Cinnamon and Gunpowder (22 page)

“You didn’t like their games? Let me guess, tried to protect the cat that they tied spoons to? A valiant knight even then, weren’t you, Wedge?”

“A knight can fight. As you well know, I fight about as well as a pillow.”

“That’s an insult to pillows. At least they can take a beating.”

“Sonora was cantankerous and had a heavy hanging lip with a hairy mole. He pretended to be frustrated, but he never hit me the way the other monks did; he was gentle. I loved him fiercely. He was overly fond of vinegar, though.”

Mabbot’s eyes were closed again, but she had not fallen asleep. “And?” she demanded.

“And what?”

“Go on. Did you ever avenge a lover with a fork?”

“Perhaps another night, Captain.”

“Well enough.”

I felt, with a shudder, the rabbit brush past my feet. After a moment, I asked, “You know the sailors Theodore and Finn?”

“I know my men.”

“Then you have seen them holding hands?” I asked delicately. “Going everywhere arm in arm?”

“What of it?” Mabbot asked.

“You tolerate it? I’m not naïve; I know what happens aboard a ship, but those two … they’ve sewn their hammocks together. It goes beyond brief physical comforts.”

“Indeed it has progressed unforgivably to sweetness and, sin of sins, right on to love.” Mabbot laughed.

“Call it what you may, in God’s eyes it is a crime.”

“I have seen crime.” Mabbot leaned close and her glare was back. “I have been trod under it. I have, in my haste and fury, committed crimes, a few, and I’m paying for them even now. If, looking down, God ignores the screaming and steaming gore and chooses to be offended by those two doves, He is an ass or an idiot. I do not abide either.”

Hearing heaven thus insulted would, just weeks ago, have spurred me to violence, but now I merely shifted in my seat. I ventured another subject, one which had been bothering me since the “salt opera.”

“So it’s true you worked for Ramsey as a privateer against the French
guerre de course
?”

“It was a different crew I had then,” Mabbot said. “Almost twenty years ago. I didn’t know then what a devil Ramsey was. But eventually I learned how the tea-opium-slave wheel turned, how
he
turned it. It’s not hard to be ignorant on land—you go to your market and you buy your tea and that’s that. But I had seen too much to pretend I hadn’t. Ramsey had directed me to the Bay of Bengal, where the French were harassing Pendleton ships. I didn’t have to sink but a few of them to realize they weren’t French but Bengalis with French guns, trying to defend their coast. A small revolt that I had crushed almost single-handedly. I went ashore, I saw the opium farms, I saw the starvation. Wedge, you only cooked for the man, but, you see, I had killed for him, protected his routes, I helped it all happen. I couldn’t sit by.”

“And you were with child?”

“I didn’t know it. I had torches and a good portion of my crew—we were on our way to burn Ramsey out of his house when we were ambushed, I barely escaped. He had smelled my shift in loyalties and was ready for us with a garrison of musketeers. With a stroke of his pen, I went from legitimate privateer to hunted pirate.”

“Your men have fabulous stories about the Fox,” I said. “Just today, I heard this: You and the Fox, working together, long ago, put your hands on a map to Eden, the actual garden, and stole the fruit of life, dodging the while swipes of the flaming sword. At the last moment, though, the Brass Fox abandoned you while he sneaked away. You, cornered by furious angels, pleaded and swore to bring him back for divine justice.”

“That’s good.” Mabbot laughed while picking her teeth with a blade. “I hadn’t heard that one.”

“The Fox said that you taught him to kill. He said he sailed with you—that you took him from Ramsey’s house in the middle of the night.”

“You’re such a stubborn weed, Wedge. I’ll tell you only if you swear to keep it to yourself.”

“I’ll not whisper it even in my sleep.”

She leaned in to say, “The Brass Fox is Cain himself. He cannot be apprehended because he is protected by the mark God gave him. He comes and goes as he pleases.”

“Mabbot, you’re as bad as your men.”

“I should hope I’m considerably worse.”

“I’m asking, Captain,” I said. “Help me understand. You would have me eat with you as if I were not a prisoner swept up in the course of your adventures. So here I am, my life suspended for the sake of this hunt. I’m not appeased by fairy stories. I met the man, I saw his features—he even speaks like you. He claims Ramsey as his father. Is it true or no?”

