by Joan Druett
George laughed, and then said more soberly, “He’s very fond of you.”
“And I of him,” said Wiki lightly.
“I wondered—well, knowing that he left you behind in Salem, and how you felt about it, old chap … And I couldn’t help but notice how many young lads he ships along…”
“Carrying cadets is a Salem custom,” Wiki told him. “And an efficient one, too, if you belong to a port where every substantial man has his sights on foreign trade. If they don’t turn into good seamen, with careers as shipmasters ahead, then they can be employed as supercargoes until a trading post becomes available in the Pacific or Indian Ocean. Some even turn into reasonably respectable United States consuls! And those who are not fit to take charge of either a ship or some farflung station can always find jobs as clerks in Salem.”
“Clerking being the last resort?” George said shrewdly.
“Aye,” said Wiki, remembering his father’s disgust at the news that he’d become Captain Wilkes’s clerk.
“Ouch,” said George with sympathy.
Carpenters were filing off the Osprey, and Wiki and George moved out of the way. Then they walked back toward the Swallow. As Wiki stepped onto the gangplank he said, “Tell me about what happened at the Pharoux Hotel last night.”
“After you left?” said Rochester. They crossed the deck, and he led the way down the companionway stairs to the saloon. “Room crowded, many people chattering,” he related as he sat down at his end of the table. “Came away deafened, but the grub was good. That sausage casserole was first rate—feijoada, they call it; apparently it’s a national dish. But God, they were a bunch to talk.”
Wiki swung a leg over the small bench at the forward end of the table, which was his usual seat, sat down, and said, “In Portuguese—or French?”
“A lot of it was indeed in French.”
“For the benefit of Madame de Roquefeuille?”
“She’s Brazilian. As a matter of fact, she’s Sir Patrick’s sister-in-law.”
“Good God, really?” exclaimed Wiki. So the other woman in the fallua was probably Madame de Roquefeuille’s sister, he deduced, but he had not a notion what she looked like, because he hadn’t noticed her at all. It had been quite a family party—one that included his father.
He inquired, “And what language did my father speak after I’d gone?”
Instead of answering, George studied him with a troubled frown. For a moment he was silent, obviously choosing words, but then merely said, “Wiki, your father—”
Wiki said flatly, “Girls.”
“You don’t want to take any notice of Forsythe, old chap,” George protested. “He was fearfully drunk.”
“Nevertheless, he was right. Come on, ’fess up—you’ve apparently got to know my father quite well, and I’m sure he’s shared a few confidences.”
George grinned. “You never told me about the milkmaid.”
“Who?” For a moment Wiki’s mind went quite blank, and then he suddenly remembered her hands. He saw them as clearly as if the girl were in the cabin—large, competent, experienced hands, the curled palms smoothly callused. “Oh,” he said, disconcerted, and George laughed.
At that moment, rather to Wiki’s relief, Stoker came in, bearing a good repast of bread, butter, ham, cheese, and pickles. Looking down as he buttered bread, he said, “Did you know that Sir Patrick Palgrave is the guiding hand behind this survey of the coastal jungle?”
“Wilkes told you about it?”
“Aye. And I wonder why Palgrave should be so interested in the exploring expedition—which is an American enterprise, after all.”
Rochester scratched one fluffy sideburn meditatively while he chewed. “It must be on account of orchids,” he decided at last.
“Orchids?”
“Aye. He has a passion for them—well, he must have, considering he spent years at it. Before he inherited his father’s estate and married into Brazilian high society, he was an orchid collector. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
“I’ve actually met a few orchid collectors, e hoa,” Wiki told him.
“Good God, dear fellow, you never fail to surprise me. Where?”
“Brazil and Uruguay, particularly in the smaller ports. They’d come in from the jungle, driving mule carts loaded to the gun’ls with orchid plants in wet sacking bundles, looking for a vessel to freight them to New York, or London, or Boston. I don’t think there was much money in it for them, as they were such a miserable lot, poor fellows. Their complexions were bright yellow, and they were invariably shaking with fever. I never saw the same man twice, because they died so easily.”
