap of him, his arm rose and tugged me back. He was my keeper now—even Feng left us unwatched.
I had had my fill of murder and corpses. A revulsion crept into me bit by bit, until it was everything I could do to stay where I was and not run screaming, dragging the bloody thing behind me.
Thus yoked with the dead, I witnessed the interrogation of the prison warden, who was brought at gunpoint to the deck. This man’s keys had been ripped from him, belt and all, and he was forced to hold his pants up with both hands. Mabbot asked Mr. Apples a question with her eyes to which he merely shook his head.
A small heap of items, among them a tin cup, a prayer rug, and boots, were placed at Mabbot’s feet. “These were in the jailer’s chambers—he says they belonged to the Fox,” Bai said.
Mabbot, her fury barely contained, demanded of the warden, “And where is the Brass Fox?”
The man pressed his forehead to the wood and raised his folded hands in supplication. “Not here! He’s not here.”
“I’m beginning to grasp that. Where is he?”
“He escaped three weeks ago. We haven’t had him for three weeks.”
“Three weeks? Are you sure? Damn Jeroboam! Wish I could kill him again.” She paced, fuming, then gripped the jailer by the hair. “Tell me why I shouldn’t shoot you for incompetence. Did he just swim away?”
“He was delivered with a dozen other criminals.” The officer moaned. “At first we didn’t know who he was—he’d blacked his hair and given us a false name. When we discovered we had the Fox, we sent right off for instructions. Sometimes they want the notorious ones hanged in the public squares in London, it makes for a good show…” Here the man trailed off, remembering whom he was talking to.
“Give his head a thump, Mr. Apples,” said Mabbot. “The contents are stuck.”
The warden flinched and blurted the rest: “By the time we got instructions back, he’d flown.” He held his hands up to show they were empty, as if he could be palming the Fox like a card.
“What were the instructions from London?”
“Immediate execution after interrogation.”
“Without trial or even a last meal.”
“‘Immediate’ was the word. But we never got to do it. The Fox is not a natural man.” The prison keeper wept. “Locks are nothing to him, he moves through the walls themselves. He took a hostage, one of the guards. There was a ship waiting for him. He had help.”
“What ship?”
“A Dutch merchant, the Diastema, I think.”
“Have you nothing for me?” Mabbot whispered.
“He left those things, a rug, a pipe, just things.”
Feng returned on another longboat with a thin bearded man who covered his eyes against the sun. His overgrown nails and the grey stripes in his long beard gave him the appearance of a badger woken from its winter sleep. He was naked, filthy, and his ankles were swollen and suppurating where the shackles had been. By the angularity of his ribs, the man was starving.
“Who is this?” Mabbot demanded.
“That’s Braga. He was in league with the Brass Fox,” the jailer said eagerly. “Helped him escape.”
“Bring him biscuits softened in a splash of wine, boys. Clothes for the man!”
The jailer stood in protest, but Mabbot kicked him down and placed her boot firmly on the buttons of his uniform. “By the looks of it, he’s been kept in a hole for … how long?”
“Since the Fox escaped.”
Mabbot pushed off from the jailer and made her way to crouch in front of Braga, who had ignored the clothes but was stuffing the hardtack into his mouth faster than he could choke it down.
“I know what loyalty the Fox demands,” Mabbot said. “I won’t ask what you think of him now.”
Braga finally looked up from his food. He muttered, through wads of half-chewed dough, “Your hair—”
“We aren’t talking about me, Mr. Braga. We are talking about the Fox. You would like to find him, I’ll bet, to kiss his cheek or to throttle his neck for leaving you here in this pit. I don’t care which. I am going to give you your freedom today, whether you help me or no.”
“I don’t know where he has gone.”
“But you know where he has been, you know his secrets.”
“Dug his tunnels around the Pearl River.”
“Tunnels?” Mabbot stood, her brow shining in the sun. “So that’s how he’s out-smuggling the Pendleton curs. Mr. Apples, tunnels! Yes, Mr. Braga, you can help us. I’m offering you a position on my ship for as long as you like, and in exchange you’ll tell me, and only me, Mr. Braga, all you know about the Fox. Is that an amicable arrangement?”
“Yes,” the man said, “but…” And he looked at the jailer.
“But you have some unfinished business with your keeper,” Mabbot said with a hint of disgust. “Make it quick. Bosun, loan our new shipmate a firearm. Trip anchor, Mr. Apples. Aloft and gather way. We didn’t come here for tea and crumpets.”
The crew moved up the shrouds like spiders to cast the gaskets from the sails while the jailer scampered across the deck begging, “Wait. Wait!”
Braga shot him twice in the head, dropped the gun as if it weighed too much, and began to bathe himself with a bucket and sponge.
Mabbot and Mr. Apples took the rug and other miscellany to disappear into her cabin, where I could hear their muffled argument.
