“On that dark morning at Beachy Head, after Tubby and I gave Stoddard a sound thrashing, he went straight down to Eastbourne and served his notice. It was then that he asked boldly about Captain Sawney’s effects, whether there might have been a book, a birding log lying about. Sawney had promised it to him, Stoddard said, the lying pig. Benson wisely told Stoddard that there was no such thing, and Billy Stoddard went away with his hands empty.
“Two months later, after a tour of the lights along the southern coast, Benson brought Captain Sawney’s log to me in Dicker, and I’m mortal certain that Billy Stoddard followed him, and that he’s been on the trail of the log ever since—hot on the trail, as the American would say, for he nearly had the prize twice this very day. But by God he does not have it, and he won’t have it, and if I have my way I’ll see him swing from a gibbet for the murder of Reginald Sawney.”
Gilbert looked at us darkly and thumped his knuckles on the table. The bow of the ship rose precipitously at this instant, as if the force of his blow had depressed the stern. The ship shuddered for a moment before dropping into the trough of the swell. I was surprised to see through the broad windows the lights of a sizeable city off to starboard—Margate, perhaps, unless we had already rounded the North Foreland; I had no sense of the speed at which we traveled. The White Cliffs would tell the tale when we reached the Strait, but I wouldn’t be awake to see them.
“Now here’s the long and the short of it,” Gilbert said. “Because I’m a birding man, I found Sawney’s log interesting, but for the life of me I couldn’t at first fathom its mystery. I laid the log aside and neglected it again until two months ago when I had the leisure to attend to it in earnest. What I found then was passing curious.”
He opened the log now, turned to an early page, and indicated with his finger a letter that had been crossed out—the first letter B in the entry that read ‘Black bellied whistling duck.’ “It was a simple error immediately rectified, one would suppose,” Gilbert said, “and yet as you can see, there is no discernible error at all, for the identical letter was rewritten at once. Three pages later there were two corrections of the same sort, the E in egret and the N in night heron, each letter marked out and then restored. I began to look for similarly marked out letters, and very quickly discovered the simple message hidden within the log: ‘Beneath the palm,’ the message read—three words comprising fourteen lined-out letters. But what was beneath the palm? And which palm? I was defeated. I pitched the log onto the desktop as if it were a playing card, thus.”
To illustrate he did just that thing with a flick of his wrist, the log slapping down alongside the decorated speaking trumpet and spinning atop the heap of charts. Gilbert waved his hand at it and laughed aloud. There, embossed on the leather cover of the thing, was a simple palm tree, worn flat with rubbing, but visible.
“Watch carefully, gentlemen,” Gilbert said, as if he had been born for the stage. He produced a straight razor, flicked it open, and slipped the keen edge of the blade sideways into the leather cover of the log, then prised apart what was in fact two thin pieces of leather bonded around the perimeter, forming a hidden compartment between. With his thumbs he worked the glued edge loose, retrieving from within three folded sheets of thin vellum, closely written on both sides. He carefully pressed the pages flat, donned a pair of spectacles, and read aloud the very tale with which I began this account: the story of young James Douglas and his ill-fated journey to the island beyond Hispaniola aboard the Celebes Prince.
When he had read it through, he folded the vellum carefully and replaced it within its leather sandwich. From out of the desk he produced a brush and a small glass jar of hide glue with which he carefully dabbed the edges of the leather before pressing the two pieces together again. The birding log, message restored, disappeared once again into his coat.
I for one had little to say. It was an entertaining bit of theatre, but aside from that ball of ambergris, the wild tale of James Douglas was horrible in every regard, a catalogue of bloody violence and death, the story of malicious, unseen spirits that had torn a large sailing vessel to pieces and brought about the death of its crew. I could see no evidence to suppose it was factual aside from the “oath” at the conclusion. I was bold enough to say so at the hazard of doubting the old man. But my doubt didn’t trouble him in the least.
