Pirate King: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

CHAPTER ONE

RUTH: I did not catch the word aright, through being hard of hearing … I took and bound this promising boy apprentice to a pirate.

“HONESTLY, HOLMES? PIRATES?”

“That is what I said.”

“You want me to go and work for pirates.”

O’er the glad waters of the dark blue sea, our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free …

“My dear Russell, someone your age should not be having trouble with her hearing.” Sherlock Holmes solicitous was Sherlock Holmes sarcastic.

“My dear Holmes, someone your age should not be overlooking incipient dementia. Why do you wish me to go and work for pirates?”

“Think of it as an adventure, Russell.”

“May I point out that this past year has been nothing but adventure? Ten back-to-back cases between us in the past fifteen months, stretched over, what, eight countries? Ten, if one acknowledges the independence of Scotland and Wales. What I need is a few weeks with nothing more demanding than my books.”

“You should, of course, feel welcome to remain here.”

The words seemed to contain a weight beyond their surface meaning. A dark and inauspicious weight. A Mariner’s albatross sort of a weight. I replied with caution. “This being my home, I generally do feel welcome.”

“Ah. Did I not mention that Mycroft is coming to stay?”

“Mycroft? Why on earth would Mycroft come here? In all the years I’ve lived in Sussex, he’s visited only once.”

“Twice, although the other occasion was while you were away. However, he’s about to have the builders in, and he needs a quiet retreat.”

“He can afford an hotel room.”

“This is my brother, Russell,” he chided.

Yes, exactly: my husband’s brother, Mycroft Holmes. Whom I had thwarted – blatantly, with malice aforethought, and with what promised to be heavy consequences – scant weeks earlier. Whose history, I now knew, held events that soured my attitude towards him. Who wielded enormous if invisible power within the British government. And who was capable of making life uncomfortable for me until he had tamped me back down into my position of sister-in-law.

“How long?” I asked.

“He thought two weeks.”

Fourteen days: 336 hours: 20,160 minutes, of first-hand opportunity to revenge himself on me verbally, psychologically, or (surely not?) physically. Mycroft was a master of the subtlest of poisons – I speak metaphorically, of course – and fourteen days would be plenty to work his vengeance and drive me to the edge of madness.

And only the previous afternoon, I had learnt that my alternate lodgings in Oxford had been flooded by a broken pipe. Information that now crept forward in my mind, bringing a note of dour suspicion.

No, Holmes was right: best to be away if I could.

Which circled the discussion around to its beginnings.

“Why should I wish to go work with pirates?” I repeated.

“You would, of course, be undercover.”

“Naturally. With a cutlass between my teeth.”

“I should think you would be more likely to wear a night-dress.”

“A night-dress.” Oh, this was getting better and better.

“As I remember, there are few parts for females among the pirates. Although they may decide to place you among the support staff.”

“Pirates have support staff?” I set my tea-cup back into its saucer, that I might lean forward and examine my husband’s face. I could see no overt indications of lunacy. No more than usual.

He ignored me, turning over a page of the letter he had been reading, keeping it on his knee beneath the level of the table. I could not see the writing – which was, I thought, no accident.

“I should imagine they have a considerable number of personnel behind the scenes,” he replied.

“Are we talking about pirates-on-the-high-seas, or piracy-as-violation-of-copyright-law?”

“Definitely the cutlass rather than the pen. Although Gilbert might have argued for the literary element.”

“Gilbert?” Two seconds later, the awful light of revelation flashed through my brain; at the same instant, Holmes tossed the letter onto the table so I could see its heading.

Headings, plural, for the missive contained two separate letters folded together. The first was from Scotland Yard. The second was emblazoned with the words D’Oyly Carte Opera.

I reared back, far more alarmed by the stationery than by the thought of climbing storm-tossed rigging in the company of cut-throats.

“Gilbert and Sullivan?” I exclaimed. “Pirates as in Penzance? Light opera and heavy humour? No. Absolutely not. Whatever Inspector Lestrade has in mind, I refuse.”

“One gathers,” Holmes reflected, reaching for another slice of toast, “that the title originally did hold a double entendre, Gilbert’s dig at the habit of American companies to flout the niceties of British copyright law.”

He was not about to divert me by historical titbits or an insult against my American heritage: This was one threat against which my homeland would have to mount its own defence.

“You’ve dragged your sleeve in the butter.” I got to my feet, picking up my half-emptied plate to underscore my refusal.

“It would not be a singing part,” he said.

I walked out of the room.

He raised his voice. “I would do it myself, but I need to be here for Mycroft, to help him tidy up after the Goodman case.”

Answer gave I none.

“It shouldn’t take you more than two weeks, three at the most. You’d probably find the solution before arriving in Lisbon.”

“Why-” I cut the question short; it did not matter in the least why the D’Oyly Carte company wished me to go to Lisbon. I poked my head back into the room. “Holmes: no. I have an entire academic year to catch up on. I have no interest whatsoever in the entertainment of hoi polloi. The entire thing sounds like a headache. I am not going to Lisbon, or even London. I’m not going anywhere. No.”

CHAPTER TWO

PIRATE KING: I don’t think much of our profession, but, contrasted with respectability, it is comparatively honest.

MY STEAMER LURCHED into Lisbon on a horrible sleet-blown November morning. My face was scoured by the ocean air, I having spent most of the voyage on deck in an attempt (largely vain) to keep my stomach from turning inside-out. My hair and clothing were stiff with salt, my nose raw from the handkerchief, I had lost nearly half a stone and more than half my mind, and my mood was as bloody as my eyeballs.

If a pirate had hove into view – or my husband, for that matter – I would merrily have keelhauled either with a rope of linen from the captain’s table.

My only source of satisfaction, grim as it was, lay in the knowledge that several of the actors on board were every bit as miserable as I.

The eternal, quease-inducing sway lessened as we left the open sea to churn our way up the Rio Tejo towards the vast harbour – one of Europe’s largest, according to someone’s guide-book – that in the days of sail had made Portugal a great empire. The occasional isolated castle or fishing village along the shore slowly proliferated. Our view panned across a lighthouse, then picked up an odd piece of architecture planted just offshore to our left, a diminutive fort in an unnecessarily exuberant Gothic style. (Was that the style the guide-book – Annie’s? – had called “Manueline”?) Someone in the crowd of shivering fellow passengers loudly identified it as the Tower of Belém; my mind’s eye automatically supplied the phrase on an internal sub-title:

“That’s the Tower of Belem!”

I shook my head in irritation. I had watched more moving pictures over the past few days than in the past few years: My way of seeing the world had changed dramatically.

Beyond the Manueline excrescence rose Lisboa itself-Alis Ubo to the Phoenicians, Ulissipont to the Romans. Our first indication of the city was the spill of masts and belching smoke-stacks that pressed towards the docks. As we drew nearer, a jumble of pale walls and red tile roofs rose up from the harbour (it looked like a lake) on a series of hills (the guide-book had claimed seven, on a par with Rome) punctuated by church spires (a startling number of those) watched over by a decaying castle.

Pirates, I sniffed as I eyed the castle gun-ports. Any sensible member of the piratical fraternity would have steered well clear of this place.

I pulled my thick coat around me, made a fruitless attempt to clean my spectacles, and went below to assemble my charges.

* * *

My job – my official job – was to shepherd, protect, nurse, and browbeat into order some three dozen inmates of a mobile lunatic asylum. I was the one responsible for their well-being. It was I who ensured the inmates were housed and fed, entertained and soothed, kept off one another’s throats and out of one another’s beds. I was the one the inmates ran to, sent on errands, and shouted at, whether the complaint was inadequately hot coffee or insufficiently robust lightbulb. On the first night out from England, I had been roused from a fitful sleep by a demand that I-I, personally – remove a moth from a cabin.

A fraternity of actual pirates could not have been more trouble. Even a travelling D’Oyly Carte company would have been less of a madhouse.

But I was working neither with buccaneers nor with travelling players: The letter with the heading of the firm responsible for the Gilbert and Sullivan performances had merely been by way of introduction. Instead, I found myself the general coordinator and jack-of-all-trades for a film crew.

In the early years after the War, Fflytte Films had appeared to be the rising star of the British cinema industry: From Quarterdeck in 1919 through 1922’s Krakatoa, Fflytte Films (“Fflyttes of Fancy!”) seemed positioned to challenge the American domination of the young industry, producing a series of stupendously successful multi-reel extravaganzas with exotic settings and dashing stories. Then came Hannibal, which ran so far over budget in the preliminary stages, the project was cancelled before the second reel of film was fed into the cameras. Hannibal was followed by the wildly popular Rum Runner, but after that came The Writer, which took eight months to make and ran in precisely four cinema houses for less than a week. The Writer’s failure might have been predicted – a three-reel drama about a British novelist in Paris? – except that Randolph St John Warminster-Fflytte (“Fflyttes of Fantasy!”) was a director famous for pulling hugely successful rabbits out of apparently shabby hats (Small Arms concerned the accidental death of a child; Rum Runner was about smuggling alcohol into the United States; both had returned their costs a hundredfold) and a movie about a thinly disguised James Joyce might have been as successful as his other ugly ducklings, particularly when one threw in the titillating appeal of the Ulysses obscenity ban.

However, since the film had skirted around the actual depiction of the obscene acts in question, it went rather flat. So now, with three costly duds on his hands and the threatened loss of his aristocratic backers, Fflytte was returning to the scene of his three previous solid successes (“Fflyttes of Fanfare!”): the sea-borne action adventure.

This one was to be loosely based on the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Loosely as in wobbling wildly and on the verge of a complete uncoupling. Not an inch of film had gone through the cameras; the Major-General was drunk around the clock; the cameraman’s assistant had a palsy of the hands that was explained to me, sotto voce, as the result of a recent nervous breakdown; the actress playing Mabel had taken the bit into her teeth with this, her first starring rôle, and was out to prove herself a flapper edition of Sarah Bernhardt (if not in talent, then in imperious attitudes and a knack of fabricating alternate versions of her personal history); and the twelve other young ladies playing the Major-General’s daughters – yes, thirteen daughters altogether – formed a non-stop cyclone of lace, giggles, and yellow curls that spun up and down the decks and occasionally below them – far below, to judge by the grease-stains on one pink dress thrust under my nose by an accusing maternal person. Even the eldest of the “sisters,” a busybody of the first order, had blinked her big blue eyes at me in practiced innocence from more than one out-of-bounds state-room.

We had not left the Channel before I felt the first impulse to murder.

* * *

“Producer’s assistant,” then, was my official job. My unofficial one – the one Holmes had manoeuvred me into – was given me by Chief Inspector Lestrade in his office overlooking Westminster Bridge. He had stood as I was ushered in, but remained behind his desk – as if that might protect him. A single thin folder lay on its pristine surface.

“Miss Russell. Do sit down. May I take your bag?”

“No, thank you.” I dropped the bag I had thrown together in Sussex – basic necessities such as tooth-brush, clean socks, reading material, and loaded revolver – onto the floor, and sat.

“Mr Holmes is not with you?”

“As you see.” Was that a sigh I heard? He sat down.

“You two haven’t any news of Robert Goodman, have you?”

“Is that why you asked me here, Chief Inspector? To follow up on the last case?”

“No, no. I just thought I’d ask, since the man has vanished into thin air, and whenever something like that takes place, it’s extraordinary how often Sherlock Holmes happens to have been in the vicinity.”

“No, we have not heard news of Mr Goodman.” The literal, if not actual, truth.

“Why do I get the feeling that you know more than you’re telling?”

“I know a great number of things, Chief Inspector, few of which are your concern. Now, you wrote asking for assistance.”

“From your husband.”

“Why?” Lestrade had always complained, loud and clear, that there was no place for amateurs in the investigation of crimes.

“Because the only police officers I had with the necessary skills have become unavailable.”

“Those skills being …?”

“The ability to make educated small-talk, and mastery of a type-writing machine. It is remarkable how few gentlemen are capable of producing type-written documents with their own ten fingers. Your husband, as I recall, is one who can.”

“And yet the city’s employment rosters are positively crawling with educated women type-writers.”

“I had one of those. A fine and talented young PC. Who is now home with a baby.”

“Oh. Well, now you have me.”

“Yes.” Definitely a sigh, this time. “Oh, it might as well be you.”

My eyes narrowed. “Chief Inspector, one might almost think you had no interest in this matter. Is it important enough to concern Holmes and me, or is it not?”

“Yes. I mean to say, I don’t know. That is-” He ran a hand over his face. “I dislike having outside pressures turned on the Yard.”

“Ah. Politics.”

“In a manner of speaking. It has to do with the British moving picture industry.”

“Do we have a moving picture industry?” I asked in surprise.

“Exactly. While the Americans turn out vast sagas that sell tickets by the bushel, this country makes small pictures about bunnies and Scottish hillsides that are shown as the audience is taking its seats for the feature. I’m told it’s because of the War – all our boys went to the Front, but the American cameras just kept rolling. And now, when we’re beginning to catch up, we no sooner produce a possible rival to the likes of Griffith and DeMille when a rumour – a faint rumour, mind – comes to the ears of Certain Individuals that the man they’re backing may be bent.”

I put the clues together. “Some members of the House of Lords are worried about the money they put up to fund a picture; they mentioned it to the Chancellor of the Exchequer over sherry, and Winston sent someone to talk to you?”

“Worse than that – the Palace itself have invested in the company, if you can believe that. And the trouble is, I can’t say for certain that there’s nothing to it. The studio has been linked to … problems.”

“I should imagine that picture studios generate all sorts of problems.”

“Not generally of the criminal variety. There are some odd coincidences that follow this one around. Three years ago, they made a movie about guns, and-”

“An entire moving picture about guns?”

“More or less. This was shortly after the Firearms Act, and the picture was about a returned soldier who used his military revolver in a Bolshevik act, accidentally killing a child.”

“The Bolshevist terror being why the Firearms Act was introduced in the first place.” The 1920 Firearms Act meant that every three years, Holmes and I were forced to go before our local sheriff for weapons permits, demonstrating that we were neither drunks, lunatics, nor children.

“That and the sheer number of revolvers knocking around after the War waiting to go off. Which more or less concealed the fact that someone sold quite a few of said firearms in this country, unpermitted, shortly after the picture came out.”

“What does that-”

“Wait. The following year, Fflytte did a story about a young woman whose life was taken over by drugs-Coke Express, it was called. The month following its release in the cinema houses, we had an unusual number of drugs parties along the south coast.”

“Yes, but-”

“And last year, one of their pirate movies was about rum-running into America. It came out in November.”

“I was busy in November. What happened?”

“McCoy’s arrest. ‘The Real McCoy’? The man’s made a small fortune smuggling hard liquor into the United States.”

“Hmm. Is this perhaps the same studio that was making a film about Hannibal?”

“Fflytte Films, that’s them.”

“Odd, I don’t recall hearing about a sudden influx of elephants racing down the streets of-”

“I knew this was a mistake. Never mind, Miss Russell, I’ll-”

“No no, Chief Inspector, sit down, I apologise. Surely there must have been something more concrete to interest you in the case, even in a peripheral manner?”

He paused, then subsided into his chair. “Yes. Although even that I can’t be at all certain about. We were beginning to ask some questions – in a hush-hush fashion, so as not to set the gossip magazines on fire – when the studio’s secretary went missing. Lonnie Johns is her name.”

“When was that?”

“Well, there’s the thing – it was only four or five days ago. And there’s nothing to say that the Johns girl didn’t just quit her job and go on holiday. The girl she shares a room with said it wouldn’t surprise her, that Lonnie’s job would shred the nerves of a saint.”

“But Miss Johns didn’t say anything to her, about going away?”

“The room-mate didn’t see her go – she’d just got back herself from a week in Bognor Regis.”

“Any signs of foul play at the flat?”

“Neither disturbance nor a note, although some of her things did seem to be missing, tooth-brush and the like.”

“If the girl had run off to the Riviera with a movie star, she’d probably have told everyone she knew,” I reflected.

“Normally, we’d barely even be opening an enquiry into a disappearance of a girl missing a few days, but time is against us. The entire crew is about to set sail out of England, and if we don’t get someone planted in their midst, we’ll lose the chance. And when my likely officers were unavailable, I thought, just maybe Mr Holmes would have a few days free to act as a sort of place-holder, until I could get one of my own in line for it. But never mind, it was only a-”

“And in addition, if it does blow up in the face of a gaggle of blue-bloods and splatter them all with scandal, it would be nice if Scotland Yard were nowhere in sight.”

“Miss Russell, I deeply resent the im-”

“Chief Inspector, I have nothing in particular on at the moment. I’ll be happy to devote myself to the Mysterious Affair of the Coincidental Film Crew.”

He looked shocked. “You mean you’ll do it?”

“I just said I would.”

“I thought you’d laugh in my face.” He gave me a suspicious scowl. “You aren’t a ‘fan’ of the cinema world, are you?”

“By no means.”

“And yet you seem almost eager to take this on.”

Motion pictures, or Mycroft? I reached out to snatch the folder from his hand. “My dear Chief Inspector, you have no idea.”

CHAPTER THREE

PIRATE KING: Away to the cheating world go you,

Where pirates all are well-to-do.

FROM LESTRADE’S OFFICE, I went directly to that of Fflytte Films. It overlooked the friendly confusion of the Covent Gardens flower mart, where I dodged sweepers, buckets, carts, heaps of pulped blossoms, and a dark and winsome young lady aiming a heather sprig at my lapel.

At the top of a flight of stairs, I found a door standing open, a ring of keys protruding from its lock. Inside, the chaos was nowhere near as colourful as that on the street outside, and the cries of vendors had been replaced with a raised telephonic voice from an inner office. I followed it to its source.

“-don’t care what he says, the alcohol is to go into the hold, not in his quarters. Yes, I know it’s not your job to search him, I’ll take care of that, you just- That’s right, into the hold, and we’ll worry about his rooms on the day. Great, thanks.”

The telephone clattered onto its stand, and I rapped my knuckles against the half-open door, then repeated it when I realised that the man’s muttered epithet had hidden my first attempt.

Geoffrey Hale, the general manager of Fflytte Films, raised his head from his hands, presenting me with a pair of cornflower blue eyes in a face too young for the white of his hair – or, what I had thought was white hair, but with a closer look became merely very pale blonde. He was in his late thirties, and would have been quite attractive but for his haunted expression. “Yes?” he said, a syllable that tried for irritable but came out more than a little fearful.

“I’ve come about the position,” I replied. “Sir Malcolm-”

For Hale’s benefit, I began to trundle out Lestrade’s manufactured story, which in point of fact was a reasonably efficient means of inserting a person (male or female) into Fflytte Films. In the manner of all things English (particularly things in any way connected to the House of Lords) it had drawn its particulars from the old-boys network: a luncheon conversation at a club; Hale bemoaning the abrupt loss of his secretary-assistant and going frantic over the number of hours required to grease the machinery of a moving picture company; the old boy/luncheon mate saying that he might know someone, if Hale didn’t require a person who knew the industry; Hale answering that he’d hire a myopic orang-utan if the chimp could take dictation and manipulate a telephone.

And here I was, with three of those four characteristics.

(That, in any event, was how Hale remembered it. According to Lestrade, it had begun the other way around, with Lestrade actively hunting for a man with links to Fflytte or Hale; on finding one, he had arranged for the old boy to invite Hale to lunch, drawing the scent of a potential assistant before his nose.)

(That, at any rate, was how Lestrade remembered it. However, knowing the House of Lords and its fondness for meddling in the lives of those who actually worked for a living, I thought it equally possible that Lestrade had been handed the plan ready made: Here’s our suspicions, the peers had told him; here’s what your man is to do; here’s the path we’ve paved for him to get there.

It had been a set-up from the beginning, although there was no knowing at this point how many layers of deception there were: Hale definitely was being manipulated, Lestrade possibly, me almost certainly. Even that conveniently missing secretary had the faint odour of red herring, a ploy designed expressly to attract the attentions of the police. And if Lonnie Johns was safely tucked up for a quiet holiday in the south of France, it was more likely that the House of Lords was paying her bills than Scotland Yard.

Apart from which, Lestrade was not a good enough liar to manufacture a false concern for a missing girl.)

(Only some days later, as I leant miserably over the storm-tossed railing, desperately searching for something to bring my mind up from my stomach, did it occur to me that Mycroft’s threatened trip to Sussex had been an oddly convenient piece of timing. And once that idea had swum to the surface, a great cloud of morbid thoughts boiled up in its wake: Since the notion of Mycroft Holmes doing the bidding of any number of Lords was laughable, it suggested that the House of Lords were not the instigators of this investigation, but the puppets of Mycroft Holmes. Mycroft had moved them: They had moved Lestrade: Lestrade had moved-

Which in turn suggested that Mycroft had wanted me to do this, but knew that if he were to ask me directly, I would refuse.

Later, when I was not in quite such a vulnerable position, I decided that it was a ridiculously convoluted, Heath Robinsonian piece of machinery, a bit much even for Mycroft. My brother-in-law was sly, but he was practiced enough to know that setting a fox before Lords might take the hunt in any direction.

One thing I was certain: If plot there was, Holmes had not been in on it.

But all the doubt and suspicion came later, when it was too late. Had I put the pieces together earlier, I would not have found myself standing before Geoffrey Hale’s chaotic desk in his Covent Garden office that November afternoon, laying out the story Chief Inspector Lestrade had provided for me.)

“-so I don’t actually know anything about the picture industry, but a friend mentioned this and I’m between projects just at the moment and I thought it sounded like a lark. I’m a whiz at type-writing,” I added with a bright smile.

I was none too certain how Hale would feel about the person being thrust towards his manly breast – one Mary Russell, who, although well dressed and reasonably energetic, was far too young for the sort of placid maternal secretarial authority that his typhoon-struck offices cried out for, who moreover admitted that she knew exactly nothing about co-ordinating a film crew. But before I could finish my prepared explanation, dawn came up across his unshaven features and he rose as if to fling himself at my feet.

I hastened to stick out my hand, forestalling any greater demonstration; he clasped it hard and pumped away with hearty exclamations.

“Oh how utterly jolly, a life-saver in sensible shoes, you are so very welcome, Miss – what was it? Russell, of course, like the philosopher, although I’d guess looking at you that you’re a dashed sight more practical than him. Oh, Miss Russell, you can’t believe what a mess things have got into here – I had a perfectly adequate assistant who seems to have upped and left, just as we’re about to set sail. Both literally and figuratively.”

“Er,” I said, retrieving my squashed hand and glancing down at my shoes, which were the most fashionable (and hence impractical) I owned. “Do you want to see some letters of recommendation or something?”

“You speak English and you’re dead sober at two in the afternoon, what else could I ask for? You know your alphabet?”

“I know several alphabets. And shorthand.” Holmes, when going undercover, could disguise himself as anything from garage mechanic to priest; I was forced into the more womanly rôles of secretary or maid. (Although after one stint in the kitchen of a manor house, I tried to avoid being hired as cook; still, the fire had been quickly doused.)

“And you have a passport, and no small children or aged grannies needing you at home? If you spoke with Malcolm, you’ll know that we will be away from London for some weeks? Although we’ll try our best to be home by Christmas.”

That was either a gross and self-delusional underestimate, or a blatant lie designed to soothe a nervous would-be employee. But I did not blink. “I am aware that the job entails travel, yes.”

“Perfection. Can you start with these?”

He stabbed the air with a desk spike impaled with more than four inches of paper. Avoiding the wicked point, I extracted the object from his hand. “You want me to begin immediately?”

“Absolutely. That is, could you?” he asked, recalling his manners with an effort.

“I could, although it might be good if I had some idea what you’d like me to do.”

When he flung himself out of the office six minutes later, late for a meeting with a last-minute addition to the cast on the other side of town, I had not much more of an idea. However, I soon discovered that by identifying myself as “-with Fflytte Films,” the voice in the earpiece would instantly break in with the urgent business at hand, much of which had to do with unpaid bills. At 6:40 that evening, I reached the bottom of the spike, having taken care of roughly half its problems and transferred the remainder onto a single sheet of lined paper for consultation with Hale. With that in hand, along with another page holding a list of cheques needing to be sent, I locked the door with the abandoned keys, and set off for Hale’s home.

At 7:00 that morning, Mrs Hudson’s coffee in hand, I’d neither heard of nor cared about Geoffrey Hale, Randolph Fflytte, or the business of putting a moving picture before the great British public. Twelve hours later, I felt I had been intimately involved for weeks.

Geoffrey Hale was the lifelong friend, long-time business partner, and (another inevitability in English business arrangements) second cousin of Randolph Fflytte himself. Hale was the man who enabled the director’s vision to inhabit screens around the world. Hale was the one to assemble cast and crew, negotiate with the owners of cinema houses and would-be filming sites, and in general see to the practical minutiae of taking a film from initial discussion to opening night. Hale was the one to ensure that the actors were sober enough to work, that the actresses had enough flowers and bonbons to soothe their delicate egos, the one to make certain that the country house where filming was to take place actually possessed four walls and a roof.

Hale, and now me.

CHAPTER FOUR

PIRATES: A rollicking band of pirates we.

GEOFFREY HALE LIVED in St John’s Wood. A rotund and shiny-headed person on the far side of middle age opened the door, his chins gathered above the sort of collar that labelled him a butler of the old school.

“Mary Russell, for Mr Hale,” I told him. His manner made me regret keenly that I did not have a card at hand for him to carry upon a polished salver.

He bore up under the disappointment, parked me in the room designated for the parking of intruders, and glided away, returning a precise four and a half minutes later to convey me to the presence of the master of the house, up a set of magnificent mahogany stairs that looked as if someone had recently dragged a piece of light artillery down them. I avoided the worst of the splinters, wondering if Hale’s cousin and partner was experimenting with a scene from a forthcoming war movie.

Despite what I had said to Lestrade, I had in fact heard of Fflytte Films. (“Fflyttes of Fun!”) I believe even Holmes would have known the name. Over the course of a decade of film-making, the trademark element of Fflytte Films had become Realism. In an industry with papier-mâché Alps and Babylonian temples made of composition board and gilt; where Valentino’s Sheik pitched his tents a quick drive from Los Angeles (rumour even had it in Queens), and Blood and Sand showed not Spain, but a Hollywood back lot; where even Robin Hood had been born in Fort Lee, New Jersey, Fflytte Films made it known that when this company made a movie about the open seas, to the open seas the crew went; and when Fflytte Films produced a story about an aeronaut, by God the cameraman and his instrument were strapped in and set to turning. In Quarterdeck, half a ton of equipment had gone down in a storm; in Jolly Roger, men had been washed overboard – and if no lives had actually been lost, the great movie-going, gossip-magazine – reading public stoutly believed to the contrary.

One might have expected this rigid commitment to authenticity to require that any version of Pirates of Penzance be filmed in Penzance. However, during the course of that long day, I had come to suspect we were not bound for that sleepy watering-place on England’s south coast.

Hale had shaved since flying out of the office that afternoon, although the smears of tiredness under his blue eyes were no lighter. He crossed the opulent library with his hand out, a ready apology on his lips.

“Miss Russell, can you ever forgive me for my state this afternoon? You must have thought you were in the company of a raving maniac – Thank you, Pullman, that will be all – or, no, ask Mrs Corder to send up a tray of – coffee, Miss Russell? Or tea? To go with these sandwiches and what-not? Coffee, then. Do sit down, Miss Russell, honestly, I’m not always in that sort of state.”

The first three minutes were spent with my mouth full as Hale delivered honeyed apologies while simultaneously performing the sort of dance upper-class males do when faced with a woman both of a lesser rank and in their employ: a polite, brotherly flirtation that lacks the faintest element of sex. It is amusing, particularly when based on invalid assumptions, but it must be even more exhausting to generate than it is to receive. Once I had relieved a meal’s worth of dainty snacks from the platter, I used my linen napkin, then cut the dance short.

“Mr Hale, I have a degree from Oxford, I am on the boards of several companies, I speak four languages fluently, five haltingly, and can read several more. As I said, this is a lark for me, since I’m at loose ends at the moment and I’m always up for a new experience. This is not a job I need to pay the rent. Why don’t you tell me what you are looking for, and I’ll tell you if I can do it?”

He sat back, startled as much by my blunt attitude as by what I had told him. “Er, yes. Very well. Perhaps you’d care for a drink instead of coffee?”

And so over glasses of brandy, he told me what I was in for: actors, crew, sets and costumes, local negotiations, food and housing, the lot. “We’re scheduled to spend ten days in Lisbon doing rehearsals – which, since you have little experience with the picture industry, I should note is not always the case, that many companies have neither rehearsals nor scripts. Fflytte Films uses both. We’ve found that if we don’t prepare the choreography, as it were, of the fight scenes, we waste a lot of time and miles of film.”

“And you have a number of fight scenes?”

“We do.”

“Sorry, but I’d understood that you were filming The Pirates of Penzance?” Which I remembered as a distillation of saccharine songs, much tip-toeing about, topsy-turvy logic, and slapstick chases. My attempt to keep any dubious feelings out of my voice was only partly successful: Hale’s quick glance at me glimmered with understanding and humour.

