The Adventuress (34 page)

“And we’re down on our bellies swillin’ the water, with the torches glimmerin’ on the little ripples we make, when we see it shining gold like a city under the waves. Montpensier wades in—he’d been off his head since we found him—and he’s knockin’ his shins on some stones in the water. Big ones, like for a cathedral, rough and broken. Then the others are in there, too, pulling things from the water, things crusted like ancient crabs. Crowns, we find out. Golden crowns under a shell of rock and sand. Broken a bit, but real gold crowns. And neckpieces, pagan-like—heavy and thick. Things to eat and drink from, looking like strange rocks, all crusted and brown, but underneath it, the golden glint, you see!

“And finally Grimes and a Frenchy—I never caught his name—strip and go under, deep, holdin’ their breath.

“They come up asking for rope. Rope! We stranded without knowin’ where, with what flotsam we can burn and what foul water we can drink and what grass we can chew—and they want rope! But we find some washed up the next day, and they dive again and we all pull away in the shallows of the pool, and the torchlight catches it as up it comes up—big as a mastiff and covered in barnacles, but with the glint of gold shining. ’Twas a great golden man with the head of a homed beast—maybe Singh could tell you what it was—and we all gathered ’round and chipped at it with stones and watched the brittle barnacles fall off like a suit of armor. Oh, it was bright beneath. We never made much headway, I grant you, but we could see what we had. And there was more of it below, who knows how much?”

“Treasure!” I breathed. “Ancient treasure.”

“Archaeological treasure,” Irene said, caution in her voice. “Of course you couldn’t admit to it; the whole world would want a piece of the discovery.”

“As it turned out, couldn’t indeed. The winds had never quit. We heard them howling outside the cave. Inside, the pool was boiling. Maybe the gods of the golden man were angry with our meddling. Maybe the sea still had a finger in it. Anyway, we were sleeping and dreaming of wealth, every man jack of us, lord and lowborn, and that night the water washed in, racked the rocks that had been our shelter, filled up the cave like to drown us right then.

“Most of us struggled out and lay quaking on the sand. And lucky we were, for behind us, the cave—it already was half-submerged—simply cracked and crumbled into the tide. All that stone and sand and gold washing out to sea. In the morning we found a few pieces, a broken bit of crown, a pot of glass. But the golden man-beast was gone.

“We sat right down and wrote an oath in the sand, each and every one of us, that we would tell no one, but would return and claim the treasure secretly when we could. The tattoos was my idea, Singh bein’ handy and we havin’ time to occupy until we was rescued. His oilskin pouch of inks and needles had never left his waist. It diverted the party, you see.

“One of the Frenchmen went up on a prominence and sketched the shoreline. Then we counted that there was seventeen still alive, so we divided into quarters, each oath-bound to keep track of one another. The others wouldn’t admit Singh to our company, him being heathen, though I always figured, like I said, to share my portion with him. So poor Singh did the needlework; for all he wasn’t worthy of a share, he was worth double most of the others. Each man of a Quarter bears on his breast one point of the compass and a fourth portion of the shoreline where the treasure lay.

“Later, when Montpensier died, I had Singh tattoo my portion on hisself. Singh and I could count for two now, I figured. Claude was always talking of his little daughter, so I swore to see that Louise got her share when the time came. Our pact allowed that if one of us died afore- times.”

“But
several
of you died aforetimes,” Godfrey noted.

Jerseyman nodded and tightened his three-fingered grip on the tankard.

“How were you rescued?” I ventured in the silence.

“Greek freighter, full of olives, bound for Marseilles. Saw our signal fire a half a league off and scooped us all up
lik
e we was guppies in a pond.”

“Someone,” Irene repeated, as if barely heeding Jerseyman’s exotic tale, “had to oversee the whole.”

“The gennelmun,” Jerseyman admitted at last.

“What gentleman?”

“Don’t know. That was the idea of the tattoos, wasn’t it, that names didn’t matter? Though two Quarters were sea folk like ourselves, eight of the survivors were passengers, gennelmun all. One undertook to direct this scheme.”

