Pirate King (28 page)

Separated by walls and armed guards, the violin and the piano combined, joined by a chorus of women. I waited tensely for the guards to storm in and quiet us, but either they were lovers of music themselves, or their instructions had not covered what to do if the
firengi
women next door burst into song.

And then a little after ten o’clock, the violin stopped. The women valiantly kept going for a song or two, but in a pause, Mrs Hatley sighed and said that she was tired. Annie’s hands remained at rest in her lap, and within the quarter hour, the piano was shrouded, the pillows gone, the rooftop lay empty and silent as the city around us.

I could only hope that the silencing of our other half had not been too brutal. I needed to speak with Holmes, which would be difficult if he’d been knocked unconscious.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

SAMUEL
: Your silent matches, your dark lantern seize,
Take your file and your skeletonic keys.

I
HAD SPENT
much of the day dozing in the sun, so as to be fresh for the evening’s activities. Holmes’ violin the night before had given me the location of his room; tonight, there was no need for the street. I waited impatiently for the house to grow still, then changed into my boy’s garments and eased open the door.

As I’d hoped, a cautious venture of my head over the high wall confirmed that the neighbouring rooftop was deserted, the guards safely indoors with their prisoners. I padded over to look at the door, finding to my irritation that it was bolted, not locked. It is difficult to pick a bolt. Fortunately, I had other means of reaching Holmes.

I looped my rope around a convenient sturdy lump—not as convenient as it might have been, unfortunately, placing me a good three feet to the side of where I wished—and walked backwards down the wall, as silent as I could be although the outside guard was nowhere in sight. As I came even with Holmes’ window, just ten feet down from the roof level, a pale hint of motion came from the side of the metal shutter: his waving fingers, confirming his presence.

I made myself as comfortable as one can be on a thin rope dangling twenty-five feet above cobblestones, and reached to slide my fingers through the narrow gap.

Two warm and oh, so welcome hands swarmed up to take possession of mine, and I felt happy for the first time in days. Well, perhaps
happy
is not the exact word, but I no longer felt quite so alone. I scooted over, searching in vain for an external anchor that would take some of my weight, and ended up stretched across the stones to hold my face to the window covering.

Before I could speak, a voice as much felt against my face as heard by my ear recited,
“ ‘What is that form? if not a shape of air, / Methinks, my jailor’s face shows wond’rous fair!’ ”
Perhaps Holmes, too, had once laboured under a Miss Sim?

“Thank you, Holmes.” I, too, breathed the words into the blackness within.

“Good evening, Russell. I regret having to ask you to seek me out.”

“All in a night’s exercise, Holmes. I could see that your windows are considerably more secure than ours.”

“A number of the fittings of the house make me suspect that this was at one time the harem. And, as you no doubt could infer, the search of our bags was scrupulous.”

“Well, they seem to be concentrating on you men—we have no inside guards beyond the housekeeper and her two maids. It would appear that our pirates meet few females with a streak of independence.”

“And a climbing rope,” he added.

“Extraordinary, isn’t it? The only thing they removed from my bag was the revolver. They must have thought my pick-locks were a manicure set.”

“You have your pick-locks?”

“Indeed I do. Shall I—”

“That would be a great service.”

I worked the leather pouch of tools from my pocket without dropping it, thumbed out a tool by touch, and slid it through the metalwork. He thanked me, and got to work.

“I heard a shotgun yesterday,” he remarked.

“A warning shot, literally, to let us know we were not permitted to look over the wall that separates our house from yours. They seem to have decided that the lesson was well learnt, because there’s no one on your roof tonight. And you, are you all well?”

“Mr Fflytte is nursing a sore head after protesting against our confinement—not that the situation itself seems to trouble him, oddly enough, but he grew increasingly restive during the day, and when the guards finally opened his door he expressed his outrage, that our confinement will interfere with the making of his film.”

“That sounds like him. Do you have any— Aah.”

The lock mechanism gave its whisper of release, and I shifted so Holmes could push the shutter out. I studied the resultant hole.

“I believe I can get inside,” I told him.

“But the process will be slow, and I would not wish you trapped here.”

However, the open sill meant that I could transfer a portion of my weight onto the sill and off my hands.

“You were asking me if I had something?” he prompted, when I was settled again.

“Yes, do you have any of the pirate crew with you?”

“I think not, although our only communication has been brief tapping on the walls—someone knows Morse code, although three others only imagine they do, which rather confuses matters. La Rocha and Samuel were in the house earlier—my first inkling of their presence was a shriek that made my blood run cold until I realised it was that accursed bird. In any event, Hale was brought out to speak with them, for quite some time, but the conversation took place behind closed doors in a room on the ground floor. After the two men left, Hale’s voice shouted out that if we are obedient tomorrow, we shall be permitted to gather in the courtyard during the afternoon. That is the only thing I have heard from any of them.”

“Carrots and sticks.”

“Precisely. What have you learned?”

“The town is small and its walls and gates maintained. As you may have seen when you were brought here—”

“We saw nothing: Sacks were drawn over our heads. A certain amount could be discerned by hearing and by—”

“Holmes,” I interrupted happily, “I shall never again complain about men who believe in the incompetence of women. Thanks to my freedom, I can tell you that we are in the north-east quadrant of Salé, about a hundred metres in from the walls.” I described all I had found during the previous night’s wanderings: gates, walls, guards, the road out, the ferry; the layout of our house, the orientation of the adjoining streets, the heap of rubble to the side. I gave details of house and inhabitants, the distribution of the bedrooms.

Then I came to the more complicated part, which concerned the characters acting out their parts inside our tight little stage.

Four sentences into my analysis, however, Holmes stopped me. “Perhaps you had better go through that more slowly.”

