by Gideon Defoe
‘Gracious me!’ said Shelley, once they’d got inside and taken off their wet overcoats. He looked about, delighted. ‘It’s so authentic!’
The people crowding the tavern all had the type of face that has its own special section in Spotlight. Everybody had the right number of eyes and noses and chins and mouths, but they seemed to have been stuck onto their heads by a particularly cack-handed child.
‘We mustn’t mention this place to a soul, lest the rest of London society should start to include it on their Grand Tour. It would be overrun by tourists.’
‘Aren’t we tourists?’ asked the albino pirate, confused.
‘No, we are travellers,’ Shelley explained. ‘There’s a world of difference that I’m not going to go into right now. Mostly it’s to do with wearing flip-flops.’
‘Hello, characterful local barkeep,’ said Byron, waving. ‘A flagon of whatever disgusting indigenous drink you probably brew out of wolf skeletons and bits of mud, please.’
‘Just look at the man’s hands!’ Shelley marvelled. The barkeep obligingly held up his hands for closer inspection. ‘The stubby fingers of a real culture, untainted by Western values!’ He turned to address the entire tavern. ‘You know, in many ways all of you strange, hunched-over peasant folk are far richer than us, because you’re so much more spiritual.’
The locals murmured a slightly half-hearted ‘thank you’. As the Romantics attempted to strike up a conversation about tribal tattoos, Jennifer picked her way across the tavern to where the Pirate Captain had parked himself on a stool. He was pulling wistful faces into his pint glass.
‘Hello, Pirate Captain. Mind if I join you?’ she said, sitting down next to him. The Captain glanced across the room at Mary and pulled another even more wistful face. Jennifer patted his shoulder. ‘You know, Captain, before I joined the crew, all my adventures happened in drawing rooms and on lawns. We didn’t have sea monsters or tidal waves so we tried to get our excitement from listening to what people said.’
‘Sounds awful,’ said the Pirate Captain with a shiver.
‘It was,’ agreed Jennifer, ‘but it taught me something really useful. It’s called reading between the lines. When people say one thing they often mean something else entirely. The trick is to think about what that could be. So, for example, when Lady Something-or-other talks about an urn in her ornamental garden she’s actually intimating that the Earl of Wherever is interested in marrying Madame Thingy’s niece who was recently in Bath. That’s called subtext.’
‘Subtext?’ said the Pirate Captain, blankly. ‘Is that like one of Babbage’s codes?’
Jennifer nodded. ‘That’s right. It’s like a really annoying code. Here’s another example. Imagine a young Englishwoman writing about a nautical mutant. Now imagine she tells a nautical person about a plot where a young Englishwoman has feelings for the mutant.’
‘That sounds a lot like Mary’s book,’ the Captain said with a nod. He paused. ‘Hang on a tick. I thought you were asleep?’
‘I was trying to sleep, but you’ve got quite a loud voice. It penetrates.’
The Pirate Captain took this as a compliment and gave a little bow.
‘So I pretended to be asleep rather than get in the way.’
‘Do you do that often? Pretend to be asleep, I mean?’
‘Don’t worry, Captain, I’ve never noticed you creep into my cabin and try on my clothes at night, and if I had noticed I would be sure to assume it was just the kind of healthy experimentation anybody might do. But you’re missing my point about Mary’s subtext.’
It took quite a long time for the Captain to really grasp it, even after she’d drawn a few diagrams to help him along.
‘So,’ said Jennifer, ‘to sum up: I think Mary likes you too. But she’s conflicted. The same way you sometimes get conflicted about whether a chop is better than a steak.’
The Captain contemplated. The face the Captain did for contemplating was a lot like the face he did for nodding off, so Jennifer gave him a prod.
‘All depends on the context. Is it to go with potatoes?’
‘Try to stay on topic, Captain.’
‘Sorry. Well then. Mary and me. I think I’ve got an idea!’
‘I suppose it’s too much to hope that your idea involves “talking about your feelings like two sensible adults”?’
