A Pack of Lies

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  ‘It’s not right, Captain,’ said the bo’sun loudly, and the muttering grew to a hubbub, and the whole length of the rail was hidden by sailors leaning over.

  ‘You mutinous pack of blubbering women,’ said the Captain contemptuously. ‘If you want him that much, you fish him out like the herring he is.’ And he dropped Ned into a shattering world of sharp-flying emeralds, rib-creasing cold and salt-tasting panic of bubbles as the water rushed up over his head. Surfacing was like running up an immensely long staircase with no treads.

  At once a tail-end of heavy ship’s rope hit the water beside his head and he made a clumsy grab at it and it slipped through his hands. His head went under again.

  ‘Catch hold boy, quick!’ shouted a dozen voices from overhead, and the rope came down again, just out of reach. Ned could see the side of the ship slipping by him at great speed, like the barnacled flank of a massive whale. The stern was coming closer, and once the ship had passed him by, it would not turn back. A third time the rope hit the water, and he grabbed tight hold with hands and feet and teeth and knees and was hauled up the splintery side of the speeding square-rigger.

  A dozen pairs of hands pulled him over the rail, but they dropped him on the deck, and the first face he saw was again the Captain’s, pushed close against his. ‘Well, get to the crow’s-nest, boy, and keep watch for a day. I reckon you’ll be sorry these jellified women here fished you out. I’m putting you off at Barbado.’

  He stalked to his cabin, and the sailors who had defied him turned their eyes away from Ned as though he were a sin they had rather not have committed. Everyone would suffer for crossing Captain Lock.

  ‘Better do as he says, lad,’ said the bo’sun. ‘Have you ever climbed rigging?’ Ned shook his head. ‘Well here’s your chance to learn. Take a can of water with you and keep a sharp look-out. If you see a ship, sing out. He’ll maybe soften before Barbado if he thinks you’ll make a ship’s boy.’

  The mast rose out of the deck like some naked, lopped, jungle tree shrouded in vines of rigging. The slack ropes sagged beneath him so that he was like a small animal struggling in a net, a fly trapped in a spider’s web. He looked up at the crow’s-nest and the white midday sun was behind it, so that his eyes were momentarily blinded. By the time he reached the first yard-arm, the joints of his arms and legs were burningly useless and he thought he would simply cling there until he fell. But when he looked down, the deck below seemed to be racing from side to side as the ship rolled. It was a sight so unnerving that he kept climbing despite himself, with sweaty hands on the coarse rope, up among the huge, flapping sails.

  The crow’s-nest was a miserable little basket, no bigger than a bath-tub. As the ship rolled, it swung way out to port side, then to starboard side. Even a hardened sailor gets sick in the crow’s-nest. Ned felt certain he would die with each flick of the masthead. The sun dried the sea salt on his clothes and on his skin until he was caked in corrosive white, and burning, burning. There was nothing to do but crouch down in the bottom of the basket and cover his head with his salty arms and groan.

  They left him there all night, when the stars and their reflections in the sea became indistinguishable and both were flecks of ice which pierced him through and through, as the mast tossed him across the whole arc of space, to and fro. As for keeping watch, he would sooner have been born without eyes than scan the lurching horizon.

  He never so much as saw the pinnace coming. It closed out of a heavy sea mist in the morning, and the first he knew of it was the cry of ‘Pirates!’ from the deck.

  Captain Lock, who had been drinking heavily and whose cruelties of the day before were nothing but a forgotten blur, demanded to know who was in the crow’s-nest, who had failed to keep watch. But it was too late for blame. The pinnace was upon them, closing from astern as if she would gouge the side out of them with her bowsprit. From point-blank range she fired her cannon - first at the yards, so that tackle and ropes rattled down like twigs through a stormy tree — then deeper and deeper into the body of the ship, but above the water-line. As the bo’sun ran out one cannon, it crashed through the weakened deck into the hold below. Another rolled clean through the shattered gunwale and plunged into the sea. There was utter confusion among the sailors - whether to fight or whether to surrender. At their backs stood Captain Lock, cursing them, blaming them, threatening them with a hangman’s noose if they allowed his ship to fall to pirates.

