Gilbert waited, and he might have waited forever for all of me, for I had no idea. “A bloody great heap of gold ducats,” I said to him.
He sat back in his chair and smiled with amusement. “What a fellow you are, Jack. Pray tell me, what constitutes a heap? Define your terms.”
“Hundreds of thousands of pounds,” Hasbro put in, getting to the heart of it. “Many hundreds. There’s no precedent for such a thing, however—not as you describe it. The perfumeries would never see the item, if it existed. It would be in the hands of a fabulously wealthy collector. Only a man with an uncommon fortune could afford to keep it.”
“Indeed,” Gilbert said, nodding slowly. “Unless it’s the man who finds it and takes it in the first place, eh?” He winked heavily. “Oh, it exists, right enough, lads; so it does. Now, shall I tell you the secret of Captain Sawney’s log?”
CHAPTER 2
Trouble in Pennyfields
THERE WAS A rumble of heartfelt assent when Gilbert uttered his question, to which the old man shook his head and responded by saying, “Presently, but not here. No sir. You’ll have to be patient. We’ll miss our tide if we don’t look sharp.” He shoved the log into his bag again, snapping it shut.
“God help us…” I started to say, when Henrietta Billson appeared with the flaming pudding and a bottle of cognac. We pledged each other’s health, shoveled more food into our mouths, and had no sooner licked our plates clean like greedy dogs than a private coach reined up outside, the letters GF in gilt paint on the doors. Gilbert threw open the casement, waved his napkin at the cadaverous driver, pressed a sum of money into Henrietta’s hand, and bundled the lot of us through the door, gripping his pistol and looking roundabout himself savagely, anxious, it seemed to me, to blow someone’s head off.
We rattled away toward the river, the coach burdened with our persons and our baggage, through dark streets that were very much awake in the summer moonlight. I felt as if I had been taken up by the press gang: summoned to the meeting at the Half Toad and then ignominiously shanghaied before the pudding had completed its plunge into my gullet. The coach slowed its capering pace in order to avoid running down the pressing throng as we descended through Limehouse—Lascars and Chinese and Arabs in colorful dress, the prostitutes and the destitute dressed in rags, the sailors just back from foreign shores and kicking up Jack’s-a-dying with their pay. Low lodging houses lined the road, phantom courtyards lying within a mephitic gloom, and here and there a sputtering gas-jet to enliven the night, illuminating wastes of broken tile and brick, villainous gin shops, and opium dens. A black reek poured from chimneys, the smell of it mingling with the stink of fried fish shops and the conflicting odors of the hundreds of thousands of tons of goods in the warehouses above and below ground: tobacco and spirits, sugar and molasses, tar and cordage. The entire neighborhood—buildings, ramshackle and tilting away on either side and darkened by soot and dirt and poverty—was colorful in a way to make Hogarth shudder.
The carriage turned off West India Dock Road, proceeding along a narrow street through Pennyfields where it drew to a premature halt adjacent to a general shop, so called, in front of which was a clutter of old iron, kitchen debris, broken wooden chairs, and rags hung from hooks. Some short distance down stood a down-at-heel public house with the ‘Jolly Tar’ painted on a sign hanging over the door—not intentionally ironic, I assumed.
“God’s rabbit, Boggs! What is it?” Uncle Gilbert shouted when the carriage remained still. He opened the door and peered out. Our coachman, a narrow cockney man with a long face, was trading hard words with someone unseen. Within moments all of us were out of the carriage and looking on. A dead cow utterly blocked the road, its master, a man in a filthy apron, was explaining that it had collapsed there and died and that he couldn’t shift it without help. The story was highly unlikely, since the cow stank, and its legs were thrust out from a bloated midsection. Despite that, I had no suspicion of a threat until I saw St. Ives and Hasbro signal to each other, followed by the issuance of Gilbert’s pistol.
Some distance in front of us stood the forests of masts rising from the docks. Black smoke tumbled from the chimneys of steamships, for the tide was making and there would be great activity for the next two or three hours. I could see moonlight on a sort of canal just forty feet away. We were very near our goal, and it occurred to me, rather stupidly, that we were hearty enough to haul our own dunnage the next hundred yards and leave the coachman to deal with the cow.
