When the worst of our accompanying dust cloud had drifted past, a bevy of females staggered from the charabanc, coughing in chorus, groaning at their bruises (the older ones) and exclaiming at the dust in their clothing (mostly the younger). They dispersed along the roadside. Will Currie clambered to the roof to check the tight shrouds on his equipment. Daniel Marks stepped down, grimacing at the surface underfoot. We stood listening to the engine tick and the dust settle, alone on a rural road a short mule-ride from the capital city, when like magic, local residents drew into existence, to all appearances materialising from out of the dust, bearing cups of water and baskets of oranges, bowls of raisins and tubs of oil-washed olives. Trades were made, combs and hair ribbons, cheap bracelets and money offered, first through facial expressions, then gestures and, when those proved popular, full-blown charades. The natives sat in awe-struck appreciation when Annie, June, and little Linda dragged Daniel Marks into their wordless play, enacting something that was either the 1910 Portuguese revolt or Love’s Labours Lost—my attention was occupied with counting our heads, lest we lose one of our alphabet of girls. When I herded my charges back onto the charabanc, leaving behind a carpet of orange peel and olive seeds, I discovered that the locals had been selling other things as well.
“Wait! What’s that noise?”
In the back, six scrubbed and innocent faces turned to me. If one of them had possessed the wits to claim that she was merely whining at the thought of getting back onto the ’bus, they might have got away with it, but instead they blinked their lashes and asked, “What noise?”
I heard it again, and traced its source: of course.
“Turn out your pockets, Edith. The other pockets. No, Mrs Nunnally, I’ll handle this. Edith, give the boy back his puppy. In any event, it’s far too young to be away from its mother—its eyes aren’t even open. How much did you pay him? Really, for that scrawny—never mind, give it back. No, let him keep your money, it can be a lesson to you.”
I tried to get the driver to chide the enterprising local that a puppy that small would only sicken and die if taken from its mother; judging from the amused reaction of the people lined up at the charabanc door, either the Portuguese were disturbingly heartless, or the exhortation changed somewhat in translation.
I climbed on, counted heads for the twentieth time, and off we drove.
Someone from the Avenida-Palace, it seemed, had made the arrangements not only for our transportation, but for our welcome at the other end. We were greeted, gathered up, refreshed with luncheon at a nearby café, then loaded upon a fleet of decorative if rickety wooden carts and aimed at the hill under whose side Cintra sheltered.
Most of us took pity on the animals after half a mile or so and climbed down to walk. (Daniel Marks, after due consideration, decided that noblesse—or perhaps virtus—oblige, and joined us; Bibi did not.) The exertion helped to dispel the effects of the faint drizzle that had begun to fall, or at least take our minds off it. A few of the girls tried to rouse community feeling with song, but that soon petered out when the pedestrians lacked sufficient breath to participate other than in brief gasps, while those huddled beneath their travelling rugs felt an uneasy suspicion that singing might be taken for lightness of heart.
It was a long hill.
I wondered if I was drifting towards the hallucinations of hypoxia when, on raising my head to appraise the next unforgiving rise, a garden party appeared. There was a taut canvas marquee. A queue of what could only be servants stood just beneath the cloth roofline; three uniformed grooms trotted out to take our horses’ reins.
A small fortune in hothouse flowers stood, incongruously, in three enormous tin buckets. I could even smell them. But then, I thought I smelt bacon as well, which was every bit as unlikely as the flowers.
Our party, stunned respectively either by breathlessness or by cold, stumbled towards the oasis. To my astonishment, it did not shiver and fade away as we drew near. Cups of piping tea were thrust into our hands, platters of fresh, buttered rolls laid with crisp bacon were set before us, scones with—well, no, not clotted cream, but with butter and jam were shovelled onto the plates of famished adolescents.
Cheeks that had been variously hectic pink or blue with cold took on a more uniform glow. Blue eyes began to sparkle.
After my third cup, I worked my way over to Will Currie to ask, “Have you any idea how this came to be?”