The section of my body resting on narrow stone had lost sensation and my arms ached, but I could not bring myself to be impatient with him, since it had taken me hours with mental graph paper to map out the permutations of all that I had gathered on the rooftop harem that day.

“We knew on the
Harlequin
that Adam is smitten with Annie,” I began. “However, paying close attention to her concerns during the day, she responds to remarks concerning Bert-the-Constable with approximately the same ratio of interest as she does to remarks about Adam-the-Pirate, even though I’d have said that Bert was more intent on a friendship with Jack than on reciprocating Annie’s affections. Jack, on the other hand, would rather follow Edith about, being unaware that Edith is a boy.”

“Edith is a boy?”

I was pleased to find
something
he’d missed. “Didn’t I mention that? Yes, I found Mrs Nunnally plucking her child’s emergent beard. Beyond those specific links, various of the girls are interested in the young pirates and the young constables interchangeably—any young male will do—but I should say that Mrs Hatley—”

“Mother of June.”

“Right. Mrs Hatley appears to retain both affection and hope regarding Geoffrey Hale—although it could as easily be a sort of psychic contagion spilling over from her rôle as the pirate’s nursemaid, Ruth, since she also pets Daniel Marks, her Frederic, at any given opportunity.”

“And yet I should have said that if Geoffrey Hale is interested in anyone, it’s his cousin Fflytte.”

My numb hands jerked along the rope and nearly spilled me to the paving stones.

“Russell? Are you there?”

“Yes, Holmes, merely startled. You think …?”

“They would not be the first aristocratic cousins we have known in … that situation.”

“Except that Fflytte has a reputation as a womaniser. And is currently—well, not currently, but until
Harlequin
intervened—associated with the picture’s choreographer, Graziella Mazzo.”

“Which association appears to trouble Hale considerably.”

“But, Mrs Hatley, and June …?”

“A man’s tastes may change. Or they may be, shall we say, inclusive.”

I thought about that, about one or two times when I had found Hale studying his cousin with an expression difficult to analyse. “You could be right. But what about La Rocha and Samuel?”

“You suggest they may have a similar, er, affection?”

“No! I mean to say, I hadn’t thought of …”

“I should think more along the lines of the Barbarossa brothers,” he said firmly.

“The sixteenth-century pirates.”

“Aruj the elder—called Red Beard by Europeans—and his brother Kheir-ed-Din,” Holmes mused. “Aruj was a brutal fist of a man, and became the virtual ruler of Algiers. When he died, his brother took over, and consolidated their base of power. He was every bit as merciless as Aruj had been, but he was also a sophisticate, educated, capable of seeing beyond the reach of a pirate ship.”

“Holmes, the length of time I wish to linger out here is limited.”

“I suspect that we may be caught up in a re-establishment of the Barbarossa empire.”

“What, in this little place? The smallest gunship of the British Navy could flatten Salé in an afternoon.”

“With thirty-four European citizens within its walls?”

He had a point. “So how do we remove His Majesty’s citizens from harm?”

“Having had a plenitude of time in which to reflect, I believe I have identified Mycroft’s agent here.”

“You don’t sound terribly pleased.”

“It’s Bert.”

“Really? But that’s good, isn’t— Ooh. Bert, who may be fond of Samuel’s younger son. I could be wrong,” I offered.

“I, too, have seen reason to believe that there are emotional ties there, ties that could make Bert less than wholehearted in his support of an escape.”

“If he’s Mycroft’s man, he’d never side against his countrymen.”

“Not consciously, I agree, but a slip of the tongue? A moment’s hesitation?”

I dangled glumly and had to agree: Mycroft’s undercover agent had best be considered a broken reed, and should not be brought into any plans. “For my part, the only person on my side of the wall with a degree of native wit is Annie, and I consider her judgment clouded by affection for Adam. Certainly, she seems to have a suspect degree of curiosity about the actions of others—you saw how every time one turns around, there she is, blinking her pretty blue eyes.”

“It is true, beauty and reliability rarely go hand in hand.”

Which rather trod underfoot the compliment with which he had greeted me. “Thank you, Holmes,” I muttered.

“Beg your pardon?”

“I said, It looks as if it’s up to the two of us, yet again.”

I remained at his window for another ten minutes or so while we discussed options and signals, then reluctantly I told him that I had to go or risk falling. He ordered me to give him one hand, which he massaged back to life, then the other. Feeling restored, I dug out my pocket-knife and held it into the inner darkness, then set about climbing back up the wall to the rooftop. Behind me, the metal shutter swung shut on silent hinges, and I reflected that Holmes had contrived to grease them, probably with a pat of butter from his breakfast. That he had done so spoke of his confidence in me.

As I set my hands upon the rope, there came a melodramatic whisper:

“ ‘And noiseless as a lovely dream is gone. / And was she here? and is he now alone?’ ”

I nearly fell off the rope laughing.

Warmed by his hands and his attitude, I walked up the wall to the rooftop. There I hung for a couple of minutes, peering over and waiting for motion, but the area was still deserted. I swung up and onto the rooftop, retrieved the rope and bound it around my waist, then clambered to the top of the high dividing wall to stretch my foot down for the bench, left against the wall.

Except that it was no longer there. Dangling, I craned to look over my shoulder, and saw two figures stand up from their seats on the bench, now ten feet distant.

They did not rush to seize me. After a moment’s thought, I let go and dropped to the roof, then turned to face my captors.

There came the scrape of a match, and a flame gave light to our tableau: Annie holding the flame to a candle, with at her side a smaller person. Oh, God: Edith.

All in all, I’d rather have confronted a pair of armed guards.