Under the Jolly Roger: Being an Account of the Further Nautical Adventures of Jacky Faber (45 page)

"'All I want to do is give them the Bible, sir,' I say, and I hand the Bible to the man. 'See, there is nothing in it but the Word of God. Surely you don't want that on your soul, that you denied the Gospel to men who might be condemned?'

"The man looked confused, but he took the Bible and riffled the pages and saw that there was no gun contained therein, and I said, 'You shall see Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates someday and what will he say to you then?' and he said, 'All right, all right,' and he opened the outer cage and walked in and put the Bible in the outstretched hand of the red-headed boy ... your son, I believe?" says the mock Father McSweeney.

Liam nods.

"A fine boy, I'm sure," says Grandfather. Liam glowers and reserves judgment on the fineness of one Padraic Delaney until he can once again get his hands around that fine neck.

"Anyway, once the Good Book was in the lad's hand, I lifted my hand and pronounced in Gaelic just as Mairead had taught me, 'Page seven hundred and fifty-three, you ignorant Irish clods.' The boys looked up, Padraic thumbed through to the proper page and gave me the thumbs-up sign behind the jailer's back."

My grandfather settles himself in his chair. "All is in train, I believe, and now I'll have a spot of sherry. A 'bit of the creature,' as you Irish will have it."

He's my granddad, all right. Make no mistake about it.

Out on deck in the afternoon, we make our preparations. Muskets are cleaned and reloaded. The sails are hung and held with slipknots for instant loosing. And the smoke canisters are put on deck alongside the forward and after guns.

Liam looks down at the canisters and says to John Reilly, "Smoke, hey, Reilly? Shall we make some Holy Smoke, then, for these Brits?"

"Aye, Liam, we shall," says the dour Reilly. "We'll make some Holy Smoke for Father Murphy, that we shall."

Liam turns and leaves the deck to tend to the business at hand.

"What's that all about?" I ask Reilly, but he shakes his head and goes about his business.

"It's about the Father Murphy thing," says Mairead, close at my left hand. "You don't know about it?"

"Nay," I say, "tell me."

She collects her thoughts, looking up at the prison where both her brother and her young man lay, then she says, "It was back during the Uprising. One of the leaders of the resistance, Father John Murphy, the Hero of Oulart and Enniscorthy, was captured in a town called Tullow, in County Carlow. My dad, who with John Reilly, was hiding out in an attic in that very town, knew Father Murphy and had great respect for him as a leader."

More pauses, then, "The Brits hauled Father Murphy out to the center of the town, stripped him, flogged him, hanged him till he was almost but not quite dead, and then forced him to his knees and cut off his head with a dull ax. They stuck his head on a pike to stand by the entrance to the town."

I am struck dumb.

She continues, quite calmly. "Then they put the rest of his body in a barrel and filled it with oil and set it afire, and when it was burning, they forced every Irish family in the town to open their windows to let in the 'Holy Smoke' from his pyre, and to
smell
it."

Once again, I think to myself,
Why do people and the governments who govern people constantly do to each other that very thing which can never be forgiven nor forgotten? It is one thing to stand a man up and kill him, it is quite another to demand the Executioner's Tax from the man's family—to demand from them the cost of the bullet used to kill him before they can claim his body. Why do they do that when they know that the deed will never be forgotten, not this generation, nor the next, and down through the centuries? I don't know. I know nothing about this world.

I get a nudge from Mairead, who, I suspect, has been looking at my burning eyes. "Hey, I've been hearin' that story all my life. Come on, get over it."

All the preparations are made. We gather on the quarterdeck. "There is nothing left to do," I say to my assembled shipmates. "Everyone will have an early dinner and get some rest, it being daylight or not, for we shall get no rest later this night. We must be fresh if we are to have success in this venture. I bid you good evening."

Mairead and I go to bed. Higgins has instructions to wake us at midnight.

We believe that we will not sleep, but we do.

"Now two of my children are at risk," says Liam in the gloom of the night, "instead of just the one. Three, counting you." He looks at me, readying myself on my quarterdeck. It is a little after midnight. The town of Harwich lies dark and quiet over there and here on the ship only the creaking of the rigging can be heard. I shiver a bit against the chill, then make myself stop.

