Greenbeard (9781935259220)

by Bentley, Richard James

  Blue Peter, as Master Gunner, had overseen the mounting of her new guns, whose black snouts now protruded from her gun-ports. The latest cast-steel eighteen-pounders from the Carron Company, none finer, equipped her single lower gun-deck, with twenty-four-pounder iron carronades on her upper decks. He would miss the short bronze Portugese thirty-two-pounders from the foredeck, though; he had been fond of those old smashers. As each new gun-barrel was dragged to the frigate on a sledge the crews had stopped to introduce it to its predecessor, laid on timbers in a shed, to splash them both with rum and ‘marry’ them so that the new gun would carry the same name as the old one. Sailors are superstitious, and pirates perhaps even more so.

  The only thing that looked odd about the Ark de Triomphe was the small platform mounted between the foremast and the mainmast on a diagonal spar, at about one-half of the mainmast’s height. Blue Peter had no idea what it was for, but his fingers still ached from the fitting of the five thin copper rods that ran to it, the last of the copper rods to be installed, he hoped. The Ark de Triomphe is not just a leopardess, he thought, there is more; she has bones of iron now, and yet more, her claws are guns of steel, and, yet more again, her nerves are copper rods made to carry lightning. What is he making here? What kind of beast has he built as his steed for his monster-hunt? And Blue Peter Ceteshwayoo was suddenly cold, and very afraid.

  Although it was still freezing cold, there were faint signs, if not of Spring then of the imminent arrival of Spring, and the low sun was occasionally shining apologetically through the scudding clouds. As Blue Peter stood on the bank looking at the frigate’s mysterious platform a Liver bird settled on it, flapping its wings whop-whop before folding-up like an old umbrella. In the brief calm between gusts of breeze Blue Peter heard its call, “awk! awk-la! AWK!”

  CHAPTER THE TENTH,

  or The Captain Calls For A Boucan

  The Broadmeadow estuary lay calm and dark under a moonless night sky, and the small Irish village of Malahide showed no lights. The pirate frigate Ark de Triomphe lay at anchor, low and black. The ship and the longboat that was shuttling to-and-fro from the shore should have been invisible in the gloom, but the wide estuary was full of small skiffs with bright lanterns on poles.

  “I have heard of the cunning Orientals using birds to catch fish, but I never thought to see such a thing ten miles from Dublin,” said Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges.

  “They are cormorants, it seems. Avian creatures that are accustomed to dive beneath the waters in search of their piscine prey,” said Blue Peter Ceteshwayoo. “The fisherman ties a leather thong around the bird’s neck, the poor creature cannot swallow the fish and so must bring it back to its master. The lantern’s light attracts the fish.”

  Captain Greybagges looked at him quizzically.

  “I asked the fellows down there on the beach,” said Blue Peter, pointing.

  “There seemed to be little point in being stand-offish when we are already exposed in plain sight by their lights. Fishing with birds is a source of extra money for the farming people around here, they said. Fishing with birds, and collecting seaweed.”

  “Seaweed?”

  “A particular kind of seaweed. They told me it is dried, shredded and sold to be used for padding coffins, as it absorbs the stink of a corpse. The departed relative is displayed in the family parlour for the wake, which is an overnight vigil of drunken remembrance. The sad occasion is thus rendered less dolorous by the exsiccative properties of the bier of kelp, so the grieving kin may then enjoy the roborative properties of the beer of barley….”

  Captain Greybagges eyed him in silence. Blue Peter looked abashed, and then continued.

  “The fishermen may have been making sport of me, of course, as I am but a poor heathen blackamoor, but I doubt it, as they were otherwise quite amiable and polite. Well, they were after I gave them a sip of rum.”

  “Seaweed to line coffins? I suppose I have heard of stranger things.” Captain Greybagges strode back to the road above the beach. The boat had returned and pirates were carrying small wooden boxes to it from a coach and a cart. The horses snorted and stamped their hooves, their breath swirling in ghostly clouds in the glow from the coach-lamps.

  “How many more, you swabs?” growled the Captain.

