Elinor had heard enough to agitate her nerves and fill her mind, and she was glad to be distracted by the powerful sensation of the submarine’s thruster-propellers whirring to life beneath the vast hull. She was spared from the necessity of saying much in reply herself, and from the danger of hearing anything more from her brother, by the entrance of Mr. Robert Ferrars, panting and out of breath, lugging an oversized wooden trunk on his back like a mule.
“I made it!” he cheered gaily. “By God I made it, and barely nicked the good china along the way!”
“Three . . .” came the voice of the servant, and it was instantly echoed by the voice of the captain, hollering along the long cabin of the submarine. “Three minutes to Ascension.”
“Three! My God!” hollered John Dashwood, and hastened away to make a last-minute search for Fanny and their child. Elinor was left to improve her acquaintance with Robert, who, by the happy self-complacency of his manner on this most desperate of occasions, was confirming her most unfavourable opinion of his head and heart.
As he buckled himself in to an adjoining ferry bench, Robert promptly began to speak of Edward; for he, too, had heard of the posting at the Delaford lighthouse, and was very inquisitive on the subject. Elinor repeated the particulars of it, as she had given them to John; and their affect on Robert, though very different, was not less striking than it had been on him. He laughed most immoderately. The idea of Edward’s being a mere lighthouse keeper, and tracking the movements of some second-rate Loch Ness Monster, diverted him beyond measure; he could conceive nothing more ridiculous.
“Two minutes!”
Elinor, even as she gritted her teeth and prepared for the lurching motion of the great submarine’s departure, could not restrain her eyes from being fixed on Robert with a look that spoke all the contempt it excited.
“We may treat it as a joke,” said he, at last, recovering from the affected laugh which had considerably lengthened out the genuine gaiety of the moment—”but, upon my soul, it is a most serious business. Poor Edward! He is ruined forever. I am extremely sorry for it—for I know him to be a very good-hearted creature. You must not judge of him, Miss Dashwood, from your slight acquaintance. Poor Edward! His manners are certainly not the happiest in nature. But we are not all born, you know, with the same powers. Poor fellow!—to see him in a circle of strangers!— among lake people! But upon my soul, I believe he has as good a heart as any in the kingdom; and I declare and protest to you I never was so shocked in my life, as when it all burst forth. My mother was the first person who told me of it; and I, feeling myself called on to act with resolution, immediately said to her, ‘My dear madam, I do not know what you may intend to do on the occasion, but as for myself, I must say, that if Edward does marry this young woman, I never will see him again.’ Poor Edward! He has done for himself completely, shut himself out for ever from all decent society! But, as I directly said to my mother, I am not in the least surprised at it; from his style of education, it was always to be expected. My poor mother was half frantic.”
Unmoved by this appeal to empathy for Mrs. Ferrars, and indeed weary of the whole line of conversation, Elinor happened to look outside the window of the Ferry, where a universe of fish now swam and darted happily through the ruins of the elaborate civilization that had been built on their turf. She happened to spy, as she looked disconsolately at the wreck of the Sub-Station, a small, cigar-shaped one-person submarine of an old-fashioned design, whooshing rapidly by in a spray of bubbles. Behind the wheel was Lady Middleton, who—for the first time since she had made that worthy’s acquaintance—was smiling; indeed, grinning from ear to ear, and, or so Elinor thought, whooping loudly with pleasure.
Recovering herself from this remarkable sight, Elinor rejoined her conversation with Robert Ferrars. “Have you ever seen Edward’s intended?” she asked.
“Yes; once, while she was staying in our house, I happened to drop in for ten minutes; and I saw quite enough of her. The merest awkward country girl, without style, or elegance, and almost without beauty. Just the kind of girl I should suppose likely to captivate poor Edward. I offered immediately, as soon as my mother related the affair to me, to talk to him myself, and dissuade him from the match; but it was too late then, I found, to do anything. But had I been informed of it a few hours earlier—I think it is most probable—that something might have been hit on. I certainly should have represented it to Edward in a very strong light. ‘My dear fellow, you are making a most disgraceful connection, and such a one as your family are unanimous in disapproving.’ But now it is all too late. He must be starved, you know—that is certain; absolutely starved. He would have been better off, if he lived through what has just occurred, to have drowned instead.”
