Sense And Sensibility And Sea Monsters (5 page)

In such employments as these they were interrupted by the entrance of their landlord, who called to welcome them to Barton Cottage, and to offer them every accommodation from his own house and docks in which theirs might at present be deficient.

Sir John was an imposing figure, weathered and burnt nut-brown by years of trekking in tropical heat. He held the lifelong conviction that the Alteration resulted from a curse laid by one of the tribal races who had come under England’s colonial dominion over the centuries, and he had spent the better part of two decades in search of the culprits. Never had he found proof of his belief, let alone any amelioration of his homeland’s peril, but he had in the meantime accumulated a lifetime of wondrous adventures. Sir John had led troups in search of the heart of the Nile, up the slopes of Peruvian volcanoes, and deep into the impassable jungles of Borneo. Except to bed, he invariably wore upon his belt a glinting machete; in his boot a five-inch quicksilver dagger; and ‘round his neck a chain
beaded with human ears. He bald head was round and cratered as the new moon, but his eyebrows and beard were thick as the Amazonian undergrowth and white as the snows of Kilimanjaro.

In his current state of semi-retirement from the life of adventure, Sir John kept prizes zoological, herbivorous, and mineralogical; the various islands of his archipelago were dotted with secret treasure pits, apiaries, and gardens filled with orchids and rare flowering shrubs plucked from Zanzibarian soil. In his den, among the musty, dark leather furniture, was a chess set carved from rhinoceros bone, shelves of dusty tomes revealing the ancient lore of various African, Incan, and Asiatic tribes, and exemplars of 112 distinct species of butterfly, each pinned to a board, their multihued or zebra-striped wings forever stilled.

But his greatest prize was the island maiden Kukaphahora, now Lady Middleton, a six-foot-two-inch, jewel-bedecked princess of a tribe indigenous to a far-flung atoll. Her village had worshiped Sir John as a god—until they discovered their new deity, in the dead of night, digging a pit from whence to strip-mine the diamonds that glittered in ore deep beneath the village. They nearly castrated him along with all his men, but he and his company fought loose, razed the village, murdered the men most triumphantly, and dragged away the women in their nets.

The arrival of the Dashwoods seemed to afford Sir John real satisfaction, and their comfort to be an object of real solicitude to him. His manner was thoroughly good-humoured, if somewhat eccentric to their more civilized tastes, and he delighted in sharing with them his expertise on all manner of monster lore and legend. He said much of his earnest desire of their living in the most sociable terms with his family and pressed them cordially to dine on Deadwind Island every day till they were better settled at home. His kindness was not confined to words; for within an hour after he left them, there arrived a large basket full of edible exotica from Sir John’s various arboreums; this gift was followed before the end of the day by a brace of freshly caught sturgeon; and that by a big bag of opiates. He insisted, moreover, on conveying all
their letters to the post-frigate, which delivered letters to and from the mainland; Sir John additionally would not be denied the satisfaction of sending them his newspaper every day.

Lady Middleton sent a very civil message by him, denoting her intention of waiting on Mrs. Dashwood as soon as she could be assured that her visit would be no inconvenience; and as this message was answered by an invitation equally polite, her ladyship arrived the next day on a handsome pirogue rowed by two sturdy oarsmen, their muscles oiled and glistening in the noonday sun.

The Dashwoods were, of course, very anxious to see a person on whom so much of their comfort on Pestilent Isle must depend, and the elegance of Sir John’s concubine was favourable to their wishes. Lady Middleton was not more than six or seven and twenty; her face was handsome and her imposing figure was draped in long, flowing robes of distinctive tropical hues. Her manners had all the elegance which her husband’s wanted. But they would have been improved by some share of his frankness and warmth. She was reserved and cold, as if having been stolen from her native village in a burlap sack and made to be servant and helpmate to an Englishman many years her senior, for some reason sat poorly with her. She had nothing to say for herself beyond the commonplace inquiry or remark.

Conversation however was not wanted, for Sir John was very chatty, and Lady Middleton had taken the wise precaution of bringing with her their eldest child, a fine little boy about six years old, with Sir John’s same eyes and nose, but with Lady Middleton’s imposing stature and bearing. They had to enquire his name and age, admire his beauty, and ask him questions which his mother answered for him, while he hung about her and held down his head. On every formal visit a child ought to be of the party, by way of provision for discourse, or in extreme cases, if someone needs to be thrown overboard to satisfy the piranhas trailing the boat. In the present case it took up ten minutes to determine whether the boy was most like his father or mother, and in what particular he resembled either,
for of course everybody differed, and everybody was astonished at the opinion of the others.

Sir John and Lady Middleton would not leave the house and be rowed back to Deadwind Island without securing their promise of dining there the next day.

A
TEAM OF BRAWNY OARSMEN
was thoughtfully dispatched by Sir John to convey the Dashwoods to Deadwind Island, about six mile’s steady row due east from Pestilent Isle; the ladies had passed near it in their inbound journey, and Elinor had even remarked upon the enormous, ramshackle estate, marked around its perimeter with tiki torches and the skulls of alligators set upon pikes.

Lady Middleton piqued herself upon the elegance and extravagance of her table, and of all her domestic arrangements; she loved to surprise her English visitors with displays of hospitality native to her homeland, such as flavoring her soups with monkey urine and not telling anyone she had done so until the bowl had been drained. But Sir John’s satisfaction in society was much more real; he delighted in collecting about him more young people than his house would hold, and the noisier they were the better he was pleased. He was especially fond of relating long tales of his days at sea, stories of riding recalcitrant crocodiles even as he throttled them, or of the time he got scurvy and had to be held down on the deck while his rotting front teeth were knocked out with a spyglass.

