Pirate King (2 page)

CHAPTER ONE

RUTH:
I did not catch the word aright, through being hard of hearing … I took and bound this promising boy apprentice to a
pirate
.

“H
ONESTLY
, H
OLMES
?
P
IRATES
?
”

“That is what I said.”

“You want me to go and work for pirates.”

O’er the glad waters of the dark blue sea, our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free …

“My dear Russell, someone your age should not be having trouble with her hearing.” Sherlock Holmes solicitous was Sherlock Holmes sarcastic.

“My dear Holmes, someone your age should not be overlooking incipient dementia. Why do you wish me to go and work for pirates?”

“Think of it as an adventure, Russell.”

“May I point out that this past year has been nothing but adventure? Ten back-to-back cases between us in the past fifteen months, stretched over, what, eight countries? Ten, if one acknowledges the independence of Scotland and Wales. What I need is a few weeks with nothing more demanding than my books.”

“You should, of course, feel welcome to remain here.”

The words seemed to contain a weight beyond their surface meaning. A dark and inauspicious weight. A Mariner’s albatross sort of a weight. I replied with caution. “This being my home, I generally do feel welcome.”

“Ah. Did I not mention that Mycroft is coming to stay?”

“Mycroft? Why on earth would Mycroft come here? In all the years I’ve lived in Sussex, he’s visited only once.”

“Twice, although the other occasion was while you were away. However, he’s about to have the builders in, and he needs a quiet retreat.”

“He can afford an hotel room.”

“This is my brother, Russell,” he chided.

Yes, exactly: my husband’s brother, Mycroft Holmes. Whom I had thwarted—blatantly, with malice aforethought, and with what promised to be heavy consequences—scant weeks earlier. Whose history, I now knew, held events that soured my attitude towards him. Who wielded enormous if invisible power within the British government. And who was capable of making life uncomfortable for me until he had tamped me back down into my position of sister-in-law.

“How long?” I asked.

“He thought two weeks.”

Fourteen days: 336 hours: 20,160 minutes, of first-hand opportunity to revenge himself on me verbally, psychologically, or (surely not?) physically. Mycroft was a master of the subtlest of poisons—I speak metaphorically, of course—and fourteen days would be plenty to work his vengeance and drive me to the edge of madness.

And only the previous afternoon, I had learnt that my alternate lodgings in Oxford had been flooded by a broken pipe. Information that now crept forward in my mind, bringing a note of dour suspicion.

No, Holmes was right: best to be away if I could.

Which circled the discussion around to its beginnings.

“Why should I wish to go work with pirates?” I repeated.

“You would, of course, be undercover.”

“Naturally. With a cutlass between my teeth.”

“I should think you would be more likely to wear a night-dress.”

“A night-dress.” Oh, this was getting better and better.

“As I remember, there are few parts for females among the pirates. Although they may decide to place you among the support staff.”

“Pirates have support staff?” I set my tea-cup back into its saucer, that I might lean forward and examine my husband’s face. I could see no overt indications of lunacy. No more than usual.

He ignored me, turning over a page of the letter he had been reading, keeping it on his knee beneath the level of the table. I could not see the writing—which was, I thought, no accident.

“I should imagine they have a considerable number of personnel behind the scenes,” he replied.

“Are we talking about pirates-on-the-high-seas, or piracy-as-violation-of-copyright-law?”

“Definitely the cutlass rather than the pen. Although Gilbert might have argued for the literary element.”

“Gilbert?” Two seconds later, the awful light of revelation flashed through my brain; at the same instant, Holmes tossed the letter onto the table so I could see its heading.

Headings, plural, for the missive contained two separate letters folded together. The first was from Scotland Yard. The second was emblazoned with the words
D’Oyly Carte Opera
.

I reared back, far more alarmed by the stationery than by the thought of climbing storm-tossed rigging in the company of cut-throats.

“Gilbert and
Sullivan
?” I exclaimed. “Pirates as in
Penzance
? Light opera and heavy humour? No. Absolutely not. Whatever Inspector Lestrade has in mind, I refuse.”

“One gathers,” Holmes reflected, reaching for another slice of toast, “that the title originally did hold a
double entendre
, Gilbert’s dig at the habit of American companies to flout the niceties of British copyright law.”

He was not about to divert me by historical titbits or an insult against my American heritage: This was one threat against which my homeland would have to mount its own defence.

“You’ve dragged your sleeve in the butter.” I got to my feet, picking up my half-emptied plate to underscore my refusal.

“It would not be a singing part,” he said.

I walked out of the room.

He raised his voice. “I would do it myself, but I need to be here for Mycroft, to help him tidy up after the Goodman case.”

Answer gave I none.

“It shouldn’t take you more than two weeks, three at the most. You’d probably find the solution before arriving in Lisbon.”

