Pirate King: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

by Laurie R. King

  My phlegmatic attitude, more than my words, gave my fellow prisoners pause for thought. Twenty pairs of eyes followed me to the richly laden table; twenty pairs of ears heard the ting of silver on porcelain as I stirred in the cream; twenty stomachs decided that they might deign to try one of those croissants and some of that pale butter.

  Annie seemed to have got over her affront at being ill-treated by the guards. She loaded a plate and filled a cup with tea, then brought them over to where I was sitting, on the wide, decorated edge of the fountain.

  “I’m sorry you were frightened,” I told her.

  “I was more angry than anything else,” she said. “And it’s frustrating, to not be able to speak to anyone. Even the maid and cooks just stare at one blankly when one asks for another bath-towel.”

  “I’d have thought an actress would be skilled at making herself understood.”

  “True, but some things are a touch embarrassing. And more complicated forms of communication, such as asking why one is not permitted to leave a door, can be difficult.”

  “Yes, I’m sure we’ll find that this is all merely an oversight on Mr Fflytte’s part. Just as he overlooked the problems of arriving on the eve of the Moslem Sabbath.”

  “Do you think so?”

  I can turn a bland face on anyone short of the Holmes brothers and have it believed. “What else could it be?” I asked mildly. Before she could answer, I went on. “I for one intend to make the most of our paid holiday here, and gather the sun’s rays on the rooftop. And perhaps I ought to take a glance at those French novels in the sitting-room, before the younger girls spot them.”

  I abandoned my empty cup and plate to do as I had announced—and did in the end notice one or two books that might be inappropriate for young girls, although I should have to read them to be certain. I carried them to the rooftop and made a show of setting up for a leisurely day of relaxing in the sun. The others, after some hesitation and grumbling, decided to throw over their complaints and take my lead.

  By mid-day, we had a ladies’ salon going atop the house. In one corner, Bonnie and Harriet were taking turns translating one of the more innocent French novels aloud to an audience. Some of the mothers had uncovered a supply of embroidery floss and were teaching two of the girls (who in the normal course of events would have nothing to do with needlework) to pick out a design, an experience that became more enticing when I descended to the kitchen, figured out (using gestures and raised eyebrows) which of the inhabitants had been responsible for some of the towelwork, and dragged her up to demonstrate Moroccan designs. Celeste and Ginger were to be in a stage-play when we returned to England and were helping each other with their lines; Edith was teaching Kate and June how to whittle; and Fannie and Linda, looking like a pair of schoolgirls, were playing a cut-throat game of chemin de fer.

  Several times during the day I wandered down to the kitchen, hoping, if not to find fodder for a band of Irregulars, at least to forge some kind of relationship with the ladies there. Each time, either Annie was already in residence (scrubbing vegetables and stirring pots and laughing merrily at the impossibility of communication while creating a language of hand gestures and facial expressions) or she would appear a few minutes later. In the end, I abandoned the kitchen to her. Which was probably for the best, since she seemed less likely than I to burn down the house or be the cause of an epidemic of food-poisoning.

  Lunch was brought to the rooftop, served to us like a picnic without the champagne or the ants. Afterwards, Doris excused herself to go wash her hair, and when she came back up, she carried the looking-glass from her bedroom wall, that she might better primp and admire the fall of her thick, wavy locks. One glance, and six of the others rushed for the stairs; soon, our tiled picnic grounds more resembled a boudoir.

  When the two kitchen girls climbed the stairs with a tray of mint tea, shortly after the mid-afternoon chorus of muezzins, they lingered, glancing disapprovingly at the cigarettes but frankly gawping at the sea of yellow hair. Doris spotted the two girls and waved for them to come over. Soon, she had them brushing her hair and giggling behind their hands at the way it sprang back under the comb.

  They left, heads together and talking far too quickly for me to follow their exclamations, then returned a few minutes later with a basket full of paraphernalia, followed by the cook.

