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

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

KATE: Far away from toil and care,

Revelling in fresh sea-air.

Meanwhile, the previous Monday …

ABOUT THE TIME the charabanc full of Major-General Stanley’s thirteen blonde daughters was crawling out of Lisbon’s last hill on Monday, its War-era engine gasping for air much in the way its passengers would do on the hill above Cintra later that day, Teams One and Two arrived at their respective destinations. Within minutes, anger flared.

Team One, composed of Randolph St John Warminster-Fflytte and his piratical highness, La Rocha the First, disembarked from the taxi that Fflytte had judged necessary for the sake of face (even if, as he had to admit, they might have walked there and back in half the time) and presented themselves to the offices of the harbour master.

Which were shut, it having been judged time for morning coffee.

When the harbour master and his secretary returned, fifteen minutes later, Fflytte had worked himself into a state of high dudgeon and was ready to turn his aristocratic fury on someone, whereas La Rocha was … well, he was La Rocha. Anything might happen.

The harbour master was young, educated, and new to Lisbon (a beneficiary of the country’s current impoverishment and general dissatisfaction with The Way Things Were, young newcomers being both cheap and unaffiliated with the status quo). His secretary was a Lisboan, born and raised, who had lived within gull-cry of the water his entire life, and who had worked as a stevedore until an accident had cost him a few essential body parts. His wits, his modicum of literacy, and his ability to hold a pen landed him in the office instead of on the street, and here he remained, a valuable resource for three decades of harbour masters.

And this man knew La Rocha, oh yes. His hand came out as if to seize his employer’s coat, then faltered as his initial philanthropy was countered by craven self-interest: the impulse to turn heel and run. But the urge got no further than a brief step backwards before his nobler instincts regained control.

He caught his employer’s shoulder and murmured in that young man’s ear. The fresh face went from an expression of curiosity at the pair of men waiting to mild irritation at being manhandled by his inferior, followed by a frown of concentration at his secretary’s words, until his eyes went wide and his throat convulsed in a nervous swallow. The grey-haired assistant let go his grip. The boss settled his narrow shoulders inside the jacket, and came slowly forward.

“Good morning, gentlemen, I apologise for my absence. Are you waiting for me?” He spoke flawless English, and would have presented a face of complete assurance but for the tight wobble that was the final word. He made haste to get inside his office and around the back of the polished counter, as if personal territory combined with solid wood might offer a defence.

“Yes,” Fflytte answered. “There’s a ship in your harbour called Harlequin. I need to talk with the owner.”

“The-”

One word was all he managed before La Rocha began to speak. Everyone listened, even Fflytte, who did not understand a word of it but could appreciate authority when he heard it: incongruous voice, looming presence, and the texture of promised violence at the back of La Rocha’s torrent of words. The scar helped, too: The harbour master’s gaze wove in fascination between the compelling eyes and the terrible scar.

Within a couple of sentences, the young man was making a hurry-up gesture to his assistant, who ducked under the counter and began to pull out files. Less than a minute after La Rocha opened his mouth, the secretary stood up with a piece of paper in his good hand, and made to proffer it to La Rocha. The harbour master snatched it, then laid the page cautiously on the wood between the two strangers. La Rocha picked it up.

“Obrigado,” he said, like a pat on the head. He handed the page to Fflytte, who repeated the thanks in a surprised voice.

As the two men left the office, the sweating employees of the Lisboan harbour authority heard the tiny Englishman’s comment: “I say, they’re certainly more efficient than one might expect. They didn’t even have to look it up!”

The name and address were for a ship’s chandler near the harbour. This man, too, seemed almost to be expecting an enquiry concerning the Harlequin, although he was clearly not interested in a temporary arrangement. He flatly turned down Fflytte’s offer to hire the vessel for the week. When Fflytte pointed out that he would be returning the ship in considerably better shape than it was currently, the man’s eyes flicked briefly sideways in the direction of La Rocha before they locked back on Fflytte. No: It was for sale, to the right customer, but only for sale. And no: He could not introduce Fflytte to the owner, whose instructions had been clear, and who was in any event out of the area. The entire country, in fact. Perhaps forever. But to be absolutely honest (he said, earnestly holding Fflytte’s eyes, as if another glance at La Rocha would mean being reduced to smoking bones) the Harlequin was a bargain. Yes, she was not pretty, but the owner was getting out of the fishing business and wanted only to sell. To the right customer, as he had already indicated. And if he could be so bold to suggest, if the good gentleman did not wish to take the Harlequin back to England with him, once the ship was restored to beauty, she could be sold again, perhaps by sailing her around Spain to the coast of France where the wealthy gathered with little to-

La Rocha cleared his throat, and the man went a touch pale, dropping his gaze to his papers and scrabbling them about for a moment. Then he returned to his suggestion: Perhaps if Mr Fflytte would look at the proposal, he would see that purchasing Harlequin would be a far more beneficial arrangement.

So Mr Fflytte sat down with the papers, and to his surprise, what the man had said looked to be true. The purchase price was so reasonable it made him wonder what was keeping the vessel afloat.

Love might be blind, but it was not completely witless.

“I’ll have to have someone survey it for me,” he said firmly, expecting the man to quibble, but far from it, the fellow seemed quite relieved.

Fflytte took away a sheaf of papers, which he studied with the attitude of an unlovely octogenarian handed a marriage proposal by a charming young beauty: What am I not seeing here?

“I must speak with Geoffrey.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

PIRATE KING: Although we live by strife, We’re always sorry to begin it.

For what, we ask, is life Without a touch of Poetry in it?

Also the previous Monday …

IN THE MEANTIME, Team Two had gathered in the Maria Vitória to continue the arrangement of the pirates’ scenes. Without La Rocha to keep the men in line, Geoffrey Hale was anticipating problems, and his heart sank when his first instruction to gather round was completely ignored by the merrily chattering men.

Then Samuel’s single word crackled through the theatre, bringing instantaneous silence. He fixed the others, one by one, with a baleful eye, then turned to Hale and waved a hand of invitation.

Hale had no subsequent problems with discipline.

Not that there weren’t problems aplenty without discipline entering in.