The arrival of a new family in the islands was always a matter of joy to him; and in every point of view he was charmed with the inhabitants he had now procured for his rickety little shanty on Pestilent Isle. The Miss Dashwoods were young, pretty, and unaffected. It was
enough to secure his good opinion; for to be unaffected, or to have one of those facial piercings that grotesquely extends the lower lip, as he had seen in Africa, were the two things he found most captivating in a young girl.

Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters were met at the dock-end by Sir John, his pate glistening in the sun, laughing jovially, leaning casually on his oaken cane, and stroking his waist-length white beard. He welcomed them to Deadwind Island with unaffected sincerity as he settled each into an oversized sealskin-leather sofa; the only suspension in his cheerful attitude came upon hearing the tale of their inward journey and of Mrs. Dashwood’s dispatching the monster that attacked them; “I hope,” he muttered, “That you did not invoke the wrath of the Fang-Beast.”

“The what?”

“Never mind, never mind,” he muttered into his beard, and changed the subject to a favourite concern, that of being unable to get any smart young men to meet them. They would see, he said, only one gentleman there besides himself; a particular friend who was staying on the island, and who was—and here Sir John paused, and took a long, uncomfortable breath—a bit
unusual
in his appearance. Luckily, Lady Middleton’s mother, who had been abducted at the same time and from the same Edenic tropical homeland as Lady Middleton, had arrived at Deadwind Island within the last hour; she was a very cheerful, agreeable woman. The young ladies, as well as their mother, were perfectly satisfied with having two entire strangers of the party and wished for no more.

Lady Middleton’s mother was referred to as “Mrs. Jennings,” simply because Sir John thought it amusing; her real name was some fourteen or more syllables in length, containing a series of consonant strings impregnable by the English tongue. She was an elderly widow who talked a great deal; her dialogue was peppered with bits of her inscrutable native language, accompanied by a wide supplementary vocabulary of winks, nudges, and suggestive hand gestures. Before dinner was over she had said many witty things on the subjects of lovers and husbands and hoped laughingly that the
Dashwood sisters had not left their hearts (or possibly their genitalia—the relevant hand gesture was not entirely clear) behind them in Sussex. Marianne was vexed at this inarticulate teasing for her sister’s sake, and turned her eyes towards Elinor to see how she bore these attacks, with an earnestness which gave Elinor far more pain than could arise from such commonplace raillery as that leveled by Mrs. Jennings.

Colonel Brandon, the friend of Sir John, suffered from a cruel affliction, the likes of which the Dashwood sisters had heard of, but never seen firsthand. He bore a set of long, squishy tentacles protruding grotesquely from his face, writhing this way and that, like hideous living facial hair of slime green. There was, in addition, some odd aura about him, indefinable but undeniably disquieting, even beyond these perverse appendages; one sensed that to look him in the eye would be to catch a terrifying glimpse of all the terrors that lie, unknowable and unimaginable, beyond the world that we can see and feel. Otherwise, he was very pleasant. His appearance, besides the twitching tentacles that overhung his chin, was not unpleasing, despite being an absolute old bachelor; for he was on the wrong side of five and thirty. He was silent and grave, but his countenance was sensible and his address was particularly gentlemanlike.

There was nothing in any of the party which could recommend them as companions to the Dashwoods; but the haughty diffidence of Lady Middleton was so particularly unpleasant, that in comparison to it the gravity of Colonel Brandon, the squidishness of his visage notwithstanding, was interesting. Elinor leveled a silencing glance at her sister when she sensed Marianne’s intention to indecorously enquire of their new acquaintance how he came to bear his peculiar facial stigmata. Such physiognomic eccentricities were variously whispered to result from one’s mother drinking sea-water while confined, or a hex, laid upon the bearer by a sea witch. It was not, in any case, a topic appropriate to polite company, and certainly not in the presence of one so afflicted.

Margaret returned from a long ramble on the grounds of Sir John’s estate, out of breath and bursting with wild-eyed excitement. “I—I—I have seen …
something
!” she shouted. “Something …
incredible …
upon the island!”

COLONEL BRANDON, THE FRIEND OF SIR JOHN, SUFFERED FROM A CRUEL AFFLICTION, THE LIKES OF WHICH THE DASHWOOD SISTERS HAD HEARD OF, BUT NEVER SEEN FIRSTHAND.

“Tell me, then, dear girl, and I shall explain,” offered Sir John. “I know Deadwind Island, and all its odd crevices, as I do the scars on the back of my own hand.”

“No,” replied Margaret. “Something upon
our
island—on
Pestilent Isle
. I saw, as I wandered along the shore here, a thick spiral of steam, shooting up from the mountain that sits in the centre of Pestilent Isle.”

All laughed merrily. “The
mountain
?”

“Well, the hill is more like,” said Margaret, blushing. “But as I gaze upon it from my window at night, I have taken to calling it a mountain. Mount Margaret, I have dubbed it, and it is there that—”

“Upstairs, young lady!” interrupted Mrs. Dashwood. “And clean yourself for dinner. No more talk of mountains, or queer spirals of steam, or other childish fantasies.” Reluctantly, Margaret obeyed.

Shortly thereafter, Marianne was discovered to be musical and invited to play. At their request she performed a ballad in thirty-seven verses that Sir John had composed about his discovery of, infatuation with, and subsequent abduction of Lady Middleton. The performance was highly applauded. Sir John was loud in his admiration at the end of every verse, banging his cane on the ground, and as loud in his conversation with the others while the verses continued. Colonel Brandon alone, of all the party, heard Marianne sing without being in raptures. He paid her only the compliment of attention, and she felt a respect for him on the occasion, which the others had reasonably forfeited by their shameless want of taste. He sat in silence, his tentacles writhing; his hands folded in his lap, making only the low gurgling noise that his sinuses always emitted, unbidden, from his lunatic’s nightmare of a face.