by Eli Brown
“The man could curdle water.”
“They were worse than his usual fare, and the crew came close to mutiny. Your arrival must have stung the chap.”
“He loved you.”
“Who doesn’t love me?” Mabbot joked, but her smile was weary.
Wednesday, Later
This afternoon Mabbot made an announcement to the gathered crew. “The saboteur has surrendered himself. For this I grant him a certain clemency.” The men hissed, but Mabbot continued. “Meanwhile, you are forbidden to molest him in any way.”
The mob grumbled and one sailor, a cooper named Peter, yelled, “You promised theater paint!” At this the mob erupted with calls for blood.
“Sentencing is a captain’s prerogative!” Mabbot yelled as she jumped from the poop deck into the crowd to confront Peter. “But the cooper would like to be captain.” Mabbot took off her coat and tossed it to Mr. Apples. “In order to be captain, you must wear the captain’s hat.” Mabbot walked directly to the man and looked up into his eyes, for he was a head taller than she. She drew her knife and handed it to Peter. She said, “Are you ready to take my hat, cooper?” When the man’s eyes flitted to Mr. Apples, Mabbot called back, “Mr. Apples, go and check the bowsprit lines, will you?”
After a breath, Mr. Apples strolled away, leaving Mabbot alone before the mob.
“Now, then,” said Mabbot, “I asked you a question.”
Peter’s lower lip was quivering. “No’m,” he said, dropping the knife.
“Can’t hear you over the wind.”
“No, ma’am. I don’t want your hat,” shouted the cooper.
“Are you quite sure you like being cooper with your hoops and barrel wood?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, good. Because you make a fine keg,” Mabbot said, and the crew laughed as the tension broke. “Back to work!”
When the crew had dispersed, I took Mabbot aside. “Wasn’t that reckless, Captain? Sending Mr. Apples away?”
“If this crew wants my head, even Mr. Apples won’t be able to protect me. In the end I am alone on a ship of pirates with nothing but their respect to shield me. But your weak stomach doesn’t make it any easier, Wedge. I have gone back on my word and disappointed my crew all for your aversion to blood.”
“I thank you, Hannah.”
“Of course, the crew will be much mollified if they have a proper meal. After all, we’ve lost a cook.”
“That’s not fair—”
“I insist.”
“I cannot cook for you and them.”
“Don’t be modest.” Then her face softened. “If you do find a spare moment to sleep, come to my cabin.”
Thursday, November 25
The crew is much disgruntled not to have Conrad to torture. Mr. Apples has stationed the bosun at the cell door to keep vigilantes from the poor wretch.
To appease them I set to the galley. With the help of Joshua, I threw together a cauldron of spicy shark bisque built on a blond roux and the last of the cayenne pepper. Herrings were fried and served with cornmeal biscuits and pickled hominy. When the modest repast was presented, it triggered an impromptu celebration. Before long I was roped into dancing with the men, striking my peg against the boards along with the music from the fiddles and flutes.
Thursday, Later
Rat-belly Island is a craggy atoll of algae and coral no more than an acre in total, with stunted trees and a thin rocky beach curving around a lagoon on the northern side. It is distant from any proper trading route and not marked on most maps. Here, Conrad has been put to shore to perish as a castaway. His shoulder hasn’t mended and his left arm hangs useless.
Mr. Apples and two others escorted him ashore in a longboat to leave him with a knife and a Bible and little else. Before they pushed off, I threw into the boat a sack of cornmeal tied to a tin cup. Mr. Apples, considering my deviation from custom, looked to Mabbot for guidance. Mabbot shrugged. “So it gives him a few more days of loneliness. Here,” she said, retrieving a gold piece from the sack that had been tied to the mizzen. “Let him buy more when that runs out!” She lobbed the coin and it hit the man where he sat like a discarded doll in the bottom of the boat. The crew loved this.
Mr. Apples and the others in the boat each spat into the cornmeal before handing it to Conrad.
When the transport was complete, the cook stood lamely upon the beach as we departed. I couldn’t help but watch him shrink in the distance, and I believe that, just before he disappeared, I saw him wave.
