Greenbeard (9781935259220) (25 page)

“Indeed, yes. Are you sure that the clockmakers
are
a problem?”

“Well, a potential problem. People talk, and skilled tradesmen gossip more than fishwives, and the mechanisms I ordered from them are unusual and mysterious. They would not be the fine artisans whom they undoubtedly are if their curiosity was not whetted to a degree by the mere fact that they are in ignorance of even the purposes for which I require the devices.”

“You are right, of course,” said Blue Peter. “I have only just been remarking upon how happy Frank and his boys are presently. Mechanical enthusiasts in their earthly heaven! They are filing and scraping and hammering, each bearing a spanner like a field-marshal's baton! Muttering with each other over great sheets of engineer's drawings, and probably bursting into song every ten seconds!”

“Indeed they were,” said the Captain wearily, rubbing his face, “when I tried to do my correspondence in the Great Cabin, and yet I had no desire to constrain their keen spirits, their
animae
, so I came here.”

“And yet you have denied the clockmakers that pleasure! The pleasure of assembling the machines that they have built into a functioning whatever-it-is. Their
amour propre
of cogs, gears and pinions will remain unrequited and unconsummated!” chuckled Blue Peter. “How they must loathe you! A love-struck Romeo would not hate you even one-half as much if you had shot his virgin Juliette before his very eyes with a blunderbuss loaded with tin-tacks! Surely they are conspiring with your foulest enemies even as we speak!”

The Captain laughed, and went to hurl a biscuit at Blue Peter's head, but dunked it in his coffee instead. “Maybe they would, but I have found a distraction,
a will o' the wisp that will divert them for a while to a place where they can do me no harm by their egregious rumour-mongering.”

“Where is this magic kingdom of faerie, then, where clockmakers may be spirited away?”

“Switzerland.”

“I have heard of the place, but I know little of it, except that it is not magical.”

“Ah! The land itself is not magical, but my imagination makes it so for Irish clockmakers!”

“You are obviously pleased with your cunning. Do be so good as to explain.”

“Then harken. Switzerland is a country of much cold, much snow, much poverty and much misery. So poor, in fact, that its main export is mercenary soldiers. The average Swisser is a very good gallowglass, it is true. They come from a land where even a casual stroll to church may involve more vertical movement than horizontal, where the mountains have all kinds of traps for the unwary - avalanches of snow, howling blizzards that last for weeks, even the dreaded
tatzelwurm
, a snow-white dragon that has near as many legs as a centipede, the better to grip the ice - and where food and comfort are always in short supply. The Swissers are tough because they have to be to reach manhood. Why! Even the Pope himself has Swiss mercenaries to guard his person and his treasures, and he is not a fellow to stint himself, or so I am told. There would not seem to be much to interest me, or indeed anybody, in such a barren land, but it occurred to me that it was just the place for a bank. It is poor country surrounded by almost-impassable mountains, peopled by stubborn warriors. So it is a land of very little interest to a conqueror looking for rich pickings. It is not a nation grown rich and grown soft, so who would wish to invade such a place? But a nation that has no attraction for a Tamerlane is a place of wonderful peacefulness and stability of government, and so it is an ideal spot for a bank.”

“Does not the presence of a bank reverse your logic?” said Blue Peter. “When there is a bank there is money to steal, surely.”

“Ah! A bank is a temptation to a band of thieves, and to pirates, of course, but not to an invader. An invader needs bread, beef and beer for his troops, fodder for his horses, clothes, boots, weapons, all kinds of useful plunder and booty. Any banks that he may chance upon in the course of his campaigning are just the cherry on the cake. A chest of gold is nice to put by for his retirement, but it will
not feed his men if there is no food to buy. On the other hand an entire nation, even one so wretched as Switzerland, is too big for a mere band of ruffians to subdue … You smile, Peter! I know you think of bloody Captain Morgan! But Panama proves that I am right! Panama thought itself very grand, but it was only a rich town, not a nation with a nation's resources, and so it was vulnerable to a band of ruffians.”

“I concede that your logic does seem sound,” said Blue Peter, pouring more coffee, “but how does this concern your Irish clockmakers?”