  “One more trip, Cap’n,” said Torvald Coalbiter, carrying a wooden box on his shoulder.

  “Don’t say it!” said the Captain, turning to Blue Peter. “Not until we are safely back at sea. Don’t tempt the fates.” Blue Peter looked abashed again.

  There was a confused outbreak of shouting from the sea. Ghastly piratical oaths answered by curses in Gaelic and the squawking of cormorants; the longboat had nearly rammed a fisherman’s skiff.

  “I shall say it, now that we are safely back at sea. Everything went well!” Blue Peter grinned and poured rum for himself and the Captain.

  “I am not usually a superstitious man,” said the Captain, “but these mechanisms are vital to my plans. I feared that such delicate engines might be easily broken, or that an attempt might be made to steal them away to ransom them. Now they are stowed aboard the barky I can feel easier.”

  “The ride from Dublin certainly will have attracted attention,” said Blue Peter. “A cart, a coach and an armed escort of pirates mounted on old nags and mules. I’m surprised the children of Dublin didn’t follow us, thinking that the circus had come to town.”

  “I wish I could have arranged things more efficiently, Peter, but with time pressing I could not. A more clandestine meeting with the clockmakers and a diversion when the boxes were moved would have been better, but instead I just had to load the boxes, go as fast as we could and trust that any wicked rapparees or mosstroopers would be without the time to prepare an ambush. I wasn’t going to meet all the clockmakers at the same time and place, either, but I again had no choice. The clockmakers, thus introduced, would discuss the engines and so, in turn, so the gossips of Dublin would certainly have had word of a valuable cargo in transit.”

  “The clockmakers were a congenial parcel of rogues, though,” said Blue Peter, sipping rum from his crystal goblet.

  “Indeed, and that is a problem, for they will continue to talk among themselves now, being intrigued by the mechanical devices that I ordered from them, and I do not wish my business to be discussed or bruited abroad by wagging tongues.”

  “I am intrigued, too,” said Blue Peter, “but I am not a clockmaker, so I will remain mystified, I suppose.”

  There was a knock at the door of the Great Cabin and Jack Nastyface entered, followed by Mr Benjamin carefully carrying a square box. The box was rectangular, as long as a forearm, half that in width and height and made of unvarnished pinewood, with a rope handle at each end, and a number scorched onto its top and sides with a hot iron

  “I thought you might like to see an example what you have purchased at such expense, Captain,” said Mr Benjamin, placing the box on the table. There was another knock and Bulbous Bill Bucephalus and Israel Feet entered. Mr Benjamin took a small jemmy-bar from a pocket and levered off the top of the box, nails screeching in the wood, while Blue Peter poured shots of rum for everybody.

  “No touching! No poking with fingers! Don’t spill any damned rum on it, either!” spoke Mr Benjamin sternly, then reached into the box and lifted out a complex mechanism of brass and steel, of cogs and gearwheels. It sat on the table, the machined metal coruscating in the lamplight. The Captain and his officers looked at it in silent wonderment for a while. Jack Nastyface kept quiet and hoped nobody would notice him.

  “Why, they are fine craftsmen, these Dublin clockmakers!” said Mr Benjamin at last. “These are not your mere cork-and-nail men!”

  “Cork-and-nail men?” asked the Captain with a raised eyebrow.

  “Irish travelling tinkers who will attempt to mend clocks. They will hold a piece of drilled sheet-brass with a nail stuck into a bottle-cork, the better to file it into a cog-wheel. Some of them have surprising skill for unlette
red oafs, it is true, but the workmanship shown here is of a different order entirely.” Mr Benjamin smiled down at the brass clockwork machine.

  “What does it do?” asked Bill, frowning.

  “It multiplies numbers, or rather quantities,” said Mr Benjamin. “See, the shaft here is rotated to represent one value, this shaft here the other value and the resulting multiplicand is the rotation of this shaft here. The powerful spring here provides the energizing power to drive the mechanism, which is re-wound by this little shaft here.”

  “What be these?” said Israel Feet, reaching out with a finger.

