Greenbeard (9781935259220)

by Bentley, Richard James

  “This is but a mere gee-gaw,” said Mr Benjamin, “but is it not pleasing? The mechanism itself detects the movement of the ship with the little lead weights in the little box there…” Blue Peter peered into the locker. There was indeed a small cabinet with glass panes, inside he could see a number of spindly levers with balls of grey lead on their ends. As the boat moved under his feet the little levers waggled and glittering brass escapements whirled, faint clickings and whirrings came from deeper inside the mechanism. “This indicator of the rudder’s position is a frippery, a mere curlicue I have added to this wonderful engine, so I that may more easily perceive if there is a discrepancy between the rudder’s movement and the heading given by the mechanism. A crude measure, but a useful one, and they are in complete agreement!”

  Mr Benjamin’s jowled face beamed his satisfaction, his eyes shining behind his pince-nez spectacles. His assistant, a young pirate, a gangly youth who had been apprenticed to a clockmaker in Clerkenwell, grinned happily, nodding and repeating “in complete agreement!” several times. Blue Peter noted that both of them had acquired very steady sea-legs. They both shifted their bodies easily as the frigate pitched and rolled, and kept a firm grip against any sudden lurch with at least one hand.

  Blue Peter squeezed past them, stepping over Mr Benjamin’s canvas tool-bag, and knocked on the door to the Great Cabin. Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges was at his desk writing in a ledger, dressed all in black, his beard seeming to glow a wan grass-green in the pale easterly light from the tall stern-windows. He shouted for Mumblin’ Jake to bring coffee. Blue Peter sat down.

  “Tell me, Captain,” he said, “who designed the demiheptaxial mechanism?”

  “Why do you ask?” the Captain smiled.

  “It was not Frank. The joy which I saw in his eyes just now was admiration, not the pride of a creator, and anyway he has been too busy with other things, and before that enslaved in Barbary.”

  “The devices of which it is composed are familiar to clockmakers, and their principles may be found in a library, if one knows where to look. It is the work of many minds, but Frank has brought all the pieces together into a complete whole, so you grant him but little credit for his labours. I fear that I cannot tell you anything more.”

  “I know, I know,” said Blue Peter, “I must wait and all will become clear in time.” He sighed.

  Mumblin’ Jake came with the coffee and a dish of sweet cakes on a tray.

  “To change the subject, Captain,” said Blue Peter, his mouth full of cake, “can we not raid the slave-masters of Virginia? You once told me that you had no objection if the time was right, and we are headed there with in the finest pirate-frigate ever to sail the seas, and with a crew who have not seen action for a while, and a good half of them who have never seen action at all. It might be useful experience for the new pirates and an encouragement to the old hands. These are very good cakes!”

  “That young fellow Thackeray makes ‘em. Cookie is quite jealous. A raid on Virginny? Umm, it’s not a bad idea – you are right that the crew could do with some action to sort them out, and the young fellows are eager to show their mettle - but we are on a tight schedule, and I don’t wish to draw any attention to ourselves. We must call at Norfolk, where I have some business, and that will surely set enough tongues wagging up and down the coast, so I must say nay. I appreciate your feelings in the matter, Peter, but I don’t think it can be done at this time. I must stick to my plans.”

  Blue Peter felt obscurely thwarted by this. He ached to do some damage to Master Chumbley and his odious fat wife, or any other slave-owner, and he could almost feel the heat as he imagined their white mansion burning, could almost hear the crackle of the flames and their screams as they burned in their canopied feather-beds. I had forgotten how much I loathe them, he thought. He sipped his coffee glumly.

  Blue Peter wished to argue the point further, but it seemed useless when the Captain’s mind was made up. Instead he turned the conversation to discussing the romantic attachments that the crew had made during the past winter in Liver Pool. The necessity for arranging payments to common-law wives and pregnant girlfriends had given them a tedious extra burden before leaving the port, yet it had to be done to maintain goodwill and discretion. The two buccaneers were tired from the stormy passage across the Atlantic, and they got into the kind of argument that only old friends can have, where the issue remains unclear and where the participants end up attacking their own original propositions.

  “Why then did you not yourself take a mistress in Liver Pool?” asked Blue Peter Ceteshwayoo, in some irritation.

