Pirate King (25 page)

Dusk drew near, giving Adam an excuse to row after Annie and Bert, who had contrived to fall behind the slowly moving
Harlequin
. Annie’s shrieks of laughter at being hauled aboard the little boat rang across the intervening water, and although she was shivering when she came on deck, her eyes shone with the pleasure of having admirers.

Appetites were hearty for Maurice’s dinner. Afterwards, the gramophone was brought out again, and lamps were lit, and we danced beneath the stars.

It is, as one can see, impossible to keep much hidden in a universe 150 feet long and 23 feet wide. One need only keep one’s ears and eyes open, to overt behaviour and to nuance, for much to be revealed.

The problem being, it works both ways, making it necessary to construct a believable reason for such questions as, Why did Miss Russell climb a mast for a lengthy conversation with a gent she barely knew—and whom she had nearly drowned at first meeting?

Yet another story-within-a-story, with the only possible script being: A haughty young woman encounters, rejects, and ultimately is won over by a most unlikely man.
The Taming of the Shrew
, with pirates. And considering that with my trousers, hair-cut, and spectacles I might at first glance be taken for a man, and that Holmes was nearly thrice my age and already established on board as a lecher, the only way to construct the play was as a comedy.

Which placed us in the awkward position of being two married people engaged in a prolonged and very public flirtation, while three score of onlookers sniggered behind their hands at the unlikely pairing. At least our audience cooperated—egged us on, as they thought—by granting us a few square feet of privacy during our tête-à-têtes.

I had to be grateful this voyage was only 350 miles; had we been crossing the Atlantic, we’d have either had to stand before La Rocha while he performed an on-board marriage, or beside him while he performed at-sea burial services for a series of shroud-wrapped fellow passengers. Probably both.

Setting aside the burden of this exquisitely uncomfortable wooing performance, and its unfortunate effect on Holmes’ blood-pressure, the round-the-clock ship-board intimacy provided wide opportunity for a reverse espionage: While Holmes and I enacted a stage comedy at our end, we could also watch a series of other performances unfold among those who considered themselves our audience.

For example, I should never have come to realise Geoffrey Hale’s simmering resentments and irritations with Fflytte were it not for this continuous close surveillance. As it was, the entire ship heard him shout, “Oh for God’s sake, can you talk of nothing but this damnable film!” one night from the tiny cabin the partners shared. And I feel certain that the reaction of my fellow passengers was the same as mine:
Of course he cannot; why would you even ask?

The next day, Hale’s usual long-suffering amiability was back in place, but once the slip had been given voice, it was difficult for him to disguise further small ventings of frustration as the good-humoured grumbles they had seemed before.

Further reasons to appreciate the brevity of our voyage cropped up almost hourly. I noticed that wherever Annie was, Adam-the-Pirate and Bert-the-Constable would often drift over to stand, listening casually. Although I’d caught the occasional flash of wit sullying Annie’s big blue eyes, and although she seemed to treat Bert with a sister’s dismissal, Adam’s attentions made her go all fluttery and girlish. Even though she had to be five years older than he.

Taking this to an extreme, Mrs Hatley seemed to be rehearsing her part of Ruth-the-Nursemaid even during her hours of rest, making much of Daniel Marks, our Frederic, patting his hair, adjusting his coat, laughing at his jokes.

Frederic seemed oblivious, because his eyes were usually on the beautiful young pirate Benjamin.

Benjamin’s beautiful eyes, however, followed Celeste.

And Celeste often looked back at him.

The older girls alternated their flirtations between the pirates and the constables, stirring the antagonism between the picture’s enemies. Two of the pirates were old enough to interest the mothers, who took to powder and paint (often lopsided, thanks to poor lighting and the ship’s motions).

One of those was Mrs Nunnally, whose preoccupation with the middle-aged pirate David freed young Edith to cultivate a friendship with Jack. Edith was happy to find someone with whom “she” could hunker on the decks with dice or a pen-knife.

Among the pirates I slowly became aware of some facts. I knew that La Rocha, Samuel—Selim—and Gröhe all spoke Arabic, although with a different accent from what I had learnt in Palestine. Over the next days, despite Samuel’s constant presence that had the sailors guarding their tongues and their actions, several of the men let slip a word here, a phrase there, betraying their knowledge of the language. Adam and Jack were the first two I overheard, followed by Benjamin, then Earnest.

And not only linguistic clues emerged: On our third morning, Adam spotted Annie in conversation with one of the constables (not, as symmetry might suggest, “Alan,” but her other attendant, Bert) and he took objection. Shouting soon escalated to jostling, but to my surprise, Annie did not perform the requisite girlish mock-protest that serves to feed tensions to the point of open violence. Rather, she shoved herself in between the two young cockerels. With her there, no punches could be thrown, and in a flash others had intervened to separate the would-be combatants.

I watched closely as Adam slid his knife back into its hiding place—then Samuel had the young pirate’s collar in his fist, to drag the lad off to the side and give him hell and a couple of hard shakes. When he let go, Adam staggered against the railings. Samuel snapped out a harsh order and pointed at a bucket with a frayed rope tied to its mended bail.

