Pirate King: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes mr-11

by Laurie R. King

  He caught at it, missed it, nearly fell in again, dropped his blanket in the water, and finally got his fist around the line. By dint of my pushing him from below – a tricky manoeuvre, when braced in a skiff – and others pulling from above, we got the Major-General back on deck.

  “Take him to galley,” La Rocha ordered Adam, then to his damp passenger, “Warm there, you be dry in no time.”

  The young pirate led him away; I did not think Holmes’ shivers were entirely an act.

  The boat was made fast, and La Rocha ordered the sails raised. I wished him a good night and headed below, but his voice stopped me.

  “Why you on deck?”

  “When he fell, you mean? I was enjoying the quiet – I’m not used to sleeping in a room full of people – and he came up and … Well, I thought he was assaulting me, so I … I’m afraid I shoved him, and he went overboard. That’s why I sort of felt I had to go after him. My fault.”

  The pirate king stared at me, then stared at me all over. And he laughed. As if a man making advances on Mary Russell was quite the biggest joke he’d heard in years.

  Which was more or less what I’d intended. Still, he didn’t have to agree with quite so much gusto. Feeling very cross, I went down the stairs and, instead of going directly to my bunk, went to the galley instead. I thrust my head inside, to find my husband and partner arranging his wet garments over various chair backs. Adam was with him; both men looked up.

  “From now on, you keep your hands to yourself!” I stormed. “Next time I’ll use a belaying pin, and let you drown!”

  The young man looked startled, but Holmes’ face ran a quick gamut of surprise, disapproval, and distaste, before he pasted on an expression of sheepishness for the benefit of La Rocha’s man.

  I’d had to let him know what explanation I’d given for our little adventure. I dimly recognised that saddling him with a reputation for lechery – a reputation he would find repugnant every time he was forced to uphold it – was a displaced revenge on his brother. However, I will admit that the thought of it was a small warm satisfaction, nestled to me as I drifted off in my canvas sling.

  Where I slept peacefully, until the screams started.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  MAJOR-GENERAL: In fact, when I know what is meant by “mamelon” and “ravelin,”

  When I can tell at sight a Mauser rifle from a javelin …

  I SHOT UPRIGHT in my hammock, instantly flipped over, and by dint of hanging on hard to the canvas, managed to describe a complete circuit before crashing dramatically to the floor. The hold seemed to be populated by dangling pupae with startled faces, but everyone else managed to remain in their canvas, and no one appeared to be writhing in agony or fighting off an attack. I snatched my glasses from the nearby shelf and looked again. No: The noise was coming from above.

  Grabbing my dressing-gown from the laden row of hooks, I tied the belt while hurrying up the companionway towards the thin dawn light. When I stepped out on the deck, I knew I was still dreaming.

  The last time I’d seen Captain La Rocha, near midnight, he’d been dressed in a pair of striped pyjamas and a dark dressing-gown – extraordinary in their unexpected ordinariness. Now …

  Either our Captain had decided to immerse himself wholeheartedly in his assigned rôle, or I had knocked myself cold falling from the hammock.

  His hat was scarlet. From it danced an emerald ostrich plume the length of my arm. His jacket was brocade, orange and red, over a gold waistcoat, burgundy trousers, and knee-high boots a Musketeer would have killed for, also scarlet. His small earring had doubled in size overnight, and half a dozen fingers bore rings – gold rings, with faceted gems. The henna in his beard gleamed red in the sunlight.

  The only missing details were an eye patch, a peg-leg, and a parrot.

  “Good-morning, Miss Russell,” his incongruous voice piped. “Meet Rosie.”

  He tipped his face upwards. I, too, lifted my eyes to the rigging, then lifted them some more, wondering what female on board the ship would dare to clamber the lines. Surely Edith wouldn’t have – then the scream came again, and I saw its source.

  A parrot.

  I felt someone beside me and looked over, then down. Randolph Fflytte, who for the first time looked almost nondescript in a violet dressing gown, was rubbing his eyes.

  “This is your fault,” I said bitterly.

