The Death-Defying Pepper Roux

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  “No. It’s all right. I’ll stay,” said Pepper. He had read enough books, after all, and he knew the rules. It was a shame: Drowning had come very low down his list of favored deaths—somewhere between suffocating and the guillotine. But he knew the rules: A good captain goes down with his ship.

  The scar on Duchesse’s cheek puckered. “That really isn’t required.”

  “Oh, I think it is,” said Pepper. “You see…I shouldn’t be here.”

  “Never a truer word, petite framboise,” said Duchesse as the ship groaned and began to list. “Don’t forget the log.”

  Pepper fetched the leather-bound log and gave it into his steward’s hands. “There. I haven’t messed it up too much.” There was shouting outside, as those abandoning ship struggled with a faulty boat winch. “I’m a Jonah,” said Pepper, and took one step back. “I’m the one it’s after, you see.” Then he stood, chin up, hands behind his back, waiting for the water to fill the cabin like a fish tank.

  Duchesse’s eyebrows shot up, and after a second, a kind of laugh erupted from his nose. “Is this the kraken we’re talking about here?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  Duchesse looked over his shoulder. He did not understand, no. But there was a very particular timing to these operations; they had not a second to lose. “The owners don’t want this…. This is insane, boy. He must’ve told you! He must’ve told you when he sent you in his place?”

  “‘If I dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,’” said Pepper unhelpfully, and bent forward the tips of his ears before sliding on his naval cap.

  “Sir’s scared to get into the lifeboat! Is that it? I could blindfold sir! Like a horse!”

  But Pepper had had plenty of time to think up an answer to every temptation. The saints had made it abundantly clear what they thought of his ducking and diving; they had even posted him a note under his blotter. “If I get into that boat, it won’t reach land. I told you. I’m a Jonah. The angels are after me.”

  Duchesse’s color deepened with his dismay. The Bay of Biscay had shrouded L’Ombrage in spray, and large waves were breaking over the starboard bow, making her wallow. Running to the speaking tube, he bawled into it, “Keep her head into the wind, you ?#@*&s!” Then he hurried outside to help free the winch of the lifeboat.

  The engineer was the last into the boat, received into the upstretched hands of the men below, like a shrimp into an anemone. Though he had stopped the engine before leaving, the ship was still noisy with banging doors, falling crates, crashing spray, creaking joints. It was uncomfortably wet and treacherous on deck, too, now that the ship was listing and side-on to the swell. Even so, Captain Pepper decided not to stay in his cabin, but to crawl and stagger for’ard to the hold, where he sat down on its rim.

  He understood now why the hatch had been opened—so that the water could enter top as well as bottom, and take the ship swiftly to the seabed. It would not do for the crew of some passing boat to see her in difficulties, board her, and discover the sea cocks open. Oh, it was not that Pepper had failed to grasp the whole idea of coffin ships and insurance scams—he had always been quick on the uptake. It was Duchesse who did not understand. L’Ombrage, on her shabby, risky, dishonest final voyage, had strayed accidentally into the path of something much more dangerous: a boyhunt. Angels and saints were even now harpooning the ocean with forked lightning, shaking the tarpaulin waves, loosing windy howls, and snorting up the spray for scent of a missing boy, a boy overdue. Aunt Mireille had always said that unpunctuality is the height of bad manners, and Pepper had purposely tried to be late for his death. He really must not keep Saint Constance waiting any longer.

  “We commit our bodies to the sea, in the sure and certain hope,” he remarked to Roche, whose body was submerged now under a fathom of water and beckoning to Pepper with both bare arms. “Don’t we?” The listing ship groaned. Down below, empty clothes hangers in Duchesse’s locker all fell down at the same moment, with a noise like a skeleton gone mad.

  “Bless me, Father, for I think I might have sinned,” said Pepper, but there were no fathers—the good kind or the bad—aboard the dying Ombrage. The hatch cover shifted and the cable bearing its weight slipped on its drum with a terrible screaming noise. The dead Roche beckoned….

