Pirate King (18 page)

Unfortunately, the crowd soon thinned, a feather bed was successfully folded and inserted into the companionway with only a minor eruption of down, the last parcels were brought aboard (including, yes, Mr Pessoa’s traditional Portuguese dresses), and I was left with no distraction from what lay before me.

A very small boat, wasn’t it? And despite being in rather better condition than I’d anticipated, and showing signs of very recent and highly aggressive cleaning, it was still an old boat,
and
laden with a distressing number of chronically excitable people. My gaze travelled unwillingly down the twin masts (they did look more nearly parallel, didn’t they?) seizing on the occasional encouraging sign of a new rope and a gleam of varnish. The masts and beams showed no obvious sign of rot, the fore mast appeared to have a full complement of sails, and the aft mast, although naked of canvas, seemed to have the rest of its rigging in place. There were even a few scraps of fresh paint, one of which was her name.

“Ready to come aboard, Miss Russell?”

The high voice brought my eyes down to my next immediate challenge: the deck itself. La Rocha stood at the far end of the gangway, his meaty hands gripping the top of the bulwarks. His teeth were bared in a grin, and he exuded a most proprietary air. A pirate king, in all his particulars.

“Mr La Rocha—” I began.

“Captain.”

I sighed: another actor who had fallen in love with his character. “Won’t that rather confuse matters? I mean to say, the
Harlequin
’s captain may object.”

“I am
Harlequin
captain, Miss Russell.”

My jaw fell open. I felt it drop, and could only stare, but he just grinned all the wider. “Mr Fflytte buy
Harlequin
, I sail it for him. What, you think I was schoolteacher, maybe?”

“But, I thought … a fisherman?”

“Yes! On ship. Ship just like this, once. Come, Miss Russell. Everyone else on board.”

Yes, that was the rub, wasn’t it?
Everyone else:
all the people for whom I was responsible. I stood gaping up at him, wondering why I felt as if a spider had just invited me to see his nice web.

I took a deep breath, and set my foot on the worn gangway.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

MAJOR-GENERAL
: As I lay in bed awake,
I thought I heard a noise.

E
VEN WITH THE
tide sucking us towards the open sea, it took us forever to reach it.

La Rocha’s crew was—I should have guessed it—our pirates.

Except that most of the men clearly hadn’t worked under sail for years, if ever, yet La Rocha absolutely insisted that we use the sails. The rest of us shifted around in front of the crew like herded sheep, trying to find a square foot of deck that might not be required by a man pulling on a rope—and continually failing to anticipate the antics of the racing, sweating figures. Eventually we were driven into four or five tight knots, and there we stayed, gazing at the antics.

Except that the antics of unpractised men made La Rocha roar, then sent him rigid and silent with fury while Samuel took over the roaring. The girls tittered when our captain’s voice climbed shrilly and commented at every slip of the hand and foot. Then the sailors’ tongues started as well, the meaning of their words plain despite the foreign languages, and the mothers hastily escorted their charges below, joined by most of the other girls.

Which left the rest of us—the men, six women, and me—shifting from amusement to discomfort to growing alarm. Finally, when we had spun lazily less than a mile from the port and twice nearly collided with other ships, Fflytte decided to take charge of operations. Hale tried to stop him, but the director shook off his cousin’s hand and marched down to the quarterdeck, where La Rocha’s hands gripped the wheel so hard one imagined the wood creaking while Samuel cursed one of the younger men dangling overhead—Irving or Jack, I wasn’t sure—for pulling on the wrong rope and sending everything into a tangle.

“I say,” Fflytte called as he went up the two small steps, “wouldn’t it be easier to just set the engine going and try out the sails when we have a little more elbow room? That last fellow seemed a bit—”

Only Samuel’s lightning reactions saved the director from a hospital bed. The belaying pin left La Rocha’s grip just as Samuel’s fist made impact, deflecting the heavy wood three inches shy of its target: Instead of smashing into Fflytte’s face, it took a chunk out of the rail, spun in the air, and splashed into the water. La Rocha turned on his lieutenant with his own clenched fist, but Samuel stood his ground. The two men stared at each other for an unnerving length of time before La Rocha’s shoulders subsided a fraction and Samuel raised his chin to yell at the boy in the rigging. Neither man acknowledged Fflytte’s presence, ten feet away.