“Ah,” he said. “It’s all very well for a country to stage a revolution, but after fourteen years, buildings do want keeping up. Windows don’t wash themselves. Seems the staff of the Royal Palace, just up the road, were happy to take on some pounds sterling in exchange for a day or two of alternate service.”
“Let that be a lesson to us all.”
“When the Revolution comes to Britain, it’ll be no time at all before we set the toppled statues upright and beg the King to come back and pay his own bills. You finished with your tea, Miss Russell? Let’s take a look at where we’re meant to film.”
Our impromptu garden party was at the edge of the road near the ruins of Castello dos Mouros, the Castle of the Moors, overlooking a wide plain of rich farmland with the Rio Tejo to the south and the Atlantic to the west. The castle (which had, in fact, once been Moorish) had guarded the vitals of Portugal for centuries. In the twelfth century, the place was sacked by passing Norwegians, on their way to the Holy Land. They must have recalled with fondness this frigid, wind-shoved, rain-whipped place as they plunged into their Crusader hell. (Had they decided to stay, I reflected, it would have made for an interesting shift in Iberian history.) By the fifteenth century, the hilltop fortress had been more or less abandoned, when finally even the Jews decided that Cintra in the lee of the mountain had to be more comfortable.
“They say it’s quite pleasant in the summer,” Will said sourly. “We have to make do with the flowers.”
“Flowers? Ah, I see: to give the impression of spring-time in Penzance.”
“Three hundred of the bloo—of the dratted things. We stick them in the earth so they look natural.”
“Whatever happened to realism?” I murmured.
“Pardon?”
“Where does Mr Fflytte want you to film?” I said.
Will set off to explore the walls—which, upon closer examination, looked more like an elaborate Victorian folly than an actual working castle. I followed him for a while, since I was supposed to be his assistant, but as he clambered and dangled and risked his neck on walls designed more for decoration than for invasion-repulsion, I went back to where we had begun, huddling into my coat until he returned.
“We’ll shoot here. No need for lights. Pain in the neck, lights. Maybe a reflector.” He was thinking aloud, frowning at the sort of glade or small amphitheatre in which we stood. It had a pool at its centre. I stood beside him and looked, imagining it transformed into black-and-white images on a screen, and had to admit, the setting would bring an unexpected degree of drama to what was a rather fatuous scene.
“I have to admit,” I told him, “the setting will help that scene.”
“The girls can dance in from the left, there. Gather in front of that section of wall, wondering if they dare remove their shoes and stockings to wade. Then pantomime the beginning of doing so. Fflytte and Hale may think it’s too risqué to show, but they’re the editors. Marks goes behind that tree; the camera will see him but the girls won’t.”
“And the flowers?” Fortunately, the rains had brought a faint stubble of growth, so blossoms wouldn’t be springing out of bare rock.
“Put them where the girls sit. Give them something to do while they’re taking their shoes off.”
I had to wonder if the laconic Welshman had ever made a more, as he called it, risqué film. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
We returned to the tent, hearing music as we came along the hillside path, and found that someone had set up a gramophone. The girls were kicking up their heels and were nicely dry and pink-cheeked. Wh
en I pulled the needle from the record, their complaints were short-lived.
We led them through the mossy boulders to the proposed site, told the girls and Frederic what we planned, allowed Graziella Mazzo (wearing a coat today over her scarf-frock, and sandals) to flutter around her assigned dance-stage, and then sent them all back to town. By the time Will and I got the daffodils in the ground, it would be too late to begin filming: Plant now, and shoot in the morning.
I received my bucket and my hand-trowel, and we got to planting.
A hundred or so stems later, my hand was numb, my back was on fire, my garments were soaked from labour and mist. Will finished his last dozen, and we stood back to look at our handiwork.
“I have to say, that’s going to look fabulous,” I told him.
“Cost a fortune. I thought Mr Fflytte was mad—but then, I usually do. I’ve stopped arguing with him, he’s always right.”
