The Pirates! in an Adventure with the Romantics (16 page)

Then some enemies appeared but the half-man, half-seaweed monster exploded them and ate them too.

‘So, what do you think?’ asked the Captain.

‘I think you like adverbs and unconventional sentence structure,’ said the pirate with a scarf, who never really enjoyed these conversations.

‘I’m not asking for a
critique
, number two. I learnt a long time ago that writing is a lot like piracy – the trick is to have almost no quality control whatsoever. That’s why I was able to knock off an entire novel in an hour. No – my point is, do you think it’s
too subtle
?’

‘No, Captain, I’ll think she’ll get the message. It helps that you’ve included so many graphic illustrations of what they get up to.’

The Captain looked pleased. ‘Right then. Here’s the plan: first we wait until everyone is asleep, and then, in the dead of night, you’ll creep into Mary’s room and replace
her
manuscript with
this
one. She’ll find it in the morning, read my clever subtext, and bingo! Her little lubber heart will probably swell to twice its normal size. I’m not the sort to count my chickens before they’ve hatched, but I don’t think it’s getting ahead of myself to suggest that she’ll forget all about Shelley on the spot.’ He leaned back on his pillow and went a bit misty-eyed. ‘After that I expect our relationship will go through three main stages. At first we’ll be totally wrapped up in one another. We’ll dance through meadows with garlands in our hair and make daisy chains. I’ll make spontaneous romantic gestures and playfully splash her when we’re near water. In the next stage, we’ll move into a lovely little cottage in the Cotswolds where we’ll get married amongst the apple blossom. A simple ceremony, not too many uncles or cousins and we’d prefer to shell out for decent portions rather than table service, so we’ll have a buffet. Then we’ll have three strapping sons – Chet, Champ and Turlough – and three charming daughters, Marina, Neptunia and Barnacle. In the final stage of the relationship, the children will fly the nest and we’ll sit in rocking chairs and think about the old days. She’ll have a scrapbooking hobby and I’ll grow petunias in the garden because they’re hard-wearing. Slugs can be a problem, but apparently you can keep them under control with a saucer of beer half-buried in the soil. Did you know that?’

The pirate with a scarf didn’t.

‘Our only worry will be Turlough, who’ll be more difficult than the other children. He’ll make a few bad decisions, but we’ll always be there for him, Mary and I.’

‘One point I’m not entirely clear on, Captain,’ said the pirate with a scarf. ‘Why am
I
the one stealing into her room?’

‘Well, I’d do it myself, but there’s always the risk she’ll wake up, which could be difficult to explain. Not the done thing in lubber circles, creeping about a girl’s bedchamber. Whereas if she wakes up and sees
you
, we can just inform her that, regrettably, you’ve a shocking and despicable history of this sort of behaviour.’

So as the grandfather clock in the study chimed midnight, the pirate with a scarf tiptoed across the hallway and into Mary’s bedroom. He was relieved to see that she was asleep, snoring loudly, and that right there on the bed next to her was a manuscript. He carefully put the Captain’s novel down in its place, and then crept back out again. But he had barely got two steps back towards the Captain’s room when he heard footsteps tapping down the corridor towards him. Deciding it was probably best not to be caught red-handed, the pirate with a scarf quickly stuffed Mary’s manuscript into the mouth of a shabby polar bear head hanging on the wall. At that moment Percy appeared from round the corner. They both jumped.

‘Oh!’ exclaimed Shelley. ‘Hello. I was just going to get a glass of water.’

‘Yes,’ said the pirate with a scarf, ‘I was also going to get some water.’

‘Water is good, isn’t it?’

‘It is, yes.’

‘Well, ’night then.’

‘ ’Night.’

The pirate with a scarf threw in a bit of innocent whistling for good measure and ducked back inside the Captain’s room. The Captain looked up hopefully from his copy of
Barely Human Mermaids
.

‘Operation Subtext Switcheroo is a go, sir,’ said the pirate with a scarf, doing a thumbs-up.

Fourteen

Death Paid for Dinner

The Pirate Captain awoke to the sound of terrible screams, which instantly put him in a bad mood, because in the era before John Humphrys ‘terrible screams’ was the worst noise you could wake up to. Even bloodthirsty terrors of the High Seas preferred to wake up to birdsong, or someone pretty singing in the shower, or the smell of freshly laundered bacon. He grabbed his dressing gown and tramped blearily out of bed to see what the commotion was about.

In the hallway he found the poets and a big gaggle of pirates all pressed up together by the open door of Jennifer’s bedroom.

‘What’s all the racket, you swabs?’ the Captain asked, rubbing sleep goop from his eyes. ‘Some of us have spent an uncomfortable night dreaming our beards were haunted by great flapping ghost moths, and would appreciate a bit of peace and quiet.’

Mary waved him over. ‘Oh! Captain, it’s awful!’ she cried. The Captain pressed through the throng and peered inside.

He’d witnessed some pretty shocking scenes in his time as a pirate: a crew of twenty reduced to a crew of three thanks to poor porthole maintenance; a man eaten alive by ants; a menu where half the starters were more expensive than the mains; an ant eaten alive by men; the business with Little Jim; and more besides. But this was worse than all of them. Jennifer was nowhere to be seen. And her bed was covered in blood. Big splotches of sticky bright red blood.

‘Moider!’ said the pirate from the Bronx, who had been worried that he wasn’t going to get a look-in on this adventure.

‘I was on my way down to breakfast, when I saw Jennifer’s door ajar,’ explained Mary. ‘So I popped my head in, hoping to have a chat about girl-related matters, and then I found this! What terrible fate do you think could have befallen her?’