George frowned. “Sir Patrick doesn’t fit that description, old chap.”
“That’s right,” said Wiki slowly, as the same thought occurred to him. “Perhaps he employed collectors, instead of going after them himself?”
“You’ll have to ask the man himself. All I know is that Palgrave sent the plants off to his father’s estate in Cambridge, England, where the gardeners cultivated them in heated glasshouses until they were ready to be sold.”
Glasshouses. Palgrave. Cambridge. Wiki put down his knife, and stared at his friend in startled speculation.
Seventeen
The sun was barely up next morning when Lieutenant Forsythe marched on board to take charge, and within an hour the brig Swallow was a hive of activity, taking on fresh water and provisions, as well as scientific and drafting equipment. Hollering around in his usual hectoring fashion, the southerner looked as if he couldn’t wait to get into the jungle and start decimating the wild life. When Wiki asked him if he knew about the dinner party at Sir Patrick Palgrave’s mansion on Praia Grande, he was most matter-of-fact about it, simply nodding before turning to roar at some innocent seamen who were delivering a raft of freshwater casks.
To keep Midshipman Keith out of range of Forsythe’s unpredictable temper, Rochester gave his young first officer the day’s liberty, along with one of the brig’s boats.
“You spoil the lad,” said Wiki, looking Keith severely up and down.
“He deserves it.”
“For running your ship afoul?”
Pausing only to cast Wiki a deeply reproachful glance, Constant Keith set off. Wiki saw him take the boat to Enxados Island and sprint up the boat stairs, and about a half hour later saw it sail off into the harbor. He imagined the boy spending the day exploring the riotous, exotic markets, but instead, when young Keith arrived back, well after dark, he reported with pride that he and Midshipman Dicken had climbed Sugar Loaf Mountain.
It had been quite a struggle, he declared; he and Dicken had taken turns to haul each other over numerous precipices and many rocky crags. They had been somewhat dashed to get all the way to the summit, only to find a message in a bottle, telling the world that some British officers had beaten them to it. “But never mind,” he ebulliently went on. “We wrote our names on the bottom of the paper, announcing that we were the first Americans to do it, and put it back in the bottle.” Then he and Jack Dicken had toasted the great United States Exploring Expedition in a flask of wine, and had scrambled and slid all the way back down to the bottom.
Even more dampening was the official reprimand that was borne to the brig early next morning by Midshipman Dicken, who was redder in the face than ever, and still flinching from a verbal battering. Captain Wilkes had been surprised and disappointed to learn that two of his officers had climbed Sugar Loaf—just to have something to boast about later!—that they had climbed all that way without taking a single measurement! And, forthwith, he had ordered them to repeat the feat this very day, this time with a team of volunteers, and carrying the proper equipment. And, he had snapped at the conclusion of the tirade, the two midshipmen were not to dare to even think of returning until they had a set of reliable figures!
“Volunteers?” Midshipman Keith exclaimed. “Where the devil am I going to find volunteers?” he demanded of Wiki.
He, like his friend Jack Dicken, was he
fting a number of enigmatic contraptions, including a two-foot-long mahogany case which held a mysterious assemblage of glass tubes filled with various oils. “A sympiesometer,” said Constant Keith grumpily, when Wiki asked about it, and then unbent to explain, “It’s a kind of barometer that tells variations in the weather.”
“You’re using a barometer to measure a mountain?”
“Why not?” said Keith.
Wiki had no answer to that. Shaking his head in bemusement, he walked along the wharf to watch the work on the Osprey, which was a lot more comprehensible. As he perched on his favorite bollard, he could hear Keith and Dicken trying to talk Sua and Tana into volunteering, and the two Samoans having a lot of fun at the lads’ expense. Then he was distracted by the sight of his father stalking down the quay with six young mariners in tow.
Wiki straightened, and Captain Coffin, looking rather harried, introduced his cadets. Wiki shook hands solemnly with them all. They had solid Salem names like Derby, Cheever, and Follansbee, and, while they immediately set out to impress Wiki with grand tales of Canton and the Pearl River, Macao and Manila, they all looked very young and somewhat overawed.
