by Hunt N. Peck
Chapter the Tenth, or The Captain Calls For A Boucan.
The Broadmeadow estuary lay calm and dark under a moonless night sky, and the small Irish village of Malahide showed no lights. The pirate frigate Ark de Triomphe lay at anchor, low and black. The ship and the longboat that was shuttling to-and-fro from the shore should have been invisible in the gloom, but the wide estuary was full of small skiffs with bright lanterns on poles.
“I have heard of the cunning Orientals using birds to catch fish, but I never thought to see such a thing ten miles from Dublin,” said Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges.
“They are cormorants, it seems. Avian creatures that are accustomed to dive beneath the waters in search of their piscine prey,” said Blue Peter Ceteshwayoo. “The fisherman ties a leather thong around the bird’s neck, the poor creature cannot swallow the fish and so must bring it back to its master. The lantern’s light attracts the fish.”
Captain Greybagges looked at him quizzically.
“I asked the fellows down there on the beach,” said Blue Peter, pointing. “There seemed to be little point in being stand-offish when we are already exposed in plain sight by their lights. Fishing with birds is a source of extra money for the farming people around here, they said. Fishing with birds, and collecting seaweed.”
“Seaweed?”
“A particular kind of seaweed. They told me it is dried, shredded and sold to be used for padding coffins, as it absorbs the stink of a corpse. The departed relative is displayed in the family parlour for the wake, which is an overnight vigil of drunken remembrance. The sad occasion is thus rendered less dolorous by the exsiccative properties of the bier of kelp, so the grieving kin may then enjoy the roborative properties of the beer of barley….”
Captain Greybagges eyed him in silence. Blue Peter looked abashed, and then continued.
“The fishermen may have been making sport of me, of course, as I am but a poor heathen blackamoor, but I doubt it, as they were otherwise quite amiable and polite. Well, they were after I gave them a sip of rum.”
“Seaweed to line coffins? I suppose I have heard of stranger things.” Captain Greybagges strode back to the road above the beach. The boat had returned and pirates were carrying small wooden boxes to it from a coach and a cart. The horses snorted and stamped their hooves, their breath swirling in ghostly clouds in the glow from the coach-lamps.
“How many more, you swabs?” growled the Captain.
“One more trip, Cap’n,” said Torvald Coalbiter, carrying a wooden box on his shoulder.
“Don’t say it!” said the Captain, turning to Blue Peter. “Not until we are safely back at sea. Don’t tempt the fates.” Blue Peter looked abashed again.
There was a confused outbreak of shouting from the sea. Ghastly piratical oaths answered by curses in Gaelic and the squawking of cormorants; the longboat had nearly rammed a fisherman’s skiff.
“I shall say it, now that we are safely back at sea. Everything went well!” Blue Peter grinned and poured rum for himself and the Captain.
“I am not usually a superstitious man,” said the Captain, “but these mechanisms are vital to my plans. I feared that such delicate engines might be easily broken, or that an attempt might be made to steal them away to ransom them. Now they are stowed aboard the barky I can feel easier.”
“The ride from Dublin certainly will have attracted attention,” said Blue Peter. “A cart, a coach and an armed escort of pirates mounted on old nags and mules. I’m surprised the children of Dublin didn’t follow us, thinking that the circus had come to town.”
“I wish I could have arranged things more efficiently, Peter, but with time pressing I could not. A more clandestine meeting with the clockmakers and a diversion when the boxes were moved would have been better, but instead I just had to load the boxes, go as fast as we could and trust that any wicked rapparees or mosstroopers would be without the time to prepare an ambush. I wasn’t going to meet all the clockmakers at the same time and place, either, but I again had no choice. The clockmakers, thus introduced, would discuss the engines and so, in turn, so the gossips of Dublin would certainly have had word of a valuable cargo in transit.”
“The clockmakers were a congenial parcel of rogues, though,” said Blue Peter, sipping rum from his crystal goblet.
