Flying Dutch

THREE

The slight misunderstanding concerning the legend of the Flying Dutchman came about like this.

In the summer of 1839, a young German musician was sitting in a café in Paris drinking armagnac and thinking uncharitable thoughts about the regime of King Louis Philippe. It was a hot day, armagnac is by no means non-alcoholic, and the German was fiercely Republican by temperament, so it was perhaps understandable that the intensity of his reaction to the crimes against freedom that were going on all around him led him to speak his thoughts out loud. Before he knew what he was doing he was discussing them with the man sitting at the next table.

“Kings,” said the young German, “are an anachronistic obscenity. Mankind will never be truly free until the last king’s head is impaled on the battlements of his own palace.”

If the young German had bothered to look closely at the stranger (which of course he didn’t) he would have seen a neatly-dressed weather-beaten man of absolutely average height and build, who could have been any age between a gnarled twenty-nine and a boyish forty. There was just a hint of grey in his short beard, and his eyes were as sharp as paper can be when you lick the gum on an envelope. He considered the German’s statement seriously, wiped a little foam off his moustache and replied that in his experience, for what it was worth, most kings were no worse than a visit to the dentist. The young German scowled at him.

“How can you say that?” he snarled. “Consider some of the so-called great kings of history. Look at Xerxes! Look at Barbarossa! Look at Napoleon!”

“I thought,” interrupted the stranger, “he was an emperor.”

“Same thing,” said the young German. “Look at Ivan the Terrible,” he continued. “Look at Philip of Spain!”

“I did,” said the stranger, “once.”

Something about the way he said it made the young German stop dead in his tracks and stare. It was as if he had suddenly come face to face with Michaelangelo’s David, wearing a top hat and a frock coat, in the middle of the Champs Elysées. He put down his glass and looked at the stranger.

“What did you say?” he asked quietly.

“Please don’t think I’m boasting,” said the stranger. “I don’t know why I mentioned it, since it isn’t really relevant to what you were saying. Do please go on.”

“You saw Philip of Spain?”

“Just the once. At the Escorial, back in ‘85. I was in Madrid with nothing to do—I’d just got rid of a load of jute, you could name your own price for jute in Madrid just then, I think they use it in rope-making—and I thought I’d take a ride out to see the palace. And when I got there—took me all day, it’s thirty miles if it’s a step—Philip was just coming home from some visit or other. As I remember I saw the top of his head for at least twelve seconds before the guards moved me on. I could tell it was the top of his head because it had a crown perched on it. Sorry, you were saying?”

“How can you have seen Philip of Spain?” said the young German. He never doubted the stranger’s word for a moment; but he needed to know, very badly indeed, how this could be possible. “He’s been dead for two hundred and fifty years.”

The stranger smiled; it was a very peculiar smile. “It’s rather a long story,” he said.

“Never mind.”

“No but really,” the stranger said. His accent was very peculiar indeed, the sort of accent that would always sound foreign, wherever he went. “When I say long I mean long.”

“Never mind.”

“All right, then,” said the stranger. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

The young German nodded impatiently. The stranger took a pull at his beer and sat back in his chair.

“I was born in Antwerp,” he said, “in 1553.” He paused. “Aren’t you going to say something?”

“No,” said the German.

“Funny,” said the stranger. “I usually get interrupted at this point. I’ll say it again. I was born in Antwerp in 1553. Fifteen fifty-three,” he repeated, as if he wished the young German would call him a liar. No such luck. He went on, “…And when I was fifteen my father got me a job with a merchant adventurer he owed some money to. The merchant was in the wool trade, like more people were then, and he said I could either work in the counting-house or go to sea, and since handling raw wool brings me out in a rash I chose the sea. Funny, isn’t it, what decides you on your choice of career? I once knew a man who became a mercenary soldier just because he liked the long holidays. Dead before he was thirty, of course. Camp fever.”

“Well, I worked hard and saved what I earned, just like you’re supposed to, and before I was twenty-seven I had enough put by to take a share in a ship of my own. Not long after that I inherited some money and bought out my partners, and there I was with my own ship, at twenty-nine. Dear God, I’m sounding like one of those advertisements for correspondence courses. Excuse me, please.”

