“But if Easton was working for Killigrew, and Killigrew was in with King James, how could they . . .”
“Everybody paid off the king, who then let ’em all have their little squabbles between themselves. Same situation in Europe, and the seas were still up for grabs, with no laws pertaining. In any case, the coalition of niggled shipowners who went after Easton put their battle fleet in the hands of another young aristocrat named Henry Mainwaring. Good sailor, and well connected at court.” He pronounced it “Mannering” and told me to remember it well, because the name loomed large in the subject he was teaching me.
“When Killigrew and Easton learn what’s coming for ’em, Easton takes his ships and clears out.”
“To where?”
The captain told how Easton, with ten ships, sailed for Newfoundland and more or less took it over (to the delight of the Newfoundlanders, though not their governor), using it as a base for raids on the Grand Banks and the Caribbean. He was very successful, sacking Puerto Rico, taking ships, finally sailing for the Mediterranean Sea. Tunis was a longtime haven for pirates, where loot could be traded and sold. Then, with great wealth, he sailed to the French Riviera, where he bought a villa at Villefranche, and a title, making him Marquis of Savoy. “He had a patio done by the best stonecutters, with a mosaic deck and a marvellous view of the bay. Also the best wine cellar you can imagine.”
“What happened to Mainwaring?”
“So here comes Mainwaring to Cornwall to find Easton, and there’s him, gone. Well, what do you do? You’ve got a bloody expensive fleet, and a great responsibility to get your sponsors some kind of payoff. The only thing for it is to go after Spaniards, which is always an option. And you do, and then you, too, sail for Newfoundland, and do the same bloody thing that Easton did. He’s long gone, o’course. So you take over, raid the Grand Banks, then the Caribbean, do rather well. Then you, also, head into the Med, go to Tunis, flog your loot, and go to Villefranche. By this time, you’re listed as a pirate in the British Book of Public Records.”
“I’m still chasing Easton?”
“Not for years, but you do catch up with him at last, and instead of shooting a bunch of cannonballs, you drink a very pleasant vintage to one another’s health and continuing success. Just close your eyes and imagine it, with palm trees, wine, moonlight . . .”
I closed my eyes, and by some trick of mind, I heard the whisper of breeze through palm fronds, felt a brush of it on my cheek, and it was like velvet. I distinctly heard a clink of crystal, laughter, a toast, and an image began to form of moonlit water below a terrace, the silhouettes of anchored galleons . . . all astonishingly vivid, and getting more so by the moment, until the captain brought me back.
“No time for that right now. We’re about done here, finished with Easton, who’s happy where he is, but not quite yet with Mainwaring, who wants to go home, back to merry old England. That means he has to buy a pardon, which is how aristocrats who have been naughty with their ships get away with it. Mainwaring pays the price that King James bills him for, and agrees to a very important condition attached to his pardon. That is that he returns right away, and helps stamp out piracy around the British Isles. Set a thief out to catch a thief, eh? So home he sails, carrying what’s recorded as ‘a large sum of money,’ to take up his new career as the king’s chief authority against pirates. He’s not yet thirty years old.
“His first advice to the king is to stop pardoning pirates. His own pardon is of course secure at that time. He tells the King . . .” (here he closed his eyes and quoted ) “‘ . . . to take away their hopes and encouragements, your Highness must put on a constant immutable resolution never to grant any pardon, and for those that are or may be taken, to put them all to death, or make slaves of them.’
“In other words, as long as the government winked at piracy, there would be pirates. Mainwaring also advised closing up shop on all the baronial pirates around the British Isles, and licensing privateers to chase them down. Thieves against thieves again. Last, and most important, Mainwaring recommended a standing navy, answerable only to the Crown, in order to regulate the privateers, y’see. Some call him the father of the Royal Navy. Be that as it may, Mainwaring, ex-pirate, was knighted and elected to Parliament, and rose to vice admiral in the new navy that he wanted. With it he made good on his promise to squeeze piracy out of home waters forever. Rather ironic, eh?” A yawn. “Now, dear lad, I confess a certain exhaustion with the subject at this moment. Now let us return to now. We both have much to do, and much to be careful about.”