“Indeed, and that is a problem, for they will talk continue to among themselves now, being intrigued by the mechanical devices that I ordered from them, and I do not wish my business to be discussed or bruited abroad by wagging tongues.”
“I am intrigued, too,” said Blue Peter, “but I am not a clockmaker, so I will remain mystified, I suppose.”
There was a knock at the door of the Great Cabin and Jack Nastyface entered, followed by Mr Benjamin carefully carrying a square box. The box was rectangular, as long as a forearm, half that in width and height and made of unvarnished pinewood, with a rope handle at each end, and a number scorched onto its top and sides with a hot iron
“I thought you might like to see an example what you have purchased at such expense, Captain,” said Mr Benjamin, placing the box on the table. There was another knock and Bulbous Bill Bucephalus and Israel Feet entered. Mr Benjamin took a small jemmy-bar from a pocket and levered off the top of the box, nails screeching in the wood, while Blue Peter poured shots of rum for everybody.
“No touching! No poking with fingers! Don’t spill any damned rum on it, either!” spoke Mr Benjamin sternly, then reached into the box and lifted out a complex mechanism of brass and steel, of cogs and gearwheels. It sat on the table, the machined metal coruscating in the lamplight. The Captain and his officers looked at it in silent wonderment for a while. Jack Nastyface kept quiet and hoped nobody would notice him.
“Why, they are fine craftsmen, these Dublin clockmakers!” said Mr Benjamin at last. “These are not your mere cork-and-nail men!”
“Cork-and-nail men?” asked the Captain with a raised eyebrow.
“Irish travelling tinkers who will attempt to mend clocks. They will hold a piece of drilled sheet-brass with a nail stuck into a bottle-cork, the better to file it into a cog-wheel. Some of them have surprising skill for unlettered oafs, it is true, but the workmanship shown here is of a different order entirely.” Mr Benjamin smiled down at the brass clockwork machine.
“What does it do?” asked Bill, frowning.
“It multiplies numbers, or rather quantities,” said Mr Benjamin. “See, the shaft here is rotated to represent one value, this shaft here the other value and the resulting multiplicand is the rotation of this shaft here. The powerful spring here provides the energizing power to drive the mechanism, which is re-wound by this little shaft here.”
“What be these?” said Israel Feet, reaching out with a finger.
“Don’t touch!” snarled Mr Benjamin. “Sorry, Izzy, but these mechanisms are quite gracile, and frangible if mishandled. Those ivory discs are for fine adjustments.”
“It is quite beautiful, I have never seen its like!” said Jack Nastyface.
“What be you a-doing in here, Jack?” growled the Captain. Jack Nastyface blushed to the roots of his hair.
“I … I helped Mr Benjamin to carry it in,” he gulped.
The Captain regarded him with a baleful eye.
“Curiosity killed the cat, Jack. Go and tell the cook to bring us some snacks, and as a punishment for your nosiness you must pass it around the crew that I nearly ran Izzy through with a cutlass for merely breathing on this engine, and that I will surely keel-haul any fool who touches any one of these mechanisms with even the nail of a little finger. Only Mr Benjamin is allowed to fiddle with them.”
Jack departed, closing the door behind him. Mr Benjamin carefully replaced the gleaming brass engine back into its box.
“They are all there, Captain. Nine multipliers, nine adders of the Gaussian pattern, nine differential integrators, plus the regulators, the connecting shafts and all the other bits and pieces. Each component in triplicate to give two spares against breakages. One hundred and forty-seven boxes.”
“Once we are returned to Liver Pool and moored, how long to install them in the barky, Frank? The deciheptaxial mechanism we discussed?”
Mr Benjamin scowled. “Two weeks, maybe three if there’s a problem.”
“Make it two, if you can, Frank!” said Captain Greybagges, before sipping rum from his chased-silver goblet.
The Ark de Triomphe ploughed eastwards under full sail through the dark Irish Sea, under a sky bright with stars.
