Run Afoul (23 page)

To keep Midshipman Keith out of range of Forsythe's unpredictable temper, Rochester gave his young first officer the day's liberty, along with one of the brig's boats.

“You spoil the lad,” said Wiki, looking Keith severely up and down.

“He deserves it.”

“For running your ship afoul?”

Pausing only to cast Wiki a deeply reproachful glance, Constant Keith set off. Wiki saw him take the boat to Enxados Island and sprint up the boat stairs, and about a half hour later saw it sail off into the harbor. He imagined the boy spending the day exploring the riotous, exotic markets, but instead, when young Keith arrived back, well after dark, he reported with pride that he and Midshipman Dicken had climbed Sugar Loaf Mountain.

It had been quite a struggle, he declared; he and Dicken had taken turns to haul each other over numerous precipices and many rocky crags. They had been somewhat dashed to get all the way to the summit, only to find a message in a bottle, telling the world that some British officers had beaten them to it. “But never mind,” he ebulliently went on. “We wrote our names on the bottom of the paper, announcing that we were the first
Americans
to do it, and put it back in the bottle.” Then he and Jack Dicken had toasted the great United States Exploring Expedition in a flask of wine, and had scrambled and slid all the way back down to the bottom.

Even more dampening was the official reprimand that was borne to the brig early next morning by Midshipman Dicken, who was redder in the face than ever, and still flinching from a verbal battering. Captain Wilkes had been
surprised
and
disappointed
to learn that two of his officers had climbed Sugar Loaf—just to have something to boast about later!—that they had climbed all that way without taking a single measurement! And, forthwith, he had ordered them to repeat the feat this very day, this time with a team of volunteers, and carrying the proper equipment. And, he had snapped at the conclusion of the tirade, the two midshipmen were not to dare to even
think
of returning until they had a set of reliable figures!

“Volunteers?”
Midshipman Keith exclaimed. “Where the devil am I going to find
volunteers?
” he demanded of Wiki.

He, like his friend Jack Dicken, was hefting a number of enigmatic contraptions, including a two-foot-long mahogany case which held a mysterious assemblage of glass tubes filled with various oils. “A sympiesometer,” said Constant Keith grumpily, when Wiki asked about it, and then unbent to explain, “It's a kind of barometer that tells variations in the weather.”

“You're using a barometer to measure a
mountain?
”

“Why not?” said Keith.

Wiki had no answer to that. Shaking his head in bemusement, he walked along the wharf to watch the work on the
Osprey,
which was a lot more comprehensible. As he perched on his favorite bollard, he could hear Keith and Dicken trying to talk Sua and Tana into volunteering, and the two Samoans having a lot of fun at the lads' expense. Then he was distracted by the sight of his father stalking down the quay with six young mariners in tow.

Wiki straightened, and Captain Coffin, looking rather harried, introduced his cadets. Wiki shook hands solemnly with them all. They had solid Salem names like Derby, Cheever, and Follansbee, and, while they immediately set out to impress Wiki with grand tales of Canton and the Pearl River, Macao and Manila, they all looked very young and somewhat overawed.

For a while, he thought they were intimidated by meeting a strongly built brown man with long black hair, as so many
pakeha
were, but then he saw that they cast many flickering looks from Captain Coffin and back to him again, secretly comparing their faces, and Wiki realized that they knew their captain was his father. Because of that, no doubt, they treated him with vast respect, asking him many questions about how and why he had joined the exploring expedition, and what adventures he had experienced before and since, while Captain Coffin listened with an air of relief that time was being wasted like this.

“You're wondering how to fill in your day,” Wiki shrewdly guessed when the questions ran to a stop.

They looked at each other, then back at Wiki, and nodded. Usually, the mate found them jobs to do, but today he was in town on business. Captain Coffin had brought them to the
Osprey
in the hope of finding work on the hove-down hull, but the carpenters didn't want them, and so they were at a loose end.

“Ah,” said Wiki, with perfect understanding. To his hidden amusement, his father had a hopeful glint in his half-closed eye. “Would you like me to find them something to do?” he asked him.

