The Pirates! in an Adventure with the Romantics

by Gideon Defoe

  The Captain slapped his forehead, groaned, and pointed up to a tiny gap in the wall. ‘Neptune’s lips! There! He obviously transmogrified into a bat and flew out through that hole. I forgot they can do that.’ He sighed, sat down on a stool and ruefully started to chew on a wet bit of Weetabix. ‘It’s like my old Aunt Joan always used to say: if you’re going to end up fighting monsters, Pirate Captain, try to stick to ventriloquist’s dummies who have gone alive.’

  They spent the rest of the evening searching the castle from top to bottom, but there was no sign of Byron anywhere. Eventually, as the clocks struck eleven, everybody agreed that there was no alternative but to go to bed, and – assuming they didn’t all meet a grisly end in the middle of the night – decide what to do in the morning. So reluctantly they tramped back to their rooms, locked their doors, made sure the windows were closed so bats couldn’t fly in and tried to get some sleep. Usually the Captain prided himself on being able to fall asleep in any situation at the drop of a hat. Once he’d even managed to nod off in the middle of being squeezed to death by a giant squid. But now he found he couldn’t get comfortable. He tossed and turned and every time he did get close to drifting off, he’d suddenly hear a noise. He tried to console himself with the thought that a nervier pirate would think the creaking sound was a wooden ghost opening its mouth ready to gobble him up. Or that the hideous shuffling from outside his door was an awful headless horse about to strangle him with its terrible hooves.

  Tap! Tap! Tap!

  The Captain let out a shriek.

  ‘Pirate Captain?’ whispered the headless horse from outside the door. It was quite well-spoken for an unnatural monster that presumably spoke through a severed windpipe.

  The Pirate Captain shrieked again, but this time with as much dignity as he could muster. If he was going to get eaten alive by a headless horse then he planned on doing it with aplomb.

  ‘Captain?’ repeated the headless horse, now sounding uncannily like Mary Shelley.

  He opened the door a crack and peered out. Sure enough, Mary stood there wearing a long white nightgown and some sort of complicated woman’s sleeping bonnet that framed her face in a particularly attractive way.

  ‘Hello, Mary.’

  ‘Were you shrieking?’

  ‘Yes, just practising my girlish shrieks. I’m entering an improbable competition of some sort.’

  He did another shriek to illustrate.

  ‘Anyhow, what are you doing shuffling about like a headless horse at this time of night?’ he asked. ‘Not really safe with Byron on the prowl.’

  ‘Oh, Captain, I can’t sleep. Can I come in?’

  ‘Of course. I was sleeping like a baby, by the way, aside from the shrieking.’

  ‘I can’t stop thinking about my novel,’ said Mary, perching on the end of his bed. The Captain noticed now that she was clutching the manuscript to her breast. ‘I’m starting to fear it’s cursed. That my love of monsters has somehow beset us with this actual monster. Do you believe that possible? Could one’s own imagination call forth a corporeal horror?’

  ‘Oh no, that almost never happens. I spent ten months marooned on an island trying to will a ham shrub into existence, but with no joy.’ The Captain paused, and tried to do a casual face. ‘So, your novel . . . how is it? Any interesting bits leap out at you?’

  ‘It’s useless,’ sighed Mary, ‘and I am nowhere nearer to finishing it.’

  ‘You’re not? Are you sure? Can I have a look?’

  Mary passed him the manuscript. He flicked through it. To the Captain’s bafflement it seemed that it hadn’t changed at all. Everything was still written in her looping handwriting, and there was none of his clever new subtext or slightly obscene illustrations to be seen anywhere.

  ‘This doesn’t make any sense,’ said the Captain, frowning.

  ‘You’ve spotted a plot hole?’

  ‘No it’s just . . . the pirate with a scarf is usually so reliable.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Sorry, nothing. Just thinking out loud.’

  ‘To be honest, Captain, I’m considering abandoning the whole thing,’ Mary sighed again. ‘Because I have reached something of an impasse. There’s a scene I simply don’t know how to write.’

  ‘Oh dear. Anything I can help with? You’ve tried my capital letters trick?’

  ‘It’s near the end. Phoebe still doesn’t know her own mind. She’s torn. So she goes to the sea monster’s cave lair. She fears he will try to seduce her. Or rather, she is not sure if she fears it . . . or hopes for it.’

