“Mr. Moehner, I believe you make the rules.”
“My concern,” here he took on a look of genuine concern, “is that you now, at this time, have the opportunity to sell the inn, getting a good enough sum for it to start an easier and, I think, happier life. The alternative, foreclosure, means a tedious process that will leave you with next to nothing by the time it’s all finished. I’m speaking to you as a friend. Why ruin yourself with a hopeless effort when you don’t have to let everything go to the dogs?”
“Mr. Moehner, I’ll consider what you’ve said.” She gave him a polite “Good day” and out we went, with his reference to dogs hitting home. Grendel. Grendel was his nephew’s dog. He had to know about Grendel. I told my mother.
“Jim, that man is bad enough without you stretching your imagination to make him worse. I’m more worried about your dwelling on this dog all the time, when our main worry right now is where we’ll ever get the money by March 1 for the next payment.” With this, she sent me off on other errands. As I was pedalling home, I was surprised to see the captain in his peacoat going into the Sou’wester Beverage Room. That establishment wasn’t exactly our competition, but it was certainly the place where our enemies congregated. It hadn’t occurred to me that he would ever go there.
The following day, after school, I went down to his boat on schedule to help him sail it to Tom’s boatyard. He was waiting for me. “Now, Merry, I want to properly introduce you to Master Jim,” he said. “He’s a good young chap, and he’s going to respect you, and you’ll like him.” He nudged me. “Say hello. You’re crew now.”
“Hello, Merry,” I said.
“That’s good. Now let’s get the lines off her.” This we did, and her sails up, and away from the dock in a gentle twelve-knot breeze. It was perfect for a short downwind sail up the harbour to the place where Tom had a cradle waiting, but the captain trimmed the sails to a windward tack in the other direction.
“Merry wants to have a short, last sail before I start carving on her. Also,” he added, “there’s an hour yet to high tide, and if you’re comfortable I’d like to behold the inn from the sea, as I mostly missed when sailing in, in the circumstances. Ready about,” he commanded me, giving me the jib sheet to handle as he put the helm down. “Merry is a Falmouth boat, and she’s handy in stays.” The little vessel did have a quick response, and then we were bubbling along on the other tack, passing the inn’s promontory from seaward.
“Is that a cave?” the captain asked, directing my eye to the base of the low cliff below the inn, where the sea had carved spaces in the rock. He pointed to a particularly deep one. I had sailed past it many times, but I didn’t know. There was no access to it from any direction; a dangerous surge permanently seethed in and out of it. “Let’s have a look then. What’s the depth of water off your point?” I told him the rock was steep-to, so toward it we sailed. The fissure was indeed like a cave, although there was no way to approach its boiling surf in order to find out what was in its darkness.
He examined it closely. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the way the water’s getting to your cellar at spring tide.” This caught me. If I had mentioned the flooding to him at all, certainly I had not told him anything about its tidal schedule, although he was right about it.
“There is a buoy missing,” he said, pointing to our position on a coastal chart folded to a detailed inset of Grey Rocks Harbour and approaches. I told him that the buoy had been washed out in a southeaster two or three winters ago, and never replaced. He pencilled in a correction on his chart. It was another peculiarity, that he had such a fully detailed chart of a small fragment of the Nova Scotia coast, where he wasn’t even planning to be. A yacht had no room for such an inventory. I commented he’d been lucky to have such a good chart for the exact place he got blown into on our coast, a very long way off his course.
“Aye, lucky. Just so,” he agreed, gazing around, correlating what he was looking at with the chart. “Old Landing,” he read from it, taking a sight line on Lighthouse Point. “What’s that?”
“It’s where the first Grey Rocks settlers are supposed to have stepped ashore. And it’s where our cannon is,” I impulsively added. At the time, I had no idea of where this simple remark was going to lead.
“What cannon?”
