The Pirates! in an Adventure with the Romantics

by Gideon Defoe

  27th September: Not 100 per cent sure about this ferry. Europe to England via Barbados seems like a strange sort of route. Lots more plundering than you would expect.

  9th October: The Captain blames ‘sea air’ for missing valuables and my disordered belongings. Slightly worried that ‘sea air’ intends to get to Oxford before me. But tomorrow I disembark, and will make utmost haste towards my prize.

  The Captain closed the diary. ‘Then, after that the entries stop and it just becomes a list of girls’ names with marks out of ten. Pages and pages of them.’

  ‘Well, that probably explains how your old mentor wound up with the catalogue number. But I’m not sure how any of it helps us,’ said Shelley, folding his arms in a surly way.

  ‘Ah, but that’s not all I found,’ said the Captain, looking pleased. He held up a piece of antique parchment. ‘Because see here – this was tucked into the back of it.’

  Shelley took the parchment and studied it for a moment. It was a piece of sheet music with the lyrics to a song. Byron grabbed it from him excitedly.

  ‘Could this be it? Perhaps Plato’s treatise is actually a love song so powerful it can overcome any lady that should hear it?’

  They all gathered round to look at the song.

  ‘Hmmm. Can’t feel myself swooning,’ said Mary.

  ‘Nope,’ said Jennifer. ‘Doesn’t do anything much for me, either.’

  ‘Must at least be a clue of some sort though?’ said the Captain, a little crestfallen. ‘Some kind of clever code maybe?’

  ‘How about it, Babs?’ said Byron. ‘Anything there?’

  He passed the piece of music to Babbage, who gave it a cursory once-over, shrugged, and passed it back. ‘Not a sausage, so far as I can make out.’

  ‘Damn and blast!’ said Byron, scrunching it up and tossing it over his shoulder.

  ‘Well then,’ said Babbage, getting to his feet. ‘It looks like this entire expedition has been an unfortunate wild goose chase.’ He yawned. ‘Gentlemen, and ladies, it has been a long day, and the night draws in. I suggest we have little option but to retire to bed for the evening. I for one welcome the chance to spend a night free from clattering hooves or the incessant chatter of weevils.’

  A bit reluctantly everybody agreed that Babbage was probably right, so they gathered their things together and went upstairs to choose where to sleep. The Pirate Captain crossed his fingers and hoped that none of the rooms had bunk-beds in them, because he didn’t want to have to spend the rest of the night mediating disputes between the crew as to who got to go on top.

  A little while later the pirate with a scarf finished his nightly moisturising routine, and headed back towards his bedroom. As he was passing the door to the Captain’s room it opened a crack.

  ‘Can I have a word, number two?’

  ‘Of course, Captain,’ said the pirate with a scarf. ‘Did you want me to brush your teeth for you?’

  ‘Yes, thanks, in a minute. But first, I’ve got another little job for you.’

  He beckoned the pirate with a scarf inside. Then the Captain proudly slapped a bundle of paper into his hands. It was tied together with a bit of twine. ‘Ta-da,’ he said.

  ‘What’s this?’ asked the pirate with a scarf, hoping that the answer wouldn’t be too stupid.

  ‘Nothing less than a cupid’s arrow aimed directly at young Mary’s heart!’

  The Captain took a moment to get the pirate with a scarf up to speed. He explained all about Mary’s secret love of monsters, and about her novel, and about her clever use of subtext.

  ‘So,’ he continued. ‘I’ve decided to do some subtext too. To that end I’ve written an entirely new version of Mary’s story, but this time there’s none of that conflicted feelings nonsense. In my version the heroine and the monster get it together. Actually they get it together in chapter two, so the rest is pretty racy stuff, as you can imagine.’

  The pirate with a scarf flicked through the manuscript. He read a page at random.

  Phoebe stepped out of the shower, sensuously towelling off her glistening elbows. Then the wall exploded and the half-man, half-seaweed monster walked in excitingly. ‘Hello, doll-face,’ said the half-man, half-seaweed monster noisily. ‘I have just eaten Sir Henderson.’

