“Charlie and Bessie, that was capital, just capital!” Raymond shouted over his cigar. “You must meet my friends. This is Father Simon, Sister Carolina, Count Schindler, the Shlessingers, and the good Mrs. Wells.”
The young couple bowed. Raymond went on a little loudly, “Capital tunesters, those Gilbert and Sullivan fellows. Now wasn’t that song from their new play the Pinafore?”
“Yes, sir. It’s the closing number.”
“Are you going to perform the play in America? New York, perhaps?”
“We hope to stage it, yes.”
I broke in. “You seemed displeased the other night when the orchestra played the overture to Pinafore.”
Charlie’s face darkened, but Bessie went on in her incongruously deep Cockney voice, “Well, it’s like this, we feel like that’s ours, you see, our music. And we don’t like others playing it.”
Raymond sat back and regarded them for a moment. “Surely it’s Gilbert and Sullivan’s music, isn’t it? You’re pirating it, aren’t you?”
The two artistes looked uncomfortably at each other.
Then Raymond laughed. “Here’s my card. You two are going to need some help in the land of liberty, and I’d be interested in backing you. Come and see me when you get to New York.”
“Oh, we will, sir! Thank you, sir!” Relieved and excited, they danced away.
“You’re not serious, Harry,” said Katherine Wells with a giggle. She wore a dress which she had informed me was of “rose silk faille,” a white feather boa, her tiny golden locket, and, intriguingly, a cameo on a black ribbon round her neck. In the lamplight, she came near to causing me to forget my vocation. Night after night, she came out like a star—never appearing during the day, but a dream of beauty at dinner and afterwards as we lounged and talked. Sister would retire to her weaving, while Mrs. Wells found something appealing about my listening ear.
She had asked my opinion of nearly everyone in the dining room. She apparently had nothing else to do and nothing to occupy her thoughts but to inquire about, and talk about, our neighbors; so we speculated and surmised together as the others played cards or smoked and drank brandy while the ship swayed beneath us.
One evening I had asked her about someone—Adam Verver.
“Rich as Croesus. Wife married him for the cash, but she didn’t take stock of him coming with it.” This was so starkly put that I glanced at her in surprise. There was a breath of the Liverpool docks in her voice.
Verver was engaged across the room in a genteel card game, with his bored wife seated next to him. I’d had no further encounters with him other than the occasional tip of the hat, a fact that mildly surprised me.
“You don’t find something … menacing about him?” I asked Mrs. Wells.
“Oh, he’s a menace, all right. Just look at her.”
“Something … corrupted?” I tried again.
At this Mrs. Wells had turned quiet and then sighed—severely, I thought, if that were possible.
“Most blokes are,” she said with an empty smile. “That’s why I was interested in your Captain Basil. He struck me as an unspoiled sort.”
Unspoiled? I suppose so, I thought. And infuriating.
After that, she had fallen into a sad silence, and I eventually excused myself for the night.
But now Mrs. Wells was all frills and giggles. “What will you do with this ‘Charlie and Bessie’ if they do turn up on your doorstep, Harry?”
“They’re pirates, aren’t they?” the little man cackled. He had drunk one brandy too many. “Right down my line, Kitty.”
“Yes, I suppose you’ll know exactly what to do with them,” she said with a twinkle of contempt in her voice. At this, Count Schindler, who never spoke, leaned over to Mr. Raymond and whispered something in his ear. I couldn’t tell what, for the purser had taken the floor as a kind of master of ceremonies.
“Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we have the pleasure of a magic lantern show by the Reverend Doctor Shlessinger, who will lecture on his mission among the poor benighted savages of the Amazon coast.”
Chairs scraped, ladies clapped, and the men in the room took on the look of animals in captivity, but no one left. The staterooms were the only refuge of escape, and most of the couples aboard were by this time avoiding each other. Even the men of the orchestra, including the rigid Sigerson, lounged against the bar to see the show. Shlessinger began to set up his apparatus as everyone re-arranged themselves.
A timid gray couple I had met the first night happened to sit nearby. We exchanged pleasantries, and the husband leaned vaguely in the direction of Mr. Raymond. “Excuse me, sir, but would you be the Henry Raymond, the editor of the New York Times?”
Emitting a glow, Raymond asked, “I’m afraid you have the advantage of me, sir. And who would you be?” The fellow was a prosperous farmer from Wisconsin, bringing the little wife home from a long-promised European tour, and such a tour it had been, Paris, Venice, Florence, Rome, London, and he so admired you, Mr. Raymond, and the New York Times and abolitionism and he had been a volunteer in the 5th Wisconsin and … . Like many nervous men he couldn’t stop talking.
Eventually he subsided, and the stewards finished making a theater of the dining room. The Ververs took seats in front of us. Verver turned and nodded slightly to us, then bowed extravagantly to Mrs. Wells and her companion.