“Anyway, soon I was doing very nicely indeed, despite the wars and the Spanish taxes—the Spanish were pretty well in charge of the Netherlands then, you remember, what with the Earl of Leicester and the Duke of Parma and all that—and I was all set to retire at thirty-five when I had a stroke of bad luck. Two strokes of bad luck. The first was the bottom falling out of jute, just when I’d got a ship crammed with the stuff. I’d put every last liard I had into jute, and suddenly you couldn’t give it away. I hawked it all round Spain and Portugal and people just stared at me as if I was trying to sell them tainted beer. It was amazing; one minute you had perfect strangers accosting you in the street begging you to sell them some jute, the next thing you know jute is out. I’m not even sure that I know what jute is. I’m absolutely positive I don’t care.”

“And then I had my second stroke of bad luck, which happened just off Cadiz. I happened to run into the celebrated Francis Drake, who was on his way to singe the King of Spain’s beard. You’ve heard of Francis Drake? Oh good.”

“When I said you couldn’t give the stuff away I was exaggerating, because actually that’s exactly what I did. I needed some persuasion, mind, but I think it was the way Sir Francis drew up alongside and said that if I didn’t surrender my cargo he’d blow me out of the water that tipped the scale.”

“Well, after that there was nothing much I could do except wait until Sir Francis had finished messing about in Cadiz harbour and go for a drink. Even that wasn’t easy, what with the bombardment and so forth—one of the depressing things about licensed victuallers as a class is the way they dive for cover at the first little whiff of gunpowder—but eventually I found a tavern that wasn’t actively burning down and where they were prepared to sell me fermented liquor.”

The stranger paused and looked at the bottom of his glass, but the young German didn’t take the hint. He appeared to be spellbound, and the stranger carried on with his story.

“I’d been sitting there for a while, I don’t know how long, when this man came in and sat down beside me. It’s odd the way people sit down beside me in liquor-shops—no disrespect intended, of course, perish the thought. Anyway, he had this huge box with him, a sort of junior crate, and he was obviously worn out with lugging it about. Tall chap, thin, nose on him like an umbrella-handle, about your age or maybe a year or two older. I thought he was Spanish, or Italian, or he could have been French at a pinch. Anyway, a Southerner. Well, he looked even more miserable than I felt, which would have made him very miserable indeed, and I remember wondering if his trunk was full of jute. Incidentally, I’ve often wondered what Sir Francis did with all that good stuff he took off me. I bet he had no trouble shifting it at all.”

“Do excuse me, I tend to get sidetracked. This Southerner came and sat down in this tavern, and I offered to buy him a drink. He seemed offended.”

“‘I can afford my own drink, thank you very much,” he said. “That’s the least of my worries.” Brittle sort of bloke, I thought, highly-strung.

“‘All right then,” I said. “You can buy me one.”

“He looked at me, and I think he must have noticed that I was still in my sea-boots and general working clothes, because he suddenly became very much less hostile.”

“‘If you could tell me where I could find a ship to get me across to England,” he said, “I’d buy you as many drinks as you like.”

“‘England!” I said. “You don’t want to go there. The English are a load of thieving bastards, they’ll kill you for the buttons on your doublet.”

“He shook his head. “Better than being burnt alive,” he said. “And that’s what’s going to happen to me if I stay around here much longer. I’ve got to get to a Protestant country double quick.” ”

“I didn’t like the sound of this, but he wasn’t going to give up. “If you find me a ship that’ll take me to England,” he said, “I’ll pay you a hundred pistoles, cash.” ”

“To a refugee from the jute trade, this sounded too good to pass up, even if the man was clearly three sols short of a livre tournois, as we used to say when I was a boy. “What would you pay me if I could provide a ship myself, then?” I asked.”

“‘Think of a number,” he replied, “then double it. I can afford it, rest assured.”

“‘Who are you, then?” I asked.

“‘Does it matter?” he said.

“‘No,” I replied, “I’m just incurably nosy.” Which is true, as it happens.

“‘My name’s Juan de Montalban, but I trade as Fortunatus Magnus,” he said, with just a hint of pride. “You’ve probably heard of me.”

“I mumbled something about how out of touch you get in my business, but I could see he was disappointed. It’s true, though; you do lost track of things when you spend most of your life surrounded by hundreds of miles of open sea. Oh yes.”

“‘Well,” he said, “if you must know I’m an alchemist.”

“You mean cures for headaches and things?” I said.

“‘Certainly not,” he replied. “I am a philosopher, and I have discovered, the answer to the riddle of transmigration of the elements.”

“I was startled. “Base metal into gold and all that sort of thing?” I said. He sneered slightly.”