8
The Concert
AS TO STAYING alert, I didn’t need the captain’s caution where Grendel was concerned, as will be very well understood by anybody who has had the occasion to flee from a deadly beast, then to be stalked by it. I varied my routes to school and town, not encountering my nemesis, but with no way of knowing whether that was because my evasion was working or if Klaus Moehner had simply lost interest in tormenting me with his evilly trained dog. In class, I had semester final exams, and all work fell due, including my essay, entitled “Western Piracy, Part One.”
“Saints alive!” said Miss Titherington when I handed it to her, all fourteen pages of it, neatly penned. “Part one?” Pleased with my commitment to my topic, she readily agreed to let me pursue it during the second semester.
I was to have no more piracy lessons for a while, however. At the inn, everything was given to preparations for the concert, an event that had become problematic, not for lack of interest, but for too much of it. As word of it got around, more musicians wanted to come, and Meg found herself having to programme things so those she deemed worthy would have some chance to play, yet trying not to hurt the feelings of those she felt were unready to perform for a paying audience. The promise of success also meant a crush of preparatory expenses. All the food, a gross of candles, twenty pounds of coffee and such could be bought on credit, but not the liquor and beer needed to stock the bar for an overflow crowd. The liquor commission wanted cash, and Mother had to empty our bank account in order to get it.
“This thing had better work,” she fretted. “If there’s a blizzard, or if anything else happens to keep people from coming, we’re all going to be eating the same food until March, when we’ll be evicted anyway.” In fact, Mother’s vigour had increased as she fussed over every detail, recruiting more help, rehearsing people in their jobs, all with an efficiency that swept everybody before it like cobwebs in front of a broom. My life had no more time for piracy lessons, or anything else.
The captain remained more or less aloof from all of the activity that his suggestion had generated, spending his days in Tom’s boat shed, starting the serious work that Merry needed, returning to the inn for supper, then tying little knots by the fire until Meg appeared with her fiddle for their evening practice. Her only communication with him, however, was the signalling that musicians make to one another. When she spoke, it was generally an instruction as to how she would prefer to hear him play the tune.
“Like this?” he would ask.
“More like this,” she would say, and off they would go again. In the community where I grew up, such deference to a woman (never mind a girl) was at least unusual. I couldn’t resist asking why he let her boss him around so.
“Any why I gave you would be a lie. But it’s no lie that she’s got a music that vibrates in my bones. And she doesn’t bruise your eye, eh?” He squinted at me with a look that probed my most secret thoughts, and I blushed.
The last working day before Christmas brought a snow that was heavy enough to blanket the landscape, making everything look like a postcard, especially the inn, with its ancient presence. It also brought the first indication of a threat to the concert other than the weather, and that was the discovery that many of the posters that I had made and put up around town had been torn down. Then around midafternoon an officer from the Department of Public Health showed up, demanding to inspect the kitchen, which he did with surpri
sing zeal. Finding no bug, no contaminant, not even a loose noodle to reward his efforts (not in my mother’s kitchen), he went away mumbling that he had been sent as a result of a private complaint.
“Well, they can’t close you down for a sanitary violation, or stop everybody from knowing about the concert by attacking Jim’s posters,” Aunt Karen observed. “But it is certainly a reminder that not everybody wants to see the inn have a successful event. What else might they have up their sleeve?” It was supper on Christmas Eve, and everybody except the captain seemed torn between apprehension and excitement over the gamble on which our fates now seemed to hang.
“I’ll keep an eye on things,” said Robin. He had been assigned the Boxing Day duty by Chief Moehner, who knew well that the assignment meant his subordinate would miss much of his family’s big event. “But the weather’s cleared, and I don’t know what else they can pull off to stop you.”
