The Tides of Avarice (26 page)

Opposite the writing desk was a chest of drawers, and on the floor in front of the chest of drawers was a sodden mass Sylvester recognized with some difficulty as a pile of discarded clothing. It was as if the long-ago captainly occupant of the place had been picking through his most splendid garments, trying on one and then another, but was never being quite satisfied with any of them. Then, some alarum had caused him to sprint from the cabin wearing whatever he'd had on at the time. Sylvester had seen the look before, in his mother's bedroom when she'd been preparing herself for some social function or other where she'd thought it important she look her best.

Holding the hot lantern carefully away from himself, Sylvester bent down and picked up a splintered spar of rotting wood from the cabin floor.

“What're you doing?” hissed Viola.

“He's going through them old raiments is what he's doing,” answered Mrs. Pickleberry, who'd by now joined them and was looking around her, hands on her waist, as if she longed for nothing more than to give this place the kind of cleaning and tidying it'd not forget in a hurry. “Maybe he thinks he can salvage a nice pair of underpants.”

“Oh for—”

Sylvester was stopped from saying whatever he'd been about to say by Viola's paw on his forearm.

“It's just her way. You mustn't mind her.”

The spar broke in Sylvester's paw as he tried to use it to lift the topmost layer of saturated cloth.

“You could make yourself useful,” he said to Mrs. Pickleberry, marveling even as he did so at his own courage.

“Yeah?” Heavy on the sarcasm, light on the promise of cooperation.

“Yes. You could go and fetch that rolling pin of yours.”

“Elvira, you mean?”

“Elvira?”

“Yep.”

“You mean your rolling pin has a name?”

“Don't everybody's?”

Sylvester couldn't think of a reply.

“Er, could you bring Elvira then, please?” he mumbled lamely.

“I'll ask her,” amended Mrs. Pickleberry, retreating into the main cabin.

“Your mother ever found a need to have long conversations with Doctor Nettletree?” asked Sylvester once she'd gone.

“No,” said Viola, looking mystified. “Why should she?”

“Oh, nothing. Just wondering.”

Mrs. Pickleberry splashed back into view, clutching Elvira.

“Whass so int'resting 'bout a bunch o' moldy ol' clothes anyway?” said Mrs. Pickleberry as she handed the rolling pin over.

“Camouflage,” Sylvester replied.

“Eh?”

“In your bedroom, where do you put things you don't want anyone to find? To keep them safe from burglars, perhaps.” As soon as he'd spoken he wished he hadn't asked. Aside from anything else, it was many years since last there'd been a case of burglary in Foxglove, and the culprit in that instance had proved to be not a genuine criminal, but an unruly young jackdaw.

“In the chamberpot,” Mrs. Pickleberry said promptly. “No one'd ever t'ink of lookin' in there.”

No one would ever want to, thought Sylvester.

“Or?” he prompted.

“Or, if they did look in there, me an' Elvira'd clobber 'em.”

Sylvester moaned inwardly. This wasn't quite what he'd meant.

“What I'm saying is,” he tried again, “if there isn't a chamberpot to, er, to hand, as it were, where's the next best place in a bedroom to hide things?”

“Under yer kegs,” said Mrs. Pickleberry. “Like Viola does.”

“Kegs?”

“Yer smalls.”

Ah. Sylvester grinned happily. That was more like the answer he'd been searching for.

Viola looked fretful. She glanced at her mother. “I didn't know you'd worked out that—” she began.

“Precisely,” Sylvester said, cutting her off. “Underneath some dirty underwear. If whoever was the inhabitant of this cabin – and I'm pretty sure I know who it was, from what Rustbane was telling me the other day – if whoever he was wanted to hide something in a hurry before rushing up on deck because of an emergency, where better than under a heap of dirty clothes?”

“Blimey,” said Mrs. Pickleberry. After a long moment's cogitation she added, “Yeah, but, even if folk afterwards had a nat'ral whatjacallit, a nat'ral reticence about pokin' around in his smelly undies, don't yer think that eventually someone'd have done it anyway?”