Saturday, November 27
Today we passed the mouth of the Pearl River, the seat of the Pendleton Trading Company. A telescope was passed among us, and I saw the white slabs of the massive Pendleton compound set like a tiered cake on the shore, commanding a view of the kidney-shaped harbor crowded with junks, merchant ships, hulks, and, indeed, navy vessels. This was the fulcrum of the Eastern trade. Kingdoms could rise and fall on the wealth carried in those ships. Tea enough to darken the sea, porcelain enough to build another Buckingham Palace from saucers and cups, and silks to swath the moon passed through this crowded port, jostled on all sides by smugglers with boxes of opium going in the other direction.
The Pendleton offices were still and glaring in the sun above the bustling wharf. The sheer number of ships in the harbor frightened me. It would be only a matter of time before our thin disguise provoked curiosity. Our crew was uncharacteristically quiet, as if we were tiptoeing past a sleeping giant. We tarried not, and on each of our lips was a prayer that our freshly painted hull and false colors would grant us passage.
Mabbot broke the spell by shouting, “The Chinese call it the Barbarian House. Take a good look, gentlemen! It won’t be there when we come back.”
My mind is with Conrad. Helping Joshua with the great vats of chowder for the men, I find myself measuring his portions and days. Is there water on Rat-belly Island? Are there lizards to eat? My guess is very little of either. He may eat on the cornmeal for a week at the most if he can find some clean water to slake his thirst.
No doubt Conrad’s reasons were sufficient to him. If a pirate like Mabbot does not wake of a morning with malevolence on her mind, if she sees her actions as the pursuit of justice, can’t I give Conrad the same measure of doubt? I can’t help but notice in retrospect that each act of sabotage occurred after Mabbot and I were indiscreet about our lavish rendezvous. It was easy to picture him muttering about us in the darkness as he took secret drinks from the rum barrel to steel his courage. I had labored under the fantasy of escape myself, so I could imagine what Conrad hoped for: Laroche welcoming him with open arms and a bag of gold. The men call Conrad a coward, but isn’t it bravery to lift your chisel against a world that despises you? And then to take his chances on the currents with little more than a week’s worth of food?
A lifetime of sleeplessness will not relieve me of this guilt. The man’s death is on my head as surely as if I had dropped the guillotine. No matter that he was a criminal. It is a tangled knot of blame, to be sure; he had tried to ruin us all and would have fled in his boat with our charred bodies in his wake. And yet I cannot escape the grim fact that draws my breath up short as if my own collarbone were broken, that if not for my testimony, if not for my teapot cudgel, the man would be alive. Nay, there is no escaping that I have killed him, whatever may be said for the circumstances—I killed him, and it is precisely because I cannot see or invent a path that would have taken me out of the dark wood to goodness, not even in retrospect can I imagine a better course of action, that I feel I have become at last a pirate myself.
25
THE BARBARIAN HOUSE
In which the sea boils
Tuesday, November 30
When we were only a few miles northwest of the Pearl River, we sheered off to open seas and spent the night circling over several miles of water, tacking for three hours in one direction, only to turn and run free for an hour in the other. Such are the antics of a ship that has found her locat
ion but fears being caught at anchor.
It was under the last of the stars that we finally jibed back to anchor a few hundred yards from a craggy coastline punctuated by short stretches of black sand and eddying colonies of killdeers and plovers. An old hulk lay beached and belly-up on a plateau of guano-encrusted rock.
Mabbot was preparing to board a longboat with Braga and two other men. I climbed in. Before she could object, I said, “I’ll not leave your side. Someone will have to carry you back when you get shot.”
Mr. Apples had his own objection. “Why not just send Braga to set the charges? He knows the tunnels.”
“Feels rather impersonal, doesn’t it?” Mabbot said. “This is something I’d rather do myself. We’ll just nip in and dash out; have her ready to run.”
As we rowed toward the hulk, I saw that the rising sun was cloaked by a thick curtain of purple clouds. “I’ll be giving you a full share, Braga,” Mabbot said. “If we manage this, you’ll have more than earned it.”