“There must have been a way for you to communicate.”

“Monte Carlo. This very cafe.”

“For almost twenty years?” Godfrey sounded skeptical. “The cafe might have vanished.”

“Didn’t, though, did it?” Jerseyman looked smug despite his grief. “Maybe the gennelmun saw to it. And there was the system.”

“Ah.” Irene looked intensely interested. “What was it?”

“We was to write here once yearly and to slap a special sealing wax on our letters as a sign that we were in a Quarter. When the time was ripe for a go at the hoard, we’d get a letter with the selfsame wax upon it, and head here. Then off we’d all scamper to get our loot at last.”

“How could you be sure that others in the league wouldn’t precede you to the treasure?” Godfrey wondered.

“Beg pardon, sir?”

“That they wouldn’t beat you to it?”

The sailor shrugged. “Couldn’t be sure, save that it’d take a crew to raise that lot, and who’d keep themselves mum but those that stood to gain by it? ’Course, there’s nothing to say that some villain couldn’t cut the Quarters down so there’d be less to share.”

“And the special sealing wax, how did you come by it?”

Jerseyman regarded Irene with eyes nearly screwed shut. “We all got a chunk of it as big as your fist—or my fist, ma’am. Parceled out like gold at these very tables nigh twenty years ago, and seals for each point of the French compass.”

“Parceled out by the ‘gennelmun’?” Irene asked sardonically.

“Yes’m.”

“Yet you used this scarce wax on your letters to Louise’s uncle—”

‘To put an air of importance on the letters. An’ it was Quarter business, after all. Looked right royal on the envelopes, official-like, even if the insides was unlettered. Grimes, rest him, could only print. We relied on Paddy for the French—his mother was Calais born— though we gave him an idea of what to say.”

“Apparently your ‘gennelmun’ gave you more than enough sealing wax for side ventures. You have no recollection of what he looked like?”

“Oh, I do, ’deed I do. Only that was twenty years ago and I look nothin’ like meself then. But he was a young fellow, quiet and gennelmunly, of ordinary height, dark- brown hair, eyes like muddy water, and wearing sideburns and mutton chops. But a man’s facial adornments may change in twenty years.”

“But not a tattoo.”

“No’m. Not a tattoo.”

Irene sighed. “Was he French?”

“French? Yes.”

Godfrey leaned forward, looking particularly villainous in his Black Otto guise. “How many of your survivors were French?”

“Why, almost all, sir. Save for Singh, Paddy, meself and Grimes.”

Irene sighed more deeply and sat back on her flimsy wooden chair.

Jerseyman shook his head. “Don’t know what I’ll do without Singh. Depended on that little blighter. Don’t know what I’ll do with the bloody serpent. Could turn it loose, I suppose.”

My feet shifted nervously on the paving stones beneath the table.

“Or drown it,” he said.

A silence prevailed, broken only by the reptilian rasp from within the basket of the creature under discussion.

“Sir,” said I, astonished to find that I cared, “that seems poor repayment for the serpent’s companionship to your late friend.”

“If it were a bird, I could tolerate it,” he said. “A nice fat parrot with glossy feathers—now there’s a proper pet. And it might even say a word or two to you now and again.”

“Feathers and scales are not much different,” I pointed out, “and God found room for all creatures great and small, and even, I daresay, slimy.”

“Oh, he’s not slimy, Missus. Dry as a landsman’s hand, him. Take a look; mayhap you’d keep him for a parlor pet.”

“I?!” I glanced wildly from Irene to Godfrey, both of whom were sitting back with firmly noncommittal expressions. “Of course not; it’s out of the question.”