“‘That’s transmutation, not transmigration,” he said. “Vulgar party trick, though it pays the rent, I’ll grant you. I do that, too.”

“Suddenly I could understand why he wanted to get out of Spain in such a hurry. Apart from being incredibly hard on heretics—and alchemists are heretics by definition—the Spanish had a peculiar horror of anything which might disrupt the nice little monopoly on gold and silver they’d been enjoying ever since Cones came back from the Americas. Have you ever been to America? Funny place. You can’t get a decent boiled egg for love nor money.”

“‘Be that as it may,” he said, “I’ll give you five thousand pistoles for a ride to Bristol. Good Spanish coin,” he added, “I wouldn’t try and palm you off with the home-made stuff.”

“By now my natural scepticism was telling me that alchemists you meet in taverns at the end of a long, difficult day may well turn out not to be alchemists at all, particularly if they end up trying to borrow money or sell you a lump of cut-price gold; but there was something unusually convincing about him—probably the way he wasn’t trying to convince me. Do you see what I’m getting at, by any chance?”

The young German nodded. He saw only too well.

“So,” continued the stranger, “I said that if he showed up at the quay next morning with five thousand pistoles I’d take him to England with the greatest of pleasure, and then I went off to get drunk in slightly less eccentric company. I was so successful in this—getting drunk is one of the things I’m best at—that I didn’t get up till quite late the next morning, and I reckoned that even if he’d kept the appointment he’d have given up and gone away long since. But when I got down to the quay at about half-past ten—I had some business to see to in the town first—there he was, looking extremely nervous and asking what the hell had kept me.”

“I explained about my bad headache, but he didn’t seem terribly interested. He did, however, seem extremely anxious to show me a large number of very genuine-looking gold coins, and I decided that even if he was a lunatic he was a rich lunatic, and that if he wanted to go to Bristol then I wanted to take him there, before any unscrupulous character turned up who might exploit the man’s mental frailty by asking for six thousand pistoles.”

“My crew were by no means overjoyed to be off again so soon, and when I told them that we were going to England they made some very wounding remarks about my intelligence. They pointed out, perfectly accurately, that Sir Francis Drake was English, and so were John Hawkins and Black Jack Norris, and that a country capable of producing such unsavoury characters was somewhere they were in no hurry to visit. In fact, so determined were they that I had to take the unprecedented step of promising to pay them before they would do any work at all.”

“Their fears turned out to be absolutely groundless. Sir Francis and his fellow merrymakers were far too busy chivvying honest businessmen off Puental to bother us, and an unusually obliging wind took us right up to the mouth of the Bristol Channel.”

The stranger hesitated for a moment. “You don’t really want to hear the rest of this,” he said. “I think it would be much better if we go back to discussing kings. Take Charlemagne, for instance. Did you know that Charlemagne didn’t learn to read until he was forty?”

“Never mind Charlemagne,” said the young German. “Go on with what you were saying.”

“I’d really much rather talk about Charlemagne,” said the stranger, “if it’s all the same to you. Believe me, I have very good reasons.”

The young German said something vulgar about Charlemagne, and the stranger shrugged and went on.

“It was then,” he said, “that things started to go wrong. The unusually obliging wind went away again, leaving us stranded in mid-sea with nothing to do but look at the coastline of Wales, which is not something I would recommend unless you have an overwhelmingly keen interest in geology. To make matters worse, something unsavoury got into the ship’s beer, and when you put twenty Dutchmen on a ship—did I mention we were mostly Dutch? Well, we were—when you put twenty Dutchmen and a Scot on a ship in the middle of the sea with nothing to drink but cloudy beer, then you have a recipe for unpleasantness on your hands.”

“Halfway through the second day we were starting to feel more than usually thirsty, and by that evening the ship was alive with parched mariners in search of hidden caches of the right stuff. Me among them, I might add; I had an idea that the answer to the riddle of the transmigration of matter wasn’t the only thing Fortunatus Magnus had in his luggage. You see, he was the only person on board who didn’t seem worried about the beer crisis. When the first mate told him about it, all he said was “So what?” Suspicious, you’ll agree.”

“As soon as I’d got his big trunk open—it didn’t take more than five or six blows with the axe—my suspicions were confirmed; there was this huge glass bottle arrangement, carefully packed with straw and about half-full of the most delicious-looking tawny-yellow liquid you ever saw in your whole life. I closed what was left of the lid of the trunk and went in search of privacy and a tankard.”