The Rose was already wearing about, the sheets luffing anxiously as we crossed the wind and began to tack toward open sea, leaving the ruins behind us. A few other prisoners, wearing stupefied grins, had been brought aboard as recruits and, along with Braga, were given hardtack, panch, and a jovial tour. In my opinion, the disposition of the crew did not adequately reflect the horrors that the new recruits could look forward to. They explained the watch bells so blithely that I mumbled, “Oh, and they have ‘theater paint’ to look forward to, don’t forget that!” As soon as I said it, I feared recrimination, but, happily, I was ignored.
A morbid petrel alighted and stared at Jeroboam’s face, considering desecration. I shooed it away. I was being tested. Though I wanted nothing more than to be separated f
rom Jeroboam’s body, I could not bring myself to beg these pirates. To do so would give up the last shred of dignity I had. And so I stood there, until the sun set and the waning moon brought its cold scythe across the shimmering field.
Mercy appeared in the guise of Joshua, who, with Mabbot’s keys jangling, unshackled me and led me toward my room. The moonlight was bright enough that I could see the child had no fewer than four cowlicks. It was then that a thought hit me like a pot dropped from the rafters: Joshua is the age my own son would have been, had he lived!
He is too quick to hide from; he saw my eyes watering and lifted his lantern to illuminate my face.
“Bring a book,” I mouthed to him. “A book, next time. You can’t write without reading.”
In my room, I tied the dough tin again to my belly. I had hoped to leave the crude practice behind, but, it seems, I won’t be escaping soon. I’ll have to conjure a repast for the vixen after all.
As I pace in circles, my repugnance at the day’s events has given way to a cold conviction: I cannot sit by as Mabbot callously murders every good man in the world.
Though I have no weapons, nor friends, nor money, nor hope of help, I swear that I will learn the scope of her mission. As an egg spoils from the tiniest crack, I will pierce the pellicle of her mystery and ruin her plans.
6
DINING WITH THE DEVIL
In which I earn a pillow
Saturday, August 28
I go, in my mind, to gentler times. Memory is a strange soup. My wife, when she was ready for me, wore a particular dress with a hem of lace poppies. It was her sign to me. She might say shyly, “A good day to go flower picking?” These days I can hardly recall her face and yet that hem is clear to me, its pattern burned into my fingertips.
Mr. Apples has either forgotten his duty or has been ordered to leave my cell open, for last night I was free to roam the boat deep into the night. Considering that it might be my last chance to see the stars, I moved along the bulwark, chilled to the bone as the graveyard watch went about their duties by lantern light. Cold as I was, it was good to stride freely under the filigree of the heavens. Still I am as far from freedom as I have ever been and daily getting farther; we push forever south with Africa an occasional stitch of ocher on the port horizon. The ocean, whose essence is fluid and unresisting, is more prison than the staunchest bricks or iron bars.
I have examined the davits and blocks of the longboats again and am confident that they are not beyond my ken. If I take my time and lower myself very gradually, I believe I can manage the lines from within the boat itself. Further, I think it may be done quietly, as long as I move with deliberate pace. The moon is just a shaving shy of new. If I’m to have the advantage of darkness, I’ll have to do it soon. In preparation I have waxed a small sack and filled it with dried figs, Mary Sweet, hardtack, and a flask of panch. I considered stealing the compass from the helm house but don’t want to raise suspicion. After the captain has been fed and attention drifts from me, I shall make my move.
Monday, August 30
I am alive. The shrew is appeased, at least for the week. This is how I did it.
Yesterday morning I rose early, still unsure of my recipes but with a fire in my belly. I fasted, as is my wont when faced with an important job, taking only the smallest bite of hardtack dipped in weak tea. I have found that hunger improves my sense of smell and gives inspiration a clean passage. In any case my nerves would not allow me to eat.
Conrad had already committed his crimes for the morning, and so I banished him from the galley. I was alone and strangely energized by the task before me. I clapped my hands together to scare invisible demons from the room and began.
It is no great secret that cooking is, in essence, seduction. As with amour, pleasure does not bloom in the body so much as in the mind. One may be a “gymnast in the sheets,” as the coarse say, but without passion and internal fire, without longing and anticipation, one may as well be doing calisthenics. So food. The most rarefied tastes on the unprepared tongue may be ignored or, worse, misunderstood. How then is the mind prepared for delicacy? As with Don Juan, reputation stirs desire. But even the best chef must entice interest, use aroma to flirt, caress and kiss with silken soups, reassure and coddle with a dulcet pudding.
Beginning at the end, I roasted walnuts and ground them to a fine crumb, then mixed them with half of my yeast starter, whose spongy surface, to my delight, was capped with a vigorous froth—evidence of its appreciation of the coconut water. To this batter I added flour, honey (warmed and strained through cloth to rid it of the grit), a pinch of salt, and a little lime juice and set it aside near the hearth. My heart leaped up when, an hour later, it had risen. I added a little more coconut water to thin the dough and spooned it onto a hot grill to make walnut crisp-cakes.