He was setting Adam to scrubbing the deck, on his knees, with a brush. The young man, face red and stormy, snatched up the bucket, upturned it so that a brush fell out, then dropped the pail over the side to fill it with sea water. As he stomped past Jack, the pail sloshing furiously, Jack reached out a comforting hand; Adam threw it off with a snarl. The younger lad shot a covert look at the quarterdeck, saw with relief that Samuel’s back was to him, then walked away towards the bowsprit, looking bereft at the rejection of his friend.

As I thought over the motions, the postures of long familiarity between the two, an odd notion took root in my mind: Perhaps Adam and Jack were
familiar
in more than the abstract? If one looked closely and discounted the difference in years, one might say there was a degree of resemblance between them.

Almost the resemblance of brothers.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

GIRLS
: Piracy their dreadful trade is—
Nice companions for young ladies!

A
S
G
EOFFREY
H
ALE’S
assistant, one of my tasks was to ensure that the crew remained more or less content, letting the film go ahead without disruption. As
Harlequin
worked her way southwards, with fifty-two individuals spanning the variations of age, background, interest, and gender, keeping everyone placid proved an increasing problem. My only reassurance was that, given the tight quarters, all these burgeoning relationships—both affectionate and war-like—would find consummation difficult until we had made landfall.

The changing tide from the quarterdeck was most worrying of all.

Before leaving Lisbon, La Rocha’s attitude towards Fflytte and Hale had been condescending but amiable: Apart from the one uncomfortable outburst in the first hour, La Rocha had listened politely to the requests and demands of his English employer, albeit with the amused eyebrow of an expert faced with the enthusiasms of an amateur.

The farther south we went, however, the further Fflytte and Hale were demoted towards the ranks of the actors. Fflytte seemed to have forgot that La Rocha had come inches from killing him with the belaying pin. Instead, when not actively engaged in filming, our director either ignored the quarterdeck entirely, as if having that portion of the ship
—his
ship—forbidden to him was no more unusual or irritating than being barred from the parrot’s perch atop the mainmast, or else he approached that
sanctum sanctorum
with bows and scrapes, to ask our Captain’s thoughts on some twist of the picture’s plot, to enquire of Samuel what the function of that line there might be.

Holmes and I were not the only wooing being done on
Harlequin
, not by a long shot.

Hale approached the demotion of Englishmen by going quiet. He watched the Captain and his lieutenant as they came and went, studied their interactions with the crew, and rarely spoke directly to them. He stopped what he was doing whenever Fflytte approached the ship’s masters (which was rarely when they were on the quarterdeck), and frowned at his cousin’s subservient posturings.

He did not have to say aloud what he was thinking:
Why is the ship’s owner given no say in the running of his vessel?
One might imagine that La Rocha not only ran, but owned
Harlequin
.

The thought went far to explain Hale’s outburst during the night.

As we neared the coast of Africa, the attitude of the two pirates shifted from patronising to near-scornful. And not just La Rocha and Samuel—I noticed Adam turning away from Fflytte with a faint sneer; later that day, young Jack did the same.

It was worrying.

It would have been positively alarming had the pirates demonstrated the same low-grade aggression towards the girls. But towards all of us women, they held an air of distracted kindliness, as if we were pretty toys who were not to be played with too energetically. An attitude I found personally infuriating, but it was preferable to most of the alternatives.

That last afternoon at sea, Holmes and I managed another brief conversation without having to perch fifty feet in the air. The coast of Morocco was approaching, and all those not actively engaged in running the ship were gathered along the port-bow to watch. So long as we kept our voices low and our expressions those of two people murmuring sweet nothings at one another, we should be all right: there were no port-holes underneath us, and not even Samuel or Annie, between them omnipresent on board, could come upon us from seaward.

We sat shoulder to shoulder on the starboard rail; there was no need to feign my welcome of his physical proximity.

“They’re up to something,” I said, fluttering my eyelashes.

“La Rocha and Samuel, with Adam, Benjamin, and Earnest,” he replied with a smile.

“And Jack.”

“Adam’s younger brother.” He said it as if it were obvious, although he couldn’t have figured it out much before I had.

“Samuel’s sons, you think, rather than La Rocha’s?”

“Adam looks more like Samuel than Jack does, but they all have much the same accent. However, I agree, they’re probably both Samuel’s.”

“Gröhe must know as well. If it was so urgent they had to sneak him in under our noses, he has to have some purpose. But what?”

“Were I to venture a prediction,” he said calmly (heaven forbid he should be caught out in a guess), “I’d say we’re about to be kidnapped.”

A cold finger ran down my spine: Robinson Crusoe had it easy, when it came to piratic captivity. “There are some real horror stories about Moroccan prisons.”

“This is 1924, not 1624,” he said, without a trace of doubt in his voice. Which made me lean into him a touch more, in gratitude. “And although La Rocha is unstable and capricious, I’d say he lacks the mental pathology needed to put a collection of blonde girls into chains.”