For a while, he thought they were intimidated by meeting a strongly built brown man with long black hair, as so many pakeha were, but then he saw that they cast many flickering looks from Captain Coffin and back to him again, secretly comparing their faces, and Wiki realized that they knew their captain was his father. Because of that, no doubt, they treated him with vast respect, asking him many questions about how and why he had joined the exploring expedition, and what adventures he had experienced before and since, while Captain Coffin listened with an air of relief that time was being wasted like this.
“You’re wondering how to fill in your day,” Wiki shrewdly guessed when the questions ran to a stop.
They looked at each other, then back at Wiki, and nodded. Usually, the mate found them jobs to do, but today he was in town on business. Captain Coffin had brought them to the Osprey in the hope of finding work on the hove-down hull, but the carpenters didn’t want them, and so they were at a loose end.
“Ah,” said Wiki, with perfect understanding. To his hidden amusement, his father had a hopeful glint in his half-closed eye. “Would you like me to find them something to do?” he asked him.
His father cleared his throat, fought unsuccessfully to hide his mighty relief, and said, “Well, now that you mention it—”
“How would you like to measure a mountain with a barometer?” Wiki inquired of the boys. The cadets looked baffled, but gamely nodded.
“Well,” he said. “I have just the thing for you. Not only is there a mountain for you to measure, but I know just the men to lead you to it.”
“You young devil,” said his father, five minutes later. They were standing together on the quay watching the string of boys carried off by a hugely thankful pair of midshipmen.
“They’ll enjoy it,” Wiki confidently assured him.
“With two wet-behind-the-ears junior officers in charge, God alone knows what they’ll get up to,” Captain Coffin grumbled. “I thought you were offering to take care of them yourself.”
“I’m far too busy,” said Wiki loftily.
“You don’t look very busy to me. What does linguisting involve, anyway?”
“It’s too complicated to go into now. And I want to ask you some questions.”
“In your capacity as sheriff?”
Wiki ignored this. “Have you ever heard of Grimes before?”
“Isn’t he the man who was poisoned?”
“I’m glad to see you still have all your faculties, including your memory,” Wiki dryly observed, and then said, “I wondered if you’ve heard Sir Patrick Palgrave mention him.”
“Why the devil should he mention that man? He’s never met him, has he?”
“Grimes told us that in Cambridge, England, he worked as a gardener and glasshouse designer for a man named Sir Roger Palgrave.”
“Good God,” said his father, looking extremely startled. “It certainly sounds as if he worked for Sir Patrick’s father—but what a coincidence!”
“Not really,” said Wiki. “Sir Roger Palgrave paid to have him trained in the science of optical glass, with such impressive results that he was hired by an American astronomer as his assistant—and when the astronomer joined the expedition, it was only natural that he brought Grimes with him.”
“It proved fatal for Grimes.”
“Perhaps—and perhaps not.”
“What do you mean? He died from poisoning, didn’t he? It’s a fate he would have escaped if he hadn’t sailed with the expedition, surely.”
“According to the colonial analyst—who, presumably, knows what he is talking about—the strychnine that accidentally got into his medicine wasn’t the primary cause of death. Grimes had weak lungs, and so forth—and so I wondered if his health had always been bad.”
“I wouldn’t have a notion,” his father said. “Sir Patrick has certainly never mentioned the man to me. If you’re desperate to know, you can ask him tomorrow night.”
Wiki said, surprised, “You know I’ve been invited?”
“Of course. Lieutenant Forsythe and the six scientifics have been invited, too, as well as all the men who have offered to host the survey party.”
“So it’s going to be a conference? I thought it was a social occasion.”
“Is that wrong?” his father demanded, taking exception to something in Wiki’s tone of voice that Wiki hadn’t intended. “It’s obvious that you dislike Sir Patrick Palgrave, but once you get to know him, you’ll find that he is a very clever man, extremely artistic. Wait until you see his gardens, and then you will understand what I mean—they’re really quite spectacular. A feast is an enjoyable way for the surveying party and their prospective hosts to get acquainted.”
