The Death-Defying Pepper Roux

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  But when he reached the bridge, the first officer was already at the helm and too busy maneuvering the ship to notice him. So Pepper went on to the prow. The ship moved at a walking pace toward the green and red poles marking the harbor entrance.

  So it passed very close to some boys fishing for eels from the end of the breakwater. Seeing Pepper, one pointed his bamboo cane. An eel dangled from the woollen fishline: a repulsive, puny creature still trying to wriggle out of its fate. “It’s you, right?” said the boy. “It is, isn’t it? Pepper Roux?”

  “Not me,” said Pepper, turning away, setting his face toward the horizon. “Not me.”

  Little by little, the sounds from the shore faded: breaking waves, the carpenters stripping La Berenice, the church bells…their noises could not leap across the space between shore and ship. Did Death have a longer stride? Would it chase Pepper out to sea? Or could he truly outrun it, throw it off his scent? He had read somewhere that bloodhounds can’t follow a scent across water.

  He moved to the stern and watched the ship’s wake braid itself into a lit fuse in the sun. A flock of seagulls swooped and quarreled and complained overhead: strident, thwarted angels shrieking orange hymns at him. Birds of ill omen. The Hour must be nigh. He watched the sun rise toward midday—a burning magnifying glass trained on a boy of fourteen who had outstayed his welcome.

  What would it be, then? A giant wave? The legendary kraken rising, with mile-long tentacles, to drag the ship below? A maelstrom? A sandbar? A reef?

  Pepper raised his face flat on to the sky and screamed back at the gulls: “Not me! Not me! Not me!”

  Then a hard hand fell on his shoulder.

  Pepper turned guiltily—I’m sorry!—but it was not his father. Nor the harbormaster, nor even the Angel of Death.

  A tall man in rope-soled shoes and sweaty deck clothes looked him in the face, studying each feature as if he were drawing up an inventory. The scar at the corner of the man’s cheek twitched. There were flakes of bread crust on his lips, and he licked them clean. If a butcher had been carving the two of them, he would have found twice as much meat on Duchesse, the captain’s steward, as on the captain.

  “Sun’s over the yardarm, sir. All’s made ready,” said the steward, and led the way to the captain’s cabin. He gave the door handle a quick wipe with his neckerchief, then opened it and stood aside. “Everything to hand, sir. Everything aboveboard.”

  Pepper sat on the bunk, hugging his knees close to his chest without realizing that he was doing it. A chronometer on the wall pointed out the time by chiming the half hour. A chrome speaking tube bent his reflection out of shape. There was a smell like the inside of the wine vat at home.

  “It’s my birthday,” said Pepper.

  “Felicitations, Captain,” said the steward, which seemed not quite to cover the disastrousness of the situation. Then he poured a full glass of something brown and presented it to Pepper on a little round tray. When Pepper did not reach for it, Duchesse folded the boy’s small ice-cold hands around the glass and held them there until the brown liquor stopped slopping over the sides. “Santé, Captain. Happy birthday.”

  The drink scorched his throat. Perhaps it was poison. Pepper rested his head on the pillow and counted to a hundred. Maybe the Angel of Death went about in rope-soled shoes and a sweaty neckerchief.

  Outside, there was a commotion, and the ancient engine slowed again. A boat thudded lightly against the hull, and there was shouting on deck. Duchesse cocked his head to listen. Pepper covered his ears and shut his eyes, all too sure of who was being hauled aboard by the crew. His father must have rowed out to the ship and caught it after all.

  “Roche,” said Duchesse, loosing the word like spittle. Then he gave a short laugh. “He’ll soon wish he’d missed this sailing, eh, sir?”

  Squinting out of the porthole, Pepper could see an empty rowboat being hauled aboard by its mooring rope, banging up against the ship’s side. The latecomer was offering violence to anyone who came near him. The crash of his boots came closer and closer…but mercifully passed by the captain’s cabin.

  “Never fear, dear heart,” said the steward soothingly. “Leave it to the Duchess. I will endeavor to keep the pig from troubling you.”