“The tankard was no problem at all; but more or less the only privacy you can find on my ship is in the crow’s nest, which is why I tend to spend a lot of time there. Even then, I wasn’t going to take any chances, since the crow’s nest is directly above the beer-barrel—we keep it permanently on deck, where everyone can see it; just knowing it’s there can be a great help at times of stress—and there was a crowd of indomitable optimists gathered round it trying to fine the repulsive mess with Irish moss and fishmeal. I pulled the rope ladder up after me, uncorked the bottle, and poured myself a drink.”

“It tasted odd to start with, but it had a certain something, and after the third tankard I was feeling much more relaxed and in tune with the music of the spheres. Just then the alchemist appeared on deck, looking absolutely livid, like a sort of manic cormorant. I reckoned I knew why, but by then of course I couldn’t care less.”

“He started telling about how someone had broken into his trunk and stolen something of great value, and of course I was grinning all over my silly face with pleasure. Nobody was taking much notice of him apart from me, because a couple of the crew had just put another cupful of Irish moss in the beer-barrel and were peering anxiously at it to see if it would do any good. Funny stuff, Irish moss—I think it’s made up of ground-up fish bones, and I haven’t the faintest idea why…Sorry, you’re right, I do tend to wander off the subject from time to time. It’s probably subconscious.”

“I imagine the alchemist must have lost heart, because he stopped shouting after a while and went and leaned sullenly against the rail, muttering to himself in Latin and breathing heavily through his nose. Did I mention he had a big nose? Oh, well, anyway, what with the drink and the general stimmung, and it was extremely wrong of me, I admit, but I suddenly felt the urge to let the alchemist know exactly what had become of his precious hoarded treasure. After all, selfishness is a major sin, and the creep hadn’t offered any of us so much as a sniff of the cork. I leaned over the edge of the crow’s nest, waved the flagon at him, and jeered.”

“Given the quantity of its contents which I had consumed, waving the flagon was a bad move. It was, as I said, a big thing, and as soon as I lifted it up so that the alchemist could see it, I felt it slipping through my fingers. I made a desperate attempt to grab it back, but all I succeeded in doing was spilling its contents, which went soaring off into the air in a magnificent golden wave, like a sort of proof rainbow. A moment later I followed it, since I’d completely lost my balance; and that is a foolish thing to do in a crow’s nest. Shall we talk about Charlemagne now? All right, please yourself.”

“It’s a very, very strange feeling to fall from a great height, I can tell you, and not something I would recommend to anybody who isn’t employed by the Revenue. It seems to take a long time, and it isn’t actually particularly frightening, even though the logical part of your mind is telling you that when you land you are definitely going to die. Of course I did land—eventually—and very unpleasant it was, too. Only I didn’t die.”

“I didn’t even break anything. I just lay there on my back feeling an utter fool, with the crew gathered round staring at me as if I’d just grown an extra ear.”

“After a while I got up and walked round the deck a few times, and my loyal crew seemed to lose interest. They muttered something about some people being born lucky, looked back a couple of times to make sure I was still alive and hadn’t been fooling them, and went back to the beer-barrel. The only person who seemed to want to talk to me was the alchemist, and since I had a fairly good idea of what he was likely to say I kept plenty of deck between him and myself. He was gaining on me steadily when a terrific cheer went up from the vicinity of the beer-barrel.”

“I pushed my way to the front and saw the most miraculous sight. That beer was actually clearing; the Irish moss must have done the trick after all. There was a very short interval, while everyone dived for vessels of any description, and then an orgy of sploshing noises while twenty involuntary abstainers made up for lost time. I had to use all my authority as captain to get close enough to the barrel to dip a tin cup in.”

“In the general excitement I had forgotten all about the alchemist, and when I emerged from the ruck round the barrel he was standing over me with a face only marginally more pleasing to the eye than Sir Francis Drake’s culverins. The only thing to do, I thought, was try to jolly him along.”

“‘Now look,” I said, “I’m sorry I pinched your beer but there’s plenty for everyone now. Grab a jug and get stuck in.”

“‘It wasn’t beer,” he said.

“‘Porter, then,” I replied, “perry, ale, whatever. Does it matter?”

“‘Yes,” he said. “That was my elixir.”

“‘Your what?” I asked.

