Cinnamon and Gunpowder (21 page)

“I’ve no choice but to bite,” Mabbot said.

“Could wait until the season is over, hide out for a patch, give the men a spell—they love beach revels. They’re shit-brained for mangoes. Then, when Laroche is tired, we’ll head in swift and find the Fox.”

“We cannot slow now—we’ve come so close. By minutes and hairs we’ve missed him. Time to redouble our efforts.”

“I’m only saying, Cap’m, that the men are tired, and now they’ve got silver burning their pockets, itchin’ to spend a little.”

“They’ll have plenty of time to buy whores and chocolate once I’ve found my Fox.”

11

ONE WOMAN’S WAR

In which Mabbot reveals herself

There was a heavy silence, and worried that they might sense my presence, I knocked. The door was opened by Mabbot herself. Mr. Apples replaced the maps in the chart cupboard, locked it, and then disappeared. I set the platter upon the table and stood silent while Joshua brought the china and candelabra. I helped him set the table for two, smiling at him all the while, but he ignored me entirely, leaving as soon as the places were set.

It was then that serendipity and my own oafishness brought us closer to understanding the Fox’s plans. While setting the table, I spotted a new pattern on the bed: clusters of pink and tan that, upon closer inspection, revealed themselves to be poppies woven into a Turkish rug. Mabbot saw my eyes linger. “Do you fancy it?” she asked. “It’s one of the trifles recovered at the prison. A variation of prayer carpet, perhaps. Quite fine, but I have more underfoot than I know what to do with.”

“It would make my cell warmer, that’s sure,” I said, stepping closer. “It seems nice and thick. I thought for a moment it was a map. It’s so dim in here.”

At this Mabbot looked at me as one looks at a friend long missed. “A map?”

“I thought this blue strip was a sea, and these green humps, hills. The blossoms could be … of course, I see now that it’s only flowers.”

“How silly of you.” A moment passed as she stared dreamily at the rug. Then she screamed, “Apples!”

A moment later her faithful second-in-command burst into the room with a knife drawn for blood. Mabbot, disregarding the alarm she had invoked, pulled him by the arm to the bed and patted the rug. “Cork-brained Wedge thought this elegant carpet was, can you imagine, a
map
.”

Mr. Apples chuckled. “And a Bible is salad to a goat.”

Mabbot traced her finger along the patterns of the rug and said, “Right. But then, if we pretended this was,
in fact
, a map, what might it tell us?” He studied the flowers, then blinked at Mabbot in surprise. The two pirates looked at each other with growing pleasure. “These vines and these blossoms—”

“Tunnels and chambers! That clever bastard.”

“It’s his warren under the Pendleton warehouses. But I’m hungry,” said Mabbot. “Wedge has been working all day on whatever succulence he has hidden here. Draft a copy of the rug and show it to old Pete, and to Braga. No one else sees it.”

“Yes, Cap’m.” And with that Mr. Apples rolled the rug up and whisked it out the door. Mabbot slapped me on the back and said, “I knew you’d prove useful, Wedge. I just didn’t know how very.”

“I guess I’ll not be getting that rug to warm my floor.”

“Remember all those times I didn’t kill you? And coming about to pull you from the water after your little swim?”

“Fair enough.”

“Oh, don’t pout. I’ll get you a damned rug.” She glanced about and laid her hand upon a dog-eared book. “And here, it’s a prison Bible, handwritten. Warden said it belonged to the Fox, but my boy is hardly God-fearing. I know you like that sort of thing.”

She handed me the leather-bound book, which, with a quick perusal, I could see was only a fragment of the New Testament, Mark or Luke perhaps. I was touched by the humble manufacture; I could imagine a prisoner coming to terms with his wickedness by writing the word of God out, letter by letter, in some damp cell. There are many roads to salvation.

Mabbot and I, in our strange ritual, sat quietly before touching the victuals. She was still brooding. I took the moment to say grace, softly, aloud. She glared at me with storm-water eyes. Her hair was still in braids, and her brow and neck were exposed, browned from the sun and densely freckled. Those freckles were hypnotic in the candlelight, trembling where her pulse danced, cinnamon shaken into a bowl of milk.

I must have become transfixed because Mabbot cleared her throat and said, “Are we still praying?”

I removed the pot I used for a lid to reveal the meal.