  As the cabin door closed softly behind Duchesse, the sunlight falling between the door’s wooden slats sliced the room into strips of light and dark. Pepper shut his eyes.

  When he opened them again, the room was gray with evening. He looked out of the porthole and saw a navy sky swagged with vast gray wings of cloud. From horizon to horizon, the sea seemed to be netted over—like a strawberry bed—with angels. How had he ever hoped to escape? Aunt Mireille’s voice rang in his ears:

  “No escaping, boy. As the Good Book says, you can try taking the wings of the morning, and dwelling in the uttermost parts of the sea: The Lord will still hunt you down and grab ahold of you.”

  What would become of L’Ombrage, then, and its crew? Would the saints consult their pocket watches, tut-tut, and put things back on schedule? Would they plunge the entire ship to the ocean floor to ensure that Pepper met his end on time? That wasn’t fair. That wasn’t fair to the crew at all!

  Stumbling to the door, Pepper tugged it open and ran. Best to get it over and done with. Best to leap the ship’s rail like Jonah and spare his men! He would leap outward—far and far—from the ship, and the oily black of the sea would hide all noise, all panic, all second thoughts and third and fourth thoughts too….

  In the dark he tripped over a pair of legs sticking out from under a lifeboat. A figure pulled itself out into the open and rolled across him, hunchbacked with muscle and rolls of fat, to press its forehead against Pepper’s, supported by hands on either side of Pepper’s head. “Look where you’re going, you ?#@*&,” said a mouth reeking of rum and garlic before it bit him in the ear. “Come dark, this here’s my ship. Got that? Shall I teach yuh?”

  Captain Pepper rolled sideways and scuttled—on hands and knees, then hands and feet, then at full tilt—“Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!”—back to his cabin, where he crawled under his bunk and lay wide-eyed with terror. His little heart was ready to burst with it—especially when the chronometer began to chime—on and on and on. Eight bells. Midnight. The last chime died away.

  What? Still alive?

  Was the clock in Heaven’s parlor running slow? Had his mother misremembered the date fourteen years earlier? Had Saint Constance of the Perfect Diction put in an elegant word for him with the Angel of Death?

  Or had Pepper truly stepped sideways into his father’s life and out of his own?

  TWO

  SKELETON MAN

  No ship’s crew minds if they see nothing of their captain. To a crew, captains mean only orders, unwelcome amounts of work, the finding of faults. The crew of L’Ombrage did not complain at all when their new captain chose to stay in his cabin. They simply hoped their luck would hold. Some people can be wished invisible.

  When Pepper woke next morning in his father’s bunk, he looked around the cabin and counted seven glasses of rum. One stood on the table, one on either side of the washbowl, another on the corner of the bunk, one on the clothes chest, one beside the door, and one on the chart desk. The dark liquid inside rocked in time to the steady dipping of the ship. They had just been poured by his steward, who stood now in the doorway, surveying the room to spot any task he had overlooked. Duchesse had ironed Pepper’s clothing, polished his shoes, washed his underpants and supplied a spare pair, laid out a breakfast of sardines and soda bread, filled the ewer with hot water, altered the date on the brass calendar, and wound the brass chronometer. And he had filled the seven glasses of rum, which, in his experience, it took for an alcoholic captain to rise, dress, and confront the new day. Whatever had made the grotesque scar below Duchesse’s left eye seemed to have spared his sight, for his small, gleaming eyes missed nothing, skirted over nothing—except perhaps the captain himself.

  “Fine morning, Captain,” he said, as
if he had somehow managed to arrange that too. Then he pushed bare feet back into his rope-soled shoes, smoothed the pleats of the kilt he was now wearing, and closed the cabin door behind him.

  The problem of actually sailing the ship still worried Pepper, but luckily the first officer did all that for him.

  First Officer Berceau was happy with the arrangement. He had heard tell of Roux’s drinking and had sailed with drunken captains before. They would wrench the helm out of his hands so as to go looking for mermaids, or draw wriggly lines on his clean chart and tear holes in it. They would write down sightings of nonexistent islands in the ship’s log in drunken, looping letters. No, it suited Berceau perfectly if the Old Man drank himself insensible in his cabin and never appeared on the bridge at all.