  “Sun’s over the yardarm, Captain,” said a voice behind Pepper. “Everything to hand, sir. Everything aboveboard. I think a drink might be in order.”

  Duchesse helped Pepper to his feet and returned him to the captain’s cabin, where he pointed out six dusty glasses of rum. Because of the ship’s list, each of them stood aslope now, the rum inside just starting to lap out onto the floor. Duchesse abhorred waste. When Pepper said he did not drink, Duchesse said, “There’s always a first time, chéri. And the last time’s as good a time as any for the first time.” One.

  When Pepper said he was shivering not from fright but from cold, Duchesse said, “The rum will warm you up.” Two.

  When Pepper admitted he was shivering from fright, Duchesse said, “Rum’s not called ‘Dutch courage’ for nothing.” Three.

  “That’s gin, isn’t it?” said Pepper, whose family library had taught him an odd assortment of facts.

  “Here’s to a broad general knowledge,” said Duchesse. “A wonderful thing.” And they shared the fourth glass. The drink scorched Pepper’s throat like poison, but Duchesse folded the boy’s small, ice-cold hands around each glass and held them there until the brown liquid stopped slopping. “Santé, Captain.”

  “You should have gotten off with the others! Why didn’t you get off? Why didn’t you?”

  The Duchess sat back comfortably in his chair. “Life hasn’t suited me lately,” he said, as if life were a fashion trend and his hips too broad to carry it off.

  When Pepper said that he was going to be sick, Duchesse insisted a glass of rum would settle his stomach. Five.

  The sixth glass no one drank, because it—or was it the ship?—had tilted too far, and trickled the contents onto the floor. Pepper rested his head on the pillow and began to count. By the time he reached fourteen…

  …he was deeply unconscious.

  When Pepper woke the next day—or was it the week after?—he knew, from the chugging of engines, that he was still on board ship. But he also knew this ship must be bound for Hell. Scarlet-and-green demons were squatting around all four edges of the ceiling. Their claws gripping tight to stacked plywood crates, they squawked and tutted, peering down at him from behind huge beaks. Aunty Mireille had taught Pepper lots about demons and how they loved to rend and tear the souls of the damned, but she had not mentioned the beaks. These were what she must have meant by “birds of ill omen.”

  There were demons inside his head, too, tearing at his brain, and he felt very, very sick. Every time he closed his eyes, he pictured L’Ombrage on her slow plunge through transparent darkness and cold toward the bottom of the sea. Was he still aboard her and breathing water? He wondered if information was allowed in Hell, because more than anything, Pepper wanted to know whether Duchesse and the rest of the crew had been saved. The demons clacked their beaks and fluttered, but they wouldn’t answer his questions.

  While he had lain there unconscious, every piece of braid had been laboriously picked off his uniform jacket—who by?—leaving him drab. That was fair, he supposed. It probably said something in the Bible about gold braid: Vanity of vanities, all braid is vanity, saith the preacher. Naturally, ranks were not allowed in the underworld, he quite understood that. No rank, no escape, no saying sorry. But it was strange to find Aunty’s prayers still in his pocket…along with a slender roll of banknotes that had not been there before.

  Demon droppings fell like hail as the door opened and a Malay sailor brought in a bowl of rice and a cup of water.

  “May I ask questions?” asked Pepper.

  But the Malay only bowed and smiled, set the food down, and bowed again before leaving, no more able to understand the French language than he could
the squawks of the parakeets tethered to the cargo crates.

  When Pepper went up on deck (the door of the cell was not locked, but two days passed before he thought to try it), a sight rose out of the sea that was very like the Gates of Heaven, shimmering. Perhaps, after all, the angels had caught him in their nets and were drawing him home according to plan.

  But the vision proved to be only the city of Marseille, gilded yellow by its usual pall of pollution. After the ship docked, the crew presented Pepper with a gift of small macaroons and an umbrella, gesturing toward the shore, smiling and bowing. Pepper descended the gangplank.

  All Pepper lacked now was a reason to set one foot in front of the other. For what use is a sea captain without a ship—or a crew—or a steward with an array of jolly costumes? Anyway, he did not want to be Captain Gilbert Roux, defrauder of insurance companies, drink-sodden sinker of ships. There must have been better lives to hide inside.

