“Prince Henry say—says—Prince Henry says he is only friends to make himself look better, later. This does not seem to me a noble thing to do.”
“No. I think Shakespeare was far more interested in Falstaff than he was in either of the kings, but he was working his way through the kings of England, so he had to let the Henrys come forward.”
“He would rather have been writing a comedy?”
“The Merry Wives of Windsor does seem a more comfortable setting for the old drunkard.”
“But Shakespeare put him into the Henry plays.”
“Most of his dramas have comic touches.”
She did not seem satisfied. Then again, neither was I. There was no way around it: Sir John Falstaff got a bum deal from his Prince, and his creator.
“I think maybe Falstaff is the hero,” she said after a time.
“Oh, I agree that Shakespeare probably wanted to write a comedy here, but at the time found himself stuck with dramas.”
“No, I mean, he is the hero. Prince and Falstaff both not what they appear: Harry says he is pretending to be young and irresponsible—an act, so everyone will be very impressed when he suddenly grows up, becomes noble. Silly reason. But Falstaff also act the fool, only he stay there, to force Harry to choose—really choose. Where does noble behaviour get a man? Forced to behave, made to marry a stranger for his country, having to lead men he loves into death? Who would want that? But with Falstaff, Harry is forced not just to look noble, but to be noble, and turn his back on the old friend for the bigger cause.”
She frowned at the book, looking for words that fit her thoughts. “I think maybe, secretly, Shakespeare make Falstaff not just the fool, but his hero. In the end, Falstaff teaches Harry all. About loyalty, about how very, very hard it is to be king. In the end, Falstaff give his—gives his life, his honour, to his new King. When Harry refuses his foolish old friend, that is when he is marked as a king.”
I stared at her delicate and unlined face, frowning at the mysterious volume in her hands as if it was conveying some personal message to her alone. I’d never thought of the character that way, merely regarded him as a problematic artefact of a playwright working too fast for reflection.
“That’s an … interesting interpretation.”
She looked up then. “Ah, sorry, is only my silly thoughts.”
“Absolutely not. It’s … Well, certainly that’s what the playwright did with Lear’s fool. Have you got to King Lear yet?” Lear’s nameless man-boy wields neither power nor fear. He is a despised servant who is yet the King’s only friend, a non-son who brutally mocks his master but remains loyal when everyone else has betrayed him. The Fool spends all his energies trying to goad Lear from his madness, and at the end—with an enigmatic, I’ll go to bed at noon—he disappears. Theologically speaking, the Fool is an Old Testament prophet with pratfalls. I shook my head. “I admit, I’d never seen Falstaff as a hero. I will have to read those plays again.”
“Aloud?” Her dark eyes had a twinkle.
“Yes. You know,” I said, “that’s not a bad idea. We might ask a few of the others to join in, and we could do group readings.” Long ago, my teacher Miss Sim had done that with me, revealing an invaluable dimension to the text.
This entailed another approach to the purser, who was looking a bit bemused at the seaborne university taking shape around Miss Sato. However, he agreed, and half a dozen of us were soon launched on the Henry plays.
All of which meant that between the stern linguistic demands of Miss Sato, earnest lessons from the devout American Buddhists, the group readings, and her public lecture series on customs of all kinds (followed by the enthusiastic discussions those lectures set off amongst the passengers), Holmes and I were well occupied. He made no further mention of a rapid disembarking at the next large port.
Plus, there remained the question of blackmailers and card sharks.
Three weeks of enforced intimacy made it difficult to hide matters from one’s fellow travellers. Only the most gifted and inexhaustible of actors could maintain a rôle that whole time. Some did not try. Lady Darley and her stepson, Thomas, for example, avoided expressing their mutual distaste by the simple means of coming together as rarely as two people could within a floating village: the viscount dined with his friends, participating in vigorous sport on the sun deck during the day and raucous entertainments and card games during the night, while the earl’s wife kept to the shaded promenade deck, sat with her husband at the Captain’s table, and turned in early. The only times they were in a room together was during Miss Sato’s afternoon salons, and even then, the two occupied opposite sides of the room, each pointedly taking no notice of the other.
Similarly, one always knew if two passengers had a falling-out: when Tommy made amorous advances on Virginia Wilton three days before Manila, her brother, Harold, bristled every time the viscount appeared. But the ship’s relief when the two siblings disembarked for their missionary work in the Philippines was short-lived, for Tommy then turned his eyes on Lucy Awlwright, and the good-natured competition for that young woman’s affections that had been brewing between the two Australian brothers erupted overnight into open fury. For two days, we all awaited outright fisticuffs or a mid-night cry of “Viscount overboard!” Intervention came from an unexpected direction: I was up on the rolling deck one evening, dinner having started and the decks being nearly deserted, when my eye was caught by motion. I craned my neck, then went still at the sight of Lady Darley—and her stepson.
They kept their voices low, but one could see the intensity of their manner. Facing each other, the two stood as rigid as the deck-post behind them. She was delivering a lecture—and although he protested, even reaching out a hand to her, she took a step back and crisply delivered his marching orders. She left. He watched her go. Then he took out his cigarette case and smoked furiously, crushing the butt out on the wooden boards before he followed her down to the dining room.