  His eyes caught on La Rocha and went wide. His jaw made a few fish-like motions; at Rosie’s next shriek, it dropped entirely. He stood gaping at the bird, who screamed its challenge at the rising sun, then turned to me. “I never,” he declared.

  “You wanted a pirate,” I told him. “You got one.”

  “Jaizus” came Will’s voice in my ear, “he’s even put up a pirate flag!”

  He was right. A skull and crossbones taller than a man rippled in the bow breeze, flashing its grin at the pirate, the parrot, and those of us along for the ride. The Jolly Roger, a declaration that no quarter would be given. The voice of the Byron-loving Miss Sim seemed to thrill in my ear: These are our realms, no limits to their sway- Our flag the scepter all who meet obeyem›.

  “Is that legal?” It was a woman’s voice – Mrs Hatley, sounding disapproving. I had to agree: Surely maritime laws frowned on such frivolities as pirate flags?

  The rising sun touched the top of the mast, exciting our avian alarm. It flapped its brilliant wings and shouted something in response.

  “What did it say?” someone asked.

  “Probably Portuguese,” came an answer.

  “Not Portuguese,” said a man – our pirate crew was now awake, too, and clearly as astonished by La Rocha’s antics as the English passengers.

  The bird screamed again, and I blinked as the sign-board appeared before my mind’s eye:

  “Actions are propaganda!”

  I repeated it aloud.

  Fflytte said, “What the devil does that mean?”

  “I don’t know, but that’s what it said.”

  “She’s right,” said Will.

  Three dozen people in various stages of undress, and one pirate in extraordinary dress, stood agog, awaiting the next pronouncement. The bird gazed down at its audience.

  “Destroy the state!” it shouted.

  “Those are Anarchist slogans!” I said. “It must have belonged to Anarchists.”

  Our necks were growing stiff, but we listened, wrapt, for the next pronouncement. What came was a long garble of apparent nonsense. We looked at each other. “Did you catch that?”

  It was Annie who ventured a translation. “ ‘I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree’?”

  Followed the sound of forty-some people puzzling.

  Clearly, I had knocked myself unconscious.

  * * *

  I waited in vain for an awakening hand on my shoulder, but with reluctance decided that I was not lying stunned. I went below with the others, some of whom attempted a return to sleep, but I had smelt the coffee and got dressed instead, to join the first seating at Maurice’s breakfast, questions at the ready. Annie was there, looking remarkably chipper after a night dangling above the floor, and was already grilling Adam about the newest member of our crew.

  The parrot – a scarlet macaw – had been a last-minute addition: La Rocha’s idea, Mr Pessoa’s find. Its cage had been brought on board under heavy shrouds, that the creature might wake to a new day in a new home, undistracted by the call of the land.

  Its original owner had been a lady much taken by lyric poetry in the English language – Longfellow proved an avian favourite. When she died, the bird took up residence with her grandson, who had flirted with the attractions of Anarchist doctrine from the comfort of his twenty-room estate on the outskirts of Lisbon until his arrest a few months before, followed by the sale of his house, lands, and possessions. The bird had several Portuguese phrases, and a handful in French, German, and Spanish, but he – and it was a he, despite the name given him by the old lad
y, who’d thought it inappropriate for a maiden lady to have a male companion – seemed to prefer English.

  A few of his Portuguese utterances, to judge by the reactions of the crew, would have condemned him to his cage – if not to Maurice’s pot – had they been in English. When Kate and Linda began to, well, parrot those phrases, I had a word with their mothers.

  The political and poetic exhortations would soon become a part of the background noise of the ship, punctuating the sounds of sail and rigging, hull and voice. At least while the bird was talking, it did not emit those blood-curdling screams.

  Piecing together this narrative took our allotted breakfast time, was continued on the deck, and was still under way when the second seating began to emerge into open air: Annie’s questions were occasionally pertinent but often most roundabout, and her dual flirtations with Adam and Bert did not speed the flow of information.

  The girls came up, dressed now and exclaiming at the prettiness of the morning. The pirates followed, exchanging glances at the prettiness of the girls. Rosie grumbled and recited from her perch at the Captain’s left hand, taking the occasional snap at anyone else who ventured within range.