His father cleared his throat, fought unsuccessfully to hide his mighty relief, and said, “Well, now that you mention it—”

“How would you like to measure a mountain with a barometer?” Wiki inquired of the boys. The cadets looked baffled, but gamely nodded.

“Well,” he said. “I have just the thing for you. Not only is there a mountain for you to measure, but I know just the men to lead you to it.”

“You young devil,” said his father, five minutes later. They were standing together on the quay watching the string of boys carried off by a hugely thankful pair of midshipmen.

“They'll enjoy it,” Wiki confidently assured him.

“With two wet-behind-the-ears junior officers in charge, God alone knows what they'll get up to,” Captain Coffin grumbled. “I thought you were offering to take care of them yourself.”

“I'm far too busy,” said Wiki loftily.

“You don't look very busy to me. What does linguisting involve, anyway?”

“It's too complicated to go into now. And I want to ask you some questions.”

“In your capacity as sheriff?”

Wiki ignored this. “Have you ever heard of Grimes before?”

“Isn't he the man who was poisoned?”

“I'm glad to see you still have all your faculties, including your memory,” Wiki dryly observed, and then said, “I wondered if you've heard Sir Patrick Palgrave mention him.”

“Why the devil should he mention that man? He's never met him, has he?”

“Grimes told us that in Cambridge, England, he worked as a gardener and glasshouse designer for a man named Sir Roger Palgrave.”

“Good God,” said his father, looking extremely startled. “It certainly sounds as if he worked for Sir Patrick's father—but what a coincidence!”

“Not really,” said Wiki. “Sir Roger Palgrave paid to have him trained in the science of optical glass, with such impressive results that he was hired by an American astronomer as his assistant—and when the astronomer joined the expedition, it was only natural that he brought Grimes with him.”

“It proved fatal for Grimes.”

“Perhaps—and perhaps not.”

“What do you mean? He died from poisoning, didn't he? It's a fate he would have escaped if he hadn't sailed with the expedition, surely.”

“According to the colonial analyst—who, presumably, knows what he is talking about—the strychnine that accidentally got into his medicine wasn't the primary cause of death. Grimes had weak lungs, and so forth—and so I wondered if his health had always been bad.”

“I wouldn't have a notion,” his father said. “Sir Patrick has certainly never mentioned the man to me. If you're desperate to know, you can ask him tomorrow night.”

Wiki said, surprised, “You know I've been invited?”

“Of course. Lieutenant Forsythe and the six scientifics have been invited, too, as well as all the men who have offered to host the survey party.”

“So it's going to be a conference? I thought it was a social occasion.”

“Is that wrong?” his father demanded, taking exception to something in Wiki's tone of voice that Wiki hadn't intended. “It's obvious that you dislike Sir Patrick Palgrave, but once you get to know him, you'll find that he is a very clever man, extremely artistic. Wait until you see his gardens, and then you will understand what I mean—they're really quite spectacular. A feast is an enjoyable way for the surveying party and their prospective hosts to get acquainted.”

“Do you have any idea why he stipulated that I should go on the survey?”

“Consider it an honor,” his father said grumpily, without answering. “Just concentrate on making an effort to be pleasant—and don't eat with your fingers, either. I know it's the way you were brought up to eat, but in Brazil it's not considered polite.”

Wiki looked away. It was moments like these that he almost wished he used tobacco. Back home in the Bay of Islands, smoking had become all the rage. Everyone had a pipe almost constantly in his or her mouth, down from the most ancient
kuia
to children who could barely walk. Wiki found the smell and taste of tobacco foul, but if he had a pipe right now, he would be able to light it with great concentration, and pretend he hadn't heard.

Lacking one, he tilted his head and studied the clouds swimming in the sky above the two tall masts of the
Swallow.
Then he heard his father add, “And when you talk to Sir Patrick, don't start cross-examining him, either. He won't like the implications at all.”

It almost sounded as if his father had told Sir Patrick Palgrave about his letter of authority from the sheriff's department of the Town of Portsmouth, Virginia. Surely not, Wiki thought with a frown.