“Raymond,” Verver acknowledged him.
“Verver,” Raymond replied, and they struck up cigars simultaneously. When the lamps were dimmed, all the gentlemen’s shirts glowed in the reflection from Shlessinger’s miraculous lantern. The grand missionary stood to introduce his topic, “mission work among the Maroons of Brazil.”
“At last something other than drinking and playing cards,” Sister whispered to herself. “But I wonder, what is a Maroon? Is it like a mulatto?”
I chose not to answer, partly because I didn’t know the answer, but shushed her instead.
“In keeping with our Lord’s great commission in the Gospel of John,” Shlessinger boomed, “my beloved wife and I have worn ourselves out in service to the Maroons of Brazil—to make disciples of these wretched creatures.”
He showed us pictures of the miserable Maroons who were supposed to be the descendants of runaway slaves. Shockingly, they all lived together in promiscuity and seaside huts called mocambos and harvested manioc to survive. The ladies gasped at the scandal and squalor. However, as Shlessinger dropped one slide after another into his magic lantern, I began to suspect he was spreading something other than the gospel.
For one thing, the great commission to go and make disciples of all nations is in the book of Matthew, not John. And for another, the scenes in the slides looked suspiciously familiar to me. The more I saw, the surer I was.
When he finished, Shlessinger embraced the light applause from the audience and beamed ruddily at the ladies like a boiling lobster. He announced he would now take questions, as well as a collection “for the poor Maroons.”
“Is a Maroon the same as a mocambo?” one quavering lady asked.
“You say they eat … ‘manioc.’ Is that what they call … human flesh?” asked another, cringing.
Then I ventured. “I find it interesting, Doctor Shlessinger, that in your pictures the Maroons wear the same jean cloth and homespun dresses as the field hands round Charleston, where I live. And their little huts look extraordinarily like the clapboard houses I’ve seen on Hilton Head and Port Royal Island. What do you make of that?”
Shlessinger muttered something about their “common West African origin” and then hastily moved on to the next question.
Mrs. Wells leaned in to me. “What could you be suggesting, Padre? That the reverend doctor has confused North America with South?” Next to her, Raymond stifled a chuckle.
“I’m suggesting that he picked up these magic-lantern pictures in th
e States,” I kept my voice low. “They have nothing to do with Brazil.”
“When will you be returning to Brazil, Dr. Shlessinger?” asked a pious lady on the front row.
“I’m sorry to say that I may not be able to return.” Shlessinger bowed his head and shook it slowly and sadly. “I had hoped to establish a school among these base and vile people, if only to give succor to their children … .”
“But do you think it wise to send colored children to school?” Sister Carolina spoke up.
“My dear Sister,” Shlessinger intoned, raising his bald face to the heavens, “The Lord has sent me in search of the black sheep of the flock so they may know the simple gospel, not the worldly learning of men, which would simply confuse and annoy them. And now, my return depends utterly on the gracious bounty of my hearers. Anything you can contribute, my friends, anything at all—the smallest coin is as valued as the most precious jewel, I assure you—will be greatly appreciated, and will redound to your account in heaven, I have no doubt. Blessings on you all.”
Taking the hat from his wife, he roved round cadging the audience for donations. The bar was now open so the party could cap the night. Sister refused, so I took a small glass of port with Mrs. Wells and her friends.
“A confidence man, then?” she asked me.
“If Shlessinger truly is a missionary, I will eat the feathers in your lovely wrap,” I said.
Raymond, irrigating himself once again, couldn’t stop laughing. “The fellow is as bare-faced as any I’ve seen.”
“And that’s more than a few,” Mrs. Wells murmured into her drink.
Raymond went on, “Just the sort of fellow I like to have in my employ.”
“A swindler?” I asked.
“A showman,” Raymond replied. “Men like Shlessinger attract an audience.” He nodded at the man, who was ingratiating himself with a flock of grand dames adorned with piety and pricey jewels. His hat was filling up.
“At heart Henry is an impresario,” Mrs. Wells explained, coldly. “He loves a good spectacle, so he collects showy people like Charlie and Bessie and this reverend gentleman with the bogus pictures—and many, many others.”
“I thought you were a journalist, Mr. Raymond.”
Raymond chuckled again. “Journalism, Padre, is the greatest show on earth, to borrow a phrase from the good Mr. Barnum … and, speaking of spectacular frauds, Mr. Shlessinger approaches.”
“As you clink the social glass, my friends,” Shlessinger said, his hat in hand, “I’m sure your magnanimity extends to the poor Maroons of Brazil.”
