The Death-Defying Pepper Roux (3 page)

“Give me a minute.”

Pepper closed the door, biting his lip. He had no idea what a bill of lading looked like, or even how it was spelled. In his weariness he could make no sense of the documents on the cabin desk. He could find nothing mentioning scrap iron. Pianos and porcelain, yes, but nothing about scrap iron, nothing about scrap iron, nothing about forgiveness or scrap iron. He even scrabbled up the blotting paper off the blotter, in his panic.

Underneath lay a folded sheet of paper bearing the name of the owners: Maritime Sud & Cie. The bill of lading, surely!

No. Nothing about scrap iron. Only a map position—45° 20' N, 6° 54' W—oh, and a pencil sketch alongside, obviously drawn by someone bored and doodling.

It was the sketch of a skull.

Pepper’s eyes rolled upward and his lids fluttered. He pitched forward and cracked his head on the desk. The last thing he heard was the crackle of his ears as they escaped the rim of his naval cap.

A skeleton climbed up out of Aunty Mireille’s teacup, then crawled between her plate and the toast rack to admire its
reflection in the saltcellar. Pepper tried to spear it with his fork but missed, and it clambered on toward him across the breakfast table, laughing as it came….

A hand momentarily stroked the back of his head and stirred him back to consciousness.

“A big mistake, to use letterhead paper,” said the Duchess, tugging the sheet out of Pepper’s fist. He memorized the figures—45° 20' N, 6° 54' W—then set it alight with a match. “Especially with the added sketch, silly boys. Tell them not to do it again,
chéri
, when you collect your bonus.” He reached out a finger, lifted Pepper’s bangs, and winced at the size of the bump on his forehead.

“You don’t understand, Duchesse! It’s a sign! That’s where! That’s where it’s going to happen!”

Duchesse studied the captain’s pinched, weary, tearstained face for a long time. “Mmm. But then it
won’t be our first,
will it, dear heart?” he said, leaning on the words as if they were brass tacks. “You and I are old hands at this game. Like undertakers, we deal in coffins…. It’s a bit late for us to try to change the way things work
in the coffin trade
.”

And Pepper took the hint and fell silent. Because
either he was Paul Roux, an ignorant boy pretending to be his father, or he
was
Captain Gilbert Roux, drink-sodden Old Man of
L’Ombrage
and several other ill-fated ships. Pepper was going to die, at 45° 20' N, 6° 54' W, but then—as Duchesse said—it was a bit late to try to change Fate.

Pepper sat for so long—frozen with fear, head throbbing—that the sun passed overhead and
L’Ombrage
chugged into the Bay of Biscay. The speaking tube squealed once, but he ignored it. He heard—briefly—the hatch cover outside being raised by winch and cable. Strange. (Perhaps England was very close now—how would he know?) The Duchess came with a tray of supper, but Pepper did not open the door to him. “I’m not hungry. Go away.”

It was a shame. He had loved the sea—every indigo smell of it, every dolphin, every kicking wave, every whooping cheer that broke from the ship’s whistle. He loved Duchesse’s scrambled eggs, and the gold braid on his captain’s jacket, and sliding the cap onto his head, folding his ears forward to keep it high on his brow. A shame for it all to end. But tonight he would—he
really must—search the ship until he found his father, wherever he was lurking, and hand back the cap, the papers, the ship’s log: name and rank. Say sorry. Gilbert Roux (Captain) might flog him or hang him from the yardarm for piracy, but it could not be helped. Pepper had not been to confession for a week, so if he died now, unpunished, he would certainly go to Hell and be punished forevermore, and that would be worse.

Aunty Mireille had taught him lots about Hell.

That night, moonlight puddled and curded on the decks, turning them white. Pepper half expected to skid as he scoured the ship for Gilbert Roux. He looked in the paint store and under the lifeboat covers. The hatch of the hold had indeed been lifted slightly—as if to keep the scrap iron from suffocating—but nothing moved down there. In fact all he found, after ten minutes’ searching…was Roche sitting naked astride the ship’s rail.

“Be very careful, Mr. Roche,” said Pepper, worried that the man might slip into the sea.