‘It is, sorry. See, if Mary likes this subtext palaver as much as it seems, then it only makes sense for me to use even more of my own subtext. It will show we’re on the same wavelength. I don’t really know what being on the same wavelength means, but I do know that it’s one of the most important things to you women.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Jennifer, who knew when to cut her losses in a conversation with the Captain. ‘So how are you planning to do your subtext?’
Before the Captain could reply, Byron’s big ringing voice cut right across the noise of the tavern.
‘. . . and so that’s why we’re here to visit Castle Ruthven!’ he boomed.
Everything stopped. The barmaids stopped serving drinks. The band stopped playing gypsy versions of popular hits. Even the raven on the roof stopped his atmospheric cawing. A few of the younger pirates thought it was a game of musical statues and so they stopped too, and did their best to freeze in position.
‘Did I say something bad?’ asked Byron, in as much of a whisper as he could manage.
The barkeep grunted, and reached behind the bar. Then he slapped a piece of paper down on the table in front of the poet. It was a short leaflet printed in English, German, French, Spanish and Japanese.
It was the most bone-chilling tourist information leaflet the pirates had ever read. A few of the crew suddenly remembered they might have left a stove on aboard the boat, and suggested it could be a good idea to go back and check.
Byron, though, just laughed.
‘I think you’ll find,’ he said to the barkeep, ‘that we are made of sterner stuff than you suppose. For you see, we travel with the indomitable Pirate Captain! A man who bested the kraken itself! A man who single-handedly wrestled a dinosaur to a standstill in the Bodleian Library! Not the sort of chap to turn tail and run from a horrifying curse. Why, I doubt you’d even find the word “fear” in his dictionary.’
The barkeep shrugged a suit-yourself sort of shrug, and went back to polishing an ashtray.
‘He’s right, of course,’ said the Pirate Captain, nodding to Jennifer. ‘If you look in my dictionary you’ll find that it goes straight from “fealty” to “feasible”. My advice: should Black Bellamy ever turn up on your doorstep offering to sell you a set of reference books, send him packing. His encyclopedias are even worse. It’s just the definition of “sucker” repeated on every page for nineteen volumes.”
Thirteen
Today’s Special . . . Is Gore!
If the adventurers had arrived at Castle Ruthven two hundred years later they would probably have found it being restored by a bright-eyed young couple with energetic names like Kyle and Marcy. Kyle and Marcy would say stuff along the lines of ‘the castle itself is the real project manager’ and ‘we’re simply custodians for the future’ and they’d make sure that the new bits looked new, so that you could ‘read the continuity of the architecture’, and they’d furnish it with some tasteful Eames recliners, and maybe a Barcelona chair, and then they’d sit down in their bespoke kitchen with a bowl of olives resting on the hand-cut Italian tiles and take a moment to gaze proudly at their creation, and then they’d look at each other, and there would be a terrible gaping silence as they realised that they hadn’t actually got anything in common at all, and Kyle would wonder if Marcy’s neck had always been that stringy, and Marcy would wonder why Kyle still wore those ridiculous distressed jeans like he was a teenager or something and right there and then, they’d decide to have kids, because that at least would give them another distraction to put off the inevitable acknowledgement of the awful, desiccating meaninglessness of it all, but nothing would ever entire
ly block out that one bottomless silence, and it would loom over them for the next twenty years until Kyle had an unhappy relationship with a local waitress half his age and Marcy ran off to ‘find herself’ by spending a fortune on yoga and cupcakes and Valium.
But because it was the early part of the nineteenth century all the pirates and their companions found were great heaps of ivy crawling across the crumbling stone walls and an inescapable and unsettling air of dread. The pirates shivered in the moonlight. Obviously it was because they were cold, not because they were frightened of the moon. Stories of dog-eating moon squid were just tales made up to stop young pirates asking for a puppy every single Christmas and birthday. They knew that. Only Byron seemed immune to the eerie atmosphere, mainly because he was too busy trying to spook Babbage by putting ivy on his head and making Triffid noises.