  ‘You swine!’ said Phoebe breathlessly, first swooning, and then caressing his beak affectionately. ‘Oh! But why pretend any more? Let us be frank at last – it is you I have always loved, from the first moment I saw you powerfully wrestle the quarter-bee/three-quarters-mollusc creature that night in the Limehouse opium den. We should probably elope to someplace hot and get married now. By the way, it is all right if you want to see other women, I’m completely fine with that.’

  Then some enemies appeared but the half-man, half-seaweed monster exploded them and ate them too.

  ‘So, what do you think?’ asked the Captain.

  ‘I think you like adverbs and unconventional sentence structure,’ said the pirate with a scarf, who never really enjoyed these conversations.

  ‘I’m not asking for a critique, number two. I learnt a long time ago that writing is a lot like piracy – the trick is to have almost no quality control whatsoever. That’s why I was able to knock off an entire novel in an hour. No – my point is, do you think it’s too subtle?’

  ‘No, Captain, I’ll think she’ll get the message. It helps that you’ve included so many graphic illustrations of what they get up to.’

  The Captain looked pleased. ‘Right then. Here’s the plan: first we wait until everyone is asleep, and then, in the dead of night, you’ll creep into Mary’s room and replace her manuscript with this one. She’ll find it in the morning, read my clever subtext, and bingo! Her little lubber heart will probably swell to twice its normal size. I’m not the sort to count my chickens before they’ve hatched, but I don’t think it’s getting ahead of myself to suggest that she’ll forget all about Shelley on the spot.’ He leaned back on his pillow and went a bit misty-eyed. ‘After that I expect our relationship will go through three main stages. At first we’ll be totally wrapped up in one another. We’ll dance through meadows with garlands in our hair and make daisy chains. I’ll make spontaneous romantic gestures and playfully splash her when we’re near water. In the next stage, we’ll move into a lovely little cottage in the Cotswolds where we’ll get married amongst the apple blossom. A simple ceremony, not too many uncles or cousins and we’d prefer to shell out for decent portions rather than table service, so we’ll have a buffet. Then we’ll have three strapping sons – Chet, Champ and Turlough – and three charming daughters, Marina, Neptunia and Barnacle. In the final stage of the relationship, the children will fly the nest and we’ll sit in rocking chairs and think about the old days. She’ll have a scrapbooking hobby and I’ll grow petunias in the garden because they’re hard-wearing. Slugs can be a problem, but apparently you can keep them under control with a saucer of beer half-buried in the soil. Did you know that?’

  The pirate with a scarf didn’t.

  ‘Our only worry will be Turlough, who’ll be more difficult than the other children. He’ll make a few bad decisions, but we’ll always be there for him, Mary and I.’

  ‘One point I’m not entirely clear on, Captain,’ said the pirate with a scarf. ‘Why am I the one stealing into her room?’

  ‘Well, I’d do it myself, but there’s always the risk she’ll wake up, which could be difficult to explain. Not the done thing in lubber circles, creeping about a girl’s bedchamber. Whereas if she wakes up and sees you, we can just inform her that, regrettably, you’ve a shocking and despicable history of this sort of behaviour.’

  So as the grandfather clock in the study chimed midnight, the pirate with a scarf tiptoed across the hallway and into Mary’s bedroom. He was relieved to see that she was asleep, snoring loudly, and that right there on the bed next to her was a manuscript. He carefully put the Captain’s novel down in its place, and then crept back out again. But he had barely got two steps back towa
rds the Captain’s room when he heard footsteps tapping down the corridor towards him. Deciding it was probably best not to be caught red-handed, the pirate with a scarf quickly stuffed Mary’s manuscript into the mouth of a shabby polar bear head hanging on the wall. At that moment Percy appeared from round the corner. They both jumped.

  ‘Oh!’ exclaimed Shelley. ‘Hello. I was just going to get a glass of water.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the pirate with a scarf, ‘I was also going to get some water.’

  ‘Water is good, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is, yes.’

  ‘Well, ’night then.’

  ‘ ’Night.’

  The pirate with a scarf threw in a bit of innocent whistling for good measure and ducked back inside the Captain’s room. The Captain looked up hopefully from his copy of Barely Human Mermaids.

  ‘Operation Subtext Switcheroo is a go, sir,’ said the pirate with a scarf, doing a thumbs-up.