  “Don’t touch!” snarled Mr Benjamin. “Sorry, Izzy, but these mechanisms are quite gracile, and frangible if mishandled. Those ivory discs are for fine adjustments.”

  “It is quite beautiful, I have never seen its like!” said Jack Nastyface.

  “What be you a-doing in here, Jack?” growled the Captain. Jack Nastyface blushed to the roots of his hair.

  “I … I helped Mr Benjamin to carry it in,” he gulped.

  The Captain regarded him with a baleful eye.

  “Curiosity killed the cat, Jack. Go and tell the cook to bring us some snacks, and as a punishment for your nosiness you must pass it around the crew that I nearly ran Izzy through with a cutlass for merely breathing on this engine, and that I will surely keel-haul any fool who touches any one of these mechanisms with even the nail of a little finger. Only Mr Benjamin is allowed to fiddle with them.”

  Jack departed, closing the door behind him. Mr Benjamin carefully replaced the gleaming brass engine back into its box.

  “They are all there, Captain. Nine multipliers, nine adders of the Gaussian pattern, nine differential integrators, plus the regulators, the connecting shafts and all the other bits and pieces. Each component in triplicate to give two spares against breakages. One hundred and forty-seven boxes.”

  “Once we are returned to Liver Pool and moored, how long to install them in the barky, Frank? The deciheptaxial mechanism we discussed?”

  Mr Benjamin scowled. “Two weeks, maybe three if there’s a problem.”

  “Make it two, if you can, Frank!” said Captain Greybagges, before sipping rum from his chased-silver goblet.

  The Ark de Triomphe ploughed eastwards under full sail through the dark Irish Sea, under a sky bright with stars.

  The Ark de Triomphe lay moored once again to the Liver Pool boatyard jetty, her masts and decks busy as pirates attended to any small problems that the short trip to Ireland had shaken out. Mr Benjamin and his team – mostly young pirates, but with a cabinet-maker and a whitesmith from the ranks of the old pirates – were installing the Captain’s mechanisms in a large locker below the quarterdeck, next to the steering-tackle under the ship’s wheel. They all seemed strangely cheerful, thought Blue Peter, and he wondered if it was the simple joy of such precise and exacting work. Whatever the cause, their chatter and the noise of the necessary carpentry had driven Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges out from the refuge of his Great Cabin ashore to the front parlour of the boatyard house, where Blue Peter found him writing letters – scritch, scratch – and drinking coffee.

  “I believe I have solved the problem of the Dublin clockmakers!” said the Captain, as Blue Peter sat down. “Will you have some coffee? A biscuit?”

  “Indeed, yes. Are you sure that the clockmakers are a problem?”

  “Well, a potential problem. People talk, and skilled tradesmen gossip more than fishwives, and the mechanisms I ordered from them are unusual and mysterious. They would not be the fine artisans whom they undoubtedly are if their curiosity was not whetted to a degree by the mere fact that they are in ignorance of even the purposes for which I require the devices.”

  “You are right, of course,” said Blue Peter. “I have only just been remarking upon how happy Frank and his boys are presently. Mechanical enthusiasts in their earthly heaven! They are filing and scraping and hammering, each bearing a spanner like a field-marshal’s baton! Muttering with each other over great sheets of engineer’s drawings, and probably bursting into song every ten seconds!”

  “Indeed they were,” said the Captain wearily, rubbing his face, “when I tried to do my correspondence in the Great Cabin, and yet I had no desire to constrain their keen spirits, their animae, so I came here.”

  “And yet you have denied the clockmakers that pleasure! The pleasure of assembling the machines that they have built into a functioning whatever-it-is. Their amour propre of cogs, gears and pinions will remain unrequited and unconsummated!” chuckled Blue Peter. “How they must loathe you! A love-struck Romeo would not hate you even one-half as much if you had shot his virgin Juliette before his very eyes with a blunderbuss loaded with tin-tacks! Surely they are conspiring with your foulest enemies even as we speak!”

  The Captain laughed, and went to hurl a biscuit at Blue Peter’s head, but dunked it in his coffee instead. “Maybe they would, but I have found a distraction, a will o’ the wisp that will divert them for a while to a place where they can do me no harm by their egregious rumour-mongering.”