Hale began by introducing the stand-in cameraman, William Currie’s assistant. This was a nervous and spotty Liverpudlian named Artie, who wore a soft cap that he never removed and prefaced each speech with a series of tugs at the beard he was attempting to grow. The pirates looked him over as if he were a puppy, or dinner.

“Artie is here to see that the fight scenes we plan out will work on the screen. Remember, the camera lens stands at one place, so if, for example, Adam – come here, Adam – goes to stab Charles – yes, you stand there – and in the meantime Earnest is in the way, the audience will make no sense of it when Charles falls with his hands to his stomach. You see?”

Charles said something, and Pessoa said, “He wants to know if he is going to die in the picture.”

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

Pessoa translated that, then Earnest spoke, and Pessoa said, “He says, who is he fighting with while the other two are stabbing each other?”

“Again, I don’t know.”

Translation, then Kermit spoke up, followed by Pessoa: “He wants to know if he can fight Irving. I think the two boys both have eyes for one of the girls. That is my comment, not what the boy says.”

“Tell him- Oh hell, this is going to make me crazy. Mr Pessoa, your English is really quite good. Do you think you might just try to keep up a running translation rather than pausing to say ‘He says’ and ‘He wants to know’?”

“I will try,” Pessoa said, and after that he did. At first he was slow and scrupulous, but within the hour he was caught up in the rhythm of it and even took to duplicating the inflections of the speaker.

It made things much easier.

The first scene took place in the pirate stronghold. Fflytte had marked the script with “pirates clown about,” which suited Hale as a starting place, since clowning was a good way both to break the ice and see what his amateur actors could do in the way of physical emoting.

“Now,” he told them, “I want you to remember that your audience won’t be able to hear your words. You have to tell them everything by your gestures, the expressions on your face, how you stand and move. Imagine that your audience on this stage is made up of deaf people. You-”

“Do you want us to shout louder?” Lawrence, the smallest and youngest, asked.

“No, they don’t hear at all. Surely you’ve all seen a moving picture?” All the heads nodded. “The only thing you hear is the music, isn’t it? Now, imagine that the cinema is filled with all those pretty girls, the sisters. They won’t be able to hear your words, will they? You have to impress them by how you act. You have to tell them your story without using words.”

The heads nodded again. Encouraged, Hale went on.

“Your first scene takes place in the pirate stronghold. You’re gathered there to celebrate the end of Frederic’s apprenticeship, since he has turned twenty-one.” The plot had been laboriously explained to them already, but reviews, Hale had found, were essential when amateurs were involved. “It’s a party, there’s drinking – although no, we’re not breaking out the rum today for the rehearsal-” (Hale was pleased when this brought groans and jokes from his pirates.) “-and there’s a lot of clowning around and … sorry, Mr Pessoa? Oh, clowning around is jokes, merry-making, games. It’s a celebration. So let’s pretend for a minute that you’re all at this party. I’ll play the part of Frederic, since he’s off with the sisters filming in Cintra. Raise your glasses – yes, just pretend – and … what would you do? Dancing? How about some dancing?”

He began to clap loudly, and Adam followed by Francis gave themselves over to the spirit of it and jumped about. Some of the others joined in, singing and leaping, and then two of them started a wrestling match and in moments the birthday party had disintegrated into a free-for-all of arms and legs and happy shouts. Hale waded in to separate the nearest pair of combatants, and a fist came out of the melee, sending him reeling.

For the second time, the pirate lieutenant’s voice sliced through the air, freezing a stageful of men in their places. Samuel moved fast, sending one lad flying and hauling another upright and off the boards in a single jerk.

“Stop!” Hale managed to wheeze. Samuel paused, looking over his shoulder. Hale coughed and said, “I’m Frederic, remember?”

The lieutenant studied him, then lowered the lad he had been holding – Earnest, looking very frightened indeed – gently to the floor. He brushed the boy off, bent to pick up a couple of hats and restore them to their respective heads, and stepped back to the side of the stage.

So much for clowning. Still, it suggested some additions to the scene, and when Hale had his breath back, he began to run through them: Several of the lads could perform cart-wheels (Lawrence took care to button his pet white mouse into its pocket first); middle-aged Gerald had a quite impressive squatting dance move, almost like a Russian folk-dance; Irving had a face like rubber; Benjamin had a dark intensity that would play well next to fair-headed Frederic.

And so it went.

Still, before long they ran up against the limitations of using a stage to practice scenes that took place out of doors. And other than the initial party, that included all of the scenes. Time and again, Hale would have to exhort a man to imagine that there was a tree there, or water behind him, or a boulder behind which he could hide. Each time he did so, a string of questions came trailing across the stage: How big a tree? (It doesn’t matter.) What kind of water? (Salt, with small waves.) Why is there a solitary boulder there? (Because I put it there.)

It did not take too many of these diversions before Hale felt like beating one of the less-imaginative pirates over the head with an invisible chair. He looked at his watch, and put out one hand, calling a halt and sending them all to lunch.

“And I want you sober when you come back!” he shouted at their backs. He sighed, gingerly prodded his bruised stomach, and retrieved the jacket he had shed in the heat of frustration. Pessoa, halfway down the aisle, paused to look back at the stage.

“Would it make a difference if you were to practice in the out of doors?” the translator asked with diffidence.

“Not in the manicured little parks you have around here, they’d be no better than the stage.”

“I was thinking, perhaps, the botanical gardens?”

Hale considered the suggestion, and told himself that not all of the translator’s suggestions would be as fraught as the Harlequin. He finished straightening his neck-tie. “Show me?”

The gardens, right adjacent to the theatre grounds, proved ideal. Particularly as it wasn’t actively raining when the men – more or less sober – came back from their luncheon. And Pessoa knew the man in charge, who let them in at a special rate for the group. There were trees and a little water and even a few diminutive boulders, and Samuel’s crew responded to the setting with the relief of men coming home after a confusing time abroad.

Originally, Hale had intended to bring the police constables in for the scenes, but after seeing the enthusiasm with which the pirates had thrown themselves into the party melee, he was glad he had decided to wait a day. Or two.