There were several things, as it turned out, starting with a midmorning visit from Fire Chief Wirtz, who was married to the Moehners and had come to prohibit the inn’s occupancy to no more than forty-two people, under new regulations. By a stroke of luck, his visit coincided with Robin delivering Aunt Karen to spend the day, and our Corporal MacMaster had the authority to talk to him nose to nose. Chief Wirtz had some bluster, but he was essentially a shy kind of person, and Robin let him retreat with his dignity. “What next?” said Mother.
Next was Clem Clancy’s not showing up as promised to snowplough the inn’s parking area outside the gate. His plough (serviced by Moehner Equipment & Repair) was broken-down. This made for a frantic moment, but a parking disaster was averted by Roderick Hirtle, who came over with his plough two hours before the event and cleared an area big enough for lots of cars.
“Let’s hope for that,” said Mother, who was strung taut and had to be commanded by her sister to sit down and take some deep breaths.
“You’re just fussing now,” Aunt Karen told her. “You’re going to need your energy.” So she sat, just as the captain came down the stairs, resplendent in his black suit, as though for church, and wearing a broad smile. But there was something unfamiliar about him, something remarkably youthful . . .
“You’ve got a new tooth!” I blurted.
“Actually, three, thanks to Dr. Wentzel.”
“You look very handsome,” said Mother.
He bowed. “That’s as befits the beauty of this place and all here.” His gaze swept the room, now expanded to a space with twenty-three tables, each perfectly arranged, each with its own candle to “make the old place glow in all its charm,” as he phrased it. His reference to the candles caused Mother to spring up and straighten several that were crooked to her eye. Then she was off to speak again with her new crew, who were hovering, waiting for things to happen, and the captain got his customary rum with uncustomary speed from a waitress other than Meg. Grandpa’s clock rang five bells. Nervous anticipation charged the air, but the captain was like an oasis of calm. Aunt Karen gave him one of her rare small smiles.
“Captain Johnson,” she addressed him, “since we have a moment to fill, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“Yes, madam?”
“Do you like old cannons?” On the surface, it was an innocent enough thing to ask, but Aunt Karen seldom operated on the surface. The question set the captain to scraping out his pipe bowl.
“Madam, you pose a very broad question. I confess a certain indifference to most of the many varieties of land ordnance, or the populous mortar family. However, if you mean ships’ cannon—the singular is properly the plural—do you refer to long guns, or their shorter cousins, the canons obusier, carronades, howitzers, or pivot pieces? In the truck gun family are your cannon royal, cannon, demi-cannon, bombards, licornes, falcons, sakers, serpentines, curtows, and culverins, not to mention your bastard culverins, and demi-culverins, and semi-demi-culverins, on down to the minions. And falconets.” Here he took a drink. “Then, of course, there’s the swivel family, with the perriers, lantakas, rabonets, cohorns, espingoles, hailshot pieces, sling pieces, murderers, pedreros, and portingall bases, or port pieces, for short. There’s also the whole bouche de feu family. On the whole, making allowance for your lack of specificity, and my own particular prejudices among the categories of naval artillery in general, yes, I would have to confess to a certain affinity for old cannon.”
“Good,” said Aunt Karen without blinking. “Because I want to know what you think of our cannon—the one that so mysteriously found its way back, like Lassie come home.”
“It is a light four-pounder, Queen Anne vintage, circa 1710, with decorative relief and dolphins. Very lovely. Perhaps I can fashion a proper carriage for it, using its original iron hardware, which Jim here says is still in the cellar. I’m looking forward to getting down there to have a closer look.”
“And what is your theory as to how the cannon came home?”
“Any guess would have to be a lie. Do you have a theory of your own?”
“No,” Aunt Karen shook her head. “Just questions and thoughts so far. For instance, Robin and I noticed that the ground under the cannon barrel was not dented, as it should have been if dumped from a truck bed. Why not, do you suppose?” Before the captain could be further tested, here came Tom, our volunteer bartender for the evening, and right behind him much of the Anglican Church choir, who would be first to perform, and on their heels was Tapping Tim with somebody to adjust the sound system. When Tim learned there was no sound system he almost went away, but Meg emerged and got him back.