  She gazed up at him expectantly. It struck the Captain that it was just possible Mary was doing her subtext thing again. But he wasn’t entirely sure. If Jennifer hadn’t got herself eaten by a vampire then she might have been able to help him out at this point. People, he reflected, could be selfish.

  ‘If he was to seduce her, how do you think it might go, Pirate Captain?’

  The Captain pondered. ‘Well, I have a feeling that the half-man, half-seaweed mutant would skirt about the issue rather than come straight out with it. “Would you like to rub the gas-filled bladders on my ventral surfaces?” is too blunt. The art of seduction is about saying less with your mouth than with your expressions, gestures and undulating, swaying movements.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Mary, trembling a bit.

  ‘Their eyes would meet. Not literally, that would be disgusting. More like this.’

  The Pirate Captain gave Mary a meaningful look.

  ‘Oh, you monster!’ said Mary. ‘You knew I’d come tonight! You know I can’t resist your soulful eyes, both your normal eye and the compound eye . . . panted Phoebe.’

  No going back now, thought the Pirate Captain. He took off his hat.

  ‘What do you expect? You’ve bounced a rainbow off my heart, dear Phoebe. Just your name is poetry to my ears. For these past weeks I’ve been unable to think of anything else. I’ve lost so much, but all I can think about is your smooth face and sensuous lips . . . breathed the half-man, half-seaweed mutant.’

  Mary bit her lip again. ‘You heathen brute. Every fibre of my being tells me to flee, but my quivering femininity, and this waterlogged wetsuit, keep me rooted to the spot!’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Said Phoebe,’ added the Pirate Captain.

  ‘Of course,’ said Mary.

  There was another pause, this time with added metaphorical sparks flying.

  ‘Captain,’ said Mary.

  ‘Yes?’ said the Captain.

  ‘I . . .’ Mary looked him right in the eye. ‘I think . . .’

  And at that moment the pirate in green and the albino pirate burst in through the door, wide-eyed and gasping.

  ‘GHOSTS!’ they cried.

  ‘Oh, for the love of kelp,’ said the Pirate Captain.

  ‘I don’t know if you remember Aesop’s fable about “the pirates who cried ghosts”,’ said the Captain, as the albino pirate dragged him by his sleeve out of his bedroom and down the stairs, ‘but I seem to recall that they stopped crying ghosts because an angry pirate captain had run them through in a particularly vicious manner.’

  ‘It’s definitely ghosts this time. Possibly more than one. Listen! It’s coming from the crypt!’

  When they reached the door to the crypt, the usual crowd had assembled. They all strained to listen. There were undeniably ghostly noises emanating from within. Strange rustling sounds, and the occasional terrible moan.

  ‘That was definitely a ghostly wail!’

  ‘And that bump sounded exactly like a head being chopped off!’

  ‘Though I can barely credit such a thing, it does seem like some fearful occult gathering is taking place,’ muttered Babbage.

  ‘All right,’ said the Captain, rolling up his sleeves in a resigned sort of way. ‘But this is the last sinister door I’m going to go through on this adventure. Three is my absolute limit.’

  He picked up a lantern, pulled open the door, drew his cutlass, and
crept inside the crypt.36 The rest gingerly followed him in. Picking their way past big stone tombs, the little group advanced towards the awful ghostly sounds. Something moved in the corner. The Captain raised the lantern to see what was going on.

  ‘Kraken’s eyeballs!’ exclaimed the Pirate Captain, at the grim spectacle that confronted him. For there, stretched out on a sarcophagus, lay the pale lifeless body of Jennifer, and looming over her, apparently just getting ready to take a big bite out of her neck, was Byron.

  Seventeen

  The Intestine That Came Back

  ‘Hello, Pirate Captain,’ said Jennifer’s lifeless body, sitting up and adjusting its blouse. ‘You really ought to knock, you know. It’s very impolite to just go barging in to crypts like this.’

  ‘An apparition! And the beast himself, no less!’ cried Babbage, trying to curl up into a ball. The Pirate Captain leaned forward and gave Jennifer a poke with his cutlass.

  ‘You smell nice, for a ghost,’ he remarked.

  ‘I’m not a ghost.’

  ‘She isn’t,’ agreed Byron.

  ‘Well, a zombie corpse then.’ The Captain waggled his cutlass at Byron. ‘And don’t you get any closer, you monster.’

  ‘I haven’t been murdered,’ persisted Jennifer, ‘and Byron here isn’t a vampire.’