The Ark de Triomphe lay moored once again to the Liver Pool boatyard jetty, her masts and decks busy as pirates attended to any small problems that the short trip to Ireland had shaken out. Mr Benjamin and his team – mostly young pirates, but with a cabinet-maker and a whitesmith from the ranks of the old pirates – were installing the Captain’s mechanisms in a large locker below the quarterdeck, next to the steering-tackle under the ship’s wheel. They all seemed strangely cheerful, thought Blue Peter, and he wondered if it was the simple joy of such precise and exacting work. Whatever the cause, their chatter and the noise of the necessary carpentry had driven Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges out from the refuge of his Great Cabin ashore to the front parlour of the boatyard house, where Blue Peter found him writing letters – scritch, scratch – and drinking coffee.
“I believe I have solved the problem of the Dublin clockmakers!” said the Captain, as Blue Peter sat down. “Will you have some coffee? A biscuit?”
“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 lags 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 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 its teeth were polished steel like cutlass blades and the claws that flashed briefly from its 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 time to the rhythm of his pumping in an incomprehensible west-country dialect, 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.
In the kitchen of the boatyard house there was coffee and oatmeal burgoo with brown sugar and yellow cream. Blue Peter ate at the dining-room table, hearing the tramp of feet outside the door and muttered salutations and insults as pirates came to the kitchen to collect tubs of burgoo and cans of coffee for their messes’ breakfasts. It had started raining again so he put on a boat-cloak and clapped on a wide-brimmed hat before going on a morning inspection of the boatyard.
Now that the work on the Ark de Triomphe was coming to an end the pirates were clearing the boatyard and some of the wooden huts had been dismantled as the pirates moved back aboard. Captain Greybagges had decided to keep the boatyard, which would be staffed by retired pirates and suitable candidates from Liver Pool. Blue Peter found this an encouraging development, as it showed that the Captain’s plans did not include a suicide mission. Trust your heart, Blue Peter thought, I suppose I must do just that. It’s good advice, even if it did come from a shape-shifting leopardess in a peculiar dream.
Mr Benjamin was standing naked on top of the foundry building, his arms spread and his face tilted upwards to the rain.
“Good morning, Frank,” called Blue Peter. “Don’t get washed away.”
“And a fine morning it is! The wind and the water are a sovereign tonic, you should try it, Peter!”
“I had a bath under the pump earlier. That was cold enough and wet enough for me.”
Blue Peter plodded back to the boatyard house for a second breakfast, thinking about his work for the day. The new cannons were installed in the gun-decks and he was almost satisfied with their carriages, but he wanted to reinforce the eye-bolts on the recoiling-tackles. Torvald Coalbiter had a notion to increase the width of the forward gun-ports so that the two forwardmost cannons could be slewed if required to be more useful in a chase. Blue Peter wasn’t sure about this, but Torvald made a good case. He would have to make a decision this afternoon, as the carpentry would take at least three days and time was beginning to press.
In fact widening the two ports took two days, but reinforcing the eye-bolts took longer than planned. The ship and crew were now very close to being ready for the oceans. A contingent of retired pirates had arrived in the tubs to work in the boatyard, and the boatyard’s affairs were in a fit state for the Captain to hand over day-to-day control to Mavis O’Bacon, the chief of the women in the drawing section. He had worried about this, but none of the retired pirates could manage a business, excellent hands though they were at carpentry, caulking and rigging. Handing control to any of the men of Liver Pool would be to invite them to strip the boatyard to its bare bones, for that was the way their minds worked; they would the loot the boatyard even though more profit could be made by operating is as an honest venture. The widow O’Bacon, though, would defend the boatyard because she would be running it herself and opportunities like that did not come often to womenfolk, so she had every reason to wish it to prosper and to continue. She was a red-haired dragon with a fiery temper and a tongue that could lash like a bull-whip, too, so she stood a reasonable chance of keeping the workforce in a state of productive fear. All the drawing-section women would be staying on, too, and the widow O’Bacon was their acknowledged queen, so any attempts at peculation by the Liver Pool men would face daunting opposition.
Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges sat in his Great Cabin enjoying the return of peace now that Mr Benjamin and his boys had finished installing the deciheptaxial mechanism. Mr Benjamin was testing and adjusting it now, but that was a comparatively quiet labour, carried out in hushed whispers with only the occasional tap of a hammer, the squeak of a screw being tightened, to be heard through the oak of the cabin door. The Captain sipped coffee and wrote letters with a new goose quill and fine black ox-gall ink, scritch-scratch.
Jack Nastyface, Torvald Coalbiter and a Yorkshireman called Jake Thackeray were sitting on the maintop cross-trees, smoking pipes, yarning and taking their ease. Jack had seemingly grown two inches taller and put on muscle with the labours of the winter, labours which he had not minded for the hard work had eased the loneliness he felt from the departure of his great friend Jemmy Ducks. He had lately been assisting Torvald on the gun-deck, and had made himself so useful that he had been given Jake as an assistant to take over some of his kitchen duties. Jake Thackeray was a tall, skinny youth with a long gloomy face, hooded eyes and a down-turned mouth. His lugubrious mien concealed a sharp wit, and he was known for composing comical songs lampooning his shipmates, a talent that was greatly valued ‘tween decks. He was supposed to be a cabinet-maker, but he had little skill with wood and preferred kitchen duties, even being so confident as to question Bulbous Bill Bucephalus’s sacred recipe for hot chilli, feeling that it had insufficient garlic. He was lucky that Bill was not very agile in the rigging, and so he had eluded chastisement for this blasphemy. Torvald Coalbiter, being a gunner and not a foremast-jack, was not entirely at ease perched in the cross-trees, but an invitation to a morning smoke had to be accepted out of courtesy to a shipmate.
“So, even Mr Benjamin don’t know what the clockworks are for?” said Jake.
“The Captain does, though,” said Jack, “and that’s good enough for me.”
“He told Blue Peter that it would become clear soonish,” said Torvald.
“He is a deep old file, our Captain,” said Jake, “and no mistake on that, but I am still curious, thou knows.”
“When we had the run-in with the corsairs down off the coast o’ Barbary he saw off that mad bugger Ali the Barber just by twisting words around,” said Torvald. “I think he often sees further than most men, but to explain himself would take too long, so he doesn’t bother.”
They had been watching one of the tubs manoeuvring in the sluggish slack-water river to come alongside the Ark de Triomphe where she lay at the jetty, and now it did with a slight bump, and a burst of shouting and curses as pirates put bumpers between the hulls and tied-off the ropes.
“And what be this now?” said Jake, peering down.
“It looks like the top half of a big barrel,” said Jack, examining the cargo on the deck of the tub, “with iron shackles on its head.”
“More alike to an upturned bucket for a giant. They are going to lift it onto the barky,” said Torvald, seeing pirates laying down wooden slabs on the frigate’s deck for the huge half-barrel to rest upon. “Here is yet another mystery for you to ponder, young Jake. Let’s get down, they’ll want to rig the steadying-tackles from up here and we will be in their way.”
Torvald Coalbiter crawled carefully through the lubber’s hole and climbed slowly down the rat-lines, the younger men slid down the back-stay.
The giant upturned bucket was settled between the foremast and mainmast, lashed down with ropes to iron staples in the deck, and covered in a black tarpaulin. The crew were mystified, and wrangled a little over what it might be, The enigmatic nature of the large piece of coopering only added to a sense of expectation; it seemed they were off on an adventure, the meanings of such things would be revealed in time, and the crew were eager to get to sea, wherever it was that the ship was headed.