Roche’s head snapped up, and the moonlight turned his face ghost white.

“What are you doing?” asked Pepper, knowing that it
is polite to express an interest in other people’s work.

Roche opened his left hand, and Pepper went closer, thinking he was being shown something. It seemed to be one of those brackets used to hang up the fire buckets. Moving close also filled his nose with a familiar smell: one he had not smelled since it had sunk its teeth in his ear. Fate smelled of garlic and rum, thought Pepper, as Roche swung his leg inboard, shifted the metal bracket into his right fist, and slashed at him with its hook.

“Skeleton Man.”

Pepper ran, but Roche was so close behind that the hook hit him repeatedly on the shoulders, then snagged in the half belt of his jacket and was pulled out of Roche’s fist. Pepper collided with the various sand-filled fire buckets that Roche had lifted down so as to steal the brackets. Sand hissed across the deck. There was nowhere to hide. Even his thoughts could not catch their breath.

If I say…the darkness shall cover me…. Yea, the darkness is no darkness….

“Mama! Aunty Mireille!” The half belt came unstitched: The hook, still embedded in its fabric, banged into the back of Pepper’s legs as he ran. “Saint
Constance! Father Michel! Mama! Holy Mary!” But maybe the saints and angels locked up house at night and shut their shutters, as Mama had always done. “Roche! Stop! I’m the captain! Don’t!”

He almost tripped over the partly raised hatch cover: The hold gaped below him like the mouth of Hell, and the smell of Roche was in every breath that he gulped down. Colliding with the foot of the funnel, Pepper began to climb—if he could just get up high!—but feeling for handholds, he soon met only with hot metal, and dropped back down, fully expecting to land in Roche’s arms.

His fall to the deck knocked the wind out of him. Nothing softened his landing. Nothing. Nothing and no one.

Looking back the way he had come, Pepper imagined the momentary flicker of an angel’s white, lacy robe. But of Roche there was not a sign. Gasping and reeling, he fled to his cabin and spent the rest of the night on his callused knees, burned palms pressed together, apologizing to everyone in Heaven that he could think of for the sin of being alive.

He supposed the knock at the door was Duchesse bringing his breakfast, but it was the first officer. Pepper (remembering the lost bill of lading) hastily shut the door in his face. What to do? Berceau knocked again, louder and more urgently. Pepper opened the door.

“Accident on deck, sir,” said Berceau. “Roche has…taken a tumble.”

Apparently, Roche had lost his footing during one of his nightly prowls, skidded on some spilled sand, and fallen twenty feet into the open hold, landing on a length of rusty metal fencing. His face had the agonized, waxy whiteness of the saints in the church at home.

So this was what a fall looked like: neither quick nor clean.

Pepper went down on his knees in the cluttered hold. “Don’t worry, Roche. Lie still, Roche. Soon get you out, Roche,” said Captain Pepper Roux.

Roche opened a red-rimmed mouth, but no words came out. He looked up at the square of sky above them, and seagull shapes drifted across his vacant eyes. The crew had thrown a blanket over him, but a line of
sharp points still stuck up through the cloth, like the bony spine on a mackerel. Rummaging in his jacket pocket, Pepper brought out a prayer, penned in his aunt’s purple ink on lilac notepaper—a prayer to Saint Constance.

It was hard to know where to put it on a naked man, so Pepper tucked it into Roche’s armpit, murmuring an apology.

For surely the fall had been meant for Pepper? Surely the seagulls had gathered over the site of a death days overdue? The hold had yawned for Pepper but accidentally swallowed Roche.

The man impaled on the scrap iron turned his eyes on Pepper, reached out a trembling hand, and caught him by the throat. The hand was very cold, and powerless to grip. Taking it in his own, Pepper began to recite the last rites, tugging each icy finger in turn, just as his
aunty had done for him when he was little.

But before the end, the hand slackened and the eyes turned upward into the skull. Roche had mopped up death like a lump of bread mopping a greasy plate.