  By the time Fflytte came on deck, the bird was taking a nap, the sail-makers were hard at work, the girls were lounging in the sunny spots, and the pirate crew were busy at various tasks (and shooting the girls looks both admiring and disapproving, as the girls shed clothing and lit cigarettes).

  Our diminutive leader rubbed his hands together, then frowned at the vast canvas drapes on all surfaces.

  “We need this cleared,” Fflytte declared. When the sail-makers continued their needlework, he turned to the quarterdeck and repeated his demand.

  “I’d planned on filming some scenes this morning. We need the decks cleared,” he insisted.

  “When sail is up, decks will be clear,” La Rocha countered.

  “ ‘Sail on, O Ship of State!’ ” Rosie urged.

  Samuel said nothing.

  “When will that be?”

  “Braak!” Rosie answered.

  La Rocha and Samuel studied the horizon.

  “What are we to do in the meantime?” Even Rosie said nothing. “Captain La Rocha, we had an agreement. We need to do our filming on the way to Morocco.”

  “Point camera here,” our pirate chief said, waving a ham-like hand at the quarterdeck. “No canvas.”

  Fflytte squinted at the area in question, and turned to Will. “Would this be a good time?”

  “We’d only use a few feet of film, if we can’t shoot the deck as well,” the cameraman replied.

  “Captain-” Fflytte began, when La Rocha took pity on him.

  “Two hours, maybe little more. Go, look around ship, find places to point camera.”

  “I really-”

  “Mr Fflytte,” I broke in. “That might not be a bad idea. If you haven’t seen all the nooks and crannies, a tour might give you some interesting angles.”

  He thought for a moment, then nodded. “Very well, we will take a tour of the ship. Will you lead us?” he asked La Rocha.

  Samuel had been frowning at a point among the forest of ropes where Adam and Jack were smearing some disgusting-looking grease into the wooden pulleys and all over themselves. Inadvertently, his elbow ventured into Rosie’s territory. La Rocha’s feathered familiar lunged, but quicker than the eye could follow, the quarterdeck erupted into a flurry of brilliant plumage as Rosie fought the hand wrapped around its throat. La Rocha stepped forward; Samuel let go; Rosie took off. A trail of scarlet and blue feathers traced the outraged bird’s path into the heights.

  The two men looked at each other; the wind held its breath; the sail-makers’ needles held the air; waves held back from lapping our wooden sides. Then La Rocha turned on one shiny red heel, and said to Randolph Fflytte, “Your ‘Samuel’ will guide you through ship.”

  Samuel’s normally dead-pan face registered a slight flush. He started to speak, but La Rocha cut him off, in Arabic. “The whole ship, Selim.”

  Personally, I would not have turned my back on a man with that expression on his face (Selim the Grim) but La Rocha was made of sterner stuff than I. Either that or he knew just how far he could push his second in command.

  Samuel’s gaze left the Captain’s hat, played across the passengers standing motionless about the deck, rested on the two grease-spattered lads (who hastily bent to their work), and then flicked briefly towards the presence that perched above us in the rigging.

  He gave a brief nod, as if confirming some private idea, and descended from the quarterdeck, saying “Come” as he walked past Fflytte and Hale, leading the way to the bow. They followed Samuel; after a moment, I followed them; Annie and Edith came, too; soon half the ship’s population was gathered to hear Samuel’s voice.

  Samuel waited for us to go still – or as still as one can go on a moving deck. Then, with a final dark glance at the quarterdeck, he faced the open sea and pointed. “Bowsprit,” he said. His forefinger went up. “Outer jib.” The finger dropped a few degrees. “Inner jib. Fore stays’l.”

  And so he went. We learned what the lashings around the anchors were called (in English, to my surprise and relief) and which neat coil of rope was connected to which sail, and whether it was a halyard or a sheet; where the upper topsail ended and the topgallant began; the various staysails as opposed to the jibs. Or rather, we heard the labels recited. It was as if Samuel had been assigned the job of naming every minute portion of the ship – but naming alone. He would occasionally answer a direct question, if it reached him in a pause between recitations, but for the most part, he was a dictionary rather than an encyclopaedia. When Bibi asked why the sail was called “square” when it was a rectangle (in fact, they were trapezoidal), he simply looked through her and went on.

