The Celebes Prince leapt upon the sea now, like the bodies of the Indians had done. The mainmast went by the boards, and the sails and rigging fell across the deck, as if she had been shattered by the first blast of a hurricane. And yet we could see nothing of any enemy. The ship was caught in the grasp of some great spirit, which was destroying it as violently as the sharks had destroyed the two sponge divers. The bosun tied onto the seizing and hauled himself up the mainchains, the Captain at his heels and the rest of the men following. There was a vast creaking and rending of timbers from the ship, and the sound of screams and shouting. I stood alone on the pitching deck of the launch, full of stony fear, the memory of those butchered divers still before my mind’s eye.
During the pull back to the ship, I had seen that to the north lay cloud drift over what must be an island, and it came to me now to leave the ship to its fate, which I could not alter in any event. As soon as it entered my mind to do so, I slipped the knot and sat on the thwart, taking the oars in my hands, in a moderate hurry now that I knew what I was about. Before I was thirty yards from the ship, however, there sounded a vast cracking, the Celebes Prince listed to starboard, and as God is my witness, the bower anchor itself pierced the side of the ship near the waterline. I mean to say that it smashed straight through the hull, like an arrow through straw. I set out rowing with a will, and when I was perhaps a half mile away, thinking to reach the island, I saw the ship cant sideways again, stay there, and start to settle. In three minutes she was drawn under.
I knew in my heart that I must go back in order to pick up survivors, but I could not. I knew also that the island with the sea cave was cursed, and the sea around it haunted. I made landfall on the island before night and drew the launch up a stream out of the jungle, setting it upside down for a snug roof, and there I lived for a time before a ship put in for water and I was saved. I made up a lie, left the launch behind, since it didn’t fit with the lie, and found myself in Santo Domingo, living there for three months before taking ship for Portsmouth once again, a year and two months after setting out. By then the sea cave and the destruction of the Celebes Prince had come to be very much like a figment to me, and at night I dreamt of sea fans waving over that ball of ambergris, and the sharks circling, and the water red with blood.
I set this account down in my own hand and gave it of my own free will to my friend Reginald Sawney when I set out for home. Whether any but me came away from the wreck of the Celebes Prince I never learned. I take my oath that what I write here is true.
—James Douglas
CHAPTER 1
Ambush at the Half Toad
A WEEK FOLLOWING THE Snow Hill Massacre, which had rocked Smithfield and all of London, I found myself once again at William Billson’s Half Toad Inn, Lambert Court, along with the brilliant Professor Langdon St. Ives and his man Hasbro, who had traveled with St. Ives these many years and was more friend than factotum. We were waiting on Tubby Frobisher and his eccentric and fabulously rich Uncle Gilbert, the two of them a worrisome quarter of an hour overdue. Tubby was coming down from Chingford, and Gilbert up from his mansion in Dicker, the old man anxious to communicate with us face-to-face. It was he who had summoned us. The mails weren’t to be trusted, Gilbert had told us, and we were to destroy the missive that called us to the Half Toad.
We were well used to Gilbert’s fancies and had done as he’d asked, ascertaining from the summons that he had in mind a sea voyage of some four weeks duration, the destination a well-kept secret: somewhere in the Atlantic, given the brevity of the voyage, but whether to the high northern latitudes or to the tropics we knew not. His privately-owned, ocean-going steam yacht was moored at the West India Docks. Our curiosity piqued, we had come along to the Half Toad, dunnage in hand, St. Ives evidently relieved to be active once again after a long period of hibernation.
Nearly a year had transpired since the terrible business of the Aylesford Skull, during which time St. Ives had gone to ground in Kent, playing the role of the gentleman farmer. He had seen to the building of an oast house on his and Alice’s considerable property during that mild fall and winter, and in the spring to the planting of a cherry orchard. The breezes of early summer, however, generated a certain nervous energy in the man, the old wanderlust rising in him like a tide. He had been denying nature, of course—something that Alice understood all too well—and it was she who insisted that he agree to Gilbert’s voyage. Meanwhile, she and the children and my own betrothed Dorothy toddled off to Scarborough for their annual summer visit to Alice’s aged grandmother, leaving the running of their acreage in Kent in the hands of the admirable Mrs. Langley, old Binger, the groundskeeper, and young Finn Conrad.