“The one the Moehners stole from us. There were two to begin with, but there’s only one left now, and that’s where it is.” The captain made a minor course change to take us in that direction, wanting to hear more, starting with what kind of cannon it was. I told him it was a brass gun, beautifully ornate, one of a pair that an old admiral named Holbourne had put ashore to augment the Grey Rocks battery, which was on the point adjoining the inn, where the sun patio was now. When the old battery fell into disuse, the ancient guns had simply been rolled into storage, and their oak carriages had rotted away down in the cellar—where his sea chest was now—until the Grey Rocks bicentennial celebration. For that, the town council got federal and provincial grants to make a little park area at Old Landing, with a lot of expensive stonework laid by a Moehner contractor. The whole thing became a major event, with everybody in town participating in one way or another. I sighed. It was still painful to talk about. He urged me on.
During preparations for the festivities, Mother was approached by Phyllis Moehner, who was Roy’s wife and the chairwoman of the local chapter of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire, which was pretty much running everything. Phyllis requested the cannons for the event, and Mother willingly loaned them as a civic contribution, asking only their return after the festivities. This was promised. Moehner Woodworkers Inc. built new carriages for display. The cannons were never fired off, being stuffed with popcorn boxes, but it was all very successful, with tents, fireworks, local musicians, and food and drink concessions that did well because of all the visitors. The trouble was, we had never gotten our cannons back. Nor did it look like we were going to, and one of them was now gone.
“Gone where?”
I shrugged. Supposedly, in the version of events reported to Chief Moehner, one had been stolen. The scuttlebutt around town had it that the cannon had been sold to a wealthy American collector who had paid a lot of money for it, and had it crated up and shipped off. The word was he tried to buy them both, but Roy wanted to keep one for himself, and it was still decorating the Old Landing, which was a part of his property. “Is that it?” He pointed. It was. The captain reached for his binoculars. “How do they justify not bringing it back to you?”
“Now, they say that our cannons were really town property all along, being abandoned government artefacts,” I explained. We had no papers on the cannons; they had been there forever. Uncle Bill, who was a lawyer in Halifax, had filed a civil action on our behalf. He had told us that we had a good case, but that we didn’t have much chance of recovering our cannon in the courts, because it would be claim and counterclaim, and the whole thing would take a lifetime to drag through the system, where possession was 90 percent of the law in cases like this. The captain put down his binoculars, glanced at his watch, and prepared to jibe around to run back for the harbour.
“Why don’t you just get a pickup truck and go get it?” he wanted to know. I explained that it was a gated private road, through the Moehner estate, with all their dogs, and was closed off to the public. No private vehicles allowed. “You mean he got public tax money to fix his own property in the name of a public event? Plus the profits from contract kickbacks and such? Plus your cannons?” That was about it, I agreed. He had another look through his binoculars.
“As best I can make out, it looks to be a light four-pounder gun, is that about right?” I didn’t know. I had once put an apple into its bore, and it was a pretty good fit. “D’you know its weight?” I didn’t. It had taken three men to get just the barrel onto a pickup truck. “That’s useful to know,” he said.
“For what?”
“Getting it back.” This was different.
“You mean . . .”
“Getting it back is what I mean.”
“Stealing it?”
“Retrieving it, I would say. If you ask it of me, I’ll help.”
“Mother wouldn’t . . .”
“This is not about your mum, or anybody else. It’s you and me. But it’s your choice. If you want my help getting the inn’s cannon back, you’ve got it. Think it over while you fetch me a tot of rum from that bottle under the settee.” Doing that, I was torn between my want for our cannon back, and my fear of what could happen. I pulled out his rum bottle, poured him a tot in a mug, and was about to carry it above, when I took the notion to have a taste of it. It burnt my tongue and throat, but I got some down without gagging.
“From the sour look on you, I reckon you don’t like my idea,” he said.
“No,” I gasped. “I mean, I do. Let’s do it. What’s the plan?” He regarded me thoughtfully.
“That,” he said, “is up to you. I’m just your help.” I told him I wouldn’t know where to start. “Well, do it as Sir Francis Drake would have done it.” I said I still didn’t know. “In that case, you’d better pay rather close attention when I tell you about him. Stand by your jib sheets, and be ready to jibe again.” We were rerounding the breakwater and I felt a bit light-headed. The run up the harbour took little time. The next thing I knew we were handling her sails again, then coasting into the cradle at the top of the tide.
