The Pirates! in an Adventure with the Romantics (14 page)

The unlikely group struggled from the mud track towards a village nestling at the foot of the pass. More of the mist hung about doing its thing, and a bleak and relentless rain made everything as shiny and slippery as a seal, though not so adorable. Eventually they reached the village’s single little tavern, from which spilled the sound of meaningless foreign chatter, and the sort of music that strikes you as interesting when you’re on holiday to far-flung climes, but which turns out to be unlistenable in any other context.

‘Gracious me!’ said Shelley, once they’d got inside and taken off their wet overcoats. He looked about, delighted. ‘It’s so
authentic
!’

The people crowding the tavern all had the type of face that has its own special section in
Spotlight
. Everybody had the right number of eyes and noses and chins and mouths, but they seemed to have been stuck onto their heads by a particularly cack-handed child.

‘We mustn’t mention this place to a soul, lest the rest of London society should start to include it on their Grand Tour. It would be overrun by tourists.’

‘Aren’t we tourists?’ asked the albino pirate, confused.

‘No, we are
travellers
,’ Shelley explained. ‘There’s a world of difference that I’m not going to go into right now. Mostly it’s to do with wearing flip-flops.’

‘Hello, characterful local barkeep,’ said Byron, waving. ‘A flagon of whatever disgusting indigenous drink you probably brew out of wolf skeletons and bits of mud, please.’

‘Just look at the man’s hands!’ Shelley marvelled. The barkeep obligingly held up his hands for closer inspection. ‘The stubby fingers of a real culture, untainted by Western values!’ He turned to address the entire tavern. ‘You know, in many ways all of you strange, hunched-over peasant folk are far richer than us, because you’re so much more spiritual.’

The locals murmured a slightly half-hearted ‘thank you’. As the Romantics attempted to strike up a conversation about tribal tattoos, Jennifer picked her way across the tavern to where the Pirate Captain had parked himself on a stool. He was pulling wistful faces into his pint glass.

‘Hello, Pirate Captain. Mind if I join you?’ she said, sitting down next to him. The Captain glanced across the room at Mary and pulled another even more wistful face. Jennifer patted his shoulder. ‘You know, Captain, before I joined the crew, all my adventures happened in drawing rooms and on lawns. We didn’t have sea monsters or tidal waves so we tried to get our excitement from listening to what people said.’

‘Sounds awful,’ said the Pirate Captain with a shiver.

‘It was,’ agreed Jennifer, ‘but it taught me something really useful. It’s called
reading between the lines
. When people say one thing they often mean something else entirely. The trick is to think about what that could be. So, for example, when Lady Something-or-other talks about an urn in her ornamental garden she’s
actually
intimating that the Earl of Wherever is interested in marrying Madame Thingy’s niece who was recently in Bath. That’s called
subtext
.’

‘Subtext?’ said the Pirate Captain, blankly. ‘Is that like one of Babbage’s codes?’

Jennifer nodded. ‘That’s right. It’s like a really annoying code. Here’s another example. Imagine a young Englishwoman writing about a nautical mutant. Now imagine she tells a nautical
person
about a plot where a young Englishwoman has feelings for the mutant.’

‘That sounds a lot like Mary’s book,’ the Captain said with a nod. He paused. ‘Hang on a tick. I thought you were asleep?’

‘I was
trying
to sleep, but you’ve got quite a loud voice. It penetrates.’

The Pirate Captain took this as a compliment and gave a little bow.

‘So I pretended to be asleep rather than get in the way.’

‘Do you do that often? Pretend to be asleep, I mean?’

‘Don’t worry, Captain, I’ve never noticed you creep into my cabin and try on my clothes at night, and if I had noticed I would be sure to assume it was just the kind of healthy experimentation anybody might do. But you’re missing my point about Mary’s subtext.’

It took quite a long time for the Captain to really grasp it, even after she’d drawn a few diagrams to help him along.

‘So,’ said Jennifer, ‘to sum up: I think Mary likes you too. But she’s conflicted. The same way you sometimes get conflicted about whether a chop is better than a steak.’

The Captain contemplated. The face the Captain did for contemplating was a lot like the face he did for nodding off, so Jennifer gave him a prod.

‘All depends on the context. Is it to go with potatoes?’

‘Try to stay on topic, Captain.’

‘Sorry. Well then. Mary and me. I think I’ve got an idea!’

‘I suppose it’s too much to hope that your idea involves “talking about your feelings like two sensible adults”?’

‘It is, sorry. See, if Mary likes this subtext palaver as much as it seems, then it only makes sense for me to use
even more
of my own subtext. It will show we’re on the same wavelength. I don’t really know what being on the same wavelength means, but I do know that it’s one of the most important things to you women.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Jennifer, who knew when to cut her losses in a conversation with the Captain. ‘So how are you planning to do
your
subtext?’

Before the Captain could reply, Byron’s big ringing voice cut right across the noise of the tavern.