T
he business of the last rites vastly impressed the crew of
L’Ombrage
, gathered around the brink of the hold. For the first time, they looked at their Old Man with startled respect. They were even more impressed when Captain Roux proved to know the funeral service by heart…though no one offered to pry Roche off the rusty metalwork, so Pepper had to stop short of the bit about committing him “to the sea in the sure and certain hope of salvation.”

“Later,” said Berceau.

Nobody dressed up for the service either, except the Duchess, who put on red satin as a mark of disrespect.

“Amen,” said Pepper at the end of the Lord’s Prayer.

“Good riddance,” said the crew—which was not a response Pepper had ever heard before but which he presumed was a special seagoing expression of farewell. His efforts gave Pepper no joy: Couched on his scrapmetal bed, Roche did not look to be any more at peace because of all those words.

Later that day, with Roche’s body still lying in the hold, Duchesse came and broke the bad news. “Married man,” he said.

“No I’m not!” exclaimed Pepper, and sat back in his captain’s chair so sharply that it almost toppled over.

“Roche, dear heart,” said the Duchess patiently. “Roche was a married man. The customary letter is required. To the widow.”

And here, for the first time, was a duty no one else was willing to do for Captain Pepper.

“Not my province,” said the Duchess.

“Not me,” said the second mate.

“Not me,” said Berceau, spotting the bill of lading on the floor and smoothing it out against his thigh.
Pianos and porcelain,
it read.

“Doesn’t he have…didn’t he have a best friend? Someone who’s known him for a long time?” Pepper begged them.

But Roche had no friends. So Captain Pepper was obliged to sit at his desk with a blank sheet of paper in front of him and a pencil in his hand. He wrote the name of the ship in one corner. He wrote the address of the widow in the other. He wrote:
I am very sorry to say….

Then he sent for the crew.

They all squeezed into his cabin, elbow to elbow, knees slightly bent because of the low deckhead. What did they know about Mr. Roche? asked Pepper.

“He was a pig,” said Annecy.

“Used to bet the deck boys he could knock them down with one punch,” said Gombert. “Broke their faces. Took their money.”

“Beat his wife,” said Bougon. “Used to boast about it.”

“Don’t know how she lives. He spent all his money on whores; never sent a penny home.”

“He sold the pans out of the galley,” said the cook bitterly.

“Heard he killed a man once, in Nantes.”

Pepper sighed. “There’s good in everyone,” he suggested hopefully. “My priest says…”

“He was good with his fists,” said Annecy.

“Perhaps you could share with us some of your own impressions of the man, sir,” suggested the Duchess, fretful at having the captain’s private sanctum cluttered up with people.

Pepper thought hard. “He wanted to kill me.”

The assembled crew nodded thoughtfully. “He was a rare pig, that one,” said Annecy.

“Amen,” said the others, and squeezed out of the door again.

Pepper stared at the blank paper. A dozen times he wrote the address and began:

He imagined the woman—Mme. Yvette Roche—opening and reading his letter. In his imagination, she
took on the face of his own mother: the shoulders folding forward, the head sinking into grief.

Pepper snatched up the letter and crammed it into his pocket. On the whole, he thought she would much rather not know at all. That way, she could go on hoping all was not lost, even when it was.

“How will she manage without the money?” he asked. But the Duchess simply went on grating nutmeg over a bowl of custard. “I say we should…I mean, could we…What say we don’t tell the owners about Roche being dead? That way they won’t stop his
wages—not till the end of the trip, anyway.”

The Duchess did look up, then, and Pepper assumed nutmegs must be like onions, for there were tears in the steward’s eyes. “I think that would be a very great kindness to his wife,
mon brave
.”

The next thought made Pepper’s gorge heave, but one of his duties as captain was surely to help a dead crew member find eternal rest. “I expect you could make him a nice shroud, Duchesse, if I could just get him off the…get him up out…get him into the sea.”

For the first time since they had met, the steward was completely at a loss. “Well, he can go down with the ship, can’t he?” he said, hurrying to the door, sickened by the horrific notion of Pepper wrestling with a corpse. Outside, Duchesse recovered his calm, smoothed his red satin, and patted his hair into place. Then he caught hold of the nearest crew member by the shirt, dragged him close, and laid a finger to his lips. Never again did the crew mention the name of Roche or the small matter of his death.