“Nothing so simple as that, Miss Russell, although making a silent film about a musical performance would be just the sort of thing Randolph would love to try. This is Pirate King: a film about a film about The Pirates of Penzance.”

“Very well,” I said slowly.

This time he laughed outright, and his face lost its pinched look, becoming both younger and more nearly handsome. “What do you know about Fflytte Films?”

“Not a whole lot. Randolph Fflytte is in the papers from time to time, of course, but I have to admit, I only go to the cinema a handful of times a year.”

“Don’t let Randolph hear you say that. Not unless you want to be sat down for a marathon screening of his work. You might say that Fflytte Films began in 1902, when Randolph got his first camera. He was seventeen at the time. For some years it was a summer-holiday toy, recording the antics of friends, playing around with effects. Randolph’s first serious attempt at telling a story on the screen came in ’07, when he bought up a lorry-load of Boer War uniforms and had every working man on his estate dress up to re-enact the Siege of Mafeking.”

“I don’t know that I’ve seen that one.”

“You won’t, either. There were only three prints made, and nine years ago, he threw them on the fire. Nearly burned the house down – cellulose nitrate is remarkably flammable. He was unhappy with Mafeking even as he was editing it, since a battle across Berkshire countryside looks nothing like a battle across open veldt. Every time he looked at it, he regretted that he hadn’t just piled his workers on a boat and taken them to South Africa.

“Two years after Mafeking, he took some friends to Paris to make a film, as a joke more than anything. This time, once he’d done the editing, he sold it. And decided that was what he wanted to do with his life. Before we knew it, we were making films commercially – most of them so dreadful they’ve blessedly disappeared from the scene, although Hester’s Grandmum wasn’t too bad, and She Begs to Differ had its moments.

“Then came the War, and while the Americans happily went on building studios and hiring actors, Randolph was reduced to filming the local evacuees and German prisoners on pig farms. But in 1915, he talked his way into France, where he shot The Aeronaut, about a spotter balloon. Two and a half years later, in winter of 1917, he managed to return, and was thrilled to come under live fire. Or within a mile or so of live fire, at any rate.

“It was a revelation. Randolph came home and burned those copies of Mafeking as a sort of vow, that utter realism would be the guiding light of Fflytte Films. And so it’s been to this day: We make the audience feel ‘the wind in your face and the lash on your back.’ ”

“I do remember that – the Roman galley film!”

“The first time Fflytte Films hit the headlines.”

“But wasn’t the case dismissed?”

“Not dismissed: settled out of court. Randolph paid the actor off, although, truth to tell, the chap hadn’t actually been beaten. It was camera tricks. Occasionally, we are reduced to mere verisimilitude.”

“I’m glad to hear you don’t sacrifice your actors for the battle scenes. Or bury them under volcano ash. But why on earth pay the man off?”

“One cannot buy that kind of publicity, Miss Russell. Fflytte Films pummelling its actors bloody for the sake of realism? Priceless word-of-mouth. Almost as good as burning down the village in Krakatoa-although the ash there was flour, and the volcano was only waist high.”

“Good to know. And now you’re doing The Pirates of Penzance-or at any rate, a picture about a picture about it.”

“The plot is, a film crew is making a picture about the pirates who come to Penzance in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. And as they film, the crew gets involved with real-life Barbary pirates.”

“Er, you do know that there aren’t any more Barbary pirates?” An American film-maker might not have picked up on this little fact, but a man with Hale’s accent would surely have had a modicum of history thrust down his throat.

“Of course. On the other hand, there will always be pirates of one stripe or another in the world.”

“And this film-within-a-film is about real pirates wrapped around fictional pirates?”

“You’re catching on.”

“It’s a farce, then?”

“No, actually, it’s more along the lines of an adventure. Do you remember the story in The Pirates of Penzance?”

“Dimly.” I had probably fallen asleep halfway through the first act: Music has that effect on me. A source of continual outrage from my musical husband.

“The young pirate Frederic, on the eve of his twenty-first birthday, announces to his fellows that he has never been able to stomach piracy, and that even though this particular band to which he has been apprenticed is soft-hearted, he intends to leave them and devote himself to fighting piracy. He falls in love with the daughter of a Major-General, but through a piece of trickery, the pirates take him back into their ranks, capturing the girl and her sisters to take as their wives. There follows a great deal of Gilbertian shenanigans before the pirates are revealed to be not only Englishmen, and loyal to the Queen, but of noble birth as well, which makes them appropriate husbands for the Major-General’s many daughters. Happy endings all around.”

To such had the wit of Chaucer and Shakespeare descended.

“How many daughters?” I asked.

“Productions of the opera have varied in the numbers of both daughters and pirates – there are four named sisters and simply a ‘chorus’ of pirates. In addition to Mabel and Frederic, Randolph has decided on twelve of each.”

“Thirteen daughters? Wouldn’t that make some of them a bit young to marry?” Or old.

“We’re classifying them as four sets of triplets. And Mabel, of course.”

“Mustn’t forget Mabel. And a dozen constables as well?”

“For symmetry, one might imagine, but no, only six of those. Plus the sergeant.”

“Twelve and twelve and two and seven – thirty-three actors?”

“We won’t have pirates at first, but you have also to add Ruth, Frederic’s piratical nursemaid, and Major-General Stanley, Mabel’s father.”

“And you want me to help keep that lot happy, healthy, and in some kind of order?”

“Plus the crew – cameraman and assistant, make-up woman, seamstress, three or four others. No servants; Randolph banned the actors from bringing their servants along after Anna Karenina-two illegitimate pregnancies, one divorce, and a bullet wound between them. Because of the cold,” he explained.

“Of course.”

“So no personal maids or valets. However,” Hale added, his voice innocent but his eyes taking on a wicked gleam in their depths, “the four youngest sisters – youngest in fact, not youngest on film – will bring their mothers.”

“Oh, Lord,” I said. I had encountered the mothers of young prima donnas before.

He laughed aloud. “You begin to see why I greeted you with such enthusiasm this afternoon.”

“You all but wept in joy. Well, if that’s the case, I’d best-” I started, but he cut me off.

“There’s something else.”

What on earth could surpass what he had already described? “Yes?”

He reached for the decanter, replenishing our glasses. The level in the glass rose; I braced myself. “You seem a sensible kind of person, Miss Russell. The kind of person who pays attention to details.”

“I try.”

“And the kind of person who dislikes … wrongdoing.”

The very model of an unwilling apprentice pirate, one might say. “Yes,” I ventured.

“And quite, well, sensible.”

Like my shoes? I wondered.

“Plucky, even.”

Plucky?

“Because I was thinking, perhaps you would be willing to … extend your assignment. Just a little.”

Please, please don’t ask me to dress up as one of the daughters. “Er,” I said.

“So that in the course of your job, if you come across something – how to say this? Something out of the ordinary – you will bring it to my attention.”

I kept my face still, although my heart gave a little thump. Was the man aware of the same activities that had attracted Lestrade’s attention? Or had one of his blue-blooded chums dropped a hint about the investigation, and he wished me to share any findings with him? Or – further concern – could he be laying a false trail for me by claiming concern for illicit behaviour?

Pirates within pirates, crime within crime …

“Perhaps you’d best explain what you mean by ‘out of the ordinary.’ ”

He picked up his glass, to swirl the contents into an amber whirlpool.

“Three years ago, Fflytte Films made The Moonstone. Do you remember it?”

“I did see that one, yes. Very realistic, as I remember, the scenes in India.”

“As I said, our hallmark. The actor playing Ablewhite – who you may remember dies in the story – was killed a few days after his final scenes were filmed.”

“How unfortunate.”

“He was drunk playing the Dame in a Christmas panto and fell into the orchestra pit, breaking his neck on the kettle drum, but yes, it was a tragedy. Later that year, we went to Finland for Anna Karenina, Finland being the closest we could come to Russia without getting involved with the Reds. But as I said, it was cold, and our Anna got frostbite when the filming was only halfway through and went home (quit the profession entirely, I heard the other day; she now runs a boarding house in Leeds), so we had to turn the story into a short about the frozen North instead. And even then, the polar bear rather chewed up its handler.”

“Oh dear. Perhaps a crew as accident-prone as yours ought to go into a less hazardous business.”

“And then in Jolly Roger, we almost lost two men in a freak wave.”

“Yes, so you mentioned.”

“With Krakatoa, two of the cinema houses where it was running burned down. In Coke Express, one of our actors decided to drive through Town in the altogether – that one took a lot of work to hush up. I had to prove that he was just drunk, not coked.”

I said nothing: True, the coincidences were piling rather high, but clumsiness in stunts did have a way of bringing its own punishment, and Hale himself had pointed out how inflammable film could be. And actors had been known to drink.

“Hannibal was cancelled, but one of the men we’d used as a consultant for Rum Runner was arrested, for rum-running. The Writer, about a failed writer, well, failed.” He knocked back a hefty swallow from his glass, and continued bleakly, “We’re cursed. Whatever the movie’s about, it happens. There: Now you’ll probably quit on me, too.”

I blinked. Lestrade wanted me to look into chronic lawbreaking; Hale was suggesting I investigate-

“You want me to help you with a curse?”

Hale went on with an air of determination. “Miss Russell, this current picture is about piracy. And yes, I will admit it sounds mad, but I’ve got the wind up about it. Getting fined for mistreating an actor is one thing, but I don’t have time for a court case involving some dastardly deed on the open seas.”

I opened my mouth to say something along the lines of If a beaten galley slave sells movies, wouldn’t a pirates’ curse make for a sure-fire hit? but caught myself. If someone in Fflytte Films had come up with that brilliant publicity scheme, it would either be Hale, or Fflytte himself.

Still, looking into a fantasy threat would give me the ideal excuse to snoop, if Hale happened to catch me at it. And he would be so grateful I stayed with the company – at any rate, stayed long enough to find who was responsible for the crimes that concerned Lestrade: say, fourteen days, 336 hours – that he would overlook any oddities in my behaviour.

“It would appear that building a reputation for realism has its drawbacks,” I remarked.

“It’s a major pain in the backside,” Hale replied. “But it is what we do. When we’re filming The Moonstone, we send a camera to India. If we’re making a film about the Punic Wars, we take some elephants to the Alps. Even if it nearly kills us all and leaves us bankrupt.”

“And when the script says pirates, you go to sea.”

“Lisbon first.”

“ ‘On, on, the vessel flies, the land is gone.’ ”

He cocked his head, and replied, “ ‘What beauties doth Lisboa first unfold!’ ”

“ ‘But whoso entereth within this town That, sheening far, celestial seems to be Disconsolate will wander up and down.’ ”

“Yes, Byron was not fond of Portugal, even before he had an unhappy affaire there.”

Long, long ago, as an unschooled orphan preparing for university examinations, I had a tutrix with a marked, even startling, affection for Lord Byron. There were lines of Childe Harold that the Byron-besotted Miss Sim had taken care to skip lightly over – thus guaranteeing that her adolescent student should commit them indelibly to memory. Triggered by mention of the Portuguese capital, some of those phrases began to rise now to the surface of my mind: memorials frail of murderous wrath, and the shrieking victim hath Pour’d forth his blood beneath the assassin’s knifeem›, and Throughout this purple land, where Law secures not life … I could see from the way Hale fiddled uneasily with his cigarette case that those phrases were pressing at his memory as well.

“No doubt much has changed in the past eleven decades,” I observed.

“So I have been reassured.”

“Very well: We set off on Monday for some weeks in Lisbon.”

“And Morocco.”

“Africa?”

“The town of Salé, on the coast north of Casablanca. In the seventeenth century, it was a pirate kingdom.”

“ ‘Sun-burnt his check, his forehead high and pale,’ ” I blurted out. “ ‘The sable curls in wild profusion veil.’ ”

“ ‘There was a laughing Devil in his sneer that raised emotions both of rage and fear,’ ”em› Hale agreed. Before any more of Miss Sim’s Byronic Corsair images could trail before my eyes, I pushed the glass of brandy away from me. “Mr Hale, you’re making a film about a film about pirates. Unsuccessful Victorian pirates from fifty years ago, not blood-thirsty African pirates three hundred years in the past. And from Penzance, not Salé. Why on earth don’t you just film the thing in Penzance?”

“Because at some point real pirates enter the scene, and they are based in Morocco.”

“But if you are telling a story about some people telling a story, why not just construct a fake-Africa studio? Which, since you’re after realism, is what your fictional film company would have done, in any event.” Real realism about realistic verisimilitude …

“As I said, Pirate King is about a film crew that is making a picture – which is also called Pirate King-about The Pirates of Penzance. The picture’s director – the fictional director, not Randolph Fflytte – is dissatisfied with the looks of the men in England, so he takes the production to Lisbon to hire some swarthy types, only to have their boat captured by actual pirates, who take them to Salé. The fictional director and the apprentice pirate Frederic are both played by Daniel Marks. The fictional director’s fictional fiancée is an actress. That is to say, she is an actress working on the fictional film, playing the part of Frederic’s girlfriend, Mabel, both parts being played, I’m afraid, by Bibi, who is an actual actress. Or so she claims. You don’t know Bibi? Oh, blessed innocence!

“But lest you think there’s a further stratum of reality, Daniel Marks and Bibi are not in turn romantically connected. Daniel is, shall we say, otherwise inclined. Then there’s Major-General Stanley, who is not only Mabel’s father but the fiancée’s father, and also a financial backer of the film. The fictional film, that is – the actor himself, Harold Scott; you’ve heard of him, I expect? – is unrelated to Bibi, and doesn’t have a sou. Spent it all on drink and horses.”

I made a small noise rather like a whimper.

“I know, it gives one a headache. Still, that’s Randolph’s plan. Ours not to reason why.”

Ours but to do and die? God, I hoped he wasn’t thinking of blending in “The Charge of the Light Brigade”: Cannon to the port of them, cannon to the starboard of them; some Major-General had blundered …

Where were we? “So, you load everyone on a boat for Africa?”

“Lisbon first.”

“Don’t tell me: Mr Fflytte also wants to hire swarthy actors?”

“In part – and it’s true, English actors just don’t look very piratical. Plus, Will the cameraman threatened mutiny at what an extended period of sand would do to his delicate machines, even though I don’t believe Salé is very sandy, and Bibi – the female lead – put her tiny foot down at the idea of what sand would do to her delicate complexion, so compromise was reached. We’ll cast the parts in Lisbon, then start rehearsals and work out the choreography of the fight scenes. After ten days, we’ll load the entire circus onto a boat – everything but the horses, thank heavens: I managed to convince Randolph that horses were one thing Morocco had plenty of – and sail to Salé. Or actually Rabat across the river, which I am told is friendlier to infidels.”

“And you’re filming there so as to capture the essence of a seventeenth century pirate kingdom within a nineteenth century comic opera for the edification and amusement of twentieth century house-maids, factory workers, and garage mechanics.”

He grinned. “You’ve got the idea now.”

Even in the early stages, it turned out, the script would make for a two-hour picture, and Hale admitted that it was likely to grow by at least half. Apparently, embedding an operetta into a film, then making a film of the process, requires time.

And although the The Pirates of Penzance is all about the songs and the silliness, Pirate King would be dead earnest and without the songs.

In addition, to put the cap on the enterprise, certain portions of the film were due to be tinted, in an as-yet secret (and, I suspected, as-yet unperfected) technique similar to the DeMille-Wyckoff process, which Fflytte intended to patent under his own name.

Pirate King would either set the standard for movie-making for a generation to come, or it would set a match under the Fflytte fortune, incinerating a boat-load of careers along the way. And displeasing the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the current resident of Buckingham Palace, and a number of Peers of the Realm.

Actual peers, one assumed, not fictional and piratic peers.

CHAPTER FIVE

FREDERIC [looking off]: By all that’s marvellous, a bevy of beautiful maidens!

RUTH [aside]: Lost! lost! lost!

THAT FIRST EVENING, Hale and I worked until nearly midnight. At 7:00 the next morning I turned the key to the Covent Garden office, and the telephone rang: The shipping agency was concerned that a trunk labelled with the name of Scott appeared to be leaking something that smelt of whisky. I made a note for Hale, reached to take off my hat, and the instrument rang again. I laid the hat on the desk and took up the receiver: An irritable voice demanded Hale, asked who I was, said never mind that I’d do, and issued a command that the offices were under no circumstances to be left unattended for so much as ten seconds that day since a delivery was to be made that would have disastrous consequences if someone were not there to receive it. Or so I guessed was the message, it was a bit garbled and before I could get a single word in, the man rang off. I set the earpiece into its hooks, reached for the buttons of my coat, and it rang again.

It did not stop ringing until the evening, alternating with the arrival of telegrams. (The new actress whom Geoffrey Hale had offered a part the previous afternoon agreed to his terms: I found the blank forms in a filing cabinet while the telephone balanced atop the files, its cord stretched to its full length; typed in the relevant information as I fielded three more telephone calls; handed the forms to Hale for signature as he dashed past an hour later; he handed them back to me as he went out for lunch; I folded them into an envelope, addressed the thing – in between two more telephone conversations – and thrust it into the hands of the building’s mail-boy just in time for the mid-morning post.)

When Hale returned, he carried a grease-stained parcel by way of peace offering and, more to the point, swore a blood oath not to step foot from the offices for five minutes lest the urgent parcel arrive in my absence. When I returned, much comforted by my wash-room outing, he was just ringing off the telephone and three more telegrams had arrived.

“I have to go out again, Miss Russell,” he announced, picking up his hat.

“Very well,” I said, ripping open the flimsies. “Would you bring some milk when you come? The bottle’s gone sour. Oh, wait. Do you know anything about a Mr … Can this be right? Pessoa?” Surely not Pessary?

“Who? Oh, Pessoa?” He pronounced it Pess-wah. “He’s the translator chap, in Lisbon. A friend said he was good. Why, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing, just a request for confirmation – I did see something about him, somewhere …”

Hale left; the phone rang. I spoke to a mother of one of the actresses, one-handed, while lifting various elements of the previous day’s avalanche of papers that I had tidied into piles but not yet filed away. Eventually, I unearthed an inch-thick pile of letters and telegrams that Hale had exchanged with a Portuguese translator. The voice continuing to stream into my ear – something about her daughter’s delicate digestion, good luck with that on a steamer crossing the Channel, I thought – I soon had them in chronological order, and read through them, frowning. It was possible that their infelicitous style reflected the inherently brutal prose of the telegraph. However, if the choppiness was a sign of inadequacy on the part of our would-be translator, I should have to do something immediately, since we were going to be heavily dependent on the fellow from the instant we landed.

I put the earpiece on its stand, wondered vaguely what I had agreed to with the mother, and immediately picked it up before it could sound again. Once I had phoned around to the translator chap’s references, I felt somewhat better: Senhor Pessoa (Pess-oh-ah) had a good enough grasp of English to have published verse in the language, but more to the point, he had attended an English-language public school and worked for a number of English companies in the translation of actual documents. There were going to be enough flights of fancy from my new charges without adding a poet’s nonsense into the mix, and I did not intend to stay long enough to add Portuguese to my store of languages.

I set that stack of papers aside, wrote a brief telegram confirming the date of our steamer’s arrival in Lisbon and a letter reviewing our needs on arrival, then went on to the next pressing task.

Clearly, I would not be given more than thirty seconds at a time to question mail-boy, tea-lady, charwoman, or inhabitants of neighbouring offices concerning Fflytte Films’ missing secretary. However, by giving up on a second night’s sleep, I could go through Hale’s files during the night – and I’m sure I would have learnt a great deal, except that at five that afternoon, a team of large men arrived and carted the files off, cabinets and all.

* * *

The advantage of being immersed in a mad flurry of preparation was that I could push to the back of my mind the voyage itself. The disadvantage was that I could push the voyage to the back of my mind.

My own list of Urgent Tasks was necessarily short to begin with, and of the twelve items on it (dress footwear, dinner frock, ammunition, hair-cut, and so on) I only managed to check off half, most of which had to do with clothing.

Hale and I went down to Southampton on the train, he dictating letters to the last possible instant. Which meant that my actual arrival on the docks, standing and looking up at my home for the next few days, came as a dreadful shock.

I loathe ocean travel. After what felt like a lifetime of Atlantic crossings, I had only to glimpse a smoke-stack to be hit by nausea. I pulled the bottle of paregoric from my pocket and took my first swig of many. Not that the drug lessened the sea-sickness, but it did put it at a distance.

Moments after Hale and I set foot on the ship, a tornado of blonde heads descended on us to pelt our ears with questions, complaints, and helpful suggestions. Hale, cowardly male that he was, pointed to me and said, “This is Miss Russell. She’s my new assistant. Introduce yourselves to her. If you have any problems, she’s your woman.” And walked away.

There on the deck, valise in one hand and portable type-writer in the other, still wearing hat and coat, I was verbally assaulted by what sounded like a girls’-school luncheon hall. I surveyed the expanse of young females, decided that these were the Major-General’s thirteen daughters (with maternal chaperones looming in the background), and decided further that I did not need to submit to the assault then and there. I chose one, based on the ill fit of her dress and the impatient arrangement of her hair, and held out the slip of paper with my cabin number on it.

“Can you find that for me?” I asked her.

And bless the child, she turned instantly on the heels of her new, too-large shoes and led the way, the others trailing behind.

At the door to my cabin, I handed my possessions to the attendant and took up a position in the door, to keep the girls from following me inside. I held up a hand. The voices died away.

“If anyone is in need of medical attention, talk to your cabin’s attendant. If your baggage hasn’t shown up, talk to your cabin’s attendant. If you need anything else, I will be on the foredeck in ten minutes. I suggest you wear your coat.”

And I shut the door in their faces.

“Actresses,” I told the wide-eyed young man, and pressed a coin in his hand.

“Yes, Madam. Will your maid-”

“Didn’t bring one, don’t need one.”

“Very well, I shall make certain your cabin is included in the ship’s service.”

“I won’t need that, either. I shan’t be spending very much time down here.”

Hard experience had taught me that the best way to cope with sea-sickness was fresh air, copious and uninterrupted. I planned on establishing a well-wrapped beach-head on the foredeck, out in front of the smoke, and staying there until we docked in Lisbon. If things went well, I could celebrate with a riotous cup of tea and a water biscuit. If not, well, it was the open air, after all.

And, it now occurred to me, although being trapped on the deck might make it more difficult to carry out my investigatory duties, it might have the advantage of discouraging all those yellow-haired young beauties from seeking me out too often. The wind on deck could be chill, and hard on permanent waves.

The initial novelty of Hale’s assistant holding court, as it were, among the deck-chairs meant that when I got to the specified location, my arms laden with fur coat, fur hat, two woollen travelling rugs, three books, a writing pad, mechanical pencil, small tin bowl, and flask of weak tea, almost every one of Hale’s actresses was waiting for me. The questions (and their Greek chorus of echoes) began as soon as I appeared.

“What happened to Miss Johns?”

(“Who?” “Mr Hale’s secretary.” “But isn’t this-?”)

“I don’t know, I was just hired three days ago.” Although I was beginning to suspect why the woman might have run off.

“Will there be a decent band for dancing tonight?”

(“There was a socko band the other night at-” “-oh I saw them coming on-”)

“I don’t know.”

“When will the sun come out?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is there going to be a script for the picture?”

“I don’t know, that’s Mr Fflytte’s decision.”

“Is it true that last spring Mr Hale went to the cinema with Agnes Ayres?”

(“Ooh, can you imagine being her?” “I can imagine being her in The Sheik, cuddling Valentino!” “More than cuddling, I’d like-” “Shh, darling, the children!” “Who are you calling-?”)

“I really don’t know.”

“Did he meet Valentino?”

(Instant silence, as all ears awaited the answer.)

“I don’t know.”

(“I’ll bet he did.” “I heard Valentino was supposed to be our Frederic until Daniel got it.” “Can you imagine? On a ship with Valentino?” “Did you see The Young Rajah?” “Wasn’t he the dreamiest?” “No! Mama wouldn’t let me!”)

“How long before we get to Spain?”

At last, something I could answer. “I think we put in at Coruña the evening before we arrive in Lisbon.”

“Where’s Coruña?”

“In Spain.”

“But Lisbon’s in Spain.”

“No, Lisbon’s in Portugal.”

“Isn’t Portugal part of Spain?”

“No, it’s a separate country.”

“Have you ever met Valentino?”

“Have I- Heavens no.”

“Would you like a table for that?”

“I don’t- What? Oh, yes, that’s very thoughtful of you.” The child in the too-short frock and too-large shoes settled a small table at the head of my deck-chair. I arranged my books, bowl, and flask on it, and thanked her. She appeared to be chewing cud, or some similarly tough substance. “What are you eating?” I asked her.

“Bibi gave me some chewing gum. It’s Doublemint. She gets it from America. Want one?” She held out a packet.

“No, thanks. And I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t chew around me.” Not unless you want to encourage me to use that small bowl on the table.

“Okay,” she said cheerfully, and spat it onto the deck. I closed my eyes, and asked her to take it with her and find a wastebin for it.

“When weel we be given a place to rehairse?” I opened my eyes. Neither the questioner’s accent nor her appearance fit our crew – would not fit many places, come to that. She was as tall as I, but dark, her lithe form dressed in what appeared to be stitched-together scarves. She wore a turban-like hat of multiple colours of scarf. Her feet were bare. And blue.

“I’m sorry, who are you?” I asked.

“Graziella Mazzo.” She stretched out an artistic hand. “I teach the girls to dance.”

“Very well. I’ll find out where you can practice, and when.”

The ship’s horn blasted away the next question, and the girls jumped and squealed and rushed off to the rail to watch the lines fall and the land recede. The wind would soon pick up – the rain, too, by the looks of the sky, although the bit of overhang above me should keep the worst of it off. I put on my fur coat, stretched my legs onto the chair, and picked up a book.

“The porter said I’d find you here,” Hale said. He looked curiously at my little encampment.

“As you shall until we dock in Lisbon. I get sea-sick, down below. And people tend to be rather put off by holding a conversation with someone who is retching over a basin the whole time.”

“ ‘Thou, luxurious slave! Whose soul would sicken o’er the heaving wave.’ ”

“Please!” My upheld hand stopped him from further Corsair lines.

“Er, well, will you be able to …?”

“Oh, I’m fine, so long as I’m in the fresh air,” I lied. “But it does mean you’ll need to come up here if you need me.”

He gave a mental shrug and pulled up a stool, to go over some of the last-minute business, including la Graziella’s temporary dance studio. We finished about the time the girls grew bored with the process of leaving England behind, and they returned, to fling questions at him for a while.

He stood up and interrupted the rapid-fire attack. “Could you girls line up by height for me? Left to right, shortest to tallest. No, you’re not taller than she is. That’s right. Is Bibi here? No, of course not. She is on board, isn’t she?” he asked me in alarm.

“I’m told all our members are here,” I confirmed.

“Well, I suppose she doesn’t matter, since she’s the M,” he said, confusingly. “Now, girls, we need a way of telling you apart. It’s such a bother to learn two complete sets of names, I’m going to ask you all to answer to your rôle name. Makes life much simpler all around. You,” he said, aiming his forefinger at the tallest actress, a classic English-rose beauty with crimson Clara Bow lips. “You’ll be Annie. Next is Bonnie. Celeste – Celeste, you didn’t wear spectacles before. Can you see without them?”

“Oh yes sir!” She whipped them off and gave him a myopic simper. He shook his head, but soldiered on, to Doris, Edith (she of the ill-fitting clothes), Fannie, Ginger, Harriet, Isabel, June, Kate, ending with the shortest (if by no means the youngest), Linda.

Arranged like that, a dozen girlish stair-steps, one began to see differences: Their hair ranged from June’s pale, wispy curls to Fannie’s rich (suspiciously so) brassy yellow; their eyes ran the gamut, too, from icy translucence to near-violet; their ages went from knock-kneed adolescence to full womanliness. The personalities they had already begun to reveal could now be attached to names: Annie was the one with the air of beatific innocence; Doris the one whose hands were constantly fiddling with her hair; Edith was my gawky and eager assistant; little Linda had the sour face.

Hale stood back and beamed with satisfaction at his newly named girls, so perfectly spaced in their heights that a straight-edge rested on their crowns would have touched each one (until one noticed that Edith had bent knees and Annie was stretching – no doubt they’d worn different footwear when Hale hired them). “For the duration of this project, you’ll answer to the name of your character, not your own, do you understand?”

None of the girls seemed very happy about that, but those familiar with the company looked resigned. I had to say, it was going to make my job that much easier.

The rain began then, and the girls ducked for cover, leaving me to my deck-chair, my tea, my books – and my paregoric.

Before the day was over, my singular method of travel had ceased to rouse comment. When anyone needed me, they could find me. I made a point of responding to their gossip with eagerness, since that appeared to be the only kind of criminal investigation I would be permitted until we reached Lisbon: I laughed at Bonnie’s description of our Major-General passed out into his blancmange, exclaimed at Harriet’s news of Bibi’s tantrum over the seating chart, and made disapproving noises when Edith described the wrestling match between Clarence and Donald, two of our fictional police constables (most of whom were odd-looking, if not frankly ugly – which did simplify the job of chaperoning the girls, a bit). The constables had also received fictional names, although theirs had been based on a sequence of age rather than height.

