Greenbeard (9781935259220)

by Bentley, Richard James

  “I am sure that ...” Captain Greybagges picked up the letter and perused it, “… Mister R. O’Lecks, Mister O’Meeger, Mister Jago L. Coulter and Mister Pat Philip will have such a pleasant European tour to Geneva and back – the food and wines of France! The gay nightlife of Paris! The splendour of the mountains of the Alps! - that it is possible that they may not even think once of the large-scale manufacture of pocket-watches.”

  “I am sure that you are right, but I cannot believe that anybody could comprehend what you are planning from examining the clockwork devices,” said Blue Peter. “After all, Mr Benjamin doesn’t know what you are doing, and he is building it. What is a ‘deciheptaxial mechanism’ anyway? It’s not as if it is something that one can buy in an ironmonger’s shop.”

  “I fear that other interested parties may be trying to trace me by now, those who may be able to deduce my plans from the design of these devices. A deciheptaxial mechanism is a mechanism that calculates in three and a half variables, although I admit that it is a clumsy description.” The Captain winked and grinned at Blue Peter. “All will become clear in time, my friend, and in a fairly short time now, so your patience will not be stretched too badly.”

  Blue Peter left the Captain calling for more coffee, whistling happily and sharpening his goose-quill to continue his letter-writing.

  That night Blue Peter slept in his small cabin in the Ark de Triomphe. He had become accustomed to the sea from his years within wooden walls and now found the land somehow too stable and solid, its quiescence too obliging to be entirely trustworthy. Spring storms far away in the Irish Sea sent waves rolling into the mouth of the River Mersey sending diminishing ripples up as far as the boatyard jetty, and the very gentle rocking of the frigate soothed him, the faint rhythmic creaking of the ship’s timbers a lullaby to his sailor’s ears as he lay snug in his bunk, wrapped in a thick blanket that was wonderfully dry and smelled of lavender.

  Blue Peter became aware that he was dreaming. He found himself to be laying at his ease under the sparse shade of a baobab tree, his back against its rough trunk and the African plains in front of him stretching away into the heat-haze before reaching the invisible horizon. The brown grassland had a scattering of bushes and the occasional noble baobab tall against the blue sky. A few gnus wandered in the middle distance. He felt a deep sense of peace and, simultaneously, a great homesickness. He sighed. Slowly he became aware that he was being observed. He turned to his left, and a leopardess was sitting almost within reach of his hand, watching him with yellow eyes, her tail swishing. Blue Peter did not feel alarmed. The leopardess yawned, and he noticed that her teeth were polished steel like cutlass blades and the claws that flashed briefly from her paws were cannon-barrels.

  “Hello,” said the leopardess.

  “You are the ship, the Ark de Triomphe,” said Blue Peter. “Hello.”

  “I am the ship as you imagined me to be. You also imagined me as a wolf.” The leopardess changed into a grey wolf, but the yellow eyes stayed the same. “You thought I was ‘as lairy as a wolf ’. It’s an odd word ‘lairy’, isn’t it?”

  “I believe it is Irish,” said Blue Peter, “meaning ‘afraid’, but in the positive sense of ‘alert, watchful and cautious’ rather than in the negative sense of ‘cowardly’. It is not derogatory.”

  “What a pedant you are! Since you are so learned perhaps I should present myself as Nike, since my figurehead is Winged Victory arrayed with a rainbow.” The wolf changed into a rather handsome woman with the wings of a giant eagle, dressed in a white Doric chiton belted with a wide zoster. “Or perhaps all three.” She changed into a chimera with the head of a woman with a wolf’s mane of grey hair, a feline, but still human, body with yellow dark-spotted fur and the multicoloured wings of a parrot.

  “I find that rather disturbing.”

  She laughed and turned once more into a leopardess. “I rather like being a leopardess,” she said, “it’s the wiggle of my bum when I run, just as you thought.” She twitched her hindquarters playfully from side to side, her tail swishing.

  Blue Peter laughed, and they sat in companionable silence for a while.

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve been in Africa, and it’s been even longer since I talked with my tribe’s old sorcerer, but I seem to remember that a visitation in a dream usually comes to impart a message. Do you have a message for me, Nike the leopardess?”