Elinor thought she could bear no more of this, when the grave voice of the public address reached its conclusion.
“ONE . . . be braced . . .”
And the turbines revved up to their full capacity, and the propellers whirred faster, and the seat rumbled beneath her as the Ascension Station discharged the emergency ferry, with all its passengers aboard; Elinor looked around, and saw that, two benches over, Marianne was looking out the window of the ferry with the same sentimental regard she looked upon all places, at all times, on leaving them—no matter what level of affection she may have bore during her time there. On this occasion, however, Elinor shared in her moist-eyed regard.
Sub-Marine Station Beta was no more.
CHAPTER 42
THERE WAS NO SENSE in further discussion; continuance on Sub-Station Beta having been rendered a tragic impossibility, every circumstance now dictated that the Dashwood sisters, in company with Mrs. Jennings, proceed to The Cleveland, from where they would proceed after a suitable interval back to Pestilent Isle and the comforts of Barton Cottage. The two parties who would be travelling hence, disembarked from Emergency Ferry No. 12 and met on a small atoll, three nautical miles from the former location of Sub-Marine Station Beta. For the convenience of Charlotte and her child, they were to be more than two days on their journey. Colonel Brandon, travelling separately, was to join them aboard The Cleveland soon after their arrival.
They would travel to The Cleveland aboard the Rusted Nail, the hearty old two-masted pirate schooner which Mr. Palmer captained in his buccaneering youth; their escort was an assortment of Palmer’s former crewmen, with whom he had fortuitously been assembled on an island redoubt for a reunion holiday at the time of the Sub-Station’s collapse. These gentlemen of fortune were the usual assortment of colourful characters, each with their own affable eccentricities; there was, besides Mr. Palmer, by now well known to the Dashwoods, McBurdry, the genial and foul-smelling ship’s cook; One-Eyed Peter, who had two working eyes, and Two-Eyed Scotty, who had one; Billy Rafferty, the cabin boy; and the first mate, Mr. Benbow, a massively tall half-blood Irishman with feathers sewn into his beard; Benbow was as famous a curmudgeon as any man on the seas, and he looked so dourly upon the prospect of passengers that, whenever he encountered Mrs. Palmer, her child, or either Dashwood, he made the sign of the cross and spat thickly on the foredeck.
As eager as Marianne had been to quit the Station, she could not bid adieu to the now-extinct undersea paradise in which she had for the last time enjoyed her confidence in Willoughby. Elinor’s only consolation was her expectation that the company of the Nail’s crew would provide the pirate-enthusiast Marianne with a pleasurable distraction from her thorough-going melancholy.
For her part, Elinor’s satisfaction, as the Rusted Nail navigated south-easterly from the Station to the swampy Somersetshire inlet where The Cleveland was moored, was entirely positive. The waters were piloted smoothly by Mr. Benbow; the sea air was fresh and clean; and the only threat of attack was swiftly dispelled. This peril was from a school of monster-fish unlike anything Elinor had ever seen: a pack of floating eyeballs, each as big as a man’s head, all trailing long tentacles behind them like hideous jellyfish, and blinking terribly as they floated for sever
al nautical miles behind the Nail. But a single perfectly aimed shot from Two-Eyed Scotty’s blunderbuss neatly pierced one of these ocular horrors, exploding it in the water and scattering the rest.
Each day at twilight, the crewmen drank their daily allotted jigger of bumboo, roasted a pig, and scared each other with terrifying tales of Dreadbeard. At the uttering of his name, all men present, blasphemous and God-denying mercenaries to a one, crossed themselves and looked skyward; Dreadbeard, captain of the Jolly Murderess, was the most infamous of pirates. While most gentlemen of fortune became so for a love of plunder; and some for a love of the seas and for killing the monsters that dwelt therein; Dreadbeard’s motivations (they whispered) were all for blood and the love of killing. His own piratical crewmen, pressed into service from among the crews of plundered frigates, trembled in fear of him, as they were keelhauled or dropped to dance the hempen jig at the slightest insubordination—or, Dreadbeard’s favourite, thrown naked and screaming to the sharks, whom Dreadbeard purposefully kept trailing his ship by tossing bloody bits of flank steak off the stern at odd intervals. He was a madman; a murderer; and, it was whispered with particular meaning to Elinor and Marianne, he saw no distinction between fellow pirates and honest lubbers, men and women, boys and girls.