When I was not required to perform the duties of an audience, I sat on the deck and read in peace.

Read my way through the three too-slim volumes I had managed to bring, in fact, which was most distressing.

Before the dinner hour, Hale came to dictate a couple of letters and to review what we should need when we arrived in Lisbon. When he had finished, he stood there for a moment before asking, “Can I have some dinner brought up?”

“No,” I said quickly. “No, I’m just fine.”

“After dinner, we’ll be using the dining room to screen a couple of Fflytte Films, if you’d be interested?”

“Attractive as that may sound, I think it is not a good idea.”

“But you’re not planning to stay here all night, are you?”

“I’m quite comfortable.”

“Really? Well, if there’s nothing I can do-”

“Actually, there is. I didn’t have much time to shop in London, and only brought a few books. If anyone has any reading material, I’d appreciate it.”

“Certainly. And I’ll send the ship’s librarian along, too.”

“Very good of you.”

Beginning that night, I had a constant stream of women bringing me their bound treasures. One title was brought by no fewer than three of the girls’ mothers, each of whom presented it in an identical, surreptitious manner. The first two I thanked and handed it back, but after the third such indication of prize and respect, I thought I might as well give it a try: E. M. Hull’s The Sheik.

The novel, made into a moving picture that put Valentino onto the world’s lips (in more ways than one), had been written during the War by a woman whose husband was at the Front. Whose husband had clearly been at the Front for a long, long time.

It was appalling. Not so much the writing itself (which was merely the lower end of mediocrity) nor the raw pornography (which it was), but its blatant message that an independent and high-spirited young woman would be far happier if she were just slapped around a bit by a caring sadist. I read every word about fiery young Diana Mayo and her encounter with, abduction by, and ultimate submission to Sheik Ahmed ben Hassen. Then I went to wash my hands, and took the novel back to Mrs Hatley, with a fervent plea that she not let any of the girls read it. She turned pink and said of course not. But had I enjoyed it?

I closed her cabin door and went back to my wind-swept perch to examine by lamp-light my further literary options. Which to read first: Desert Healer, Desert Love, The Hawk of Egypt, or Zareh the Cruel?

CHAPTER SIX

MAJOR-GENERAL: This is a picturesque uniform, but I’m not familiar with it. What are you?

THE NEXT DAY, the sky grudgingly cleared. My solitary roost was invaded, with Signorina Mazzo leading the girls in swaying dances meant to evoke trees or trailing smoke, with Edith, my admirer of the ill-fitting footwear, offering to fetch things for me, with regular passengers taking exercise on the deck. In the evening, after the dining room was refused for a second night’s transformation into cinema-palace, Randolph Fflytte managed to inveigle the First Officer into stringing a bed-sheet out-of-doors on the deck-my deck – and opened the showing to anyone possessing a First Class ticket and sufficient warm clothing.

The impromptu cinema-house nearly closed on its opening night when Will Currie, our laconic Welsh cameraman and general machinery-operator, was nowhere to be found. His assistant, Artie, proved so fumble-fingered under the pressure of threading film through a constantly-moving projector that his hands more or less ceased to function. Randolph Fflytte and Geoffrey Hale admitted incomprehension.

Hope stirred that I might be permitted a solitary evening after all, but then one of the actors – our “Bert-the-Constable”-stepped forward to see what he could do. Bert was a fit, swarthy-looking young actor whom I was sure the camera would appreciate as much as a couple of the girls did (although thus far, he had maintained a degree of aloofness towards them that I, for one, was grateful for). He had a brilliant white grin, a Cockney accent, and fingers as clever as Will’s when it came to machines. In a moment, the projector was turning, and the outside lights were switched down.

Roman Galley began to sail across the bed-sheet (although I thought the topic of ship-wrecks might have been avoided) followed by the first reel of Moonstone. At that point, some of the older girls (the younger having been dispatched to their beds) began to murmur a rebellious desire for something other than a Fflytte offering. Hale was prepared, and handed a film can over to Bert.

I took another swallow from my bottle, nestled into my furs in a haze of drug and moving picture, and was startled out of my wits when my husband’s name appeared on the flickering screen.

Buster Keaton in “Sherlock Jr”

I jammed the cap onto the small bottle and launched it overboard: too late.

Sherlock Jr was, bizarrely, a similar film-within-a-film, the embedded adventure of a young fantasist whose nap-time clamber onto a cinema screen translates into a picture by the “Veronal Film Company.” The audience around me laughed uproariously, but it made me quite dizzy to watch Keaton’s phlegmatic battering by a rapid change of scenery. It was no less disorientating when he became a Crime Crushing Criminologist with an assistant named Gillette faced by a pretty girl, a dastardly foe, a criminal butler, and the most astonishing sleight of hand and stunt-work that I had ever seen. I blinked, decided that I was plastered to the gills, and waited for the next film to be as hallucinatory.

But that one was called The Perfect Flapper, and although many of the characters projected onto the sheet were drunk, I was clearly not.

I went the rest of the voyage without benefit of opiates. Sobriety did not help: I remained ensnared in a make-believe world.

* * *

Eventually, on a dreary, sleet-spattered November morning a thousand storm-swelled miles from that untidy Covent Garden office, I wove down the Lisboan gangway in search of a poetical individual. It being 1924, and the weedy, artistic look being all the fashion even in this distant enclave, there were several melancholics who fitted the description. I eliminated those bearing expensive accoutrements – two wrapped in thick overcoats and one sheltered under an elaborate silken umbrella – since any man taking stray translator jobs was unlikely to have generous resources. When I had also dismissed those men already in groups, I was left with three persons. One looked far too eager: He had to be waiting for a loved one. Another looked as if he should be in bed: If that was my man, his pallid languor suggested it would be less work to learn the language myself. When my boot touched down on the solid dock, I elbowed my way through the crowd to the undernourished, bespectacled figure that remained.

“Senhor Pessoa?” I asked.

He dashed the stub of a hand-rolled cigarette to the ground and snatched off his hat. “Miss Johns?”

“Her replacement, Miss Russell,” I said. “Is all ready?”

“I booked cars for the day, as you requested,” he replied, “although as foreigners, you should have been safe enough …” A disturbance behind my back made his voice trail away and his jaw ease open.

I did not need to turn around to know what he was seeing, although I did. There is an undeniable fascination with oncoming catastrophes, a basic human inability to tear one’s eyes away from runaway lorries, banana peels on crowded pavements, and overbalancing waiters with over-laden trays. Such was what stood now at the top of the gangway.

Between the built-up shoes and the oversized hat, the man now taking his place in the miraculously vacant passageway barely cleared five feet, but by his attitude, he towered over all he surveyed. The sun seemed briefly to emerge from the gloom, although that could have been the effect of the newcomer’s brilliant white fur coat, his equally brilliant teeth, and the enormous diamond on his right pinkie finger, which had been expertly mounted so as to adorn a finger considerably narrower than the stone itself.

Randolph St John Warminster-Fflytte, founder and sole director of Fflytte Films, the man on whose boyish shoulders the future of the British film industry sat, Hollywood’s coming rival, whose five generations of family fortune were riding on the surviving heir’s keen understanding of the taste of the common man.

From all I had seen of him on the voyage from England, which was rather a lot, the wager was close to being a sure thing. Fflytte had spent his youth embracing the taste of the masses; now he had more in common with his young would-be actors than with the likes of Barrymore and the generation trained by stage.

Fflytte had made his name (“Fflyttes of Freshness!”) with three pictures that cumulatively did for pirates what Valentino had done for rajahs and desert sheiks. As the girls had said, Valentino had even been mooted for the current project, when it was being thought of as a modern version of The Pirates of Penzance but without the songs (this being cinema and therefore, in 1924, blessedly without sound – although I had no doubt technology would catch up with us before long, inflicting audiences with a flood of opera-movies and driving tin-ears like me out of cinema houses forever). However, when Fflytte managed to smuggle Valentino into an elaborately negotiated secret meeting (secret due to the draconian contracts tying actors to their studios) the two men ended up staring at each other in mutual incomprehension, Valentino not understanding Fflytte’s English accent and the Englishman unable to decipher whatever language it was that Valentino spoke. The meeting was not a success.

Instead, Fflytte would make his own star. His eye had lit upon a rather stupid young man with symmetrical features and luscious hair whose chief ability was an imitation Valentino intensity, a gaze that struck me as dyspeptic although the average film-goer reacted with the breathlessness of a blow to the solar plexus. Daniel Marks (“Making his Marks!” “Hitting the Marks!” et cetera) had a more important knack: He never, ever, made Fflytte feel short.

Even now, the actor automatically took up a position well behind his director at the gangway’s head, so that any photographs from below would place them on an equal plane: famous director, dashing young man in fashionable soft cap, beautiful girl in flapper clothes and drooping spit-curls furiously chewing her chronic wad of Doublemint. One would have thought them Americans, although all three were British; but for the weather, the trio might have been getting off a train in Los Angeles.

However, there were no photographers, to the irritation of the man in the white coat. And far from the sun coming out, the rain gathered its petulance and threw itself at the fur and the hat.

Fflytte, Marks, and Bibi, the leading lady – just Bibi, no surname – slid down the boards and dove into the first of the waiting motorcars.

Marks might be Fflytte’s invention, but Bibi was the most prominent of several near-stars stolen outright from Valentino’s own Famous Players-Lasky company earlier that year. It was a coup that had shaken the California studios and dubbed Fflytte with his current (and appropriate) nom de cinéma: The Pirate.

I watched the car take away my blueblood piratical employer and his two prized possessions, and turned to Mr Pessoa. Both of us reached up to wipe the rain from our spectacles. He, and his coat, looked sodden through.

“I’ll introduce you when we meet them at the hotel,” I told him. “First, we have to see to the rest of the lunatic asylum.”

Mr Pessoa looked startled, clearly wondering if his English had failed him, but I just waved him at the motley crew gathered on the decks before committing themselves to foreign territory, and we got to work.

CHAPTER SEVEN

PIRATE KING: And honorary members of our band we do elect you!

THE FIRST ORDER of our Lisbon business was to hire actors to play the pirates – although we might have been hiring actors to play actors who played pirates, who were actually pirates who …

As Hale had suggested, it was better not to think about it too closely.

As I understood matters, Fflytte’s initial impulse had been to use actors from Morocco itself – I was already sick of the word Realism-but Hale had convinced the director that finding people both decorative and capable of acting in front of a camera, in a country so backward it had no motorcars until ten years previously, threatened to consume a dangerous amount of time and hence money. They had compromised on collecting actors along the way.

The English cast was already with us: Daniel Marks, playing the director and the apprentice pirate Frederic; Bibi, the fictional-director/apprentice pirate’s romantic interest, Mabel (Bibi presented herself as a Parisian-born American, although she was in fact a product of the East End, named Eleanor Murphy). The dual part of Bibi’s fathers – the investor/chaperone and Major-General Stanley – was filled by a red-faced and invariably tipsy Yorkshireman named Scott, a stage actor of Holmes’ era. His twelve other daughters were played by the twelve yellow-haired girls, the symmetry of whom was threatened by the growth spurt of Daughter Five, Edith – it had not been her shoes that made her seem taller, and by the start of filming she would have to bend her knees to fit between Doris and Fannie. The youngest four girls were accompanied at every moment by their mothers, who (as Hale had warned me back in London) constantly jostled for primacy.

I had the impression that Holmes’ original idea – and perhaps Lestrade’s, although he hadn’t the courage to suggest it to my face – had been that I try out for the part of Ruth, the forty-seven-year-old Piratical Maid of All Work who fancies herself as a future wife for her young charge, Frederic. Fortunately for us all, Lestrade had come up with an alternative. My job was to make note of the commands issued by Hale, Fflytte, and Will, the chief cameraman; delete any of Fflytte’s that contradicted one of the other men; delete any of Will’s that went against Hale’s; then see to the implementation of said commands.

Beginning with the hiring of pirates.

I’d only had time for a single exchange of telegrams with Mr Pessoa before we set off from London, although I’d read his previous cables and letters closely. The film industry would be as new a venture for the translator-poet as it was for me; however, on the taxi over, he seemed sanguine that one industry would be much like another in its need for skilled labourers, nourishment for the overfed egos of its principals, and grease on the wheels of communication.

But then, he hadn’t met Bibi or her dozen “sisters.” So instead of checking into my room, I abandoned my luggage and took Mr Pessoa to one side for a review of wants and needs, finding a chair close to a radiator. He took off his hat, but before I could unfold my list, he had a concern.

“I was not given guidelines as to bodyguards.”

“Bodyguards? Good heavens, Mr Pessoa, we’re not working with Rudolph Valentino and Mary Pickford, here. I shouldn’t think the masses of fans are going to make us need bodyguards.”

“These are troubled times, in my country. Your ladies and gentlemen may require-”

“If anyone needs guarding, it’s the populace, not my girls. No, our first order of business is to hire actors.”

He shrugged, and took out a tobacco pouch to roll a cigarette. “I have hired a theatre, posted notices, and taken out advertisements announcing the casting sessions this afternoon.”

“We don’t need a theatre, just a large room,” I protested.

“It was inexpensive, so long as you end each day before their evening performances.”

“How inexpensive?”

He took a sheaf of papers from his inner pocket and showed me various figures, comparing an actual theatre (having both lights and heat) with a bare, cold warehouse. I nodded.

“Very good, thanks. Next, as you may have been told, we’ll need the various accoutrements of pirates.”

He looked puzzled.

“Things like costumes and make-up – you’ll need to help Sally and Maude, two of our crew, find what they need.”

“For pirates?”

“Yes. Didn’t Miss Johns tell you what this picture is about?”

“Not in detail, no.”

“Oh, Lord. Say, I don’t suppose she mentioned to you where she was going?”

“Your telegram was the first I knew that she was no longer with Fflytte Films.”

“Odd. Well, do you know the comic opera The Pirates of Penzance?”

“I have heard of it, but not seen it.”

Lisbon began to sound appealing. “This picture is about a moving picture company that is making the film version of The Pirates of Penzance. In the process, they encounter actual pirates, based on-”

He sat forward, frowning. “Pirates, both fantasy and authentic?”

“I don’t know how authentic-”

“A picture with two layers of dream. A picture which is itself a dream? Artifice upon artifice …”

The conceit of the film-within-a-film appeared to be exciting some poetical instinct behind that melancholic face: Pessoa’s dark eyes went darker, his cigarette drooped alarmingly close to his knee. He smiled, a dreamy and faraway smile. Before he could either catch fire or reach for his pencil to write down whatever literary inspiration had seized him, I cleared my throat loudly and said, “One of the girls asked me to find a shop in Lisbon where she might buy chewing gum.”

The spell was broken, and we went back to my list, not pausing over a hasty lunch – the steamer having been delayed by the weather, tryouts began a mere three hours after we’d docked. Near the end of the list, if not the meal, Hale and Fflytte came in, both of them tidy and, no doubt, well fed. I looked down at my clothes, the same I had worn off the ship that morning, and at the half-eaten meal, then stood to introduce my employers to their translator.

Pessoa led us under threatening skies along pavements of attractive black-and-white mosaics to the hired theatre, a large, handsome, and surprisingly new building called the Teatro Maria Vitória. I was handed a list of Portuguese names, the men trying out for the parts, and we took our places in the comfortable seats, Fflytte and Hale third row dead centre, with Pessoa and me behind them. The actors had been given a badly roneographed copy of the Major-General’s song for their reading, which would have been a peculiar choice even for native English speakers. After the third man attempted to decipher the blotched printing and the unfamiliar words, Fflytte’s hand came up (lifted high enough to clear the seat-back in front of him) and his voice cut into the stumbling, heavily accented attempt.

“No no no, that’ll never do. Give me anything.”

Pessoa hesitated, then asked, “What does this mean, ‘give me anything’?”

“It means, these are supposed to be actors; have them give me any speech or bit of dialogue they’ve used for a rôle. Any rôle. So I can see what they look like.”

Pessoa addressed the stage with a flood of Portuguese, guttural and sibilant. The actor lowered his sheet and asked something; Pessoa responded. After several exchanges, another face popped around the curtains to make a remark, then several more short, dark men came out until the stage was filled with enough argument to establish a riot scene.

“Enough!” Instant silence, as every face turned towards the astonishingly loud command from the tiny director. Fflytte said to Pessoa, “We want pirates. Tell them to act like a pirate.”

The Portuguese command was terse and to the point. Fflytte settled back into his seat. Pessoa sat down, fishing out his tobacco pouch. I sat back. The man on the stage contemplated the piece of paper he held, folded it neatly into his pocket, then stared at his empty hand as if a sword might appear there. He cleared his throat, raised his head, and lowered his eyebrows into a terrible scowl. “Eu sou um pirata!” he stated, although it came across less of an exclamation than a question.

Hale rested an aristocratic forefinger on his furrowed brow.

I drew a line through the first name on my page.

* * *

One man after another would wander onto the stage, feebly pat at his pockets, take off his hat and search for a place to lay it, put it back on, and then turn to the audience of four, assume a fierce scowl, and declare himself a pirate. After the third such declamation, Pessoa ceased to bother with a translation.

Four hours later, Hale had filled three of the eighteen parts, two of whom would only be adequate for the dim recesses of a pirate horde. Sounds from backstage made it clear that the afternoon’s performance was about to get under way. Hale told Pessoa to inform the would-be pirates that the process would resume the following morning, and two sets of irritated theatre-folk grumbled past each other, one onto the stage, one off.

Fflytte decided to stay for a time to watch the performance, on the chance that he could steal a few of its players, but five minutes was enough: There is not sufficient make-up in the world to turn a Portuguese comic actor into a Barbary pirate.

Out on the street, the director stormed away, talking furiously to his friend and assistant, Hale. They made an odd pair, since Hale did not bother himself with the foot of height he had over Fflytte, but walked straight-backed at the small man’s side, one slow pace for every two of the director’s. Pessoa trailed behind, unsure if his services would be required. I followed after, examining the city around me.

In the fifteenth century, Portugal had become the world’s first truly global empire, planting its flag on four continents, beginning with Ceuta, just across the Mediterranean, and stretching to Macao in one direction and São Paulo in the other. Lusitania to the Romans, Portucale to the Moors, and troublesome to all, at its peak the pugnacious little country had possessed sea-borne chutes that filled royal coffers to overflowing with gold and spices and power, its Navy making full use of the enormous harbour at Lisbon’s door. Now, its heyday well past, Portugal was a small country with a robust sense of importance, giving one the impression that its walls hid untold riches.

Most of which description would also apply to Randolph St John Warminster-Fflytte, come to think of it.

Craning my neck at an ornate façade overhead, I promptly walked into a man crouched on the pavement tapping stones into place. Reeling away from him, I collided with our translator’s outstretched hand, pointing in the direction of the water.

“An interesting idea,” Hale was saying. He sounded dubious.

“A great idea,” Fflytte corrected him. “We should’ve thought of it ourselves.” Meaning: You should have.

“They’d be rank amateurs,” Hale countered.

“Sorry,” I cut in. “What is this idea?”

“This chap said – well, you tell her.”

Pessoa inclined his head. “I merely suggested that if Senhor Fflytte requires men who look like pirates, he might wish to search among the sea-folk rather than among those who make their living in the theatre.”

“It’s a great idea,” Fflytte repeated.

“An interesting possibility,” Hale mused.

I could not imagine that this would end well.

CHAPTER EIGHT

ALL [kneeling]: Hail, Poetry, thou heaven-born maid! Thou gildest e’en the pirate’s trade.

13 November

Lisbon

My dear Holmes,

The ides of November have come. And are (I fear) far from over. The next time you see Lestrade, you can tell him he owes me three weeks on a warm beach somewhere, by way of repayment for this.

It’s a madhouse. I knew before ever I left Sussex that the situation would be a lunatic one, but who would have suspected that every person I have met since my London interview with Geoffrey Hale ought to be lodged in Bedlam?

Beginning with Fflytte himself. His Christian name might as well be Napoleon for all his megalomania, with the stature to match. His films are, to his mind, the defining markers of the modern age, and require from each and every one of his small army of experts the scrupulous attentions of a Fabergé enamellist.

I discovered him on the ship – in one of its calmer moments, when I was not stretching my torso over the railings – deep in a discussion with the third-mate concerning the proper hand position to be used in a knifefight. I’ll grant that all signs testified to the sailor’s experience with knifefights; however, his missing ear, notched eyebrow, and scar-striped forearms did not have much to say for his expertise. I was tempted to correct the man’s lecture, but decided that knifefights were not included in my job description, and made do with a gentle remonstration, pointing out that shedding First Class blood would be a sure guarantee of never working on a passenger ship again.

Had I followed my initial impulse and stepped forward to demonstrate, Fflytte would no doubt have contrived to write a female pirate into the script.

That demented attention to detail pervades the enterprise. Evenings on board the steamer began well enough, but as soon as the weather permitted use of the deck, Fflytte had a projector set up there, and my quiet evenings were taken over by screenings of at least three moving pictures a night, each of which had portions re-played at the demands of one or another member of the company: Our “Isabel’s” mother wished to repeat a scene in which her young daughter appeared – three times over; Mabel had many remarks concerning the actress in The Flapper; and in – why have I not seen this picture before? – Sherlock Jr, Buster Keaton climbs into a cinema screen and becomes a detective. Several of its scenes are now etched indelibly onto my mind’s eye, as our cameraman wished to re-examine the (admittedly clever) effects.

Did I say that attention to detail pervades every aspect of the enterprise? That is not strictly true: rather, every aspect of it except those that might actually be of benefit.

For example, might not someone have noticed early on that Portugal is on the brink of some kind of revolution? That its capital city might not be the ideal place to drop a film crew? That a movie about pirates does not require convenient access to bread riots and clashes between the Army and the National Guard? (Although should we be so fortunate as to experience an uprising as we go our way in the streets of Lisbon, you can be certain that the cameras of Fflytte Films will capture every moment of it.)

Similarly, the cast. We have brought with us all the English characters, from Frederic to the Major-General, managing successfully to keep the daughters (thirteen of the creatures – even W. S. Gilbert would have quailed) from falling overboard, or falling into bed with one of the sailors. Having hastily read Gilbert’s libretto before we left, I protested to Fflytte that since all the opera’s pirates turn out to be English noblemen fallen on hard times, we needed only hire Englishmen – and could even avoid sailing to Morocco altogether (yes, we are headed there next) by sticking to the original story, which takes place entirely in Penzance. I might have convinced him, had he not remembered that he was not making a movie about The Pirates of Penzance, but a movie about a movie about The Pirates of Penzance, and because his fictional movie crew goes to Lisbon to hire its pirates, so must we. (Is your head spinning yet, Holmes?) The logical next question being, if the fictional movie crew is, in point of fact, fictional, could not we adjust chosen elements of the fiction?

No.

(Did I say three weeks on a warm beach? A solid month, I think, will be required.)

In my brief hours between being hired by Hale and leaping with my valise onto the departing steamer, I had no spare minute to hie me to a bookseller, and thus my choice was limited to the three books I had brought from Sussex, supplemented by offerings from some of the film company and some well-thumbed novels from the ship’s library. As one can only bear so much Ethel M. Dell, and even I cease to discover new revelations in the Holy Writ after an unrelieved diet of it, I seized on a Defoe title that I had last read as a child.

And regretted having done so. I’d forgotten that the book starts out with Robinson Crusoe taken prisoner by the pirates of – yes – Salé. However, Crusoe managed to escape. Eventually. Perhaps I shall be as lucky.

In any event. This morning we docked in Lisbon, half a day late, and scurried off to a borrowed theatre with Hale’s translator, to hire us some pirates.

Our translator is a singular gent by the name of Pessoa, neat of dress and polished of shoes. He carries about him an air of distraction, as if his mind is on Greater Things than translating for a moving picture crew. (He is a poet, which you might have guessed.) Still, he appears to know his business and seems intelligent enough to be of assistance, with the occasional faint betrayal of a sense of humour. He seemed much taken with Fflytte’s peculiar vision of what Pirate King is to be, although whether that is the humour speaking or the intelligence, I have yet to discover.

Perhaps I shall soon know. The day draws to an end, a cup of some liquid purported to be tea has been drunk, but as yet, piratic actors have we none. In a quarter of an hour, Senhor Pessoa will return to guide us to an alternative source for these creatures (no doubt a drinking establishment of the lower sort) where a friend of his may be found. Pray with me that the would-be pirate is not also a poet.

Still, if the den in which the fellow hides out sells local wine, it shouldn’t be too bad.

In haste,

R.

Postscript: It may not have escaped your notice that this missive contains a dearth of data concerning the true reason for my presence, namely, a missing secretary and the illicit selling of cocaine and firearms. Perhaps that is due to the circumstances of my employment, which is rather that of a person attempting delicate surgery whilst standing in a hurricane.

I shall persist.

– R

CHAPTER NINE

PIRATE KING: And it is, it is a glorious thing

To be a Pirate King!

PESSOA STOOD IN the hotel lobby, hat on head and cigarette in hand – a commercial cigarette, this time, not hand-rolled. He was gazing out the window at a group of unloading passengers, his thoughts far away. Perhaps he was composing an ode to the taxi. The poet-translator was a thin figure in an elderly black overcoat, about five foot eight and in his middle thirties. One could see a slight fray to the collar beneath his hairline.

He started when I said his name, causing a length of ash to drop at his feet, and hastened to press the stub out in a receptacle. He took off his hat, revealing black hair, lightly oiled and neatly divided down the centre.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to surprise you.”

“Life is a surprise, is it not?” he said. His accent was neither British nor purely Portuguese, but shaped by the British school that his curriculum vitae said he had attended during his formative years in South Africa. His owl-like spectacles could not hide the attentive gaze or the gleam of humour, no more than the brief triangle of moustache could hide the slightly drawn-in purse of his lips. Everything about him was watchful rather than outgoing, although the previous day’s pristine but slightly out-of-date neck-tie had been replaced by a tidy if well-worn bow tie, suggesting a minute relaxation of standards. His overcoat, hat, suit, and shoes were those he had worn the previous day, brushed and polished.

This was a man with pride, if little money.

“If we’re fortunate, life will not inflict on us too many more surprises,” I replied. “You haven’t seen either of the others?”

“Not yet. I have only been here a few minutes.”

Long enough to burn down one cigarette. “Well, we could be waiting some time. Shall we sit down and have a drink?”

Pessoa seemed to know the hotel as well as he knew the rest of the city, and led me to a small table with a view of the lobby. He waited until I was seated before he placed his hat on a chair and prepared to sit, then paused to remove a folded magazine from his overcoat pocket. This he put with rather elaborate casualness on the table before gathering his overcoat tails and lowering himself to the chair.

The gesture was too off-hand to be anything but self-deprecation, like a man accidentally letting drop the photograph of a first-born son. I stretched out a hand, asking, “May I?”

“Oh, it is nothing,” he said, predictably. “A small publication some of us started up recently.”

Athena, it was called, a literary journal, handsomely produced. Although it seemed to be in Portuguese, I opened it with respectful hands. To my surprise, it did not appear that any of the poems had been written by Pessoa, merely an essay.

“You’re the editor?” I asked. “I was told you wrote poetry yourself.”

“I am. And yes, in a manner of speaking, I have several poems.” He laid a nicotine-stained finger beside a name, then another, and another. And a fourth.

“Pseudonyms,” I commented. It was one way to add literary credibility to what would otherwise look like a single man’s collected verse.

But he corrected me. “Heteronyms, rather. Reis and de Campos are not Pessoa, but their own men, with their own history, style, opinions. About Caeiro I am sometimes not so certain,” he mused.

I did not permit my gaze to come up from the page; only Holmes would have detected the minuscule raise of an eyebrow. However, silence encourages elucidation.

“To lie is to know one’s self. I see in Pessoa a living drama, but divided into people rather than acts,” he told me. “To some extent, all men are thus: The modern belief in the individual is an illusion.”

To hear that Pessoa’s alternate personas had their roots in Modernist philosophy rather than psychological aberration came as something of a relief. Still, I couldn’t help suggesting, “I shouldn’t mention that to Mr Fflytte, if I were you. He’s pretty dedicated to individual statement.”

“Ah, but if you were me, perhaps you would.”

I flipped the journal shut, my taste for sophomoric debate having been worn thin before I turned seventeen; he tucked it with care into an inner pocket.

“Miss Russell, you seem to me a young lady with both imagination and common sense. Tell me more about the structure of this project. How the stories are envisioned to combine.”

I had heard the film-in-a-film speech often enough to repeat portions of it backwards, but a recitation was not what Pessoa wanted. He nodded a few times in politeness, then interrupted.

“Yes, I understand the conceit, and the manner in which the two worlds will wrap around each other. I will admit that I hesitated before accepting employment from a picture crew, live translation not being my usual pastime. However, I find myself intrigued by the possibilities in Mr Fflytte’s story. Shakespeare betrayed his talent when he stooped to writing plays. One can but imagine the results had he freed himself from dramatic conventions and turned Hamlet loose to be his character.”