No sooner had the thought entered my head, than the owner of the cow simply bolted, disappearing through a nearby open door. None of us were foolish enough to follow. Gilbert swiveled this way and that, pointing his pistol, looking for trouble. Tubby gripped his blackthorn as if he meant to use it, and Hasbro had drawn a pistol of his own from within his coat. There were footfalls behind us now—four men coming at a run—and more footfalls and what sounded like the banging of a pan from an alley on our right. The coachman climbed down onto the pavement, standing next to Gilbert, who aimed a pistol back down the road as if to shoot past my head, compelling me to drop to the street. There was a loud report and a flash of fire from the muzzle. As if by magic the four men had vanished into the warren of courtyards and passageways. The open door of the Jolly Tar swung shut with a bang. Someone called out a warning—Tubby, I believe—just before a heavy object struck the road very nearby, glass shattering—a wooden crate of bottles. I looked up to see a man ducking away from the edge of a balcony three stories up. Hasbro blew a splinter from the balcony rail, but the man was already gone. There was momentary silence, and then a shout from the alley—someone crying out “Heave away!” and then a dark shape flying into our midst, a round, black bomb with a sputtering fuse. Tubby scooped it up in his broad hand as if it were a grapefruit and pitched into the canal, where it exploded with a wet, whooping report, sending up a small geyser of water.
The foot traffic on the road had entirely melted away. Save for the sounds of nearby shipping there was a silence that was heavy with menace. The five hundred pounds of dead Guernsey cow still lay in the road. In the lull I looked about me for a weapon, as did St. Ives, both of us hurrying to the heaped debris in front of the general shop, the door of which was now shut tight. I grasped the long, cast-iron handle of a loaf-shaped bread pan, and St. Ives plucked up a three-legged chair and a bent fireplace poker. Immediately there came another onslaught, as if the ambuscade was written out in scenes and choreographed for the stage: four heavily muscled bruisers wearing the striped jerseys of stevedores. They were perhaps the same men whom Gilbert had shot at, having come round in front of us now, their faces hidden by kerchiefs. We stepped out to meet them, the cow a barricade between our two groups, Hasbro and Gilbert holding their pistols in plain sight. Our four assailants would have been madmen to carry out an assault against five armed men, six counting our carriage driver, who stood flicking his buggy whip, the tip snapping.
Tubby hefted his blackthorn and shouted, “Come on, you bastards, if you’re not shy.” But the four attackers, such as they were, stopped dead, and then feinted this way and that, cutting silly capers on the road before dashing away, two each in either direction. I was very much afraid that Gilbert would shoot them down like dogs, but he was blessedly too sensible to commit murder unless there was some defense for the crime.
I heard the sound of something landing on the road behind me, and thinking of bombs, I spun around, fear closing my throat. What I saw was a small man bolting away, carrying Gilbert’s Gladstone bag, which the man had pilfered from within the coach while we had been distracted by the raree-show on the street. I shouted, and pitched my bread pan at the man, the long-handled piece of iron flying straight as an arrow at the back of his head. Unfortunately it was impeded by gravity and clanged uselessly to the street. Tubby and I set out in pursuit, but Gilbert whistled us to a halt and waved us back.
“Your bag…” Tubby started to say to him, but Gilbert shook his head at us, and patted his coa
t.
“I’ve foiled the blighters again,” he said upon our return. “Let them have the bag, eh? Why not? There’s not a damned thing of value in it. Their antics were a mere diversion, you see, except for the infernal device, which was a penny squib after all—nothing taken away from your courage, Tubby. Great bravery, I call it, or perhaps an act of consummate foolishness, which it would have been had it blown your head off, ha ha!”
The flight of the small man apparently signaled the end of the threat. People reappeared on the pavement, looking around warily at first, and then more boldly when it became clear that the danger had passed. The door of the Jolly Tar opened once again, and the night resumed its normal debauched course. I fetched the bread pan and returned it to its place, along with St. Ives’s chair and poker. A slatternly woman scowled at me from the door of the shop, and I gave her three shillings by way of rent money before I set out to help my friends move the impossibly heavy cow.