  “Trust your heart.”

  “Is that all? Trust my heart?”

  “Yes, of course it is. Your logic and your reason should tell you that the Captain has gone completely insane - his wits have flown and he is off on a mad hunt for monsters! - but your heart, your instincts if you prefer, tell you that he is sincere, and that he seems to know what he is doing, so you take your part in his plan and follow the path of your fate. If you followed your reason you would not avoid your fate, for nobody can, but you might have a more tedious and unpleasant time, as you would be swimming against the tide of events.”

  “Have you also given encouragement and advice to Captain Greybagges.”

  “This is your dream, and I am your imagining of how the soul of the ship would appear. How could I talk to the Captain?”

  “I shall trust in my heart, then, and hope that the ship’s spirit appears to him in his dreams in a form that is as congenial as you.”

  “For your gallantry I shall reward you with more good advice. Trust your heart!”

  “Once again? Trust my heart?”

  “Certainly! Trust your heart. You hold in yourself a belief that in a time to come there is a great love waiting for you, so you try to keep yourself in a fit state to welcome her when she arrives. You are a great ruffian and a pirate, and you are a frightening sight with your pointed teeth and the cicatrices on your cheeks, but you try to keep to certain standards, to exercise good taste and restraint in your actions. You try not to be a beast, even though you are indeed a pirate and could behave as a beast quite easily. The alternative is, of course, giving up your belief in your future, in your destiny, and so giving up your humanity in the anger of your disappointment, and then your true love may come to you at last, but spurn you for being a beastly knave. Trust your heart.”

  “Umm,” said Blue Peter Ceteshwayoo.

  “The sun is setting. I must go.” The leopardess stood, grinned at him, the low sun glinting red on her steel cutlass teeth, and loped away. Blue Peter watched her until she vanished into the tall grass with a last twitch of her hindquarters.

  Blue Peter awoke briefly and shook his head groggily. The African plains? he thought, that’s odd, I grew up in the forest. The thick woollen blanket that he had warmed and dried in the kitchen oven with sprigs of lavender between the folds was very hot around him. Hot, he thought, yes, Africa, hot. He wriggled and pulled the blanket looser, rolled over and went back to sleep, a faint smile on his lips.

  Blue Peter awoke before dawn. On deck it was dark except for the faint glimmer of a lantern in the waist. He took a dousing under the pump, one of the pirates on watch working the pump-handle for him, singing a lilting song in an incomprehensible west-country dialect to the rhythm of his pumping, Blue Peter hearing the singing in snatches between the gushes of river water over his head and shoulders. He dressed in his cabin, regretfully fingering the sleeve of an embroidered blue-satin coat before donning brown broadcloth; Liver Pool was not Porte de Recailles and it would not do to be too obviously a buccaneer. The sun was just starting its rise as he strode along the jetty, and he turned back and gazed at the Ark de Triomphe, low, sleek and dark in the blue dawn gloom, her masts, yards and rigging a black tracery against the grey sky. He walked on. I am still dreaming, he thought, the figurehead did not wink at me, it is made of painted wood and the light is too bad to see clearly anyway.

  In the kitchen of the boatyard house there was coffee and oatmeal burgoo with brown sugar and yellow cream. Blue Peter ate at the dining-room table, hearing the tramp of feet outside the door and muttered s
alutations and insults as pirates came to the kitchen to collect tubs of burgoo and cans of coffee for their messes’ breakfasts. It had started raining again so he put on a boat-cloak and clapped on a wide-brimmed hat before going on a morning inspection of the boatyard.

  Now that the work on the Ark de Triomphe was coming to an end the pirates were clearing the boatyard and some of the wooden huts had been dismantled as the pirates moved back aboard. Captain Greybagges had decided to keep the boatyard, which would be staffed by retired pirates and suitable candidates from Liver Pool. Blue Peter found this an encouraging development, as it showed that the Captain’s plans did not include a suicide mission. Trust your heart, Blue Peter thought, I suppose I must do just that. It’s good advice, even if it did come from a shape-shifting leopardess in a peculiar dream.