I opened my mouth to object, or perhaps to enquire, but in the end could come up with no graspable point. He did not notice, but went on, speaking (so it appeared) to the burning end of his cigarette. “The dimensions of a single life, the many levels of artifice within a reality, can only excite the mind of a person tuned to that chord. Thus the philosophy behind Mr Fflytte’s moving picture, the men and women who are simultaneously artifices and real-artifices, as well as being real-real outside of the realm of the camera. But what I wish to know is, why pirates? Is piracy a thing that speaks to the English soul as well as my own Portuguese one?”

“Er,” I said.

“That is to say, the multiple natures of ‘pirate’ within the bounds of this single piece of art is akin to a room filled with mirrors, is it not? Here on this wall, one sees the image of pirates as buffoons, silly and easily outwitted and ultimately proven to be empty of any piratic essence. On the next wall, one sees the piratic image of the interior director, the handsome boy who pretends to be a pirate, as well as the image held in the mind of the overall director, Mr Fflytte, the invisible God-figure in this story. And just when one thinks to grasp the duality of piracy, another set of mirrors comes up and the play-pirates become true pirates, doing battle with their own natures in the person of Frederic, who is at one and the same time an outsider and a true pirate.”

All this talk about pirates had made Mr Pessoa’s gaze go far away. Two lengths of ash had dropped unnoticed as his monologue unfurled. Then he looked at me, as if in expectation of an answer, to a question I could not begin to recall. I felt an absurd urge to lay my head down on the table and go to sleep. Or to weep.

“Mr Pessoa, I do not know. Could you tell me, what are the plans for this evening?”

He was greatly disappointed, that I had not leapt to my feet and declared my undying love for buccaneers and corsairs – perhaps I ought to have brought Miss Sim along, they could have recited Byron at each other. He brushed off his coat, emptied his glass, and assembled his thoughts. “As I mentioned, Mr Fflytte’s desire for actors who look like pirates drew to mind a local … character, I suppose one would call him.” As opposed to Senhor Pessoa, an everyday Lisboan with multiple personas? “A … colourful man I met some years ago. It may take a little time to locate him precisely; however, the evening shall not be wasted. I shall be your … cicerone to one of the most picturesque sections of Lisbon, where we are sure to find him.”

The optimism of my note to Holmes began to shrink.

I asked Pessoa about Lisbon’s literary community, which diverted him until Fflytte bounced into the lobby, followed by his tall shadow, some twenty minutes late. Pessoa eyed the director’s dramatic hat and white fur coat, but merely tamped out his third cigarette and led us to the door.

* * *

The evening air smelt of coming rain. We made to step from the hotel’s forecourt onto the pavement proper, then Pessoa’s arm shot out, a barricade to progress. Three armed police trotted by, intent on something up the road, and I became aware of a crowd noise from the Rossio, the wide rectangular plaza that formed the centre of the town.

Pessoa seemed unconcerned, once the intent constables had passed, and set off in the direction from which they had come. I glanced over my shoulder, and decided that if a riot erupted, we were as well off in the town’s outskirts as in the central hotel.

Our path took us along gently sloping cobbled pavements through a district of expensive shops and white-linened restaurants discreetly scattered with banks – not for nothing was the street named Rua do Ouro, or Gold Street. Fflytte’s head turned continuously, scanning alleys and the buildings’ heights for potentially scenic shots, paying no attention to Pessoa’s scrupulous narration. At the bottom of the street (“This triumphal arch displays Glory crowning Genius and Valour.”) another vast plaza spread out, this one perfectly square and lined on three sides by what could only be municipal buildings. A tall bronze equestrian statue stood in the centre. As he led us across the space, Pessoa’s running commentary told us that this was the Praça do Comércio, known as Black Horse Square to Englishmen; that the gent on the horse was King José; and that the statue had been put up to mark the rebuilding of Lisbon after it was more or less levelled by an earthquake in 1755 (an earthquake that was felt throughout Europe and caused a major tidal wave along the English coastline).

Which served to remind me that we were not only in a city where police-attended riots were commonplace, it was also liable at any minute to be reduced to rubble.

Across the square, we followed the river east for a few minutes before veering uphill, into a dark jumble of buildings. Pessoa’s narration never faltered, although the pace he set kept Fflytte at a near-jog, and even Hale and I had to move briskly. This, Pessoa’s trailing voice informed us, was the most ancient part of Lisbon, the Alfama, which oddly enough was spared much of the 1755 destruction. Oddly because it had been long abandoned by the wealthy, left to the fishing community – who must have been amused at the irony. It was a place with ancient roots, felt in the labyrinth of narrow streets and featureless buildings: the architecture of the Moors – the district’s name was from the Arabic for springs-with its life and beauty turned inward, away from public view.

Not, I imagined, that there remained much beauty here, not after centuries of working class practicality, but life there most certainly was, even if one only judged by a constant sequence of cooking odours. Most of them seemed to involve fish.

We travelled in Pessoa’s wake, Fflytte’s head rotating left, right, and upwards until it threatened to come loose from his shoulders. After a while, Pessoa turned into an alley that had been invisible an instant before we entered it. A door came open.

The interior of the building was little lighter than the alleyway had been; as we patted our way inside, Fflytte’s coat was the brightest thing in the room. Pessoa gestured us to a table, held out a chair for me, and asked what we would drink.

I said I would try a glass of white wine; Fflytte wanted a cocktail; and Hale, a glass of brandy. Pessoa went to the bar – a journey of five steps – and described our request in lengthy detail. From the time it took, he might have been talking about the weather and the state of the nation’s politics, but the regular gestures at the bottles behind the bar suggested a debate about the nature of the requested cocktail.

He came back and lit a cigarette. After a great deal of activity, the man behind the bar brought us our libations: vinho verde for me, something called ginjinha for Hale, and a cloudy glass for the director. Fflytte looked dubiously at his drink, which contained an object that might have been an olive or a maraschino cherry, or a smooth stone. He took one sip, and put the glass down with an air of finality. My wine was not too bad, although Hale’s startled expression suggested that his palate had never encountered a drink quite like that ginjinha.

Pessoa, on the other hand, took a hefty swallow from what appeared to be a light port, and looked satisfied.

“So, is he here, your man?” Fflytte asked.

“I haven’t asked. It is always best to blend in a little before asking questions.”

I blinked: How long would it take before a young blonde woman nearly six feet tall, an Englishman wearing an Eton tie and a vicuña overcoat, and a midget in white sealskin would blend in here?

“Er, perhaps we shouldn’t wait for that,” I suggested. “Could you just ask him now?”

Pessoa finished his drink and carried his empty glass back to the bar. My eyes having adjusted somewhat to the gloom, I noticed that two customers stood there, slack-jawed.

I couldn’t blame them a bit.

Fflytte gingerly lifted the object out of his drink, examined it, then allowed it to slip back under the murky liquid. Pessoa launched into conversation with the barkeep while the man refilled his glass. The customers soon chimed in. A tiny, wizened woman with a scarf around her hair poked out from a set of curtains at the back. The Portuguese conversation, as always, sounded furious to the edge of violence, but I had already learnt to suppress the urge to draw my knife, and indeed, the shaken fingers seemed mostly to be pointed at the walls rather than into the face of an opponent. Still, agreement seemed either to be unreachable, or not to the point. Eventually I stood up and approached the bar with my note-case in my hand.

Nodding and commenting all the while, yet another cigarette dangling from his mouth, Pessoa plucked the money-purse from my hand and pawed through the dirty bills, dropping a remarkably small amount of money on the bar. He handed me back the case and drained the glass (his third?) as the consultation wended its way to a close. I blew a gobbet of ash from the remaining bills, and we went out into the night.

“They have not seen him today,” Pessoa informed us, and walked off down the street.

We repeated the ritual at four more establishments, each smaller and dimmer than the last. Fflytte abandoned any thought of a cocktail after the second version, one sip of which had him coughing and pale. Hale and I, too, gave up on our initial choices and settled for port, which seemed harder to ruin by maltreatment. Pessoa was the only one who polished off his drink each time; the man had a heartier constitution than first appeared.

The fifth bar was so small, even Fflytte looked oversized, and the rest of us ducked our heads like Alice after the growing cake. It was getting on to eleven o’clock; I had not slept a full night since leaving London; I had not eaten a full meal in that same time. I was exhausted and cold and so hungry that the plate of fly-specked objects on a shelf (pies? boiled eggs? bundled stockings, perhaps?) made my mouth water. Hale looked far from hearty. Fflytte’s air of determination had gone a touch grim. Only Pessoa remained undaunted. He looked no more fatigued than he had when I met him on the quay-side half a day earlier.

We ordered the requisite drinks. Pessoa took a swallow and reached for his packet of cigarettes, then addressed the saloonkeep with the question that, following repetition, I could understand. “Have you seen La Rocha?”

Each time before, the query had set off a lengthy back-and-forth of identification: Which La Rocha? The old man with the scar (Pessoa inevitably drew his finger down the left side of his face at this point). The barman (or in one case, – woman) would narrow his (or her) eyes in concentration, at which point a customer (there were never more than three) would speak up from where the bar was supporting him (always a him) and suggest some further characteristic – a quick swipe at the chin to ask if it was the La Rocha with a beard, a pass of the hand over the hat to indicate baldness, once a thumb shoving the nose to indicate a distortion of that protuberance – and Pessoa would generally shake his head and go on with further verbal description of his man.

This time, however, the barman pursed his mouth to indicate understanding, then jerked his chin up to point at a spot behind Pessoa. All four of us swivelled to look: The wall had a hole in it, concealed behind a hanging heap of garments so large and so permanent in appearance, I would not have been surprised to find a Moorish burnoose at its base. When we turned back to thank the man, he was standing with his hand around the neck of a bottle. It was unlike any bottle I had seen that evening – indeed, unlike any I had seen for a very long time.

Dark rum, from Cuba, very old. The vessel had the air of a king before peasants. The way the barman’s hand clasped its shoulders made a clear statement: The rum was the price of being permitted through that door.

I retrieved my note-case. This time Pessoa by-passed the small denominations (the escudo was worth so little, coins had all but disappeared from use) and thumbed a 100 escudo note into view. The bottle retreated a quarter of an inch on the sticky wood; a second such note came up behind the other. A third note edged up before the man’s hand slid the bottle forward and accepted the 300 escudos.

Pessoa reached for the expensive tipple, but my hand intercepted the glass neck first. I thrust the bottle at Fflytte. “I think we’re seeing our man now,” I told the movie mogul. “This appears to be your gift to him for the honour of an audience.”

On the one hand, Randolph Fflytte was not a man to beg an audience, especially in a place like this. However, I was betting that the whole rigmarole would appeal to his dramatic sensibility, and so it proved. He studied the petrified cobwebs for a moment, then hefted the rum and lifted his eyes to Pessoa. “Lead on,” he commanded.

It was something of a relief to see that Fflytte wasn’t idiotic enough to go first through a dark passageway with a pirate at the end of it – even a would-be, fictional pirate. Pessoa did not look quite so phlegmatic. For the first time, it occurred to me that our cicerone perhaps might not know this La Rocha as well as he had given out.

We went through single-file: Pessoa, Fflytte, and me, with Hale bringing up the rear. Only Fflytte could walk straight-spined, and as we approached the end of the brief passageway, the upturned nape of my neck tingled with vulnerability.

However, we stepped into the open room without a scimitar removing any heads from shoulders, then fanned out to examine our surroundings – but in truth, it was only later that the details of the room itself were recalled to mind, its generous proportions in relation to the outer room, the ancient wood and rich colours, three age-dark paintings, and an ornate carved door in the back, glimpsed through a pair of heavy curtains. The room faded into unimportance, compared to the two men it contained.

One stood, although there was an empty chair – an impressive figure, well over six feet tall and hard with muscle despite his grey hair, a man with watchful eyes, weathered skin, and an air of private pleasures. Still, it was the seated man in front of him who instantly caught, and held, our attention.

The old chair in which this man sat became a throne, his royal hands cupping the arm-ends, his enormous, oncered boots planted like trees on the rich carpeting. Seated, his head was below our eye level – even Fflytte’s – but it felt as if he were towering above us on a raised dais.

His eyes were black, his skin was leather, and the grey in his hair was iron rather than age. A gold ring glinted from the shadows beneath his ear. The man had to be in his sixties, although he could as easily have been ten, even twenty years older. He occupied the chair like an ageless crag of rock on which countless ships had gone to their doom.

Fflytte recovered first.

He stepped forward, to set the expensive bottle on the table before the fire. “My name is Randolph Fflytte,” he said. “I’m here to make a movie about piracy.”

He stopped: concise, dignified, and with a sure grasp of the dramatic. Pessoa cleared his throat. “O Senhor disse-” he began, head inclined as if he were addressing the Pope. Only to be cut short by a dismissive twitch from La Rocha’s fingers.

“I unnerstan’ English,” the man said – or rather, squeaked.

At least three of us felt an urge to giggle at the unlikely sound coming from such an impressive figure, but the urge fled before it entered the room, killed instantly by the shocking sight of the scar that came into view as he shifted. It had been a terrible wound, beginning just in front of his left ear and following his jaw-line to the larynx. It looked as if his head had been detached; the blade must have come within a hair’s breadth of severing any number of vital vessels. That he could speak at all was a miracle.

Even Fflytte gulped in reaction, but again, he recovered first. He walked across to the empty chair, hesitating briefly with his buttocks hovering, a silent request for permission. La Rocha’s eyes gave a slow blink; Fflytte gathered his ridiculous coat around him and sat. Hale took up a position behind the director, forming a mirror image with the pair on the other side of the table. Pessoa and I stayed on either side of the entrance like two eunuchs guarding a harem, the translator clasping his hat in both hands, intent on the seated man.

La Rocha lifted one hand, palm up. The man at his shoulder placed two small glasses in it. He set them down on the table, wrenched the cork from the ancient neck with his brown teeth, and filled both glasses to the brim.

Fflytte picked up his glass, took a swallow, set it down again, and leant forward to gaze into the other man’s face. “I need a pirate,” he stated. “A pirate king. I think you’re my man.”

CHAPTER TEN

SERGEANT: … we should have thought of that before we joined the Force.

IT WAS NEAR two in the morning before we left the pirates’ den and stepped into a rain-drenched alleyway slick with grime. When we entered the door of the Avenida-Palace, Pessoa might as well have been dropped into the Rio Tejo, Hale’s vicuña coat would never be the same, and Fflytte resembled a drowned white puppy. My shoulders were clammy beneath my normally efficient rain-coat; my shoes squelched. Wordlessly, the two Englishmen slithered across the lobby towards the lift. I turned to Pessoa.

“I shall see you in the morning. Perhaps Mr La Rocha will come up with some more likely pirates.”

“One can but hope,” he agreed. With some effort, he retrieved his near-flat packet of cigarettes, looked mournfully at their state of damp collapse, and inserted them back into the pocket. With a brief tug at his hat-brim (sending a dribble of water to the floor) he took his leave and went back out into the night.

I enjoyed a deep, hot bath, then crawled into a bed that neither tossed nor rolled beneath me, and slept for many hours.

* * *

Rested, warm, and clean, I descended the next morning with a bounce in my step, buoyed by the anticipation of a breakfast that would remain in situ. My benevolent mood lasted until the first sip of coffee.

My hand jerked at the shriek that tore through the hotel restaurant; coffee shot over my table and my person, the gentleman at the next table contributed a juicy expression to my Portuguese vocabulary, and one of the waiters dropped his tray. Simultaneously mopping my clothes and searching the vicinity for the source of the harpy’s scream, I soon found it, and the day disintegrated around my feet.

The thirteen daughters of the Major-General formed, as I said, a stepping-stair of curly blonde heads. Their height-determined names had been assigned that first hour on the steamer: “Annie,” “Bonnie,” and “Celeste” were the picture’s nineteen-year-olds; “Doris,” “Edith,” and “Fannie” played seventeen-year-olds; “Ginger,” “Harriet,” and “Isabel” sixteen; and “June,” “Kate,” and “Linda” assigned the age of fifteen. Mabel, the eighteen-year-old lead, was out of place in the arrangement, being a middle daughter in the opera.

In truth, half of the girls were in their twenties – even Mabel (Bibi) admitted to twenty-six, and I suspected the woman playing Annie was nearing thirty – where the others’ heights did not match their ages: middle sister “Fannie” looked the youngest of all, although as I got to know her better I decided that her wide-eyed simplicity was acute stupidity; sister number five, “Edith,” had a tom-boy personality that made her seem less than the fourteen years her mother claimed for her, and a world younger than the seventeen her height had automatically assigned her; “Linda,” on the other hand, was eighteen, but so tiny she had no problem playing the youngest sister (although her growing bitterness at being treated like a child – by attractive young men, most of all – was already threatening to incise frownlines on her diminutive features).

(Oddly, considering his passion for realism, Randolph Fflytte did not bother to explain a family with four sets of triplets. And it goes without saying that The Pirates of Penzance, even with its lesser chorus of daughters, has no rôle for the heroic mother responsible for producing them. Neither did our own Pirate King.)

It was tom-boy “Edith” who had proved a problem from the beginning, first because she had shown up on the docks at Southampton half an inch taller than when Hale had hired her three weeks earlier, and second because she was such a handful. If Isabel or June (ages “sixteen” and “fifteen”; actually fifteen and fourteen) discovered a fish-head between the sheets of her bed one night, it was sure to be Edith who had been spotted sneaking away from the galley with a bundled newspaper. If Doris’ hair-comb was mysteriously coated with honey, Edith would be discovered with sticky fingers. She was one of the actresses who had come with mother in tow (or in the case of “fifteen”- [fourteen] year-old “Kate,” an elder sister) but the maternal person could do little to keep Edith under control.

For some reason, on board the steamer from England, Edith had forged something of a tie with me, despite my spending most of the time in solitary contemplation of the waves. Unlike the other girls, who came looking for me when they had a complaint and otherwise regarded me as beyond the pale (my sensible shoes, no doubt), Edith seemed actively to seek my company. Why the child should regard me as a kindred spirit, I could not think. Certainly any vague affection for me did not stand in the way of her trouble-making.

All of which meant that when a youthful shriek split the peaceful coffee-and-toast-scented air of the hotel, one’s immediate thoughts went to Edith.

I stood, pressing the linen to my damp thigh as I went in search of the catastrophe. Sitting on the floor before the closed lift door was June (who, although fourteen, at the moment looked more like eleven) with one hand clapped to the side of her head. I hurried to kneel next to her, examining her fingers for signs of seeping blood.

“June, what happened?”

She shook her head vigorously, letting her hand slip a little – still no gore.

“June, let me see. What’s wrong?”

She bent over, shaking her head so quickly that some hair ripped free – but no, that was unlikely. I reached down to peel her fingers away. With them came an alarming quantity of hair. She began to weep.

With her hand off, I could see a shilling-sized patch where someone had taken a pair of scissors to her pretty head. “June, who did this to you?” I demanded.

She squeezed her lips together to keep any revelation from escaping. Good Lord, I thought: extortion among the adolescents.

“Was it Edith?” I asked.

At that, the child scrambled to her feet and confronted me, her face pink with fury. “My name is not June! I’m Annie, not Annie!”

Oh, heavens. “I know that, dear, but we have another Annie because silly Mr Hale wanted to give you all nick-names. Surely it wasn’t Annie who did that to your hair?”

Annie – that is, “Annie,” the “oldest” and I thought probably oldest – did have a butter-wouldn’t-melt look that rode on her peaches-and-cream English features and made one overlook her nosey-parker habits until she turned up in one’s state-room. Still, she’d never demonstrated open aggression towards the younger girls.

June turned and fled for the stairs. I looked down at the sad drift of pale curls, and got to my feet. If I wasn’t quick, the day would be upon me before I had a chance to snag any breakfast at all.

June’s mother found me at the same moment my egg did. Manners might have demanded that I put aside the meal, but I had a suspicion that if I were to pause for every interruption, I would starve. Instead I hunched over my plate to shovel in fuel while the woman stormed and fumed and demanded that I assemble all the sisters this instant.

“Did June tell you who did it?” I mumbled around a full mouth.

“It could be any of them. They’re all jealous of my Annie’s hair – she’s a real blonde, I hope you know, unlike some of the others.”

And unlike Annie/June’s mother herself. “Yes, your daughter has lovely hair, and I’m sure we can comb it so the cut patch doesn’t show on camera. Maybe she could wear a hat.”

“Why would she wear a hat? It would hide her pretty hair!”

“Or maybe pin on some kind of ornament? Honestly, Mrs, er-” What was this woman’s name, anyway? She was there both as chaperone and to play the part of our nursemaid, Ruth, and acted as if she ruled not only the crew but the principals, judging by her conversation with Hale that I’d half-overheard on the steamer that day, just before the wind blew off her – ah: “-Hatley, it will be easy to conceal, I’m quite certain. I’ll talk to Mr Fflytte about it.”

The director’s name served generally as an anodyne to affront, and I had come to make shameless use of it to reduce various irate actresses, mothers, or sisters to cooing females. Mrs Hatley was of harder stuff, being a veteran in the world of films and having known the director for years, but even she melted a degree under the warmth of his name. “Would you? I hate to bother him with this, but truly, my baby is quite upset. If Mr Fflytte has a word with the others, to tell them how tender her sensibilities are …”

If Mr Fflytte did, I thought, every one of them would instantly turn on June and peck her to shreds. “I’m sure he’ll make it right,” I promised, holding her eyes in all earnestness while my hand surreptitiously snaked out to claim another triangle of toast. “Perhaps you should go make sure your daughter is all right?”

It took several repetitions of the suggestion before the woman grudgingly withdrew, and I was free to press shavings of hard butter into the cold toast and glue them down with a very tasty marmalade. I scraped the side of my fork on the plate to get the last of the egg yolk, and felt the next interruption standing at my elbow.

“Hello, Bibi,” I said – no need to look up for purposes of identification, not for a person accompanied by smacking lips and the odour of mint.

“Hello, darling, have you seen Daniel?” she demanded.

Where is Daniel?

“Mr Marks? No, I’ve only been down here for-”

“He swore he’d be down here, he insisted that we had to work on a scene, although really it’s a rotten hour, I must look absolutely hell.” She paused for me to deliver a stout rebuttal of the devastation of her looks, but I merely chewed my toast and turned on her a pair of bovine eyes. Bibi glared. “I mean, it’s all very well for people like you to be dragged out of bed at an ungodly hour, but it’s just not a part of my régime, don’t you know? Daniel said to be here so here I am, only he’s done a bunk, and I can’t think where he’s got to.”

I stopped chewing. “ ‘People like me.’ ”

“Oh, I don’t mean …” she said, although clearly she did mean. She waved her manicured fingers to indicate my appearance, but had just enough sense to grasp that she stood on the edge of danger. Instead, she stamped her little foot and half turned away, looking, if not for Daniel Marks, at least for someone with the authority to produce him. Without further word, she wandered off.

My appetite seemed to have wandered away, too. I dropped the remains on my plate, swallowed the last of my coffee, and went to see what other disaster awaited me.

I got twenty feet when it dropped on me. Rather, he dropped on me.

Major-General Stanley (or Harold Scott, the actor playing the Major-General – Hale’s habit of calling the actor by the rôle was contagious) came across the lobby on the shoulders of a pair of uniformed hotel employees. I exclaimed and stepped forward, but again, there was a singular absence of blood. Except in the whites of the good gentleman’s eyes – and then the smell hit me, and I halted.

The Major-General, however, shook off his supporters to stagger in my direction, weaving from side to side as if he’d just come off the ship. “My dear Miss Russell!” he exclaimed. “How superb to see you. Come and have a drink with me.”

I dodged his grasp, saw him begin to overbalance, and stepped back inside his stinking embrace to keep him from falling. He beamed happily into my face for a moment, then frowned. His eyes took on a faraway look, and I wrenched myself out from under – there are things the job of film assistant most emphatically does not cover. Fortunately for the Major-General, the two young men reached him before he hit the floor. Unfortunately for them, they were not as quick in the techniques of avoidance as I.

I left them exclaiming in disgust as they more or less carried the now-reeking Yorkshireman towards his room, while a platoon of mop-wielders took up formation behind them.

I cast a despairing glance at my wrist-watch: It was not yet nine o’clock in the morning. We had been in Lisbon just under twenty-four hours.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

SAMUEL: Permit me, I’ll explain in two words:

we propose to marry your daughters.

MAJOR-GENERAL: Dear me!

THE PAVEMENTS OF Lisbon were a sea of cream-coloured stones with patterns picked out in black. The streets of Lisbon range from mildly sloping to positively vertiginous. The stones are invariably worn smooth. That morning, I wore shoes I’d purchased in London after Hale’s unwitting snub to my fashion sense – the sturdy pair I had worn the night before were steaming on the radiator.

Two steps outside the hotel door, my feet went out from under me. I was saved by the ready hand of a doorman, who was probably stationed there for that express purpose. After that I went more cautiously until I discovered that a sort of ice-skating gait best kept me upright. Other pedestrians seemed not to have a problem. Perhaps it was these shoes?

I skated along the rain-slick Avenida da Liberdade for a while, barely glancing at the fine boulevard with its statues, fountains, plantings, and black-and-cream mosaic pavement. Electric trams clattered past, Lisboans skipped merrily up the glassy footways, and I reached the remembered kink in the road before my foot came down on a sodden leaf and I went down again, this time catching myself on a lamp-post. After that, I tottered. A tiny, hunched-back, ninety-year-old woman with a walking stick tapped briskly past. Two chattering women bustled past balancing baskets of fish on their heads; one of them was barefoot.

The Maria Vitória theatre evicting us in the afternoons required that we get an early start in the morning. I expected that I would be the first one there, since I’d already got the clear impression that Lisbon’s clock was two or three hours canted from that of London: Here, 10:00 p.m. made for an early dinner.

To my surprise, the outer doors were unlocked and I could hear voices. I shook the rain from my coat and hat, following the sound.

Three hats occupied the centre of the second row of seats, looking like the set-up for some Vaudeville jest: The one on the left barely cleared the seat-back; that in the middle was exaggeratedly wide and battered even in outline; the one sticking up on the right bore the perfect shape of the best in British haberdashery.

Fflytte on the left, Hale on the right, and between them La Rocha. All three were intent on the man occupying the stage.

In the seat behind La Rocha, straight-backed and hatless, sat Fernando Pessoa.

I draped my outer garments on the seat at the beginning of the row and sidled along to sit next to our translator. He gave me an uncertain smile before returning his attention to the conversation in front of him which, although it was in English, gave indications that it might require his services at any moment.

“No,” Hale was saying, “we only need twelve pirates.”

“Have more,” La Rocha’s incongruous high-pitched voice urged. “I have many.”

Fflytte, his eyes on the stage, said in a distracted manner, “We only have thirteen daughters.”

La Rocha stared down at the small man. Then he turned to his lieutenant from the previous evening, whose big figure was planted on the edge of the stage. “Treze filhas! É mais homen que parece.”

Pessoa’s back went straighter and his mouth came open as he prepared to spring into action, but he paused at the pressure of my hand on his sleeve.

“There may be a slight misunderstanding,” I suggested: La Rocha’s meaning had been clear in his tone of voice, if not his words, and I did not think relations would be improved by a translation of “He’s more of a man than he looks.” I leant forward to explain. “Mr Fflytte does not have thirteen daughters. There are thirteen girls in the story.”

The pirate king craned back to look at me, then again at Fflytte. “Entendo. Thirteen girls. And they need ’usbands, yes? Then thirteen piratas.”

“Just twelve,” Fflytte insisted. “Mabel is already taken by Frederic.”

Hale spoke up. “Frederic is the apprentice pirate.”

“ ’Prentice? What is this? ’Prentice?”

“O aprendiz de pirata,” Pessoa contributed.

The black eyes swept each of us in turn, silently, before La Rocha showed me his back and returned his gaze to the stage. “Aprendiz,” I heard him mutter. “De pirata.”

The current would-be pirate on the stage resumed the monologue from his printed sheet, but I found it hard to pay him any attention, distracted as I was by the man ahead of me.

I rather wished I had come in by the other door, which would have put me on Pessoa’s right: At this angle, my view was entirely dominated by La Rocha’s terrible scar. Temple to larynx, the thing must have spanned ten inches. The heavy red-gold earring winking above it made for an eccentric contrast. Why didn’t the man grow a beard to conceal the injury? One’s own throat went taut, seeing that shiny raised track.

“No,” Fflytte said, sounding as if he had been contemplating some profundity. “The colour’s wrong.”

“Clothes can be changed,” La Rocha declared.

“Not the clothing, the skin.”

“This, too, can be changed.”

“No, he’s just too light. These are Barbary pirates. This man looks Swedish.”

It was an exaggeration, but not by much. The other men trying out for the parts of pirates were swarthy, hard-looking men with nicely photogenic moustaches or beards, but the person currently at stage centre would have looked more at home in a European counting-house than as a high-seas privateer. He wore elderly but well-polished shoes, his shoulders were stooped, and his hair was not only thinning, but a most unthreatening light brown colour. His facial hair consisted of an apologetic line above his lip.

“He’s just not … swashbuckling enough,” Fflytte said. La Rocha cocked his ear back, and Pessoa struggled for synonyms.