Then the early customers started showing up, friends and family of the choir, wanting choice tables. They got them, along with the tea that most ordered. According to Meg’s carefully considered programme, the afternoon people (or “cookie-eaters” as she called them) would leave early, opening the tables to an evening crowd, with a door charge. When the first medley of madrigals commenced, it was to the better part of a full room, which included quite a few people who had never been to the inn. During the programme’s mandatory set of carols Ernie Fischback creatively mimed all twelve presents described in the lyrics of “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” and easily got the room amused and singing along. Meg’s solo set, driven by the captain’s accompaniment on his little tin flute, brought heavy applause that didn’t stop until they had performed an encore.
Then came Tapping Tim, by which time we had nearly a full house, and his gravelly ballads needed no sound system. At supper time, a half-hour break in the programme was announced, with the reminder there was a door charge for the evening part of the concert, and most of the previous customers went away, as planned, while others drifted in.
“Seems like you’ve got a success on your hands,” Robin remarked, sticking his head into the kitchen where Mother was toiling. “People are parked all the way out to the road.” Although on duty and in full uniform, he was immediately drafted to carry a box-load of trash out to the bin. “Anyway,” he said, picking it up, “I’ll be around to keep an eye on things, unless there’s trouble somewhere else around town.” But there was that, as it happened. Just as the supper crowd had filled the room, Robin got a call that the fire department was scrambling to a blaze, meaning he had to go too. “But you’ve got a pretty easygoing crowd, and it doesn’t look like you need a cop.”
He was wrong about that. Five minutes after his departure, just as a trio from the Fiddlers’ Association was getting warmed up and everything seemed to be going perfectly, Klaus Moehner and his cronies came in, this time seven of them, making a beeline for the last empty tables left in the room. They wore work clothes, and conspicuously upstaged the performance while getting themselves situated. Then they amused themselves by flustering their inexperienced waitress. The fiddlers struggled to keep their tempo under the distraction, making brave work of it, until the Moehner gang started to clap to the music without much regard for the beat. I parked my tray and made my way to where I’d last seen the captain, hoping he
could somehow dispose of them as neatly as before, but he was gone. Nor was he at the bar.
“Where’s Robin?” asked Tom, with a scowl at the invaders. I explained he’d had to go to a fire, and I couldn’t find the captain. Nor did I know what he could do. This new attack was obviously a lot more determined than before. Tom looked grim. “They’re killing this act, and it won’t take much more to kill the evening.” The other customers, trying to ignore what was happening, started to chat among themselves, and the concert atmosphere was evaporating by the moment.
The fiddlers simply stopped playing in the middle of their set. Tom went over and spoke with the Moehners’ table. Whatever he said did less than no good, because Klaus stood up and announced to the room that he and his friends would fill the break with something they’d been practising for the occasion. So saying, they all started up an old Nova Scotia sailor’s song that made every religious person in the room blanch.
“Away, away, with fife and drum,
Here we come, full of rum,
Looking for girls who peddle their bum
To the North Atlantic squadron . . .”
As everybody knows, the first verse of “The North Atlantic Squadron” is the most polite one, and a couple of people were rising to leave, but the second verse petered out after two or three words. Moving rapidly toward the Moehner table was the awesome figure of Noel Nauss, all six foot six inches, 350 pounds of him. Yet he moved in a curiously graceful, almost feminine way, like a dancer, which was somehow quite sinister. Klaus sat back down. Noel loomed over their party and regarded them with an expression that was without anger or malice, more what I would call eagerness. He had no message to them other than his unswerving attention. Noel did dart a glance toward the bar, where I saw the captain shaking his head, as though signalling “not yet.” Noel moved quietly to a position behind the Moehners, and took up station there, arms folded, gazing down at them with patient appetite.
The Brotherhood of Pirates Page 11