“Why—” I cut the question short; it did not matter in the least why the D’Oyly Carte company wished me to go to Lisbon. I poked my head back into the room. “Holmes: no. I have an entire academic year to catch up on. I have no interest whatsoever in the entertainment of
hoi polloi
. The entire thing sounds like a headache. I am not going to Lisbon, or even London. I’m not going anywhere. No.”

CHAPTER TWO

PIRATE KING
: I don’t think much of our profession, but, contrasted with respectability, it is comparatively honest.

M
Y STEAMER LURCHED
into Lisbon on a horrible sleet-blown November morning. My face was scoured by the ocean air, I having spent most of the voyage on deck in an attempt (largely vain) to keep my stomach from turning inside-out. My hair and clothing were stiff with salt, my nose raw from the handkerchief, I had lost nearly half a stone and more than half my mind, and my mood was as bloody as my eyeballs.

If a pirate had hove into view—or my husband, for that matter—I would merrily have keelhauled either with a rope of linen from the captain’s table.

My only source of satisfaction, grim as it was, lay in the knowledge that several of the actors on board were every bit as miserable as I.

The eternal, quease-inducing sway lessened as we left the open sea to churn our way up the Rio Tejo towards the vast harbour—one of Europe’s largest, according to someone’s guide-book—that in the days of sail had made Portugal a great empire. The occasional isolated castle or fishing village along the shore slowly proliferated. Our view panned across a lighthouse, then picked up an odd piece of architecture planted just offshore to our left, a diminutive fort in an unnecessarily exuberant Gothic style. (Was that the style the guide-book—Annie’s?—had called “Manueline”?) Someone in the crowd of shivering fellow passengers loudly identified it as the Tower of Belém; my mind’s eye automatically supplied the phrase on an internal sub-title:

“That’s the Tower of Belem!”

I shook my head in irritation. I had watched more moving pictures over the past few days than in the past few years: My way of seeing the world had changed dramatically.

Beyond the Manueline excrescence rose Lisboa itself—
Alis Ubo
to the Phoenicians,
Ulissipont
to the Romans. Our first indication of the city was the spill of masts and belching smoke-stacks that pressed towards the docks. As we drew nearer, a jumble of pale walls and red tile roofs rose up from the harbour (it looked like a lake) on a series of hills (the guide-book had claimed seven, on a par with Rome) punctuated by church spires (a startling number of those) watched over by a decaying castle.

Pirates
, I sniffed as I eyed the castle gun-ports. Any sensible member of the piratical fraternity would have steered well clear of this place.

I pulled my thick coat around me, made a fruitless attempt to clean my spectacles, and went below to assemble my charges.

My job—my official job—was to shepherd, protect, nurse, and browbeat into order some three dozen inmates of a mobile lunatic asylum. I was the one responsible for their well-being. It was I who ensured the inmates were housed and fed, entertained and soothed, kept off one another’s throats and out of one another’s beds. I was the one the inmates ran to, sent on errands, and shouted at, whether the complaint was inadequately hot coffee or insufficiently robust lightbulb. On the first night out from England, I had been roused from a fitful sleep by a demand that I—I, personally—remove a moth from a cabin.

A fraternity of actual pirates could not have been more trouble. Even a travelling D’Oyly Carte company would have been less of a madhouse.

But I was working neither with buccaneers nor with travelling players: The letter with the heading of the firm responsible for the Gilbert and Sullivan performances had merely been by way of introduction. Instead, I found myself the general coordinator and jack-of-all-trades for a film crew.

In the early years after the War, Fflytte Films had appeared to be the rising star of the British cinema industry: From
Quarterdeck
in 1919 through 1922’s
Krakatoa
, Fflytte Films (“Fflyttes of Fancy!”) seemed positioned to challenge the American domination of the young industry, producing a series of stupendously successful multi-reel extravaganzas with exotic settings and dashing stories. Then came
Hannibal
, which ran so far over budget in the preliminary stages, the project was cancelled before the second reel of film was fed into the cameras.
Hannibal
was followed by the wildly popular
Rum Runner
, but after that came
The Writer
, which took eight months to make and ran in precisely four cinema houses for less than a week.
The Writer
’s failure might have been predicted—a three-reel drama about a British novelist in Paris?—except that Randolph St John Warminster-Fflytte (“Fflyttes of Fantasy!”) was a director famous for pulling hugely successful rabbits out of apparently shabby hats (
Small Arms
concerned the accidental death of a child;
Rum Runner
was about smuggling alcohol into the United States; both had returned their costs a hundredfold) and a movie about a thinly disguised James Joyce might have been as successful as his other ugly ducklings, particularly when one threw in the titillating appeal of the
Ulysses
obscenity ban.

However, since the film had skirted around the actual depiction of the obscene acts in question, it went rather flat. So now, with three costly duds on his hands and the threatened loss of his aristocratic backers, Fflytte was returning to the scene of his three previous solid successes (“Fflyttes of Fanfare!”): the sea-borne action adventure.