  ‘But we’ve caught him red-handed,’ said Babbage, ‘about to drain the blood from your semi-clad body!’

  ‘He wasn’t about to do any such thing.’

  ‘Then what was he doing?’

  Byron fought back a grin. Jennifer arched an eyebrow. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘sometimes when an attractive man and a free-spirited girl find themselves with time on their hands, things take their natural course.’

  The pirate crew went on doing their blank expressions.

  ‘Oh, good grief,’ said Jennifer. ‘Do I need to draw you a picture?’

  A few of the pirates asked for a picture. Some of the more naive ones contended that this still didn’t explain the ghostly wailing sounds. The pirate in green seemed ready to cry.

  ‘Come on, you lot,’ said Jennifer, hopping down off the sarcophagus. ‘It’s a bit nippy in here, so let’s all go and light a fire in the study and I’ll explain everything over a nice hot mug of tea.’

  ‘Right, has everybody got a drink?’ Jennifer asked. ‘I have a feeling that this is going to turn into quite a long explanation, so we don’t want anybody getting thirsty.’

  ‘If you’ll allow me, Jennifer,’ said the Pirate Captain, brandishing a pipe he had produced from somewhere, ‘I think I’ve already solved the mystery, using my famous nautical powers of deduction.’ He turned and eyeballed the assembled little group. ‘That’s right, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, because if Byron isn’t the dracula, then it can mean only one thing. The actual dracula is someone else entirely.’ He held for a dramatic pause, then wheeled around and pointed an accusing finger at the pirate in red. ‘Villain!’

  The pirate in red groaned, and slapped his head with a seal flipper.

  ‘No, Captain, it’s not the pirate in red. And there isn’t any sort of dracula. Let’s begin at the beginning, shall we?’ Jennifer leaned against the mantelpiece and started to explain. ‘You see, that first night when we all went off to bed, I couldn’t get to sleep. I kept thinking I heard an ominous eerie rumbling. But I quickly realised that the rumbling was my belly, and that I was just really hungry. So I went downstairs to the pantry to get some toast and jam. It’s quite cold in this castle, so I took the toast back upstairs to bed with me. Only then I managed to get jam all over the bed sheets. I don’t know why you all assumed it was blood. If you’d looked closely you’d have seen pips, which blood doesn’t tend to have.’

  ‘This is why I’m always telling you coves not to eat snacks in your hammocks,’ said the Captain to the pirates. ‘It’s unsanitary. No wonder we’ve got so many rats knocking about the boat.’

  ‘So anyhow,’ continued Jennifer, ‘I went back downstairs looking for a cloth to wipe it up. But then I heard a sound coming from the library. Curious, I tiptoed inside to see what was going on. The last thing I remembered was some great big owl flapping at me, and then bang! it bopped me on the head. A little while later I woke up, confused and disorientated, inside the crypt of all places. The door was bolted, and I didn’t have a clue what to do. But luckily I stumbled upon a secret passage. It turns out this place is riddled with them. Since then I’ve been walking about, trying to find my way out, but it’s like an impossible dusty maze. I did find my way out for just a moment, when I believe the albino pirate and the pirate in green saw me – a bit covered in cobwebs – but I think I was still rather concussed, because I managed to get turned about and wandered straight back into the secret passage again.37 After an age it spat me out in the pantry, where I encountered Mister Byron. He told me he was a vampire and that you were all about to dispatch him in a grisly fashion. He felt that might be for the best, but I didn’t think it sounded like a very good idea at all, so I took him off into the secret passage before you had the chance to do anything daft. Eventually we found our way right back to where I’d begun, in the crypt. Well, by that point I’d had my fill of wandering about secret passages, so Byron and I decided to find some other ways to occupy ourselves. And then of course, that’s when you lot turned up.’

  ‘So who was it that bopped you on the head and trapped you in the crypt?’ asked the pirate with a scarf, who was good at identifying the pertinent questions to ask.

  ‘A mystery!’ exclaimed the Captain, tapping his temple. ‘But not so great a mystery that it can withstand the detective genius of the Pirate Captain. The clue was in that last confused glimpse you caught of your assailant. Fair enough to think you were being attacked by an owl, because it was dark and you were getting bopped on the head and you’re a lady, prone to overwrought flights of fancy. But it was no owl. It was a person with a face a bit like an owl. Because you, Charles Babbage,’ the Captain whirled around and did his finger-pointing thing again, ‘are a dracula!’