  “The Old Man.” Several times those words drifted in through the louvered door of Pepper’s cabin to bewilder him. At first he imagined the men were being sarcastic, but he soon realized that “Old Man” was simply naval slang for “captain.” And so long as this particular “Old Man” did not come out of his cabin and try to command the ship, they would be relaxed, happy…and bone idle.

  The crew used lots of interesting words and phrases Pepper had never come across before; words so much more expressive than the language spoken at home. He sometimes asked Duchesse to translate, so that he could master the words himself, but Duchesse declined. “Officers operate a different philology from crew,” he said with a sniff, and straightened the toga he was wearing that day with the haughty dignity of a Roman senator.

  Dust settled on the seven poured glasses of rum, and the Duchess (who dusted everything else) let it lie. What the Old Man did in the privacy of his cabin was no business of anyone but his and his steward’s. Duchesse never mentioned to his comrades that this particular Old Man was teetotal. He did not mention the prayers he found tucked inside the captain’s laundry, but left them in a neat pile for Pepper to pocket again. Nor did he reveal that the captain seemed to own only one pair of underpants and a jacket that did not fit him.

  In fact, on the third morning, a new, well-fitting jacket swung and swayed on the back of the cabin door, and onto it had been sewn all the braids and ribbons from the old one. So Pepper was better able to go up on deck, down to the boiler room, and up and down the companionways. Hands clasped behind his back, Captain “Pepper” Roux surveyed his vessel: looked up at the mast tops, down into the hold, and out to sea at the weather.

  L’Ombrage seemed to be carrying a cargo of scrap iron. Pepper wondered: Were the English too rich or too poor to have any scrap iron of their own, so that they had to send all the way to France for it? And why did it say on his father’s papers that L’Ombrage was carrying pianos and fine porcelain?

  Pepper was busy wondering this when he stepped in a puddle of playing cards and tore one of them in half. He had walked into the middle of a card game, and four squatting sailors looked up at him, annoyed. Pepper saw nothing of them, only the symbol on the torn playing card—the ace of spades: unluckiest card in the pack. It hit him quite as hard as a full-size shovel. With a yelp, he turned and ran for his cabin.

  He found the Duchess—dressed today in a sarong—grating Parmesan cheese over a plate of scrambled eggs.

  “Your favorite, Captain,” said the Duchess tenderly.

  And it was true! Pepper had seen his mother serve scrambled eggs to his father on every shore leave with much the same anxious tenderness: Your favorite, dear.

  “How do you know?” Pepper said, before he could help himself.

  The Duchess smiled one of the slow smiles that puckered his scar into the shape of a rosette. “After sailing together all these years, sir? Remiss of me not to know your little weaknesses.”

  Not an entirely new crew, then.

  Pepper sat down sharply and, all the while he ate, waited in terror for the Duchess to say more. But the steward only continued his round of chores, changing the linen on the bunk, fixing a troublesome squeak in the boards. On hands and knees he chased that mousy squeak, cornering it beside the locker and killing it with a hammer. The noise made Pepper blink at last and realize that his eyeballs were dry from staring at the dirt-blackened soles of Duchesse’s enormous bare feet. As Pepper laid down his knife and fork, the Duchess stood up—the low deckhead made him stoop—thrust his feet back into his espadrilles, and picked up Pepper’s dirty dishes.

  “Are there any more…old comrades of ours aboard?” asked Pepper in a high, breathy whisper.

  “Just me, sir.”

  And never again did Duchesse refer to the twenty years he had spent as steward to Captain Gilbert Roux.

  Pepper did not know enough of the world to think the Duchess unusual. But he began to pick up from the crew that his steward was in some way…remarkable. The clothes he wore on board had been collected during a lifetime’s voyages to exotic parts. The men smiled affectionately whenever they saw him—stepped aside as he swaggered along the ship, swaying his broad hips, swishing grass skirts, or sporting a sombrero. As well as fetching Pepper his dinner and his laundry, he brought messages from the first officer. “First sends his compliments, sir, and wonders if the ship would look prettier with a navigation lamp or two lit.”