  There was only one musket-shot. It came from the yard-arm of the pirate ship and silenced the Captain in the space of a single curse. He fell rigidly, toppling over the side just before the two ships grazed together with a flurry of sparks from the iron bolts clashing. A final cannon blast shattered the mast high up and it fell, like the top smashed out of a tree by lightning, into the outstretched yard-arms of the pinnace. The two crow’s-nests rubbed cheeks.

  Ned was dislodged from his nest, and tumbled into the upper rigging, unseen. The sailors of the merchant-man gave him no thought: they were busy surrendering themselves and their cargo to the pirates.

  The shouts of the boarders were blood-curdling, but they had no apparent interest in blood-letting, now that Lock was silent. Having emptied the Captain’s cabin, they locked the crew inside it and fell like locusts on the contents of the hold, transferring them to their own ship with the skill of long practice. Then, with a rattle of small-arms fire, they sheered away. The rigging snagged in the pinnace’s topmast, and pulled the pillaged ship over to starboard before the ropes snapped and broke free and left the merchantman wallowing side-on to the swell.

  It was in no great danger of sinking.

  Ned found himself head-down in a sort of hammock of rigging, sliding and falling and yelling his way towards the deck to the amusement of the deckhands below. They caught him in strong, rope-calloused hands, and carried him along like a ritual sacrifice, and set him down in a terrified bundle at the feet of their own Captain. ‘Look what fell out of the yards, Skipper!’

  Ned’s eyes travelled up from the sagging, shineless boots to the cracked leather belt, the sabre and pistol and axe, and the musket held pinned under one threadbare elbow. The pirate skipper’s face was turned up towards the masthead, assessing the damage done by the tumbling crow’s-nest. He was very tall and lean, with creases in his face as deep as sabre cuts, and eyes shut down to slits with looking into the sun. He had a three-day growth of black beard and a pony-tail of raggedly cut hair. At last he looked down at Ned and scowled. ‘Not hurt, then?’ he said. ‘Sorry about your skipper.’

  ‘He wasn’t mine. I was stowed away, sir.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Please don’t kill me, sir.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ The pirate captain put his hand behind one ear. ‘It’s the noise of the cannon. It always leaves me a little deaf. It passes, though. Come to my cabin. You must be knocked about. You can lie down there.’ He had an unsmiling, melancholy face, as if preoccupied with some distant sadness. In his cabin he poured himself a jug of wine from a cask and his hands shook and the pewter clattered against the barrel.

  The entire cabin was strewn with books and charts, and there was a musical instrument - a spinet - in one corner, anchored by twine to nails in the wall to save it crashing about in rough weather.

  ‘Why did you stow away, boy?’ he said. ‘Speak up, if you please. Remember my poor distressed ears.’

  ‘Me ma died and me pa drank,’ said Ned.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I thought to go to the New World and be a trapper. But they found me. And the Captain dropped me over the side and the men pulled me out and then the captain sent me up to the crow’s-nest all night. And then you … and then I …’

  The pirate skipper banged his ear irritably with the heel of his hand. ‘Something of a tyrant, that captain, by the look of him. You come to know after a time. There are those who can rally a crew and there are those who can only bully them. Yours was one of the bullies. I could see that from a furlong off. It’s easy to pirate
from a bully: the crew’s half on my side from the start. There’s mutiny in their hearts already. That’s what I tell myself when I shoot a bullying ship’s master. Maybe I saved his crew from mutiny and ending up like me and these other poor creatures. That’s what I tell my conscience.’

  Ned nodded, but he was not following. All he could think to say was, ‘You’re English.’

  ‘No. No, boy. I used to be English. Now I’m a citizen of the sea. There! I told you my ears would come back to me. I heard you well enough that time. Yes. I was English once - a lifetime or so ago. I was First Officer on a big wooden-wall out of Gravesend. The master was of the bullying breed. A flogger. A stopper of rations. A keelhauler. The men mutinied. I took their side. And that was the end of us.. Mutiny’s easy. It’s afterwards that’s hard.’ He was staring out of the leaded bow window that flooded the room with light. ‘That wooden-wall was too slow for piracy. I changed it for this.’ There was a chink of music, and he turned round and saw that the boy was standing at the spinet, his hands frozen guiltily over the keys.