We retrieved our empty buckets and walked in friendly accord back towards the tent. As we left the castle proper, we passed through a pair of oddly placed stone structures that I had seen earlier. This time, I stopped to look at them—then looked more closely, climbing up on the right-hand structure to rip away some fingers of obscuring ivy.
A skull and crossbones, carved into the stone.
The marquee remained, but the staff had gone. One of the carts was there, the driver stretched out on a bare table, snoring. We roused him and let the horse trot us down the hill to the town.
The hotel was adequate, the evening meal a step better than adequate, and the wine the best I’d had yet in this country. A holiday spirit took hold of the girls, aided no doubt by other spirits, and Marks and our Bonnie were moved to offer a series of duets, spoken and in song, from other ventures they had shared. We took to our beds well pleased with our side of Pirate King, and ready for the initial filming on the morrow.
In the absence of handsome pirates, I did not even feel it necessary to patrol the hotel corridors that night.
Will and I finished our breakfast before the others had come down, heading up the hill in a cart laden with his tools of the trade—cameras and reflective screens, cases and bundles, even an arc lamp he did not intend to use. The equipment was bulky, but lighter than half a dozen girls had been, which meant that this morning, the horse was positively frisky in its ascent. We found the marquee unoccupied, other than a small mountain of provisions that had been delivered during the night. The cart-man helped us unload our equipment, then Will set his tarpaulin-wrapped camera on his shoulder, I picked up the aluminium screens, and we went back along the path.
Past the pirate-stones, into the fort’s main gate, down to the clearing with its pond.
And face to face with a goat. A chewing goat, with an expensive, hot-house daffodil bobbing from its lips.
It was the last flower in sight.
I dropped the satchel and caught the camera being ejected from Will Currie’s shoulder as he launched himself at the devil’s spawn, a roar in his throat and murder in his eyes. The goat took one look and shot through the picturesque ruined gate to skip light-footedly away on the tumbled stones towards the valley below.
Telegrams were exchanged, the phone lines having proved erratic. Hale assured us replacement flowers would be there by afternoon. The girls introduced themselves to the residents of the decidedly bizarre royal palace uphill from the ruined fort, where most of the marquee employees normally worked, and desported themselves through the once-royal hallways (bereft of tourists, what with the weather, the economy, and the political turmoil) of the former convent (which had borne the cheering name Nossa Senhora da Pena: Our Lady of Punishment) while Will and I planted a second set of flowers.
I hired a guard for the night, a fit young man who understood that a return of goats would mean his instant death, and we arrived on Wednesday morning to find the daffodils intact, the sun out, the walls still standing.
But no pond. Had the goats consumed that, too?
“I thought this was a pond,” Will screamed at the hapless young man.
“Pond?” said the man.
I knew he spoke some English, so I contributed a few synonyms. “Lake? Pool? You know—a body of water.”
“Water? Yes, puddle.”
“Well no, not exactly—” Will started, but I laid a hand on his arm.
“I think it may be, exactly.” And so it turned out: What we had thought to be a conveniently located pond was merely a puddle; in the absence of rain the day before, it was now more of a wallow.
“Well, perhaps we could still …” I started, but Will was already shaking his head.
“A dozen nice English girls are not going to be stripping down for a frolic in mud. Without water, there’s no reason for them to be here. Fflytte will toss it all out.”
“So,” I persisted, “let’s bring in some water. Don’t look at me like that. If we can bring in flowers, we can bring in water.”
“I’m not carrying buckets up that hill.”
“I hadn’t thought of doing it personally, no.”
Thus it was that on Thursday, four days after we’d come to Cintra, the camera finally started turning. Before us lay a pond of very expensive water, trucked and carried in before dawn that morning by a small army of hirelings, local farmers, and servants from the palace—and if it was mere inches deep and more mud-choked than sparkling, on film it would be fine. Around the pseudo-lake, the surviving flowers stood—and if they looked moth-eaten and wilted up close, despite several sprinklings of water, again, they would look just fine on film. As we came off the carts at the garden tent, the sun even came out—and if it was cold enough to put a rime of frost on the blossoms and set the girls to shivering, well, we had a brazier going behind the camera to warm up between takes, and adding a blush to cheeks was the reason we’d brought Maude, the make-up woman.
