by Eli Brown
Then, thinking I might have won a certain degree of influence, I suggested: “Both of our lives would be made considerably better with but a sprinkling of shaved black truffles.”
“I’ll have my boys find some next we land.”
“I doubt your men could. Truffles are a cook’s treasure, buried in rare and secret places. And the wrong mushroom, Captain, would make our last meal.”
Mabbot considered this as she chewed. Finally she said, “You’re a strange man, Wedgwood.” She served herself a second helping of the pâté. “Where does this strange man come from? Do we know each other well enough yet for you to tell me?”
“Perhaps not, Captain.”
“Is that how you play? She must show hers first? Very well, I’m happy enough to talk about myself, I so rarely get to. But it must be a fair exchange.
“Someone birthed me, that much I’m confident of—the rest is hearsay and heresy. I too am an orphan. Mine was a city home. I spent my first years in a many-roomed house where the mold made fantastic patterns on the walls, where the rain came and went freely through holes in the roof, where mice enjoyed great privilege and opportunity, where nothing was expected of us save obedience. We didn’t complain of being rented out to sweep chimneys or glean orchards or sort coal. At the proud age of ten years, some of us little damsels—I say ‘little’ only because we were terribly thin—were brought to another house altogether where the beds were soft and well used and we were given company, sometimes a dozen times a day. Tell me, Wedge, do you know what a merkin is?”
“I can’t say I do…” I stammered.
“Well, that’s a credit to your character, probably. They’re itchy, leave it at that.”
Mabbot was sniffing the food again, enjoying its aroma with a vitality I had never witnessed in Ramsey, but the grim tale she told kept me sober.
“Who does not love a lovely child?” she said, with a half smile. “Who can resist having a little fun? The world came to me; I had neither to move nor speak and great men came to play: barristers, lords, men of industry, indeed even royalty. Oh, the fun they had! Fun enough for a lifetime, I should say. One gentleman brought his daughter’s nightclothes for me to wear. Believe it. God dug no deeper pit than a man’s skull.”
I could only blink at her. Each word out of her mouth was worse than the last. I felt suddenly naked and pulled my jacket tightly around me. Did no one protect her? I saw her as a child on a filthy mattress and could not hide the horror on my face.
She said, “You little daisy, Wedge, you blanch so easily. I’ll move along. Feeling quite undeserving of the gifts we were receiving, my friend Evangeline and I stole out one night and slept in alleys and upon the rooftops of London, during which time she acquired a stubborn cough. I left her blue and wheezing upon a doctor’s doorstep.
“The street is where I studied the fine art of availing myself of people’s latent generosity,” she continued. “I never took more than my share, nor from those who couldn’t afford to replace it. Nevertheless, men with clubs didn’t appreciate my lifestyle—but the fun we had in those jailhouses! You may think wardens and officers a dull bunch, but they like to play with a child as much as anyone. From there to the orphanage, from which I flew again like a spit seed. I was housed for a time by the judge I told you about, then on to other cities to escape my reputation. I shaved my head to hide myself; this hair can be seen, I’m told, from quite a distance. Well, it was seen by a privateer you may have heard of: Sean Corey, the Rake of the Great Horn. I liked this one. Oh, I did. I kept him warm in those frozen waters for six years before we were ambushed. He was captured and leaped dancing from a gallows in Newfoundland. You can imagine my disappointment. I led the ragged survivors to reclaim our ship from the admiral who had seized us, and deposed him myself.”
“Deposed?”
“Deposed his neck, mostly. With a salad fork. It earned me the respect of our crew, and they elected me captain, and that was the beginning of my career, I suppose. I was still dressing as a man back then. But look at me, going off like a teakettle. Your turn now, Wedge. Fair’s fair.”
Mabbot took the last two ravioli from the tray. Here, at last, was a true appetite, who had seen the caverns of death and yet clung hard to life, who chose daily where to be in the world. I had thought myself content to cook for lords and ladies whose natures were passive, to whom things were brought. Cooking for Mabbot was altogether different. She had nothing but what she took. For her, my cuisine was well earned and relished with a vigor that made my palms sweat.