She sighed and considered me for a long time before speaking. “It is. Ramsey stole him from the nuns where I had left him, just a tyke. I took him back as soon as he was old enough to sail. It was a mistake, perhaps, to bring him aboard so young—no, youth has nothing to do with it. Some are too soft for the sea at any age. But what choice did I have? I couldn’t leave him with Ramsey—the loneliness of that rambling house with the servants whispering in the shadows like ghosts. Can you believe Ramsey never spoke to the child? The boy looking like me didn’t make it any easier for him. It is not good to have the gaze of a man like Ramsey on you at an impressionable age. A man of influence, a man whose flatulence is attended to by a thousand shareholders, and to see in that gaze nothing but disgust. A glance like that is a sharp awl, and my Fox was soft wood. By the time I got him, he was desperate for attention, but if I merely tousled his hair he would fly into a rage. I couldn’t touch my own child; he was like a feral dog that way, but praise, oh, he was a puppy for that. Tell him he was clever, and his grin would nearly cleave his head in two.” Mabbot’s own smile lit the room for a moment, then quickly disappeared.

“My boy saw a thing … a murder in the barracks. There had been a feud earlier in the night; one seaman felt another had cheated him at cards. This seaman waited until the cheater was asleep, then held his head and poured molten lead into his ear. This, by the way, is why gambling is forbidden on my ship. My son saw it all from his own hammock. He didn’t speak for a week after that. We’ve all seen worse, but, as I said, Leighton … the Fox, he was sensitive. It’s not a pretty thing to witness, a man killed that way, but, from the way he shivered, you’d have thought it happened to him. It may as well have, he was so changed after.

“‘Soft children become hard men.’ Who said that, Wedge? Or is it ‘Sweet children become sour men’? Some have survived lead in the ear for a time. The metal cuts right through the fatty parts and cools deep inside, like a lump of ore, sometimes in the skull, sometimes in the neck, there for good. Once you see a thing, once you know a thing, it’s in you forever. Maybe it’s one solid fist, or maybe it’s got jagged petals. So the flesh becomes a purse for the blade. They go mad from the pain, or the lead poisons them slowly. Luckier to die right away.

“I had high hopes for my boy; I held nothing back. I could teach him how, but I couldn’t teach him why. His anger had no target, he would aim at anything. He sank a tunny boat with her crew aboard—for fun, like shooting a cow. I couldn’t have a loose cannon like that on my ship, but I couldn’t leave him to be shot by marines. It was in Calcutta that he just disappeared. He’s been chewing through the guts of the world ever since. I tracked him through opium dens, carnivals, caves, forests, deserts. He makes enemies everywhere he goes, sets bigger and bigger fires…” She trailed off.

“And you’ve been chasing after him, putting out his fires?”

“In a manner of speaking.” Mabbot sighed. “Tell me, Wedge, what do you really know about the company—about their trade?”

“China is a nation of martinets, that much anyone knows, who insist that we move all the tea in the world through the little porthole of Canton alone—their stubborn intractability in taxes and free trade are an impediment to progress.”

“And opium?” she asked.

“To be perfectly blunt, if the Chinaman has difficulty with moderation, why should English commerce suffer?”

“You are the scholar, aren’t you?”

“I have never claimed to be a diplomat nor a historian. I am interested in China as the source of tea and spices. My world is the kitchen. My skirmishes are fought in the skillet,” I said.

“How poetic. A feather in the cap of ignorance. This war surrounds you. If you have hidden in a kitchen and kept your hands clean, it is because you have been allowed to.”

“I’m no innocent, Captain. It’s not play to be raised a despised Catholic in England and yet be loyal to her. Our orphanage survived only by the mercy of a protective benefactor. And then to have been secreted in a barrel across fortified borders to clean duck with my French chef while our nations were busy gutting each other for the plums of the New World and the pits of the Old. I’m no schoolboy. I have walked the edge of treason and have not crossed it.”

“It may be why I like you, Wedge. You’ve been rolled in the surf to a luster. But here’s a little bedtime story: The Pendleton Trading Company, of which your beloved former employer controlled the lion’s share, was established to bring you your precious spices and, of course, tea. How we love our tea. But what could England offer in exchange? The Chinese aren’t fond of jellied eel, nor of fog. No, we paid silver, and before long China had all of it. It couldn’t continue. Happily, England found the solution in Bengal, India. There grows a lovely flower—”

“I know what opium is.”