“Er, romântico. Exôtico? Swashbuckling.”

“Ah. Swashbuckling. He can swashbuckle.”

“I really don’t think so,” Fflytte said. “He looks like my book-keeper, Bertram, who’s the least exotic person I know.”

“Next,” Hale called.

“No!” The syllable echoed through the empty theatre like a crack in glass; the entire theatre stopped dead. The balding Swedish accountant looked near to fainting. I fought an impulse to leap for the aisle. Hale, veteran of the trenches, appeared to be wrestling the same urge.

Fflytte, on the other hand, turned to peer up at the source of the countermand, frowning in disbelief. “Mr. La Rocha, are you making this picture, or am I?”

I had thought the silence profound before; now one could have heard a hair settle on the floor. The cracked pane trembled, preparing to shatter in an explosion of deadly shards – until La Rocha looked back at the stage.

“Go,” he squeaked. The accountant fled. Fflytte sat back in his seat. The rest of us drew breath. Hale settled more slowly, but within a few minutes he, too, was wrapped up again in the casting process. Pessoa’s shoulders gave a motion that was halfway between a shrug and a shiver, as if to shake off an idea he could neither justify nor account for.

It took somewhat longer for the hair on the nape of my neck to go down. Something large and dangerous had flitted through the theatre. I did not know who or what La Rocha was, but the man’s potential for violence had snarled at us, just for a moment. That he had so easily shut it away again was perhaps the most unsettling part of all: Having this man play the pirate king was like hiring a lion to play a tabby.

I studied his scar, and was struck by the image of the man standing before his looking-glass each morning holding a razor to his face, deftly manoeuvring its keen blade around that obstacle, touching weapon to scar …

That was why he went clean-shaven – and why he wore a loop of gold that attracted the eye: He wanted people to notice the scar. Wanted them to see it, and to consider the man who had survived that injury, and to be afraid.

* * *

Well short of mid-day, Fflytte and Hale had eliminated three men too ancient (even in this post-War era) to marry a Major-General’s young daughters, a couple of others too ugly, one with a disconcerting facial spasm, and another with a mouth that refused to shut. In the end, they settled on fourteen men, allowing for two extras. These were all friends or associates of La Rocha. None had any experience with the stage. Two were mere boys, one of them so young he carried a pet mouse in his pocket. Some were willing, others sullen, a few treated the enterprise as a huge joke, but they would all make believable pirates, and they all obeyed La Rocha. Of course, if Fflytte’s pirate king decided to quit, the picture would go up in smoke, but that was hardly my problem.

Today there would be no matinée, so the theatre belonged to Fflytte Films until six o’clock. Hale dismissed the unwanted actor-pirates, handing them each a day’s pay to make up for their rejection, while Pessoa translated Hale’s words and I began to fetch chairs from backstage. Fflytte wanted them set in a circle, although I did not get the chance to carry even one since the pirates instantly seized it from me. By dint of dragging my insistent helpers across the stage and using emphatic hand gestures, I got the chairs assembled in only twice the time it would have taken me to shift them myself.

When Pessoa and Hale had finished with the others and the doors were closed behind them, Fflytte pulled a break into the circle and told Pessoa, “Have them sit down.”

The instructions were passed on, and the men and boys (after a glance at La Rocha for permission) drifted into the circle, each taking up position before a chair. Hale sat. La Rocha and his right-hand man sat. The others looked at me; they remained standing.

Fflytte took no notice. “Miss Russell, we’ll be working here for the rest of the afternoon. See what you can do about bringing in some sandwiches or something, would you?”

“Right away?”

“One o’clock would be fine. Now, sit, you men.”

Fourteen large rough figures hovered over their chairs as if waiting for the gramophone needle to drop. I snorted as I turned away, but the image of piratical musical chairs kept a smile on my face until the pavement nearly had me on my backside. After that I concentrated on my feet.

I made it to the hotel without mishap and told the maître d’ what I required. He stared at me blankly, although that morning, he had spoken a quite serviceable English.

“Sandwiches,” I repeated. “For twenty.”

“These are English men?”

“What does it matter? They’re men, they need to eat.”

“This is lunch?”

“That’s right. In an hour, if you please.”

“Sandwiches.”

What was wrong with the fellow? “Yes. Sandwiches. For twenty. In an hour. And some drinks – I suppose most of them would like a beer. I’ll also need someone to help me carry everything,” I added, just imagining myself trying to negotiate the paving stones with a load of glass bottles.

“Very well,” he said dubiously, pulling a small tablet out of his pocket and writing a few words. He went away, frowning at the message, but I had no interest in pursuing the minor mystery.

I only had an hour in which to burgle my employer’s rooms.

CHAPTER TWELVE

PIRATES: Let’s vary piracee

With a little burglaree!

ON THE STEAMER out from London, in the calmer intervals when my head and stomach were not spinning, I had tried to get a sense of which members of the cast and crew were permanent fixtures, and thus conceivably linked to any criminality that Fflytte Films might be trailing behind it. Fflytte and Hale, of course, were omnipresent, but I had been surprised at just how many of the others were long-time employees.

From cameraman to costumer, at least a dozen members of Fflytte Films had consistently worked together for five years or more. Another twenty individuals had come and gone in various projects. Sister two, “Bonnie,” had acted in half a dozen Fflytte films over the years – although one would never know it by the way Fflytte and Hale treated her, which was with the same mild lack of interest that they used to address any of the girls. Mrs Hatley, whose daughter “June” was the victim of an involuntary hair-cut, had herself acted in four or five Fflytte productions, including one so early, it was before Fflytte Films actually existed. Daniel Marks’ first Fflytte production was the 1919 Quarterdeck, and since then he had appeared in five others, in various hair colours and styles, with facial hair or clean-shaven, peering through spectacles or not.

The only people I had eliminated for certain were Bibi, who had worked in America for the past few years, and the six of her “sisters” who were under eighteen: Surely I could omit children from my list of suspects?

I had compiled a rough list of those whose careers spanned the years that troubled Lestrade, but before I investigated the shell-shocked camera assistant and the petite redheaded Irish lass whose needle produced costumes ranging from Elizabethan collars to beggars’ weeds, I wanted to eliminate the two men in the best position to manipulate the company. By breaking into their rooms.

In my experience, hotels generally count on the presence of doormen and desk personnel to repel potential burglars. All one need do is become a guest of the hotel, and defences are breached.

My choice of targets was a toss of the coin: Hale, or Fflytte? Granted, I could not envision Fflytte wasting any energy on an enterprise not directly connected with the making of films; on the other hand, I could well imagine our director simply not taking into account that the laws of nations applied to him, so why not dispose of the drugs or guns that one had assembled for the purpose of a realistic (damn the word!) film by selling them? I might imagine Hale involved in a surreptitious criminal second career, but he must surely be aware of the consequences were it to be uncovered – and in any event, why then encourage a newly hired assistant to watch for untoward activities?

It might help to know if Lonnie Johns, the missing secretary, had been located yet. Back in Lestrade’s office, the woman’s unexplained absence had a sinister flavour, but the longer I lived in her shoes, as it were, the more sensible a tear-soaked flight to a Mediterranean beach or the Scottish highlands sounded.

My choice was made by the hotel’s cleaning staff: As I came out of the lift, they were coming out of Hale’s room. I walked around the corner, waiting for them to disappear into Fflytte’s room next door.

They went in – and they came out rapidly, moving backwards, blushing and apologising and making haste to get the door shut between them and whatever had startled them. Or rather, whomever. Three middle-aged Catholic ladies stood in the hallway, given over to a shared gale of stifled laughter, then scuttled down the corridor to the next room. Where they knocked loudly before letting themselves in.

When no one popped instantly from the director’s room, I sidled down the corridor and applied myself to the latch. Less than thirty seconds’ work put me inside Hale’s suite. I took off my shoes to pad silently through the four rooms, checking for a sleeping guest or a particularly diligent cleaner, but all I found were the sitting room, a bedroom, a second bedroom from which the furniture had been stripped, and a bathroom with fittings considerably more elaborate than those in my room on the floor below. No missing secretary stuffed into a traveling-trunk; no packets of unsold cocaine in the sock-drawer. Yes, there was a small hand-gun in the bedside table, but I had no way of knowing where it had come from.

In the suite’s second bedroom, the bed and dressing table had been replaced with a desk, a laden drinks cabinet, four comfortable chairs – and a small mountain of wooden file cabinets, which I had last seen going out the door of the Covent Garden office. They were held shut with locks. I laid my shoes on the desk, and got to work.

Because Fflytte Films spent so much of the year in locations around the globe, Hale was in the habit of carrying his office with him. The file cabinets bore labels, 1 through 12, and as I’d expected, the last two bristled with details concerning Pirate King, while the files in the first were concerned with early films. I started with 3, looking for the year of Lestrade’s earliest suspicions.

I quickly realised two things. First of all, these files were not complete – which made sense, because trailing every scrap of paper around the world would make for cumbersome travel indeed. And second, that even with the condensed files of the earlier drawers, my search would take me a lot more than the hour at hand.

Take Small Arms. The picture was three years old and Hale still carried around a dozen folders concerning its making; several were about the personnel (mostly actors, type-written pages annotated by Hale and Fflytte); four covered technical matters. (Film used; problems encountered; letters from cinema-house managers; carbon copies of letters to cinema-house managers – most of these were complaints over the speed at which they had run the film; and one long, furious, epithet-dotted complaint from Will-the-Camera over the impossibility of working with small children who are supposed to lie dead but keep smirking and giggling and peer into raw film canisters and ruin a day’s shooting and burst into tears whenever an adult shouts at them, with a strongly worded postscript asking that he be given a budget for laudanum. It did not specify whether the drug was for himself or for the young actors.) One file contained distribution records; another held details on the sites used; and the slimmest of all had chaotic notes on the history of Small Arms, in Fflytte’s hand, which looked to have been made with an eye to an eventual autobiography.

No receipt for the illicit sale of a large number of revolvers.

I put the last Small Arms folder into place and reached for Hannibal, but before I could get tucked into a lamentation on working with elephants, the sound of a key hitting the door had me slapping the drawer shut and leaping for the desk.

Hale walked in to find me with a shoe in one hand and a corkscrew in the other. I jumped, nicking the ball of my thumb and dropping the implement.

“Ow!” I gasped, and stuck the wound into my mouth. “Heavens, you startled me!”

“What are you doing in my rooms?” he demanded.

“Fixing my shoes.” I pulled out the thumb, looked at it, and shook it in a demonstration of pain.

“No, I mean-” He looked down at my oozing wound, then at the shoe. “What’s wrong with your shoes?”

“Their soles. Haven’t you noticed how deadly those pavements are?”

I directed his gaze to the sprinkling of tiny black divots lying on his blotter. He frowned. “But why are you here?”

I checked the scratch, which had already stopped bleeding, and retrieved the tool to bend over the sole again. “I know, you didn’t give me a key, but I didn’t know the Portuguese words for knife or wood rasp or corkscrew, and I knew you’d at least have one of those, so I came up to see if maybe you’d followed me back and I found the cleaning crew just leaving-” I looked up, feigning alarm. “Please don’t tell on them. They’d lose their jobs and they’re such nice ladies, and they’d seen us talking downstairs so they knew I worked for you.”

One advantage of not really wishing to do a job is that it becomes easier to risk losing it. If Hale fired me, I should be free to take the next steamer home, where with any luck I would find Mycroft gone. Better, I could set off on a nice, terrestrial train, and spend a few days in Paris. However, Hale responded more to my attitude than my words – not that he liked having his rooms broken into, but he could see the shoes and had no particular reason to accuse me of criminal trespass. His ruffled feathers subsided.

“You hurt your hand.”

“Just a scratch,” I said. “Better than a broken leg.”

“Those pavements are a bit hazardous, aren’t they?”

I looked up from my task. “I’ve ordered a pile of sandwiches. Was there something you forgot?”

Hale cast a last glance at the proclaimed reason for my invasion of his rooms, and dismissed it from his mind. “Yes, I didn’t bring the sketches and I thought they might help those imbecile pirates understand what we’re doing.”

“They’re not much as actors, are they?”

“They’re not much as human beings. But there’s no denying, they have the look of the sea about them, and that’s what Randolph wants.”

He went over to the second Pirate King cabinet, opened it with the key, and drew out a file so thick, its string tie barely held it shut. He shoved the drawer closed with his foot, pocketed the key, then straightened, looking dubiously at me.

“I’ll leave,” I offered, “but may I borrow your corkscrew?”

“That’s all right, just lock the door when you go.”

And he left me there with his secrets – any of his secrets that might lie in the cabinets.

However, I merely finished gouging some holes in the shoes, locked the cabinet I had broken into, and left.

I didn’t really expect to find him standing outside the door, but I didn’t think I should take the chance.

* * *

In the dining room, the picnic meal and a young man to carry it were awaiting me. On the pavement, the tread I had carved into the soles of my shoes improved my traction. In the theatre, the actors were still in their circle, the colour sketches spread at their feet. At the interruption, Pessoa looked grateful for the respite in translating six simultaneous conversations. After instructions, the hotel employee handed around the sandwiches and beer. Upon finishing, the pirates looked content. And at the stroke of 1:30, all sixteen pirates got to their feet and paraded out, to the consternation of the two Englishmen.

“Wait!” Fflytte exclaimed. “Where are they going?”

“To lunch, of course,” Pessoa answered.

“But that’s what the sandwiches were for!”

The poet looked up from buttoning his coat, his eyebrows raised in disapproval. “For a Portuguese man, a sandwich is not a lunch,” he said with dignity, and walked down the theatre aisle after his countrymen.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

MABEL: It’s true that he has gone astray.

THE AFTERNOON WAS somewhat truncated, since our pirates did not reappear until 3:00 and we had to be out of the Maria Vitória at 6:00. In addition, they’d had a somewhat liquid luncheon – and moreover, had brought the alcoholic portion of the meal back with them, since at least four of them paused every so often to swallow from small bottles.

By five their boisterous shouts were rattling the lights, and Fflytte hastily cancelled the scheduled swordfight rehearsal. While I went through the cast with a box of sticking plasters, he threw up his hands and stormed out. La Rocha watched him go, looking amused, and one of the younger pirates took half a dozen steps in the director’s wake, mocking Fflytte’s pace. Which I had to admit was rather funny, the gait of an outraged child.

I glanced at Hale, who stood motionless, his eyes drilling into La Rocha. When the door banged shut behind Fflytte, the pirate king turned, still smiling, and saw the Englishman. The two locked gazes for a long minute before La Rocha’s fell, and he spoke a word that caused the hubbub to die.

“Be here at nine in the morning,” Hale said through clenched teeth. Pessoa automatically translated, causing a couple of the men to protest. La Rocha cut their complaints off with a sharp twitch of the hand.

Hale picked up his hat. As he went past my seat, midway down the aisle, he paused. “Have a word with Mr Pessoa,” he told me. “See that his friend understands that Fflytte Films is making a moving picture, not providing entertainment for amateur actors. We can find others willing to show up and work.”

“Why me?” I protested.

“Would you rather have the job of convincing Randolph that he shouldn’t pack up and go home?”

“Er, no.”

However, Pessoa had himself not stinted at lunch-time, and was distracted by the antics of the pirates, who had spilled over into the ropes and gangways above the stage and were trying to inflict concussions on their mates with the dangling sandbags.

“Mr Pessoa,” I began, making my voice sharp as a schoolmaster. He snapped to attention, as any public schoolboy would. “I need you to come to the hotel tonight at eight o’clock. I need you to be sober. And I need you to clear these men out before they damage something that Fflytte Films has to pay for.”

I watched them go, a few minutes later, herded by Samuel, following La Rocha. Pessoa made to stay, but I sent him off, too, hoping he had a long walk home to get rid of the wine in his veins. Then I hunted down a broom and did what I could to corral the spilt sand, happily turning the cleaning over to the man who came to open the theatre at six. He stared at the dangling ropes. They looked as if a herd of monkeys had got at them.

I made a mental note to learn the Portuguese for I’m sorry. It looked to be a phrase Hale’s assistant was going to use a lot in days to come.

* * *

I was waiting in the hotel lobby at eight that evening, my official Assistant’s Notebook in my lap. I was still waiting at 8:15. At 8:30, I gave up and went into the restaurant. At 8:40, Pessoa came in, although it took me a moment to recognise him.

He wore a monocle in place of the black owl spectacles. His hair was parted on the side and his maroon-coloured bow tie was dashing rather than snug, but beyond the details, it was his overall air that was so very different. Coming to the table, he gave a little click of the heels and a brief inclination of the head, the humorous gesture of a friend, not an employee, before dropping into the chair across from me. There he sat sprawled, an expansive set to his shoulders, with not the slightest sign of his normal prim attitude.

I leant forward to study the man’s features: Yes, there was the fleck in the right iris, the mild disturbance in the hair over his left brow, the nick from that morning’s razor. I sat back, breathing a sigh of relief: For a moment, I feared I’d strayed into the clichés of an unlikely detective story. As if William S. Gilbert were collaborating with Edgar A. Poe.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I need truth, and some aspirin.

Friday, 14 November, 11:30 p.m.

Avenida-Palace, Lisbon

Dear Holmes,

I have spent any number of odd evenings (generally in your company, come to think of it) but I’ve just had one of the oddest. Even after having it explained to me, I’m not at all certain I understand it.

This afternoon, our hired pirates turned up drunk from their lunch, and it was given to me to explain to the translator that it simply wouldn’t do. Since he, too, had of drink taken, I commanded him to dinner. When he showed up, I would initially have sworn that he and I had become characters in “The Case of the Substitute Twin.”

Now, it is true that I occasionally feel myself going translucent and fictional (again, often in your company.) However, the stories I occupy are not generally so lowbrow as to depend on the mechanism of twins. This being a new experience for me – what next, I could only wonder: white slavery? opium dens? – I pursued the anomaly with interest. What had caused our translator’s transformation from a quiet, unhealthy-looking, marginally shabby and humorously self-deprecating melancholic into an intense, ardent, witty gentleman-about-town? He wore the exact clothes he had earlier, but with panache rather than apology.

And although I’m not at all certain I grasp the details, it would appear that I have spent the evening within a poetical conceit.

I believe I mentioned previously that our translator, Mr Pessoa, is a poet – and according to him, not simply any poet, but the poet who will define his country to the world. It matters not that he is well into his fourth decade and few have heard of him. No: In his mind, Portugal is due to become the world’s leader in the modern era – in artistic and literary matters, if not political and economic – and Fernando Pessoa is due to take his place at its head. A Fifth Empire, less the apocalypse, ushered in by this narrow country on the edge of Europe – just as soon as he obtains government funding for his journal. And finds a publisher for his poetry. And finishes his detective story, and finds acceptance for his Arts Council, and … And he did not show any indication of being under the influence of drugs.

Holmes, I am awash in a sea of megalomaniacs.

In any event, I settled to dinner with this fellow who was both familiar and unknown: hair parting different, monocle in place of spectacles, wide gestures instead of controlled, a flamboyant vocabulary, a shift in accent. He even looked taller.

After some minutes of increasingly disorientating conversation, I had to ask. It turned out the man across from me was both Mr Pessoa, and another.

Modern poetry, in Pessoa’s eyes, is required to be outrageous and exaggerated. The modern poet, he believes, must do more than sit and write verse: He must become his poem, he must transform himself into a living stage. Only through lies is the truth known; only through pretence does one achieve revelation. The dramatis personae of Pessoa’s life are the embodiment of theatre, a solemn game, a celebration of the counterfeit. He calls them (apparently there are quite a few) his heteronyms.

And lest one assume that Pessoa thus makes an ideal partner for a moving picture company, he has a theatrical scorn for the theatrical. He holds in polite contempt the contrivance of stage trickery, regarding the theatre as “low” because it limits a playwright – even a great playwright such as Shakespeare, whom he otherwise admires – to the dull formality of a script. At best, theatre or film itself provides the stage on which the actor can make a new thing. “A true play is one not intended as a performance, but as its own reality.”

Which is why, although he looks down his nose at scripted stage-craft, this one picture has thrilled his imagination (someone’s imagination – Pessoa? de Campos? Ricardo Reis perhaps?) because it counteracts the formal script with a “boundless unreality” of free association. (That, and the pirates – he is completely besotted with pirates, and went on and on about freedom and masculine imagery and the sea-going heritage of Portugal, and cannon. I’m sure there was something about cannon.)

If you are a touch confused, I will pause while you fetch yourself strong drink: I found that alcohol helps considerably.

All of this came spilling out of this new and excitable version of Mr Pessoa (whose surname, I should point out, translates as “Person”) after I had made the mild remark that he looked … different.

With our soup, we drank in philosophical reflection, which settled our palates for the main course of revelation: that his changed appearance reflected this true theatre, this true-faking, this poet’s grasp of play. That Fernando Pessoa does not, in fact, exist, that he is a vácuo-pessoa, a vacuum-person.

Before taking up his knife and fork, this non-person fished into a pocket, then extended his card across the table linen. “Álvaro de Campos, at your service.”

Senhor Álvaro de Campos is not a translator, but a naval engineer. He is from the south of Portugal, born Jewish (although he seems not entirely certain what this entails) though raised Roman Catholic, studied in Scotland, and travelled widely before settling in Lisbon. He is a Sensationist and admirer of Walt Whitman, and his tendency to flamboyance and lusty flirtations with decadence are reflected in his writing. A thick packet of which he then handed me.

Oh, indeed: Senhor de Campos is a poet, too.

It took us until coffee to reach this dramatic revelation, having spent the interim in a monologue: the great history of Portugal; the greater future of Portugal; piracy as an allegory for the Portuguese identity; his experiments with automatic writing; Pessoa’s schooling (to which he referred in the third person) in Durban (where – he gave a disbelieving laugh – the students were woefully ignorant that Vasco da Gama, a gentleman of Portugal, had not only discovered their land, but named it); the publication of two volumes of English verse; his belief that the greatest artist is the one who writes with the most contradictions, the clearest writer is he who writes the most baffling prose.…

Or I may have got some of that wrong, because by this time I was near cross-eyed with tiredness and my only lusty flirtation was for my own quiet rooms. He had been telling me about a 900 verse ode he had written to pirates, or perhaps about pirates, some years before, when I broke in to inform Pessoa – or de Campos – that I was tired, that we both were needed at the theatre by nine o’clock, and that if he did not have a word with his friend the pirate king about keeping his retainers under control, Fflytte would fire the lot of them and take his company off to Morocco, seeking his piratical actors there.

And I left the poet with his multiple personas at the table, and shall now stagger off to bed.

Saturday, 6:30 a.m.

I finish this seven hours later, in what will no doubt be my only quiet moment of the day, before setting off for my theatre of the mad.

You might, by the way, enjoy the antics of our pirates, and especially our designated Pirate King, a man who would have the air of a brigand even were it not for his gold earring and the considerable scar down the side of his face (which must have come near to taking out an eye, if not the throat itself). La Rocha lacks only a peg-leg and parrot to complete the storybook image. He impresses Randolph Fflytte mightily, as well as the men hired as his pirate band. Which is good: If he can keep that rabble in line, this film may actually get made.

Your,

R.

Postscript: Again, I fear I have given the impression of having greater concern with the demands of my façade employment than with the darker matter that may be at its core. I confess, I keep hoping that word will reach me of Miss Johns’ safe reappearance at her flat. Still, lest you (and Lestrade) imagine me taking my ease here, I assure you that I am pressing forward, albeit on an indirect path. If there is wrongdoing on the set of Pirate King along the lines of the guns of Small Arms and the drugs of The Coke Express, it may be possible to anticipate the new crime and solve the old at one and the same time. I merely have to figure out what it may be. If, as I say, crime exists.

– R

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

ALL: How pitiful his tale! How rare his beauty!

SATURDAY MORNING BEGAN at the specified ungodly hour of nine o’clock, when a cohort of unkempt and ill-shaven pirates came face to face with a flock of scrubbed and radiant young ladies. It would be hard to say which side had the greater shock. The girls put their curly yellow heads together and giggled; the men turned (according to their age) surly or scarlet beneath their stubble, kicking their dusty boots against the boards.

Fflytte mounted the stage steps and took up a position between the two groups, rubbing his hands in anticipation. “Now,” he said with the air of a schoolmaster calling together his unruly class, that they might be inculcated into the amusements of the Latin deponent. “Here we are! We’ll be working together for several weeks, and although some of us know each other, many of us are strangers. Let me do a quick run-through on the story we’ll be working on, just to remind you, and then I’d like to introduce each of you before we split up to begin our rehearsals.

“Once upon a time,” he began (thus proving himself a quick judge of an audience), “there was a musical stage-play about a young pirate named Frederic.” He lit into the worn tale as if he’d just invented it that instant: Frederic repudiates the pirate band to which he has mistakenly been apprenticed all these years; repudiates, too, the affections of his middle-aged nursemaid; encounters a group of pretty sisters, bathing on the shore; falls instantly in love with Mabel.

Hale and I stood looking on, Hale with amusement, me with amazement: The little director might have been a storyteller around a camp-fire, flitting between the interests of the girls (romance!) with those of the men (sex!) and weaving together apprehension (the police!) and tension (can Frederic and Mabel ever be together?) with humour (the sisters speak pointedly of the weather, to permit the flirtation of the young lovers) and satisfaction (a good fight scene!). The girls gasped when Fflytte revealed that the pirates were taking them captive; the pirates looked uneasy when they heard that the Major-General was bringing in the troops. And when Fflytte revealed that the pirates were, in fact, noblemen in disguise, and thus acceptable husbands-

I pray you pardon me, ex – Pirate King!

Peers will be peers, and youth will have its fling.

Resume your seat, and legislative duties,

And take my daughters, all of whom are beauties.

– they applauded, one and all. Personally, I’d found the story both thin and somewhat distasteful, a sort of nineteenth century precursor of The Sheik, concluding that because the pirates were peers (and marriageable) the abduction of a group of young girls would be forgiven. Still, both girls and pirates seemed to find the story satisfactory, and Fflytte bowed.

When the huzzahs and buzz of conversation died down, Fflytte went on. “However, we are not making a movie about The Pirates of Penzance. The subject of our tale is the movie crew who is making a movie about The Pirates of Penzance, and whose lives come to intertwine with the lives of their stage counterparts. For example – Daniel, stand up, if you would – Mr Marks here plays Frederic, and he also plays the man directing the film about Frederic. And – Bibi? – this lovely lady is at one and the same time Frederic’s Mabel, and the director’s fiancée. And our Ruth – Mrs Hatley, please? – is also the fiancée’s aunt. Major-General Stanley, the father of all those girls – Harry? – is also William Stanley, the director’s fiancée’s father and financial backer of the film.

“And now for the daughters themselves.”

Fflytte’s voice paused for the translator to catch him up, yet Pessoa went on, and on. The pirates were all gawping at him with expressions ranging from confusion to outrage, and he went on, with increasing volume and insistence, until his gestures began to look more like those of Álvaro de Campos than those of Fernando Pessoa. Eventually he ran out of breath, and in the pause, questions shot across the stage at him. In an instant, we were back in the same wrangle we’d had before. The voices climbed in volume until, at a crescendo, La Rocha’s squeaky voice cut in with a sharp question. To which Pessoa responded, in a state of considerable frustration, with a brief phrase, half of which I’d heard the previous morning from the startled man in the breakfast-room. The phrase was accompanied by a hand flung in Fflytte’s direction, and its meaning was crystal clear: “Because he’s a [blithering] madman.”

It must have been a strong adjective, because as one, the pirates blinked, looked at each other, looked at the waiting Fflytte, and burst into laughter.

This time, La Rocha got them back into order before Fflytte could blow up. The pirates rearranged their faces and pasted a look of expectancy over their mirth. Fflytte glared, but the techniques of working with actors could be applied to Portuguese non-actors as well: He stretched his arm towards the girls, to regain the men’s attention, and began to introduce them.

Fflytte’s variation on the original plot – that there be thirteen girls, all of marriageable age – caused the pirates less concern than it had me. I could not fit my mind around the ghastly gynaecological and logistical nightmare of four sets of triplets (and one single birth, Mabel); they merely nodded. Perhaps they assumed that the Major-General had several wives.

In any event, the actresses had been hired first by their looks (blonde) and then for their variations in height. Fflytte had not yet noticed the creeping imperfections of their precisely regulated heights. He might not notice until he turned his camera on them, since only Linda was shorter than he. I made a note on my pad to consult a shoe-maker, to have lifts made for the laggers. Edith – and one or two others – would have to slump.

He ran through their names, from “Annie” to “Linda,” blind to the moues of dissatisfaction that passed over several rosebud mouths at these substitute identities. “June” turned her back in protest.

Then he had the pirates remove their hats and line up by height, to give them identities as well: “Adam,” “Benjamin,” “Charles,” and so on. (In the play, the only named pirate is the king’s lieutenant, Samuel – naturally, Fflytte had assigned that name to La Rocha’s man, who invariably lingered nearby, as bodyguard or enforcer. As if La Rocha needed either.) It was my job to follow behind the director with a prepared set of cards on which those names were written, pinning each to its pirate’s chest.