Of course, she was a tyrant and a criminal, but when she ate, I saw in her a radiant life, a deep hunger, and an almost pious reflection on each moment. When she swallowed, her nostrils flared like those of a running horse, yet her hunger was sophisticated. The ladies I had served in the past knew how to hold salad forks and discuss the latest fashions, yet their palates were blind. Mabbot claimed each dish as Moses’s men claimed the land of milk and honey.
I took myself a fig, considering what to tell her. It had cooled in the sweet amber glaze. Inside, though, the cheese was still warm, and the liquor of the stewed fruit and salty tang of the aged cheese made me speechless for a moment.
“That good, is it?” Mabbot said, reaching for one herself.
Surrendering to the seduction of the food made me pliable. Why hold anything back? What would silence win me?
“I was left on the back stoop of the monastery in a crate of freshly dug potatoes, one muddy lump among many,” I told her. “So I assume my mother was a farmer. The potatoes must have been her way of offering payment to the monks for my care.”
“How do you know it was your mother?” Mabbot asked, taking the fig in small bites and letting it dissolve in her mouth.
“At times, I imagine I can remember her voice,” I said. “Who knows? There I was, gnawing with my one tooth the slick nub of a potato. Father Sonora found me on his way out to gather mushrooms. He did not pick me up right away but left me on the stoop in the cold until he came back, his apron pregnant with morels. Only when he saw that I was still there, not crawled away, nor retrieved by a regretful mother, nor devoured by a hungry dog, did he kick the crate inside, accepting me as another of God’s burdens. He must have felt some guilt about this later, as he confessed it to me more than once. As a boy I was sensitive to the cold. I still can’t bear it, and he blamed my time on the winter stoop for my infirmity.
“Because of my frailty, I couldn’t room with the other boys who slept in the dormitory with their breath making clouds above their faces. I thrived only in the steam bath of his kitchen. When moved into colder chambers, I wheezed so frighteningly that I was allowed to sleep on a cot near the curative heat of his stove all the time. I was nursed on warm goat yogurt and spoonfuls of Father Sonora’s cocido, a dish too sublime to be called bean stew.”
“A Spaniard?”
“He’d been sent by Rome to help reestablish a Jesuit diocese and had ended up in the kitchen of the orphanage. He said, ‘Apparently the Lord would have me serve Him by serving you breakfast.’ It was a stroke of luck for me; I grew up eating roast lamb skewered between mint leaves, empanadas stuffed with ground beef and olives, and each summer when our garden finally gave up a few tomatoes and cucumbers, we celebrated with gazpacho.”
It was surprisingly comforting to say his name. It reminded me that I had another life before this one. Just the thought of Father Sonora made me weepy, and I forced myself to keep talking.
“His soup was nourishing, but it was his bread that stays with me. Sonora was a master baker, and though I know exactly how he made his loaves, to this day I cannot re-create their crusts, crisp as sycamore bark.”
“I thought you said your father was a cobbler.”
“This was what the monks told me. Probably a kindness to spare me from feeling a bastard. I was Sonora’s ward, and he, grumpy old man, was my earth and sky. Eventually I was forced to sleep in the dorm with the other orphans, but when we were given free t
ime twice a day, once after matins and once again before vespers, whereas the other boys played, I went back to the kitchen to sit near the hearth and watch him work.”
“You didn’t like their games? Let me guess, tried to protect the cat that they tied spoons to? A valiant knight even then, weren’t you, Wedge?”
“A knight can fight. As you well know, I fight about as well as a pillow.”
“That’s an insult to pillows. At least they can take a beating.”
“Sonora was cantankerous and had a heavy hanging lip with a hairy mole. He pretended to be frustrated, but he never hit me the way the other monks did; he was gentle. I loved him fiercely. He was overly fond of vinegar, though.”
Mabbot’s eyes were closed again, but she had not fallen asleep. “And?” she demanded.
“And what?”
“Go on. Did you ever avenge a lover with a fork?”
“Perhaps another night, Captain.”
“Well enough.”
I felt, with a shudder, the rabbit brush past my feet. After a moment, I asked, “You know the sailors Theodore and Finn?”
“I know my men.”
“Then you have seen them holding hands?” I asked delicately. “Going everywhere arm in arm?”