Foot traffic in Smithfield was uncommonly sparse this evening, and there were few customers, the bloody murders having cast a shadow over the neighborhood that hadn’t lifted yet. But it was all the better for our clandestine meeting with Tubby and Gilbert. Billson, who had the physical properties of a blacksmith and the mind of a natural philosopher, was cooking with a keen eye and a generous hand, turning a multi-armed spit that skewered two dozen of Henrietta Billson’s fat sausages, the drippings basting three plump pheasants on another spit directly below, the fire sizzling happily. Billson had just served out delicate mounds of lobscouse as a kickshaw, molded in tiny pie dishes and swirling beneath a cloud of steam redolent of nutmeg, juniper berries, and corned beef. Billson subscribes to the odd habit of serving lobscouse with a brown onion sauce, by the way, which I heartily recommend, the entire business, lobscouse and sauce both, thickened with pounded ship’s biscuit that had borne the government stamp—an inverted arrow—before Billson pulverized it with a belaying pin.
Billson had been a sailor, you see, in the years before he married Henrietta and purchased the Half Toad. Indeed, he had brought an immense, carved, wooden toad home with him from the West Indies—a fanciful ship’s figurehead, the ship itself having been blown to flinders, turning the toad into a missile that had very nearly done for Billson when it splashed down like a meteor not three feet from his head. But the toad had meant his salvation, for he had clung to it through the long night, the rest of the crew dead, the ship sunk. The heroic amphibian now looks out from its perch above the door on Fingal Street, its broad mouth set in a mysterious smile that brings to the well-tempered mind Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, and never more evidently than after one has consumed two quarts of Billson’s best ale, Old Man Newt.
I had just put a share of it away, the three of us having decided to whet our appetites and whistles while we waited for Tubby and Gilbert. I was admiring in a happy reverie the old oak wainscot, the etchings by Hogarth that adorned the wall, and the pheasants on the spit, my mind idle but well satisfied. Lars Hopeful, the halfwit tapboy, had renewed our jug of ale, and the window behind us stood open, letting in a grateful evening breeze. The bell of St. Bartholomew the Great began to toll just as Mrs. Billson was putting a bread pudding into the oven, which would come out again, hot and with buttered rum set aflame, when we had need of it later in the evening. I recall having turned to the window at the sound of the bell, looking for the crenellated tower of St. Bartholomew over the rooftops, when there came the sound of a wild curse, a pistol shot, and running feet.
We all leapt up, doubly alarmed because of the recent murders. I leaned out through the casement and was astounded to see Tubby Frobisher himself chasing a man out of Lambert Court—a swarthy, heavy-set man, although not so heavy as Tubby, who was milling along with his blackthorn stick gripped in his hand, very much like an enraged hippo and wearing an old Bollinger hat with a vast, bowl-shaped crown skewered with peacock feathers. There was blood on the fleeing man’s coat from a wound in the shoulder—no doubt a bullet—although it wasn’t apparently slowing him down.
I went straight out through the window onto the sidewalk and gave chase, my fork in my own hand, not knowing that St. Ives and Hasbro had also gone out, although through the inn door. A four-horse carriage blocked my path, follo
wed by a man driving a gaggle of ill-natured geese, and by the time I had navigated the carriage and the geese and set out again, I had lost sight of Tubby, who had apparently followed his prey into a byway behind Long Lane. I raced into that same byway in time to see Tubby’s man turning into a narrow alley just as a second man—an ally, no doubt—stepped out from behind a brick chimney and tripped Tubby up. Tubby sprawled forward, his blackthorn spinning away, the man raising a cricket bat into the air in order to crush Tubby’s skull with it.
I sang out, “Stand, or I blow your head off!” and charged straight at him with the tines of the fork gripped in my fist. I had no pistol, of course, but there was some chance he had heard the earlier pistol shot or had seen the bloody wound in his companion’s shoulder and would take the fork handle for a pistol barrel. In any event, he hesitated, considered the quickly closing distance between us, looked in vain for his companion, and abruptly ran off, easily cowed, thank God.