He explained that the scene he needed them to think about was when the police came-“The police are coming? Here?” “Only in the picture, Charles.”-when the pretend police came, because the pirates had taken the Major-General’s daughters captive-“I’ll take them captive, yes!” “I can have two?” “Harriet is mine!” “No, she is mine!” at which point Pessoa’s translation bogged down. Since there was little need for translation Hale merely raised his voice and went on. “-taken the girls captive, but freed them to return to their father. The Major-General then sends the police – yes, the pretend police – and that is when you fight them.”

As he talked, he had taken off his jacket and worked his way into a special, heavily padded waistcoat he’d asked Sally to fashion after the knives came out on Saturday. She’d had to cannibalise other garments – none of the costume corsets had whalebone now – but it ended up a garment that might protect his more vital organs from any stray non-collapsing blades.

“All right, first thing is to give your own knives to Samuel, here.” When none of them moved, Hale said, “You’ll get them back at the end of the day, and it saves you from worrying about pulling the wrong blade.” When still none of them moved, he added, “If I end up in hospital, it’s going to slow the production down considerably.”

Samuel’s hand went out, and one by one, the pirates filed past and divested themselves of their arms. Fourteen men: Hale stopped counting at twenty-three weapons.

He felt somewhat more confident when they began lining up to practise stabbing him.

* * *

That night, while Hale was attempting to dress for dinner, his cousin let himself in. Fflytte stopped dead.

“Christ, Geoffrey, what happened to you?”

“Impressive, isn’t it?”

“Looks like the time just before the War when that bloody mare tossed you into the stream. What was the creature’s name?”

“Thumper.” Hale prodded a small patch of his torso that was not black or blue, and winced: even that hurt. “So long as you’re here, help me with the plasters? I don’t want to bleed all over another shirt.”

Fflytte took the packet of plasters and began to cover the open wounds Hale had trouble reaching – all minor, although an alarming number of them. As he worked, he asked, “Have you decided how we should pair up the constables?”

Unlike the girls and the pirates, who would be matched up by their respective heights, the smaller number of constables required a more deliberate pairing to get the full effect of the fight scenes. And where the girls were for beauty and the pirates for masculinity, the constables (with their tall, thin Sergeant) had been chosen for humour. Short, bald-headed “Clarence” in his brass-buttoned uniform would be perfect battling Samuel, as sixty-year-old Frank with his protruding ears and missing teeth was going to look absurd facing handsome young Benjamin. Trying to ignore his cousin’s none-too-gentle ministrations, Hale ran over his pairings. “-and the Sergeant with Lawrence, who comes up to his belt-buckle. The only one I’m none too sure about – ow, watch it! – is Bert.”

“Which one’s Bert?”

“The dark Cockney.”

“The pretty one. Yes, I meant to ask about that: I thought we were going for odd with the constables?”

“I wouldn’t say he’s pretty. Not exactly. Though I’ll admit, he’s prettier than I remembered.”

Fflytte made no comment, which was comment enough. Hale opened his mouth to defend himself against the unspoken charge of a personal interest, but decided there wasn’t much he could say. He didn’t recall hiring an actor with good looks – indeed, if anything, he vaguely remembered a runt with a twisted nose. But he had been rushed at the time, and then the problem with Lonnie came up, and in any event, here was Bert, with nothing particularly odd about him. And if he wasn’t pretty, exactly, his looks were interesting enough that his attentions to Annie were reassuring.

Hale was abruptly called back to himself by a prod in a tender zone. “Was there something you wanted, Randolph?”

“Oh yes – it’s about the ship.”

Hale stood, watching in the big cheval glass as Fflytte slapped on plasters while waxing lyrical about Harlequin. However, he’d known two things the moment his cousin came in the door. First, that whatever the director had in mind, Hale wasn’t going to like it (and Fflytte knew that Hale wasn’t going to like it). And second, Randolph had already made up his mind.

Eventually, Fflytte ran out of wounds and Hale retrieved the sticking plasters before he ended up bound head to toe. “Let me look at the papers before you sign anything,” he said sternly.

With a look of pleased surprise, that the job of convincing Hale had not been harder, Fflytte dropped a distressingly thin envelope onto the table.

Hale stifled a sigh. “I’ll read it, and be down for dinner shortly.”

Fflytte bounced out. Hale finished his drink, painfully threaded his arms into a formal shirt, and picked up the day’s suit-jacket, intending to hang it in the wardrobe. However, when he held it to the light, the lovely wool had a lace-like quality that would have given its tailor the vapours. He quietly dropped it into the dust-bin, and poured himself another drink.

Tuesday they spent at the Botanical Gardens, learning how to stab, pummel, bash, and impale a man for the camera.

On Wednesday, cursing as he extricated himself from his bed, Hale decided that his pirates could now be trusted to avoid committing manslaughter. That morning, he brought in his six police constables and their sergeant, a Paris-born, Irish-accented Englishman named Vincent Paul. The previous day’s ease went instantly stiff-legged, with both sides bristling at each other far too convincingly. After separating one pair – Edward-the-Constable and Earnest-the-Pirate – for the third time, Hale ran his hand through his hair and contemplated cancelling the entire project: Fflytte Films really did not need a homicide on its hands. That headline might not be so easy to shake.

“They need to eat together.”

Hale was startled, not having noticed the cat-like Samuel at his side. “Oh, a great idea – let them sink the cutlery into each other’s throats.”

“They are boys. Boys wrestle, then become friends.”

“They’re grown men.”

“Not in their hearts.”

“You can’t guarantee me that your … boys wouldn’t lose control.”

“I can.”

Hale looked at the big man, and after a moment admitted, “You probably could. Well, if you want to try, I’ll have a talk with my men. Maybe I can convince them that if they get into a serious fight, they’ll never work for Fflytte Films again.”

So they broke for lunch and trooped in two separate groups to a nearby restaurant. The men sat at opposite sides. Once they were seated, Samuel went around and lifted every other man up by his collar, pirates and constables alike, rearranging them until the tables were mixed. While the diners glared at each other with hackles raised, he went to the back of the restaurant, and returned with a waiter carrying a large tray covered with bottles of beer.