At the forbidding doorway everybody looked up at the big brass doorknocker. It was shaped like a bat. Next to the door were some gargoyles, which were also shaped like bats.
‘Here’s an interesting fact about bats,’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘There’s a popular misconception that they’re evil creatures who’ll go for your jugular soon as look at you. Whereas of course there’s actually nothing to worry about, because you’re far more likely to get rabies from bat saliva dripping into your mouth whilst you sleep.’27
At this point everybody pretended to be really interested in bats for a bit. Once that conversation dried up, they all talked about this weather they’d been having. Then they moved on to anecdotes about the trip so far. But before long they’d run out of topics and it was obvious that they couldn’t really delay the inevitable much longer. The Pirate Captain banged the doorknocker. It echoed a big clanking echo about the mountains. Nobody answered. So, steeling himself, he gave the door a push. It swung open with a creak which, no matter how you tried to spin it, sounded exactly like the noise a pirate or a poet would probably make if they were being crushed under a giant coffin full of severed heads.
‘See, where they’ve gone wrong here is too many cobwebs, rusting suits of armour, and mouldy bits of taxidermy,28 not enough twigs in bowls,’ said the Pirate Captain, stepping into a cavernous stone hall. ‘Twigs in bowls do wonders to make a house feel more homely.’
‘What an abominable place,’ whispered Shelley with a shudder, as they wandered from room to room. Everything was damp and dusty, and full of creeping shadows. In some places, where the owner had obviously felt there weren’t enough creeping shadows, a few more had been painted directly onto the walls. And where there weren’t shadows there were awful portraits.29
‘Look!’ said Mary, raising her lantern. ‘These must be all the Count Ruthvens going back through history. Goodness! It doesn’t seem like they got much in the way of vitamins.’
The counts were a sickly-looking bunch. One of them had a club foot. One of them had a club foot and a cruel mouth. And one of them had a club foot and a cruel mouth and a face that looked exactly like a cabbage. A few of the pirates pointed and laughed, and said ‘cabbage face’ until Babbage hushed them with a frown.
‘I would rather you didn’t jest about the unfortunate fellow,’ he said. ‘As a man with the surname “Babbage”, and possessing a peculiarly lumpy face myself, it may not surprise you to learn that I have received a fair number of cabbage-based taunts in my time. Please desist.’
‘Sorry, Charles, that was insensitive of us,’ said Jennifer. ‘But you must admit, he really really does look like a cabbage.’
‘Right then,’ said Byron, clapping his hands whilst the pirate with a scarf lit a fire in the castle’s study. ‘What’s the plan? Where do we think this Count might have put “On Feelings”?’
‘Well, he’s bound to have hidden it somewhere ingenious. You wouldn’t want to leave something like that just lying about,’ said the Pirate Captain, sinking into an armchair by the fireplace and pulling a cigar from his pocket. ‘So we need to look for clues. That’s the first rule of detectiving: legwork. To that end, I suggest we split up. Mary, why don’t you go and check the library? Percy, have a look in the dining room. Babbage can do the crypt. And Byron can investigate the pantry. Assorted pirate crew, you can look upstairs and check the bedrooms.’
‘And what are you going to be doing?’ asked Shelley.
‘Ah well, I’ve got the hardest job of all,’ said the Captain, sitting back and blowing a smoke ring. ‘You see, the second rule of detectiving is to get inside the mind of your suspect. So whilst you lot are having fun searching everywhere for clues, I’m going to risk life and limb by sitting here in front of the fire, eating a sandwich and imagining what this Count Ruthven fellow might have been like. There’s a chance I’ll become obsessed and start taking on his characteristics, but that’s a risk the criminal profiler has to take.’
Shelley looked a bit unconvinced.
‘Also, I can’t partake in clue-hunting, because the dust might interfere with my sensitive palate. And where would we be without my famous ability to tell chicken from fish, hmm? Well, come on then, don’t just stand there like corpses. Go and find some exciting clues.’