“What of it?” Mabbot asked.
“You tolerate it? I’m not naïve; I know what happens aboard a ship, but those two … they’ve sewn their hammocks together. It goes beyond brief physical comforts.”
“Indeed it has progressed unforgivably to sweetness and, sin of sins, right on to love.” Mabbot laughed.
“Call it what you may, in God’s eyes it is a crime.”
“I have seen crime.” Mabbot leaned close and her glare was back. “I have been trod under it. I have, in my haste and fury, committed crimes, a few, and I’m paying for them even now. If, looking down, God ignores the screaming and steaming gore and chooses to be offended by those two doves, He is an ass or an idiot. I do not abide either.”
Hearing heaven thus insulted would, just weeks ago, have spurred me to violence, but now I merely shifted in my seat. I ventured another subject, one which had been bothering me since the “salt opera.”
“So it’s true you worked for Ramsey as a privateer against the French guerre de course?”
“It was a different crew I had then,” Mabbot said. “Almost twenty years ago. I didn’t know then what a devil Ramsey was. But eventually I learned how the tea-opium-slave wheel turned, how he turned it. It’s not hard to be ignorant on land—you go to your market and you buy your tea and that’s that. But I had seen too much to pretend I hadn’t. Ramsey had directed me to the Bay of Bengal, where the French were harassing Pendleton ships. I didn’t have to sink but a few of them to realize they weren’t French but Bengalis with French guns, trying to defend their coast. A small revolt that I had crushed almost single-handedly. I went ashore, I saw the opium farms, I saw the starvation. Wedge, you only cooked for the man, but, you see, I had killed for him, protected his routes, I helped it all happen. I couldn’t sit by.”
“And you were with child?”
“I didn’t know it. I had torches and a good portion of my crew—we were on our way to burn Ramsey out of his house when we were ambushed, I barely escaped. He had smelled my shift in loyalties and was ready for us with a garrison of musketeers. With a stroke of his pen, I went from legitimate privateer to hunted pirate.”
“Your men have fabulous stories about the Fox,” I said. “Just today, I heard this: You and the Fox, working together, long ago, put your hands on a map to Eden, the actual garden, and stole the fruit of life, dodging the while swipes of the flaming sword. At the last moment, though, the Brass Fox abandoned you while he sneaked away. You, cornered by furious angels, pleaded and swore to bring him back for divine justice.”
“That’s good.” Mabbot laughed while picking her teeth with a blade. “I hadn’t heard that one.”
“The Fox said that you taught him to kill. He said he sailed with you—that you took him from Ramsey’s house in the middle of the night.”
“You’re such a stubborn weed, Wedge. I’ll tell you only if you swear to keep it to yourself.”
“I’ll not whisper it even in my sleep.”
She leaned in to say, “The Brass Fox is Cain himself. He cannot be apprehended because he is protected by the mark God gave him. He comes and goes as he pleases.”
“Mabbot, you’re as bad as your men.”
“I should hope I’m considerably worse.”
“I’m asking, Captain,” I said. “Help me understand. You would have me eat with you as if I were not a prisoner swept up in the course of your adventures. So here I am, my life suspended for the sake of this hunt. I’m not appeased by fairy stories. I met the man, I saw his features—he even speaks like you. He claims Ramsey as his father. Is it true or no?”
She sighed and considered me for a long time before speaking. “It is. Ramsey stole him from the nuns where I had left him, just a tyke. I took him back as soon as he was old enough to sail. It was a mistake, perhaps, to bring him aboard so young—no, youth has nothing to do with it. Some are too soft for the sea at any age. But what choice did I have? I couldn’t leave him with Ramsey—the loneliness of that rambling house with the servants whispering in the shadows like ghosts. Can you believe Ramsey never spoke to the child? The boy looking like me didn’t make it any easier for him. It is not good to have the gaze of a man like Ramsey on you at an impressionable age. A man of influence, a man whose flatulence is attended to by a thousand shareholders, and to see in that gaze nothing but disgust. A glance like that is a sharp awl, and my Fox was soft wood. By the time I got him, he was desperate for attention, but if I merely tousled his hair he would fly into a rage. I couldn’t touch my own child; he was like a feral dog that way, but praise, oh, he was a puppy for that. Tell him he was clever, and his grin would nearly cleave his head in two.” Mabbot’s own smile lit the room for a moment, then quickly disappeared.