“I’m not sure I’d say the same about Samuel.” I gave a shy duck of the head, for the sake of our onlookers—which, considering our topic of conversation, felt even more lunatic than usual.

“Were Samuel in charge, Russell, I should be worried indeed. But La Rocha will take care to leave us in cotton wool, for the time being. Don’t worry, holding captives for ransom is a common enough occupation here.”

“Is it?”

“Oh yes. Sir Harry Maclean, who later became the Sultan’s commander in chief, was held ransom for a time. Twenty thousand, I believe they got for him.”

“Francs?”

“Pounds.”

“Ouch. I can’t see anyone parting with that much for this lot in a hurry.” I thought of having to spend months locked up in the company of Bibi and Annie and Edith … “What do you think about taking the ship?”

He smiled—his own smile, not the smarm of the Major-General. “Have I mentioned recently, Russell, that I find your confidence anodyne to an old man’s doubts?”

I snorted. “The day you doubt yourself is the day I sprout wings and fly with Rosie. You and I could take the ship if we wanted.”

“Not by direct action.”

“We can’t put the others at risk, I agree, even though low cunning outdoes open warfare any day. Still, two against sixteen …”

“Three if—”

He bit off what he had been about to say, and I turned to him a face that, had anyone been nearby, would have cast our affectionate act into serious doubt. “Let me guess: You were going to tell me that Mycroft has a man on board.”

“I think he may.”

“So why didn’t he tell you?” I demanded.

“Kindly don’t look so murderous, Russell, we’re supposed to be love-making here. That’s better, if a trifle sickly. He didn’t tell me because I haven’t talked with him.”

“You haven’t—” I closed my mouth, pushed away from the railing, and stalked across to the other side, staring unseeing towards the brown line across the horizon. When I went back to him, land was a mile closer and things were somewhat clearer. “You didn’t actually say that you came to escape Mycroft. He never got to Sussex, did he? There were no builders in. Yet he made arrangements for you to come here?”

“My brother may not be aware that he made the arrangements. He kept sending messages to say he’d been delayed, that he would arrive the next day. I thought nothing of it—I’ve had sufficient experience with British builders to expect that any dealings with them will go awry—but when I received your letter on Wednesday and telephoned to his flat, there was no answer. The building’s concierge said he’d been gone for days. I don’t know where he is or what he’s up to, but I didn’t want to wait for him. I forged a document and commandeered his resources.”

How jolly: another warrant for our arrest.

“But you agree that he has a man here?” I asked.

“I’d say the machinations for your getting on board were too complex for Scotland Yard. They carry the aroma of Mycroft.”

“Well, his agent is unlikely to be one of the pirates, since La Rocha brought them. And the film crew have mostly been with Fflytte for a while. That leaves the constables, of whom Clarence and Donald are regulars. What about Alan? He has the watchful air of one of Mycroft’s men.”

“Even if all four of the remaining constables are with us, there are too many innocents standing in the way of harm.”

Plus, La Rocha and Samuel had no small degree of low cunning themselves. And more ruthlessness than either Holmes or I could summon.

“Are you suggesting that we let them continue with their kidnapping?”

“I think it would be more dangerous to move against them now, when they are clearly braced for challenge, than later when they feel secure at their success.”

“Holmes, I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“If nothing else,” he mused, “it will be a novel experience. I have been abducted before, but never within the setting of a Gilbert and Sullivan play.”

I considered our situation, and was hit by a thought that made me chuckle.

Holmes looked at me sideways. “I should be glad to hear any aspect of the situation that is merely humorous.”

“A moving picture based on a story of fictional pirates taken over by real ones, and the picture itself hires false pirates to play pirates, who turn out to be real? Fernando Pessoa would die with happiness.”

We, however, in the absence of our walking conundrum and translator, could only wait with interest for the announcement of our abduction to be made. The handful of pirates that we had decided were in on the plot became ever more tense as the coastline grew before us. The girls began to bubble with the thrill of the adventure. The rest of the pirates happily demonstrated their skills in the rigging to the girls below and to the other ships in the vicinity. The tan horizon line became a shaped coast with long white breakers and a tight collection of stone walls and flat rooftops.

No announcement was made.

We came within shelling range of the city, then rifle shot, then bow-shot, without being informed that we were prisoners.

Finally, the water curling back from our hull took on a tinge of brown, from the waters of the Bou Regreg river that divided bustling modern Rabat on the south from the enclosed and xenophobic Moslem Salé to the north. In its heyday, the river had provided a neat refuge for shallow pirate hulls, while keeping at a distance the deeper draughts of the royal navy. Over the generations, the river had silted up, permitting the passage of small fishing boats and ferries—until the French occupation began, and improvements were made.

The French and English governments would no doubt be thrilled to learn that their European modernisation schemes had enabled the latest generation of Salé pirates to bring thirty-four European prisoners up to the city gates in modesty and ease.