That night over cards, Tommy withdrew his flirtations from Lucy Awlwright, leaving the field to the Arthur brothers. The rest of the ship breathed a sigh of relief.
Questions on the seas:
When is a fool not a Fool?
When his blood runs blue.
If I was interested in Lady Darley, it was doubly true when it came to her titled husband. I might claim that I was merely being loyal to my own husband’s endeavours, like a golfer’s wife who learns to knock the gutta-percha ball into a hole. That was certainly true to a degree. But beyond wifely reinforcement, our relationship always had something in the order of a contest about it: who could claim the correct answer first?
As the days went by, Holmes had contrived an excuse to visit the ship’s safe, even succeeding in a quick survey of the purser’s list of its contents, and he was forced to acknowledge that nothing of Darley’s appeared to be therein. Not that a clever (or at any rate, experienced) blackmailer didn’t have a dozen ways to summon a needed item of extortion, from onboard confederates to a friend back home willing to drop an envelope into the Royal Post.
Short of physical evidence, we needed to watch for slips of behaviour. Thus, although I did not actively pursue testimony against Darley—or indeed, for him—neither did I avoid the man’s presence as studiously as I might have under other circumstances.
However, despite the enforced intimacy of shipboard life, it proved surprisingly difficult to engage the man in casual conversation. For one thing, despite his apparently robust physique, he seemed often unwell, keeping to his cabin and missing several of the port stops (although his wife and son took advantage of the touristic opportunities—separately, of course). And when he did participate in communal events, he was often surrounded by his fellows—an entirely masculine community—and wrapped up in the minutiae of shared enthusiasms: hunting, horses, and guns chiefly among them. Holmes might get away with lingering on the edge of those conversations, but not I.
The first time he appeared at Miss Sato’s afternoon
salon was when the posted topic was “sports.” Naturally, her talk focussed largely on sports exclusive to Japan—sumo wrestling, archery, falconry, and the martial arts—but the discussion that followed was wide-ranging, and took us into baseball, cricket, motorcar racing, and beyond. Then Lord Darley spoke up.
“What about horses? You do have them, don’t you?”
“Yes, we have horses in Japan. Not, I think, as many as you have in England, because we have little free land, but we do have them.”
“What about a hunt?”
Miss Sato exchanged glances with the Japanese man seated nearby. He stood and faced the room. “Certainly we hunt. If you are interested in a day out, I have a friend near Tokyo who hunts. What kind of falcon do you have, sir?”
Confusion reigned for a time, until the difference between hunting-with-Salcons and hunting-on-horseback was straightened out. Lord Darley, it seemed, was an enthusiastic huntsman, and wished to arrange for some horseback riding once dry land was achieved. His monologue concerning the difference between his home mounts and those of the Colonies—Kenya and India, for the most part—would have gone on for some time, had not the purser gently moved to rescue Miss Sato, suggesting that she might continue this conversation elsewhere while the room was cleared for tea.
It turned out that Miss Sato was to some degree familiar with both horses and riding equipment, and amiably set about describing the differences between the traditional Japanese saddle and those of the English and Western schools. However, when it came to details of the horses themselves, she regretfully shook her head and admitted that she knew nothing about the angle of pasterns. The earl was taken aback at this woeful ignorance, but his reproach was soothed when she offered to locate a stable near Tokyo for his entertainment.
He reluctantly let her be pulled away by a couple of adolescent boys who were interested in jujitsu, a martial art about which she protested that she knew little, but I slipped in beside the earl.
“I’d be very interested to know of a good public stable near Tokyo, if you hear of one,” I said earnestly.
He looked at me in surprise, running an eye down my length as if judging the angle of my pasterns. I did not, it would seem, have the appearance of a great lover of horses. Still, he replied with no apparent disbelief. “Oh, you don’t want public stables, Mrs Russell. Not unless they’re a whole lot better than those you find in other countries. Ill-tempered nags with no wind, for the most part. See if the gel there can find some people with their own place.”
Before one of the others could interrupt, I asked him what he thought about the saddles that Miss Sato had described, then agreed with his opinion that they sounded more like the saddles in museums than those he used.
“I suppose that makes sense,” I said thoughtfully. “The Samurai were fighters, they’d need something secure to brace against as they were aiming their bows or swinging a weapon.”
A second, more appraising glance, this time at my unexpected sensibility. We were soon launched into a rather more technical discussion than I was qualified for, but in those situations, I generally fall back on an open declaration of ignorance followed by a series of admiring questions. Most men read this as self-deprecating expertise, although there is always the danger that the man will be astute enough to see past the performance and suspect coquetry.
Lord Darley did not appear astute. Amiable, yes. August and self-absorbed and well pleased with his own appeal, yes—but not astute. He was the sort of aristocrat in whom generations of in-breeding and privilege led to a belief that his ermine robes were not only deserved, but proof of the rightness of the universe.
I left his presence feeling the need of a good cold, invigorating bath, to clear away the honeyed assumptions of wealth. Later, I informed Holmes that as far as I was concerned, if Darley had provided Society secrets to a blackmailer, he probably hadn’t realised it—and if he had, nothing would convince the man he was wrong to use whatever resources he had to produce whatever money he needed.