“I opened a branch of our Bank of International Export in Geneva, and while I was organising it one of my correspondents there informed me that Switzerland was so poor that they made their clocks of wood! Not of brass and steel, but of wood! I pointed out to the Irish clockmakers that a country that could make clocks of wood was surely not short of ingenious fellows, and that pocket-watches require very little metal but much skilled labour, and that an enterprise to manufacture pocket-watches there would have low labour costs and a central position in Europe. In quite a short time Switzerland could come to completely dominate the business of pocket-watch manufacture, all it would require was a few skilled horologists and an investor to fund the project through its early stages while the labour-force was trained and premises and tools acquired.”

“Do you actually believe this?”

“Of course not! It verges upon the ridiculous – although it is true about the wooden clocks, which gave me the idea - but the Irish clockmakers were impressed by the sums of money I was prepared to invest and so have set off to Geneva to look things over. I am sure they think that I am a great tom-fool with more money than sense, but a pleasant journey across Europe with all expenses paid is hard to resist, especially as they need not take their wives as it is business. They will be gone for months in foreign lands where little English is spoken, and busy with making at least a token appraisal of the possibility of watchmaking in the rocky valleys of Switzerland, so that any chance of my plans becoming known is minimised. I have set it up by mail, and this letter confirms that the Irish clockmakers left Dublin two days ago on a fast and seaworthy barque, bound for France.”

“It is a shame that the poor fellows will be on a wild-goose chase,” said Blue Peter, smiling.

“I am sure that ...” Captain Greybagges picked up the letter and perused it,
“… Mister R. O'Lecks, Mister O'Meeger, Mister Jago L. Coulter and Mister Pat Philip will have such a pleasant European tour to Geneva and back – the food and wines of France! The gay nightlife of Paris! The splendour of the mountains of the Alps! - that it is possible that they may not even think once of the large-scale manufacture of pocket-watches.”

“I am sure that you are right, but I cannot believe that anybody could comprehend what you are planning from examining the clockwork devices,” said Blue Peter. “After all, Mr Benjamin doesn't know what you are doing, and he is building it. What is a ‘deciheptaxial mechanism' anyway? It's not as if it is something that one can buy in an ironmonger's shop.”

“I fear that other interested parties may be trying to trace me by now, those who may be able to deduce my plans from the design of these devices. A deciheptaxial mechanism is a mechanism that calculates in three and a half variables, although I admit that it is a clumsy description.” The Captain winked and grinned at Blue Peter. “All will become clear in time, my friend, and in a fairly short time now, so your patience will not be stretched too badly.”

Blue Peter left the Captain calling for more coffee, whistling happily and sharpening his goose-quill to continue his letter-writing.

 

 

That night Blue Peter slept in his small cabin in the
Ark de Triomphe
. He had become accustomed to the sea from his years within wooden walls and now found the land somehow too stable and solid, its quiescence too obliging to be entirely trustworthy. Spring storms far away in the Irish Sea sent waves rolling into the mouth of the River Mersey sending diminishing ripples up as far as the boatyard jetty, and the very gentle rocking of the frigate soothed him, the faint rhythmic creaking of the ship's timbers a lullaby to his sailor's ears as he lay snug in his bunk, wrapped in a thick blanket that was wonderfully dry and smelled of lavender.

Blue Peter became aware that he was dreaming. He found himself to be laying at his ease under the sparse shade of a baobab tree, his back against its rough trunk and the African plains in front of him stretching away into the heat-haze before reaching the invisible horizon. The brown grassland had a scattering of bushes and the occasional noble baobab tall against the blue sky. A few gnus wandered in the middle distance. He felt a deep sense of peace and,
simultaneously, a great homesickness. He sighed. Slowly he became aware that he was being observed. He turned to his left, and a leopardess was sitting almost within reach of his hand, watching him with yellow eyes, her tail swishing. Blue Peter did not feel alarmed. The leopardess yawned, and he noticed that her teeth were polished steel like cutlass blades and the claws that flashed briefly from her paws were cannon-barrels.

“Hello,” said the leopardess.

“You are the ship, the
Ark de Triomphe
,” said Blue Peter. “Hello.”

“I am the ship as you imagined me to be. You also imagined me as a wolf.” The leopardess changed into a grey wolf, but the yellow eyes stayed the same. “You thought I was ‘as lairy as a wolf '. It's an odd word ‘lairy', isn't it?”