“Who’d miss a pig like that?” observed Annecy.

Sometimes a shipping company can make more money from losing a ship than from keeping it. After all, ships
are forever sinking, so they are always insured. A ship with a cargo of pianos and porcelain is insured for far more than some rusty, dilapidated hulk carrying scrap iron. And once that ship is sunk and on the seabed, who is to say what cargo she was carrying? She will keep her secret as well as a dead man in his coffin. Maybe that is why such hulks are called “coffin ships.”

At position 45° 20' N, 6° 54' W, with a dirty sea running and
L’Ombrage
sitting over 2,600 fathoms of water, the engineer deliberately opened her sea cocks. Sip by sip, she began to swallow the sea. Only the engineer, Berceau, and Gilbert Roux were being paid by the owners to sink her. The Duchess was in on it, of course. But the rest of the crew were told
L’Ombrage
had sprung a leak and were as scared as if
L’Ombrage
had hit an iceberg or been attacked by the kraken.

“Time to go,” said the captain’s steward to the captain.

“Why?”

Duchesse looked exasperated. With the ship’s claxon blaring and the air as full of filthy language as spray, even the old-style, drunken Captain Roux might have grasped that the ship was sinking. “Time to go,” said
the Duchess again. He was dressed once more in trousers and oiled jersey, and had hacked his hair short with a pair of scissors.

“No. It’s all right. I’ll stay,” said Pepper. He had read enough books, after all, and he knew the rules. It was a shame: Drowning had come very low down his list of favored deaths—somewhere between suffocating and the guillotine. But he knew the rules: A good captain goes down with his ship.

The scar on Duchesse’s cheek puckered. “That really isn’t required.”

“Oh, I think it is,” said Pepper. “You see…I shouldn’t be here.”

“Never a truer word,
petite framboise
,” said Duchesse as the ship groaned and began to list. “Don’t forget the log.”

Pepper fetched the leather-bound log and gave it into his steward’s hands. “There. I haven’t messed it up too much.” There was shouting outside, as those abandoning ship struggled with a faulty boat winch. “I’m a Jonah,” said Pepper, and took one step back. “I’m the one it’s after, you see.” Then he stood, chin up, hands behind his back, waiting for the water to fill the cabin like a fish tank.

Duchesse’s eyebrows shot up, and after a second, a kind of laugh erupted from his nose. “Is this the kraken we’re talking about here?”

“You don’t understand.”

Duchesse looked over his shoulder. He did not understand, no. But there was a very particular timing to these operations; they had not a second to lose. “The owners don’t want this…. This is insane, boy. He must’ve told you! He must’ve told you when he sent you in his place?”

“‘If I dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,’” said Pepper unhelpfully, and bent forward the tips of his ears before sliding on his naval cap.

“Sir’s scared to get into the lifeboat! Is that it? I could blindfold sir! Like a horse!”

But Pepper had had plenty of time to think up an answer to every temptation. The saints had made it abundantly clear what they thought of his ducking and diving; they had even posted him a note under his blotter. “If I get into that boat, it won’t reach land. I told you. I’m a Jonah. The angels are after me.”

Duchesse’s color deepened with his dismay. The Bay of Biscay had shrouded
L’Ombrage
in spray, and large waves were breaking over the starboard bow, making her
wallow. Running to the speaking tube, he bawled into it, “Keep her head into the wind, you ?#@*&s!” Then he hurried outside to help free the winch of the lifeboat.

The engineer was the last into the boat, received into the upstretched hands of the men below, like a shrimp into an anemone. Though he had stopped the engine before leaving, the ship was still noisy with banging doors, falling crates, crashing spray, creaking joints. It was uncomfortably wet and treacherous on deck, too, now that the ship was listing and side-on to the swell. Even so, Captain Pepper decided not to stay in his cabin, but to crawl and stagger for’ard to the hold, where he sat down on its rim.