“Welcome,” said Tom, coming out to help adjust Merry between the uprights, so that she could be hauled for the winter work. Then the little boat was winched up and out, hosed down, ready to start drying enough to work on. Tom and the captain examined the hull, agreeing on the places where planking was to be replaced. “We’re going to take good care of you, dear girl.” He patted her hull with affection.
Our return trip to the inn was on foot, in the last twilight. “He was about your age when he went to sea,” said the captain as we walked. “Maybe a year or two younger.” I must have looked confused. “I’m speaking of Francis Drake. He was a little chap, considerably smaller than you, I should think, because fully grown, he was quite short. Fierce, though. He had red hair. He was born in Devonshire around 1540, got educated mostly by his father, who taught him the sailor’s arts, and navigation. Then he went aboard a trading bark, where he found the life he wanted.
“He learned ship-handling, the movements of wind and currents, forecasting the weather by the look of the clouds, the behaviour of seabirds, the direction of waves set moving by distant winds, the smell of land on a dark night. He learned to pilot his ship by reading from nature’s book. By measuring the angle of the sun or a star to the horizon with a cross-staff, he learned to find his latitude on the broad plane of the ocean. And from all his various shipmates and teachers, he learned about sailors, who are quite different from persons who are not sailors, in a number of ways that don’t change.”
“I don’t have my notebook,” I reminded him.
“During his first voyage to the West Indies—by now he was a young man—he was given a small vessel under Hawkins, who was an elder among the Queen’s Sea Dogs, as she called them. Hawkins, Raleigh, Frobisher, Grenville, Cavendish, Drake, that lot. In any case, your Hawkins chap had been making a tidy profit running African slaves to the Caribbean, where the Spaniards bought them because they needed slaves for their plantations. So that’s what Drake was doing there, and peaceably, except the rule came down from His Catholic Majesty King Philip II of Spain, that there would be no more colonial traffic of any kind with the English. Philip wanted all of the profits from his vast empire, y’see, every bit. Think of him as Roy Moehner with a pointy beard, and picture Klaus and his other nephews as conquistadores, his thugs. Did you know, by the way, that they had war dogs to unleash on their enemies?”
“War dogs?”
“Lots of them. They were a standard weapon. In any case, the Spaniards seduced the English into a trap. Having promised safety, they pounced, and in a surprise bit of treachery they decimated the Brits, took most of their ships, killed a lot of Drake’s mates, and captured most of the rest. But not Drake. He barely escaped with his ship, and in a desperate condition. Being the master sailor that he was, he got what was left of his crew back from the Mexican Gulf to England. There he learned the fate of his comrades who hadn’t made it, and it wasn’t a pretty story. The Spaniards tortured some of them, and others they burned alive. Not one of your more preferable ways of having to depart this earth, I should think, eh?”
“Because they were pirates?”
“No, because they were Protestants, who were regarded by the Holy Inquisition as heretics who therefore could be burned in the name of God. The Protestants, who had a somewhat different version of God, never matched them for studied cruelty, but got in their licks by chopping up a lot of Catholics. Drake was very upset by what the Spaniards had done, and from that time on he devoted his career to making them wish they had been nicer to his shipmates. When he paid his next visit to Spanish America, he had his blood up.”
We walked in silence for a while as I dangled, anticipating Drake’s revenge. “What did he do?” I asked after what seemed a long time. By now we were approaching the inn under a starry sky.
“That’s for after supper, and after the ladies have turned in. It should be your special interest, regarding our project.”
“Were you serious about stealing the cannon?” I’d had several misgivings since impulsively going along with the notion.
“If it’s as you’ve told me, the cannon is your property. Your lawyer uncle chap says it is, and if possession is as much of the law as he’s told you, it would seem to me to be more a repossession. But it’s up to you. I’m just the help.”
“Why would you do that?” I couldn’t help asking. He shrugged.
“Call it a whim. Also . . .” he paused, “perhaps there will be some odd thing you can do for me some day.”
“What if that was something I didn’t want to do?”
“Then you wouldn’t do it.” This seemed all right, but it didn’t ease my fears about getting the cannon back.
“Mother . . .” I started to say, but he cut me off.