Sylvester rocked on his heels. Damn, I hadn't thought of that. These are cutthroat pirates we're talking about, not milksops. They'd not be deterred for long, no matter how filthy the—

“I don't know,” he said, shrugging. He glanced at the rolling pin in his paw, then at the fungus-girt mass of clothing by the chest of drawers.

“They could have been a whole lot worse many years ago,” said Viola dubiously.

“That must be it. Over time their initial, ah, virulence must have abated somewhat, so that—”

“Oh, gimme 'ere, yer great buttockbrain!” said Mrs. Pickleberry, grabbing back Elvira. “I brought up children o' me own, ya know. I seed a lot worse'n this in their bedrooms.”

Soon there were items of clothing, and bits of items of clothing, all over the cabin floor. Some were indeed not so savory as one might have preferred.

“Nope,” said Mrs. Pickleberry with finality after a while. “There ain't not nuffink of value 'ere.”

Sylvester, having been a little hopeful despite the unlikelihood of actually finding anything having fought his way through the thicket of negatives, gave a little sigh of disappointment. Then something caught his eye.

“Wait a moment.”

“Wot?”

He went down on his knees, ignoring the cold slimy water that splashed on to him.

“Look!”

“What is it?” said Viola.

“It's a chest.”

“A chest? A treasure chest?”

“Who knows? Who can tell until I get it open,” cried Sylvester, his excitement rising. Forgetting about what he was putting his paws into, he scrabbled away at the last of the clothing.

“'S a very small chest,” said Mrs. Pickleberry staring at it critically, her head cocked to one side.

“Sometimes it's the smallest things that're the most valuable,” observed Viola, looking eagerly at the little chest.

“Thass what yer father keeps sayin',” muttered Mrs. Pickleberry.

Their discovery was made of wood, with iron bands hooping around it in both directions. The bands had severely rusted, as had the lock that held the lid down. Even if the discoverers had possessed a key, it was clear the only way they were going to get inside the box was by brute force.

“Lemme at it,” said Mrs. Pickleberry, as if on cue.

Elvira rose and fell with brutal effectiveness, then rose and fell again even more devastatingly. Sylvester found himself shuddering in sympathy with the wooden chest or, at least, what was left of it.

“Yow! I've got a splinter in my leg,” wailed Viola, putting a forepaw on Sylvester's shoulder to balance herself while she reached for the offending area.

“I'm just surprised we don't all look like porcupines after that little display,” said Sylvester too softly for Mrs. Pickleberry to possibly hear the remark.

She heard it anyway.

“You got any complaints, punk?”

“Not quite.”

“Then keep 'em to yerself, unless you wanna end up lookin' like that box o' yours.”

“Certainly.”

By this time, even had Sylvester been remotely in the mood for an argument, his attention would have wandered. Lying in the blistered wreckage of the wooden chest was a shape Sylvester recognized only too well from his time in Cap'n Rustbane's cabin.

A book!

Not a scroll, like those in the Foxglove Library, but a book with binding and pages you could turn and a spine with lettering on it.

Well, not much by way of lettering. Age and disrepair had more or less eradicated the gilt altogether. Still, who cared about minor details like that when one had a book that looked like it hadn't been read for decades!

“Let's get this back to my cabin,” he said with sudden decision. “Clearing up the deck in the storm's wake isn't going to take the crew forever, is it? The sooner we're out of here and have hidden any trace of this secret room the better. Agreed?”

The other two saw his point.

Within ten or fifteen minutes the three lemmings had managed to conceal the hole in the cabin wall sufficiently to pass a casual inspection, and who was likely to give the cabin anything more than this? Not Cheesefang, that was for sure. The temperamental old rat was clearly intent on doing only as much as he had to in order to pass muster in the Cap'n's eyes, and not one iota more. Sylvester pushed the boards together – their dampness made them stick to each other as if coated in a weak glue – then the two females pushed the clothes cupboard that had been near the porthole over to cover any trace there might be of Sylvester's repair job.

“I think that'll do,” said Sylvester, puffing, at last. “What in the world have you two put in that wardrobe?”

“None o' yer business, whippersnapper.”