A crowd soon gathered to laugh at us and to offer ribald suggestions. Our exertions led to the issuance of insects from various of the cow’s orifices, which fueled the public mirth until Gilbert had the brilliant idea (at the hazard of being robbed on the spot) of producing a handful of sovereigns and offering one to each and every man who would rally round and shift the beast so that the carriage could move on. There followed a great heaving and scuffling as the cow was edged away into the gutter and pitched violently up onto the pavement so that it blocked the door of what was either a desperate sort of boarding house or a house of prostitution or both at once. A pudding-faced woman shouted curses out a window on the third floor and was ridiculed for her efforts. She disappeared, then shortly reappeared, generally increasing the hilarity when she emptied a chamber pot onto the heads of two men who were entirely innocent of the outrage with the cow, and who had just come out from the Jolly Tar. Gilbert didn’t look up, but quickly doled out coins. The throng dispersed, the great bulk of them returning to the pub amidst much hooting and calling for drink.
We crawled back into the coach, twenty minutes wasted, and traveled the small distance to the moonlit docks, where we found the Nancy Dawson, out of Eastbourne, lying at anchor, our home for the next four weeks. I was surprised at how commodious she was. I knew that Gilbert was as rich as a sultan, but I was surprised even so. The ship bore a mainmast (complete with a crow’s nest) and a bowsprit as well, as if she had descended from the days of sail, which in a sense she had. She had three steel-walled holds separated one from the other with impregnable bulwarks, each of the holds entirely removable from the ship via the dockyard’s cantilever crane, so that it might be set on the dock and unloaded through a cargo door. It was Gilbert’s own invention, which he anticipated would bring him a million pounds sterling as soon as the patent was secure. He meant to put them to the test, he said, when he had the leisure to load a cargo of sufficient weight. The decks of the Nancy Dawson were a-bustle with activity, steam rising lazily from the stack, engines rumbling.
“Who might you be?” Gilbert asked a man in shirtsleeves who stood on deck at the railing, watching the lighters ply to and fro across the water, unloading the ships that couldn’t come in to the crowded docks.
The man spit a wad of tobacco over the side, doffed his cap, and said, “George Beasely, if it please your honor. First mate.”
It didn’t seem to please Gilbert much at all. “Have we met?” he asked.
“Just this present moment, sir, and happy I am to make your acquaintance. I’m sent up from Eastbourne—Mr. Honeywell’s draft, me and five other good men. Came up by rail, we did, and set about readying the ship instanter.”
“Honeywell’s draft, is it? Right-ho. And where is Captain Deane, then?”
“Drunk as Davy’s sow and snoring in his bunk, sir, no judgment implied. He was brought aboard this past hour on a stretcher. Belike he’ll come into his senses after a fortnight of sleep.”
Gilbert looked dark for a moment, as if he might clap the Captain in irons or tie him to the grating in order to give him a taste of the cat. But the cloud passed, and, as the last of the baggage came aboard, he said, “Cast off the lines, then, Mr. Beasely. We haven’t a moment to lose. And look sharp for villainy. There are those that would discommode us if they could.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Beasely said. “Villainy it is, sir.”
There were shouted orders, a good deal of stamping about by the several deck hands, and within minutes the ship moved beneath us as we were towed into the offing on the flood tide, out into Limehouse Reach as the Isle of Dogs rotated away behind us, the West India Docks disappearing from sight. We made our way through the shipping in the Pool, which to my view was a very chaos of feverish activity, demanded twice a day by the holy tide. Gilbert Frobisher strode back and forth, generally getting into the way, his pistol in his belt. He spoke to several of the crewmen whom he apparently knew, and he asked others their names, doing his best to be agreeable. I heard him laugh out loud several times, his spirits lifting now that the ship was underway, the great adventure begun at last.
I stood at the stern railing with a view of both banks, watching the constantly changing vista and the debris swirling past on the Thames. I thought of Dorothy, who I would marry if this voyage turned out to be as prosperous as Gilbert implied, and whom I had taken leave of some few hours ago. It was disorienting, I can tell you, leaving the great city behind in such wild haste when we had been aboard for a scant quarter of an hour. But wild haste was Gilbert Frobisher’s idea of sensible precaution, and Gilbert Frobisher was Commander of the Nancy Dawson, and had come into his own at last.