“If a creature has a coin, I’ll snatch it,” went the cold-eyed captain’s nefarious motto, which the crew of the Rusted Nail could recite in whispered unison. “If a creature walks a deck, I’ll kill it and eat its heart like salmagundi.”
Marianne listened to these tales with wide eyes, drinking in the stories of press-ganged swabs and men murdered in their bunks with a flushed cheek, barely disguising a frank delight that such a creature as Dreadbeard could live; Elinor, for her part, retained sense enough to be feared of such stories, but to remain skeptical of the sordid details. Mr. Palmer, Elinor noted with some curious interest, never spoke on the matter, lapsing into his customary black silence as his crewmen whispered their lurid tales of Dreadbeard, passing them around with their cups of bumboo, each night as the yellow sea-sun disappeared beneath the horizon line.
The second day brought them into the coast of Somerset, and in the forenoon of the third they arrived at the Palmers’ four-and-forty foot houseboat, The Cleveland. As they climbed aboard, the Dashwoods and their companions bade a hearty good-bye to the crew of the Rusted Nail; Mr. Benbow and his company hoisted anchor and set sail, top guns loaded and Jolly Roger fluttering, on hard lookout for Dreadbeard.
The Cleveland consisted (rather marvelously) of a spacious, well-built two-story cottage, in the country style, with French windows and a charming verandah—all serving as the cabin atop a wide-decked river-ship; the ship was piloted, when it left its moorings, by a giant captain’s wheel which sat just beyond the front, or bow-ward, door of the cottage; through a trap at the stern connected to the holds, below. Marianne climbed aboard the houseboat with a heart swelling with emotion from the consciousness of being only eighty miles from Pestilent Isle, and not thirty from Willoughby’s lair at Combe Magna; and before she had been five minutes in The Cleveland’s gently listing parlour, while the others were busily helping Charlotte to show her child to the ship’s maid, she quitted it again, went ashore and clambered atop a charming mud dune. Marianne’s eye, wandering over a wide tract of country to the southeast, could fondly rest on the farthest ridge of hills in the horizon, and fancy that from their summits Combe Magna might be seen.
In such moments of precious, invaluable misery, she rejoiced in tears of agony to be on The Cleveland; and as she returned by a different circuit to the houseboat, feeling all the happy privilege of country liberty, she resolved to spend almost every hour of every day while she remained with the Palmers, in the indulgence of such solitary rambles.
Marianne returned just in time to join the others as they quitted the house, on an excursion through its more immediate premises, and was promptly upbraided by her sister for the lack of sensible caution shown by such a venture.
“Is it your earnest desire to be murdered by rapacious pirates?” demanded Elinor. “After such a narrow escape from the destruction of Sub-Marine Station Beta, can you be so foolish as to risk your life by wandering so directly into harm’s way? Did you forget the tales of Dread-beard whispered by the men upon the Nail?”
Marianne was preparing to respond, when Mrs. Palmer broke in with her happy laugh.
“In fact,” said she, laughing lightly, “we are as safe here as possible, and can fear nothing in the surrounding country.”
In response to Elinor’s puzzled inquiries, Mr. Palmer gruffly related that, indeed, Dreadbeard was the fiercest of the pirates who plied these waters, and the one most feared as murderous and vengeful. But Palmer, or so he explained, had once served alongside him when both were but boys and sailors in His Majesty’s service, on a fire-serpent hunting mission off the coast of Africa; Palmer, seeing where his shipmate had fallen into the sea, clambered out onto the bowsprit, leapt into the water, and rescued the other boy—just as he was about to be consumed bodily by a crocodile. If there was one code respected by Dreadbeard (and, as far as could be discerned, there was but the one) it was that a man who had saved his life would never fall under harm by his hands, and to the contrary would live under his protection.
And so, upon his retirement, Palmer had moored his houseboat here, off Somerset Shore, where others would be most afraid, but where he and Mrs. Palmer could live the most securely—safe not only from Dreadbeard but also from any other murdering freebooter, none of whom would dare to harm anyone whose safety was guaranteed by the most merciless of buccaneers.