‘. . . and so that’s why we’re here to visit Castle Ruthven!’ he boomed.

Everything stopped. The barmaids stopped serving drinks. The band stopped playing gypsy versions of popular hits. Even the raven on the roof stopped his atmospheric cawing. A few of the younger pirates thought it was a game of musical statues and so they stopped too, and did their best to freeze in position.

‘Did I say something bad?’ asked Byron, in as much of a whisper as he could manage.

The barkeep grunted, and reached behind the bar. Then he slapped a piece of paper down on the table in front of the poet. It was a short leaflet printed in English, German, French, Spanish and Japanese.

It was the most bone-chilling tourist information leaflet the pirates had ever read. A few of the crew suddenly remembered they might have left a stove on aboard the boat, and suggested it could be a good idea to go back and check.

Byron, though, just laughed.

‘I think you’ll find,’ he said to the barkeep, ‘that we are made of sterner stuff than you suppose. For you see, we travel with the indomitable Pirate Captain! A man who bested the kraken itself! A man who single-handedly wrestled a dinosaur to a standstill in the Bodleian Library! Not the sort of chap to turn tail and run from a horrifying curse. Why, I doubt you’d even find the word “fear” in his dictionary.’

The barkeep shrugged a suit-yourself sort of shrug, and went back to polishing an ashtray.

‘He’s right, of course,’ said the Pirate Captain, nodding to Jennifer. ‘If you look in my dictionary you’ll find that it goes straight from “fealty” to “feasible”. My advice: should Black Bellamy ever turn up on your doorstep offering to sell you a set of reference books, send him packing. His encyclopedias are even worse. It’s just the definition of “sucker” repeated on every page for nineteen volumes.”

Thirteen

Today’s Special . . . Is Gore!

If the adventurers had arrived at Castle Ruthven two hundred years later they would probably have found it being restored by a bright-eyed young couple with energetic names like Kyle and Marcy. Kyle and Marcy would say stuff along the lines of ‘the castle itself is the real project manager’ and ‘we’re simply custodians for the future’ and they’d make sure that the new bits looked new, so that you could ‘read the continuity of the architecture’, and they’d furnish it with some tasteful Eames recliners, and maybe a Barcelona chair, and then they’d sit down in their bespoke kitchen with a bowl of olives resting on the hand-cut Italian tiles and take a moment to gaze proudly at their creation, and then they’d look at each other, and there would be a terrible gaping silence as they realised that they hadn’t actually got anything in common at all, and Kyle would wonder if Marcy’s neck had always been that stringy, and Marcy would wonder why Kyle still wore those ridiculous distressed jeans like he was a teenager or something and right there and then, they’d decide to have kids, because that at least would give them another distraction to put off the inevitable acknowledgement of the awful, desiccating meaninglessness of it all, but nothing would ever entirely block out that one bottomless silence, and it would loom over them for the next twenty years until Kyle had an unhappy relationship with a local waitress half his age and Marcy ran off to ‘find herself’ by spending a fortune on yoga and cupcakes and Valium.

But because it was the early part of the nineteenth century all the pirates and their companions found were great heaps of ivy crawling across the crumbling stone walls and an inescapable and unsettling air of dread. The pirates shivered in the moonlight. Obviously it was because they were cold, not because they were frightened of the moon. Stories of dog-eating moon squid were just tales made up to stop young pirates asking for a puppy every single Christmas and birthday. They knew that. Only Byron seemed immune to the eerie atmosphere, mainly because he was too busy trying to spook Babbage by putting ivy on his head and making Triffid noises.

At the forbidding doorway everybody looked up at the big brass doorknocker. It was shaped like a bat. Next to the door were some gargoyles, which were also shaped like bats.

‘Here’s an interesting fact about bats,’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘There’s a popular misconception that they’re evil creatures who’ll go for your jugular soon as look at you. Whereas of course there’s actually nothing to worry about, because you’re far more likely to get rabies from bat saliva dripping into your mouth whilst you sleep.’
²⁷

At this point everybody pretended to be really interested in bats for a bit. Once that conversation dried up, they all talked about this weather they’d been having. Then they moved on to anecdotes about the trip so far. But before long they’d run out of topics and it was obvious that they couldn’t really delay the inevitable much longer. The Pirate Captain banged the doorknocker. It echoed a big clanking echo about the mountains. Nobody answered. So, steeling himself, he gave the door a push. It swung open with a creak which, no matter how you tried to spin it, sounded exactly like the noise a pirate or a poet would probably make if they were being crushed under a giant coffin full of severed heads.

‘See, where they’ve gone wrong here is too many cobwebs, rusting suits of armour, and mouldy bits of taxidermy,
²⁸
not
enough
twigs
in
bowls
,’
said
the
Pirate
Captain
,
stepping
into
a
cavernous
stone
hall
. ‘
Twigs
in
bowls
do
wonders
to
make
a
house
feel
more
homely
.’