“You. Not your mother. Or me. Just you. You’re on your own about that. Your choice.” We arrived at the inn, and our conversation was curtailed.
The captain had started to play his pennywhistle at his table at about the time when Meg finished her evening duties. Tonight, he had a surprise for her, starting with a question as she was clearing his table. “Do you play the violin?”
“I do,” she said, wiping down, not looking at him.
“Then, my dear girl, you should have this.” He reached under his chair and produced a battered fiddle case, which he opened to reveal a violin. Meg glanced at it, and her eye was captured longer than I think she wanted it to be, before she recovered and went back to the business of wiping down. The captain continued: “It’s no use to me, and it’s taking up space on Merry.”
“What price?” she asked him.
“The price? Why the pleasure of your playing it with me this winter, whenever you’re inclined. That’s all. You mustn’t deny our music, whatever you think of me.” Meg wiped.
“I’ll tell you this, Captain Johnson,” she said, engaging him squarely. “I think you’re a pack of trouble. You’ve done some helpful things, and there’s nothing I can put my finger on to back up my instinct about you, but friends we are not, and you won’t buy me with a fiddle.”
“Not you, dear girl, your music. You’ll note the instrument comes with no strings.” Indeed, it was unstrung. “But there’s loops of wire there, waiting to be strung by your good hand, and a pretty good bow.”
Meg gazed at him. “The trouble is, who in the name of holy old twist are you?”
“Regard the music,” he told her.
“Yes, and you’re a clever piper. There’s that, too.” Her eye was drawn back to the violin. It was a well-used, and much-repaired thing, but it
glowed a lustrous orange in the candlelight. “Bargain,” she said abruptly, closing the case and taking it away with no backward glance.
“Now Drake,” he said, turning to me. “You’re him. It’s 1571. You’ve got two ships, a few dozen men, and you’ve decided to take on the whole Spanish empire, even though your country, England, is not at war with Spain. There’s friction, but no war, meaning you’re on your own account. You’ve got no little document from your queen authorising you to do all the things you’ve got your teeth set to do.”
“Meaning,” I interjected, “you’re a pirate for sure.”
“Not me, you. You’re Drake. I’m just the chap who’s telling you about him. Yes, you are, or are about to become, a pirate. But you are encouraged to do that by your government, which can’t officially authorise it, but can and does give you a big wink. Elizabeth does not subscribe to the notion that Spain owns everything it claims, but she can’t afford a war. The thing she can do is show Philip the vulnerabilities of his colonial sources of wealth, where the laws of Europe do not apply. In the great imperial chess game, you are a knight.”
“But you . . . I, I mean, can also be hanged for piracy.”
“Head chopped off, more likely, if it’s by your own side, which is preferable to what the other side might do.”
“Why would the English punish me for doing what they want me to do?”
“Politics. Knights are sacrificial. Your best chance of getting away with it is in bringing home so much Spanish gold that you’re a hero instead of a criminal. If there’s enough cash to interest the queen in taking a big cut, and she does, you’re off the hook. If you’re empty-handed after making a lot of fuss, your position might be more tenuous. The game has its risks.”
“But the law . . .”
“The law has ever been a very fluid thing, seldom immune to injections of money in various, indirect ways. As to money, Spain’s galleons brought back emeralds and gold from Peru, silver from Bolivia by the ton, pearls, wealth beyond imagination. They sailed in well-protected convoys, and were difficult to intercept. If you did find one of their flotas at sea, you were going to have a lot of powerful warships shooting quite a lot of cannonballs at you.” He paused, seeming reflective. “Jim, can you have any idea of the authority in a ten- or twelve-pound iron ball travelling toward you at several hundred miles per hour? It’s quite astonishing. Anything in its way more or less vanishes; if one erupts through a bulwark near you, if it doesn’t get you directly, you’ll likely catch one or more of the tremendous splinters and fragments it’s set flying. Now imagine cannonballs coming at you in truckloads, and you’ll find great incentive to avoid the situation. Drake’s first rule was: avoid confrontation with a superior force, which I should think you might take into consideration in forming your own plans.”
The Brotherhood of Pirates Page 7