Of all the pirates, Bulbous Bill Bucephalus had the clearest perception of what the deciheptaxial mechanism was for, even though he wouldn’t like to try to spell the word. Through the study of navigation he had acquired a good knowledge of mathematics and an excellent grasp of spherical geometry, that bane of midshipmen. Through the study of navigation he had also acquired a good knowledge of astronomy and an excellent understanding of the motions of the planets as they sail on their orbits through the heavens. These two separate, but related, subjects were suggesting possibilities to him. Three and one-half variables is also three and one-half axes of a graph or, looked at another way, three and one-half dimensions. Could the one-half dimension be …? No, he shook his head, it was daft enough to be right, but he could not be sure. He would think about it some more, perhaps after supper. He had no opinion of the bucket on the foredeck, except in that it would raise the centre-of-gravity of the frigate just a whisker, as it had heavy cast-iron weights around its lower rim, he had noticed.
Israel Feet did not have any perception of what the deciheptaxial mechanism was for, nor did he have any idea what the purpose of the upturned bucket was, what he did have was a headache. The headaches were coming less often and with diminishing severity, but the hoisting, levering and lashing-down a vast great thing of oak staves and iron hoops and iron this-and-that was a sure way to get a head-splitter. After supper he would ask Mr Benjamin for a small piece of opium, and sling his hammock in a quiet corner and sleep.
Blue Peter had put aside the mysteries of mechanisms and giant buckets as mere codicils to the larger mystery of Captain Greybagges’s plan, which would unfold whether he worried about it or not. Another enigma intrigued him, though; could ships have souls? He posited this question to the Captain, Bill and Mr Benjamin over the remains of their supper seated at the table in the Great Cabin, telling them of the leopardess in the dream, but not of her message.
“I have not had a dream such as yours,” said the Captain, “but then I hardly ever dream, or remember dreams, which is much the same thing. Ships do seem to have a spirit, or why else would we put a figurehead on them.”
“Ha! The figurehead is there because most sailors cannot read. That is, for the same reason that inns have signs,” said Mr Benjamin. “If both ships and taverns were not so readily identified the average matelot would not be able to find his way between them, and then international trade, the navies of the world and even – I hesitate to say it! – piracy itself would wither away and die of despondency!” He poured himself some rum, and winked at them over his eyeglasses.
“You are right, Frank, which is why I have arranged for a boucan upon the day afore we leave,” said the Captain. “Oxen, sheep and pigs to be roasted over coals. Barrels of ale and cider, and some port wine and rum-grog for later. Let us kick up our heels before we get about our business, grow our beards a little. I think that ships do have a sort of a spirit, though, if not the sort of full-blown immortal soul that a theologist would give his approval to.”
“The French fellow, René Descartes, would say not,” avowed Mr Benjamin with a mock-serious expression, “rather he would say that mentality is a non-physical substance, from which he deduces the doctrine of duality. He says ‘I think, therefore I am’ and he would say ‘the ship cannot think, therefore it aren’t’. I feel he may have a point there, although he confesses himself puzzled by insects, being unable to decide whether they think or merely act in the fashion of a machine, without will or consciousness.”
“That be true,” said Bill. “It be in his book The Passions Of The Soul, which I has in my sea-chest.”
“Ho-ho! Did you purchase it under the misapprehension that it was salacious, Bill?” chortled Blue Peter.
“I did a deal wiv a book-seller when we was in London, for all the books he had by Descartes, an got ‘em a good price, too. All I knew was that he were a mathematician, like. I haven’t read much o’ it, but I remember the bit about insects.” Bill selected an apple and munched it, a glint of amusement in his piggy eyes.
“Why did you want to read Descartes’ mathematical musings?” asked Mr Benjamin, looking taken aback.
“He has some notions about this and that. Summa them very canny. His ideas of ordination, fr’instance, might lead me to say that three and one-half quantities is three and one-half dimensions, which is length, breadth, width and the half-dimension of time.”
The Captain stared at him, mouth slightly open.
“Why is time a half of a dimension?” said Blue Peter, not noticing the Captain’s surprise.