CHAPTER 3
All is Revealed
THE CHART ROOM of the Nancy Dawson bears a passing resemblance to the interior of Uncle Gilbert’s wonderful mansion in Dicker: oak wainscot, bow windows, Turkey carpets, and oil lamps mounted on ingenious, roundabout swivels that cast a golden haze over a long table laid out with charts of the Caribbean Sea, our destination. An enormous speaking trumpet stood atop the charts like a conical paperweight, painted with depictions of undersea marvels, fish and lobsters and whales and crustaceans all circulating through and around a rampant octopus, intricately drawn. There were upholstered chairs (upon which we sat), bookcases, bottles of whisky, brandy, and rum, paintings of birds and ships, and a row of large-throated, brass voice pipes corked with whistles.
They were ingenious devices, the voice pipes: a whistle would blow, one would uncork the appropriate pipe and bend an ear, and a cheerful conversation would ensue—a chat, say, with the bridge or the engine room or with the Captain himself if he weren’t drunk in his bed. If the ship foundered and took on water, the corks, or rather stoppers, would prevent the sea from flooding the ship via the pipes.
All in all it was a room in which one could plan a campaign or be happily imprisoned, whichever suited. The starboard windows looked out onto the right bank of the Thames, where the lights of Allhallows had recently drifted past, Southend visible to larboard. The ship rocked on the swell, feeling the surge of the North Sea proper, the Nore lightship growing visible in the distance. I very much felt England slipping away like a receding dream as we were swept along by the great river and by the tide of Gilbert Frobisher’s enthusiasm.
The old man, a consummate bachelor with no wife to refine him, dusted the edge of his hand with a great heap of snuff and inhaled hugely through his flared nostrils, eyes watering. He staggered, caught himself, and let fly an immense, shattering sneeze. He dusted the brown wash of spilled snuff from his coat front before tasting the cognac that he poured from a large, cut-crystal decanter. He subsequently poured a generous dram into the several glasses sitting before us, glinting in the lamplight. Looking at us with a piratical squint, he raised the decanter in a general toast and said, “This is old Baccarat glass, gentlemen, one of the few heavy-bodied pieces, very much sought after by the antiques dealers and weighty enough to use as a weapon. This was my grandfather’s decanter, and I’ll drink a toast to the man, by
golly. He was a good ’un—turned out of Eton for shameless conduct in 1756—the theft of this very decanter from the provost’s rooms!—and died a hero at Pondicherry three years later on the bloody foredeck of the old Tiger, mowing down Frenchmen with a saber! Cheers!” He drank off a great gulp, as did we all, and God’s grace to his dead grandfather.
“I trust that you gentlemen are in no tearing hurry to fall into your bunks, for the tale I mean to recount will take some time in the telling, and I’ll want to be thorough. Most of what I have to say will be new to you.”
He drew Captain Sawney’s birding log from within his coat and held it up as if it were a piece of evidence. “This log, which those cutthroats have attempted to rob me of twice tonight, came to me by way of a man from Trinity House named Elliot Benson. Benson is a purser by trade, who keeps a tally of wicks and drums of oil and the lighthouse keepers’ stores along the south coast. On one of Benson’s monthly visits to the Belle Tout light, Captain Sawney gave Benson this very log and cautioned him to keep it safe. Benson was to give the log to me, Sawney told him, if anything untoward happened, for I was Sawney’s only living friend. Benson agreed to do so, although he was mystified: Sawney might as easily have given it to me himself on my next visit to the South Downs. Benson was doubly mystified several days later when the Belle Tout light went dark for want of oil and they found Captain Sawney’s shattered body on the beach, his head like a bashed neep.”
Gilbert removed his spectacles and wiped his eyes with a kerchief before tasting his cognac again. “Very shortly the reprehensible Billy Stoddard, the very devil who attacked Tubby and I on Fingal Street this evening, came round to Trinity House in Eastbourne. He was second man at the Dover light, he said, and was looking for a better position. He had heard of the tragic death of Captain Sawney, and could take over instanter. Of course he had heard of Sawney’s death, the infamous villain, for it was he himself who had pushed Sawney from the cliff! Why had he committed the crime? I fully believe that Stoddard knew of this log and of its secret, and that Sawney had refused to give the log up when Stoddard demanded it of him. Stoddard assumed that the log was hidden somewhere roundabout the lighthouse, and he wanted the leisure to search for it. A few days earlier he would have been correct in his assumption, but Benson had the log now, and Stoddard was all to seek.
The Further Adventures of Langdon St. Ives Page 20