“The tale sounds like a vast exaggeration, surely,” he said. “This boy, this James Douglas, admitted that it seemed very like a dream to him. Perhaps some element of it was a dream: the destruction of the Celebes Prince, for example. Clearly he feared that his flight from the battle was craven. A mad-doctor might suggest that he sought to mitigate his guilt afterward by inventing terrifying evil spirits. But we must all of us admit that the account of the sponge divers and the ambergris has the ring of authenticity. And keep in mind that the Celebes Prince would not have moored off that island if there weren’t some profit in it. I’ll reveal that my perusal of Lloyd’s records shows that the ship was owned by one Jerome Watley, of Bristol, and was lost in 1843 while cruising in just that part of the world.”
Tubby, having noted my hesitation, said, “It’s an adventure, Jack, at the expense of a few weeks’ time. Who cares for the odds? You don’t calculate the odds before crossing the road, and yet every day a dozen people are run down like dogs. I for one mean for us to have a look into that sea cave as well as another glass of this capital brandy.”
“Hear him!” Gilbert said, reaching for the bottle. “And mark this, Jack: Billy Stoddard and his ruffians are believers, and they are not fanciful men.”
The truth in what he said hit home, although it did nothing to rid me of my misgivings. When I searched my mind I discovered that a part of me very much believed in James Douglas and in that ball of ambergris. But if his story were true, then we were tempting fate in our reenactment of the disastrous voyage of the Celebes Prince.
Hasbro was inscrutable, a role he played to perfection. Tubby seemed to be in a high state of anticipation, smacking his lips over the cognac and looking at the rest of us in a madcap sort of way. St. Ives regarded Gilbert openly, and broke the silence by saying, “There are a mort of islands, unless I’m mistaken, in a 200-mile radius around Hispaniola. James Douglas fixed the location with his sextant, but he apparently neglected to note the coordinates in his account, leaving something in the neighborhood of 125,000 square miles of ocean in which the island might hide itself.”
Gilbert smiled at us in a satisfied way, looking from one to the other, nodding his head. “Exactly what I myself feared, sir. But it didn’t stand to reason that Douglas would omit the most vital detail. Without a careful latitude and longitude, the tale is so much air. And so I set myself to scrutinizing the log itself in order to seek out the answer. When I struck upon the yellow-breasted crake—porzana flaviventer—my suspicions were aroused. Sawney had allegedly seen the bird’s eggs in its nest a prodigious number of times—an unlikely number of times. Or else he had made an error, perhaps reversed the numbers—confusing the eggs and the crakes, as it were. ‘Which came first, I asked myself, the crake or the egg?’”
He laughed out loud at this witticism and paused for effect before going on. “But Captain Sawney was not given to error when it came to birds, no, sir. Rest assured, Professor, that this is no wild goose errand, ha, ha! No one but I knows the coordinates, and so it will remain until we drop anchor off the island. At present, suffice it to say that we’ve charted a course in the general direction of Hispaniola on the old Spanish Main. What lies waiting for us on the sea bottom is a mystery to be solved two weeks hence, if the weather treats us with respect.”
We rose as a body, all of us longing for bed after the food, drink, and excitement of the evening. Only Uncle Gilbert seemed fresh. He had set out to astound us with his revelations and had very much succeeded, and he insisted now that we lay our hand atop each others’ hands and recite the old, ‘One for all and all for one,’ oath of the Musketeers—harmless enough, exc
ept that it was Gilbert Frobisher to whom we were swearing an oath, it seemed to me. Ah, well, I thought, turning toward the door, God bless the old man and the fabulous ball of ambergris, which, if we had any idea of finding it, must have lain passively on the floor of the tumultuous sea forty-one years since the destruction of the Celebes Prince.
My enforced cheerfulness was altered, however, when I noted something that gave me pause. I pointed at one of the voice pipes, dead center in the row of them. For some reason it was not corked with its whistle. The stopper had been removed and balanced at the outermost edge of the speaking trumpet, which angled upward at something like 45 degrees so that one could give it the ear with a mere nod of the head. The India-rubber flange, which made it watertight when the stopper was fitted into the trumpet, must have provided enough friction to keep it stationary despite the roll of the ship.
“This has all the earmarks of a plot…” I started to say, but St. Ives shook his head to silence me. He picked up the stopper and whistle and thrust it back into its aperture, thus making certain we’d no longer be overheard, if in fact we had been.