“Hey,” protested Hale, but Samuel just held up a hand and went through the tables, placing a bottle before each man.

One bottle, each.

They ate, in silence. The cutlery remained in the vicinity of the plates.

When they left, they resumed their separate groups. Hale, following behind, could not decide if the additional degree of relaxation was a good thing.

Apparently, neither could Samuel, because when they got back to the grove where they had been practising, he lined up the men and walked along, hand held out to every third or fourth one – and not just the pirates. The first few turned innocent faces on him, but when his great forefinger pointed to a pocket, an ankle, or in one case the back of a collar, the man would sheepishly retrieve the weapon he had kept back and hand it over.

Nine more knives.

Then he turned them loose.

Ten minutes later, Hale was sure it was a severe miscalculation. Five minutes after that, his heart climbed into his throat, and he pulled two flailing men off of each other. Three minutes more, and a dogfight erupted. A tangle of enraged males threw themselves body and soul into the struggle, roaring and cursing in many languages – only to break apart when tall, handsome Adam, contorted into such a furious knot with the gargoyle-faced Donald that it was impossible to tell which leg was linked to which arm, gave a shout of laughter. In seconds, a dozen separate struggles-to-the-death broke apart, leaving the men filthy and dotted with scrapes, bruises, and future black eyes, but also leaning back on their hands, laughing until the tears came.

Samuel looked sideways at Hale. “Boys.”

Not one of them needed to be carted off to the morgue, or even the hospital. And after that, they were indeed like lads who had tried each other’s muscles and found friendship.

On Thursday, with Will stuck in Cintra because of a flower-loving goat, Fflytte tore himself away from his ship long enough to help Hale and Artie film the pirate-constable battle scenes. The pirates and the police had no need for Maude-the-Make-up, although their groans may have been due more to the drinking they’d done together during the night than from the previous day’s brawl. Fflytte sat in his folding chair. Artie, bursting with pride, turned his hat-brim back and cranked the second-best camera. Hale did everything else: checking the costumes and adjusting the reflectors and reminding the director of what the men had rehearsed.

The practised motions of the fighters intertwined perfectly. La Rocha and Samuel stood and scowled and gestured photogenically. Pessoa translated excitedly. And at the end of the day, no actual blood had been spilt – or, so little it hardly mattered.

Once the scenes were finished, Fflytte and La Rocha hurried away to check on the day’s progress down at the docks, leaving behind a sense of anticlimax after this, the first day of actual filming. Hale watched the mismatched pair scurry off, and muttered to Pessoa, “Fflytte’s Folly.”

“Sorry?” the poet asked.

“Oh, nothing. Just, the ship.”

“I begin to regret my part, in introducing Mr Fflytte to the vessel.”

Little late for that, Hale thought. “Call the men together, would you?”

He watched Pessoa move over to the tired actors. Over the past week, the translator had become his shadow. Standing at his side and effortlessly mouthing his words in Portuguese, then the pirates’ responses in English, Pessoa was gratifyingly invisible. Despite his earlier irritation, Hale was sorry the fellow had chosen not to come to Morocco with them.

When the men were gathered around, Hale climbed onto a stump and gave them the most paternal smile he could muster.

“I have to say, what you’ve done is remarkable. You men work together marvellously. If you can do half as well before the cameras in Morocco as you’ve done here, you’ll all be film stars, and Hollywood will be fighting over you.”

As always, the response came in two pulses – one among those who understood his English, the other a beat later when Pessoa had finished. Hale started to say that their week’s pay would be distributed early, in the event they wanted to spend some of it here before they left, but broke off to let Pessoa finish his translation of a remark from young Jack.

“-doesn’t matter if we’re not going to be actually ma-”

Out of nowhere, Samuel’s fist smashed Jack to the ground. Pessoa stuttered to a halt; Artie gave a girlish squeal; Adam took one angry step forward and then stopped; all the other men, pirates and police alike, reared back, looking as stunned as the lad in the dirt.

“What the hell did you do that for?” Hale demanded.

Samuel watched the boy climb to his feet, rubbing the back of his head and shooting Adam a quick glance before turning his gaze to the ground. “Do not interrupt Mr Hale,” the big man growled.

“Jesus Christ, you didn’t have to hit the boy,” Hale protested.

Samuel’s gaze drilled into Jack until the lad’s eyes came up. The two looked at each other for a long minute, and when Jack dropped his eyes again, Hale was left with the impression that a whole lot had been said, of which he’d understood not a word.

Samuel turned an unreadable face to Hale – who, when no further explanation was forthcoming, tried to recall what he’d been about to say.

The news that their pay would be available at the hotel the following morning cheered the men, but they left the gardens with more haste than they would have had that final incident not taken place. The last one away was Samuel. Hale stood and watched the big man go.

“What do you suppose Jack was about to say?” he asked Pessoa.

He hadn’t really expected an answer, which was a good thing, since Pessoa had no suggestions.

This man, Samuel. He was an exceedingly odd bird, for the friend of an unemployed fisherman.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

FREDERIC: The Major-General comes, so quickly hide!

FRIDAY DEGENERATED INTO chaos, as Hale stood, alone and assistant-less, to receive the barrage of last-minute necessities, undone tasks, and everyday emergencies. He went out to Randolph’s damned boat every few hours, holding firm to his threat that if every surface was not spotless and fragrant, no actress would set foot on Harlequin. He dragooned Artie, whose hands had begun to shake again, to distribute the pay envelopes, trying to sound soothing as he ordered the young man to give each envelope to its destined owner and to him alone, then to write down when he had done so. And he made a list for Miss Russell, praying that she would be back from Cintra in time to take over a few of the tasks.

He managed neither lunch nor dinner – but then, at this stage of a production, he was well accustomed to surviving on cold coffee and stale rolls.

The sail-makers weren’t going to finish in time: Hale arranged to have two and all their equipment go along and finish the job while at sea.