“I’ve been itching to see that Barbarian House drop since we dug the tunnels,” said Braga. “My father was a fisherman, Portuguese. Pendleton sank him for a spy when his boat went too far up the river. After that we dug ditches to buy our bread. That’s how my father died, holding a spade in the mud. When the Fox told me he was going to beat Pendleton at their own game, I never looked back. I was still digging, but the Fox made it feel like we were winning a war. He took care of his people. He paid his smugglers twice what Pendleton pays.”
It was rare for Mabbot to listen without interrupting, but Braga had her ear. “He wasn’t a bad man,” he said. “He was just … insatiable. He couldn’t help it. Adamastor, my father would have called him, a hungry storm.”
Mabbot said nothing for a moment; her face was hidden by the wide brim of her hat. Then, very quietly, she repeated, “A hungry storm.” After that we listened to the sound of the paddles on the water.
We anchored our boat just beyond the breaking surf and Mabbot told the rowers, “We’ll be making a hasty exit. Be ready for us.”
The derelict was high on the rocks with her port hull bleached white by sun. Between swaths of bird filth, she was stove in and rotted to lace. In some bygone era she had been a Dutch botter, then, by her roof, a hulk before she was too old even for that and cast here by a storm.
“There are other entrances,” said Braga, “but they’re a hike inland. Better not risk being spotted by a patrol.”
We entered the wreck through a hole where her forecastle might once have been. Boulders jutted through her starboard hull; though high tide might rock her, she was permanently pinned to the shore. Light came in through the gaps in her wales, and its angle only magnified the unsettling slope of her decks. Planks crumbled like cheese as we passed over them. The water we trudged through was fouled by tangles of rusted rings that I guessed were barrel hoops.
Deep in her belly, a mass of blue that I thought was seaweed scattered into hundreds of tiny crabs that slipped into the water and were gone.
“No surprises this time, Captain?” I asked. “I shan’t be leaping from the deck with my hair on fire?”
“I make no such promises,” Mabbot muttered.
“In we go,” Braga said, pointing to the dark water between two outcroppings of stone where the entrance to the caverns was hidden.
“In?” Mabbot’s eyebrows rose.
“We swim down five yards or so, then up into the chamber.”
“I employ a team of swimmers so that I don’t have to,” Mabbot said.
“I can swim,” I offered. “Cleave to me.”
Braga tied his beard into a knot and dove headfirst into the pool, disappearing boots and all.
Mabbot gave an unhappy sigh, removed her hat, and wrapped her arms around me from behind. In we went. My fingers touched sand soon enough, but there was no sign of Braga, and it seemed we had dived into a well, sealed on all sides. Then Mabbot tugged my hair; she had found the shaft. We wriggled into it, then followed the tunnel for a several disorienting yards. My lungs were burning by the time the tunnel widened and I saw light above us. We emerged in a shallow underground pool in the floor of a slick-walled cavern.
It was clear that our arrival had made a tense situation worse. The Fox’s paramour, Kittur, and one of the lascars from the schooner were pointing pistols at Braga. They had backed him against a wall and were interrogating him so intensely that they did not immediately see us emerge from the water.
As we wiped the brine from our eyes, we surveyed the echoing chamber; its ceiling was blackened with soot and its sloping walls were hidden by shadow. A small corridor led from the cavern behind us, and at the other end, a monstrous tunnel led deep into the earth. The light from their lanterns reflected off the pool and cast a shifting web of gold upon the ceiling of the cave, where tongues of rock let milky droplets upon our heads. Clusters of what I assumed were bats rustled in the darker crevices.
When the lascar saw us, everyone began shouting at once, and for a moment I thought we had come this far only to be shot dead in the water. Mabbot and I raised our hands to show that we held no weapons, and managed to make our way out of the pool. We were herded toward Braga, who was trying to calm the situation in his broken Laskari while Kittur screamed, “Silence all!” The bats, disturbed by the noise, swooped and darted overhead, making monstrous shadows on the ceiling. Hindi, English, and Laskari echoed off the wet walls, and for a moment I could not even make out individual words. But all yelling ceased when a ghostly moan came from the dark throat of the largest cave.