Had I not been a woman, “Adam” would have knocked me to the boards. As it was, I permitted him to seize and hold my wrist. I then spoke over my shoulder to the translator, “Mr Pessoa, would you kindly explain to the gentleman that this is merely a way of simplifying matters. We all need to be able to remember what rôle he is playing. And the girls may not have Mr Fflytte’s instantaneous memory for faces.”

Pessoa began to explain, but was cut short by a phrase from Samuel. Adam’s dark eyes did not leave mine, but after a moment, he let go of my wrist, grabbed the card and the pin, and applied the name to his lapel. Wordlessly, I went down the line, handing to each man his card and pin. Some of the names I thought oddly inappropriate – a pirate named Irving? – but their only purpose was to permit Hale and Fflytte to keep track of them.

I had no cards for the two extras, since they were only there in case something happened to one of the others, but as I drew back from Lawrence, the youngest pirate in both height and fact, the spare pirate standing beside him gave a twitch.

The man’s face was half-hidden by the brim of the hat he still wore; if he hadn’t made that sharp and instantly stifled motion, I might have taken no notice. But the movement caught my attention, and my eyes, once drawn to the tension in his clasped hands, could not help noticing that they were different from the hands of the others. His were clean, to begin with, free of callus, the nails trimmed. I bent to look up under his hat-brim; half the stage went still.

It was the Swedish accountant, in black hair-dye and no glasses.

His eyes pleaded. I looked at the fear, heard the heavy silence in the row of men. Then I straightened and spoke to the young boy beside him. “Pin your card on, there’s a good lad, so we know you’re Lawrence.”

As I turned away, I looked over to where La Rocha and Samuel stood, as tense as the others. I gave them a smile, just a small one. La Rocha’s eyebrows rose in surprise. Samuel just studied me; I could not read his expression.

Fflytte noticed none of this. Once the last card was pinned on, he spread out his arms and cried, “Let’s make a picture!”

* * *

The actors divided forces, Fflytte taking the girls away to some backstage room while Hale drew the men (less Frederic and the Major-General, they being too grand for rehearsals) into a circle. The cameraman’s assistant carried out a tea-chest, setting it with a flourish before Hale. Hale squatted, working the latch with enough drama to make the overhead ropes draw a bit closer, and eased back the lid. He reached inside, coming up with a wicked-looking knife nearly two feet long, its blade sparkling in the light. The pirates leant forward, interested at last. Hale held it high – then whirled to plunge the fearsome weapon into “Gerald’s” chest.

In the blink of an eye, twelve marginally smaller but equally wicked knives were also sparkling in the lights. Hale exclaimed and stumbled back from the steel ring, permitting the great knife to spring away from Gerald’s person and tumble to the boards with a dull thud.

Only half the pirates noticed. The others were in motion, and Hale would have been left haemorrhaging onto the stage if Samuel hadn’t been faster yet. I didn’t even see the man move before Benjamin’s hand was slapped into that of Irving, who in turn bumped into Jack. An instant later, La Rocha’s voice reached the others; they stopped dead.

Hale looked down: A knifepoint rested against his waistcoat. A button dropped, the sound of the bone disk rolling along worn boards clear in the stillness.

Then Gerald gave a cough of nervous laughter and bent to pick up the fake weapon. Knives vanished, manly exclamations were exchanged. Hale fingered the tiny slit in his clothing and slowly regained colour. I took a shaky breath, and fetched the first-aid kit to repair the slice Irving’s blade had left in Jack’s hand.

We’d been at the theatre less than an hour, and had our day’s first bloodshed, our first narrowly averted fatality.

Following that little demonstration of stimulus and response, Hale took care to explain the stage props. The cutlass he took from Gerald’s hand might collapse into its handle, but the blade was steel. Even dull, it could inflict damage if used for anything but a flat stab. For slicing motions, there was another tea-chest of weapons with similar looks but made of painted wood, wide and blunt enough to be aimed at clothed portions of the body. For faces, there was a third set made from rubber, although their appearance was not entirely satisfactory.

In the matter of luncheon, compromise had been reached, on the days when a matinée was scheduled, anyway: We would work straight through, fortified in the late morning by a brief respite with the despised sandwiches, then end at three o’clock.

So the pirates merrily slashed away at each other for a few hours, and we broke for our not-a-luncheon, after which Fflytte returned with Mabel and her sisters.

And I had my first inkling of the true problems of a film-crew.

By this time, the men – who, as I said, had not begun the day in the most pristine condition – had been leaping vigorously about for a couple of hours, and were not only tired and aromatic but had relaxed into the novelty of being paid to play games.

Then the girls came in.

I should explain that the way Fflytte and Hale intended to compensate for the lack of sound in what is basically a musical event was to design a chorus of motion instead of voices. For example, in the opera, the girls’ initial appearance is cause for a song-“Climbing over rocky mountain, Skipping rivulet and fountain”em› and so on – but in a moving picture, there would be little point in showing thirteen mouths going open and shut. Instead, they would skip gaily, a chorus of motion along a flower-strewn stream, pantomiming the incipient removal of shoes and stockings for the purpose of a paddle whilst the increasingly shocked (and stimulated) Frederic looks on from his hiding place.

On the ship from England, I had been dimly aware that Graziella Mazzo (the tall, voluptuous, and generally barefoot Italian who had trained under Isadora Duncan [and with whom (despite a comical eleven-inch difference in height) Randolph Fflytte seemed to be much taken (which, come to think of it, suggested what, or who, had so startled the hotel cleaners)]) would occasionally assemble the girls on a free patch of open deck, or below decks when the weather was unfriendly, humming while they progressed in unison with exaggerated gestures of coquetry, alarm, or humour. They looked insane, but then, a group of girls often does.

By now, the thirteen sisters were well practiced in coordinated movements. Shortly before mid-day, the girls came back onstage, name cards pinned to their frocks, hair freshly combed, eager to return to their alphabetical counterparts amongst the pirate crew.

Who were instantly struck dumb. Even the older men looked down at themselves, abashed, and ran their hands over their heads. They watched the girls trip merrily over to the trays of sandwiches, commenting on the choices, exchanging wide-eyed exclamations, laughing at each other’s jests, utterly ignoring the males.

The tension between the two groups grew like a taut-strung wire: the silent men on one side, the girls with their increasingly self-conscious laughter on the other, until I thought I should have to do something. It was Benjamin who broke it, one of the younger pirates. His clothing was a shade more modern than some of the others’, and if his hair was rather long and tousled, he had at least shaved that morning. Girding himself for battle, he swaggered across the boards to the luncheon spread, took possession of a plate, laid a sandwich on it, and raised his deep brown eyes to the girl opposite him – shy, myopic Celeste.

“ ’Allo,” he said, and with a lift of the eyebrow, added, “I am Benyamin.”

Titters broke out anew, but with the first venture made, the others surged forward. I watched with an almost parental pride as two cultures met, and achieved flirtation.

Some minutes later, I became aware of a presence at my side, and looked up at Hale, then down at his de-buttoned waistcoat. “I’m glad our Samuel is fast on his feet.”

“Not half as glad as I am. I should’ve known better.”

“I take it one doesn’t expect a group of actors to have knives?”

“In England, a pocket-knife might be used for opening adoring letters. Those blades were the real thing.”

“Perhaps for safety’s sake, we ought to collect their armament each day. It would be unfortunate if one of them grabbed a real weapon by mistake.”

“That’s an idea.”

“Interesting, how many of them speak some English. I haven’t found that among the populace in general.”

“Yes, I was just noticing that. I wonder if La Rocha specified English speakers when he put out his casting call?”

“Whatever, it’ll make things easier for you and Mr Fflytte.”

“In some ways,” Hale said. “Perhaps not in others.”

I followed his gaze to the far end of the luncheon table. There stood Annie and Adam, the two tallest among their respective choruses and thus our designated eldest. He was holding out a plate to her. Her peaches-and-cream complexion had taken on a becoming degree of pink, her eyes were downcast; his dark stubble looked romantic rather than unkempt. He was all but crowing with manliness.

“Oh, dear,” I said.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

SERGEANT: When the enterprising burglar’s not a-burgling,

When the cut-throat isn’t occupied in crime,

He loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling

And listen to the merry village chime.

THE NEXT DAY was Sunday. This being an emphatically Catholic nation, an odd assortment of things were shut. Which included our theatre, whose management was not about to provide the keys and electricity for a group of Protestant (or Jewish) heathens to risk their immortal souls by committing labour.

Instead, the cast was set adrift to see the sights. The weather was not inviting; on the other hand, it was not pouring, and we were, after all, Englishmen, to whom a drizzle is a summer’s day. Over breakfast tables, train schedules were consulted, cars were hired, and a giddy sense of holiday prevailed.

Fflytte and Hale observed the spirit with looks of gloom, since the cost of a workless day remained on the company’s books. I watched with an equal lack of enthusiasm, since I suspected that a number of the girls had arranged rendezvous with their piratical counterparts. I told myself that I had not been hired as a governess, and drank my coffee in peace. As I passed through the dining room afterwards, Hale waved me over, to ask how I intended to spend my day.

“I thought I’d see something of the city, and do a bit of reading.” And with luck, find the two men (and their guests) gone from their rooms and resume my Scotland Yard – sanctioned burglary.

“What about coming with us?” he said. “That Pessoa chap is showing us around the city, in case there are places we might want to use. It would be helpful if you were there to take notes. If,” he added, “you don’t mind working on a day off.”

Damn. “Of course not. When are you going?”

“Twenty minutes?”

“I’ll go change my shoes.”

The shoes I’d worn the first night were still damp, but they were less likely to result in a broken neck than the pair that had been my attempt at fashion. I retrieved my overcoat from its place across the radiator, and put my notebook in my pocket.

Ten minutes after I went down, Pessoa came in – Pessoa this time, I was relieved to see, not the flighty and enthusiastic Senhor de Campos. He removed his gloves and shook my hand, immediately taking out his pouch of tobacco (cheaper, and less vulnerable to the elements, than the packaged variety of cigarettes).

“I trust my … demeanour last night was not disconcerting?” he asked, sifting leaves onto paper.

“Disconcerting? No.” Of course not; I often dine with heteronyms.

“Even my friends occasionally find him so,” he remarked. “Senhor de Campos can be … fervent.”

He licked the paper to seal the tobacco in, lit the end, and raised an innocent gaze. So I made a remark about the weather.

We chatted about the relative miserableness of London and Lisbon in November and whether such climates drove countries to become world powers, that they might gain a foothold in the tropics, until Fflytte and Hale appeared. They greeted me, greeted Pessoa, held back that I might go out the door first, then put their heads together and ignored me completely. Pessoa led the way, followed by the two Englishmen, with me on their heels, straining to hear as they discussed the theatre, the mechanics of filming, and how best to weave together the fight scenes and the girls’ chorus. I was soon hoping that I would not be called upon actually to write anything down, since the frigid damp that radiated off the pavements and walls found its way into the bones in no time: I was not certain that my fingers would be able to manipulate the pencil.

Up and down the two men went while on their heels I trod, hands in pockets and making the occasional memorandum on my mental note-pad: Find silver paint to touch up the rubber knives. Ask Sally (the seamstress/costumer) whether we need any traditional Portuguese clothing. Find out what traditional Portuguese clothing might entail. Cable to America to find out if Howard Pyle is still alive; if so, contract with him to illustrate the one-sheet poster. Tell James-the-Composer (whom I hadn’t met) that the sheet music needs a lot of minor chords. Check with Will-the-Camera to see if the girls will need darker make-up under the bright African sun; if so, check supplies; if needed, help Maude-the-Make-up find some before leaving Lisbon.

Occupied with the two English voices, I was but dimly aware of our guide’s occasional contribution, until he pointed to a church and said that the convent was where the autos da fé took place beginning in 1540.

Fflytte’s ears perked up. “The Inquisition, eh? I don’t suppose it was still active fifty years ago?”

Hale hastened to squelch any idea of incorporating a nice stake-burning into the tale, and we went on, my mind trying to reassemble my mental list, which had been rather shaken by the knowledge of what these stones had witnessed.

The list was running to eleven items when I found that we were boarding a tram car, and that I was expected to come up with the fare.

I fumbled my small purse out of my pocket without dropping it, turning it over to Pessoa so as not to further irritate the driver and the other passengers. When he had paid, we claimed seats, separated from the other two. I took out my actual note-pad to laboriously transfer memory onto page. Between the jolts of the little car and the state of my digits, the result was hardly legible, but I thought I should be able to make out a few key words to jog my mind onto the correct path.

I hoped I wasn’t missing some essential secretarial function: Whenever I glanced at my employers, the two men seemed fascinated by the houses built along the ever-climbing tram line. Fflytte would point at one tile façade; Hale would scrunch up his face in thought, then point at another; Fflytte would respond with his own lack of enthusiasm. Every so often the two would agree. I wondered if I was supposed to come up with an address en passant, then decided it would be simpler to put Will on the tram and just tell him to film the buildings with the most startling colours, since that seemed to be the criterion on which they were choosing.

At the top of the considerable hill, the poet and all non-Lisboans disembarked – that is to say, the three of us and one elderly Scotsman, who had perhaps come to Lisbon for the balmy November weather. I looked around to see what attraction had caused the city fathers to run the tram up here, and found we were at the castle that brooded over the city, a run-down but impressive pile with a spectacular view.

I think Fflytte had some vague idea of filming a scene or two within the walls, although I’m not sure how he would fit it into the story. It was a barracks now, with a gaol that had to be the most miserable place in the city. While Fflytte and Hale argued amiably and my nose began to drip, our guide went in search of the day officer to request permission for a visit – taking with him my note-purse.

When he returned, he was accompanied with a round man in uniform, unarmed, who shook our hands, welcomed us in what he believed to be English, and ushered us inside the castle of St George, former site of a Moorish citadel, before that the centre of Roman Felicitas Julia, the second largest city in Lusitania.

Eighty generations of soldiers had nursed their chilblains on this very spot.

Inside the castle walls, we circled around to the right, and although our military escort clearly did not approve, nothing would do for Fflytte but that we climb one or two very hazardous-looking walls. Pessoa took one look and stayed resolutely on the ground. I decided that if the men went up, I might have to – although I let them go first, and farther. Teetering atop one such precipitous barrier, peering over into a lot of nothingness, Hale remarked that anyone who tried to get reflective screens and camera up here would be guilty either of suicide or homicide. Fflytte, much smitten by the scenic possibilities, vehemently disagreed until his foot hit a loose stone and he nearly disappeared over the edge himself. We picked our way down to a dank and dreary courtyard, to the relief of Pessoa and the escort. Hale pointed out various pieces of wall and ancient stone stairways that would film well; Fflytte found something wrong with all of them. Finally, we emerged from the more hazardous portions of the castle onto a sort of esplanade that overlooked the city and most of the harbour. Hale and I followed Pessoa to the low wall, and let him proudly point out the sights: the Rossio below (its wavy black-and-white pavements covering the ashes of the Inquisition), the train station beyond it, the long stretch of the Avenida da Liberdade, its trees going bare.

The director listened with half an ear, busy framing with gloved hands an olive tree that looked like the play-thing of a petulant elephant. Eventually rejecting the tree as insufficiently picturesque for his purposes, he drifted over to join us. There we stood, hunched into our coats while Pessoa valiantly lectured on the glories that were Lisbon, a brisk wind out of Antarctica making it difficult to admire the view through watering eyes. Fflytte seemed the most impervious, and the most appreciative, visually devouring the red tile, the white walls, the noble dimensions of the plaza far below, the ruler-sharp line of the Avenida. On the rising hillside across from us, a patch of green among the red tiles indicated a garden at the back of the Teatro Maria Vitória.

Pessoa, dressed in the thinnest coat of us all, methodically worked his way down the central valley of Lisbon: here the skeletal remains of a famous convent, there the lines of the shopping district and the roof of our hotel, across from us the odd construction of an outside lift used to raise pedestrians up yet another of the city’s cliff-like hills. I muttered that the city must have been originally settled by mountain goats, a jest that either Pessoa did not understand or did not appreciate, because after a glance at me, he led us down the esplanade towards the waterfront, where the buildings at our feet grew smaller, their right angles grew skewed, and the streets, to all appearances, disappeared completely.

And there the director froze. He stood with his toes against the stones of the wall, bending his waist forward, his attitude so fervent one expected a vision of the risen Jesú to glisten against the faraway southern shore. A hand shot out, forefinger extended – then, as if leather made an intolerable barrier between himself and the object of his attentions, Fflyte tore off his glove and extended the bare finger, trembling gently with passion, or cold.

“Look!” he breathed.

We looked. At a harbour, a nice large harbour with the ocean off to the right somewhere. We studied the hills across the water, and boats of all sizes and descriptions, sailing or (more often, it being Sunday for fishing-folk as well) resting at anchor. From Fflytte’s attitude, I expected a cavorting whale or mermaid, or someone strolling on the surface of the grey water. I took a closer look at the angle of his pointed digit, then tried again.

“The boat?” Hale asked, after a similar reconsideration of the forefinger. Which words didn’t help me much, since there were perhaps a hundred boats out there, but Fflytte looked up at his cousin with a face lit with the joy and yearning of a young girl cajoling for a Christmas pony.

“Oh, it would be perfect.”

As my eyes continued to examine and reject one floating object after another, my memory dug out and brushed off for my consideration a topic that had been touched upon during our meandering walk to the tram: Fflytte saying that we should need a boat in Morocco for one or two shipboard scenes. However, since this was still Lisbon, and since I knew the director well enough to suspect that his needs changed by the hour, much less the week, I had not inscribed his remark onto my mental to-do list.

However, it had concerned a boat, and there were a lot of boats before me. I cleared my throat. “Er, which …?”

Fflytte whirled on me with an outraged look, as if I had failed to pick out which in a group of otherwise unremarkable girls was his own adorable, beautiful, and in all ways unique fiancée. “That one!”

“Two masts,” Hale murmured, rather more helpfully.

Having had it both confirmed and narrowed down, I looked along the waterfront until I indeed came to a two-masted sailing boat.

Or what had once been a two-masted sailing boat. At a distance, I could not be certain, but it did not appear to me as if the masts stood quite parallel to each other. And as a non-sailor, I could not be certain, but drunken masts did not strike me as a promising start.

Fflytte whirled, his eyes burning with need. “How do we get down there?” he demanded of Pessoa, who for once seemed prepared for the strange impulses of his temporary employer. He pointed so readily at the exit that he might have been expecting the director’s demand. Fflytte seized the translator’s arm and hurried him towards the exit. I glanced at Hale, whose expression was, as I’d feared, somewhere between irritation and amusement.

“Tell me he’s not serious,” I pleaded.

He looked after the back of his fast-retreating cousin, and the complicated visage settled into a sort of sad affection. “Of course he’s serious, Miss Russell. That’s how Randolph looks when he falls in love.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

PIRATE KING: I sink a few more ships, it’s true,

Than a well-bred monarch ought to do.

SHE’D BEEN A brigantine, once upon a time – from the Italian for brigand-and if this was love at first sight, love truly was blind.

She was a wreck.

No, she was worse than a wreck: A wreck would at least carry a faint trace of romance from the by-gone days and the glory that was sail.

Her name was Harlequin, and she was every bit the hotchpotch that name suggested. Granted, her lines had once been clean, but that was before she’d been converted into a fishing boat and given an engine and strewn about with lines and props and cabins and God-knows-what-all. An Arab mare with bobbed tail and denuded mane, daubed with spots and hitched to a rag-and-bone cart, wouldn’t have had her beauty more thoroughly hidden than this boat.

But Randolph Fflytte saw it. He saw instantly through twenty years of cart-horse behaviour, two decades of make-shift make-do, thousands of nautical miles of heavy-handed adaptations to her original lines, to the sleek, quick beauty she’d been when she danced down the rollers from her birth dock to slip demurely into the sea.

He stood on the dock and gazed across the intervening water at her, his face transformed. He looked inches taller. I would not have been too surprised if he had stepped off the chewed-up boards and trotted across the oily, debris-clogged water, just to touch her scaley hull.

“But we leave for Morocco in six days!” I protested. Geoffrey Hale and I were standing back, keeping an eye on Fflytte and Pessoa, two unlikely outlines side by side at the edge of the dock nearest the Harlequin. “We’d have to write whatever scenes he wants and rehearse them and then film them – assuming that boat doesn’t founder as soon as three people board it.”

“With any luck, it’ll go down before morning.” Hale sounded no more pleased at the prospect of arranging to film on this floating anachronism than I was. I opened my mouth to offer my services as amateur incendiarist, then reminded myself that revealing unlikely skills was not compatible to an undercover investigation. I changed what I had been about to say.

“Maybe he can shoot whatever scenes he has in mind while it’s at anchor? Draping sheets where the sails are supposed to be?”

My only answer was Hale’s slow sideways glance and raised eyebrow. I had to agree: With a reputation for realism (God, that word!) to protect, bed-sheets would not meet Fflytte’s standards.

With a sigh, I took out my note-pad. “What are we going to need?”

“Pessoa can find out,” Hale answered. “He’s the one who drew Randolph’s attention to the boat; he’s the one who can wade through fish guts to find the owner. By the time he’s finished, he’ll regret not hurrying us past that view-point.”

Hale looked sourly at the two men: Mr Pessoa looked remarkably pleased with himself, smug as any match-maker. It had not yet occurred to him that the racket he heard in the background was the sound of a spanner clanging against the finely tuned machinery of a film-crew.

I gave a brief laugh. “Will-the-Camera may murder him.”

“I’d hold the camera while he did so.” A veil of rain moved towards us across the water, the dock, and then our hats. Hale sighed. “I need a drink.”

Fflytte shook his head, scattering rain in a wide circle, when Hale told him it was time to go, and insisted on accompanying Pessoa on his search for the Harlequin’s owners. Only when Hale pointed out that having a wealthy foreigner along, openly mooning over the ship, would drive the hire price through the roof did the director allow himself to be pulled away.

At the dock’s end, Pessoa pulled together his lapels and walked off towards what I assumed were the harbour offices. Fflytte watched him go, then turned and give a last soulful look at the once-proud ship. From this angle, one could see that even her name was not original, that beneath the fading letters some previous incarnation strove to peep through.

Even slapping on a rough coat of paint was going to cost Fflytte Films a fortune.

* * *

We returned to the Avenida-Palace just before three o’clock, and although Hale pulled Fflytte towards the bar, I was very glad to see that tea was being served. I peeled away my damp overcoat and wrapped my hands around my cup, welcoming the obscuring steam on my spectacles.

I could write Holmes another letter, bringing him up to date on the entrance of a sailing vessel into our lives, but I had to admit, the investigation I’d been sent to carry out had been rather pushed onto a back burner. And Fflytte and Hale would be in and out of their rooms for the rest of the day, making trespass hazardous. Perhaps there was some stray member of the crew, abandoned here in the hotel, ready to spill the beans about Fflytte Films.

As if my thoughts had been a wish and my personal genie was sitting bored at my side, a familiar figure appeared at the door, a wizened, bow-legged man in rumpled tweeds and a soft cap. Will retained the looks of the Welsh farm-labourer he had been when he first wandered onto the Fflytte estate some forty years before, a sixteen-year-old orphan seeking work that didn’t involve a mine-shaft. Now, he was clearly looking for someone, but I stuck my hand in the air and waved in a gesture too energetic for him to ignore. With reluctance, he came in.

“Will-the-Camera,” I said. “We were just talking about you.”

Will was not one of your garrulous Welshmen. He merely glanced his question at the empty chairs.

“I’ve been out with Mr Fflytte and Mr Hale. Here, sit down. Like some tea? Waiter, another cup,” I called, ignoring the cameraman’s protestations that no, he really- “We just got back from a sight-seeing trip around the town with Mr Pessoa, and you’ll never guess what we found?”

“A rhinoceros?”

I paused, taken aback by this unexpected note of levity from a man who looked not in the least like he was making a joke. “Er, no. A ship. A very old and beat-up brigantine that Mr Fflytte decided is just the thing for a couple of scenes.”

Will dropped his head into his hand with a mutter that sounded like, “Jaizus.”

“I imagine you’ve been involved with any number of, well, challenging situations. Haven’t you worked with Fflytte Films for a long time?”

“Since before it was Fflytte Films,” he agreed. He scowled down at the cup I’d poured for him, doubtless wishing it might turn into something translucent and more fortified.

“Really? What was it then?”

“It was young Master Fflytte with a camera. Which he didn’t know how to work so he hunted me down on the estate and shoved it at me, told me to learn how to run it.”

“Well, you certainly did that. You’ve filmed almost all of his movies, haven’t you?”

“A fair number.”

“What a lot of stories your camera could tell! Were you there when the equipment went overboard?”

“I went overboard after it,” he replied.

“Good … heavens. The wave took you, too?”

“Nah, I jumped. Thought I might be able to save it, but it went down too fast. Left me with nothing but a tape-measure. Granted, my favourite tape-measure.”

Again, I couldn’t tell if this was laconic humour or mere fact. His expression gave no hint. He reminded me of a friend of my father’s, an older man who’d spent years around cowboy camp-fires in the West, mastering the art of the tall tale in a way my childhood self could only dimly appreciate, or even recognise.

“Well, that’s good, then,” I prattled cheerfully. “Have a biscuit? What about that short Mr Fflytte made during the War, filmed from an observation balloon? Was that you?”

“It was. Two years later we filmed in the trenches. Under fire. That one was never released.”

“Oh, for a peaceful life,” I commented. “But even after the War it doesn’t sound peaceable – wasn’t there one film where a polar bear went berserk?”

“Started as Anna Karenina. Shifted to The North. That got scrapped, too. I couldn’t look at the rug they made out of him for years. After that, I told Mr Fflytte I did not care to work with dangerous animals.”

“So when they made Moonstone, someone else worked the camera?”

“For the cobras, you mean? No, Moonstone was before the polar bear. But when I saw the script for Hannibal, in ’twenty-two, I said no thanks.”

“And yet here you are, working with thirteen girls.” He shot me a glance, decided I was joking, thought about that for a moment, and then sat back in his chair with a chuckle.

“You’re right. I must be mad.”

The point of my questions had not been the perils of making a Fflytte film, but to find out if the man had held a camera for Fflytte during the War years. The Aeronaut was made in 1915, and I knew that his proposed film The Front took place two and a half years later.

“It sounds as if you’ve handled Mr Fflytte’s cameras pretty much his entire career.”

“There’ve been two or three he had other operators for – I broke my hand just before Krakatoa. And there was a year when my wife was dying. Other than those, yes, it’s all Will Currie.”

I expressed condolences about his wife, and asked a question about the cameras, and film, and what problems he might anticipate, shooting on board the Harlequin. My curiosity about the technical side of his profession disarmed him, loosing his tongue a shade. I went on in that vein, sliding in the occasional investigatory question about the crew and cast, but taking care to keep the emphasis light, even when I asked about my predecessor, Lonnie Johns.

“What about her?” he asked.

“What was she like?”

“She’s what Daniel Marks might call a ‘good kid.’ Nice. Hard working. Not terribly quick in the wits. Why do you ask?”

“I just wondered why she’d left. Wondered maybe if she didn’t get along with someone.”

“Like who?”

“I don’t know. Mrs Hatley, perhaps?”

Will snorted. I raised my eyebrows. When he did not explain his wordless comment, I probed a little. “Well, Mrs Hatley seems a bit on the formidable side. And she doesn’t appear always to get along with Mr Hale and Mr Fflytte.”

But that took things just a bit too far. He smiled, and said, “Yes, they’ve known each other a fair time now,” and reached for the watch on his chain.

I slipped in a last question. “I’m a little surprised Mr Fflytte hasn’t made a War movie, other than the balloon one. I mean The Great War – I know about the Boer film.”

He popped open his watch, giving an expression of mild alarm that suggested he’d forgotten he was looking for someone when I waylaid him. “Hale won’t have it,” he said, getting to his feet. “Made it clear when he was de-mobbed that any movie about the Front would be made without him. And Fflytte won’t work without Hale, so that’s it. Thanks for the tea, Miss Russell. And for the warning about the boat.”

He hurried out. I gathered my damp coat and, more slowly, my thoughts; and finally my instruments of writing.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

PIRATES [springing up]: Yes, we’re the pirates, so despair!

Sunday afternoon

Avenida-Palace

Dear Holmes,

I have just come from an informative conversation with William Currie, Fflytte’s long-time cameraman, a Welshman in his fifties who worked on the Fflytte estate as a young man, keeping its various engines running. A man who walks with a slight hitch to his step, who has carried a camera for Fflytte since 1902, including during the War years (which suggests that his limp predated 1914, and would explain why he was free to carry a camera instead of a rifle). In the course of our tête-à-tête, he filled in some missing pieces of information that I thought of interest.

I shall not trouble you with the minutiae of gossip, merely convey to you the following points:

Our “Ruth,” the woman known as Mrs Myrna Hatley, is also the mother and hence chaperone of the film’s daughter “June.” Mrs Hatley was herself in several Fflytte films, from 1907 to 1909, then did not act again until 1919. I mention her because there is a certain degree of delicacy when the others refer to her matrimonial state, and Will openly snorted: One suspects the lady did not submit to legal bonds. Her daughter (unlike two of the other “sisters”) has naturally blonde hair and bright blue eyes, and looks to be 14 or 15.