  It was a bright, sunny day, but as he walked down the street, he felt water drops on his face and put up his new umbrella. The water was coming from fire hoses at the end of the street. The local fire brigade was hosing down a group of protesters gathered in front of the town hall. The water pressure was low, so the demonstrators were not being knocked off their feet so much as gently doused, like potted plants watered from a high window. They milled around—men, women, and students—carrying placards and chanting doggedly up at the closed windows of the town hall. They had the look of clerks or shop assistants, in grays and browns. But their faces were bright with excitement and outrage, as if the protest had livened up a tedious week. Even the hoses were only making them gasp and giggle.

  Pepper couldn’t make out what they were chanting. He went closer to read the words painted on their soggy placards:

  REPEAL CLAUSE FIVE OF THE HONGRIOT-PLEUVIEZ AMENDMENT!

  REPEAL IT NOW!

  Pepper gave his umbrella to a woman who had curled her hair that morning and wanted to keep it nice. The demonstrators closed around him, like schooling fish, and he found himself part of the protest, given a placard to hold:

  DOWN WITH THE HONGRIOT-PLEUVIEZ AMENDMENT (CLAUSE 5)!

  “Excuse me…I don’t quite know what the—” he began, but the chanting scribbled out his words.

  The women had started up a simpler chant: “Hear what we say! Repeal the HPA!”

  In his drab, braidless jacket, Pepper was a tadpole in a pool of other tadpoles. Water ran down his neck, his shoes squelched, but apart from that, it was a good feeling. The dockside clock struck noon, and the fire brigade stopped for lunch.

  So the demonstrators went to buy their lunches from the grocery store on the corner. Rather than stand alone in a puddle outside the town hall in a strange town, Pepper tagged along. The grocery store was closed. The students of philosophy accepted this philosophically, with a shrug, but the clerks were in a reckless mood and decided they would go up to the grand department store at the top of the hill and buy sausage from the delicatessen there. It would be an outrageous extravagance, but demonstrating had made them all feel slightly bigger, bolder, more deserving than on a normal working day. Hungrier, too.

  Inside the store, they formed an orderly line, speaking in low voices, as if they were in church. Indeed, the Marseillais Department Store was almost as grand as a church, with its high vaulted ceilings and checkered marble floors. The delicatessen was a harvest festival of deliciousness laid out in a side chapel—yellow cheeses as large as collection plates, and great organ pipes of sausage dangling at the back. It was also crypt cool, and there was nobody behind the counter.

  The water ran down out of their clothes and formed a pool on the checkered marble. The umbrella—which proved to be a parasol—began to drop sodden shreds of dyed paper pulp. Assistants at the dried-flower and pastry counters looked across disapprovingly at these shabby invaders. But they did not offer to serve. Nobody did.

  The line of people began to shiver. The delicious array of quiche, pâté, olives, and giant hams was making them hungrier than ever. Each pointed to the kind of sausage they liked best, and said how thick they would ask for it to be cut:

  “Every slice a mouthful, that’s my style!”

  “Oh, I prefer mine wafer thin! It feels like more.”

  But still nobody came to serve them. Pepper handed out the little macaroons the Malays had given him. Ten minutes passed. A teacher took out her knitting.

  “We must get back before the fire brigade,” said the woman with Pepper’s parasol. “Otherwise they’ll think they’ve won!”

  They discussed buying a loaf of bread and sharing it. But as demonstrators, they had developed a stubborn streak not normally in them. They had set their hearts on sliced sausage and would not—could not—turn their backs on the idea.

  “We’re not stylish enough to serve, that’s what,” complained a secretary.

  “The rich live to eat and the workers eat to live,” mused a student of politics.

  “We won’t eat at all if someone doesn’t come soon,” said a housekeeper joining the line.