“Three courses,” I announced. “Herring pâté with rosemary on walnut bread. Tea-smoked eel ravioli seared with caramelized garlic and bay leaf. And as
touche finale
, rum-poached figs stuffed with Pilfered Blue cheese and drizzled with honey.”

Slowly, begrudgingly, a smile softened her features. She passed her nose over each, inhaling deeply, before spooning the glistening ravioli onto her plate. We ate without speaking. It was gratifying to do away with courses and take each taste as it called to me, every so often sipping wine to clean my tongue.

Blotting her lips with a silk damask napkin, she said, “My dear, you’ve proven yourself again. What do you think about while you chop and knead? Help me forget this ship for a minute.”

The ravioli slid voluptuously about the plate, attended by the firefly aromas of bay leaf and garlic. Their skins were tender between the teeth, yielding at the last moment to an eddy of smoked eel. I chewed for a moment before answering.

“I have begun to think of the mouth as a temple, of the kind that Adam and Eve might have made in a cave. The temple is open on both ends. On one side is the known world, lit by the sun and in the order nature and man have designed. On the other end is darkness and transformation. Between these poles of birth and death, serenity and insanity, lies taste.

“It is our greatest grace, a gift reserved for men alone. A dog sups on gutter filth, and a horse eats grass; they have tongues yet do not taste. Taste is the sense that was most defiled by the transgression of the forbidden fruit; it was this betrayal of the most intimate of the senses that so angered the Lord and sent us wandering out here.”

Then, thinking I might have won a certain degree of influence, I suggested: “Both of our lives would be made considerably better with but a sprinkling of shaved black truffles.”

“I’ll have my boys find some next we land.”

“I doubt your men could. Truffles are a cook’s treasure, buried in rare and secret places. And the wrong mushroom, Captain, would make our last meal.”

Mabbot considered this as she chewed. Finally she said, “You’re a strange man, Wedgwood.” She served herself a second helping of the pâté. “Where does this strange man come from? Do we know each other well enough yet for you to tell me?”

“Perhaps not, Captain.”

“Is that how you play? She must show hers first? Very well, I’m happy enough to talk about myself, I so rarely get to. But it must be a fair exchange.

“Someone birthed me, that much I’m confident of—the rest is hearsay and heresy. I too am an orphan. Mine was a city home. I spent my first years in a many-roomed house where the mold made fantastic patterns on the walls, where the rain came and went freely through holes in the roof, where mice enjoyed great privilege and opportunity, where nothing was expected of us save obedience. We didn’t complain of being rented out to sweep chimneys or glean orchards or sort coal. At the proud age of ten years, some of us little damsels—I say ‘little’ only because we were terribly thin—were brought to another house altogether where the beds were soft and well used and we were given company, sometimes a dozen times a day. Tell me, Wedge, do you know what a merkin is?”

“I can’t say I do…” I stammered.

“Well, that’s a credit to your character, probably. They’re itchy, leave it at that.”

Mabbot was sniffing the food again, enjoying its aroma with a vitality I had never witnessed in Ramsey, but the grim tale she told kept me sober.

“Who does not love a lovely child?” she said, with a half smile. “Who can resist having a little fun? The world came to me; I had neither to move nor speak and great men came to play: barristers, lords, men of industry, indeed even royalty. Oh, the fun they had! Fun enough for a lifetime, I should say. One gentleman brought his daughter’s nightclothes for me to wear. Believe it. God dug no deeper pit than a man’s skull.”

I could only blink at her. Each word out of her mouth was worse than the last. I felt suddenly naked and pulled my jacket tightly around me. Did no one protect her? I saw her as a child on a filthy mattress and could not hide the horror on my face.

She said, “You little daisy, Wedge, you blanch so easily. I’ll move along. Feeling quite undeserving of the gifts we were receiving, my friend Evangeline and I stole out one night and slept in alleys and upon the rooftops of London, during which time she acquired a stubborn cough. I left her blue and wheezing upon a doctor’s doorstep.

“The street is where I studied the fine art of availing myself of people’s latent generosity,” she continued. “I never took more than my share, nor from those who couldn’t afford to replace it. Nevertheless, men with clubs didn’t appreciate my lifestyle—but the fun we had in those jailhouses! You may think wardens and officers a dull bunch, but they like to play with a child as much as anyone. From there to the orphanage, from which I flew again like a spit seed. I was housed for a time by the judge I told you about, then on to other cities to escape my reputation. I shaved my head to hide myself; this hair can be seen, I’m told, from quite a distance. Well, it was seen by a privateer you may have heard of: Sean Corey, the Rake of the Great Horn. I liked this one. Oh, I did. I kept him warm in those frozen waters for six years before we were ambushed. He was captured and leaped dancing from a gallows in Newfoundland. You can imagine my disappointment. I led the ragged survivors to reclaim our ship from the admiral who had seized us, and deposed him myself.”