Maurice, the kitchen’s prima donna (and that was definitely the correct gender) came wringing his hands, having seen the conditions under which he would be forced to labour. Since every kitchen Maurice encountered was inadequate for his purposes, beginning with that borrowed from a famous Parisian restaurant for Gay Paris fifteen years ago, Hale had anticipated the visit. He handed Maurice a note to the city’s top restaurant supplier in the Bairro Alta, instructing them to bill Fflytte Films for anything the chef might require. Maurice seized Hale’s face and kissed both his cheeks, as he always did, and went away singing “Va, pensiero” in an eerie falsetto.

Then one of the hotel’s staff – Harold Scott’s unofficial valet – came in with a piece of paper in one hand, and Hale’s heart sank. The actor playing the Major-General had spent the last week with his foot on a cushion, partly due to the gout but also because he required little rehearsing with the others. But it had been a mistake to leave him alone, and here was the result. “In hospital? For God’s sake, it’s only gout!” The cowering non-valet tried to reassure Hale that Scott would be fine in a few days. “I don’t need him in a few days, I need him now!”

“Mr Scott feels terrible about it, but truly, he is in miserable condition. And he’s found you a replacement, a most adequate replacement.”

“Oh yes, some scruffy drinking companion who doesn’t speak any English. I can’t believe-”

“No, honestly, the gentleman is a very presentable Englishman. He lacks the, er, physical attributes of Mr Scott, but he’s worn padding before, and is an accomplished actor. He even knows the lines, although I realise that won’t be nec-”

“Hell. Where is this paragon? I should at least see him before I go out to the hospital and skin Mr Scott alive.”

“He’s just downstairs, shall I-?”

“God, can anything else go wrong? Yes, bring him along and we’ll see how deep the hole is.”

But in the event, the hole proved a shallow one, and although the substitute Major-General was entirely the wrong build, being very tall and thin and about a decade older than Hale would have wished, there was a certain air about him, and he clearly knew the part.

Hale listened to the man’s precise, if spoken, rendition of the words, grudgingly admiring the combination of speed and clarity: He might be saying “IamtheverymodelofthemodernMajor-General,” but one heard each word clearly. He even shaped a decent cadence around the impossible bits, and when he produced “I quote in elegiacs all the crimes of Heliogabulus In conics I can floor peculiarities parabolous”em› without pausing for breath, Hale waved him to a halt.

“I don’t know if you’re running from the law or selling cocaine to the convent girls, but I’d appreciate it if you try not to get yourself arrested before we leave tomorrow. If you do, I’ll have to play the damn Major-General myself.”

As he shook the thin hand of this newly minted father-of-thirteen, Hale reflected uneasily that the fellow looked far too intelligent and sensible for an actor. But that was all the time he had for reflection: At that moment Artie appeared in the doorway, tears running down his face while two irate pirates glared over his narrow shoulders.

The new Major-General excused himself, saying that he would see if he could locate portions of a uniform suitable for his frame.

Artie sidled into the room. “Mr Hale, I’m so sorry, but these two fellows tell me they didn’t get their pay, although I could have sworn-”

And after Artie, Fflytte came with news of how the swarms of workmen they’d hired had done wonders on the Harlequin, rendering it not only sea-worthy, but actress-worthy. And then the charabanc-load of girls made it back at last and he had to hear how that went, and somehow fit in a review of the film Will Currie had shot. After which Bibi came to demand that her feather bed be installed on the ship, if she wasn’t to look haggard from lack of sleep when the camera was on her. Then Graziella Mazzo slithered in, batting her dark eyelashes at him and saying that surely she had misunderstood the arrangements, that she could not possibly be expected to sleep with all the girls in one room, and when Hale patiently explained that there were few actual cabins available on the ship, and that it was only for two or three nights, she pouted; when that did not soften his heart, she looked daggers at him; and when he still would not give way, she flounced out in her Isadora-inspired draperies to find Fflytte. Then Maurice came back and needed Hale to approve of the menus he had devised. And Randolph put his head in to say Graziella had decided to go visit her family in Naples. And … And … And …

* * *

And eventually, they had the last boxes, last actors, last crew crammed on board – except for Artie, who (Hale was not surprised to hear) had arranged to place himself in a sanatorium rather than risk the Harlequin. There was another unsettling incident shortly after they’d cast off, this time with La Rocha rather than Samuel, but the belaying pin missed, and the temper-tantrums of actors was a thing Hale was used to. He made a mental note not to push La Rocha too far, then let Fflytte’s near-concussion slide into the category of Life’s Lessons for Randolph Fflytte.

And so Mr Geoffrey Hale took to his bunk at last, exhausted to the edge of collapse, but content: He had done as much as any man could to bring Pirate King closer to completion.

He slept peacefully, until the screams began.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Enter the MAJOR-GENERAL’s daughters led by MABEL, all in white peignoirs and night-caps, and carrying lighted candles.

AT LEAST I had the sense not to scream out my husband’s name as I saw him floundering behind us in the dark waters. “Hol-” turned into “Help! Man overboard!” as I ran down the deck, flinging into the night anything that might function as a life-ring.

Sailing ships have no brakes. Thus the rescue of a man overboard becomes a somewhat leisurely event (unless, of course, a shark happens by) that degenerates into a cinematic farce, as if scenes of a man falling out of an aeroplane were interspersed with the calm arrangement of his means of rescue by those on the ground: discussion; the fetching of mattresses; further discussion; many lookers-on; the arrangement of pillows; the substitution of one pillow for another; and all the while the individual is tumbling closer and closer towards solid ground. Or in this case, farther and farther away from solid ship.

Adam immediately began to shout and crank the wheel around, while Jack ran forward along the rapidly tilting deck to throw himself at various bits of rigging. I clung to the rails to keep from following Holmes overboard; before I regained my balance, sailors were pouring onto the deck in a fury of activity, directed first by Adam (who seemed to have tied off the wheel before joining the others) and then by Samuel. Men hauled at ropes; sails beat angrily on their beams; other sails made an abrupt collapse down their lines. In less than two minutes, I could feel our forward drive die away.