  Fourteen

  Death Paid for Dinner

  The Pirate Captain awoke to the sound of terrible screams, which instantly put him in a bad mood, because in the era before John Humphrys ‘terrible screams’ was the worst noise you could wake up to. Even bloodthirsty terrors of the High Seas preferred to wake up to birdsong, or someone pretty singing in the shower, or the smell of freshly laundered bacon. He grabbed his dressing gown and tramped blearily out of bed to see what the commotion was about.

  In the hallway he found the poets and a big gaggle of pirates all pressed up together by the open door of Jennifer’s bedroom.

  ‘What’s all the racket, you swabs?’ the Captain asked, rubbing sleep goop from his eyes. ‘Some of us have spent an uncomfortable night dreaming our beards were haunted by great flapping ghost moths, and would appreciate a bit of peace and quiet.’

  Mary waved him over. ‘Oh! Captain, it’s awful!’ she cried. The Captain pressed through the throng and peered inside.

  He’d witnessed some pretty shocking scenes in his time as a pirate: a crew of twenty reduced to a crew of three thanks to poor porthole maintenance; a man eaten alive by ants; a menu where half the starters were more expensive than the mains; an ant eaten alive by men; the business with Little Jim; and more besides. But this was worse than all of them. Jennifer was nowhere to be seen. And her bed was covered in blood. Big splotches of sticky bright red blood.

  ‘Moider!’ said the pirate from the Bronx, who had been worried that he wasn’t going to get a look-in on this adventure.

  ‘I was on my way down to breakfast, when I saw Jennifer’s door ajar,’ explained Mary. ‘So I popped my head in, hoping to have a chat about girl-related matters, and then I found this! What terrible fate do you think could have befallen her?’

  The Pirate Captain circled the room, licked a finger and held it up to the air. Then he stroked his beard and narrowed his eyes.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ he announced, after a few moments, ‘that this looks very much like the work of the ghoulish undead.’

  Byron gaped. ‘Good Lord! You mean . . . a vampire? You really think this Count Ruthven chap does still stalk these halls?’31

  The Captain nodded. ‘I’m afraid so. Either he’s spirited Jennifer off somewhere to be his zombie bride, or he’s already sucked the blood right out of her, like she was a flame-haired coconut.’ He waved his fist at the ceiling. ‘Oh! Why did it have to be Jennifer? There’re at least half a dozen members of the crew that I wouldn’t even notice if they met a gory end. But Jennifer was different, mostly because she had the full complement of limbs and sensory organs, which is rare amongst seafaring types.’

  Byron placed a hand on the Captain’s shoulder. ‘If it is any consolation, I intend to immortalise her in verse.’ He stared into the middle distance and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Oh! Fair Jennifer; with her gentle manner; those sparkling eyes; her bell-like laughter; that ready smile; her full sensuous lips; the firm swell of her bosom; her shapely tapering thighs; that shelf-like . . .’

  Everybody listened respectfully to Byron’s poem. Once he was done a few of the crew had to excuse themselves to go and take showers. Then everybody gathered in the kitchen for breakfast, because although they were shocked by the latest turn of events, they knew that breakfast was the most important meal of the day, and that it was important not to skip it.

  ‘We should never have come to this place,’ said Babbage, looking miserably at his slice of bread. ‘I suggest we heed that leaflet’s advice and go and conclude this adventure on a log flume.’

  Byron thumped the table. ‘But we’re so close! I can feel it! Right on the verge of discovering Plato’s great secret!’

  ‘What do you think we should do, Percy?’ Mary asked, turning to Shelley, who had been very quiet all through the meal.

  ‘Frankly, I don’t much care,’ said Shelley, sulkily downing his Rice Krispies.

  Mary frowned.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Fine,’ said the poet with a cold sort of look. ‘Why don’t you ask the Captain what our next move should be?’ he added, grimacing. ‘I’m sure he has some brilliantly improbable stratagem, one that almost certainly involves idiotic costumes.’

  Everybody turned to the Captain. He waved a piece of sausage on the end of his fork in a thoughtful way, and smiled.

  ‘As a matter of fact, I do.’

  ‘To catch a dracula, you have to think like a dracula,’ said the Pirate Captain, after making sure he had established the right atmosphere by opening and closing the creaky door to the pantry a few times and doing some spooky uplighting on his cheekbones with a candle.