"Dad, this is something that has to be done and can only be done by me and Jacky," says Mairead, laying her hand on her father's sleeve. "You know that, don't you?"

Liam, looking grim, nods and says, "But if you're not back in two hours, we're coming after you. Count on it."

I'm dressed in my serving girl outfit from back at the Lawson Peabody School for Young Girls. I've got my shiv stuck in my vest in case things get dicey, and Mairead has been fitted out with one, too. She's got on one of my skirts and that sort of brocaded peasant top she had on the day she was discovered as a stowaway. A couple of mobcaps on our heads and we're just a couple of simple country girls.

We go over the side and get into the skiff. Jack Sheehan is the coxswain and he hands us down. We settle in and Sheehan dips his muffled oars in the water and we creep silently for the shore in the deep dark of the night.

"Over at the far end of that wharf there, Jack," I whisper. "Right at the foot of that street ... right there. Good." We bump up against the wharf and Mairead scrambles out, followed quickly by me. "Hand me up the bottle. Thanks, Jack. You'd better lie off a bit in case someone happens by. We'll give a couple of owl hoots as a signal to come pick us up when we get back."

Sheehan bids us good luck and warns us to be careful as he slips back off into the darkness. Mairead and I put our feet on the road and begin the walk up the hill toward the guns of Shotley Gate.

The darkened houses thin out quickly as we get farther and farther out on the Point—no one wants to build a home way out here where the full fury of winter storms would pound without mercy. There is only the looming bulk of the battery up ahead now.

"Here we are, girl," I whisper when we get up to the back of the building where there is a closed door and an open window. "And here we go."

We throw our arms around each other's shoulder and start laughing and giggling. "Lesh do 'Roll Me Over,' Sister!" I say.

"Lesh do it," slurs Mairead, all mush-mouthed. We sing.

"
Roll me over, in the clover,
Lift me up, roll me over,
And do it again, again, again,
Lift me up, roll me over,
And do it again!
"

"
SSSShhhhhh!
" I stage-whisper, putting my finger over my lips. "We'll wake up the whole ...
hic!...
town."

"Oh, shush your own self and gi' me another drink!" orders Mairead, grandly.

A light appears in the window. Someone has lit a lamp. I think I see a face peer out, and then the front door opens and a man looks out at us.

"Now you've gone and done it, you've woken up the good people of this 'ere 'ouse!" I say, and lift the bottle to my lips.

"Bob, come look at this," says the man at the door, who appears to be clad only in a pair of long underwear and a nightcap. Another man, pulling up his suspenders, appears in the light of the doorway. Like his friend, he appears to have been asleep, but he ain't asleep now, that's for certain.

I weave and peer at him as if I'm trying to focus my eyes.

"G'evening, gennulmen, we hopes we ain't disturbed yer rest, we hopes, we do," I say.

"Ain'tcha a little out of your way, girls?" says the first man. "You ain't from around here."

"Me and 'er is from Harkstead, out in the country, like ... Our mum ...
buuuurp...
sent us down to town to sell Bessie our milk cow and sold 'er we did," I say firmly. "Yessir, we sold 'er and got money for 'er and we spent it, sir, yesh we did. Didn't we, Sister?"

Mairead collapses to the ground, laughing and crowing out, "Won't our mother be shurprised?
Haaaaaaaaaa...
" Mairead rolls over and gives them a fine view of her white underdrawers.

The men look at each other. They have just died and gone to Heaven it seems—kind Providence has just delivered two young dames to their very doorstep, two young dames who have plainly lost their way and who are, without doubt, very drunk. Unbelievably good luck.

Mairead, still guffawing over what our mum's gonna say, gets unsteadily back to her feet and clings to me.

"Wanna hear a joke?" I slur. "A really
dirty
joke? Shuuuure you do...," and I proceed to tell them one of the awfullest jokes from
Laugh and Be Fat,
punctuated by assorted burps and hiccups. Great lusty laughter all around when I am done. I catch the two men looking at each other again, and this time winking.

"Come in, ladies. You'll catch your death out there. My name's Bill and this 'ere is Bob," says the one named Bill, gesturing us in. Mairead and I look at each other, put
why-not?
looks on our faces, and stumble through the door. We are inside. Across the large room squat the butt ends of the two big guns.