“He showed a bit of a preference for you on the train, now didn’t he? Never known the little blighter to escape his basket like that before. He’s just a wee slip of a thing—”

The man, popping the lid open, pushed the basket toward me. I smothered a scream and an impulse to flee. Through the partially raised lid and by the light of the oil lamp on our table, a small, flat head lifted. Two dark eyes, as polished as shoe buttons, stared at me. It struck me that there was an anxious cast to the low-browed head. So, I imagine, Gulliver must have felt in his cage among the giant Brobdingnagians. How nonsensical to imagine that the small serpent could understand that its very fate was under macabre discussion! But certainly it might miss its dead master on some primitive level.

“What on earth would it eat?” I wondered aloud.

“Much on earth,” grinned Jerseyman, “but Singh gave it crickets and some other delicacies.”

“Godfrey? Irene?” I looked to my companions.

They were mute.

“I suppose, if you are bent on destroying it, I... we could take it back to the hotel and release it in the garden. You are sure it is harmless?”

“Safe as a shoelace,” Jerseyman said with a grin. “Singh used to wrap it around his head like a turban.”

“I have nothing that cozy in mind,” I warned as the sailor latched the basket and pushed it further toward me.

“Well, Nell,” Irene said, rising, “it appears that you have gotten more out of this evening than we. What will you call it?”

“Call it? Nothing. It is a snake.” I glanced indignantly at Godfrey, grinning now behind his barbaric beard, and suffered an inspiration. The scandalous Sarah Bernhardt had already appropriated the name “Otto” for a serpent, or I should have named it after Godfrey’s current incarnation. Instead, another candidate for namesake occurred to me. “Or, rather, I will call it Oscar, after our mutual acquaintance.”

Chapter Twenty-six

A
S
NAKE AT
L
ARGE

We were
not to return to the Hotel de Paris without incident.

Immediately outside Le Café de Mouettes, we encountered Louise’s uncle. We froze at once, paralyzed by surprise, even as we saw that he was walking at a brisk clip with his head cast down. He’d careen into us did we not have the wit to move.

Irene and I began to scatter in unison, bumping into each other and managing to make an even tighter knot. In the melee, the snake’s basket, which Godfrey had been kind enough to carry, swung like a pendulum, its lid flapping.

“Oscar!” I screeched in English, seeing a bright green ribbon flutter to the ground.

At that very moment, Monsieur Montpensier collided with me. The impact roused him from his reverie. He favored me with a most intimidating glower.

“My—” I sought the French word for snake and found none “—my cobra has escaped,” I muttered in my usual execrable French.

"Pardon, Mademoiselle,”
he said in tones that asked no one’s pardon, favoring Godfrey and Irene with a piercing stare.

Godfrey he dismissed as quickly as he had myself;

Irene he regarded burningly for a good half-minute. She broke the spell of his regard by loosing a flood of silly French, perfectly pronounced: Her dear friend, Fifi, means to say, of course, that her adorable pet serpent has taken an unsanctioned walk. Or can serpents be said to “walk”? Certainly, it is such a little snake—no cobra at all—and quite charming. Monsieur is not to be afraid. If he would watch where he steps—

Monsieur Montpensier did no such thing, stomping onward with, if anything, a harsher tread. We regarded his departure in silence. Then Irene crouched to inspect the walk.

“Is... it missing?” I asked hopefully.

“Here!” Godfrey announced, lifting a wriggling length of green from the shrubbery. He dropped it into the basket and closed the latch.

Irene had risen and was staring after our unsociable acquaintance. “A near thing. Thank goodness Godfrey was in disguise, and Nell has been altered by my cosmetic attentions. Myself he has not only seen, but spoken with. Odd that he did not recognize me. I think he is too full of himself and his plans to do so. Certainly the stratagem of the snake was brilliantly done. Thank you, Godfrey. While Nell and I blundered into each other like headless chickens, you at least had the sense to loose a distraction.”

I was incredulous. “You mean to say that you released Oscar deliberately?”

“Yes, my dear Nell, I did. Now tell me, are you angry because you were exposed to the unbridled presence of the serpent, or because your new pet might have been lost or injured?”

I studied their eyes; they were brimming with mischief. “You are growing as incorrigible as Irene, Godfrey. I had cherished hopes that you would provide a leveling influence for her.”