  “Well,” said Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges, rubbing his eyes tiredly, “I didn’t have the time. Always busy, you know.”

  “What poppycock! The red-haired widow, overseer of the copyists’ room, Mavis O’Bacon, she would have warmed your bed, massaged your back and made you possets, too. She looked at you the way a cat looks at a dish of cod-scraps.”

  “I don’t know. I was aware of her … interest. I think it’s because I have been obsessed with time these past months. Every man hates time, and tries to ignore its flow, thinking each day is a repetition of the last with a few trivial changes, and it is not. That is the secret of peasants, you know. Although poor and hard-driven they see the flow of time clearly through the rise and fall of the seasons, and so realise the arcs of their destinies. The rich, by contrast, can insulate themselves from even noticing time, dividing it with clocks and calendars and account-books until they feel it is under their control, and so they are unpleasantly surprised when they grow old, and are outraged when death approaches, whereas the old peasant is sanguine as he goes to meet his maker. Once one starts to think about time, to take the long view, brief amours lose some of their savour. One is always then thinking ‘what next? shall we marry and have children?’ and if the answer is ‘no’ then it all seems a little sad and futile. But then I could ask you the same question, Peter. You could have ensured that half the next generation of Liver Pool scallywags were large and brown. The boys would have been impressive oafs, I’m sure, but I would have pitied the girls if they favoured you in looks.”

  They glowered at each other, then burst out laughing. Captain Greybagges refilled their coffee-mugs, taking care not to spill any as the Atlantic combers made the frigate roll and pitch.

  “I do know what you mean about time,” said Blue Peter, eating another cake, “and that there should be some purpose to one’s rogerings, too. I did find the ladies of Liver Pool alluring - they have sharp tongues and even the humblest of them has a queenly gaze - but there are enough bastards in this sad vale of tears, and I would like your monster-hunt to be over before I consider domesticity.”

  “My ‘monster-hunt’?” Captain Greybagges looked surprised. “I had not thought of it quite like that.”

  “By what other name could one particularise those creatures, the extramundanes that you described in your tale to me?”

  “I suppose you are right, but I like the lizard people, and cannot think of them as monsters. A few men and women that I have encountered have been far more monstrous. Some of them fair of face, witty, elegant and charming in their manner, too.”

  “I cannot argue with that, Captain, for I have met similar human monsters, although they are quite rare, thankfully.”

  “We are both pirates, Peter, and so perhaps less inclined than others to judge by mere appearance, but still we can be deceived. Did you ever meet that mad cavalier Prince Rupert of the Rhine? He was a-buccaneering around the Carib seas before the King was restored. He had a little poodle-dog called ‘Boyo’.”

  “I don’t believe that I ever did, Captain, why do you ask?”

  “Well, the first time that I came across the fellow was in the Dry Tortugas, in the old Ponce de Leon tavern. I was sitting drinking rum-and-water in a civilised way when in came Prince Rupert. Without a word of warning the sod thrust a globule of glass under my nose and tweaked it – the glass globule, that i
s, not my nose – and it exploded like a bomb! My eyes were full of splinters of glass! I had to bathe them in salt water! That good fellow Izzie had to get some of them out with the wetted corner of a kerchief. I feared I might be blinded, and the cursed hound laughed like a drain! Prince Rupert, that is, not his little dog Boyo. If I could have seen anything at all I would have shot him or run him through without a second thought, but my eyes were full of tears and glass. Yet when I got to know him better I found that he was a congenial sort of cove. The glass-bomb was an invention of his, and he had been merely over-enthusiastic in the pride of his discovery and over-eager to demonstrate natural philosophy, and not the depraved lover of cruelty that he seemed at that first meeting.”

  “How did the glass-bomb function? Was it filled with gunpowder?”

  “Not at all, Peter. If one heats a rod of glass until it melts like pitch, then allows the molten glass to drip into a bucket of water, each drop is instantly solidified, but the outside hardens first, squeezing the interior, so that forces are frozen in the solid glass. When one snaps off the tail of the globule it precipitates the whole into shattering quite energetically, bang! Prince Rupert is presently much caressed by London’s society for his learning – he has invented a new method for printing pictures, you know - and the glass-bombs are called ‘Prince Rupert’s drops’, so his name shall be written in the pages of history for an invention of no use whatsoever, except to fill unfortunate souls’ eyes with glass-splinters, and not for his failed siege of Liver Pool.”