  Most of the others went back to their sunbathing and cigarettes before we progressed twenty feet down the port side. Fflytte and Hale were looking stunned, Will ignored the lecture entirely, Edith developed a dangerous fascination for the knots holding the various lines in place, and Annie most helpfully kept pulling the child’s exploring fingers away from the belaying pins. Daniel Marks and Bibi seemed transfixed by the reflections in Samuel’s black boots.

  Halfway down the side, only two of the audience were paying attention. Jack was one, the young pirate focussed on every label, every brief explanation, his lips in constant motion as he either tried to guess the name before Samuel could say it, or repeated the name under his breath once it was given.

  The other attentive one was me.

  I can’t say that it mattered in the least whether the bundle of rope before me was a sheet or a clewline, or if pulling on it raised the third sail of the fore mast (the fore-upper-topsail-halyard) or adjusted the angle of its yard (the fore-upper-topsail-brace) since I had no intention of running the ship myself. However, it was a mental challenge, along the lines of mastering basic Arabic in a month or committing to memory the by-ways of London. And Samuel’s whole attitude was that of a gauntlet thrown: None of you landsmen will be able to follow this, but I’ve been ordered to give it to you, and by God I will.

  So I paid attention.

  I admit that at first I cheated, writing down key words to reinforce their place in my mind. But once I had the patterns (clewlines and buntlines, halyards and braces, each going higher up the mast as we went aft) it became easier. Of course, my brain felt as if it were about to explode long before we went down the steps (companionway) and past the kitchen (galley) to the orlop deck, but it was all there, neatly catalogued and waiting for the next time I found myself on a brigantine.

  Finally, at the nethermost reaches of the ship, Samuel came to a halt. Some ninety minutes had gone by. Jack was not far from tears, Fflytte looked bored out of his skull, Hale and Will had slipped away somewhere around the middle of the second level below decks, and Annie acted as if she had weights attached to both ankles. God only knew where Edith had got to.

  Our sadistic g
uide held up the oil lamp with which he had ill-lit our way, and announced, “Is all.”

  Fflytte seized his hand, thanked him vigorously, and fled. Jack thumbed his forelock and trudged back to his grease pot. The big man looked at the two young women he’d been left with, and for the first time, permitted a grimace to cross his face.

  “I waste my time,” he said.

  Annie protested, so weakly she might have been agreeing, but I decided there was no harm in letting him know that his efforts had not been entirely in vain.

  “Not at all,” I assured him. “It’s extremely helpful to have a clearer idea of how all those bits tie together.”

  “Yes?” he said, disbelief clear in his voice and stance. “Then what you call this?”

  He kicked his boot (for the first time, not so shiny) against a piece of wood that I probably could have guessed had I never set foot on a sailing ship.

  “That’s the mast – the mainmast,” I told him.

  “That?” he said, indicating a lump of wood and metal.

  “A knee.”

  After the third such easily named object, it occurred to him that these would be fresh in my mind. Without a word, he pushed past and clumped up the ladder, restoring the lamp to its hook.

  Without a word, he pointed to a triangular scrap of canvas overhead.

  “That’s the main topmast stays’l,” I told him. “That’s the mains’l throat halyard. Fore t’gallant brace. Port deadeyes. Catharpins. Snatch block.” This went on for two or three minutes, attracting rather more attention than I had intended. I was considering allowing a few mistakes to creep in, just to take the eyes off us, when Samuel made a noise I would not have thought possible from him. He laughed. Then his hand slammed down on my back, nearly shooting me off the deck and causing my spine to tingle from toes to jawline.

  He turned to the quarterdeck, where Rosie had resumed his perch and La Rocha, unable to hear our voices, was watching intently.

  “I have parrot, too!” Samuel shouted at La Rocha, then asked me, “You maybe want to learn how they work?” A jab of the thumb upwards indicated that the lessons would not be given on deck. My heart instantly climbed up my throat.