Of course, some of the girls had tried to insulate themselves by wearing jumpers and woollen hose under the spring frocks the scene required, making Sally complain at the ill fit of her laboriously constructed costumes. However, once I had mused loudly about how fat this Portuguese food was making the girls, there was a flurry of activity around the impromptu dressing-room, and the problem went away.
The girls took their places. Graziella flitted about (tripping over a pair of shoes I’d ordered her to put on). I consulted my heavily annotated copy of the Pirate King script, printing the scene’s details in big, clear letters on the slate. Will, soft cap reversed, put his face to the camera and had Frederic stand against the tree, then shift an inch or two at a time, while I adjusted the reflective screen. When he was happy with how the light hit the actor’s face, Will told Signorina Mazzo to stop breathing in his ear, asked Mabel to move her head left a fraction, and finally said, “Miss Russell, hold up the slate in front of the girls for a few seconds, then say ‘Camera!’ and get away fast.”
“Me?”
“Just say it.”
So I pronounced the word, and thus began my career as a moving picture director.
The scene went beautifully, even a rank amateur like me could see that. Bibi had a natural bent for placing herself at the forefront of any scene, with the other girls forming a visual chorus around her. Daniel Marks set his shoulders to indicate a degree of intense fascination, wrapping his torso around the tree to watch the girls without being seen. Will’s arm worked the crank with a smooth and unvarying speed, until he stopped cranking and stood up, saying, “Cut.”
The scene disintegrated with Mabel jumping up to exclaim that she’d been sitting on something sharp and Bonnie complaining that Celeste had been blocking her light, and Frederic objecting that we weren’t filming his good side. He became quite upset when I made the mistake of saying I couldn’t see any difference, but Will smoothed things over by saying that he would be doing a number of close-ups from the desired side, since Fflytte would be sure to want them.
Then he pulled the girls together to do the scene again. It took a couple of hour
s to finish the group shots, some of which required me to act as his assistant, turning the handle as he panned the camera. He had to correct me a couple of times, telling me I was slowing my turning speed, but the takes seemed to satisfy him. Later, he shifted the camera to Daniel Marks, then to Bibi, first in their rôles as Frederic and Mabel, then in modern dress as the director of Pirates and his actress-fiancée. Afterwards, he had Bibi change back into her Pirates garb, to shoot three takes of Mabel’s expression on seeing Frederic, then an assortment of different poses—looking down in contemplation, raising a startled hand to her mouth, casting a look of mischief at a sister. He also filmed several versions of Bibi slowly drawing one stocking down a shapely ankle: with flowers in the background; dangling over the pond; with flowers and pond; with a flower floating in the pond …
“I think the sun is going,” I finally said, drawing an end to this fascination. The rest of the girls and Marks had long since retreated to the refreshments of the tent, and the wind was growing chilly. Bibi jerked up her stocking and stepped into her shoe, wrapped herself in her warm furs, and flounced away down the hill, leaving us to carry the film and equipment.
“How was that, do you think?” I asked the cameraman.
“Some of it looked very nice, although I won’t know for sure until I see it later.”
“What, tonight?”
“Have to be—can’t leave until I’m sure we got everything Mr Fflytte needs. I can give it a squint, just to see there aren’t any major boobs.”
“Do you want some help?”
“You don’t need to.”
“What can I do?”
“Come to my room tonight and give me a hand with the developing.”
It did cross my mind that Will might intend something other than film to develop within his room. However, I knocked on his door just after dinner, and although he answered in a state of relative dishabille, the stink that wafted out was in no way suggestive of romance.
Pirate King: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Page 14