“Do you have any idea why he stipulated that I should go on the survey?”
“Consider it an honor,” his father said grumpily, without answering. “Just concentrate on making an effort to be pleasant—and don’t eat with your fingers, either. I know it’s the way you were brought up to eat, but in Brazil it’s not considered polite.”
Wiki looked away. It was moments like these that he almost wished he used tobacco. Back home in the Bay of Islands, smoking had become all the rage. Everyone had a pipe almost constantly in his or her mouth, down from the most ancient kuia to children who could barely walk. Wiki found the smell and taste of tobacco foul, but if he had a pipe right now, he would be able to light it with great concentration, and pretend he hadn’t heard.
Lacking one, he tilted his head and studied the clouds swimming in the sky above the two tall masts of the Swallow. Then he heard his father add, “And when you talk to Sir Patrick, don’t start cross-examining him, either. He won’t like the implications at all.”
It almost sounded as if his father had told Sir Patrick Palgrave about his letter of authority from the sheriff’s department of the Town of Portsmouth, Virginia. Surely not, Wiki thought with a frown.
Then his father distracted him by saying even more irritably, “You should take a damn sight more care when choosing your friends.”
Wiki said frostily, “I beg your pardon?”
“He’s a crass, ignorant, foulmouthed boor.”
It was obvious who he was talking about. Much of the time, Wiki had the same opinion of Forsythe, but nonetheless his silence was chilly. Without even noticing, his father ran on, “And I’m not at all happy about him being in charge of the survey. I don’t want Sir Patrick and his friends to be offended or insulted, so I made up my mind to join the group.”
Dear God, thought Wiki, this was looking for trouble with a vengeance. The prospect of Forsythe and Captain Coffin trekking through the jungle together was quite horrible.
He couldn’t say that, however, so asked, “You will be at Sir Patrick’s house tomorrow night?”
“Of course,” said his father loftily. “I look f
orward to seeing you there.”
* * *
A whole fleet of small boats converged on Praia Grande the night of the feast, because the officers and captains of the discovery expedition had been invited to a grand ball that was staged in rooms just a couple of hundred yards from the Palgrave mansion. George Rochester had declined, taking the chance of a quiet evening without Forsythe charging around, and had sent Constant Keith in his place. Accordingly, the young man was in the boat, dressed up to the nines in his best uniform.
The row across the bay was beautiful. The water was like a sheet of satin, undisturbed by even the slightest breeze. Men’s voices echoed back and forth in the cool, soft air, and the drops falling from the blades of the oars glowed with phosphorescence. The landing was rather hard to find, and they milled around uncertainly until an orchestra struck up in the distance, creating a musical beacon. Wiki, stepping out onto the beach, watched Midshipman Keith and the other expedition officers head off toward the ballroom, following the strains through the trees.
Then Forsythe materialized out of the darkness, and together they turned in the other direction, following a gravel driveway into the shadows of an avenue. Their footsteps crunched and then silenced as they left the path and started walking across a soft lawn. The smell of grass rose up to merge with the perfume of night-scented flowers. In the moonlight Wiki could glimpse formal gardens stretching out into the dark distance like the spokes of a wheel, with a fountain in the center. Even in the dimness, it was impressive.
Sir Patrick Palgrave’s mansion lay right ahead, a dainty affair surrounded by a colonnaded patio, and with shafts of lights streaming out of many windows. As they neared, Wiki could smell tobacco, wine, and brandy, and hear masculine voices, mostly speaking Portuguese. Through open French doors women could be seen clustered on chairs in a long salon, listening to the strains of a mandolin. To Wiki’s surprise, the musician was Madame de Roquefeuille. She was wearing white, and her copper hair was coiled into a bright, unadorned knot in the nape of her bent neck. The varnish of the pear-shaped instrument gleamed, and the long neck of the mandolin was decorated with colorful ribbons.