  Mr Benjamin was standing naked on top of the foundry building, his arms spread and his face tilted upwards to the rain.

  “Good morning, Frank,” called Blue Peter. “Don’t get washed away.”

  “And a fine morning it is! The wind and the water are a sovereign tonic, you should try it, Peter!”

  “I had a bath under the pump earlier. That was cold enough and wet enough for me.”

  Blue Peter plodded back to the boatyard house for a second breakfast, thinking about his work for the day. The new cannons were installed in the gun-decks and he was almost satisfied with their carriages, but he wanted to reinforce the eye-bolts on the recoiling-tackles. Torvald Coalbiter had a notion to increase the width of the forward gun-ports so that the two forwardmost cannons could be slewed if required to be more useful in a chase. Blue Peter wasn’t sure about this, but Torvald made a good case. He would have to make a decision this afternoon, as the carpentry would take at least three days and time was beginning to press.

  In fact widening the two ports took two days, but reinforcing the eye-bolts took longer than planned. The ship and crew were now very close to being ready for the oceans. A contingent of retired pirates had arrived in the tubs to work in the boatyard, and the boatyard’s affairs were in a fit state for the Captain to hand over day-to-day control to Mavis O’Bacon, the chief of the women in the drawing section. He had worried about this, but none of the retired pirates could manage a business, excellent hands though they were at carpentry, caulking and rigging. Handing control to any of the men of Liver Pool would be to invite them to strip the boatyard to its bare bones, for that was the way their minds worked; they would the loot the boatyard even though more profit could be made by operating is as an honest venture. The widow O’Bacon, though, would defend the boatyard because she would be running it herself and opportunities like that did not come often to womenfolk, so she had every reason to wish it to prosper and to continue. She was a red-haired dragon with a fiery temper and a tongue that could lash like a bull-whip, too, so she stood a reasonable chance of keeping the workforce in a state of productive fear. All the drawing-section women would be staying on, too, and the widow O’Bacon was their acknowledged queen, so any attempts at peculation by the Liver Pool men would face daunting opposition.

  Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges sat in his Great Cabin enjoying the return of peace now that Mr Benjamin and his boys had finished installing the deciheptaxial mechanism. Mr Benjamin was testing and adjusting it now, but that was a comparatively quiet labour, carried out in hushed whispers with only the occasional tap of a hammer, the squeak of a screw being tightened, to be heard through the oak of the cabin door. The Captain sipped coffee and wrote letters with a new goose quill and fine black ox-gall ink, scritch-scratch.

  Jack Nastyface, Torvald Coalbiter and a Yorkshireman called Jake Thackeray were sitting on the maintop cross-trees, smoking pipes, yarning and taking their ease. Jack had seemingly grown two inches taller and put on muscle with the labours of the winter, labours which he had not minded for the hard work had eased the loneliness he felt from the departure of his great friend Jemmy Ducks. He had lately been assisting Torvald on the gun-deck, and had made himself so useful that he had been given Jake as an assistant to take over some of his kitchen duties. Jake Thackeray was a tall, skinny youth with a long gloomy face, hooded eyes and a down-turned mouth. His lugubrious mien concealed a sharp wit, and he was known for composing comical songs lampooning his shipmates, a talent that was greatly valued ‘tween decks. He was supposed to be a cabinet-maker, but he had little skill with wood and preferred kitchen duties, even being so confident as to question Bulbous Bill Bucephalus’s sacred recipe for hot chilli, feeling that it had insufficient garlic. He was lucky that Bill was not very agile in the rigging, and so he had eluded chastisement for this blasphemy. Torvald Coalbiter, being a gunner and not a foremast-jack, was not entirely at ease perched in the crosstrees, but an invitation to a morning smoke had to be accepted out of courtesy to a shipmate.

  “So, even Mr Benjamin don’t know what the clockworks are for?” said Jake.

  “The Captain does, though,” said Jack, “and that’s good enough for me.”

  “He told Blue Peter that it would become clear soonish,” said Torvald.

  “He is a deep old file, our Captain,” said Jake, “and no mistake on that, but I am still curious, thou knows.”