“I believe it is Irish,” said Blue Peter, “meaning ‘afraid', but in the positive sense of ‘alert, watchful and cautious' rather than in the negative sense of ‘cowardly'. It is not derogatory.”

“What a pedant you are! Since you are so learned perhaps I should present myself as Nike, since my figurehead is Winged Victory arrayed with a rainbow.” The wolf changed into a rather handsome woman with the wings of a giant eagle, dressed in a white Doric
chiton
belted with a wide
zoster
. “Or perhaps all three.” She changed into a chimera with the head of a woman with a wolf's mane of grey hair, a feline, but still human, body with yellow dark-spotted fur and the multicoloured wings of a parrot.

“I find that rather disturbing.”

She laughed and turned once more into a leopardess. “I rather like being a leopardess,” she said, “it's the wiggle of my bum when I run, just as you thought.” She twitched her hindquarters playfully from side to side, her tail swishing.

Blue Peter laughed, and they sat in companionable silence for a while.

“It's been a long time since I've been in Africa, and it's been even longer since I talked with my tribe's old sorcerer, but I seem to remember that a visitation in a dream usually comes to impart a message. Do you have a message for me, Nike the leopardess?”

“Trust your heart.”

“Is that all? Trust my heart?”

“Yes, of course it is. Your logic and your reason should tell you that the Captain has gone completely insane - his wits have flown and he is off on a mad hunt for
monsters! - but your heart, your instincts if you prefer, tell you that he is sincere, and that he seems to know what he is doing, so you take your part in his plan and follow the path of your fate. If you followed your reason you would not avoid your fate, for nobody can, but you might have a more tedious and unpleasant time, as you would be swimming against the tide of events.”

“Have you also given encouragement and advice to Captain Greybagges.”

“This is
your
dream, and I am
your
imagining of how the soul of the ship would appear. How could I talk to the Captain?”

“I shall trust in my heart, then, and hope that the ship's spirit appears to him in his dreams in a form that is as congenial as you.”

“For your gallantry I shall reward you with more good advice. Trust your heart!”

“Once again? Trust my heart?”

“Certainly! Trust your heart. You hold in yourself a belief that in a time to come there is a great love waiting for you, so you try to keep yourself in a fit state to welcome her when she arrives. You are a great ruffian and a pirate, and you are a frightening sight with your pointed teeth and the cicatrices on your cheeks, but you try to keep to certain standards, to exercise good taste and restraint in your actions. You try not to be a beast, even though you are indeed a pirate and could behave as a beast quite easily. The alternative is, of course, giving up your belief in your future, in your destiny, and so giving up your humanity in the anger of your disappointment, and then your true love may come to you at last, but spurn you for being a beastly knave. Trust your heart.”

“Umm,” said Blue Peter Ceteshwayoo.

“The sun is setting. I must go.” The leopardess stood, grinned at him, the low sun glinting red on her steel cutlass teeth, and loped away. Blue Peter watched her until she vanished into the tall grass with a last twitch of her hindquarters.

Blue Peter awoke briefly and shook his head groggily. The African plains? he thought, that's odd, I grew up in the forest. The thick woollen blanket that he had warmed and dried in the kitchen oven with sprigs of lavender between the folds was very hot around him. Hot, he thought, yes, Africa, hot. He wriggled and pulled the blanket looser, rolled over and went back to sleep, a faint smile on his lips.

Blue Peter awoke before dawn. On deck it was dark except for the faint glimmer of a lantern in the waist. He took a dousing under the pump, one of
the pirates on watch working the pump-handle for him, singing a lilting song in an incomprehensible west-country dialect to the rhythm of his pumping, Blue Peter hearing the singing in snatches between the gushes of river water over his head and shoulders. He dressed in his cabin, regretfully fingering the sleeve of an embroidered blue-satin coat before donning brown broadcloth; Liver Pool was not Porte de Recailles and it would not do to be too obviously a buccaneer. The sun was just starting its rise as he strode along the jetty, and he turned back and gazed at the
Ark de Triomphe
, low, sleek and dark in the blue dawn gloom, her masts, yards and rigging a black tracery against the grey sky. He walked on. I am still dreaming, he thought, the figurehead did not wink at me, it is made of painted wood and the light is too bad to see clearly anyway.