“If I had never pulled that lunatic from the crocodile’s mouth, and Dreadbeard were to discover us here, having heaved anchor in the very bosom of his territory, he would slaughter us all and cook us for stew— but only after having his unsavory way with the women and torturing every man slowly, for the sheer pleasure of it,” Palmer concluded grimly.
“Ah!” laughed Mrs. Palmer. “How droll!”
“Wouldn’t it be a tremendous thing, though,” sighed Marianne rapturously, “To encounter such a character, if only for a moment . . .”
“Marianne!” said Elinor, aghast at her passionate-minded sister’s lack of sense.
Mr. Palmer shook his head gravely—dismissing with one gesture Marianne’s romantic enthusiasm for pirates and Elinor’s sensible fear of them. “There are worse things in the world than pirates,” he muttered cryptically, before descending down the trap. “Far worse indeed.”
The rest of the morning was easily whiled away, in lounging round the kitchen, examining the astonishing varieties of meat, from venison to vulture jerky that were kept aboard for shipside mess—and in visiting the below-deck, where Mr. Palmer was persuaded to show off the variety of mushrooms he cultivated in the dank of the ship’s hold.
The morning was fine and dry, and Marianne had not calculated for any change of weather during their stay at The Cleveland. With great surprise therefore, did she find herself prevented by a settled rain from going out again after dinner. She had depended on a twilight walk to the mud dune, and perhaps all over the grounds, and an evening merely cold or damp would not have deterred her from it; but a heavy and settled rain even she could not fancy dry or pleasant weather for walking.
Their party was small, and the hours passed quietly away. Mrs. Palmer had her child, and Mrs. Jennings her carpet-work, and they talked of the friends they had left behind. Elinor, however little concerned in it, joined in their discourse; and Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, soon procured herself a satisfyingly gory book of shipwrecks.
Nothing was wanting on Mrs. Palmer’s side that could make them feel more welcome. Her kindness, recommended by so pretty a face, was engaging; her folly, though evident was not disgusting, because it was not conceited; and Elinor could have forgiven everything but her laugh.
Elinor had seen so little of Mr. Palmer, and in that little had seen so m
uch variety in his address to her sister and herself, that she knew not what to expect to find him in his own family, aboard his own houseboat. She found him, however, perfectly the gentleman in his behaviour to all his visitors, and only occasionally rude to his wife and her mother. His only direct interaction with Elinor, however, came a few days after they had arrived, when he suddenly came upon her on the verandah, where she stood breathing in the marshy air, and asked with abruptness: “Are your relations still on Pestilent Isle?”
“Indeed; and awaiting our return, or so we understand.”
“So you hope.”
Of Edward, she now received intelligence from Colonel Brandon, who had been to Delaford to see him installed at the lake-side lighthouse. Treating her at once as the disinterested friend of Mr. Ferrars, and the kind of confidant of himself, Colonel Brandon talked to her a great deal of the lighthouse at Delaford, described its deficiencies, and told her what he meant to do himself towards removing them. His behaviour in this, his open pleasure in meeting her after an absence of only ten days, his readiness to converse with her, and his deference for her opinion, and the way his tentacles danced gaily as they spoke, might very well justify Mrs. Jennings’s persuasion of his attachment. But such a notion had scarcely entered Elinor’s head. She knew the true object of the colonel’s affections.
On the fourth evening on The Cleveland, Marianne took yet another of her delightful twilight walks to the mud flat. She paused before a babbling brook where it ambled through the swamp, suddenly struck by how greatly it resembled the very stream where she had been assaulted by the giant octopus, before being so fortuitously rescued by the dashing Willoughby. Lost in the reflections such a sight engendered, pleasant and unbearable by turns, Marianne sank down to perch upon a log—which promptly spewed forth from a crag in its side a buzzing, furious swarm of mosquitoes. This humming devilish cloud soon entirely overwhelmed the flailing Marianne, who helplessly, uselessly, threw herself to the swampy ground and batted about as the insects covered every inch of her like a blanket. Again and again they sunk their tiny mandibles into her flesh, producing dozens upon dozens of deep stinging wounds—Marianne crying out all the while—until six or seven of the devilish buzzing things swarmed into her mouth and down her throat; the pain of which, combined with a single bite received directly in her eye, drove her past the point of consciousness.
Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters Page 27