  ‘I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to touch it!’ cried Ned.

  ‘That’s all right, lad. Do ease up. You’ve heard too many stories about pirates. It’s overfired your imagination. Do you play the spinet, then?’

  ‘Me pa’s a bricklayer,’ said Ned with a snort, but Captain Broome did not seem to hear.

  ‘It’s very out of tune now, I fear. One thing to pirate a spinet. It’s another to pirate a spinet-tuner. It’s a woman’s instrument, of course. Oh for a shipload of harpsichords to loot!’ He crossed to the keyboard and began to play. He had to stand with one knee and his shoulders bent, for indeed the spinet was built for a woman to stand at and not a tall man. But as Ned watched him play, he could suddenly see past the stubble of beard and the ragged hair, the sunburn and the dishevelled clothing, the axe and pistol and sword-belt. He could see precisely how this man had looked when, in high-collared tailcoat and breeches and with a neatly combed queue of hair tied in a black ribbon, he had stood in some drawing room and entertained the ladies to the music of Telemann and Bach. The music was the sweetest noise Ned had ever heard, for it spoke aloud that he was in the hands of a gentleman — a fact which dried up the hungry ocean, melted the sword’s edge. He had never heard a spinet played in all his life, but every note spelled out safety. He sat down on the pirate’s bunk and fell asleep leaning against the bulk-head. Captain Broome went on playing.

  A week later, a stray cannon-ball, fired from the afterdeck of a fleeing clipper, crashed through the wall of Broome’s cabin and smashed the spinet to atomies. It served no purpose, for the clipper was caught and boarded and lightened of her cargo of sandalwood in the space of two hours. The pirates cut down her mainsail and left her wallowing while they made good their escape. It was only after the pinnace was over the horizon, that the battered crew of the clipper noticed the rowing boat cast adrift by the pirates.

  In the bottom of it lay a boy roped hand and foot, and a canvas holdall of the kind sailors make themselves out of sail bits. The ship’s captain had the boat brought aboard, but he had little time for sympathy. ‘Where were they bound? Where do they put ashore? Where will he dock to make repairs?’ he demanded of the ragged little boy.

  Ned shook his head and shrugged, and hugged the sailcloth bag to his chest. ‘They kept me prisoner below decks, sir. I never saw nothing. They never touched land while I was aboard.’

  ‘And how did they come to get you?’

  ‘Fell out of the rigging when they rammed me ship, sir. Fell into their yards, sir. Then they were on me in a pack. Scared me witless, sir. Me heart’s still jumping, sir. Permission to take some water, sir? They wouldn’t give me no food nor water ‘cepting what the rats wouldn’t touch.’

  ‘What’s in the bag?’

  ‘Nothing, sir. I was a-sewing it in the crow’s-nest when they rammed us.’

  But the Captain tugged it out of Ned’s arms and cursed as he pricked his hand on a needle embedded in the seam. It was not unheard-of for pirates to put a man aboard a ship to slit the captain’s throat on a dark night …But there were no weapons hidden in the bag. There was nothing in it at all. In fact, it was only half made. He shoved it back into the boy’s grasp and sent him below to eat.

  At Tilbury a month later, Ned went ashore with the ship’s cook who had a mother near the docks with a soft spot for motherless boys. She fed him on tripe and gravy and washed him in a tin bath and made him up a bed beside the kitchen range.

  ‘Tomorrow we’ll find you a ship in need of a cabin-boy, eh?’ said the cook, ‘or maybe you can come along o’ me and be a pot-boy for me on my next ship?’

  ‘Thanking you kindly, but I’ve got a thing or two to do afore I sail again.’

  ‘Right-o. Reckon you can find yer way back here, after?’

  ‘Reckon.’

  ‘Ma’ll have a plate a-waiting then.’

  Next morning, with his half-made bag slung over his shoulder, Ned walked out of dockland and all the way to the glittering sprawl of London’s West End. But while he was still in sight of the muddy river, he crouched down in the angle of a wall and, using his fingers and teeth and the needle and brute tearing, he rended the sailcloth bag to pieces. As each gold coin fell out of the double-folded seams and spun on the pavement, he clapped a hand or a foot over it to keep it from rolling into the gutter.