Let me sing the praises of wheat, for its powers seem bounded only by imagination. It can thicken, crisp, lend strength and flexibility, or emulsify. It is the bridegroom to yeast and is more sensitive to air, temperature, and moisture than any barometer. I should not be surprised to learn that God had, in fact, not made man from mud but from a sun-browned durum. I’ve had breads made with other grains, such as farro, millet, and potato—even at their best they are more deserving of mason’s mortar than butter.
Then I set myself to the main meal. I mashed a cooked potato to a paste and dried it on the hot bricks of the hearth. Meanwhile I prepared the rice. Around my neck I wear a leather cord and a pewter locket filled with saffron, the favorite spice of my lost Elizabeth, rest her soul. It reminded her of sneaking tastes from the mulling pot as a child in her father’s inn. At closing time, the dregs, raisins, cloves, cinnamon, and cider would have formed a thick paste in the bottom, and nothing approached that heavenly liquor, she told me, so much as the smell of saffron. After I lost her, cooking became my solitary devotion, and I have touched nothing more voluptuous than a butternut squash since. My unwavering focus in the kitchen, what others have called an obsessive attention to the viscosity of a sauce or angle of a cut cucumber, is, in fact, the only medicine I have for grief. That’s not to say I have forgotten. When the tremors of life grow too jarring or when I fear I am losing touch with her memory, I open the locket, inhale, and hear the bell of her laughter and the soft graze of her arm by my side.
Of course I did not come to use the saffron easily. This was my reasoning: To leave the rice plain and be slain for it would be a class of suicide, frowned upon by heaven. Further, Elizabeth, should I meet her in that cloudy sphere, would not forgive me if, by reserving this memento, I met torture and death. And so I fed nostalgia to the grim jaws of practicality and tossed the scarlet threads into the rice as it boiled in seawater.
Such is the indomitable spirit of saffron that even after years stale on my chest, it brought the rice to life with flavor and the color of a sunset. Or perhaps my wife leaned down and touched my efforts with a kettle-blessing to keep me safe. When the rice was still covered in water, I added raisins, which plumped pleasantly.
When the potato was dry, I powdered it further with my fist and used it to bread the filleted cod, adding black pepper and salt. I sautéed onions in lard, then fried the fish quickly, until the potato crumbs were golden, finally seasoning with a squeeze of lime juice.
The wine here is reportedly from Madeira (no doubt via some slain intermediary) and surprisingly good, if smoky. It hits the palate with a berry musk that sublimates to ephemeral lavender, all the while supported by a stalwart essence I can describe only as saddle leather. So it is true what they say about the enhancing effects of sea voyages on Madeira wine. Now that I know that the potation the men are rationed every day is this delightful, I might line up for it as the others do. The men call the gargantuan wine barrels “hogsheads,” but to my eye they are properly firkins if not entire pipes. Each must carry at least one hundred and thirty gallons and several of these comprise the main ballast of the ship.
The sauce was a simple reduction of red wine
, crushed garlic, peeled shrimp, dried figs, and salt—thickened with a simple roux. I say simple, but nothing on this rocking ship is simple. For decades I have enjoyed the meditative task of heating a handful of flour in butter to a perfectly roasted roux: the susurration of the wooden spoon in the pan and, as it darkens, the odor shifting from dry grass to wet terra-cotta and, ever so faintly, almonds. But here on the ship I must hold a pot with a rag in one hand and stir with my right, while at the same time dancing on the deck to the erratic music of the sea, hoping to avoid a bad scalding. Alas, for thickening a sauce, there is no replacement for roux.
For the occasion, Mabbot had provided miraculously intact china, with a blue glaze depicting horses running before a distant pagoda.
The cod parted in seams as if anticipating the red liquor I spooned over it, as I nudged the sauce-poached shrimp and figs around the edge of the porcelain. This was a moment that I struggle to put down in words. The arrangement of a meal on a plate is a sacred thing for me, representing the culminating moment not just of a day’s work but indeed of my life’s work, such as it is. It is an act that embodies untarnished hope for another’s pleasure, a hope both ambitious and humble. Fretting falls away briefly and is replaced with an acceptance of the jumbled forms and flavors of the world, a feeling that things are as they should be. In short it is the one moment when my character is at its best. At least it should be. But how torn I had become, how lost, at the same time calmly wiping the rim of the plate clean while a voice in my ear whispered, For a villain!
I placed it, cakes and all, on a wooden plank and, lacking a proper silver lid, covered it with an inverted pot.
I kicked open the door of the galley, preparing to carry the meal out, and was met with a surprise. Unbeknownst to me—as focused as I was—my cooking had made a stir. The smell had enchanted the whispering men, who crowded near the door, sampling the air like so many alley cats, and had to be shoved aside by Mr. Apples so I could make my way to Mabbot with the tray.