White-faced, Fflytte crept back to where Hale and I stood. I removed my hand from the knife in my boot, and made myself sit. Fflytte mopped his forehead with a handkerchief, and said in a shaking voice, “Best not to interrupt the fellow when he’s upset. He’ll sort them out in a minute.”

Indeed, in a minute Adam (who seemed to know what he was doing) directed Jack (or Irving) to the correct rope, and the dead canvas overhead began to stir, as if dimly calling to mind its purpose in life.

And then, magic: The canvas awoke.

With a startling crack and a jolt of the ship, the canvas filled, proud and taut.
Harlequin
gave a little sigh of relief and settled into place behind her square-rigged foremast, creaking all over as ten thousand planks, long accustomed to the ignominious drive of an engine’s screw, made their infinitesimal adjustments to the draw from above. The men cheered, Fflytte leapt up and clapped his hands, and I tipped my head back to watch the wind carrying us to sea.

Harlequin
was, now that the accretions of the fishing trade had been hacked away, a brigantine, a two-masted ship (as Randolph Fflytte, instantaneous expert on all things maritime, had informed anyone who came within earshot the day before) designed expressly for nimbleness and flexibility. The fore mast had square sails, the kind that fly at right angles—square—to the line of the hull. These had beams along their tops—called yards—and a great deal of the shouting had been in encouraging the men to inch along the looped ropes strung beneath the yards, clinging for their lives as they prepared to loose the ties and drop the canvas. Not a job I would care for, myself, even in the softest wind.

The other mast, rising up just in front of the quarterdeck, held a different kind of sail. Fflytte had called them fore-and-aft sails and, as one might expect, they were arranged along the front-to-back line of the ship, rather than across it. Where the fore mast was fitted with four yards that sails dropped down from, the aft mast possessed a long yard at the bottom from which the big mainsail would be lifted. This yard, which was low enough to require the occupants of the quarterdeck to duck under it, looked a bit naked, since it had no canvas—no doubt the reason we’d brought two sail-makers on board at the last minute. Studying it, I decided its current nudity was probably a good thing: That massive beam would surely swing around when the wind hit its canvas, and in the confusion of getting out of the harbour, it would have bashed in the skull of anyone but Randolph Fflytte or the diminutive Linda.

As I traced the myriad of ropes and canvas and bits of machinery over my head, I saw that there was a third variety of sails on the guy-wires—stays—that ran between the two masts and from deck to masts, locking everything in place. These staysails were long triangles, and like the mainsails, they rose from below instead of dropping from yards.

Once the men were safely down from the yards, orders came to haul on various ropes. By close concentration, I could follow the lines from men through tackle and up into the heights—and I saw the yard lift from its locked position to swivel on the mast, reaching for the wind.

What a remarkably complicated piece of technology this was.

Harlequin
did have an engine (at any rate, she had a mass of metal connected to a propeller—I tried not to think what it might do if someone tried to start it up) but she was old enough that it had to be an addition. Originally, in the absence of wind (or, for tight manoeuvres in the days of the
brigantino
), she would have depended on the sweeps—long oars—for propulsion. There were still a handful of the brackets to fit them into.

Of course, were she an actual pirate ship,
Harlequin
would also have carried up to a dozen cannon; I counted among my blessings that she was not fitted for them now. If she had been, surely Fflytte and La Rocha would have goaded each other into capturing a passing American passenger steamer. For the sake of realism.

With our captain’s squall of rage safely past and the little ship on the move, the girls drifted back on deck. To my surprise, they voiced no outraged complaints, no-one stormed across the deck to demand that we instantly put back to land. I was braced for the reaction of civilised English girls faced with the filthy, cramped, and stinking conditions of a fishing boat below decks, and it did not come.

Looking around, it dawned on me that a minor miracle had taken place:
Harlequin
was clean, scrubbed down to raw wood in places. The air smelt not of fish, but of Jeyes Fluid. The change extended to the deck fittings themselves: Without the various bins, nets, and tackles that it had worn on first sight, the vessel looked almost bare. A tall deckhouse rose behind the fore mast, with a raised sky-light under the main mast and the quarterdeck at the back: Apart from those interruptions, the deck (its surface currently pocked with bolt-holes and fresh splinters) was clear.