I ranged up beside Tubby, who was crawling to his feet. The sight of the fork handle set him to laughing, his sense of humor easily overcoming his gratitude and any lingering distress from the sight of that upraised cricket bat. He dusted his hands off, shrugged his shoulders, fetched his blackthorn and his fallen hat, which had rolled away like a cartwheel, and the two of us walked back to the inn, Tubby hypothesizing that the man had taken me for a cannibal when he had seen the fork. “You put the fear into him, Jack,” he said. “The horror of being eaten is one of the primal instincts. There was stark terror in the man’s eyes when he fled.” He banged his Bollinger hat against his thigh, handed his cudgel to me, and smoothed the hat’s peacock feathers with his fingers.
A reply to his comment about the fork would merely have compounded Tubby’s wit, or what passes for it. “Your Bollinger is somewhat past the fashion,” I told him, deciding to insult his hat, which was scandalously stained and beaten. “I admire it immensely, of course. It’s…seasoned. Some might say ‘stained’ or disreputable, but not I. A man’s hat is his own business.”
“I won’t sell it to you, Jack, even if you beg. It’s my lucky hat. The peacock feathers are from the royal flock, by the way. I doubt you’ve ever seen such a radiant, sapphire blue. It brings out the color in my eyes, I believe.”
We came in through the door of the Half Toad. Our friends, including Uncle Gilbert, were sitting once again at the table by the window, Gilbert just then draining a glass of ale while wiping the sweat from his brow with a kerchief. He stood up, relieved to see Tubby apparently unscathed, and he shook my hand heartily, saying, “Well met, Jack.” Then he shifted his Gladstone bag from what had been my chair, waited for us to sit, and filled our glasses from the jug.
“Yes, sir, it was indeed an ambush,” Gilbert said to St. Ives, apparently having begun to tell the tale before we arrived. “Thank God I brought my pistol; we might have been dead men else.” He nodded heartily. “You see, I recognized the man, as did Tubby—Billy Stoddard by name, the stinking reptile. The two of us bearded him in his den not two years ago, at Beachy Head, as perhaps you recall.”
“The lighthouse keeper from the Belle Tout Light?” I asked, realizing that it could quite easily have been that very villain’s back that I had seen vanishing down that byway.
“I’ll never forget his face,” Gilbert said, “a pig’s bladder with poached grapes for eyeballs. I should have done him the service of taking his head off at the shoulders and presenting it to him on a plate when I had him tied into a chair at Beachy Head. We could have pitched his body over the cliff, serving him out like he did to poor Captain Sawney, God rest him.”
“I didn’t have the pleasure of meeting this Billy Stoddard,” St. Ives said (and in fact St. Ives had lain comatose within a cavern in the chalk cliffs themselves when the temporary lighthouse keeper had fled away along the bluffs).
“Perhaps Stoddard meant to repay you for infamous way you used him,” Hasbro said.
“No,” Gilbert assured us, shaking his head again by way of punctuation. He leaned forward, smiling now and looking around like a conspirator. “I’m perfectly certain that he wanted…the thing…the reason I summoned you here,” he whispered.
We nodded, although we only half understood. The fact of the summons was obvious, the reason not at all.
He opened the Gladstone bag, in which lay his pistol, clearly visible, and withdrew a small, leather-bound journal, much worn and rimed with salt. He turned to a random page, which appeared to contain a tally of bird sightings that his birding friend Captain Sawney had totted up, perhaps from his aerie in the Belle Tout Light in the years before he had fallen (or had been pushed by Billy Stoddard) to his death from the top of the cliff. Gilbert opened the book briefly to the title page now and held it out for us to read. It bore the legend, “Hispaniola, Reginald Sawney, 1844.” It was indeed a birding log, but compiled forty years previously in the Caribbean, replete with dates and tallies and species: the purple gallinule, the sandhill crane, the snowy plover, coots, crakes, egrets, guinea fowl, and dozens of others. Why anyone would endeavor to ambush two stout men in order to steal a birding log was a mystery—a mystery that Gilbert Frobisher understood full well, the answer to which apparently lay in the palm of his hand.
“No doubt you gentlemen believe this log to be innocent enough,” Gilbert said. “What would you say, Jacky? Are you a bird fancier?”
“Certainly,” I told him, “well roasted and served with potatoes and spring onions.”