  “Where is this magic kingdom of faerie, then, where clockmakers may be spirited away?”

  “Switzerland.”

  “I have heard of the place, but I know little of it, except that it is not magical.”

  “Ah! The land itself is not magical, but my imagination makes it so for Irish clockmakers!”

  “You are obviously pleased with your cunning. Do be so good as to explain.”

  “Then harken. Switzerland is a country of much cold, much snow, much poverty and much misery. So poor, in fact, that its main export is mercenary soldiers. The average Swisser is a very good gallowglass, it is true. They come from a land where even a casual stroll to church may involve more vertical movement than horizontal, where the mountains have all kinds of traps for the unwary - avalanches of snow, howling blizzards that last for weeks, even the dreaded tatzelwurm, a snow-white dragon that has near as many legs as a centipede, the better to grip the ice - and where food and comfort are always in short supply. The Swissers are tough because they have to be to reach manhood. Why! Even the Pope himself has Swiss mercenaries to guard his person and his treasures, and he is not a fellow to stint himself, or so I am told. There would not seem to be much to interest me, or indeed anybody, in such a barren land, but it occurred to me that it was just the place for a bank. It is poor country surrounded by almost-impassable mountains, peopled by stubborn warriors. So it is a land of very little interest to a conqueror looking for rich pickings. It is not a nation grown rich and grown soft, so who would wish to invade such a place? But a nation that has no attraction for a Tamerlane is a place of wonderful peacefulness and stability of government, and so it is an ideal spot for a bank.”

  “Does not the presence of a bank reverse your logic?” said Blue Peter. “When there is a bank there is money to steal, surely.”

  “Ah! A bank is a temptation to a band of thieves, and to pirates, of course, but not to an invader. An invader needs bread, beef and beer for his troops, fodder for his horses, clothes, boots, weapons, all kinds of useful plunder and booty. Any banks that he may chance upon in the course of his campaigning are just the cherry on the cake. A chest of gold is nice to put by for his retirement, but it will not feed his men if there is no food to buy. On the other hand an entire nation, even one so wretched as Switzerland, is too big for a mere band of ruffians to subdue … You smile, Peter! I know you think of bloody Captain Morgan! But Panama proves that I am right! Panama thought itself very grand, but it was only a rich town, not a nation with a nation’s resources, and so it was vulnerable to a band of ruffians.”

  “I concede that your logic does seem sound,” said Blue Peter, pouring more coffee, “but how does this concern your Irish clockmakers?”

  “I opened a branch of our Bank of International Export in Geneva, and while I was organising it one of my correspondents there informed me that Switzerland was so poor that they made their clocks of
wood! Not of brass and steel, but of wood! I pointed out to the Irish clockmakers that a country that could make clocks of wood was surely not short of ingenious fellows, and that pocket-watches require very little metal but much skilled labour, and that an enterprise to manufacture pocket-watches there would have low labour costs and a central position in Europe. In quite a short time Switzerland could come to completely dominate the business of pocket-watch manufacture, all it would require was a few skilled horologists and an investor to fund the project through its early stages while the labour-force was trained and premises and tools acquired.”

  “Do you actually believe this?”

  “Of course not! It verges upon the ridiculous – although it is true about the wooden clocks, which gave me the idea - but the Irish clockmakers were impressed by the sums of money I was prepared to invest and so have set off to Geneva to look things over. I am sure they think that I am a great tom-fool with more money than sense, but a pleasant journey across Europe with all expenses paid is hard to resist, especially as they need not take their wives as it is business. They will be gone for months in foreign lands where little English is spoken, and busy with making at least a token appraisal of the possibility of watchmaking in the rocky valleys of Switzerland, so that any chance of my plans becoming known is minimised. I have set it up by mail, and this letter confirms that the Irish clockmakers left Dublin two days ago on a fast and seaworthy barque, bound for France.”

  “It is a shame that the poor fellows will be on a wild-goose chase,” said Blue Peter, smiling.