The Pirate Captain circled the room, licked a finger and held it up to the air. Then he stroked his beard and narrowed his eyes.

‘I’m afraid,’ he announced, after a few moments, ‘that this looks very much like the work of the ghoulish undead.’

Byron gaped. ‘Good Lord! You mean . . . a
vampire
? You really think this Count Ruthven chap
does
still stalk these halls?’
³¹

The Captain nodded. ‘I’m afraid so. Either he’s spirited Jennifer off somewhere to be his zombie bride, or he’s already sucked the blood right out of her, like she was a flame-haired coconut.’ He waved his fist at the ceiling. ‘Oh! Why did it have to be Jennifer? There’re at least half a dozen members of the crew that I wouldn’t even notice if they met a gory end. But Jennifer was different, mostly because she had the full complement of limbs and sensory organs, which is rare amongst seafaring types.’

Byron placed a hand on the Captain’s shoulder. ‘If it is any consolation, I intend to immortalise her in verse.’ He stared into the middle distance and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Oh! Fair Jennifer; with her gentle manner; those sparkling eyes; her bell-like laughter; that ready smile; her full sensuous lips; the firm swell of her bosom; her shapely tapering thighs; that shelf-like . . .’

Everybody listened respectfully to Byron’s poem. Once he was done a few of the crew had to excuse themselves to go and take showers. Then everybody gathered in the kitchen for breakfast, because although they were shocked by the latest turn of events, they knew that breakfast was the most important meal of the day, and that it was important not to skip it.

‘We should never have come to this place,’ said Babbage, looking miserably at his slice of bread. ‘I suggest we heed that leaflet’s advice and go and conclude this adventure on a log flume.’

Byron thumped the table. ‘But we’re so close! I can feel it! Right on the verge of discovering Plato’s great secret!’

‘What do you think we should do, Percy?’ Mary asked, turning to Shelley, who had been very quiet all through the meal.

‘Frankly, I don’t much care,’ said Shelley, sulkily downing his Rice Krispies.

Mary frowned.

‘Are you okay?’

‘Fine,’ said the poet with a cold sort of look. ‘Why don’t you ask the Captain what our next move should be?’ he added, grimacing. ‘I’m sure he has some brilliantly improbable stratagem, one that almost certainly involves idiotic costumes.’

Everybody turned to the Captain. He waved a piece of sausage on the end of his fork in a thoughtful way, and smiled.

‘As a matter of fact, I do.’

‘To catch a dracula, you have to
think
like a dracula,’ said the Pirate Captain, after making sure he had established the right atmosphere by opening and closing the creaky door to the pantry a few times and doing some spooky uplighting on his cheekbones with a candle.

‘But how?! How to get inside the head of such a ghoul?’ Byron paced up and down, looking even more brooding than usual. ‘Would it help to write a verse from the ghastly creature’s perspective, do you think? As a sort of psychological exercise? But where to begin? I don’t even know what sort of music they like to listen to.’

‘No need for any more poetry,’ said the Pirate Captain, pulling up a chair and sitting on it backwards, like an olden-days nautical Christine Keeler. ‘Luckily, in my years of adventuring, I’ve had numerous encounters with the spine-chilling, so as a result I’m something of an expert on draculas.’

‘An expert to the extent that you still call them “draculas”,’ pointed out Shelley.

‘Draculas, vampyres, fanguloids, gentleman-bats, call them what you will – the point is, they have one fatal flaw.’

Everybody looked at the Captain expectantly. He tapped his nose.

‘The common dracula is appallingly vain.’

‘Really?’ said Mary. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Yes, it’s sad,’ the Captain said, shaking his bushy beard, which almost caught fire on the candle he was using for the spooky uplighting. ‘They can barely pass a mirror without preening themselves for hours.’
³²

‘I thought they didn’t even show up in mirrors?’ said the pirate in red. ‘Isn’t that the whole point of the soulless undead?’

‘No, you’re thinking of aborigines. The dracula is a narcissistic beast, brimming with an unhealthy self-regard. Just look at the way they dress. And at how our Count Ruthven fellow had this place done out.’ The Captain waved at the great hall’s sinister decoration. ‘The showy interior design of an unchecked ego.’

‘It
is
quite vulgar,’ said Babbage, looking unhappily at a great big stuffed elk that loomed over one of those medical skeletons.

‘I like it,’ said Byron. ‘It’s baroque.’

‘So what do you suggest we do to take advantage of this singular personality defect?’ asked Percy, still looking unconvinced.

‘Ah, well – this is the clever bit,’ the Captain grinned, and held for one of his famous pregnant pauses. ‘We stage a
conference of the macabre
.’

‘Conference?’

‘Yes! We pretend to hold a conference for all the most horrific monsters in the world. When the dracula realises that he hasn’t been invited to our supernatural little gathering, he’ll be
outraged
. Especially as it’s taking place right here, in his own castle. I’ll wager that before we reach item two on the agenda, he’ll show himself, unable to contain his wounded pride, and demand in his screechy dracula voice to know the reasons for his exclusion. We, of course, will just lie and say the invitation must have got lost in the post.’

So as dusk fell, it was an odd collection of guests that started to mill about in the ballroom. Anybody paying hardly any attention at all, because maybe they were in a rush and had other more important things to do, might well have agreed that it resembled a gathering of fairly unconvincing creatures, though they’d probably just be saying that so they could get on their way. The Pirate Captain, his beard and face painted a bright and fetching shade of green, stood up behind a lectern and waggled a tentacle constructed from old toilet rolls at everybody.