“Because it only goes in one direction. The other three can go back-and-forth, so to speak,” said Bill.
“I confess myself humbled, Bill,” said the Captain. “I was sure that nobody would spot that, I even dubbed the thing ‘deciheptaxial’, smugly content that the name was obscure enough for safety.”
“I would not have smoked it iffen I had not just been reading Mon-sewer Descartes, Cap’n, so I was fortunate there.”
“Well, all of you, please do not breathe a word of these notions outside this cabin for now,” said Captain Greybagges earnestly. “We only have another few days here, and then we are away. All will become clear, I hope, and trying to explain now is, well, too difficult. It’s easier if you just bear with me for now. Here! I have an amusement for you!”
The Captain got up and lifted a square wooden box onto the table.
“I ordered this in London, and it was delivered today.”
He took away the box lid and lifted out a spherical glass bottle the size of a pumpkin.
“Alf Docklefar made it for me. It is our frigate Ark de Triomphe in miniature.”
The Captain moved the oil lamp close to the round bottle and his three officers leaned forward to peer inside.
It was indeed the frigate Ark de Triomphe, the length of a hand-span and beautifully modelled. The black hull ploughed a choppy sea of blue-tinted plaster set in the bottom of the bottle, with whitecaps painted on the crests of the waves. The sails were made of fine silk stiffened with glue-size so that they appeared as if full-drawn by a stiff breeze, the little black skull-and-bones flag flying at the masthead was of stiffened silk, too, as though frozen mid-flap. Every stay, halliard, ratline, hawser and cable was represented in its correct place by silken threads and cords. The tiny muzzles of the cannons peeked from the open gun-ports,
There was silence for several minutes as they examined the ship in its round bottle, broken by the occasional quiet slurp as rum was sipped.
“Goats and monkeys!” said Mr Benjamin at last. “That is indeed a fine maquette of this noble vessel! Perfect in every visible detail! That Docklefar fellow is an artist, in his way.”
“Well, not perfect in every detail,” said Blue Peter.
“Surely yuz jests!” said Bill.
“Look carefully,” said Blue Peter, “those front gun-ports are far too narrow. I know that for a certainty, for we have just spent the past week widening them.”
The days went by quickly as the tempo of work increased towards the day of departure. The tubs came and went, delivering cargoes both mundane and strange; reels of copper wire of different gauges; thirty barrels of sauerkraut; ten sausage-shaped bottles made of cast gun-bronze, each as long as a cannon; forty-two barrels of salted herrings; a device similar to an iron fire-pump, but exquisitely made of polished brass and steel; hogsheads of wine, casks of ale, kegs of rum; ten rifled muskets (a source of much wonder) with their bullet-moulds and tools; sailcloth, canvas, rope, cable and cordage; a portable blacksmith’s forge; square slabs of glossy-black pitch and kegs of turpentine from the pine-forests of the Baltic; tinplate cans of fine castor-bean oil in several grades of viscosity (for “lubrication, not purgation”, as Mr Benjamin assured Israel Feet); fifteen boxes of soap and a hemp sack full of scrubbing brushes; a surveyor’s theodolite with its tripod; two tons of cheese, the truckles wrapped in straw….
Alarms and panics occurred, as some necessary action or essential article was nearly overlooked, but these became fewer, and those pirates responsible for ensuring readiness started to lose their haunted looks, although they were often found staring glassy-eyed at nothing, their lips moving silently as they ticked-off mental check-lists. Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges oversaw the organisation of this chaos from the Great Cabin, consulting ledgers, rosters, inventories and charts piled all over his desk and scattered on the floor around his chair. The cabin-door was wedged open, as people were coming and going all the time. He wrote letters, and pirates were despatched with bundles of them to deliver to the post-coaches and mail-boats. Occasionally he shouted for Mumblin’ Jake to bring him more coffee.
“We casts off tomorrow, shipmates” roared Captain Greybagges. “We be a-leavin’ on the evening tide!”
