Greenbeard (9781935259220) (28 page)

Mr Benjamin and an assistant were working on the demiheptaxial mechanism in its locker underneath the ship's wheel, talking in low voices. The locker was now almost filled with brass and steel shafts, cams and gear-wheels, all glinting in the yellow glim from a lantern and the wan rays from a skylight. The ropes from the wheel came vertically down through the quarterdeck above, through the rear of the locker and down into the tiller-room below, from where the ship could be steered if the wheel was carried away by a cannon-ball, and where strong men could be stationed to haul on relieving-tackles to ease the load on the steersmen, and would be if the seas got any rougher. Mr Benjamin and his assistant had just connected an indicator to the mechanism showing the position of the ship's rudder, a blue-steel arrow on a brass quadrant graduated in degrees. As the steersmen turned the frigate to ride the waves the steering-ropes went up and down creaking, and the blue-steel arrow swung slightly from on side to the other and back again. Mr Benjamin regarded it with a happy smile, and reached out to buff the brass quadrant with a rag.

“This is but a mere gee-gaw,” said Mr Benjamin, “but is it not pleasing? The mechanism itself detects the movement of the ship with the little lead weights in the little box there…” Blue Peter peered into the locker. There was indeed a small cabinet with glass panes, inside he could see a number of spindly levers with balls of grey lead on their ends. As the boat moved under his feet the little levers waggled and glittering brass escapements whirled, faint clickings and whirrings came from deeper inside the mechanism. “This indicator of the rudder's position is a frippery, a mere curlicue I have added to this wonderful engine, so I that may more easily perceive if there is a discrepancy between the rudder's movement and the heading given by the mechanism. A crude measure, but a useful one,
and they are in complete agreement!
”

Mr Benjamin's jowled face beamed his satisfaction, his eyes shining behind his
pince-nez
spectacles. His assistant, a young pirate, a gangly youth who had been apprenticed to a clockmaker in Clerkenwell, grinned happily, nodding and repeating “
in complete agreement!
” several times. Blue Peter noted that both of them had acquired very steady sea-legs. They both shifted their bodies easily as the frigate pitched and rolled, and kept a firm grip against any sudden lurch with at least one hand.

Blue Peter squeezed past them, stepping over Mr Benjamin's canvas tool-bag, and knocked on the door to the Great Cabin. Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges was at his desk writing in a ledger, dressed all in black, his beard seeming to glow a wan grass-green in the pale easterly light from the tall stern-windows. He shouted for Mumblin' Jake to bring coffee. Blue Peter sat down.

“Tell me, Captain,” he said, “who designed the demiheptaxial mechanism?”

“Why do you ask?” the Captain smiled.

“It was not Frank. The joy which I saw in his eyes just now was admiration, not the pride of a creator, and anyway he has been too busy with other things, and before that enslaved in Barbary.”

“The devices of which it is composed are familiar to clockmakers, and their principles may be found in a library, if one knows where to look. It is the work of many minds, but Frank has brought all the pieces together into a complete whole, so you grant him but little credit for his labours. I fear that I cannot tell you anything more.”

“I know, I know,” said Blue Peter, “I must wait and all will become clear in time.” He sighed.

Mumblin' Jake came with the coffee and a dish of sweet cakes on a tray.

“To change the subject, Captain,” said Blue Peter, his mouth full of cake, “can we not raid the slave-masters of Virginia? You once told me that you had no objection if the time was right, and we are headed there with in the finest pirate-frigate ever to sail the seas, and with a crew who have not seen action for a while, and a good half of them who have never seen action at all. It might be useful experience for the new pirates and an encouragement to the old hands. These are very good cakes!”

“That young fellow Thackeray makes ‘em. Cookie is quite jealous. A raid on Virginny? Umm, it's not a bad idea – you are right that the crew could do
with some action to sort them out, and the young fellows are eager to show their mettle - but we are on a tight schedule, and I don't wish to draw any attention to ourselves. We must call at Norfolk, where I have some business, and that will surely set enough tongues wagging up and down the coast, so I must say nay. I appreciate your feelings in the matter, Peter, but I don't think it can be done at this time. I must stick to my plans.”