“Deposed?”

“Deposed his neck, mostly. With a salad fork. It earned me the respect of our crew, and they elected me captain, and that was the beginning of my career, I suppose. I was still dressing as a man back then. But look at me, going off like a teakettle. Your turn now, Wedge. Fair’s fair.”

Mabbot took the last two ravioli from the tray. Here, at last, was a true appetite, who had seen the caverns of death and yet clung hard to life, who chose daily where to be in the world. I had thought myself content to cook for lords and ladies whose natures were passive, to whom things were brought. Cooking for Mabbot was altogether different. She had nothing but what she took. For her, my cuisine was well earned and relished with a vigor that made my palms sweat.

Of course, she was a tyrant and a criminal, but when she ate, I saw in her a radiant life, a deep hunger, and an almost pious reflection on each moment. When she swallowed, her nostrils flared like those of a running horse, yet her hunger was sophisticated. The ladies I had served in the past knew how to hold salad forks and discuss the latest fashions, yet their palates were blind. Mabbot claimed each dish as Moses’s men claimed the land of milk and honey.

I took myself a fig, considering what to tell her. It had cooled in the sweet amber glaze. Inside, though, the cheese was still warm, and the liquor of the stewed fruit and salty tang of the aged cheese made me speechless for a moment.

“That good, is it?” Mabbot said, reaching for one herself.

Surrendering to the seduction of the food made me pliable. Why hold anything back? What would silence win me?

“I was left on the back stoop of the monastery in a crate of freshly dug potatoes, one muddy lump among many,” I told her. “So I assume my mother was a farmer. The potatoes must have been her way of offering payment to the monks for my care.”

“How do you know it was your mother?” Mabbot asked, taking the fig in small bites and letting it dissolve in her mouth.

“At times, I imagine I can remember her voice,” I said. “Who knows? There I was, gnawing with my one tooth the slick nub of a potato. Father Sonora found me on his way out to gather mushrooms. He did not pick me up right away but left me on the stoop in the cold until he came back, his apron pregnant with morels. Only when he saw that I was still there, not crawled away, nor retrieved by a regretful mother, nor devoured by a hungry dog, did he kick the crate inside, accepting me as another of God’s burdens. He must have felt some guilt about this later, as he confessed it to me more than once. As a boy I was sensitive to the cold. I still can’t bear it, and he blamed my time on the winter stoop for my infirmity.

“Because of my frailty, I couldn’t room with the other boys who slept in the dormitory with their breath making clouds above their faces. I thrived only in the steam bath of his kitchen. When moved into colder chambers, I wheezed so frighteningly that I was allowed to sleep on a cot near the curative heat of his stove all the time. I was nursed on warm goat yogurt and spoonfuls of Father Sonora’s
cocido
, a dish too sublime to be called bean stew.”

“A Spaniard?”

“He’d been sent by Rome to help reestablish a Jesuit diocese and had ended up in the kitchen of the orphanage. He said, ‘Apparently the Lord would have me serve Him by serving you breakfast.’ It was a stroke of luck for me; I grew up eating roast lamb skewered between mint leaves, empanadas stuffed with ground beef and olives, and each summer when our garden finally gave up a few tomatoes and cucumbers, we celebrated with gazpacho.”

It was surprisingly comforting to say his name. It reminded me that I had another life before this one. Just the thought of Father Sonora made me weepy, and I forced myself to keep talking.

“His soup was nourishing, but it was his bread that stays with me. Sonora was a master baker, and though I know exactly how he made his loaves, to this day I cannot re-create their crusts, crisp as sycamore bark.”

“I thought you said your father was a cobbler.”

“This was what the monks told me. Probably a kindness to spare me from feeling a bastard. I was Sonora’s ward, and he, grumpy old man, was my earth and sky. Eventually I was forced to sleep in the dorm with the other orphans, but when we were given free time twice a day, once after matins and once again before vespers, whereas the other boys played, I went back to the kitchen to sit near the hearth and watch him work.”