He understood now why the hatch had been opened—so that the water could enter top as well as bottom, and take the ship swiftly to the seabed. It would not do for the crew of some passing boat to see her in difficulties, board her, and discover the sea cocks open. Oh, it was not that Pepper had failed to grasp the whole idea of coffin ships and insurance scams—he had always been quick on the uptake. It was Duchesse who did not understand.
L’Ombrage
, on her shabby, risky, dishonest final voyage, had strayed accidentally
into the path of something much more dangerous: a boyhunt. Angels and saints were even now harpooning the ocean with forked lightning, shaking the tarpaulin waves, loosing windy howls, and snorting up the spray for scent of a missing boy, a boy
overdue
. Aunt Mireille had always said that unpunctuality is the height of bad manners, and Pepper had purposely tried to be late for his death. He really must not keep Saint Constance waiting any longer.

“We commit our bodies to the sea, in the sure and certain hope,” he remarked to Roche, whose body was submerged now under a fathom of water and beckoning to Pepper with both bare arms. “Don’t we?” The listing ship groaned. Down below, empty clothes hangers in Duchesse’s locker all fell down at the same moment, with a noise like a skeleton gone mad.

“Bless me, Father, for I think I might have sinned,” said Pepper, but there were no fathers—the good kind or the bad—aboard the dying
Ombrage
. The hatch cover shifted and the cable bearing its weight slipped on its drum with a terrible screaming noise. The dead Roche beckoned….

“Sun’s over the yardarm, Captain,” said a voice
behind Pepper. “Everything to hand, sir. Everything aboveboard. I think a drink might be in order.”

Duchesse helped Pepper to his feet and returned him to the captain’s cabin, where he pointed out six dusty glasses of rum. Because of the ship’s list, each of them stood aslope now, the rum inside just starting to lap out onto the floor. Duchesse abhorred waste. When Pepper said he did not drink, Duchesse said, “There’s always a first time,
chéri
. And the last time’s as good a time as any for the first time.”
One
.

When Pepper said he was shivering not from fright but from cold, Duchesse said, “The rum will warm you up.”
Two
.

When Pepper admitted he was shivering from fright, Duchesse said, “Rum’s not called ‘Dutch courage’ for nothing.”
Three
.

“That’s gin, isn’t it?” said Pepper, whose family library had taught him an odd assortment of facts.

“Here’s to a broad general knowledge,” said Duchesse. “A wonderful thing.” And they shared the fourth glass. The drink scorched Pepper’s throat like poison, but Duchesse folded the boy’s small, ice-cold hands around each glass and held them there until the
brown liquid stopped slopping. “
Santé
, Captain.”

“You should have gotten off with the others! Why didn’t you get off? Why didn’t you?”

The Duchess sat back comfortably in his chair. “Life hasn’t suited me lately,” he said, as if life were a fashion trend and his hips too broad to carry it off.

When Pepper said that he was going to be sick, Duchesse insisted a glass of rum would settle his stomach.
Five
.

The sixth glass no one drank, because it—or was it the ship?—had tilted too far, and trickled the contents onto the floor. Pepper rested his head on the pillow and began to count. By the time he reached fourteen…

…he was deeply unconscious.

When Pepper woke the next day—or was it the week after?—he knew, from the chugging of engines, that he was still on board ship. But he also knew this ship must be bound for Hell. Scarlet-and-green demons were squatting around all four edges of the ceiling. Their claws gripping tight to stacked plywood crates, they squawked and tutted, peering down at him from behind huge beaks. Aunty Mireille had taught Pepper
lots about demons and how they loved to rend and tear the souls of the damned, but she had not mentioned the beaks. These were what she must have meant by “birds of ill omen.”

There were demons inside his head, too, tearing at his brain, and he felt very, very sick. Every time he closed his eyes, he pictured
L’Ombrage
on her slow plunge through transparent darkness and cold toward the bottom of the sea. Was he still aboard her and breathing water? He wondered if information was allowed in Hell, because more than anything, Pepper wanted to know whether Duchesse and the rest of the crew had been saved. The demons clacked their beaks and fluttered, but they wouldn’t answer his questions.