“Perhaps you’re correct, Jack,” said St. Ives when it was safe to speak again. “This was quite possibly an intentional oversight meant to allow someone to overhear our discussion.”
“I’m certain that’s not the case,” Gilbert said. “Of course it isn’t. We’re aboard ship, after all, with a hand picked crew. This is no doubt a completely innocent oversight.”
“Hand picked by whom, sir?” Hasbro asked, cutting to the chase in his unadorned fashion. “There was mention of a Mr. Honeywell, who was kind enough to send out Mr. Beasely, the mate. Do you entirely trust Mr. Honeywell, sir?”
“Absolutely, my good fellow. To the death. Honeywell has been a great good friend of mine these past two years. He was kind enough to facilitate the purchase of this very ship when I let him know I was in the market for just such a vessel. He undertook to have her refit, applying himself diligently. It was no mean task, neither. His father was a whaler, you know. Died at sea. Dragged to his doom by a sperm whale when Honeywell was a mere lad.”
“Out of an idle curiosity,” I asked, “how many of the crew are not from Honeywell’s draft?”
“I see what you’re about, Jack—safety in numbers, you’re thinking. I put it at nine, all men I knew from my yachting days in Eastbourne, including the Chief Engineer, Mr. Phibbs, who’s as loyal as a limpet, as are his mates. You need have no fear, Jack, not of the crew nor of Mr. Honeywell. I stand by my friends, Jack, and I count both you and Lucius Honeywell among them.
I considered protesting, but St. Ives followed at once with another attempt, although Gilbert had begun to take on a stormy appearance.
“I apologize for this inquisition, sir, but did Honeywell know of your destination?”
“Only in the most general way, Professor. I might have mentioned Hispaniola, I suppose, but certainly not the name of the island.”
“The island was not named in Douglas’s account, if I remember correctly,” I said. Gilbert smiled at me and pointed at his temple, where the name of the island apparently resided. No doubt he had discovered it as he had the coordinates—in a bird’s nest.
“And did your conversation with Mr. Honeywell run to whales and whaling?” St. Ives asked. “I mean no offense to your friend, sir.”
“No offense taken, I assure you. Our conversation did not rise to the level of particulars, Professor, at least as regards the matter that’s concerning you. I was in need of a diving bell, however, and it was Honeywell who procured one, although the request itself would have conveyed little. The device is currently struck down into the hold. Lucius Honeywell, I’ll say again, is without peer as a gentleman and a man of business.”
“A diving bell,” St. Ives said. “Quite a sensible item, given Mr. Douglas’s description of the death of the two sponge divers. Mr. Honeywell has made himself invaluable, it seems.”
“Exactly what I’ve been telling you. He’s a good man, is Lucius Honeywell, and a happy one, as long as he’s well-paid for his services.”
“And yet bad men might have imposed upon Mr. Honeywell,” Hasbro said, hanging on like a terrier to the dark thread of the conversation.
“Honeywell is too shrewd by half,” Gilbert told him, dismissing the notion with a wave of his hand and very apparently tired of the conversation. “If Honeywell recommends Beasely, then Beasely is a good man as well, as are the others who accompanied him. I could scarcely have found a full crew otherwise—not of seasoned men.”
“Mr. Honeywell particularly recommended Beasely to you, then?” Hasbro asked. But of course Mr. Honeywell had not. Gilbert hadn’t any idea who Beasely was when we had come aboard.
Gilbert sniffed. By now he’d had enough of our doubts. St. Ives assured him that we had every faith in Mr. Honeywell, although the Professor’s eyes implied a different story. Slightly off keel now, figuratively speaking, we went off to our various staterooms to sleep.
My own room, quite commodious, was as elegantly fitted-out as was the chartroom, including a small mahogany bookcase that was stocked with likely looking volumes, some of them impressively dusty and ancient. I chose a weighty tome that expounded upon the pelagic fishes, with fin and scale and bone structures illustrated, accurately measured, and convincingly depicted. Caught up at once in the marvels of the deep, it took me a good sixty seconds to fall into the abyss of sleep.