  The cook searched the rooftop of Europeans at play until she spotted me. I did not understand most of her words, but using a handful of French and grabbing my hand for a demonstration, she managed to get across the gist of her message. I explained to the others.

  “They’re offering to do henna painting on us. See that goo that looks like mud? That’s pure henna. When you trickle it onto the skin and let it dry there, it stains intricate patterns. It’s not permanent, one scrubs it away after a few days. I’ve seen it before, done for weddings and such. It’s pretty. Anyone interested?”

  June jumped forward, but her mother said she could not; as they were arguing over the child’s right to be a canvas, Linda stepped up, and Bonnie.

  We kept the three ladies of Salé busy for a couple of hours, trickling arabesques of mud onto hands, arms, and ankles. When the trio descended below to their labours, leaving a bevy of Europeans oohing and aahing over the orange-brown tendrils woven over their pale skin, I looked around and was hit by a startling thought: I was in a harem.

  And if I stayed here much longer, I should die of boredom.

  The weather stayed remarkably warm, considering it was nearly December. The wind died away, permitting us to take our evening meal down in the open courtyard, and if some of the girls and all of the mothers grumbled at the food, which again was spiced and coloured and possessing unrecognisable components from the soup to the dessert, some of us enjoyed it immensely. I polished my plate and sat back, replete.

  The courtyard was lit by small lamps, above the table and in the trees; the earlier brilliant crimson sky had given way to a panoply of stars.

  “Shall we take our tea on the roof?” someone suggested: I was surprised to find it had been I.

  The cook-housekeeper studied our charades of climbing stairs and sipping cups, and nodded her agreement. We gathered armfuls of cushions, and carried them up, and up again, covering every surface with padding. We lay there with tea and coffee, the lamps shut down, and counted stars.

  A short time later, the violin started up, clear despite the distance.

  This time, the melancholy squealing was replaced by a lively tune. Twenty-one British women heard the tune; half of them shot upright and exclaimed, “The Major-General’s song!”

  And so it was, the proud proclamation of the father of thirteen blonde daughters, declaring his knowledge of matters vegetable, animal, and mineral. The jaunty tune rang out over the dusty pirate town, hushing its inhabitants and its prisoners alike, and when it was finished, the instrument started in on Mabel’s song to Frederic, “Poor Wandering One.” To my astonishment, a woman’s clear soprano rang out in accompaniment, and we looked around to see Bibi singing to the heavens. I hadn’t known the woman could sing a note, much less knew the score of the comic opera.

  After that, those who knew the words followed Holmes’ violin into a variety of the chorus numbers, and although I neither joined in nor appreciated the musicality, I did enjoy the sensation of hearts meeting across the rooftops.

  There came a pause, while Holmes took a drink or tightened his strings—or silently fought off irate guards, for all I could tell—and Annie sighed. “One might wish for a number of strong men to bring up that piano from the sitting room.”

  Again, I spoke without thought: “Who needs men?”

  Of course, once the idea was out in the open, the others fell on it, and although I tried to withdraw the possibility of hauling the thing up the stairs, nothing would do but we all trooped down to examine the possibility. And, in fact, the instrument had legs that could be detached, so with a series of mattresses to turn the stairs into a ramp (a
bump-filled ramp, true) and a quick transformation of bed-sheets into hauling ropes, the project was on.

  It was heavier than it had looked, but not so massive that we couldn’t shift it. The turns in the stairs meant several great gouges out of the plasterwork, and I had a bad moment when I (on the downhill side, steadying it with a shoulder) felt the load wobble and gather itself for a rush towards the ground floor—one of the bed-sheets had slipped. But the weight did not crush me, and the other ties held, and in the end, we made it all the way to the top. There we reattached the legs, and set the instrument with its back to the opening over the courtyard, so that the sky-light’s canvas tarpaulin could be extended to protect it against the night mist.