He winked at me and laughed, the recent violence no longer troubling him. The smile, which revealed the pleasure he took in his superior knowledge, reminded me absolutely of Tubby, as did his vast girth, the difference between them having to do with Gilbert’s advanced age—past sixty, although strangely hearty despite the years—and the absence of hair atop Gilbert’s head. They might have been twins otherwise.
“I’ll admit to seeing nothing of great value in it,” Hasbro said, after Gilbert had closed the book and returned it to the bag, “although surely it would be of interest to a naturalist. The islands of the Caribbean must be a very treasure trove of bird species.”
“And of other treasures, gentlemen, I assure you,” Gilbert said in a low voice. “Treasures that beggar the imagination.”
He sat back in his chair and fell silent, looking with vast pleasure at the utterly appropriate pheasants now arriving at the table, already cut into pieces, along with sausages, roasted potatoes, long beans with butter sauce, and a heap of crispy salmon fritters as a sort of relish, fish and fowl together being recommended by Henrietta, generally at removes, although in this instance our hurried schedule warranted the lot of it served up at once. There were bottles of burgundy as well, and more of the onion sauce, this batch heavy with the smell of sage.
Gilbert was evidently happy to keep us suspended while he ate. He knew absolutely that the word “treasures” was now uppermost in everyone’s mind, reigning there just as Gilbert reigned over the table. The old man set about his pheasant as if he’d been two years at sea, picking up a leg and slathering it with onion sauce, then forking up an unctuous sausage with his free hand, so that he might have both appendages working at once, in the manner of an octopus. Gilbert and Tubby are trenchermen of the first water, you see—a vast emptiness within the two of them crying out to be filled, a process that reminds one of shoveling sand into a sinkhole. The bottles went round, the potatoes and long beans and sausages vanished from their dishes, and Henrietta Billson heaped more into them and brought new bottles to the table, whisking away the old. It was the loaves and fishes come again.
I was emboldened, finally, to fill the glasses ostentatiously in order to propose a toast: “To our venture, gentlemen, whatever it might entail, and may we discover what it entails some time this side of the grave.”
We tipped the glasses back, Gilbert grinning at me and nodding. He picked up a drumstick and sucked the last fragments of meat from the bone. Then he put his head out the window to have a cautious look around
before pulling his head back in and drawing the casement closed behind it. Gesturing at me with the drumstick, he asked, “What do you know about whales, Jack? The sperm whale? The cachalot?”
“I’ve read Mr. Melville’s book,” I told him.
“Then surely you’re the learned man of the world. Did Mr. Melville expound upon…” and at this juncture he once again surveyed the room before dropping his voice, “…the phenomenon of ambergris at all?” We all leaned in closely now, our supper quite forgotten, the word having fetched our attention, as he well knew it would.
“The account of the substance was the subject of a brief chapter, as I recall,” I told him. “I remember that it forms in the belly of the whale and is excreted from time to time in hard lumps, often loaded up with the beaks of squid. It’s thought that perhaps the beaks are the irritant that gives rise to the production of the substance.”
“The beaks of squid!” Gilbert said, nodding ponderously. “Just so. No doubt that’s valuable information, Jack, for the man who fancies such a thing as a discarded squid beak. But the perfumeries, what do they pay for the substance itself, and never mind the beaks? By the ounce, let’s say. None of your infernal, recently excreted filth, Jack, but ambergris washed and tumbled by the salt sea and the ocean winds until it has the appearance of a pearl. Dense enough to sink to the bottom of the sea, by God! The French eat it, you know, although there’s precious little that a Frenchman doesn’t eat. Imagine a great globe of it, if you can, three or four times the size of a man’s head.” He held his arms apart, stretching them wide by way of illustration, squinting at the lot of us. “A vast ball upward of thirty inches in diameter, lads, and as round as the moon. Imagine, if you will, the whale from whence the phenomenon was ejected, a whale well beyond a hundred feet in length, a vast great leviathan, which, if it desired, could swallow enough Jonahs to make up a dinner party very like our own, and with room left over for Balaam and his talking ass, by God. What would you say to that, Jacky? Can you place a value on such a thing?”
The Further Adventures of Langdon St. Ives Page 19