  “He laid siege to Liver Pool? Whatever for?”

  “It was in the war ‘twixt King Charlie’s cavaliers and Noll Cromwell’s roundheads, and nobody seems to have had much notion of what they were about in those times. The people of Liver Pool remembered him well, and his little dog, too, which they said had the evil eye, although how a poodle-dog may possess the evil eye is beyond my imagining, I must say, even though it was a horrid little mutt, always trying to roger one’s leg, you know? The Liver Pool ruffians said that he lifted the siege because they stole most of his supplies while his army was camped outside the town, which I can well believe.”

  “Does this tale of Prince Rupert have a moral? or indeed an ending?” said Blue Peter, selecting another cake.

  “Well, I suppose I was musing upon the nature of monsters, and that although Prince Rupert seemed like a monster at our first encounter he wasn’t, really. There is the Liver Pool connection, too, which brought him to mind.” The Captain took the last cake.

  “I suspect that you are attempting to divert me from my ploy to trick you into revealing something more of your plan, Captain.”

  “Well, Peter, I think I was going to say that a monster – which is to say a monster of evil, and not just a poor sad malformed thing such as a kitten with two heads – is defined by a lack of interest in the welfare of other beings. Such a person is so utterly focussed upon their own selfhood that they incapable of the normal human attributes of sympathy, generosity, magnaminity and so on. In fact, they may exult in defying the vestiges of their conscience, if indeed they have one, and so relish cruelty.”

  “We pirates are generally regarded as monsters, surely, Captain? Those were very good cakes, and now there are none.”

  Captain Greybagges shouted for Mumblin’ Jake to bring more cakes. Mumblin’ Jake put his head around the door and mumbled that there were no more cakes, an’ damn yer eyes yer greedy bastards. He took the coffee pot to refill.

  “Pirates may be monsters, Peter, of course they may. Alf Docklefar, who made the Ark de Triomphe ship-in-a-bottle over there, has sailed with most of them, to judge by his yarns. But when exactly is one a pirate, and thus a criminal, and not a privateer, and so a legal entity plying a legal trade? That is not clear at all. The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, sanctioned by the Pope himself, gave everything west of the Cape Verde Islands to the Spaniards and everything east to the Portugese, and yet was that not itself a great act of piracy? Most of those lands were already inhabited by folks who would not know the Pope from a coster-monger, after all. The other countries of Europe regarded the treaty with derision, of course. Francis the First, who was king of the French, roared with laughter when he heard of it, and asked to be shown the clause in Adam’s will that made such a bequest legal. As a lawyer, I do applaud him for that! He was a fine fellow, was Francis, a very learned king. He made Guillame Budé master of his library at Fontainebleau, which shows great judgement of character as well as an appreciation of the importance of librarians. So, was Drake a pirate? The Dons say that he was, of course they do, and the English say that he was a hero, of course they do. Since then the situation has become even more confused. The meridian has been moved three hundred and seventy leagues westwards, so as not to discommode the Portugese, and a further understanding among the European nations means that any incident west of that cannot be regarded as legal grounds for a war, which is how bloody Captain Bloody Morgan could besiege and sack Panama and be made Governor of Jamaica, and why the Spanish have to grin and bear it as best they can. In the seas and lands west of the mid-Atlantic meridian it must be assumed that European laws are only honoured in the breach, and that therefore the only law that needs to be considered is ‘might is right’. Under such a legal regime the label of pirate becomes meaningless. I rest my case.”

  Mumblin’ Jake came with the refilled coffee-pot and a plate of biscuits, mumbling curses. Blue Peter poured coffee and took a biscuit.

  “I am desolated to find that I am not a pirate,” he said, dunking the biscuit and eating it in one mouthful.

  “And neither are you a monster, Peter, but if certain parties were to apprehend you they would hang you nonetheless. Now I am diverted from the point I wished to make, which is that I am not a monster, but that my monster-hunt compels me to behave as one. I cannot tell my officers or my crew what I am about, but must instead strut about like a tyrant insisting my orders be obeyed even if they seem not to make much sense, and yet there is no other way. Leave me one biscuit at least, Peter, you greedy sod!”