CHAPTER 4
Morning Fog
I WAS JOSTLED AWAKE in the early morning by a man holding a pistol, the muzzle of which was perhaps two feet away from my forehead.
“Out you go, mate,” he said to me, and gestured with the pistol. There was the sound of the ship’s engines, and it felt as if we were moving, although it might have been the heaving of the sea, and there was nothing but fog outside the window. It was daylight without a doubt, but the world beyond the ship was invisible. Morning had come quickly.
I climbed out of bed wearing my nightgown, stupid with sleep. There was the ship’s bell once again, clanging a warning through the murk. Only moments earlier I had been oblivious to it. The man with the pistol was familiar to me: I’d seen him working on deck when we weighed anchor, a man with a heavy, walrus mustache and wearing a striped jersey, a battered felt cap, and with a ragged looking scar across his forehead and a half-shut eye, the result of the same wound.
“You’ll want your trousers, I’ll warrant,” he said.
Indeed I would, whatever my fate. I pulled them on under my night gown and did the same with my shoes before he grew impatient and waved me up the companionway. Out we went into the morning mist, the sea just visible below when the swell washed down the side of the ship. St. Ives and Hasbro were on deck guarded by three men with rifles and pistols, Beasely among them, his pistol in his belt, and so much for the helpful Mr. Honeywell. Beasely clutched Captain Sawney’s birding log in his hand. I took my place beside my friends, began to speak, and was told by Beasely to shut my gob or he’d shut it with a bullet, something I was inclined to believe. Tubby stumbled out onto the deck then along with Gilbert, whose face was a confused muddle.
To my mind there was nothing confusing in any of it. Honeywell’s draft had been made up of pirates. Utterly missing were the crewmen I had noticed during the trip down the Thames—the men whom Gilbert had evidently known. Where were they? Dead in their bunks? Locked into the hold? Pitched overboard? I was moderately certain that I recognized two of the pirates now as having been among the men who capered in the road beyond the fallen cow, despite the balaclavas that had covered their faces. No doubt their goal had been to obtain the birding log if they could. If not, then they would put into play the more devious plan of taking it away from us on the high seas. Gilbert had foiled their chance in Pennyfields, and so we now found ourselves in this desperate strait.
There was a brief break in the fog, and I could see Lizard Point some distance to starboard. I had seen it quite clearly when I sailed to Bayo
nne on my cousin’s yacht some two years earlier. Perhaps I was wrong about our exact location, but it was certain we must still be in the Channel if there was land to starboard at all.
“Line the fat men up against the railing,” Beasely said. “Billy says that he owes them the favor of murdering them. The rest of this lot can swim for it, lucky bastards.”
I was apparently one of the lucky bastards, if drowning passed as luck. I wasn’t a strong enough swimmer to survive in the cold waters of the Channel, and, given the still-foggy morning, the chance of our being seen by a passing boat was nil, barring a miracle. I noticed now that there was a pirate on a raised platform above us. He stood behind what appeared to be a dozen or so rifle barrels lined up side by side and mounted on a sort of swivel. I hadn’t seen such a thing before, but I knew that Gilbert Frobisher was fond of weaponry, and this was certainly an innovative specimen—a variety of machine-gun, obviously. Gilbert had no doubt envisioned using it to dissuade pirates, but that was another well-laid plan gone to smash.
Two men, both carrying pistols, waved the Frobishers toward the railing, staying well away from them. Tubby was in a dangerous state, I could see that well enough. He would not die passively, and neither would Gilbert, who had recovered from his muddle and glared roundabout him like an adder. I looked for my chance, but there was nothing but suicide in every direction. Would I allow Tubby Frobisher, one of the great friends of my existence, to be blown over the railing with a machine-gun? No, I would not. I was a dead man in any event. When Tubby acted, I would follow suit, and damn the consequences. St. Ives seemed coiled and ready, and I wondered fleetingly if thoughts of Alice and his children would give him pause. I myself thought of Dorothy and was happy she knew nothing of this, and I wished to hell I weren’t in my nightgown.
The Further Adventures of Langdon St. Ives Page 21