  The piano’s arrival on the rooftop brought a great outburst of feminine triumph that silenced the violin, and no doubt made for a number of puzzled male expressions behind barred windows. Annie pulled up a stool, and began to play.

  Separated by walls and armed guards, the violin and the piano combined, joined by a chorus of women. I waited tensely for the guards to storm in and quiet us, but either they were lovers of music themselves, or their instructions had not covered what to do if the firengi women next door burst into song.

  And then a little after ten o’clock, the violin stopped. The women valiantly kept going for a song or two, but in a pause, Mrs Hatley sighed and said that she was tired. Annie’s hands remained at rest in her lap, and within the quarter hour, the piano was shrouded, the pillows gone, the rooftop lay empty and silent as the city around us.

  I could only hope that the silencing of our other half had not been too brutal. I needed to speak with Holmes, which would be difficult if he’d been knocked unconscious.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  SAMUEL: Your silent matches, your dark lantern seize,

  Take your file and your skeletonic keys.

  I HAD SPENT much of the day dozing in the sun, so as to be fresh for the evening’s activities. Holmes’ violin the night before had given me the location of his room; tonight, there was no need for the street. I waited impatiently for the house to grow still, then changed into my boy’s garments and eased open the door.

  As I’d hoped, a cautious venture of my head over the high wall confirmed that the neighbouring rooftop was deserted, the guards safely indoors with their prisoners. I padded over to look at the door, finding to my irritation that it was bolted, not locked. It is difficult to pick a bolt. Fortunately, I had other means of reaching Holmes.

  I looped my rope around a convenient sturdy lump—not as convenient as it might have been, unfortunately, placing me a good three feet to the side of where I wished—and walked backwards down the wall, as silent as I could be although the outside guard was nowhere in sight. As I came even with Holmes’ window, just ten feet down from the roof level, a pale hint of motion came from the side of the metal shutter: his waving fingers, confirming his presence.

  I made myself as comfortable as one can be on a thin rope dangling twenty-five feet above cobblestones, and reached to slide my fingers through the narrow gap.

  Two warm and oh, so welcome hands swarmed up to take possession of mine, and I felt happy for the first time in days. Well, perhaps happy is not the exact word, but I no longer felt quite so alone. I scooted over, searching in vain for an external anchor that would take some of my weight, and ended up stretched across the stones to hold my face to the window covering.

  Before I could speak, a voice as much felt against my face as heard by my ear recited, “ ‘What is that form? if not a shape of air, / Methinks, my jailor’s face shows wond’rous fair!’ ” Perhaps Holmes, too, had once laboured under a Miss Sim?

  “Thank you, Holmes.” I, too, breathed the words into the blackness within.

  “Good evening, Russell. I regret having to ask you to seek me out.”

  “All in a night’s exercise, Holmes. I could see that your windows are considerably more secure than ours.”

  “A number of the fittings of the house make me suspect that this was at one time the harem. And, as you no doubt could infer, the search of our bags was scrupulous.”

  “Well, they seem to be concentrating on you men—we have no inside guards beyond the housekeeper and her two maids. It would appear that our pirates meet few females with a streak of independence.”

  “And a climbing rope,” he added.

  “Extraordinary, isn’t it? The only thing they removed from my bag was the revolver. They must have thought my pick-locks were a manicure set.”

  “You have your pick-locks?”

  “Indeed I do. Shall I—”

  “That would be a great service.”

  I worked the leather pouch of tools from my pocket without dropping it, thumbed out a tool by touch, and slid it through the metalwork. He thanked me, and got to work.

  “I heard a shotgun yesterday,” he remarked.

  “A warning shot, literally, to let us know we were not permitted to look over the wall that separates our house from yours. They seem to have decided that the lesson was well learnt, because there’s no one on your roof tonight. And you, are you all well?”