The first commercial film of Fflytte enterprises to star “Mrs Hatley” was Gay Paris, in 1909. Mrs Hatley would have been in her late twenties. Fflytte was 24, Hale 22 or -3.

Randolph Fflytte has dark hair and eyes and as I may have mentioned, is remarkably short. His right-hand man and second cousin, Geoffrey Hale, is tall, with tow hair and cornflower eyes.

On the ship here, while otherwise occupied, I overheard a small piece of tight-voiced conversation between Mr Hale and Mrs Hatley on the deck above me – rather, I heard her voice, while she was in conversation with him. The gist of her monologue was that although she appreciated the opportunity for employment, she could not but feel some resentment at being given the rôle of a middle-aged and unattractive harpy who is not only responsible for young Frederic’s mistaken apprenticeship to a band of brigands but on his reaching the age of twenty-one, attempts to trick the boy into marrying her. I did not hear Hale’s response, but the slap she dealt him as a consequence nearly sent him over the side. I thought at the time that he was making advances upon her, although why her, of all the women to hand.…

Regarding the other members of this travelling circus, our director has fallen in love with a sailboat, which I am led to understand will delay everything, drive his crew to distraction, and cost a small fortune. If no one else murders the man, his cousin may, since Hale is responsible for keeping the company financially sound.

(Have I told you about Geoffrey Hale, Holmes? Hale is a veteran of the Front, retaining the reactions, which saved his life [why does my hand feel driven to add, “once so far”?] following a misunderstanding during rehearsals. Hale is somewhat aloof from the others, although manifestly fond of Fflytte [their mothers are cousins (Hale’s father descends from the Hale of the Hale Commission [Wasn’t that Hale also involved in witchcraft trials? (I ask because I’ve been making notes for a monograph linking the repression of witches with that of modern suffragists.)])] – Where was I going with this? Oh yes: Hale’s lack of personal involvement with the others may be a combination of shyness and discomfort with his authority over them. It is not unknown, with officers who served on the Front, that they are unwilling to assert authority over any person, ever again.)

Our translator, Mr Pessoa, seemed mightily pleased with his rôle in introducing Fflytte to this decrepit ship, Harlequin. He does not yet grasp the amount of turmoil this introduction will entail, and I have no doubt that it will come as a surprise and a great disappointment to Pessoa (not only financially but personally, since the translator clearly relishes his involvement with piracy, even fictional piracy) when Hale invents good cause to fire him.

The necessary work of my position has made it difficult to move the investigation along at the speed I might wish – and then today’s potential snooping-time was given over to sight-seeing and mooning over a glorified fishing boat. It will not be possible to break into rooms until tomorrow, when rehearsals recommence, but I can see what little knots of actors are gathered here in the hotel, and see what golden titbits of gossip they can contribute to my hoard.

More later,

– R.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

FREDERIC: How quaint the ways of Paradox!

At common sense she gaily mocks!

IT WAS STILL too early for dinner, but I found three of the younger girls and their mothers settled in before a substantial afternoon tea. Our interactions up to now had largely been professional rather than social, since the crew tended to sit at tables apart from the actors (a pattern of segregation for which I had been grateful). When I joined them now, the mothers exchanged looks of puzzlement verging on shock, as if the maid had helped herself to a breakfast buffet and sat down among the guests. Still, short of being ill-mannered before their girls, they couldn’t very well drive me off.

Adolescent girls are a race apart. When I was June’s age, a motor accident had injured and orphaned me: Other than my friendship with Holmes, my early ’teen years were solitary, leaving me ill equipped for light conversation about … well, whatever it is girls that age talk about.

In any event, I was the wrong age for both sets of females here. I spent several increasingly uncomfortable minutes manufacturing painful topics of conversation (clothing? memorisation of lines? the weather, for pity’s sake?) before a moment of desperation had me hauling out a remark about the pirates Fflytte had hired, and waiting for that to flounder around and die.

Except it didn’t. All three mothers smiled fondly, one of the girls giggled and turned pink, the other two spoke simultaneously.

“I’m so glad-”

“I never expected-”

They stopped, and leant into each other with shrieks of laughter that rattled the chandelier.

“Sorry?” I said when my ears had stopped ringing.

“I was going to say,” said Isabel, “that I’m so glad Mr Fflytte didn’t bring a bunch of spotty boys from England to play our pirates.”

“Yes,” Kate agreed. “Who’d have thought Portuguese boys could be so good-looking?”

“Um.” I cast a sideways look at their mothers. “You do realise they’re not exactly boys, don’t you?” Apart from Lawrence, scarcely pubescent, and Jack, who seemed about fourteen, the pirates were in their twenties and thirties, and these girls were … well, they claimed to be at least fourteen, even Fannie, although I had serious doubts about her.

“Oh, pooh,” said Isabel. “At least it’ll give us something interesting to do on the way to Morocco. I always wanted to go to Arabia!”

“Morocco isn’t in Arabia.”

“It isn’t?”

“It’s on the northwest coast of Africa.”

“Are you sure?” She seemed disappointed.

“Unless they’ve moved it.”

“Well, I s’pose Africa’s all right.”

“Jungles and tigers,” popped up Fannie.

“You won’t find too many jungles in Morocco,” I told her. “More likely desert.”

“Ooh, a desert – so there will be sheiks?” Isabel wanted to know. The mothers looked interested. I sighed, and gave up.

* * *

It was not raining at the moment, so I wrapped up against the chill and went for a walk before dinner. The streets were quiet, with restaurants not yet open and shops closed tight, although I thought I saw one of the taller girls – probably Annie, who seemed to be everywhere – dart into a side-street. When I reached that corner, I looked, but saw no one. In any event, I reminded myself that I was not responsible for every crew member at every moment.

My feet took me down to the waterfront where, although there was more activity than the rest of the city, the loudest sounds were still the gulls and the slap of water. I wandered east, along the road that kept the tight-knit, almost Medieval Alfama district from spilling its piled boxes out across the modern docklands like a tipped toy-box. Pristine tiles abutted flaking plaster; ornate façades grew out of un-hewn stone; a sleek modern window stood next to one installed when Columbus was venturing into the Atlantic; a stone lion’s head set into a wall dripped water into a faded tin that had once held olive oil. It was nearly dark, and I was entering an area without street-lamps, so I turned to retrace my steps, intending to follow the next lighted thoroughfare.

Then I saw a pair of men, some distance down the waterfront, coming in my direction. They were too far away to identify with any confidence, but something about their shapes made the back of my mind prickle, and I retreated into the deep shadow of a boarded-up entrance-way. In a couple of minutes, I peered out again. Sure enough: our translator and finder of pirate ships, with our pirate king.

I faded into the stinking darkness. The men went past, speaking in Portuguese.

I followed. Of course I followed.

They took the next entrance into the Alfama, not far from where we had begun our Thursday night search for La Rocha. At the time, Pessoa had known neither the saloon nor La Rocha – it takes a good actor to craft an air of assurance-atop-uncertainty, and I did not think Pessoa a good actor – but it would appear that had changed. And I was not surprised when their goal was that same grubby hole in the wall.

I was too far behind to hear any exchange of words when they entered the place, but I pulled my scarf up and my hat down, and risked a quick glance through the bottle-thick, salt-scummed window as I passed. Enough to see that in the thirty seconds after they had gone in, they had also gone out.

Which could only mean that they had gone through the bar proper and into the same back room.

A room with, as I recalled, a back door – narrow and half-concealed by heavy curtains, but there.

It took me some time to find the right door amongst the warren of tiny lopsided dwellings jostling shoulder to shoulder beneath the castle walls. None of the streets – streets! one could stretch an arm across some of them – connected at right angles. Half of them came to an end in courtyards; many were enclosed overhead; most were unlit. The houses were occupied – I could hear voices and smell cooking, but it was late (and cold) enough that the children were inside, and the adults, too, were mostly invisible behind shutters. Feeling my way in and out of various brief passages, at last my eye was caught by a narrow line of light at the far end of a tunnel-like lane.

The thin strip was the only thing I could see, and although I had a torch in my overcoat pocket, I was loath to use it. Instead, I found that if I blocked the actual light with an outstretched hand, its reflection along the stone walk and walls would permit me to creep forward. I crept forward, and heard a voice. A voice I knew.

Not that I could understand what he was saying, but Fernando Pessoa was talking. And talking. I pressed my ear to the crack, hearing nothing but his voice, going on and on. It sounded like a recitation.

So I went down on my knees to put my eye near the half-inch gap between door and stone.

The horizontal slice of room that came into view contained three chairs and a merry fire. There were men in the chairs, and although I could only see their legs, I knew who the room held. La Rocha’s scuffed and elephantine red boots were stretched out to the coals, ankles propped, his right toe pulsing slightly as if keeping the beat of private music. His lieutenant-“Samuel”-sat on the other side of the fire, his own shiny black boots flat on the floorboards; a glass of some brown liquid hung from his fingertips, the arm itself resting out of sight on the chair. The third legs belonged to Pessoa: their knees were crossed with the right toe tucked behind the left calf, an uncomfortable position suggesting intense concentration. I could just see a corner of paper, drooping from his knee. As I watched, he lifted it, rearranged it out of my sight, then laid it back down. He continued reading.

This was not some report he was conveying to La Rocha and his man, not unless he had set his report in verse (although this being Pessoa, anything was likely). His words had a rhythm that drove La Rocha’s toe, and caused Samuel’s glass to swirl gently.

Then the rhythm broke off. Pessoa said something in a more normal voice – rather, in the voice he had used the other evening when he wore the monocle, not the deferential intonations of Fernando Pessoa, translator. He seemed to be asking a question, because La Rocha’s squeak answered, then Samuel contributed something. It went on that way for a few minutes, before Pessoa cleared his throat, paused for a swallow from his glass, and set to again.

I peeled my cheek off the grubby stone and sat upright, thinking, Good heavens, they’re holding a piratical poetry reading!

This literary salon continued for another quarter hour before Pessoa came to what was clearly, even through a closed door, some kind of conclusion. The other two men did not applaud, but they did make encouraging noises. I placed my eye back to the slit, thinking that they would pour the poet a drink and talk it over, but instead all three of them stood. I positioned my hands for instant flight in the event they decided to use the back entrance, but they did not – and to my surprise, it was not Pessoa who left, but the other two.

Instead, Pessoa made a circuit of the chairs, stood before the fire for a minute – I could only see to his bagged knees, but I pictured him rolling a cigarette. Then a spent match sailed into the coals, and Pessoa returned to his chair, and his pages.

Only this time, he read his words in English.

It was – inevitably – a poem about piracy, beginning with hard, romantic, masculine images of a man’s life at sea:

To the sea!

Salt with windblown foam

My taste for great voyages!

Thrash with whipping water the flesh of my adventure,

Douse with the cold depths the bones of my existence,

But then the harshness slipped sideways, into imagery even a pirate might have found unnerving:

Make shrouds out of my veins!

Hawsers out of my muscles!

Flay my skin and nail it to the keels!

Was this what he’d been reading to La Rocha and his friend? It was hard to picture those two men receiving these images with such calm attentiveness. No, I decided: The poet must have read them a less inflammatory portion, and set these verses free into the room only after they had left.

It went on in this vein for some time, the poet asking that his eyes be torn out, bones smashed, blood spilt. I listened in fascination as the pale, thin landsman dreamed into existence a tropical sun that made his taut veins seethe, Patagonian winds that tattooed his imagination. There was a bizarre fascination in overhearing the man’s inner vision, of himself and his people; my cheek went numb against the frigid stone as his maritime ode unfolded. His voice became increasingly caught up in the recitation, gaining in fervency at the erotically charged violence, the fire and the blood, until from deep within booms the savage and insatiable Song of the Great Pirate, sending a chill down the spine of his men:

Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest

Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!

The abrupt shift from bloody rapine into children’s adventure story startled a noise out of me, and I slapped a hand over my mouth. The dramatic recitation cut sharply off. I staggered upright and forced my stiff limbs to shamble down the tunnelled lane, clearing the corner only an instant before the bolt rattled and the door spilt light down the stones.

I was waiting at the front of the tavern when he left a short time later, and followed him long enough to confirm that it was the flamboyant, monocled Álvaro de Campos striding along the deserted streets, not meek, bespectacled Pessoa. I trailed behind him long enough to decide that he was headed to his home, on the city’s other set of hills, and then I turned off towards the hotel, and dinner.

I will admit, my dreams that night were a touch … confused.

CHAPTER TWENTY

SCENE: A ruined chapel by moonlight.

THEN CAME MONDAY morning, and everything changed.

The cast – most of it – was at breakfast when Fflytte swept in, dressed in the most remarkable suit I’d yet seen, a canary yellow twill with a bright orange cravat spotted with green fleurs-de-lis. He stood in the doorway and clapped his hands to gain our attention, gaining that of all the civilians and waiters as well.

“Good morning, everyone!” He paused, as if expecting a classroom of dutiful replies. Hale loomed behind him in the doorway, looking as if he had not slept well. He might have simply remained where he was, but behind him came Will Currie, who shouldered the yellow twill aside and gestured to a waiter carrying a jug of coffee. Hale took advantage of the opening, as did a couple whose departure had been blocked by the director. Fflytte disregarded them all.

“Fresh day, fresh week, fresh ideas!” he boomed. “Now, as some of you may have heard, I found a ship yesterday that’s going to transform what we do with this picture. It will take a bit of attention to get it in condition for the cameras, so, rather than delay the rest of the production while we’re doing that, I’m going to divide us up. Now, we’ve done this before,” he cajoled, although I had heard no protests, “and we’re all professionals here. Well, most of us. And the newcomers to the trade are fast learners. Here’s what we’ll do. Team One is composed of me and Mr La Rocha: He and I will get the ship ready to film.” And to limp into the harbour and back without going down, I added by way of silent prayer. “The second team, with Mr Hale, will rehearse the pirates and their fight scenes with the constables. Mr Hale will be in charge of that, assisted by Mr La Rocha’s, er … well, we know him in the part of Samuel. And our translator, Mr Pessoa, will remain with them.” I drew a relieved breath: I could not let the man who’d composed what I overheard the previous evening remain near young girls, but I was not looking forward to telling Hale why. “Team Three will be the girls, with Mr Currie and Miss Russell. Oh, and you, Daniel. Girls, I’m sending you on a little working holiday just near the coast, to film the scenes where Frederic first sees Mabel. I’m told it’s a lovely place, we’ve made arrangements for you to spend the night, the charabanc will be here in an hour. And-”

Whatever he’d planned on saying next was drowned in a gale of shrieks and exclamations, as a score of females threw down their table napkins and stormed for the door. Amused – he’d done it deliberately, I could tell – Fflytte stood aside to let them race past, then turned to the depleted audience, consisting of the crew, Daniel Marks, and the police constables. Harold Scott – our Major-General – was not there. One rarely saw him before noon.

“Maude,” Fflytte said to the woman in charge of make-up, “you’ll go with the girls, of course. And, Miss Russell? Will’s assistant, Artie, is a touch, er, under the weather. You don’t mind helping Will with the equipment, do you?”

I looked at Will, who was grimly stirring sugar into his coffee. He’d known about the plan beforehand – going by his lack of bounce, he’d spent a large part of the night protesting. “Happy to,” I replied.

Then Fflytte turned to the woman in charge of costuming. “Sally, you’ll stay with me and Mr La Rocha. He tells me there’s going to be a lot of repairs needed to the sails, and-”

“No!” she and I objected, at the same instant. She didn’t wait for me to cede the floor. “I’ll not ruin my hands on canvas.”

“You’ve sewn canvas before.”

“Yes, when you needed a shroud for a burial at sea,” she retorted. “But there’s a world of difference between wrapping a mannequin and producing an acre of canvas sail.”

“Oh, hardly an acre,” Fflytte cajoled.

“I’m not doing it!”

“Mr Fflytte,” I interrupted, “I have to agree. Because if Sally’s not there, any decisions and repairs to the girls’ costumes will be up to me and the girls.”

He opened his mouth to ask what was wrong with that, then looked at what I was wearing; considered, too, what his actresses would wear if given free choice; and closed his mouth – rather more rapidly than manners would require, I thought: My dirt-coloured woollen trousers and tweed hacking jacket were a lot more practical than his garments. Certainly warmer.

“Very well, I’m sure La Rocha will know a sail-maker down near the harbour.”

No doubt La Rocha was well acquainted with all sorts of men willing to garnish their bills and pass him the difference. But I did have one question.

“Have you consulted La Rocha and Samuel about this division of labour?” Samuel was La Rocha’s shadow; I had never seen the two men apart.

“They’re fine with the idea,” the director said.

But when I looked at Hale, I could see that he was not. I had to agree: Fflytte and La Rocha out in the world, unchaperoned, would be a terrifying picture for the man in charge of the cheque book.

* * *

The charabanc might be arriving at the hotel in an hour, but I did not expect that it would leave soon after that. And indeed, two hours later, Will Currie was still in argument with Sally the seamstress as to which set of equipment was the more vulnerable to weather. In the end, I bodily hoisted her sewing trunk to the man whose feet were dangling from the roof of the ’bus, told Will he could prop his camera in the seat beside me, and we were away.

Cintra was, or so I had been told, a picturesque little hilltop town nearer the Atlantic coast, fifteen miles or so from Lisbon. Normally, one would take the train that left from beside the hotel, but Fflytte and Hale had decided that a charabanc would put the equipment at less risk, and (I realised this only later) would make it more difficult for one of the actresses to slip away.

As soon as we had left the centre of town, I regretted the decision. The road was in the same condition as the charabanc – bad – which would mean that a forty-minute train ride was going to take us two or three hours. We jostled and rattled, raising a cloud of dust through which could be glimpsed olive trees and windmills, cork oaks and a very Roman-looking aqueduct, boulders and an occasional figure – young boy, old man, or mummified scarecrow? – seated on a boulder, watching over a flock of dirty sheep or goats.

An hour out, the murmur of complaint and discomfort had swollen to a tide. I told the driver to halt at the next likely place. He answered in Portuguese. I tried Spanish, then French, and in that tongue he told me that the next likely place would be Cintra. I replied that he could in that case stop anywhere the girls might stretch their legs without falling off a cliff or being attacked by a pack of dogs.

Twenty minutes later, I tapped the driver on the shoulder and told him that here would be fine.

When the worst of our accompanying dust cloud had drifted past, a bevy of females staggered from the charabanc, coughing in chorus, groaning at their bruises (the older ones) and exclaiming at the dust in their clothing (mostly the younger). They dispersed along the roadside. Will Currie clambered to the roof to check the tight shrouds on his equipment. Daniel Marks stepped down, grimacing at the surface underfoot. We stood listening to the engine tick and the dust settle, alone on a rural road a short mule-ride from the capital city, when like magic, local residents drew into existence, to all appearances materialising from out of the dust, bearing cups of water and baskets of oranges, bowls of raisins and tubs of oil-washed olives. Trades were made, combs and hair ribbons, cheap bracelets and money offered, first through facial expressions, then gestures and, when those proved popular, full-blown charades. The natives sat in awe-struck appreciation when Annie, June, and little Linda dragged Daniel Marks into their wordless play, enacting something that was either the 1910 Portuguese revolt or Love’s Labours Lost-my attention was occupied with counting our heads, lest we lose one of our alphabet of girls. When I herded my charges back onto the charabanc, leaving behind a carpet of orange peel and olive seeds, I discovered that the locals had been selling other things as well.

“Wait! What’s that noise?”

In the back, six scrubbed and innocent faces turned to me. If one of them had possessed the wits to claim that she was merely whining at the thought of getting back onto the ’bus, they might have got away with it, but instead they blinked their lashes and asked, “What noise?”

I heard it again, and traced its source: of course.

“Turn out your pockets, Edith. The other pockets. No, Mrs Nunnally, I’ll handle this. Edith, give the boy back his puppy. In any event, it’s far too young to be away from its mother – its eyes aren’t even open. How much did you pay him? Really, for that scrawny – never mind, give it back. No, let him keep your money, it can be a lesson to you.”

I tried to get the driver to chide the enterprising local that a puppy that small would only sicken and die if taken from its mother; judging from the amused reaction of the people lined up at the charabanc door, either the Portuguese were disturbingly heartless, or the exhortation changed somewhat in translation.

I climbed on, counted heads for the twentieth time, and off we drove.

* * *

Someone from the Avenida-Palace, it seemed, had made the arrangements not only for our transportation, but for our welcome at the other end. We were greeted, gathered up, refreshed with luncheon at a nearby café, then loaded upon a fleet of decorative if rickety wooden carts and aimed at the hill under whose side Cintra sheltered.

Most of us took pity on the animals after half a mile or so and climbed down to walk. (Daniel Marks, after due consideration, decided that noblesse-or perhaps virtus – oblige, and joined us; Bibi did not.) The exertion helped to dispel the effects of the faint drizzle that had begun to fall, or at least take our minds off it. A few of the girls tried to rouse community feeling with song, but that soon petered out when the pedestrians lacked sufficient breath to participate other than in brief gasps, while those huddled beneath their travelling rugs felt an uneasy suspicion that singing might be taken for lightness of heart.

It was a long hill.

I wondered if I was drifting towards the hallucinations of hypoxia when, on raising my head to appraise the next unforgiving rise, a garden party appeared. There was a taut canvas marquee. A queue of what could only be servants stood just beneath the cloth roofline; three uniformed grooms trotted out to take our horses’ reins.

A small fortune in hothouse flowers stood, incongruously, in three enormous tin buckets. I could even smell them. But then, I thought I smelt bacon as well, which was every bit as unlikely as the flowers.

Our party, stunned respectively either by breathlessness or by cold, stumbled towards the oasis. To my astonishment, it did not shiver and fade away as we drew near. Cups of piping tea were thrust into our hands, platters of fresh, buttered rolls laid with crisp bacon were set before us, scones with – well, no, not clotted cream, but with butter and jam were shovelled onto the plates of famished adolescents.

Cheeks that had been variously hectic pink or blue with cold took on a more uniform glow. Blue eyes began to sparkle.

After my third cup, I worked my way over to Will Currie to ask, “Have you any idea how this came to be?”

“Ah,” he said. “It’s all very well for a country to stage a revolution, but after fourteen years, buildings do want keeping up. Windows don’t wash themselves. Seems the staff of the Royal Palace, just up the road, were happy to take on some pounds sterling in exchange for a day or two of alternate service.”

“Let that be a lesson to us all.”

“When the Revolution comes to Britain, it’ll be no time at all before we set the toppled statues upright and beg the King to come back and pay his own bills. You finished with your tea, Miss Russell? Let’s take a look at where we’re meant to film.”

Our impromptu garden party was at the edge of the road near the ruins of Castello dos Mouros, the Castle of the Moors, overlooking a wide plain of rich farmland with the Rio Tejo to the south and the Atlantic to the west. The castle (which had, in fact, once been Moorish) had guarded the vitals of Portugal for centuries. In the twelfth century, the place was sacked by passing Norwegians, on their way to the Holy Land. They must have recalled with fondness this frigid, wind-shoved, rain-whipped place as they plunged into their Crusader hell. (Had they decided to stay, I reflected, it would have made for an interesting shift in Iberian history.) By the fifteenth century, the hilltop fortress had been more or less abandoned, when finally even the Jews decided that Cintra in the lee of the mountain had to be more comfortable.

“They say it’s quite pleasant in the summer,” Will said sourly. “We have to make do with the flowers.”

“Flowers? Ah, I see: to give the impression of spring-time in Penzance.”

“Three hundred of the bloo – of the dratted things. We stick them in the earth so they look natural.”

“Whatever happened to realism?” I murmured.

“Pardon?”

“Where does Mr Fflytte want you to film?” I said.

Will set off to explore the walls – which, upon closer examination, looked more like an elaborate Victorian folly than an actual working castle. I followed him for a while, since I was supposed to be his assistant, but as he clambered and dangled and risked his neck on walls designed more for decoration than for invasion-repulsion, I went back to where we had begun, huddling into my coat until he returned.

“We’ll shoot here. No need for lights. Pain in the neck, lights. Maybe a reflector.” He was thinking aloud, frowning at the sort of glade or small amphitheatre in which we stood. It had a pool at its centre. I stood beside him and looked, imagining it transformed into black-and-white images on a screen, and had to admit, the setting would bring an unexpected degree of drama to what was a rather fatuous scene.

“I have to admit,” I told him, “the setting will help that scene.”

“The girls can dance in from the left, there. Gather in front of that section of wall, wondering if they dare remove their shoes and stockings to wade. Then pantomime the beginning of doing so. Fflytte and Hale may think it’s too risqué to show, but they’re the editors. Marks goes behind that tree; the camera will see him but the girls won’t.”

“And the flowers?” Fortunately, the rains had brought a faint stubble of growth, so blossoms wouldn’t be springing out of bare rock.

“Put them where the girls sit. Give them something to do while they’re taking their shoes off.”

I had to wonder if the laconic Welshman had ever made a more, as he called it, risqué film. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

We returned to the tent, hearing music as we came along the hillside path, and found that someone had set up a gramophone. The girls were kicking up their heels and were nicely dry and pink-cheeked. When I pulled the needle from the record, their complaints were short-lived.

We led them through the mossy boulders to the proposed site, told the girls and Frederic what we planned, allowed Graziella Mazzo (wearing a coat today over her scarf-frock, and sandals) to flutter around her assigned dance-stage, and then sent them all back to town. By the time Will and I got the daffodils in the ground, it would be too late to begin filming: Plant now, and shoot in the morning.

I received my bucket and my hand-trowel, and we got to planting.

A hundred or so stems later, my hand was numb, my back was on fire, my garments were soaked from labour and mist. Will finished his last dozen, and we stood back to look at our handiwork.

“I have to say, that’s going to look fabulous,” I told him.

“Cost a fortune. I thought Mr Fflytte was mad – but then, I usually do. I’ve stopped arguing with him, he’s always right.”

We retrieved our empty buckets and walked in friendly accord back towards the tent. As we left the castle proper, we passed through a pair of oddly placed stone structures that I had seen earlier. This time, I stopped to look at them – then looked more closely, climbing up on the right-hand structure to rip away some fingers of obscuring ivy.

A skull and crossbones, carved into the stone.

* * *

The marquee remained, but the staff had gone. One of the carts was there, the driver stretched out on a bare table, snoring. We roused him and let the horse trot us down the hill to the town.

The hotel was adequate, the evening meal a step better than adequate, and the wine the best I’d had yet in this country. A holiday spirit took hold of the girls, aided no doubt by other spirits, and Marks and our Bonnie were moved to offer a series of duets, spoken and in song, from other ventures they had shared. We took to our beds well pleased with our side of Pirate King, and ready for the initial filming on the morrow.

In the absence of handsome pirates, I did not even feel it necessary to patrol the hotel corridors that night.

Will and I finished our breakfast before the others had come down, heading up the hill in a cart laden with his tools of the trade – cameras and reflective screens, cases and bundles, even an arc lamp he did not intend to use. The equipment was bulky, but lighter than half a dozen girls had been, which meant that this morning, the horse was positively frisky in its ascent. We found the marquee unoccupied, other than a small mountain of provisions that had been delivered during the night. The cart-man helped us unload our equipment, then Will set his tarpaulin-wrapped camera on his shoulder, I picked up the aluminium screens, and we went back along the path.

Past the pirate-stones, into the fort’s main gate, down to the clearing with its pond.

And face to face with a goat. A chewing goat, with an expensive, hothouse daffodil bobbing from its lips.

It was the last flower in sight.

I dropped the satchel and caught the camera being ejected from Will Currie’s shoulder as he launched himself at the devil’s spawn, a roar in his throat and murder in his eyes. The goat took one look and shot through the picturesque ruined gate to skip light-footedly away on the tumbled stones towards the valley below.

* * *

Telegrams were exchanged, the phone lines having proved erratic. Hale assured us replacement flowers would be there by afternoon. The girls introduced themselves to the residents of the decidedly bizarre royal palace uphill from the ruined fort, where most of the marquee employees normally worked, and desported themselves through the once-royal hallways (bereft of tourists, what with the weather, the economy, and the political turmoil) of the former convent (which had borne the cheering name Nossa Senhora da Pena: Our Lady of Punishment) while Will and I planted a second set of flowers.

I hired a guard for the night, a fit young man who understood that a return of goats would mean his instant death, and we arrived on Wednesday morning to find the daffodils intact, the sun out, the walls still standing.

But no pond. Had the goats consumed that, too?

“I thought this was a pond,” Will screamed at the hapless young man.

“Pond?” said the man.

I knew he spoke some English, so I contributed a few synonyms. “Lake? Pool? You know – a body of water.”

“Water? Yes, puddle.”

“Well no, not exactly-” Will started, but I laid a hand on his arm.

“I think it may be, exactly.” And so it turned out: What we had thought to be a conveniently located pond was merely a puddle; in the absence of rain the day before, it was now more of a wallow.

“Well, perhaps we could still …” I started, but Will was already shaking his head.