  ‘I am no such thing,’ spluttered Babbage.

  ‘We’ll see about that!’ said the Captain, quickly blessing his tea and then throwing it over the mathematician. For some reason he didn’t burst into flames. He just dripped a bit.

  ‘Oh good grief,’ said Babbage, wiping his spectacles. ‘Look, I confess – it was me that bopped Jennifer on the head.’

  ‘But why?’ the poets gasped in unison.

  ‘Well, there’s no point in hiding it any longer. The truth is, I wanted “On Feelings” for myself.’

  ‘You old dog!’ boomed Byron. ‘I didn’t know you had it in you. Bad news though, Chuck, I don’t think they had mechanical ladies in Plato’s day.’

  ‘No, it’s not quite like that.’ Babbage tried to dab himself dry with some napkins. ‘I have, as you know, been working for some twenty years now on my difference engine. A computational device of enormous power. One that can alter the face of society.’

  ‘Go on,’ said the Captain, tugging his lapels in the way he’d seen lawyers sometimes do.

  ‘For these past millennia, human relationships have been left in the idiot hands of capricious fate. But my machine could change all that! An opportunity to finally match lonely hearts together on the basis of sensible criteria. It is my contention that people do not necessarily know what is good for them. A pneumatic young lady may think she wants an athletic, rippling-torsoed type. Whereas, in actual fact, she might be more suited to a more nebbishy intellectual sort. Well, through the use of punch cards my difference engine is able to work out exactly who is compatible with whom, thereby taking the ridiculous palaver of romance from the equation. Completely removes the need for fruitless chit-chat. But if the contents of this infernal book should be made public then that’s my entire business model down the drain. A disaster!’

  ‘Still doesn’t explain bopping poor Jennifer on the head.’

  ‘The song! I mean, a child could have worked it out
. The musical notes! Look at them.’ Babbage took the scrunched-up sheet of music from his pocket.

  ‘See? “C”, “A”, “B”, “B”, “A”, “G”, “E”, “F”, “A”, “C”, “E”. Cabbage Face!’

  ‘The portrait of the man with a face like a cabbage!’ exclaimed the pirate who liked to spell things out for those who were slow on the uptake.

  ‘Exactly! Plato’s missing treatise was obviously hidden behind the painting. I came down that first night to retrieve it after everybody had gone to bed. But no sooner had I got my hands on the accursed thing than I was interrupted! Somebody was coming! I was quite terrified, so I hid behind the door, and then, in a panic, I bopped them on the head. Obviously I felt terrible when I saw it was Jennifer. I would like to take the opportunity to apologise.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ said Jennifer. ‘No harm done.’

  ‘Well, I was in a fluster. I couldn’t think what to do. So I dragged her to the crypt and locked her in, intending to concoct some excuse and explain myself to the lady later. But when I returned to the library, the treatise – which I had rather foolishly left on the table in plain sight – had vanished! As, to my dismay, had Jennifer, when I went back to the crypt later that night.’

  ‘So you mean . . . somebody else made off with “On Feelings”?’

  ‘Yes, and I have a suspicion as to who. Because when I was returning to my room, I caught a glimpse of another person up that night, creeping along the hallway . . .’ Babbage took his turn to do his own bit of pointing. ‘It was Shelley! Shelley took the book!’

  ‘A-ha!’ said the Captain. ‘Just as I expected all along – the dracula is Percy!’

  He threw some more holy tea at Shelley, who also failed to go on fire.

  ‘You’ve all got it quite wrong,’ said Shelley, glowering at his ruined shirt. ‘Yes, it’s true, I was up that night. But it wasn’t because of this confounded “On Feelings”. It was because of Mary. I am not so blind that I can’t see when a fellow is hitting on my fiancée. I had my misgivings from the start, which is why I slipped from the boat and followed you to the library in Oxford. Where, I’m afraid to say, whilst attempting to eavesdrop I rather clumsily managed to knock an entire bookcase over. Then, later in the tavern, I overheard the Captain and Jennifer talking about Mary’s manuscript.’ Shelley cast a reproachful eye towards Mary. ‘I didn’t even know you were writing a book! Anyway, I was worried about this subtext Jennifer claimed to have spied, so I waited until everybody had retired for the night and then crept into Mary’s room whilst she slept. I grabbed the manuscript from beside her and took it to my own room to see for myself.’