Blue Peter felt obscurely thwarted by this. He ached to do some damage to Master Chumbley and his odious fat wife, or any other slave-owner, and he could almost feel the heat as he imagined their white mansion burning, could almost hear the crackle of the flames and their screams as they burned in their canopied feather-beds. I had forgotten how much I loathe them, he thought. He sipped his coffee glumly.

Blue Peter wished to argue the point further, but it seemed useless when the Captain's mind was made up. Instead he turned the conversation to discussing the romantic attachments that the crew had made during the past winter in Liver Pool. The necessity for arranging payments to common-law wives and pregnant girlfriends had given them a tedious extra burden before leaving the port, yet it had to be done to maintain goodwill and discretion. The two buccaneers were tired from the stormy passage across the Atlantic, and they got into the kind of argument that only old friends can have, where the issue remains unclear and where the participants end up attacking their own original propositions.

“Why then did you not yourself take a mistress in Liver Pool?” asked Blue Peter Ceteshwayoo, in some irritation.

“Well,” said Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges, rubbing his eyes tiredly, “I didn't have the time. Always busy, you know.”

“What poppycock! The red-haired widow, overseer of the copyists' room, Mavis O'Bacon, she would have warmed your bed, massaged your back and made you possets, too. She looked at you the way a cat looks at a dish of cod-scraps.”

“I don't know. I was aware of her … interest. I think it's because I have been obsessed with time these past months. Every man hates time, and tries to ignore its flow, thinking each day is a repetition of the last with a few trivial changes, and it is not. That is the secret of peasants, you know. Although poor and hard-driven they see the flow of time clearly through the rise and fall of the seasons, and so realise the arcs of their destinies. The rich, by contrast, can insulate themselves from even
noticing time, dividing it with clocks and calendars and account-books until they feel it is under their control, and so they are unpleasantly surprised when they grow old, and are outraged when death approaches, whereas the old peasant is sanguine as he goes to meet his maker. Once one starts to think about time, to take the long view, brief
amours
lose some of their savour. One is always then thinking ‘what next? shall we marry and have children?' and if the answer is ‘no' then it all seems a little sad and futile. But then I could ask you the same question, Peter. You could have ensured that half the next generation of Liver Pool scallywags were large and brown. The boys would have been impressive oafs, I'm sure, but I would have pitied the girls if they favoured you in looks.”

They glowered at each other, then burst out laughing. Captain Greybagges refilled their coffee-mugs, taking care not to spill any as the Atlantic combers made the frigate roll and pitch.

“I do know what you mean about time,” said Blue Peter, eating another cake, “and that there should be some purpose to one's rogerings, too. I did find the ladies of Liver Pool alluring - they have sharp tongues and even the humblest of them has a queenly gaze - but there are enough bastards in this sad vale of tears, and I would like your monster-hunt to be over before I consider domesticity.”

“My ‘monster-hunt'?” Captain Greybagges looked surprised. “I had not thought of it quite like that.”

“By what other name could one particularise those creatures, the
extramundanes
that you described in your tale to me?”

“I suppose you are right, but I like the lizard people, and cannot think of them as
monsters
. A few men and women that I have encountered have been far more monstrous. Some of them fair of face, witty, elegant and charming in their manner, too.”

“I cannot argue with that, Captain, for I have met similar human monsters, although they are quite rare, thankfully.”

“We are both pirates, Peter, and so perhaps less inclined than others to judge by mere appearance, but still we can be deceived. Did you ever meet that mad cavalier Prince Rupert of the Rhine? He was a-buccaneering around the Carib seas before the King was restored. He had a little poodle-dog called ‘Boyo'.”

“I don't believe that I ever did, Captain, why do you ask?”

“Well, the first time that I came across the fellow was in the Dry Tortugas,
in the old
Ponce de Leon
tavern. I was sitting drinking rum-and-water in a civilised way when in came Prince Rupert. Without a word of warning the sod thrust a globule of glass under my nose and tweaked it – the glass globule, that is, not my nose – and it exploded like a bomb! My eyes were full of splinters of glass! I had to bathe them in salt water! That good fellow Izzie had to get some of them out with the wetted corner of a kerchief. I feared I might be blinded, and the cursed hound laughed like a drain! Prince Rupert, that is, not his little dog Boyo. If I could have seen anything at all I would have shot him or run him through without a second thought, but my eyes were full of tears and glass. Yet when I got to know him better I found that he was a congenial sort of cove. The glass-bomb was an invention of his, and he had been merely over-enthusiastic in the pride of his discovery and over-eager to demonstrate natural philosophy, and not the depraved lover of cruelty that he seemed at that first meeting.”