  Others of the sailors got into arguments or card games, but the Duchess never quarreled or neglected his duties. Tenderly he waited on the captain, so that the captain need never stir. He shouted orders into the shiny speaking tube—“Captain says to blow through the boiler tubes”—leaving Pepper feeling as thrilled as if he really had been the one to give the order. He also brought Pepper the ship’s log, politely pointing out “how white the pages looked” without the captain’s daily entry. “I could dictate, sir, if the words won’t come to mind.”

  Pepper swallowed hard. His father, though new to L’Ombrage, had already made several entries in its battered log, using wild, looping copperplate handwriting, and ink. Pepper knew he could never imitate such fancy writing, never having used a fountain pen.

  “If Captain has hurt his writing hand, perhaps he should use his left when making his entries in the log,” observed Duchesse, replacing Pepper’s supper plate with the open leather-bound book.

  “And a pencil?” asked Pepper.

  “And a pencil, sir.”

  So Pepper began to feel more at ease with his steward—not enough to confess his dreadful secret, of course, but he did pluck up the courage to mention his biggest worry—the one about a giant kraken rising from the ocean bed and eating the ship.

  The Duchess considered this for a moment, then said, “I don’t believe there is a single kraken left living between Marseille and Gravesend. Far too much traffic, chéri.”

  Pepper wanted to believe him.

  Old habits die hard, though, and next day, Pepper felt the need to climb up high and scan the four horizons: for kraken, tidal waves, or maelstroms, for fiery chariots or Saint Constance sculling toward him in a rowboat. So he climbed the mast, nimble, sure-footed, up to the crosstrees, where he perched beside the masthead light, looking out to sea. The air up there smelled of salt and the black smoke from the funnel. He could see right down the funnel and, around it, see the whole petal-shaped deck scribbled through with a web of stay ropes. He could see the horizon and the hammered-metal sea, and it soothed him. He could see his crew standing openmouthed, gazing up at him so far below. “I can see you all!” he called down, in a sudden burst of affection. “Every one of you!”

  He would do this every day, yes! He could hardly explain to his men how, by running away to sea, he had put all their lives at risk. But if, from up here, he were to spot sea monsters or freak waves in the offing, he could at least shout down, “Abandon ship!” Also, he was giving Fate the chance (if it wanted) to knock him off the crosstrees and kill him, without dooming the whole crew. That seemed only fair, and Pepper was a stickler for fairness.

  No sooner did his feet touch the deck than the Duchess hurried him back to the captain’s cabin, scolding him for “making the heart jum
p clear out of me, you naughty man!”

  “I was just checking we were safe,” said Pepper.

  “Safe? Safe?” roared the Duchess, swigging down one of the seven glasses of dusty rum. “God’s in his girdle, of course we’re bloody safe!”

  But the Duchess was forgetting Roche.

  Roche was a pear-shaped man, hunchbacked with rolls of fat and muscle, who delighted in making the younger members of the crew do any duty he was given to do himself. In port, he would lay his own pay packet on the table and tell the boys, “Yours—if you can buy me enough drink to make me pass out.” In this way he never had to buy himself a drink. Or lose his wages. For drink never made Roche pass out. It only made him foulmouthed, violent, and clumsy. It made him lurch about the ship, his flat feet splayed, cannoning into rails and bulwarks, kicking and cursing them for getting in his way.

  Any ship at night was Roche’s happy hunting ground. He slept naked on deck, glistening like a side of bacon, or prowled the vessel, unscrewing brass fitments that he sold to chandleries ashore. The fact that L’Ombrage seemed already to have been stripped of all her valuable fittings was the first thing to vex him. Then Roche discovered, too late, the name of her captain. And the hatred that name aroused in him made him more dangerous than any kraken.

  The idea began to haunt Pepper that his father had somehow, somewhere, come aboard the ship. Every night he dreamed that Gilbert Roux was rattling at the door, lurking in the hold, prowling the decks, wanting his life back. Even awake, he imagined he could hear his father searching the ship, and would lie in pools of his own sweat, wondered if stealing a vessel from its captain was still punishable by hanging.