Then his father distracted him by saying even more irritably, “You should take a damn sight more care when choosing your friends.”

Wiki said frostily, “I beg your pardon?”

“He's a crass, ignorant, foulmouthed boor.”

It was obvious who he was talking about. Much of the time, Wiki had the same opinion of Forsythe, but nonetheless his silence was chilly. Without even noticing, his father ran on, “And I'm not at all happy about him being in charge of the survey. I don't want Sir Patrick and his friends to be offended or insulted, so I made up my mind to join the group.”

Dear God,
thought Wiki, this was looking for trouble with a vengeance. The prospect of Forsythe and Captain Coffin trekking through the jungle together was quite horrible.

He couldn't say that, however, so asked, “You will be at Sir Patrick's house tomorrow night?”

“Of course,” said his father loftily. “I look forward to seeing you there.”

*   *   *

A whole fleet of small boats converged on Praia Grande the night of the feast, because the officers and captains of the discovery expedition had been invited to a grand ball that was staged in rooms just a couple of hundred yards from the Palgrave mansion. George Rochester had declined, taking the chance of a quiet evening without Forsythe charging around, and had sent Constant Keith in his place. Accordingly, the young man was in the boat, dressed up to the nines in his best uniform.

The row across the bay was beautiful. The water was like a sheet of satin, undisturbed by even the slightest breeze. Men's voices echoed back and forth in the cool, soft air, and the drops falling from the blades of the oars glowed with phosphorescence. The landing was rather hard to find, and they milled around uncertainly until an orchestra struck up in the distance, creating a musical beacon. Wiki, stepping out onto the beach, watched Midshipman Keith and the other expedition officers head off toward the ballroom, following the strains through the trees.

Then Forsythe materialized out of the darkness, and together they turned in the other direction, following a gravel driveway into the shadows of an avenue. Their footsteps crunched and then silenced as they left the path and started walking across a soft lawn. The smell of grass rose up to merge with the perfume of night-scented flowers. In the moonlight Wiki could glimpse formal gardens stretching out into the dark distance like the spokes of a wheel, with a fountain in the center. Even in the dimness, it was impressive.

Sir Patrick Palgrave's mansion lay right ahead, a dainty affair surrounded by a colonnaded patio, and with shafts of lights streaming out of many windows. As they neared, Wiki could smell tobacco, wine, and brandy, and hear masculine voices, mostly speaking Portuguese. Through open French doors women could be seen clustered on chairs in a long salon, listening to the strains of a mandolin. To Wiki's surprise, the musician was Madame de Roquefeuille. She was wearing white, and her copper hair was coiled into a bright, unadorned knot in the nape of her bent neck. The varnish of the pear-shaped instrument gleamed, and the long neck of the mandolin was decorated with colorful ribbons.

There seemed to be some sort of separation of the sexes. While the women were gathered in the brightly lit salon, sipping wine, eating tidbits, and gossiping as they listened to the music, the men were on the loggia, clustered in the rectangles of light that fell from inside. A couple of maids progressed from dimness to brightness, passing around trays of drinks and
aperitivo
plates.

In one of the shafts of light, Wiki could see Sir Patrick Palgrave deep in conversation with Dr. Olliver. He stopped to watch them, amused by the contrast they made, one scar-faced and as lean as a greyhound, the other heavily bearded and positively balloonlike in form. Yet, somehow, it was possible to tell that they were both English—because of their erect backs, he supposed, and the way they tucked in their chins. In another illuminated patch, farther along the loggia, Captain Coffin was talking animatedly with Captain Couthouy. As far as he knew, the two Massachusetts shipmasters had never met before, but they had obviously struck up an instant friendship, having so much in common. No doubt, he thought, his father was in full imaginative flight, and telling tall yarns. Then, with a frown, he noticed that Forsythe was heading with intent toward the two men. Quickly, he set after him, intent on preventing trouble, but as he stepped onto the veranda, a strong hand came out from behind a pillar and grasped his arm.