“How did the glass-bomb function? Was it filled with gunpowder?”

“Not at all, Peter. If one heats a rod of glass until it melts like pitch, then allows the molten glass to drip into a bucket of water, each drop is instantly solidified, but the outside hardens first, squeezing the interior, so that forces are frozen in the solid glass. When one snaps off the tail of the globule it precipitates the whole into shattering quite energetically,
bang!
Prince Rupert is presently much caressed by London's society for his learning – he has invented a new method for printing pictures, you know - and the glass-bombs are called ‘Prince Rupert's drops', so his name shall be written in the pages of history for an invention of no use whatsoever, except to fill unfortunate souls' eyes with glass-splinters, and not for his failed siege of Liver Pool.”

“He laid siege to Liver Pool? Whatever for?”

“It was in the war ‘twixt King Charlie's cavaliers and Noll Cromwell's roundheads, and nobody seems to have had much notion of what they were about in those times. The people of Liver Pool remembered him well, and his little dog, too, which they said had the evil eye, although how a poodle-dog may possess the evil eye is beyond my imagining, I must say, even though it was a horrid little mutt, always trying to roger one's leg, you know? The Liver Pool ruffians said that he lifted the siege because they stole most of his supplies while his army was camped outside the town, which I can well believe.”

“Does this tale of Prince Rupert have a moral? or indeed an ending?” said
Blue Peter, selecting another cake.

“Well, I suppose I was musing upon the nature of monsters, and that although Prince Rupert seemed like a monster at our first encounter he wasn't, really. There is the Liver Pool connection, too, which brought him to mind.” The Captain took the last cake.

“I suspect that you are attempting to divert me from my ploy to trick you into revealing something more of your plan, Captain.”

“Well, Peter, I think I was going to say that a monster – which is to say a
monster of evil
, and not just a poor sad malformed thing such as a kitten with two heads – is defined by a lack of interest in the welfare of other beings. Such a person is so utterly focussed upon their own selfhood that they incapable of the normal human attributes of sympathy, generosity, magnaminity and so on. In fact, they may exult in defying the vestiges of their conscience, if indeed they have one, and so relish cruelty.”

“We pirates are generally regarded as monsters, surely, Captain? Those were very good cakes, and now there are none.”

Captain Greybagges shouted for Mumblin' Jake to bring more cakes. Mumblin' Jake put his head around the door and mumbled that there were no more cakes, an' damn yer eyes yer greedy bastards. He took the coffee pot to refill.

“Pirates may be monsters, Peter, of course they may. Alf Docklefar, who made the
Ark de Triomphe
ship-in-a-bottle over there, has sailed with most of them, to judge by his yarns. But when exactly is one a pirate, and thus a criminal, and not a privateer, and so a legal entity plying a legal trade? That is not clear at all. The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, sanctioned by the Pope himself, gave everything west of the Cape Verde Islands to the Spaniards and everything east to the Portugese, and yet was that not itself a great act of piracy? Most of those lands were already inhabited by folks who would not know the Pope from a coster-monger, after all. The other countries of Europe regarded the treaty with derision, of course. Francis the First, who was king of the French, roared with laughter when he heard of it, and asked to be shown the clause in Adam's will that made such a bequest legal. As a lawyer, I do applaud him for that! He was a fine fellow, was Francis, a very learned king. He made Guillame Budé master of his library at Fontainebleau, which shows great judgement of character as well as an appreciation of the importance of librarians. So, was Drake a pirate? The
Dons say that he was, of course they do, and the English say that he was a hero, of course they do. Since then the situation has become even more confused. The meridian has been moved three hundred and seventy leagues westwards, so as not to discommode the Portugese, and a further
understanding
among the European nations means that any
incident
west of that cannot be regarded as legal grounds for a war, which is how bloody Captain Bloody Morgan could besiege and sack Panama and be made Governor of Jamaica, and why the Spanish have to grin and bear it as best they can. In the seas and lands west of the mid-Atlantic meridian it must be assumed that European laws are only honoured in the breach, and that therefore the only law that needs to be considered is ‘might is right'. Under such a legal regime the label of
pirate
becomes meaningless. I rest my case.”