“‘My elixir,” he replied. “The philosopher’s stone. The elixir of life. The living water.”

“I frowned” I hate beer snobs, don’t you? “All right,” I said, “so it was better than ship’s beer, but let’s not get carried away. They say you can get a very nice pint in Bristol.”

“‘It wasn’t beer,” he said solemnly. “It was elixir.”

“Then something clicked in my brain and I remembered something. I remembered that I had just fallen out of my own crow’s nest onto a deck of hard oak plants without suffering so much as a nosebleed.”

“‘Elixir?” I said.

“‘Yes,” he said. “E for Enrico, L for Lorenzo, I for Iachimo, X for Xeres, I for Iago, R for Roderigo, elixir. And you drank it.”

“I felt unwell. “Is it safe?” I asked.”

“He grinned. “I don’t know,” he said, “but it definitely works.” ”

“‘Does it?” I asked.

“‘I think you just proved that,” he said, “by falling out of the crow’s nest. Or how would you interpret it? Luck? A sudden gust of wind? Dry rot in the deck? What do you expect if you drink the elixir of life?”

The stranger fell silent and drew the tip of his finger round the rim of his glass. “Anyway,” he said at last, “that’s how I came to acquire eternal life, for what it’s worth. All this talk of beer has made me thirsty. Can I get you one?”

The young German replied in a small, awed voice that he would like another armagnac, and the stranger entered into an oral contract with a waiter for an armagnac and a half-litre of Stella Artois. Once the contract had been discharged to the satisfaction of both parties, the stranger continued.

“Not only me,” he said, “my whole crew as well. You see, when I spilt the rest of the stuff in the flagon, just before my untimely descent from the crow’s nest, it landed in the beer barrel, rendering the beer free from impurities and immortalising everyone who drank it. The alchemist saw it happen, and once he had calmed down he explained it all to us. I don’t think we were really convinced until he drank a half-pint of the beer and shot himself. Then we were all profoundly convinced.”

Especially the first mate; it was his pistol the alchemist borrowed, and when he pressed it to his head and pulled the trigger, the barrel burst. The first mate was livid, of course, but when he tried thumping Fortunatus Magnus all he did was squash his wedding-ring. The man was completely invulnerable. So were we all. As soon as it had sunk in, we all went completely mad and started belting each other about with our swords and roaring with laughter until there wasn’t anything larger than a paperknife left on the whole ship. Mind you, we had all been drinking rather heavily.

“As for Fortunatus, he cheered up very quickly. It turned out that he had been lugging this elixir of his around with him for years but had never found anyone brave enough to test it out on, and he was damned if he was going to risk it himself, since he was petrified of possible side-effects. Naturally we asked him what possible side-effects, but all he would say was that so far as he knew there weren’t any but we were bound to find out sooner or later, weren’t we? The only living thing he’d ever given any to, he told us, was a stray cat in Cadiz, and the contrary thing had escaped before he could do much in the way of properly-organised tests. Mind you, I don’t think he had intended to drink any himself, even when he saw that it hadn’t killed us outright. He just got caught up in the general spirit of adventure and wanted to justify his discovery to us. Common or garden scientific vanity. Well, there we are.”

“The next morning we got a breeze that took us straight into Bristol, where Fortunatus was immediately arrested as a Spanish spy and thrown in prison. He went very quietly for an invulnerable man, but when we offered to rescue him he said no, he’d much rather go quietly, since he had a lot to think over and prison seemed as good a place as any. So we left him to it and set out to spend five thousand gold pistoles on refreshments and riotous living.”

“We were all fairly well pleased with ourselves, as you can imagine, what with suddenly being made immortal and having five thousand gold pistoles. At first, we couldn’t see beyond the immediate benefits, such as being able to clean up on extremely dangerous wagers involving tall buildings, loaded firearms and ravenous bears; but even after the first wave of euphoria had worn off and nobody would bet us any more, we reckoned that we had done all right for ourselves, all things considered. For example, being immortal we were incapable of starving to death, which meant a tremendous saving on food; we could drink as much as we liked without the slightest danger of damaging our health; and since we were completely immune from what was then described as the Pox…Anyway, we felt we had every reason to be cheerful, one way or another. My only regret was that the morning before we left Cadiz I had wasted five pistoles taking out a life assurance policy, which was no obviously of no use whatsoever.”