“My boy saw a thing … a murder in the barracks. There had been a feud earlier in the night; one seaman felt another had cheated him at cards. This seaman waited until the cheater was asleep, then held his head and poured molten lead into his ear. This, by the way, is why gambling is forbidden on my ship. My son saw it all from his own hammock. He didn’t speak for a week after that. We’ve all seen worse, but, as I said, Leighton … the Fox, he was sensitive. It’s not a pretty thing to witness, a man killed that way, but, from the way he shivered, you’d have thought it happened to him. It may as well have, he was so changed after.
“‘Soft children become hard men.’ Who said that, Wedge? Or is it ‘Sweet children become sour men’? Some have survived lead in the ear for a time. The metal cuts right through the fatty parts and cools deep inside, like a lump of ore, sometimes in the skull, sometimes in the neck, there for good. Once you see a thing, once you know a thing, it’s in you forever. Maybe it’s one solid fist, or maybe it’s got jagged petals. So the flesh becomes a purse for the blade. They go mad from the pain, or the lead poisons them slowly. Luckier to die right away.
“I had high hopes for my boy; I held nothing back. I could teach him how, but I couldn’t teach him why. His anger had no target, he would aim at anything. He sank a tunny boat with her crew aboard—for fun, like shooting a cow. I couldn’t have a loose cannon like that on my ship, but I couldn’t leave him to be shot by marines. It was in Calcutta that he just disappeared. He’s been chewing through the guts of the world ever since. I tracked him through opium dens, carnivals, caves, forests, deserts. He makes enemies everywhere he goes, sets bigger and bigger fires…” She trailed off.
“And you’ve been chasing after him, putting out his fires?”
“In a manner of speaking.” Mabbot sighed. “Tell me, Wedge, what do you really know about the company—about their trade?”
“China is a nation of martinets, that much anyone knows, who insist that we move all the tea in the world through the little porthole of
Canton alone—their stubborn intractability in taxes and free trade are an impediment to progress.”
“And opium?” she asked.
“To be perfectly blunt, if the Chinaman has difficulty with moderation, why should English commerce suffer?”
“You are the scholar, aren’t you?”
“I have never claimed to be a diplomat nor a historian. I am interested in China as the source of tea and spices. My world is the kitchen. My skirmishes are fought in the skillet,” I said.
“How poetic. A feather in the cap of ignorance. This war surrounds you. If you have hidden in a kitchen and kept your hands clean, it is because you have been allowed to.”
“I’m no innocent, Captain. It’s not play to be raised a despised Catholic in England and yet be loyal to her. Our orphanage survived only by the mercy of a protective benefactor. And then to have been secreted in a barrel across fortified borders to clean duck with my French chef while our nations were busy gutting each other for the plums of the New World and the pits of the Old. I’m no schoolboy. I have walked the edge of treason and have not crossed it.”
“It may be why I like you, Wedge. You’ve been rolled in the surf to a luster. But here’s a little bedtime story: The Pendleton Trading Company, of which your beloved former employer controlled the lion’s share, was established to bring you your precious spices and, of course, tea. How we love our tea. But what could England offer in exchange? The Chinese aren’t fond of jellied eel, nor of fog. No, we paid silver, and before long China had all of it. It couldn’t continue. Happily, England found the solution in Bengal, India. There grows a lovely flower—”
“I know what opium is.”
“Then you know it cannot be grown in England. Crucial it was for the Crown to own Bengal. A bloody coup but worth it, for, at long last, the Pendleton Company had something China wanted. And how the tide has turned. They’ve gotten all of their silver back and all of the Chinese silver as well. It’s a propitious arrangement: Their country on its knees, selling anything they can put their hands on for a pinch of smoke. Pendleton forces Bengali farmers to grow the opium, sells it to the Chinese for mountains of coins and tea, and comes home fat as a cat in the bacon barrel. Cannon, coolies, opium—the staples of transatlantic commerce. Long live the king.” After a silence she said, “I am not as fond of bloodshed as you may think.”