“Then you know it cannot be grown in England. Crucial it was for the Crown to own Bengal. A bloody coup but worth it, for, at long last, the Pendleton Company had something China wanted. And how the tide has turned. They’ve gotten all of their silver back and all of the Chinese silver as well. It’s a propitious arrangement: Their country on its knees, selling anything they can put their hands on for a pinch of smoke. Pendleton forces Bengali farmers to grow the opium, sells it to the Chinese for mountains of coins and tea, and comes home fat as a cat in the bacon barrel. Cannon, coolies, opium—the staples of transatlantic commerce. Long live the king.” After a silence she said, “I am not as fond of bloodshed as you may think.”

“You make your way on a sea of it,” I objected. “Not a stranger approaches but you fill him with shot.”

“We are at war. Your ignorance doesn’t—”

“Yes, yes, the opium.”

“The opium, the slaves, these are but ripples on the surface. Our struggle is deeper and older. We battle princes of power, kings of industry, popes, the rich who gnaw at the bones of the poor.”

“And on your side?” I asked. “What armies do you have?”

“Only the few of us who are awake. We fight each in our own fashion. I’ve had the bad luck to be awake from a very young age.”

“How do you hope to win?”

“Naturally there can be no hope of winning,” she said. “That’s what makes me so dangerous.”

“And your son. Which side of this war is he on?”

I had pushed too far. Her mood properly curdled, Mabbot showed me the door.

12

THE
DIASTEMA

In which we are bitten by the Fox

Tuesday, September 7

The call from the foremast of “Ship ho!” brought all to the deck to see a schooner adrift a mile from our bowsprit. It was the
Diastema
, the very ship I had met the Fox on, only now lacking any sign of sails, rigging, or crew. The massive profiterole clouds stacked in the sky made her look the more pitiable. A lone yellow flag punctuated her mainmast, and our crew took it to mean there was illness aboard. We assumed the weather gauge so as not to be downwind from a plague craft.

“She’s adrift,” Mr. Apples announced, “and stripped of apparel and cordage—cleaner than a nun’s backside. Mayhaps mutiny?”

“Anyone care to bet he’s still in there?” Mabbot scowled. “Well, Mr. Apples, at least say hello.”

Mr. Apples fired a shot that took the flag right off the mast. The only answer was a graveyard stillness.

“We’re not far from the Sunda Strait,” said Mr. Apples. “I don’t trust a prune on a plate like this, Captain.”

“Longboats!” Mabbot ordered. “Twins, five others, keen for ambush. Muskets. Get the surgeon’s camphor for our kerchiefs.”

Mabbot called to me, “Well, Wedge? Aren’t you curious? There may be a larder for you to pillage.” As I climbed into the longboat, she chuckled. “See? You’re a pirate through and through.”

Mr. Apples halted the men readying the davit tackle for our descent and whispered urgently to Mabbot, “Captain, this has my tapeworms dancing.”

“If it is an ambush, Mr. Apples, I’ll need you here with the advantage. Eyes on the horizon, and if so much as a gull shows its feathers, fire a shot to inform me.”

We were already being lowered to the waves when I saw with chagrin that Asher, the poor young man who had received a lashing for my escape, was in the boat with me, giving me a scowl so searing that I suddenly didn’t care what was in that larder.

As we neared the
Diastema
, her stillness worried me. The ship seemed to be holding her breath. When we pulled alongside, Asher threw a line, shinnied up, then secured a jack ladder for us to climb.

The other men tied their kerchiefs about their faces. Mabbot, seeing I had none, sighed and pulled a silk square from between her breasts, doused it with camphor, and threw it at me. “Can’t have you giving me yellow fever, can I?”

The cabin, which had been glutted with charts and logs, was now cavernous and bare. The deck was bereft of lanterns, blocks, and lines—some pinchfist couldn’t stand to leave anything of use, it seemed—and therefore offered an unobstructed view of the endless horizon. The effect was both exhilarating and discomfiting. The schooner was rolling on the surf, and I tried to find the exact center of the deck where the motion was slightest. No sooner had I done that than Mabbot said, “Asher, you are Wedge’s chaperone.”

“Yes, Captain!” Asher said, as he took my elbow with an eagle’s grip. It was his opportunity to redeem himself, and my arm would bear the bruises of his determination.

“Tightly below, gents, and eyes open,” Mabbot said.