“I haven’t my notecase with me, sir, but if you will accept my card and come to see me when we debark, you will not be displeased at what I can do for you,” Raymond said. His eyes on Shlessinger made the latter shiver either with pleasure or some presentiment of danger—it was hard to tell which.
“And yourself, Padre?” the fraud asked, turning to me. “A mite from the man of God for the widows and orphans among the Maroons?”
“I fear I have nothing for you,” I said. I was clean out of coins (due to Holmes), but I would not have given if I had.
“All gone for Peter’s Pence, is it?” he smirked, then walked away muttering “Papists and Mormons. What a ship of fools.”
I finished the port and excused myself from the party, as it was getting late. Mrs. Wells thanked me for being so attentive to her.
“I’m afraid I have bored you these many evenings, but you are such sympathetic company, Padre. I wish I could tell you what it has meant to me.”
“Bored? Not in the least,” I replied, and meant it. “It’s been delightful. By the way, I didn’t realize your friend Mr. Raymond was such a prominent gentleman. Editor of the New York Times?”
“Prominent, he is,” she shrugged and led me toward the door. “Now, I do have something to give you.” Almost motionlessly, she shifted a small envelope from her hand to mine.
I put the envelope in my breast pocket without looking at it. “Then I’ll bid you good night, Mrs. Wells.” I bowed and called for Sister, who sat abstractedly staring at the crowd, and we made our way back to our rooms. Once my door was shut behind me, I ripped open the envelope, which was blank, and inside found another envelope sealed shut but with this writing:
Please deliver to Captain Basil.
Chapter 15
To Captain Basil?
I ate a little piece of my heart out, but remembered my dog collar. Of course the note wouldn’t be for me. But should I open it? Even if I posted it on the ship, it wouldn’t get to Holmes for weeks, and what would he care? He would have no interest in a love note from a near stranger: it was not in his character.
But if it was not a love note? What could it be?
The ability to wander the forest of ethics and find one’s own way is famously imputed to the Jesuits, and at least in my case the imputation fits well. It took me only a few minutes to convince myself that I should open the letter to “Captain Basil.”
There was nothing in the letter but a crudely penciled diagram, on the back of it some numbers. I had never seen such a figure, like a watch gear imposed over a snail shell imposed over a pyramid.
The numbers on the back of the paper were arranged in four vertical columns:
33-3
4-3
0-1
36-1
10-1
1-1
3-1
3-1
26-1
20-21
20-15
3-1
18-20
23-1
4-3
22-5
22-5
20-15
22-5
20-15
18-20
16-10
34-1
25-4
4-3
3-1
4-3
4-3
20-10
18-20
1-1
1-1
18-6
36-1
22-5
20-21
3-1
4-3
4-3
22-7
11-4
1-1
18-6
11-4
20-10
4-3
10-1
18-20
1-1
18-20
4-3
7-1
20-15
18-20
18-20
1-2
25-4
20-10
1-2
14-1
“Another cipher,” I sighed.
Staring at it for an hour, utterly baffled, I did not even attempt to break the code. There was something naggingly familiar about the diagram, but that late at night and under the spel
l of the warm port, my thinking was woolly to say the least. I roused myself long enough to make a copy of the drawing and the table of figures, then returned the original to its envelope just in time for my lamp to burn itself out.
The weather was rising outside when a light ruffle of sail and a flourish of wind sent me off to sleep.
In the deepest part of the night a storm erupted. I awoke to the sound of cracking wood and a roar like the groaning of a giant animal. Doors crashed and shutters dithered in the wind. Something metallic bounced violently along the deck, the ship’s bell banged frantically, and underneath it all was the whine of the wrathful ocean.
I gripped my bed, praying with each blast of wind that it would weaken, but it grew only stronger. I could taste the salty mist of it and feel the force of it even as I crouched under my blanket. I was sure the ship would break up any second.
Worried about Sister Carolina, I got up and clambered about getting my boots and coat on as the deck reared from side to side. I forced my door open against the wind. The ship was hurling itself into the air and then plunging into the water in a thunder of spray. Whiskers of cold, black rain raked at my face. Groping my way, I found Sister’s door and pounded on it.
“Are you all right, Sister?”
She responded weakly, and I told her to cover her head, hold tight, and pray. What else could I do? Thoughts of the storm on Galilee went through my brain, and I felt my faith draining away.
Just then I heard shouts from up the deck and could barely make out a group of men congregating there. “Father, we need you,” someone called, so I pulled myself forward clinging fast to the bulkhead
It was the captain, who wore a bandage round his head. He had been hit with force and seemed confused. It was too dark to recognize the others crowding round him. “The hatches!” he croaked.
I looked round and saw the great wooden hatches in the foredeck coming loose from their iron clasps. With every lunge of the ship, water surged through them into the hold. I could hear the cries of women and children below.
The Tarleton Murders Page 11