  Far away, where flies reeled drunkenly in the heady perfume of the bougainvillaea, and the palm leaves overhead menaced the beach with sabres of dark shadow, and each dazzling wave unfurled lazily and in silence, a coin fell with hardly a sound on the flour-soft, flower-white sand. Captain Broome leaned forward and picked it up. ‘Heads I win. The boy will come good.’

  His crew, who littered the beach with their sprawling, jeered and groaned. ‘Nah! Never. That boy’s tiptoed away to Ireland or South Afriki to live on jam and champ-pain,’ said the bo’sun.

  ‘It’s the foolishest thing I ever heard.’

  ‘Drink it up in gin like his father, he will,’ said another.

  ‘Your trouble is, Skipper, you think the world’s stuffed full o’ gentlemen,’ said the quartermaster. ‘And it ain’t or we’d all be home now with our wives and children.’

  This was a forbidden topic of conversation, and the crew rounded on the quartermaster and threw fistfuls of sand at him. ‘Don’t! He’s right,’ said Captain Broome. ‘The man we took the ship from by mutiny — old Gryce — by rank and by birth he should have been a gentleman. He wasn’t. That boy we picked up — he should by rights be a guttersnipe, but just maybe he ain’t. The toss of a coin says he ain’t, and if I choose to risk my gold on a bad bet it’s mine to lose.’

  The men fell silent. They did not dare say any more once their captain sank into one of his morose, despondent moods. He slumped against the coarse hide of a palm tree, and threw pebbles at the toes of his own boots. His face was dark and brooding.

  A man’s shape, half rubbed-out by the glare from the sea, came running along the beach. ‘Crate from England for you, Skipper! New in from London! I had ’em put it in the tobacco warehouse till you fetch it!’

  Captain Broome laid down the pebbles he was holding and examined his open hands, flexing the fingers and smiling and smiling. Then he jumped up at a sudden thought. ‘The tobacco house! That’s too dry. I must go and fetch it quick and get it aboard.’

  The harpsichord, in its crate, was lovingly packed with wadding. Its rosewood polish was unblemished. Its wires and the hooks which plucked at them under the shining lid were as silver as mercury. As Broome leaned over the open chest and uncovered the keyboard, it smiled up at him with ivory teeth. ‘The world not stuffed with gentlemen?’ he said to himself.

  Then a hand dropped on his shoulder and the barrel of a musket jabbed him in the spine. ‘You are John Broome, late of the ship York Castle, and I arrest you for the capital crime of mutiny!’

  A handful of British soldiers from the nearby colonial fort had ranged th
emselves at Broome’s back, the bayonets mounted on their ornate, foolish weapons. The pirate’s face showed no change of expression. His hands remained spread on the silent keys of the harpsichord. ‘Was it the boy?’ he said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I asked who sold me to you,’ said Broome.

  ‘Takes no rewards to catch your sort,’ replied the officer in charge. ‘It so happens that the captain of the vessel what shipped this object out here was a certain Captain Gryce - that’s right - the selfsame man you and your pack of mutinous dogs robbed of his ship and cast adrift in an open boat. He saw an English name on the casing: he had his suspicions, so he broke it open. Seemingly you was known for your music loving - a real comical figure in the fleet, says Captain Gryce - the laughing stock of Gravesend, you and your harpsichord-playing …

  The pirate breathed out a deep, shuddering sigh of relief. ‘All’s well, Lieutenant. I’m content to go with you. It will be good to see England again. You have no idea how much I have missed her.’

  Not a man of his crew was captured — only Broome himself. He was put aboard a naval frigate, bound for London and his trial. Captain Gryce came to satisfy himself that the treacherous mutineer was chained fast in the reechy, swilling brig, and went away smiling with the pleasure of revenge.

  After Gryce had gone back to his own ship, and once they were on the open sea, the captain of the frigate came and leaned through the hatch and said, ‘We have that harpsichord aboard that was your undoing, Broome.’

  ‘I advise you to keep it out of the salt air, sir,’ said the pirate.