  “Mr Fflytte is nursing a sore head after protesting against our confinement—not that the situation itself seems to trouble him, oddly enough, but he grew increasingly restive during the day, and when the guards finally opened his door he expressed his outrage, that our confinement will interfere with the making of his film.”

  “That sounds like him. Do you have any— Aah.”

  The lock mechanism gave its whisper of release, and I shifted so Holmes could push the shutter out. I studied the resultant hole.

  “I believe I can get inside,” I told him.

  “But the process will be slow, and I would not wish you trapped here.”

  However, the open sill meant that I could transfer a portion of my weight onto the sill and off my hands.

  “You were asking me if I had something?” he prompted, when I was settled again.

  “Yes, do you have any of the pirate crew with you?”

  “I think not, although our only communication has been brief tapping on the walls—someone knows Morse code, although three others only imagine they do, which rather confuses matters. La Rocha and Samuel were in the house earlier—my first inkling of their presence was a shriek that made my blood run cold until I realised it was that accursed bird. In any event, Hale was brought out to speak with them, for quite some time, but the conversation took place behind closed doors in a room on the ground floor. After the two men left, Hale’s voice shouted out that if we are obedient tomorrow, we shall be permitted to gather in the courtyard during the afternoon. That is the only thing I have heard from any of them.”

  “Carrots and sticks.”

  “Precisely. What have you learned?”

  “The town is small and its walls and gates maintained. As you may have seen when you were brought here—”

  “We saw nothing: Sacks were drawn over our heads. A certain amount could be discerned by hearing and by—”

  “Holmes,” I interrupted happily, “I shall never again complain about men who believe in the incompetence of women. Thanks to my freedom, I can tell you that we are in the north-east quadrant of Salé, about a hundred metres in from the walls.” I described all I had found during the previous night’s wanderings: gates, walls, guards, the road out, the ferry; the layout of our house, the orientation of the adjoining streets, the heap of rubble to the side. I gave details of house and inhabitants, the distribution of the bedrooms.

  Then I came to the more complicated part, which concerned the characters acting out their parts inside our tight little stage.

  Four sentences into my analysis, however, Holmes stopped me. “Perhaps you had better go through that more slowly.”

  The section of my body resting on narrow stone had lost sensation and my arms ached, but I could not bring myself to be impatient with him, since it had taken me hours with mental graph paper to map out the permutations o
f all that I had gathered on the rooftop harem that day.

  “We knew on the Harlequin that Adam is smitten with Annie,” I began. “However, paying close attention to her concerns during the day, she responds to remarks concerning Bert-the-Constable with approximately the same ratio of interest as she does to remarks about Adam-the-Pirate, even though I’d have said that Bert was more intent on a friendship with Jack than on reciprocating Annie’s affections. Jack, on the other hand, would rather follow Edith about, being unaware that Edith is a boy.”

  “Edith is a boy?”

  I was pleased to find something he’d missed. “Didn’t I mention that? Yes, I found Mrs Nunnally plucking her child’s emergent beard. Beyond those specific links, various of the girls are interested in the young pirates and the young constables interchangeably—any young male will do—but I should say that Mrs Hatley—”

  “Mother of June.”

  “Right. Mrs Hatley appears to retain both affection and hope regarding Geoffrey Hale—although it could as easily be a sort of psychic contagion spilling over from her rôle as the pirate’s nursemaid, Ruth, since she also pets Daniel Marks, her Frederic, at any given opportunity.”

  “And yet I should have said that if Geoffrey Hale is interested in anyone, it’s his cousin Fflytte.”

  My numb hands jerked along the rope and nearly spilled me to the paving stones.

  “Russell? Are you there?”

  “Yes, Holmes, merely startled. You think …?”

  “They would not be the first aristocratic cousins we have known in … that situation.”

  “Except that Fflytte has a reputation as a womaniser. And is currently—well, not currently, but until Harlequin intervened—associated with the picture’s choreographer, Graziella Mazzo.”