In any event, I wished nothing more to do with the man on this voyage, and was happy to leave the investigation entirely in Holmes’ hands.
The ship drove east: across the Bay of Bengal, beneath the end of the Andaman chain, down the Straits of Malacca. Since the combination of motion and enclosure was anathema to my well-being, I spent much of the time on one deck or another, either in my native First Class or with the Americans in Third. Not only were the two sets of lessons demanding—locking both Japanese grammar and Buddhist prayers onto our tongues, fitting Japanese customs and Buddhist attitudes into our minds—but we were forced to negotiate all these lessons amidst a constant stream of interruptions, from children, the other passengers, and the world past the railings.
Too, my nocturnal disturbances continued, with recurring variations on the dream of flying objects and a new and more ominous image of an anonymous haunting figure. Disturbing dreams had not been a problem for many years, and I was not at all pleased with this new development.
Afterwards I wondered if, but for these distractions, I might have caught word of the ship’s poltergeist earlier. Instead, it required a trio of overheard conversations.
Boys will play rude games.
Ship’s light sparkles on the waves.
Life goes on unseen.
Shipboard travel is always a compromise, even for those fortunate souls immune to gastric distress. Deck cabins have a window, permitting fresh air and a minimum of smells from the engine and kitchen, and even in rough weather the window can be left open (unlike the poor benighted souls below, whose portholes must be screwed shut when the seas rise). On the other hand, having the promenade deck just outside one’s room inflicts the constant noises of travellers at play: strolling, playing quoits or cards, scolding children or—worst by far—carrying on shipboard flirtations. I have, at times, fallen back on the suites designed for the very rich, but the nerve-grating habits of the neighbours tend to drive me back down to the realms of the lower classes. In any event, our neighbours this time would have been the Darleys, who in such close quarters could not have failed to notice Holmes’ glowers.
The solution is bribery. Lavish applications of cash can shift one’s quarters to the cooler side, arrange for table-mates who are interesting (or, lacking that, taciturn), and even lead to the rearrangement of the deck’s fixtures to create an obstacle outside of one’s windows. Once or twice I’ve managed to shut the deck outside my rooms entirely, ensuring a degree of peace while forcing promenaders to bounce back and forth and back again, frustrated from completion of their endless circuits.
We didn’t manage that this time, although we did (thanks to a combination of cold cash and a fulsome letter from A High-Ranking Indian Authority) ruthlessly supplant a previous reservation and take over a large, airy, relatively quiet promenade-deck suite, with a more or less functional electrical fan, located precisely halfway along the ship’s length to assure optimal steadiness.
Although I still spent most daylight hours out of doors, the seas were generally calm enough that most nights, I could retreat to my bunk for a few hours. This was the case as we worked our way down the Malacca Straits. I brushed my teeth, made sure the window was as wide open as it got, directed the fan, and stripped the bedclothes down to a single sheet. Having checked that my thermos jug had been filled with ice water, and that my clock, torch, water glass, and throwing knife were on the little table, I climbed into bed. After a few pages, I switched out the light.
It was one of the blessed nights when I succeeded in convincing my central organs that the gentle motion all around was a soothing thing, maternal as a grandmother’s arms. I relaxed. I felt fine. I slipped down, softly, to sleep …
“Did you ask the Chips?” blared an English voice inches from my ear.
Answered by a drawl. “He said he was busy with some dashed job for the Captain and couldn’t help us.”
“What about Sparks?”
“Seemed to think it might be too dang
erous. What about you? Did you talk to the chappie in the smoking room?” Chips was the ship’s carpenter; Sparks, the radio man; and my ears instantly identified the drawler: Thomas Darley. Which made the co-respondent Monty Pike-Elton.
“I rather got the impression that several others got there before us,” Pike-Elton bleated.
“There’s the bath steward—nobody’d expect us to hide it in the baths.”
“Yes, but we wanted to open the hunt to girls as well, and they’d complain we weren’t playing cricket. They can’t very well go poking around the men’s baths.”
“Some of them would,” said Darley.
“And how! Did you see what the Wilson girl was wearing? Don’t know that you’d need to get her into a game of strip poker!”
“How about the engineer?”
Were it not for the vague puzzle of what “it” might be, I’d have long since emptied my iced water out the porthole onto the pair of them. Holmes’ change of breathing told me that he was listening, too.
They dismissed the Chief Engineer as being the standard humourless Scot, the Chief Steward as being unbribable, and the boots steward as being the opposite—all too willing to sell information to anyone. Neither, I noted, brought up the library steward. Possibly unaware that such a person existed.
“So we’re back to the purser,” Pike-Elton said.
“He’s such an obvious choice.”
“Precisely! Nobody would expect the two of us to go for the obvious.”
Somehow, I doubted that.
A low voice came from the other bunk. “Russell, would you object to a spot of target practise from my Webley?”
“Have you any idea what they’re talking about?”
“The tone of their remarks indicates some sporting entertainment.”
It was true: had they been planning a bomb or a burglary, even these two might have tried to keep their voices down a touch.
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