The crew of buccaneers cheered, waving their hats like madmen.
“We be a-sailin’ off on a voyage to far lands, me hearty lads, on a very great venture indeed. We sails to strange seas and unknown shores, it be true, but success be assured, since I has laid me plans deep, and I has laid them well! I be keeping me plans under me hat, for now, because you swabs be a bunch of old ladies for the chatterin’ and the gossipin’, and, as the old pirate motto do say, ‘three may keep a secret … if two o’ they be dead’ har-har!”
Blue Peter stood on the quarterdeck behind the Captain and watched the crew, the buccaneers standing packed into the waist or sitting on yards and cross-trees in the rigging. It was no longer easy to tell which were the old pirates and which the new pirates. They were hanging on the Captain’s words, even though he was not telling them much. But then, thought Blue Peter, I know more than any of them and I don’t know what he’s up to either. I suppose the crew are trusting their hearts, just like I am. Captain Greybagges was dressed as a prosperous merchant skipper, in a fine blue broadcloth coat with gold buttons, and his beard was boot-polished a rich brown. Blue Peter had donned his embroidered blue-silk coat, a white ruffled shirt and dove-grey breeches tucked into polished boots, for there seemed little point in being too restrained in dress on the last day. The Captain was still speaking:
“…. an’ Captain Morgan, Captain Bloody Morgan, bloody Captain Bloody Morgan, do think himself to be cock o’ the walk because he and his rag-bag rag-tag ragamuffins took the great port city o’ Panama, but that will seem like mere apple-scrumpin’ when our tale is told!”
The crew cheered again, louder and longer, tramping their feet on the deck. The Captain raised his hands and they quieted.
“Now, listen yuz swabs! Today we shall have ourselves a boucan, and yuz can already smell the meat a-roasting over the fires. Today we grows our beards a little, and has an ale or two! But, me lads, let us have no strife or squabbling! Summa the people from the town are a-coming, so I wants yuz on yer best partyin’ behaviour. Don’t yuz be tryin’ to sweet-talk their womenfolk …” Laughter from the pirates. “… no, not even if they gives yuz a wink! Don’t yuz be drinking yerselves mad or dead, neither, and no scrapping, unless it be the boxin’ in the ring that Bill is a-fixin’ up. Surely yuz shall enjoy yerselves, but no shennigans! for tomorrow we sails to meet with fortune, becuz we be gentlemen o’ fortune, boys, and I tells yuz that we shall meet with great good fortune indeed! Now off with you, me cheery lads!”
Somebody called “three cheers for the Cap’n!” and the pirates hip-hip-hoorayed three times, then took themselves to the boatyard for the food, drink and entertainments, filing off the frigate in a surprisingly orderly fashion, with a quiet hubbub of high spirits.
Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges, Blue Peter Ceteshwayoo, Israel Feet and Mr Benjamin took a glass of wine and a biscuit in the Great Cabin before joining the party in the boatyard. Bulbous Bill Bucephalus was already down there, rigging a boxing-ring and arranging the bouts so that the weaker combatants would fight first.
“That was a fine rousing speech, Cap’n,” said Mr Benjamin, “and this is capital wine!”
“Thank you, Frank! I had to tell them something to raise their spirits afore we go. It’s difficult though. I was thinking that it’s a bit like wooden clocks. I had Mumblin’ Jake open a bottle of the Margaux, as it is an occasion. It is an excellent vintage, fifteen years in the bottle.”
“Wooden clocks again? said Blue Peter. “They are surely a great inspiration to you!”
“Ah! But hear me out! Your Swisser makes a wooden clock. That’s clever, thinks you, I should like to make a wooden clock myself, so you asks a Swisser to write up an account, call it, say How To Make Traditional Swiss Wooden Clocks. You read it, and it is most enlightening, and you wish to put it in your library, but where in your library do you put it? Do you put it on the shelf reserved for books on carpentry? Or on the shelf for books on clockmaking? Or on the shelf for books on Switzerland? Or on the shelf for books on traditions? It is not obvious, and so the book may not be easily found when you wish to find it again!”