"I can tell by the light in yer eyesh that you have great—
hic
—affec-shun for little ...
burp...
me," I say to Bill, the man who has plainly picked me to be his darling this evening. What I can really tell from the light in his eyes is that he cannot believe his good luck.

"Indeed I do, girlie. Let's have a kiss, then." He pulls me to him and is about to plant a great slobbering bristle-chin kiss on my mouth, but I draw back.

"Before I would kiss such a ...
hic ...
handsome man, I believe I'll take a drink," I say. "To shweeten my breath, like, for thy shweet kiss." And I pull out my bottle and put it to my lips and pretend to drink. He is
not
a handsome man. He don't smell very good, neither.

"Here!" says Mairead, reaching out her arm for the bottle. She is in the clutches of the other bloke, who is angling her toward his cot. "Don't drink it all, you greedy pig! You always get everything! It's not fair! Hand it over here! It's mine, too!"

But she doesn't get the bottle, the man holding me takes it from my hand and says, "All for you girls and nothing for me and poor Bob? For shame!"

"Hey, that's ours!" protests Mairead.

"Let's all have a drink then!" Bill shouts as he lifts it up and takes a long, long pull at the bottle. "Man!" he says, when he brings it down, "that's damned good!" He takes another huge swallow. "Whoo! It tastes just like candy, it does! Here, Bob, have a haul at it."

Bob grabs the bottle and upends it. "Lor'! That's good!" he agrees, after he's drained the rest of the bottle. "What
is
this stuff?"

"The stuff dreams are made of, gunner," says I, straightening up as Bill's hands fall from my shoulders and he slips down to the floor. Bob looks at his mate lying there with a certain bleary amusement and then his eyes roll back in his head and he, too, hits the deck. Each of them had drunk enough of the Tincture of Opium to bring a very large racehorse to its knees.

"Quick! Turn the lamp down low!" I say, and Mairead does it.

"Are they dead?" she asks, looking down at the two men sprawled on the floor.

"Nay, Sister, I assure you they are not dead, but they are having the most wonderful dreams of heaven itself. Can you imagine the good time they are having with us right now?"

"Disgusting," says Mairead, imagining.

I look up and see the dangling rope that goes up through the roof to the big alarm bell that hangs above. I pull over a chair and climb up on it and pull out my shiv and cut off the rope as high up as I can. Somebody'd have to really work to ring that bell now.

The bell was the big reason that Mairead and I had to do this job alone. Liam had wanted to send up a bunch of armed men, but our newly found beaus Bill and Bob would have just sounded the alarm and that would have been it. Liam was forced to see the wisdom of my plan, for, even though he hated the thought of his daughter and me doing this, he knew it was absolutely necessary.

I hop back down. Mairead is tying the hands and feet of my Bill and her Bob, using the lengths of light line she had tied around her waist under her skirt for just that purpose. We can't have them waking up too soon and spreading the alarm.

Now, for the guns.

I have a variety of metal spikes with me, fashioned by our shipfitter O'Donnell, tucked into my vest and I go up to the mighty guns lying there all sinister and black in the night. By putting my finger on the guns' powder holes, I am able to choose the right size spikes for the job. I take the hammer I have tied about my waist and, as quietly as I can, I pound the proper nails down into the powder holes till they are flush and cannot be pried back out.

The Guns of Shotley Gate are spiked.

Before we left the bunker, Mairead insisted on arranging Bill and Bob side by side, face-to-face on the floor. She placed the now empty bottle of opium and alcohol between them and, from outside the doorway, she found a sprig of clover to put in the bottle's neck. It ain't a shamrock, but it's close. Then we headed back down the hill to Sheehan waiting below. A couple of low hoots and we were back in the boat, and then, back on the
Emerald,
where Liam said, "Thank God!" and embraced his daughter with great relief. Me, too.

"Come down to my cabin," I say to my officers. "A cup of coffee with us and we will tell you the tale. At five o'clock we'll start warping her in. The moon should be down by then."

There will be no more sleep this night.

The moon was indeed down as we started moving the
Emerald
into the quay. We secured one of our lifeboats with a short line to the bow of the ship and the men in the boat began quietly rowing. It is slow and tedious work for the boat men, but the
Emerald
slowly, silently, and surely edges toward the shore. At least there is no breeze to be against us.