  Blue Peter pushed the plate towards the Captain, but a lurch of the frigate propelled it further and the Captain caught it as it slid off the desk.

  “Well caught, sir!” said Blue Peter, clapping. Captain Greybagges ate the biscuit.

  “However, Peter, I may vouchsafe you a little of my schemings. Our next port o’ call is St John’s in Newfoundland. A cold and miserable place, but we shall only water and provision there before heading south to Virginny.”

  The mention of Virginia reminded Blue Peter of his thwarted desire to commit arson upon white mansions, which put him in an ill humour. I am tired, he thought, we all are from the hammering of the seas, and the cold, and the need for standing watch after watch. He made his leave to the Captain and retired to his cabin for a couple of hours sleep. The ship seems to enjoy these high Atlantic seas more than the crew, he thought, as he tied himself into his bunk. I think of her as a wolf at first, then as a leopardess, and now as a seal. There is something very alive, very animal, about a good ship, even though a ship is conceived by the mind of man, not God, and made of wood, not flesh. Perhaps she will come to me again as I slumber. But Blue Peter had no hypnogogic visitation, only a dreamless restorative nap, rocked by the frigate’s pitching, lullabied by the gentle creaking of its timbers, until woken at midday by the eight bells of the end of the forenoon watch. Dinner was a broth of barley, dried peas and salt-pork, with bread, not hard-tack, as there was still flour this early in their voyage. Blue Peter ate his in the officer’s mess-room, which was a little larger after the frigate’s rebuild, and now tastefully panelled in light oak. Israel Feet joined him at the table in fine high spirits, drops of spray still glittering in the locks of hair that stuck out from under his head-scarf. The officer’s mess-room of the Ark de Triomphe was not like that of a ship of the Royal Navy, and pirates on various errands came in and out without ceremony. They seemed in fine spirits, too. I was right, thought Blue Peter, the
rough weather and cold high seas have given the crew faith in the vessel, and now they are exhilarated by its romping progress through the waves. He drank some coffee, and wondered if any more cakes had been baked yet.

  The Ark de Triomphe, sailing due-westerly under topsails alone, slipped slowly into the Hampton Roads from Chesapeake Bay, leaving a white wake on the choppy grey-green water, trailing a small flock of optimistic seagulls.

  “Starboard on my mark, mateys,” Bulbous Bill Bucephalus told the steersmen, and, stepping forward, roared “Goin’ about to port! Be ready to brace up!” to the foremast-jacks, then to the waisters; “Lead-swingers to the chains! Ready the longboat, you lubbers, har-har!”

  The breeze on-shore was light but steady, and the Ark de Triomphe’s wake curved smoothly from due west to due south as she turned into the wide mouth of the Elizabeth River. The pirate on the port fore-chain started swinging the seven-pound lead weight on its line, at first back and forth, then around like a sling in an accelerating circle before releasing the coiled line to hurl the hand-lead far ahead of the slow-moving vessel. After a moment the second pirate on the starboard fore-chain started swinging his lead, timing the cast so that the depth-soundings would come alternately as the hand-leads sank to the bottom and were pulled in and cast again.

  “Take her past Half Moone Island,” said Captain Greybagges, pointing into the distance, “and then we’ll anchor south of Town Point. The harbour-master will be assured of our goodwill when a little gold is pressed into his sweaty palm, I’m sure, and the Half Moone fort will keep us safe from any impudent Dutch privateers who may be sniffing about the coast. They can exchange broadsides with the fort, should they come up-river, whilst we may make wagers on them, sitting comfy, sipping rum and eating hot chestnuts.”

  The lead-swingers called; “No bottom!” and; “Six and a half! Six and a half and sand!” and; “Five and some! Five and some and gravel! Brown gravel and shells!” The hand-leads had hollows in their bases filled with tallow, to which the silt would adhere as they thumped onto the river-bottom. As the soundings grew shallower and the bottom more gravelly an anchor was prepared for dropping, swinging free from its cathead, and the longboat was launched to kedge the ship if required. After a normal ration of skinned knuckles, pulled muscles and curse-words the frigate swung in the slow river current, its anchor securely bedded in the gravelly river-floor, and its sails furled into swags on the yards.