His mind filling with images of extremely heavy metal strengthenings for various inscrutable items of female lemming underwear, Sylvester led the way back along the passage to his own cabin.

Once the three were settled there, Viola and himself sitting on the bunk while Mrs. Pickleberry appropriated an old sea chest on which to deposit her ample rear, Sylvester opened the book.

It was, as he'd suspected, a journal or log. What made him whistle, however, was the inscription on the flyleaf:

Logbook of

Captain Josiah Adamite

Skipper of the Good Ship Shadeblaze

Beneath this there was an inscription that Sylvester couldn't read. The long confinement in the damp of the secret compartment had made the old sea dog's ink run. Sylvester hoped this wasn't going to affect any pages but the outer ones. After being granted such an incredible stroke of luck as to discover the logbook in the first place, it would be too cruel a stroke of fate if much of it was illegible.

Cautiously, he riffled through the next few pages. Phew. It looked as if the writing on them was perfectly readable, or as readable as Adamite's crabbed hand had ever been.

“What does it say?” urged Viola, nudging him in the ribs.

“Patience, patience. I'm just getting to that.”

“I got a passin' interest in the subject meself, laddie,” said Mrs. Pickleberry from the corner.

“I know, but this book is very old and it's been kept in lousy conditions. I don't want it to fall apart in my paws. We've got to be careful with it. There could be invaluable information in here, information even Cap'n Rustbane doesn't know!”

“You goin' to tell it to him?” said Mrs. Pickleberry fixing him with a gimlet gaze. “You bein' so matey with the verminous skunk an' all?”

“Fox,” said Sylvester tiredly.

“Eh?” said Mrs. Pickleberry and Viola.

“He's not a skunk,” Sylvester explained. “He's a fox.”

“Like we're not hamsters?” said Mrs. Pickleberry.

“Same principle.”

“Oh, shaddap, yer dingbat.”

“Lemming,” said Sylvester. “Not a—oh, look,” he added hastily, “here's the first page Cap'n Adamite wrote in this volume of his diary.”

It was a pity, Sylvester ruminated as he pored over the small, angular handwriting, that he'd been unable to make out the date on the flyleaf. They had no way of telling how old this diary was. Presumably, it was the last set of records the old buccaneer had committed to paper before his untimely demise at the end of Rustbane's cutlass. For a moment, Sylvester wondered if trunkloads of earlier volumes of Cap'n Adamite's writings might exist elsewhere aboard the Shadeblaze. Then he realized the inevitable truth: all Adamite's earlier diaries must have been discovered after Rustbane's mutiny and cast overboard like their author. No, thrown to the flames, more likely, lest any of them should somehow survive the ravages of the ocean and come to the attention of other eyes.

However minuscule that possibility might be, Sylvester thought, Cap'n Rustbane is not a person ever to take even the slightest chance unless he has to.

Even so, Rustbane had taken a chance, without knowing it.

He and his crew hadn't searched the vessel that they'd stolen from its master carefully enough. Cap'n Adamite had outwitted the gray fox, something few could ever boast. This final volume had survived.

“Gerra move on, dammit,” growled Mrs. Pickleberry.

“I'm just adapting my eyesight to the handwriting,” pleaded Sylvester. “It's very small and blurry and the ink's faded. And the spelling's awful, it's hard to make out what Cap'n Adamite meant some of the words to be, his spelling of them's so weird.”
[1]

“Yeah, right. Excuses!”

“Oh, Mom.”

“Hmmf. Infatuated, that's what you are. And why?”

The bickering between the two Pickleberries, which had diminished to a minor trickle for fully ten minutes or so, now threatened to become a mighty torrent once more.

There was one possible way of stopping it, Sylvester decided.

Holding the open book up toward the lantern, he began to read aloud words that had been written decades ago by a buccaneer who'd willingly shed the blood of the innocent all over the seas of Sagaria, whose flinty heart had been a stranger to mercy, and yet for whom Sylvester now experienced a strange stirring of fellowship, in that they shared a single adversary, an adversary called Captain Terrigan Rustbane…