  ‘But how?! How to get inside the head of such a ghoul?’ Byron paced up and down, looking even more brooding than usual. ‘Would it help to write a verse from the ghastly creature’s perspective, do you think? As a sort of psychological exercise? But where to begin? I don’t even know what sort of music they like to listen to.’

  ‘No need for any more poetry,’ said the Pirate Captain, pulling up a chair and sitting on it backwards, like an olden-days nautical Christine Keeler. ‘Luckily, in my years of adventuring, I’ve had numerous encounters with the spine-chilling, so as a result I’m something of an expert on draculas.’

  ‘An expert to the extent that you still call them “draculas”,’ pointed out Shelley.

  ‘Draculas, vampyres, fanguloids, gentleman-bats, call them what you will – the point is, they have one fatal flaw.’

  Everybody looked at the Captain expectantly. He tapped his nose.

  ‘The common dracula is appallingly vain.’

  ‘Really?’ said Mary. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Yes, it’s sad,’ the Captain said, shaking his bushy beard, which almost caught fire on the candle he was using for the spooky uplighting. ‘They can barely pass a mirror without preening themselves for hours.’32

  ‘I thought they didn’t even show up in mirrors?’ said the pirate in red. ‘Isn’t that the whole point of the soulless undead?’

  ‘No, you’re thinking of aborigines. The dracula is a narcissistic beast, brimming with an unhealthy self-regard. Just look at the way they dress. And at how our Count Ruthven fellow had this place done out.’ The Captain waved at the great hall’s sinister decoration. ‘The showy interior design of an unchecked ego.’

  ‘It is quite vulgar,’ said Babbage, looking unhappily at a great big stuffed elk that loomed over one of those medical skeletons.

  ‘I like it,’ said Byron. ‘It’s baroque.’

  ‘So what do you suggest we do to take advantage of this singular personality defect?’ asked Percy, still looking unconvinced.

  ‘Ah, well – this is the clever bit,’ the Captain grinned, and held for one of his famous pregnant pauses. ‘We stage a conference of the macabre.’

  ‘Conference?’

  ‘Yes! We pretend to hold a conference for all the most horrific monsters in the world. When the dracula realises that he hasn’t been invited to our supernatural little gathering, he’ll be outrag
ed. Especially as it’s taking place right here, in his own castle. I’ll wager that before we reach item two on the agenda, he’ll show himself, unable to contain his wounded pride, and demand in his screechy dracula voice to know the reasons for his exclusion. We, of course, will just lie and say the invitation must have got lost in the post.’

  So as dusk fell, it was an odd collection of guests that started to mill about in the ballroom. Anybody paying hardly any attention at all, because maybe they were in a rush and had other more important things to do, might well have agreed that it resembled a gathering of fairly unconvincing creatures, though they’d probably just be saying that so they could get on their way. The Pirate Captain, his beard and face painted a bright and fetching shade of green, stood up behind a lectern and waggled a tentacle constructed from old toilet rolls at everybody.

  ‘Hello, monsters,’ he said.

  ‘Hello,’ said the monsters.

  ‘I hope you’re all enjoying the canapés. Now, I’m just going to go round the room and do a roll-call. The Mummy?’

  ‘Here,’ said Shelley, waving about torn-up bits of newspaper that didn’t look anything like bandages.

  ‘Generic ghostly presence?’

  ‘Here,’ said Babbage from under a large sheet.

  ‘Wolfman?’

  ‘Graaaa!’ said Byron, who was wearing one of the Captain’s fur coats and a big papier-mâché wolf’s head. Byron was better at making costumes than Shelley or Babbage.

  ‘Mad Axewoman?’

  ‘Here,’ said Mary, waving an axe and making her eyes bulge in a mad way.

  ‘Fu Manchu? Gargantua? Man-Eating Plant? Killer Rat? Slime Creature?’

  ‘Here,’ chorused various members of the pirate crew.

  ‘And obviously last but not least there’s me, the Terror From the Deep. So that’s everybody.’ He raised his voice. ‘Yes, everybody. I certainly can’t think of anybody important that we might have left out. Right, so – first order of business. Horror rating. It is proposed that we reduce the horror rating of a dracula to below that of a Giant Maggot. Any objections?’