Everybody looked a bit more pale and jumpy when they got back from their clue-hunting, apart from the albino pirate, who just looked a bit more jumpy. Some of the crew had even started to suck on their security blankets, which they knew the Captain didn’t approve of, because it failed to strike a genuinely piratical note.
‘So, any luck?’ asked the Pirate Captain, finishing off some of the port he’d found inside the study’s rather gaudy credenza.
‘It’s horrendous!’ said the pirate with gout, miserably. ‘There are unexplainable noises and unnerving smells and the curtains taste of fungus.’
‘Well, if it makes you feel better, I’ve had a horrific time too,’ said the Captain. ‘Look – I spilled some of this port on my best coat. That’s not going to wash off in a hurry. So, let’s see these clues.’
‘I found a clue shaped like most of a dead rat,’ said the pirate with bedroom eyes.
‘I found a clue shaped like a horrible great pile of cobwebs,’ said Babbage.
‘I found a clue shaped like an old skull,’ said Byron.
‘I didn’t find a clue,’ said Mary. ‘But I did find this.’
She hoisted a big glass display case onto the desk. It contained a taxidermy diorama of some stoats playing cards.
‘Oh, that’s nice,’ said Byron. ‘I always like a spot of taxidermy.’30
‘No,’ said Mary, pointing at it. ‘Look closer.’
When they peered close they could see that actually it was a more gruesome diorama than it first appeared. One of the stoats, who was wearing a little pair of spectacles and carrying a cog, had a knife sticking out of his belly. Another of the stoats, who wore a beard and a tricorn hat, had a miniature noose around his neck. A stoat with a winsome expression was about to drink some poison. The stoat with lipstick was being drowned in a teacup. And the stoat with flouncy hair had a bomb in his lap.
‘I think it’s another warning,’ said the pirate who enjoyed continually stating the obvious. The Captain picked up the stoat that looked a bit like Mary and gave it an affectionate pat. ‘Look at that, they’ve got your lipstick bang on,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that ingenious?’
All the pirates agreed that it was ingenious and more adorable than sinister, so not really worth worrying about. Mary put the diorama back on the floor with a slightly exasperated sigh.
‘Anyhow,’ said the Pirate Captain, ‘that’s all any of you managed to find, is it? I mean, I don’t want to brag, but see here.’ He held up an antique journal. It had the words ‘Private! Keep Out!’ written across the front. ‘I didn’t even leave this armchair and I managed to find this stuck down the side of the cushion.’
‘What is it?’ asked Shelley.
‘This Ruthven fellow’s old diary. I always enjoy reading other people’s diaries.’ The Captain opened it and read a page out loud:
13th February 1676: Th
at blue-eyed peasant girl is here milking the goats again. She has a very pretty smile. Think I will get a haircut.
22nd February: Said hello to the peasant girl. She screamed and asked what was wrong with my hair. Mumbled something about wolves. I hate that barber.
23rd February: Spent the afternoon practising my lute near the stables. The peasant girl asked me to stop. She said my playing was very good, but informed me that the goats are allergic to music. She is very knowledgeable for a peasant girl. Not sure she noticed my hat.
2nd March: Asked the peasant girl if she would like to accompany me for a stroll in the woods on her day off, but she said something vague about having to wait in for the plumber. I pointed out that plumbing has yet to reach the Carpathian Mountains. At that point the peasant girl said she thought somebody was calling her from the village. The village is half a mile from here, so I suppose she must have particularly keen hearing.
5th March: Went for my stroll alone. Halfway through I bumped into the peasant girl arm in arm with the stable boy. Asked what had happened to her plumbing appointment, but she just pretended to be a tree.
10th June: Have ceased to think about the peasant girl. I suppose she’s attractive in a conventional sort of way, if you go for obvious stuff like a nice figure and tumbling gold tresses, but I have decided that I have more refined tastes.
‘There’s lots of lovesick nonsense like that,’ said the Captain, flipping the page, ‘but then it gets interesting:
20th September: Whilst researching the family history, I have made a fantastic discovery! Though I dare not say what, even to you, dear diary. Have booked passage to England. Surprisingly cheap-rate ferry service.