“I can indeed follow you thus far,” said Blue Peter, sipping wine.
“But think! The memory – my memory, your memory, anybody’s memory – is much alike to a library. Many of the notions which I would have to impart to explain my plans are the same as the Swiss clockmaking book. It is difficult to categorise them, and if I tried to explain my plans to the crew they would be confused and not enlightened because those slippery notions would not fit comfortably on this shelf of their memory or that shelf of their memory, let alone whether the notions themselves would be understood.”
“That is an intriguing way of considering the condition of incomprehensibility,” said Mr Benjamin. “The memory imagined as a library, and the mind, or pneuma, as its librarian. Rational thought thus dependent on the system which joins the two. Fascinating!”
“Librarians are indeed much under-valued, in the general way of things,” said Captain Greybagges. “I confess that I would not have achieved very much at all, were it not for a … for librarians.”
“Wooden clocks, by the bones o’ Davy!” said Israel Feet. “That be a marvel, or yuz may fry me in dripping, else, wi’ a curse! Damm’ee!” He emptied his glass in a gulp.
The First Mate was exercising his pirate patois, the others guessed, for he would be master-of-ceremonies at some of the entertainments, and the pirate’s lingo had been at an ebb of late, as the influence of the educated new pirates was felt, despite the enthusiasm of the young men for speaking it.
“Come, gentlemen!” said Captain Greybagges, with a sudden smile. “Let us be away to the revels! Izzy shall be our Lord of Misrule, and with luck it may not rain too much! Come, I wishes to grow me beard, I does! Wi’ a curse I does, damn’ yuz eyes!”
Captain Greybagges strode out of the Great Cabin, shouting to Mumblin’ Jake that he may come to the boucan once he had washed the glasses and locked the Captain’s pantry. His officers followed.
Blue Peter was the last to leave the Great Cabin, as he was savouring the last of his glass of vintage French wine, which was very good. The Captain is very good at deflecting any curiosity about his plans, he thought, bamboozling Mr Benjamin with the problems of libraries, dazzling the crew with promises of riches and fame. Blue Peter noticed that the carpenter had fixed the ship-in-a-bottle on a special shelf on the cabin bulkhead, and it was brightly lit by the weak sunlight through the tall stern windows. He took a moment to examine it in daylight, rather than the yellow glow of a lamp. It was a beautiful model, quite surprising in its tiny details; there was a seagull on the foremast topgallant yard, barely the size of a flea, and a wash-tub by the hatchway to the galley. Blue Peter noticed the incongruous diagonal yard with a little platform that had been fitted to the Ark de Triomphe between the foremast and the mainmast. It was partially obscured by the sails and rigging, but he saw that there was something on the little platform. It was a tiny golden sphere, the size of a small bead. How odd. thought Blue Peter, the little platform of the real frigate has nothing upon it. Even more odd, the bright golden orb appeared to be at the exact centre of the spherical glass bottle. That is strange. He scratched his head. There seemed to be only two human figures upon the model’s deck, a dark figure and a pale figure upon the quarterdeck. The figures were very tiny, so he could make out no more.
Blue Peter recalled that there was a magnifying-glass in the drawer of the Captain’s desk. Through the lens the model frigate was even more exquisite. The tiny wash-tub by the galley hatch was visibly made of separate wooden staves barely the size of splinters, and the two figures on the quarterdeck swam into focus in the glass. They were very small and lacked detail, the faces just dots of pink paint, but so cleverly wrought that the dark figure was quite recognizable as the Captain, with a black justaucorps coat, black tricorne hat, clad entirely in black except for his long green beard. The pale figure that stood close to the Captain was a tall slender woman with black hair, dressed in a white Greek chiton belted at the waist with a wide zoster. From far away Blue Peter heard a faint roar; the first boxing-bout of the boucan had just ended.