In the sudden silence, the first of Harlequin’s passengers ventured out, tugging at dressing gown belts, patting at rumpled hair, picking their way through the unbelievable quantities of rope that now littered the decks. Soon, the ship’s entire population was at the rails, all of them with suggestions as to engines, reversing, coming about, and diving in to get our lost Major-General. Edith suggested that we could shoot an arrow with a rope upon it; fortunately for Holmes, no one had a bow.

The experts – that is, Samuel and La Rocha – were in agreement that were we to circle back for him (at least, I believe that is what they were saying) we would do little more than move farther out of his range.

“What about the motor?” Mrs Hartley asked.

“I heard one of them say that they’d broken it altogether,” Annie said. Inevitably, it was Underfoot-Annie who had overheard a conversation.

“What about the oars?” I suggested. They might slow our drift, if not actually reverse it.

Samuel had the same idea, and began shouting orders at the men, who leapt to do his bidding, tripping over the girls, puzzling over how to fit the lengths of wood into the brackets, dropping them overboard, cracking each other’s skulls …

I hauled Annie down the deck to where one of the ship’s boats hung in its davits. I jerked loose the front tie, thrust the rope into her hand, then jumped to loose the other end. “Let it out at the same speed I do,” I ordered.

The men were too occupied to notice what we were doing. In a minute, the boat’s hull kissed the water, and I – knowing enough about small vessels to have a clear image of what would happen if my weight hit in off-centre – scrambled out over the tackles above it. I paused a moment, to be certain the thing had not immediately sunk, then dropped gently into it.

Samuel’s voice rang out, commanding me to stop. But I had the tackles and painter free and managed to shove away from the hull before he could interfere. “I won the school rowing championship when I was fifteen,” I called. “It’ll only take me a few minutes to reach him, you’ll just weigh us down.” I lit the small lamp that dangled from the skiff’s prow, then dropped myself onto the seat and the oars into their rowlocks.

There was a pang I cannot deny as the lights of the only firm place in many miles grew farther and farther away. On the other hand, the man I had nearly killed grew ever closer, letting fly with the occasional splash to keep me on the right path.

Nine minutes later, I shipped the oars and looked over the side at Holmes. “You look like a drowned rat,” I said, and put down a hand to help haul him up.

“I’m grateful that your aim was off, or I’d have gone over the side unconscious.”

“My aim wasn’t off, I changed my mind at the last moment. Here, this blanket should be warmer than the coat.” We peeled away some layers of sodden wool, and I wrapped him in the thick blanket that I had been keeping warm with my backside.

I looked over my shoulder at Harlequin. She was alarmingly small and indistinct. I grabbed the oars and got to work.

“All right, Holmes, what the hell are you doing here?”

“I’m your new Major-General. I thought it best to stay out of sight until we’d had a chance to talk.”

“Good Lord. Hale said that Mr Scott was taken ill, but – why?”

“Mr Scott was taken ill because I paid him – generously – to exchange a sailing ship for a sleeper train bound for the south of France.”

“You know damned well that is not what I was asking. Talk, and be quick about it – once we reach the ship, we may not have a moment to ourselves until we get to Morocco.”

“The letter you wrote on Saturday very fortunately reached me on Wednesday. It was a test of my brother’s machinery to get me to Lisbon in twenty-four hours.”

“But, why?”

“Because I was beginning in Sussex, and as you will recall-”

“Holmes, I’ll tip you back over the side!” I hissed. “Why. Are. You. Here?”

“Because of the scar on your pirate king.”

“La Rocha?”

“A man can have many names, but few men could have that wound.”

“Who is he?”

“A pirate. Among other things.”

I looked over my shoulder at the ship. It was close enough now to see by the swinging lamp-light that most of the others had gone back to their bunks – once they knew who had gone over, and saw the skiff beat the dorsal fins to the swimmer, they’d grown bored and returned to their warm cocoons. Still, we only had a few minutes before our voices would be heard by those remaining.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Holmes. Piracy was squashed two hundred years ago.”

“So long as men sail the seas, there will be pirates. La Rocha comes from a Moroccan family with a history of piracy – the accent is not as strong in his cousin.”

“Cousin? You mean Samuel?”

“His name is Selim, and they may be half-brothers instead of cousins, but yes. Although not all of the men share their linguistic history.”

My hands faltered as the Arabic name trickled down and stirred a memory: Selim. Selim the Grim. Who in 1512 became the Ottoman emperor and promptly set about slaughtering his brothers and nephews, lest they become a threat.…

I bent over the oars again: best to think of something else.

“I thought the men were Portuguese.”

“Oh, Russell, surely you-”

“Holmes!” This was no time to scold me for a mistake in accent identification.

“La Rocha took that scar in the second year of the War, when a small boat laden with gold and valuables escaped Turkey ahead of the Allied Forces. Nothing could be proved, no evidence was found. No doubt he is aware that the eyes of many agencies have been upon him for all this time, but to all appearances, he lives in peaceful retirement in his new home.”

“By ‘agencies,’ you mean Mycroft?” Damn: I knew this had something to do with the man.

“Keep rowing,” he ordered. “We don’t want them to wonder what topic two apparent strangers find so engrossing. Bad enough that it was you who came after me.”

“You’d have drowned, waiting for the others to make up their minds. Mycroft?”

“I’d have made it eventually. Yes, no doubt La Rocha is on Mycroft’s long-term list of interests.”

I thought that Mycroft’s interest was more immediate than “long-term,” but prising an admission out of Holmes – since that admission would also mean that Mycroft was ultimately behind my own presence here – might necessitate rowing in circles around Harlequin until the new day dawned, and I wanted my bed. Hammock. I went on as if Holmes had readily confessed an active focus from his brother’s shadowy agency.

“Is this to do with the missing secretary, Lonnie Johns? Has she been found?”

“A shoe very like hers was found at the top of a cliff near Portsmouth. The other was retrieved from a Jack Russell terrier, well chewed. Police theory being that the woman committed suicide, but that her note had been held down by the shoe the dog removed.”

The shadowy boat before me was replaced by images from a screen: pretty young girl; flowered frock that the wind presses against her lithe form; made-up eyes stretched with sadness; a note, tucked under her shoe; with a last woebegone look around her, her figure is replaced by:

I can live no longer, please forgive me!