This one was to be loosely based on the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.
Loosely
as in wobbling wildly and on the verge of a complete uncoupling. Not an inch of film had gone through the cameras; the Major-General was drunk around the clock; the cameraman’s assistant had a palsy of the hands that was explained to me,
sotto voce
, as the result of a recent nervous breakdown; the actress playing Mabel had taken the bit into her teeth with this, her first starring rôle, and was out to prove herself a flapper edition of Sarah Bernhardt (if not in talent, then in imperious attitudes and a knack of fabricating alternate versions of her personal history); and the twelve other young ladies playing the Major-General’s daughters—yes, thirteen daughters altogether—formed a non-stop cyclone of lace, giggles, and yellow curls that spun up and down the decks and occasionally below them—far below, to judge by the grease-stains on one pink dress thrust under my nose by an accusing maternal person. Even the eldest of the “sisters,” a busybody of the first order, had blinked her big blue eyes at me in practiced innocence from more than one out-of-bounds state-room.

We had not left the Channel before I felt the first impulse to murder.

“Producer’s assistant,” then, was my official job. My unofficial one—the one Holmes had manoeuvred me into—was given me by Chief Inspector Lestrade in his office overlooking Westminster Bridge. He had stood as I was ushered in, but remained behind his desk—as if that might protect him. A single thin folder lay on its pristine surface.

“Miss Russell. Do sit down. May I take your bag?”

“No, thank you.” I dropped the bag I had thrown together in Sussex—basic necessities such as tooth-brush, clean socks, reading material, and loaded revolver—onto the floor, and sat.

“Mr Holmes is not with you?”

“As you see.” Was that a sigh I heard? He sat down.

“You two haven’t any news of Robert Goodman, have you?”

“Is that why you asked me here, Chief Inspector? To follow up on the last case?”

“No, no. I just thought I’d ask, since the man has vanished into thin air, and whenever something like that takes place, it’s extraordinary how often Sherlock Holmes happens to have been in the vicinity.”

“No, we have not heard news of Mr Goodman.” The literal, if not actual, truth.

“Why do I get the feeling that you know more than you’re telling?”

“I know a great number of things, Chief Inspector, few of which are your concern. Now, you wrote asking for assistance.”

“From your husband.”

“Why?” Lestrade had always complained, loud and clear, that there was no place for amateurs in the investigation of crimes.

“Because the only police officers I had with the necessary skills have become unavailable.”

“Those skills being …?”

“The ability to make educated small-talk, and mastery of a type-writing machine. It is remarkable how few gentlemen are capable of producing type-written documents with their own ten fingers. Your husband, as I recall, is one who can.”

“And yet the city’s employment rosters are positively crawling with educated
women
type-writers.”

“I had one of those. A fine and talented young PC. Who is now home with a baby.”

“Oh. Well, now you have me.”

“Yes.” Definitely a sigh, this time. “Oh, it might as well be you.”

My eyes narrowed. “Chief Inspector, one might almost think you had no interest in this matter. Is it important enough to concern Holmes and me, or is it not?”

“Yes. I mean to say, I don’t know. That is—” He ran a hand over his face. “I dislike having outside pressures turned on the Yard.”

“Ah. Politics.”

“In a manner of speaking. It has to do with the British moving picture industry.”

“Do we have a moving picture industry?” I asked in surprise.

“Exactly. While the Americans turn out vast sagas that sell tickets by the bushel, this country makes small pictures about bunnies and Scottish hillsides that are shown as the audience is taking its seats for the feature. I’m told it’s because of the War—all our boys went to the Front, but the American cameras just kept rolling. And now, when we’re beginning to catch up, we no sooner produce a possible rival to the likes of Griffith and DeMille when a rumour—a faint rumour, mind—comes to the ears of Certain Individuals that the man they’re backing may be bent.”

I put the clues together. “Some members of the House of Lords are worried about the money they put up to fund a picture; they mentioned it to the Chancellor of the Exchequer over sherry, and Winston sent someone to talk to you?”

“Worse than that—the Palace itself have invested in the company, if you can believe that. And the trouble is, I can’t say for certain that there’s nothing to it. The studio has been linked to … problems.”

“I should imagine that picture studios generate all sorts of problems.”

“Not generally of the criminal variety. There are some odd coincidences that follow this one around. Three years ago, they made a movie about guns, and—”

“An entire moving picture about guns?”

“More or less. This was shortly after the Firearms Act, and the picture was about a returned soldier who used his military revolver in a Bolshevik act, accidentally killing a child.”

“The Bolshevist terror being why the Firearms Act was introduced in the first place.” The 1920 Firearms Act meant that every three years, Holmes and I were forced to go before our local sheriff for weapons permits, demonstrating that we were neither drunks, lunatics, nor children.

“That and the sheer number of revolvers knocking around after the War waiting to go off. Which more or less concealed the fact that someone sold quite a few of said firearms in this country, unpermitted, shortly after the picture came out.”