As the stranger stopped speaking again the young German caught sight of his face. It was a terrible sight, completely indescribable, and the young German looked away quickly. He could still see it behind his eyelids days later. He felt a sudden urge to discuss the career of Charlemagne, but before he could do this the stranger resumed his narrative.

“However,” said the stranger, “there were side-effects. Shall I tell you about the side-effects? Do please say if you’d rather I didn’t. We could talk about Gustavus Adolphus if you like.”

“Tell me,” said the young German, “about the side effects.”

“We spent a fortnight in Bristol drinking to excess and laying up a cargo—wool, I think, and tin ore, and a bit of salt fish, definitely no jute—and then we left. We would have liked to stay longer, but we had somehow made ourselves unpopular in Bristol and most of the taverns had banned us—and that took some doing in Bristol, even then. So we set sail for Flanders, and we made good headway for a day or two, until the wind dropped again. But we didn’t care; we had plenty of beer now, and no killjoy alchemist on board. It was then we noticed it.”

“Noticed what?”

“The smell. The nastiest, most sordid, least pleasant smell you ever came across in all your born days. Nothing more unlike the scent of dewy roses could ever exist this side of Plato’s Republic. And the smell was coming from us.”

The stranger finished his drink and looked through the empty glass at something the young German couldn’t see. The young German decided that that was probably just as well.

“After a day of frantic and hysterical washing,” continued the stranger, “which only seemed to make it worse, one of us hit on the idea of consulting the alchemist’s notebooks, which he had left behind on the ship when he got arrested. Sure enough, we found the answer, in a passage where our old buddy Fortunatus was describing his experiments on the cat in Cadiz. He had done his best to get round the problem by fiddling the recipe here and there, and he was pretty positive he had fixed it, which I suppose explains why he drank it himself after we’d done his guinea-pig work for him.”

“Well,” said the young German, “that was fascinating. I really ought to be getting…”

“I really wish,” said the stranger, “I could describe that smell for you now. Try to imagine, if you possibly can, a muck-heap on which someone has placed the decomposing bodies of three hundred and thirty-three dead foxes. Next to this muck-heap try and picture an open sewer. Not just an ordinary open sewer, mind—this one collects the effluent from an ammonia works on the way. The muck-heap is, of course, in the back yard of a cholera hospital…No, don’t bother. Just take it from me, it was an absolute zinger of a smell.”

“Anyway, it soon became painfully obvious that unless and until we found some way of toning this odour down a bit, the only place we could be was as far out in the middle of the ocean as we could possibly get. So we set sail for nowhere in particular, rationed the beer, and waited. We waited and we waited and we waited. Occasionally something would happen to relieve the monotony. A Barbary corsair would creep up on us and attempt to board us, which was good for a laugh. One of us would go for a swim, and an hour later you couldn’t see the surface of the water for dead fish. Not to mention the run-in we had with what you would know as the Spanish Armada; boy, did we have some fun with them! Oh, don’t get me wrong, there were the occasional highlights. But most of the time it was dead boring.”

“After three months we were all so crazy with boredom and mutual loathing that we decided to blow up the ship and ourselves with it. It didn’t do any good, of course. The ship blew up all right, but we didn’t. We floated, and after a while the number of dead fish got so embarrassing we decided we’d better swim on a bit before we wiped out the livelihood of every fisherman in the Atlantic Ocean. After a day or so of nonchalant doggy-paddling we ran into another ship. They must have been downwind of us, because before we’d got within two hundred yards of them they’d taken to the boats and were rowing away as fast as their arms could work the oars. That sort of thing really dents your self-confidence, you can imagine. You begin to despair of making those lasting relationships with people that add the interest to life.”

“Well, after we’d made the new ship comfortable—painted out the name and got it nice and squalid—we sailed on a bit longer and a bit longer still, and we came to a decision. The time had come, we decided, to try and do something about it, rather than tamely giving in. That’s the way we are in Holland; every brick wall you come to has big red marks where people have been beating their heads against it. Now it so happened that when we blew the ship up I had old Fortunatus’ notebooks in the pocket of my doublet, and although the ink had run in a few places they were still legible—I think he’d written them in some kind of incredibly clever new ink, and it makes you wonder why he ever bothered with turning base metals into gold when he had such a fantastically commercial proposition at his fingertips. Anyway, we read through those notebooks until we knew them by heart. We discussed them, argued about them, tried experiment after experiment, even tried reading them upside down; all totally useless, needless to say, but at least it passed the time, and although we didn’t discover an antidote to the elixir we did find out some extremely interesting things along the way. Extremely interesting…I’m sorry, I’m wandering off again. I do tend to do that, I’m afraid. It comes of having nothing to do for long periods of time but talk; it makes you extremely wordy.”