And then: empty cliff-top; the approach of a small and business-like dog, applying its button nose to the shoe atop the fluttering note … I shook the images from my head. “So what is La Rocha up to?”

“I have no idea.”

“Right.”

“On my honour, Russell, I do not.”

“Then why risk life and limb to race down here? A telegram would have sufficed. Oh, don’t tell me you’re going all protective on me, Holmes?” Granted, our last case had been rather trying, scattering us across half of Europe as we strained to communicate, but still.

“I thought you might be glad of reinforcements.”

We had come into the edges of the light from the ship, just enough that, by leaning forward, I could make out his features. I stared at his expression, then resumed my rowing before he could scold me. “You wanted to get away from Mycroft, too!”

“Shh,” he urged. Pulling the edge of the blanket forward so his face was in shadow, he murmured, “Is there any language you are certain is not spoken by any of those on board?”

“I haven’t tried them all, but I’d guess Hindustani.” And before he could scold me about that as well, I added, “Yes, guessing is deplorable, I know.”

The shadowed face seemed to fold into a brief smile, and then he sat upright into the lamp-light and said in normal tones and a Midlands accent, “I have to thank you again, Miss Russell. Quite ridiculous of me to tumble over like that, ought to make the railings tall enough to hold a man instead of tipping him overboard. What if you hadn’t been there to see me go?”

“There was a man on watch,” I loudly reassured our Major-General Stanley. “He tossed you a life-ring, too.”

“Well, I hope you haven’t spoilt your lady-like hands on the oars, you really should have let me take them.”

“I didn’t want to risk having you over again. Catch that line, would you?”

He caught at it, missed it, nearly fell in again, dropped his blanket in the water, and finally got his fist around the line. By dint of my pushing him from below – a tricky manoeuvre, when braced in a skiff – and others pulling from above, we got the Major-General back on deck.

“Take him to galley,” La Rocha ordered Adam, then to his damp passenger, “Warm there, you be dry in no time.”

The young pirate led him away; I did not think Holmes’ shivers were entirely an act.

The boat was made fast, and La Rocha ordered the sails raised. I wished him a good night and headed below, but his voice stopped me.

“Why you on deck?”

“When he fell, you mean? I was enjoying the quiet – I’m not used to sleeping in a room full of people – and he came up and … Well, I thought he was assaulting me, so I … I’m afraid I shoved him, and he went overboard. That’s why I sort of felt I had to go after him. My fault.”

The pirate king stared at me, then stared at me all over. And he laughed. As if a man making advances on Mary Russell was quite the biggest joke he’d heard in years.

Which was more or less what I’d intended. Still, he didn’t have to agree with quite so much gusto. Feeling very cross, I went down the stairs and, instead of going directly to my bunk, went to the galley instead. I thrust my head inside, to find my husband and partner arranging his wet garments over various chair backs. Adam was with him; both men looked up.

“From now on, you keep your hands to yourself!” I stormed. “Next time I’ll use a belaying pin, and let you drown!”

The young man looked startled, but Holmes’ face ran a quick gamut of surprise, disapproval, and distaste, before he pasted on an expression of sheepishness for the benefit of La Rocha’s man.

I’d had to let him know what explanation I’d given for our little adventure. I dimly recognised that saddling him with a reputation for lechery – a reputation he would find repugnant every time he was forced to uphold it – was a displaced revenge on his brother. However, I will admit that the thought of it was a small warm satisfaction, nestled to me as I drifted off in my canvas sling.

Where I slept peacefully, until the screams started.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

MAJOR-GENERAL: In fact, when I know what is meant by “mamelon” and “ravelin,”

When I can tell at sight a Mauser rifle from a javelin …

I SHOT UPRIGHT in my hammock, instantly flipped over, and by dint of hanging on hard to the canvas, managed to describe a complete circuit before crashing dramatically to the floor. The hold seemed to be populated by dangling pupae with startled faces, but everyone else managed to remain in their canvas, and no one appeared to be writhing in agony or fighting off an attack. I snatched my glasses from the nearby shelf and looked again. No: The noise was coming from above.

Grabbing my dressing-gown from the laden row of hooks, I tied the belt while hurrying up the companionway towards the thin dawn light. When I stepped out on the deck, I knew I was still dreaming.

The last time I’d seen Captain La Rocha, near midnight, he’d been dressed in a pair of striped pyjamas and a dark dressing-gown – extraordinary in their unexpected ordinariness. Now …

Either our Captain had decided to immerse himself wholeheartedly in his assigned rôle, or I had knocked myself cold falling from the hammock.

His hat was scarlet. From it danced an emerald ostrich plume the length of my arm. His jacket was brocade, orange and red, over a gold waistcoat, burgundy trousers, and knee-high boots a Musketeer would have killed for, also scarlet. His small earring had doubled in size overnight, and half a dozen fingers bore rings – gold rings, with faceted gems. The henna in his beard gleamed red in the sunlight.

The only missing details were an eye patch, a peg-leg, and a parrot.

“Good-morning, Miss Russell,” his incongruous voice piped. “Meet Rosie.”

He tipped his face upwards. I, too, lifted my eyes to the rigging, then lifted them some more, wondering what female on board the ship would dare to clamber the lines. Surely Edith wouldn’t have – then the scream came again, and I saw its source.

A parrot.

I felt someone beside me and looked over, then down. Randolph Fflytte, who for the first time looked almost nondescript in a violet dressing gown, was rubbing his eyes.

“This is your fault,” I said bitterly.

His eyes caught on La Rocha and went wide. His jaw made a few fish-like motions; at Rosie’s next shriek, it dropped entirely. He stood gaping at the bird, who screamed its challenge at the rising sun, then turned to me. “I never,” he declared.

“You wanted a pirate,” I told him. “You got one.”

“Jaizus” came Will’s voice in my ear, “he’s even put up a pirate flag!”

He was right. A skull and crossbones taller than a man rippled in the bow breeze, flashing its grin at the pirate, the parrot, and those of us along for the ride. The Jolly Roger, a declaration that no quarter would be given. The voice of the Byron-loving Miss Sim seemed to thrill in my ear: These are our realms, no limits to their sway- Our flag the scepter all who meet obeyem›.