“A dozen nice English girls are not going to be stripping down for a frolic in mud. Without water, there’s no reason for them to be here. Fflytte will toss it all out.”

“So,” I persisted, “let’s bring in some water. Don’t look at me like that. If we can bring in flowers, we can bring in water.”

“I’m not carrying buckets up that hill.”

“I hadn’t thought of doing it personally, no.”

* * *

Thus it was that on Thursday, four days after we’d come to Cintra, the camera finally started turning. Before us lay a pond of very expensive water, trucked and carried in before dawn that morning by a small army of hirelings, local farmers, and servants from the palace – and if it was mere inches deep and more mud-choked than sparkling, on film it would be fine. Around the pseudo-lake, the surviving flowers stood – and if they looked moth-eaten and wilted up close, despite several sprinklings of water, again, they would look just fine on film. As we came off the carts at the garden tent, the sun even came out – and if it was cold enough to put a rime of frost on the blossoms and set the girls to shivering, well, we had a brazier going behind the camera to warm up between takes, and adding a blush to cheeks was the reason we’d brought Maude, the make-up woman.

Of course, some of the girls had tried to insulate themselves by wearing jumpers and woollen hose under the spring frocks the scene required, making Sally complain at the ill fit of her laboriously constructed costumes. However, once I had mused loudly about how fat this Portuguese food was making the girls, there was a flurry of activity around the impromptu dressing-room, and the problem went away.

The girls took their places. Graziella flitted about (tripping over a pair of shoes I’d ordered her to put on). I consulted my heavily annotated copy of the Pirate King script, printing the scene’s details in big, clear letters on the slate. Will, soft cap reversed, put his face to the camera and had Frederic stand against the tree, then shift an inch or two at a time, while I adjusted the reflective screen. When he was happy with how the light hit the actor’s face, Will told Signorina Mazzo to stop breathing in his ear, asked Mabel to move her head left a fraction, and finally said, “Miss Russell, hold up the slate in front of the girls for a few seconds, then say ‘Camera!’ and get away fast.”

“Me?”

“Just say it.”

So I pronounced the word, and thus began my career as a moving picture director.

The scene went beautifully, even a rank amateur like me could see that. Bibi had a natural bent for placing herself at the forefront of any scene, with the other girls forming a visual chorus around her. Daniel Marks set his shoulders to indicate a degree of intense fascination, wrapping his torso around the tree to watch the girls without being seen. Will’s arm worked the crank with a smooth and unvarying speed, until he stopped cranking and stood up, saying, “Cut.”

The scene disintegrated with Mabel jumping up to exclaim that she’d been sitting on something sharp and Bonnie complaining that Celeste had been blocking her light, and Frederic objecting that we weren’t filming his good side. He became quite upset when I made the mistake of saying I couldn’t see any difference, but Will smoothed things over by saying that he would be doing a number of close-ups from the desired side, since Fflytte would be sure to want them.

Then he pulled the girls together to do the scene again. It took a couple of hours to finish the group shots, some of which required me to act as his assistant, turning the handle as he panned the camera. He had to correct me a couple of times, telling me I was slowing my turning speed, but the takes seemed to satisfy him. Later, he shifted the camera to Daniel Marks, then to Bibi, first in their rôles as Frederic and Mabel, then in modern dress as the director of Pirates and his actress-fiancée. Afterwards, he had Bibi change back into her Pirates garb, to shoot three takes of Mabel’s expression on seeing Frederic, then an assortment of different poses – looking down in contemplation, raising a startled hand to her mouth, casting a look of mischief at a sister. He also filmed several versions of Bibi slowly drawing one stocking down a shapely ankle: with flowers in the background; dangling over the pond; with flowers and pond; with a flower floating in the pond …

“I think the sun is going,” I finally said, drawing an end to this fascination. The rest of the girls and Marks had long since retreated to the refreshments of the tent, and the wind was growing chilly. Bibi jerked up her stocking and stepped into her shoe, wrapped herself in her warm furs, and flounced away down the hill, leaving us to carry the film and equipment.

“How was that, do you think?” I asked the cameraman.

“Some of it looked very nice, although I won’t know for sure until I see it later.”

“What, tonight?”

“Have to be – can’t leave until I’m sure we got everything Mr Fflytte needs. I can give it a squint, just to see there aren’t any major boobs.”

“Do you want some help?”

“You don’t need to.”

“What can I do?”

“Come to my room tonight and give me a hand with the developing.”

* * *

It did cross my mind that Will might intend something other than film to develop within his room. However, I knocked on his door just after dinner, and although he answered in a state of relative dishabille, the stink that wafted out was in no way suggestive of romance.

Some of the odour was the film itself. But when he crossed the room again to the inner door, I could see why he had demanded the luxury of a large bath-room when we checked in: This was his developing room. I eyed the carboys of various noxious liquids, and rolled up my sleeves.

We finished shortly after midnight. My back ached, my hands were raw, my head spun from the unrelenting stench of the developing fluids. But when at last Will switched off the dim red lamp under which we had been working and held the strips of negative up to the strong light, he pronounced the film usable. He told me he would polish and pack it away in its tins after it had dried. We could return to Lisbon, triumphant.

“Want a drink?” Will offered.

“I think I’ll take myself to bed,” I told him. I said good-night, let myself out into the hallway, and came face to face with Annie and Celeste.

“What are you doing out here?” I demanded.

They looked at each other, and giggled.

It would seem the girls had discovered that Cintra did, after all, possess young males.

I sent these two to their rooms and patrolled the hallways for a couple of hours, just in case.

* * *

No catastrophes spoilt the film during the night. The hotel was not struck by lightning, earthquake, or pestilence. None of the girls disappeared from their rooms (or if they did, they had found their way back by morning). The charabanc came soon after breakfast, and we loaded ourselves and our precious film inside. We were back in Lisbon in time for a late lunch.

To be greeted by the information that the Harlequin would up anchor at eleven o’clock the following morning.

With everyone on board.

Sailing for Morocco.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

PIRATE KING: When your process of extermination begins, let our deaths be as swift and painless as you can conveniently make them.

“MOROCCO? BUT – BUT I thought we were going to film on the boat for a day or two and then get on the steamer!”

“She’s a ship, by the way, in case you’d rather avoid a lecture from Randolph-‘boat’ from a new hand suggests derision. Randolph decided that using her as transport would be a way to recoup some of the money we’d put out for repairs.” Fflytte hadn’t the courage to tell us himself, I thought: He’d sent Hale to do the job.

“We’ll all drown.”

“Actually, I was surprised. She’s more sea-worthy than she looks.”

“A bath-tub without a plug would be more sea-worthy than that boat looks.”

“Believe me, my reaction was the same as yours. I went down yesterday and poked around in all the corners. Beneath the surface untidiness, she’s been maintained – the bilge is even dry. I had to have them add water to test the pumps.”

I put a hand to my forehead: The very word bilge made me queasy. “But, the sails?”

“There’s enough to fill the camera lens,” he answered, adding, “It does have an engine.”

Oh, this was getting better every moment: stinking fumes to add to the heave of the boat.

“Although it only goes forward, for some reason,” he added. “But we have the sweeps, as back-up.”

“Sweeps?”

“Long oars.”

“I know what sweeps are. But who do you envision pulling them? Bibi and Mrs Hatley? The girls? Oh God – has Fflytte got it into his head that the pirates would use the girls as galley slaves?” I really would shoot the man. Or brain him with one of his oars. Sweeps.

“The crew will pull them. And as I said, it’s only as back-up.”

“How many days …?”

“To Morocco? Three or four.”

Meaning five, on a small and leaky tub, shoulder to shoulder with three dozen members of Fflytte Films and sixteen pirates – plus the ship’s crew, however many that was. I may have groaned.

Hale laughed, and gave my shoulder a comradely slap. “Don’t worry, it’ll be over in no time.”

I could always go home. I was not proving very successful in my assignment, in any event, which in all probability meant not that I was failing, but that there was no case here to investigate. Secretaries flee, drugs and guns are sold: The reasons for suspecting criminality among Fflytte’s crew were so ephemeral as to be nonexistent.

But I knew I wouldn’t.

Instead, I retrieved my increasingly splayed note-pad from my pocket, unclipped the pencil, and asked, “What do you need?”

He handed me a list, a daunting list, filling a sheet to the bottom, and then some. “Oh, and I meant to add, Mr Pessoa promised to find us some traditional Portuguese clothing.”

“I suppose he’s coming with us?” My heart sank at the prospect of explaining that our translator wrote enthusiastic poems about lascivious violence – and worse, explaining how I knew. But to my surprise, Hale was shaking his head.

“No. When I told him that we were going to leave on Saturday, he suggested that enough of the pirates spoke a rudimentary English for us to get by without him.”

“So you didn’t fire him?”

“I didn’t have to, no. In fact, I got the impression that he was quite relieved when I didn’t beg him to stay on. However, there were one or two things left undone, and although he said he’d come by first thing tomorrow, it’s probably better not to depend on him. If he has the clothing, you could give him his final cheque.”

I agreed, somewhat distracted by Hale’s list, and by his information. If there was any villain in this piece (indeed, if there was any villainy) I had thought that Pessoa would be in some way involved. For him willingly to retire suggested either that his part was done, or there had been no part to begin with, other than acting as translator.

As for the rest, it was a very long list.

* * *

I ran Mr Pessoa to earth in an office in the Baixa district, a remarkably unremarkable setting for the would-be poet laureate of Portugal. He was one of a number of men sitting at type-writing machines, cigarettes in mouths, oblivious of the clamour of clacks and dings. I waited for a surge of distaste when I spotted him, but somehow I could not feel it. He was a poet; he wore many personalities; one of those personalities took joy in repugnant images. But I could no more dislike the man himself than I could a young boy who played at shooting Red Indians.

As I wound my way between the desks, trying not to choke on the palpable grey mist oozing into my lungs, he came to the end of his document, jerked it from the machine, tucked it into an envelope, and dropped the result into an out-tray on his desk. He looked up and saw me swim out from the smoke.

“Miss Russell! I did not expect to see you again.”

“Mr Hale asked-” He waited politely for my paroxysm of coughing to clear. After a minute, he took his cigarette and crushed it into the overflowing tray, as if that would help. Finally, I managed to get out, “Can we speak outside?”

The shock of clean air made matters worse for a time; when I finally drew an uninterrupted breath, Mr Pessoa was looking quite alarmed. He suggested that we get something to drink.

I waved away his concerns, but accepted the offer of refreshment. Which – no surprise – was only a brief walk away, a narrow room fragrant with coffee and sprinkled with student types. Pessoa was so well known there, his cup was handed to him without enquiry. I told the waiter I’d have one of the same, which turned out to be the dribble of powerful coffee essence called bica, similar to the Italian espresso, and just the thing for clearing the lungs. When we were settled and he had begun to roll a cigarette, I said, “Mr Hale wanted me to ask you about Portuguese fancy-dress?”

“Er, do you mean the traditional clothing?”

“Precisely.”

“That should be delivered to the wharf before evening. Do you wish me to check on it?”

“It might be a good idea, thank you. Which reminds me-your cheque.”

He received the slip of paper and tucked it away in his billfold. “It has been an interesting experience, Miss Russell.”

Interesting. Yes. “I understand you won’t be coming on the Harlequin with us.”

“I find I have neither desire nor need to leave my city. Although I will admit, were I to do so, your enterprise might be the one to prise me away.”

I took a cautious sip from my cup, and reached for the sugar. “I don’t think I ever heard how you came to be involved in the first place.”

“A connexion through that office you just saw. They arrange for translations of business documents. I have skills in English and French, and I can work the hours I like. Poetry feeds the soul, but does little to nourish the body or keep out the rain.”

“So Mr Hale contacted you through the translation service?”

Pessoa struck a match, squinted at me through the resulting smoke-cloud. “Indirectly, I believe. He has a friend in London, a solicitor for whom I have translated any number of documents. The friend gave him my name and, when I received his enquiry, I decided that I could as easily do vocal translation as written.”

“Was it Mr Hale himself who wrote to you, or his secretary, Miss Johns?”

“I should imagine it was she, although I don’t remember precisely. I have exchanged letters and telegrams with both.”

“Would you have the letters?”

“Undoubtedly. Although they may have a poem or notes for a story on their reverse side by now. I tend to make full use of all the scraps of paper that come into my possession,” he explained. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, my predecessor in the job quit rather unexpectedly, leaving one or two tasks unfinished. I’d like to ask her about them, if I could only find her.”

“Yes, I did wonder at the abrupt stylistic changes in the last communications I had from Mr Hale. That would explain it. But if you’re asking, no, she gave no indication that she was leaving, much less where.”

“Ah well, we’ll make do. Perhaps I shall see you on our return to Lisbon, Mr Pessoa.”

“I should enjoy another of our discussions, Miss Russell. Although I don’t imagine I shall be accepting a position as live translator again. Once was an experience; twice would be somewhat … disruptive.”

“Well, I shouldn’t think most translating positions would be as innately disruptive as working for a film crew.”

“You certainly have your work cut out for you, Miss Russell,” he agreed, with a definite twinkle coming from behind those spectacles.

The twinkle nearly loosed my tongue: I was hit by a powerful urge to tell the man who I was. Knowing that he was sitting knee to knee with the real-life wife of the storybook Sherlock Holmes would send Fernando Pessoa/Álvaro de Campos/Ricardo Reis/etc. into throes of intellectual and poetic ecstasy, and give him a lifetime of material for his theories of deliberate pretence and personal identity. But however much I liked the fellow, I did not know that I could trust him.

And so we ended, with Fernando Pessoa taking out his pouch to fashion another cigarette, every bit as enigmatic as he’d been when I’d first met him, eight days before.

* * *

I did not get to bed that night, and as a result, drew a line through the final item on Hale’s list-“check hotel rooms for items left behind”-at ten minutes after nine on Saturday morning. I’d even managed to scribble a brief letter to Holmes, telling him of the change in plans and reminding him that if the Harlequin went down at sea, my most recent Will was at the solicitor’s.

Of course, absolute chaos seethed at the wharf. Edith’s mother was frantic because her diabolical child had contrived to leave their passports in a drawer: I handed her the documents (which had, rather, been thrust into the farthest reaches of the bed). Bibi was in a fury because someone had stolen her pearl hair-clasp that the Duke of Edinburgh had given her: I assured her it had merely worked its way into a chair’s cushions, and held out the bag in which I had placed it, along with three frilly undergarments, an ivory-handled hair-brush, a pair of belts left on a hook in the bath-room, one red patent-leather shoe, five silk stockings, and a number of objects from the drawer of the bed-side table, which I took care not to examine too closely. Hale spoke in my ear – shouted, near enough – that he’d forgot to tell me that Major-General Stanley had drunk himself into a near-coma the other night and was in no shape to go anywhere, so he’d hired a replacement; that Will-the-Camera was going to need to take over one of the cabins to develop any film shot on board; that Will’s assistant, Artie, had another nervous collapse and was currently in a Lisboan sanatorium; and that he’d brought on board two sail-makers, who would also be available for sewing costumes if Sally needed them.

A dozen similar near-catastrophes and pieces of news assaulted me. Most of the problems I could deal with then and there, sending the complainants up the gangway onto the boat.

Unfortunately, the crowd soon thinned, a feather bed was successfully folded and inserted into the companionway with only a minor eruption of down, the last parcels were brought aboard (including, yes, Mr Pessoa’s traditional Portuguese dresses), and I was left with no distraction from what lay before me.

A very small boat, wasn’t it? And despite being in rather better condition than I’d anticipated, and showing signs of very recent and highly aggressive cleaning, it was still an old boat, and laden with a distressing number of chronically excitable people. My gaze travelled unwillingly down the twin masts (they did look more nearly parallel, didn’t they?) seizing on the occasional encouraging sign of a new rope and a gleam of varnish. The masts and beams showed no obvious sign of rot, the fore mast appeared to have a full complement of sails, and the aft mast, although naked of canvas, seemed to have the rest of its rigging in place. There were even a few scraps of fresh paint, one of which was her name.

“Ready to come aboard, Miss Russell?”

The high voice brought my eyes down to my next immediate challenge: the deck itself. La Rocha stood at the far end of the gangway, his meaty hands gripping the top of the bulwarks. His teeth were bared in a grin, and he exuded a most proprietary air. A pirate king, in all his particulars.

“Mr La Rocha-” I began.

“Captain.”

I sighed: another actor who had fallen in love with his character. “Won’t that rather confuse matters? I mean to say, the Harlequin’s captain may object.”

“I am Harlequin captain, Miss Russell.”

My jaw fell open. I felt it drop, and could only stare, but he just grinned all the wider. “Mr Fflytte buy Harlequin, I sail it for him. What, you think I was schoolteacher, maybe?”

“But, I thought … a fisherman?”

“Yes! On ship. Ship just like this, once. Come, Miss Russell. Everyone else on board.”

Yes, that was the rub, wasn’t it? Everyone else: all the people for whom I was responsible. I stood gaping up at him, wondering why I felt as if a spider had just invited me to see his nice web.

I took a deep breath, and set my foot on the worn gangway.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

MAJOR-GENERAL: As I lay in bed awake,

I thought I heard a noise.

EVEN WITH THE tide sucking us towards the open sea, it took us forever to reach it.

La Rocha’s crew was – I should have guessed it – our pirates.

Except that most of the men clearly hadn’t worked under sail for years, if ever, yet La Rocha absolutely insisted that we use the sails. The rest of us shifted around in front of the crew like herded sheep, trying to find a square foot of deck that might not be required by a man pulling on a rope – and continually failing to anticipate the antics of the racing, sweating figures. Eventually we were driven into four or five tight knots, and there we stayed, gazing at the antics.

Except that the antics of unpractised men made La Rocha roar, then sent him rigid and silent with fury while Samuel took over the roaring. The girls tittered when our captain’s voice climbed shrilly and commented at every slip of the hand and foot. Then the sailors’ tongues started as well, the meaning of their words plain despite the foreign languages, and the mothers hastily escorted their charges below, joined by most of the other girls.

Which left the rest of us – the men, six women, and me – shifting from amusement to discomfort to growing alarm. Finally, when we had spun lazily less than a mile from the port and twice nearly collided with other ships, Fflytte decided to take charge of operations. Hale tried to stop him, but the director shook off his cousin’s hand and marched down to the quarterdeck, where La Rocha’s hands gripped the wheel so hard one imagined the wood creaking while Samuel cursed one of the younger men dangling overhead – Irving or Jack, I wasn’t sure – for pulling on the wrong rope and sending everything into a tangle.

“I say,” Fflytte called as he went up the two small steps, “wouldn’t it be easier to just set the engine going and try out the sails when we have a little more elbow room? That last fellow seemed a bit-”

Only Samuel’s lightning reactions saved the director from a hospital bed. The belaying pin left La Rocha’s grip just as Samuel’s fist made impact, deflecting the heavy wood three inches shy of its target: Instead of smashing into Fflytte’s face, it took a chunk out of the rail, spun in the air, and splashed into the water. La Rocha turned on his lieutenant with his own clenched fist, but Samuel stood his ground. The two men stared at each other for an unnerving length of time before La Rocha’s shoulders subsided a fraction and Samuel raised his chin to yell at the boy in the rigging. Neither man acknowledged Fflytte’s presence, ten feet away.

White-faced, Fflytte crept back to where Hale and I stood. I removed my hand from the knife in my boot, and made myself sit. Fflytte mopped his forehead with a handkerchief, and said in a shaking voice, “Best not to interrupt the fellow when he’s upset. He’ll sort them out in a minute.”

Indeed, in a minute Adam (who seemed to know what he was doing) directed Jack (or Irving) to the correct rope, and the dead canvas overhead began to stir, as if dimly calling to mind its purpose in life.

And then, magic: The canvas awoke.

With a startling crack and a jolt of the ship, the canvas filled, proud and taut. Harlequin gave a little sigh of relief and settled into place behind her square-rigged foremast, creaking all over as ten thousand planks, long accustomed to the ignominious drive of an engine’s screw, made their infinitesimal adjustments to the draw from above. The men cheered, Fflytte leapt up and clapped his hands, and I tipped my head back to watch the wind carrying us to sea.

Harlequin was, now that the accretions of the fishing trade had been hacked away, a brigantine, a two-masted ship (as Randolph Fflytte, instantaneous expert on all things maritime, had informed anyone who came within earshot the day before) designed expressly for nimbleness and flexibility. The fore mast had square sails, the kind that fly at right angles – square – to the line of the hull. These had beams along their tops – called yards – and a great deal of the shouting had been in encouraging the men to inch along the looped ropes strung beneath the yards, clinging for their lives as they prepared to loose the ties and drop the canvas. Not a job I would care for, myself, even in the softest wind.

The other mast, rising up just in front of the quarterdeck, held a different kind of sail. Fflytte had called them fore-and-aft sails and, as one might expect, they were arranged along the front-to-back line of the ship, rather than across it. Where the fore mast was fitted with four yards that sails dropped down from, the aft mast possessed a long yard at the bottom from which the big mainsail would be lifted. This yard, which was low enough to require the occupants of the quarterdeck to duck under it, looked a bit naked, since it had no canvas – no doubt the reason we’d brought two sail-makers on board at the last minute. Studying it, I decided its current nudity was probably a good thing: That massive beam would surely swing around when the wind hit its canvas, and in the confusion of getting out of the harbour, it would have bashed in the skull of anyone but Randolph Fflytte or the diminutive Linda.

As I traced the myriad of ropes and canvas and bits of machinery over my head, I saw that there was a third variety of sails on the guy-wires – stays – that ran between the two masts and from deck to masts, locking everything in place. These staysails were long triangles, and like the mainsails, they rose from below instead of dropping from yards.

Once the men were safely down from the yards, orders came to haul on various ropes. By close concentration, I could follow the lines from men through tackle and up into the heights – and I saw the yard lift from its locked position to swivel on the mast, reaching for the wind.

What a remarkably complicated piece of technology this was.

Harlequin did have an engine (at any rate, she had a mass of metal connected to a propeller – I tried not to think what it might do if someone tried to start it up) but she was old enough that it had to be an addition. Originally, in the absence of wind (or, for tight manoeuvres in the days of the brigantino), she would have depended on the sweeps – long oars – for propulsion. There were still a handful of the brackets to fit them into.

Of course, were she an actual pirate ship, Harlequin would also have carried up to a dozen cannon; I counted among my blessings that she was not fitted for them now. If she had been, surely Fflytte and La Rocha would have goaded each other into capturing a passing American passenger steamer. For the sake of realism.

With our captain’s squall of rage safely past and the little ship on the move, the girls drifted back on deck. To my surprise, they voiced no outraged complaints, no-one stormed across the deck to demand that we instantly put back to land. I was braced for the reaction of civilised English girls faced with the filthy, cramped, and stinking conditions of a fishing boat below decks, and it did not come.

Looking around, it dawned on me that a minor miracle had taken place: Harlequin was clean, scrubbed down to raw wood in places. The air smelt not of fish, but of Jeyes Fluid. The change extended to the deck fittings themselves: Without the various bins, nets, and tackles that it had worn on first sight, the vessel looked almost bare. A tall deckhouse rose behind the fore mast, with a raised sky-light under the main mast and the quarterdeck at the back: Apart from those interruptions, the deck (its surface currently pocked with bolt-holes and fresh splinters) was clear.

Our crew, keenly aware of that chorus of blue eyes upon them, gained in confidence; a few of them even demonstrated a bit of piratical swagger. There came another dangerous moment when we reached the sea, and either the wind changed or it was just that we turned southward. The deck took on an alarming tilt; the wind began to whistle around our ears. Activity erupted, involving a lot of complicated adjustments and running about, with enraged cursing in several languages – this time the girls found their own reasons to retreat hastily below decks, to change for dinner. Eventually, we settled into the new course, having neither keeled over nor witnessed murder.

Without a mainsail, we could not move very rapidly despite the brisk wind. So I was not surprised, as cooking smells rose from below, to see the sail-makers go to a small hatch in the bow and begin to haul out an incredible quantity of canvas. When they’d completed this magician’s scarf trick and covered the deck in canvas, they set to work.

As I watched the two men tug and measure, I became aware of the steady tick of the camera, recording the activity despite the setting sun and an absence of sail-makers in Fflytte’s script. Will had told me that he always came away from a movie with hundreds of feet of excess film, some of which was never intended for the subject at hand. And lest I imagine those hours were of stockings being eased down ankles, he revealed a secret passion for nature photography. “Most amazing shots I got one time of porpoises playing. Like ballroom dancing, it was.”

Tonight, the light was too dim for much, so he folded away his equipment and said to me, “We’ve got Maurice cooking, at last.”

“Who’s Maurice?”

“Ah, that’s right, you’re new, and he’s just got in from Paris. Maurice was Mr Hale’s idea. He figures that if you’re asking actors to spend weeks locked at sea or in the desert or what have you, the least you can do is see they’re well fed. Which is a fine theory until you go looking for a cook who doesn’t mind being locked at sea or in the desert. But he finally found Maurice, who’s mad enough to love every minute of it. Swears he hates it, does Maurice. Crashes his pans and curses up a storm – not much in English when there’s girls around – and acts like it’s a personal victory to come up with lovely food under the most appalling conditions. Wait ’til you see.”

This was a long speech from Will, suggesting great affection for the cook and his labours. I hated to disappoint him; however:

“I, er, tend not to eat much on board a ship.”

“I remember. You don’t look too bad at the moment.”

I considered the statement, and said in surprise, “No, I’m feeling all right, so far.”

“How’s the food smell?”

“Delicious, actually.”

“Then you might try it. Maybe you’ve got used to sailing.”

It seemed unlikely, as I’d been ill on every voyage I could remember, but he was right, the odours trickling up onto the deck had my stomach rumbling rather than clenching, which was an entirely new experience. Gingerly, I followed him down the narrow steps, ready to retreat into fresh air at every moment. But the air smelt of nothing but good, and all remained calm as I washed my hands and changed from the trousers I had put on in Cintra the previous morning, then ventured into the galley.

It was set with linen and crystal. The air smelt of honey, from a small forest of beeswax candles that brought with them the odour of home. Laden bowls and platters were carried in, and I found that still, the food smelt gorgeous. It tasted better. I had a glass of wine, and ate everything.

Gazing down at the fruit compote that was dessert, I laughed aloud.

Annie, sitting across from me, looked over with a question. I explained, “It would appear that sail travel agrees with me.”

She smiled, uncertainly, and poured a dollop of thick cream over her plate.

* * *

Later that night, the girls, worn out by fresh air and excitement compounded by a rich meal, turned early to the singular experience of making one’s bed inside a hammock (except for Bibi, who was ensconced into a private cabin so small, her feather bed ran up the walls on three sides). They giggled and wrestled their way into the strange objects, shrieking in merry alarm as the taut canvas cradles flipped them out the other side. Then Annie either analysed the problem or recalled past experience, and loosened the ropes through her hammock’s overhead hooks. Sagging, the object proved less impossible to mount, and the others followed her example. Although a couple of the mothers absolutely refused to submit to the indignity, settling instead onto the hard bunks around the edges, the others were soon bundled triumphantly inside their soft wrappings. Talk and restless adjustments of extremities and blankets quickly gave way before the rocking motion, and soon the hold was nothing but a collection of silent cocoons, swaying in gentle unison.

And me.

After a while, I cautiously descended from my hammock and made my way above decks. I was well accustomed to spending most of a voyage braced in the fresh air, but that night I came up to escape nothing more troubling than the faint odour of fish and the snores of my cabin mates. In fact, I came up because I wanted to enjoy the sensation of a boat that did not make me ill.

The sail-makers had long since bundled their project out of the way. The only persons I could see were a pair of shadowy outlines on the quarterdeck. Adam – who, although by no means the eldest of the crew, was clearly deemed one of the more responsible – was at the wheel; with him was young Jack. I gave them a small wave, but wandered in the other direction towards the bow. There, as far as I could see in the faint lamp-light, I was alone beneath the sails.

I paused halfway up the side, watching the delicate coruscations of the aft lamp dance across the sea, listening to the constant motion of the sails and ropes and all the complex, sophisticated, and nearly anachronistic mechanism of this form of travel. For the first time, I understood why people referred to a hull and its means of propulsion as “she.” Harlequin was alive, our partner in this enterprise. I would have sworn that she was grateful for Randolph Fflytte’s mad, romantic vision, which restored her, even temporarily, to her true self.

I could almost sympathise with his wish for active cannon.

I smiled, and leant over the rail, hoping for a ballet of porpoises, for a-

A hand came down on my shoulder, and I screamed. Like any mindless female who had permitted herself to become oblivious of a world of danger, I squeaked and punched hard at the large, silent, threatening figure who had taken advantage of my idiotic preoccupation with beauty to corner me on the deck.

My arm is strong. Had there been three steps of distance to the bulwarks, my assailant might have recovered. There were but two. The man staggered away, arms outstretched, and the back of his legs hit the side. One hand clawed at the worn wood but his centre of balance was compromised, and over he went. Calling my surname as he fell.

I leapt forward and grabbed the ropes, staring back helplessly at the splashing figure who dropped farther and farther behind us in the featureless sea.

Holmes.