Kittur went pale and shook her head as if to keep the sound from her ears. Her companion held his lantern toward the darkness and shouted, “Aap kahan hain?”
“I take it that isn’t the wind,” said Mabbot.
Kittur did not answer.
“One of your crew? Have you sent someone in after him?”
“Of course!” said Kittur. “Four of us—three have gone in after the first, and none have come out. The last went in two days ago.”
The lascar yelled into the darkness again, but the moaning had stopped.
Then he turned on us and whispered something to Kittur.
“Where is the map?” Kittur asked Mabbot. “You must have a map, or you would not have come.”
“In fact, we do,” said Mabbot. Reaching into her satchel, she produced a waxed sack and from it pulled the vellum map Mr. Apples had copied from the rug. The lascar grabbed it and peered at it in the yellow light of the lantern.
“Won’t help,” said Braga. “The map shows the safe routes only. Nothing about the rest. For every safe turn, there are three that’ll take you into the devil’s gut. The walls carry sound—that voice could be miles away, probably at the bottom of a pit a hundred feet deep, his back broken. Those men you sent in, they’re gone. They’re calling you to join them in hell.”
The lascar spat and rushed into the gullet of the cavern with the map. Kittur screamed for him to stay, but within moments the light from his lantern had been swallowed.
The woman was shaking. How long had she been in this hole, going mad with worry, losing one comrade at a time? Mabbot approached her and said, “You aren’t going to shoot us all, are you? I think it’s time you gave me that gun, pretty one.”
Kittur handed the weapon to Mabbot and sat ungracefully on the floor, her head in her hands. Her luxuriant hair, I now saw, had been cut in mourning, leaving the back of her head ragged. Her hands and face were filthy.
“Now we’ve lost our map,” said Braga.
Mabbot pulled the prayer rug from her satchel and tossed it to him; it was wet, but the flowers were clear and bright. Mabbot was more concerned with Kittur, though. She gazed at the exhausted woman for a moment and touched her cheek gently before saying, “When my son stopped stealing tiaras and began to smuggle opium, I thought to myself, he’s gotten a pocketful of patience somehow. The impulsive child has learned to hold out for the right moment. Where did he learn it? It’s some
thing I could never teach him. But then Wedge told me about you, lovely thing with the charts and the knowing smile, teaching him to meditate. And then this grand scheme to win his father’s shares of the Pendleton pie. I realized a pair of pretty lips was whispering into his ear—telling him to bide his time. So here you are, the demon on his shoulder who steered him toward calamity.”
Kittur was looking into Mabbot’s eyes with growing fear, but she was clearly too exhausted to try to fight back.
Mabbot placed the barrel of the gun softly on Kittur’s breast, as if to rest it there.
“He made his own plans,” said Kittur.
“Oh, no.” Mabbot showed her anger now. “I know my child—his blemishes as well as his beauty. He would not have gotten this far without … shall we say guidance. Oh, no doubt you let him think they were his plans, you played the muse, the clever pet, but the grand scheme was yours. The man would still be snatching rubies from drunken sheikhs without someone marshaling his troops, steering his vessel, telling him to breathe.”
“No.”
“Wasn’t it your idea to seize me like a stray cow? Sell me to Pendleton? How did you do it? Did you wait until he was almost asleep? Pour your body over him and whisper your poison in the darkness? Whispering, whispering, ‘We can sell your mother!’”
“I swear—”
“You lie!” Mabbot cocked the pistol. “Leighton wasn’t only impatient, he was greedy and stubborn. He came by that last honestly, I’m afraid. So damn stubborn. Far too stubborn to listen to even the most gilded tongue … unless he managed to love you.”
Kittur was crying now, tears running down her face and mixing with the ceaseless rain from the ceiling. She dropped her head, apparently ready to join the Fox in the afterlife.