  After her came a banker, banging on the counter with his rolled-up newspaper, as if to say, Serve me, I’m a busy man! He then rattled open his paper and used it as a wall to separate him from the disheveled folk in front of him in the line. A late news item on the back page caught Pepper’s eye:

  Ship Lost in Biscay

  FRENCH COASTER FOUNDERS

  It was Captain Roux’s doing; Pepper knew it. His doing. He looked down at his braidless jacket and noticed a darker patch near the cuff where Roche’s blood had stained it, and his whole body blushed with shame. He wanted to shake himself like a dog: throw off his borrowed identity like water drops. That shining silver meat slicer over there reminded him of the guillotine. There was even a splatter of bright crimson on the wall behind it. His crime weighed on him like scrap iron. The wickedness of it impaled him like a rusty iron fence. The pain was almost unbearable.

  Pepper ducked under the counter, took off his jacket, and hung it on the apron hook.

  “You work here?” said the woman with the parasol.

  “I do now.”

  “About time!” said the banker.

  “Should you be doing that?” asked the secretary.

  “Ten slices of chorizo cut good and thick,” said a clerk with inky lips.

  “The knobbly green one for me,” said the teacher with the knitting. “Wafer thin.”

  Pepper bent his body over the spinning guillotine blade. Scuff, rip, crack went the great silver blade into the flesh of each giant sausage; the crowd watched, greedily spellbound, as it sliced and slashed its way through meat, peppercorns, and fat. They winced as Pepper’s fingers came closer and closer to the blade. When the greaseproof paper below was piled high with curled petals of deliciousness, he folded it inside another plain, white wrapper and presented it on the palms of both hands. The people in the line gave him a little round of applause.

  In this way, Pepper Roux stepped out of his father’s unwearable, unbearable life and into the empty space behind the delicatessen counter of the Marseillais Department Store. Nobody really noticed: Their attention was diverted by the whirling silver blade and their rumbling hunger.

  Well, people see what they expect, don’t they?

  Or do they see what they choose?

  “Pepper salami,” demanded the banker without a smile or a please.

  “That’s me,” said the boy behind the counter.

  FOUR

  PEPPER SALAMI

  Every day, Pepper read the newspapers for word of L’Ombrage, for further details of the sinking, for news of survivors. But ships sink all the time, and other news floods in, like sea into a hold. L’Ombrage was soon lost under a thousand fathoms of newer news, and Pepper could find no mention of Berceau or the engineer, of Gombert, of Annecy or the Duchess.

  Suzanne-of-the-delicatessen-counter returned to work next day, her hand hugely bandaged where she had sliced off two fingers on the mea
t slicer in a moment’s carelessness. She did not question why Pepper had taken her place behind the counter: She supposed the management was within its rights to give away her job while she was at the hospital, and the boy plainly had talent. She hovered, tried to make herself useful, tried to help, like a magician’s assistant.

  Pepper, for his part, waited for Suzanne to tell him that he was not needed and to go away. When she did not, he assumed that he was her assistant and she his senior. He never dreamed that he had robbed her of her crown, her status, her realm of cured meats and cheese.

  The floor manager did not query Pepper’s presence: Why would anyone turn up and work unless management had employed them? Nobody does anything for nothing. If Pepper had tried to draw wages, then he would have been found out at once. But he did not.

  Well, he did pay himself a kind of wage: Every evening, he cut himself twelve rounds of salami, each about the size of a coin, and helped himself to a handful of olives, like small change. Each evening, the Bakery department cleared its shelves of perfectly good bread, and this completed Pepper’s supper.

  After spending one terrifying night sleeping in an alley, he resolved never to do it again. So when six o’clock came, and everyone else laid dust covers over their counters and went home, Pepper did not leave the store. Instead, he migrated to the Soft Furnishings department and slept there, in a splendid double bed, under a sheepskin rug.

  A penny candle lent him enough light to read the day’s newspapers, which he gathered from the waste cans in the top-floor offices. Word by word, column by column, Pepper scanned news of wars and murders, scandals and road accidents. He read the business pages (though they made no sense); the sports results (though his mother had never let him play rough sports); reviews of exhibitions and concerts (though he had never been to either a concert or an art gallery). He studied the advertisements and the cartoons, the births and the marriages.