  “When we had the run-in with the corsairs down off the coast o’ Barbary he saw off that mad bugger Ali the Barber just by twisting words around,” said Torvald. “I think he often sees further than most men, but to explain himself would take too long, so he doesn’t bother.”

  They had been watching one of the tubs manoeuvring in the sluggish slack-water river to come alongside the Ark de Triomphe where she lay at the jetty, and now it did with a slight bump, and a burst of shouting and curses as pirates put bumpers between the hulls and tied-off the ropes.

  “And what be this now?” said Jake, peering down.

  “It looks like the top half of a big barrel,” said Jack, examining the cargo on the deck of the tub, “with iron shackles on its head.”

  “More alike to an upturned bucket for a giant. They are going to lift it onto the barky,” said Torvald, seeing pirates laying down wooden slabs on the frigate’s deck for the huge half-barrel to rest upon. “Here is yet another mystery for you to ponder, young Jake. Let’s get down, they’ll want to rig the steadying-tackles from up here and we will be in their way.”

  Torvald Coalbiter crawled carefully through the lubber’s hole and climbed slowly down the rat-lines; the younger men slid down the back-stay.

  The giant upturned bucket was settled between the foremast and mainmast, lashed down with ropes to iron staples in the deck, and covered in a black tarpaulin. The crew were mystified, and wrangled a little over what it might be, The enigmatic nature of the large piece of coopering only added to a sense of expectation; it seemed they were off on an adventure, the meanings of such things would be revealed in time, and the crew were eager to get to sea, wherever it was that the ship was headed.

  Of all the pirates, Bulbous Bill Bucephalus had the clearest perception of what the deciheptaxial mechanism was for, even though he wouldn’t like to try to spell the word. Through the study of navigation he had acquired a good knowledge of mathematics and an excellent grasp of spherical geometry, that bane of midshipmen. Through the study of navigation he had also acquired a good knowledge of astronomy and an excellent understanding of the motions of the planets as they sail on their orbits through the heavens. These two separate, but related, subjects were suggesting possibilities to him. Three and one-half variables is also three and one-half axes of a graph or, looked at another way, three and one-half dimensions. Could the one-half dimension be …? No, he shook his head, it was daft enough to be right, but he could not be sure. He would think about it some more, perhaps after supper. He had no opinion of the bucket on the foredeck, except in that it would raise the centre-of-gravity of the frigate just a whisker, as it had heavy cast-iron weights around its lower rim, he had noticed.

  Israel Feet did not have any perception of what the deciheptaxial mechanism was
for, nor did he have any idea what the purpose of the upturned bucket was, what he did have was a headache. The headaches were coming less often and with diminishing severity, but the hoisting, levering and lashing-down a vast great thing of oak staves and iron hoops and iron this-and-that was a sure way to get a head-splitter. After supper he would ask Mr Benjamin for a small piece of opium, and sling his hammock in a quiet corner and sleep.

  Blue Peter had put aside the mysteries of mechanisms and giant buckets as mere codicils to the larger mystery of Captain Greybagges’s plan, which would unfold whether he worried about it or not. Another enigma intrigued him, though; could ships have souls? He posited this question to the Captain, Bill and Mr Benjamin over the remains of their supper seated at the table in the Great Cabin, telling them of the leopardess in the dream, but not of her message.

  “I have not had a dream such as yours,” said the Captain, “but then I hardly ever dream, or remember dreams, which is much the same thing. Ships do seem to have a spirit, or why else would we put a figurehead on them.”

  “Ha! The figurehead is there because most sailors cannot read. That is, for the same reason that inns have signs,” said Mr Benjamin. “If both ships and taverns were not so readily identified the average matelot would not be able to find his way between them, and then international trade, the navies of the world and even - I hesitate to say it! – piracy itself would wither away and die of despondency!” He poured himself some rum, and winked at them over his eyeglasses.

  “You are right, Frank, which is why I have arranged for a boucan upon the day afore we leave,” said the Captain. “Oxen, sheep and pigs to be roasted over coals. Barrels of ale and cider, and some port wine and rum-grog for later. Let us kick up our heels before we get about our business, grow our beards a little. I think that ships do have a sort of a spirit, though, if not the sort of full-blown immortal soul that a theologist would give his approval to.”