“Where was I? Oh yes. One morning, exactly seven years after we’d first drunk the elixir, we all woke up to find that the smell had actually gone. It was amazing. We were still invulnerable and immortal, of course, but at least we didn’t niff quite so much, and the first thing we did was set course for the nearest land-mass, which happened to be Le Havre. We had all assumed that one of our numerous experiments had finally worked, and that we’d cracked it.”

“We spent the next month getting thrown out of every tavern, inn and brothel in Le Havre, predictably enough, and we were just on the point of saying goodbye to each other and going our separate ways—as you can easily appreciate, after all that time on the ship and what with the smell and everything, we all hated each other so much you wouldn’t credit it—when the first delicate whiff of the Great Pong came filtering through and we knew that we weren’t home and dry after all. We spent a frantic afternoon buying up every drop of beer, every chess-set, every book and every piece of chemical apparatus that we could lay our hands on, and we got back to the ship just before a mob of extremely savage Frenchmen with handkerchiefs in front of their faces threw us into the sea.”

“We were still kidding ourselves that we had found an antidote and that it had worn off, and so we carefully recreated all the experiments we had done in the last seven years, and made scrupulous notes in proper joined-up writing in a big leather-bound book. But when we’d tried everything and nothing had worked, we lost heart and spent a whole year playing shoveha’penny all round the coast of Africa. We did land once or twice, but only for hours at a time, and there is—or was—a tribe in Madagascar that worships us as gods; pretty ceremonies, very heavy on the incense. Now then; seven years after our brief visit to La Havre, the smell stopped again, and we scrambled into Tangier to do our shopping—we wasted a week getting there, what with contrary winds—knowing full well that we had exactly a month before we had to leave. We were right, of course. Three weeks later, the smell came back, and seven years later it went away again. That’s the way the pattern works, and once we’d spent forty-nine years reading up on alchemical theory we all knew why, it was blindingly obvious.”

“We were all pretty good alchemists by then, incidentally, and that’s how we make our living. For eighty-three months in each seven years we turn base metal into gold, and in the remaining month we spend it. That’s the problem with alchemy; it works all right, but compared with simply taking a pick and a shovel and digging the stuff out of the ground it’s hopelessly inefficient. There I go again, digressing. Do please excuse me.”

There was a very, very long silence, during which the young German tried to recapture the use of his brain.

“So you’ve been alive since 1553?” he said at last.

“Yes,” said the stranger, “that puts it very neatly. And also in perspective. Is there anything else you want to ask me?”

“No,” said the German. “No, I think you’ve said quite enough.”

“Oh well,” said the stranger. “I seem to have that effect on people. Not,” he went on, “that I tend to tell my story much these days. In fact, you’re the first person in over thirty years I’ve told it to.”

“Well…” the young German started to say; then he thought better of it and decided to stare horribly at the stranger, like a man in one of Hieronymus Bosch’s less cheerful paintings. The stranger seemed to find the silence awkward, and to break the tension he started to speak again.

“Oh yes,” said the stranger, “I’ve had some interesting experiences in my time. Well, fairly interesting. Now you mentioned Napoleon a moment ago. The only time I met Napoleon…”

The young German suddenly jumped up, screamed, and ran away, very fast.

Vanderdecker shook his head and went to the bar for another drink. It had been roughly the same the last time he told the story, when he had landed in Porlock and met the man who was on his way to a wedding. That, he had said to himself, is the last time; but the pleasure of talking to someone new after seven years with Antonius, Johannes, Pieter and Cornelius had gone to his head.

In case you were wondering, the young German made a moderate recovery, after two or three months of careful nursing, and went on to become the composer of such celebrated operatic masterpieces as Lohengrin, Götterdämmerung and Parsifal. To his dying day, on the other hand, his manner was always very slightly unsettling, particularly to strangers, and if anyone happened to mention Philip II of Spain he would burst out into maniacal laughter which could only be cured with morphine injections. Unlike Vanderdecker’s earlier confidant, however, he never became addicted to narcotics, and the rather garbled version of the story which he embodied in his opera The Flying Dutchman can probably be attributed to nothing more serious than artistic licence or a naturally weak memory.