Our crew, keenly aware of that chorus of blue eyes upon them, gained in confidence; a few of them even demonstrated a bit of piratical swagger. There came another dangerous moment when we reached the sea, and either the wind changed or it was just that we turned southward. The deck took on an alarming tilt; the wind began to whistle around our ears. Activity erupted, involving a lot of complicated adjustments and running about, with enraged cursing in several languages—this time the girls found their own reasons to retreat hastily below decks, to change for dinner. Eventually, we settled into the new course, having neither keeled over nor witnessed murder.

Without a mainsail, we could not move very rapidly despite the brisk wind. So I was not surprised, as cooking smells rose from below, to see the sail-makers go to a small hatch in the bow and begin to haul out an incredible quantity of canvas. When they’d completed this magician’s scarf trick and covered the deck in canvas, they set to work.

As I watched the two men tug and measure, I became aware of the steady tick of the camera, recording the activity despite the setting sun and an absence of sail-makers in Fflytte’s script. Will had told me that he always came away from a movie with hundreds of feet of excess film, some of which was never intended for the subject at hand. And lest I imagine those hours were of stockings being eased down ankles, he revealed a secret passion for nature photography. “Most amazing shots I got one time of porpoises playing. Like ballroom dancing, it was.”

Tonight, the light was too dim for much, so he folded away his equipment and said to me, “We’ve got Maurice cooking, at last.”

“Who’s Maurice?”

“Ah, that’s right, you’re new, and he’s just got in from Paris. Maurice was Mr Hale’s idea. He figures that if you’re asking actors to spend weeks locked at sea or in the desert or what have you, the least you can do is see they’re well fed. Which is a fine theory until you go looking for a cook who doesn’t mind being locked at sea or in the desert. But he finally found Maurice, who’s mad enough to love every minute of it. Swears he hates it, does Maurice. Crashes his pans and curses up a storm—not much in English when there’s girls around—and acts like it’s a personal victory to come up with lovely food under the most appalling conditions. Wait ’til you see.”

This was a long speech from Will, suggesting great affection for the cook and his labours. I hated to disappoint him; however:

“I, er, tend not to eat much on board a ship.”

“I remember. You don’t look too bad at the moment.”

I considered the statement, and said in surprise, “No, I’m feeling all right, so far.”

“How’s the food smell?”

“Delicious, actually.”

“Then you might try it. Maybe you’ve got used to sailing.”

It seemed unlikely, as I’d been ill on every voyage I could remember, but he was right, the odours trickling up onto the deck had my stomach rumbling rather than clenching, which was an entirely new experience. Gingerly, I followed him down the narrow steps, ready to retreat into fresh air at every moment. But the air smelt of nothing but good, and all remained calm as I washed my hands and changed from the trousers I had put on in Cintra the previous morning, then ventured into the galley.

It was set with linen and crystal. The air smelt of honey, from a small forest of beeswax candles that brought with them the odour of home. Laden bowls and platters were carried in, and I found that still, the food smelt gorgeous. It tasted better. I had a glass of wine, and ate everything.

Gazing down at the fruit compote that was dessert, I laughed aloud.

Annie, sitting across from me, looked over with a question. I explained, “It would appear that sail travel agrees with me.”

She smiled, uncertainly, and poured a dollop of thick cream over her plate.

Later that night, the girls, worn out by fresh air and excitement compounded by a rich meal, turned early to the singular experience of making one’s bed inside a hammock (except for Bibi, who was ensconced into a private cabin so small, her feather bed ran up the walls on three sides). They giggled and wrestled their way into the strange objects, shrieking in merry alarm as the taut canvas cradles flipped them out the other side. Then Annie either analysed the problem or recalled past experience, and loosened the ropes through her hammock’s overhead hooks. Sagging, the object proved less impossible to mount, and the others followed her example. Although a couple of the mothers absolutely refused to submit to the indignity, settling instead onto the hard bunks around the edges, the others were soon bundled triumphantly inside their soft wrappings. Talk and restless adjustments of extremities and blankets quickly gave way before the rocking motion, and soon the hold was nothing but a collection of silent cocoons, swaying in gentle unison.