“Is that legal?” It was a woman’s voice – Mrs Hatley, sounding disapproving. I had to agree: Surely maritime laws frowned on such frivolities as pirate flags?

The rising sun touched the top of the mast, exciting our avian alarm. It flapped its brilliant wings and shouted something in response.

“What did it say?” someone asked.

“Probably Portuguese,” came an answer.

“Not Portuguese,” said a man – our pirate crew was now awake, too, and clearly as astonished by La Rocha’s antics as the English passengers.

The bird screamed again, and I blinked as the sign-board appeared before my mind’s eye:

“Actions are propaganda!”

I repeated it aloud.

Fflytte said, “What the devil does that mean?”

“I don’t know, but that’s what it said.”

“She’s right,” said Will.

Three dozen people in various stages of undress, and one pirate in extraordinary dress, stood agog, awaiting the next pronouncement. The bird gazed down at its audience.

“Destroy the state!” it shouted.

“Those are Anarchist slogans!” I said. “It must have belonged to Anarchists.”

Our necks were growing stiff, but we listened, wrapt, for the next pronouncement. What came was a long garble of apparent nonsense. We looked at each other. “Did you catch that?”

It was Annie who ventured a translation. “ ‘I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree’?”

Followed the sound of forty-some people puzzling.

Clearly, I had knocked myself unconscious.

* * *

I waited in vain for an awakening hand on my shoulder, but with reluctance decided that I was not lying stunned. I went below with the others, some of whom attempted a return to sleep, but I had smelt the coffee and got dressed instead, to join the first seating at Maurice’s breakfast, questions at the ready. Annie was there, looking remarkably chipper after a night dangling above the floor, and was already grilling Adam about the newest member of our crew.

The parrot – a scarlet macaw – had been a last-minute addition: La Rocha’s idea, Mr Pessoa’s find. Its cage had been brought on board under heavy shrouds, that the creature might wake to a new day in a new home, undistracted by the call of the land.

Its original owner had been a lady much taken by lyric poetry in the English language – Longfellow proved an avian favourite. When she died, the bird took up residence with her grandson, who had flirted with the attractions of Anarchist doctrine from the comfort of his twenty-room estate on the outskirts of Lisbon until his arrest a few months before, followed by the sale of his house, lands, and possessions. The bird had several Portuguese phrases, and a handful in French, German, and Spanish, but he – and it was a he, despite the name given him by the old lady, who’d thought it inappropriate for a maiden lady to have a male companion – seemed to prefer English.

A few of his Portuguese utterances, to judge by the reactions of the crew, would have condemned him to his cage – if not to Maurice’s pot – had they been in English. When Kate and Linda began to, well, parrot those phrases, I had a word with their mothers.

The political and poetic exhortations would soon become a part of the background noise of the ship, punctuating the sounds of sail and rigging, hull and voice. At least while the bird was talking, it did not emit those blood-curdling screams.

Piecing together this narrative took our allotted breakfast time, was continued on the deck, and was still under way when the second seating began to emerge into open air: Annie’s questions were occasionally pertinent but often most roundabout, and her dual flirtations with Adam and Bert did not speed the flow of information.

The girls came up, dressed now and exclaiming at the prettiness of the morning. The pirates followed, exchanging glances at the prettiness of the girls. Rosie grumbled and recited from her perch at the Captain’s left hand, taking the occasional snap at anyone else who ventured within range.

By the time Fflytte came on deck, the bird was taking a nap, the sail-makers were hard at work, the girls were lounging in the sunny spots, and the pirate crew were busy at various tasks (and shooting the girls looks both admiring and disapproving, as the girls shed clothing and lit cigarettes).

Our diminutive leader rubbed his hands together, then frowned at the vast canvas drapes on all surfaces.

“We need this cleared,” Fflytte declared. When the sail-makers continued their needlework, he turned to the quarterdeck and repeated his demand.

“I’d planned on filming some scenes this morning. We need the decks cleared,” he insisted.

“When sail is up, decks will be clear,” La Rocha countered.

“ ‘Sail on, O Ship of State!’ ” Rosie urged.

Samuel said nothing.

“When will that be?”

“Braak!” Rosie answered.

La Rocha and Samuel studied the horizon.

“What are we to do in the meantime?” Even Rosie said nothing. “Captain La Rocha, we had an agreement. We need to do our filming on the way to Morocco.”

“Point camera here,” our pirate chief said, waving a ham-like hand at the quarterdeck. “No canvas.”

Fflytte squinted at the area in question, and turned to Will. “Would this be a good time?”

“We’d only use a few feet of film, if we can’t shoot the deck as well,” the cameraman replied.

“Captain-” Fflytte began, when La Rocha took pity on him.

“Two hours, maybe little more. Go, look around ship, find places to point camera.”

“I really-”

“Mr Fflytte,” I broke in. “That might not be a bad idea. If you haven’t seen all the nooks and crannies, a tour might give you some interesting angles.”

He thought for a moment, then nodded. “Very well, we will take a tour of the ship. Will you lead us?” he asked La Rocha.

Samuel had been frowning at a point among the forest of ropes where Adam and Jack were smearing some disgusting-looking grease into the wooden pulleys and all over themselves. Inadvertently, his elbow ventured into Rosie’s territory. La Rocha’s feathered familiar lunged, but quicker than the eye could follow, the quarterdeck erupted into a flurry of brilliant plumage as Rosie fought the hand wrapped around its throat. La Rocha stepped forward; Samuel let go; Rosie took off. A trail of scarlet and blue feathers traced the outraged bird’s path into the heights.

The two men looked at each other; the wind held its breath; the sail-makers’ needles held the air; waves held back from lapping our wooden sides. Then La Rocha turned on one shiny red heel, and said to Randolph Fflytte, “Your ‘Samuel’ will guide you through ship.”

Samuel’s normally dead-pan face registered a slight flush. He started to speak, but La Rocha cut him off, in Arabic. “The whole ship, Selim.”

Personally, I would not have turned my back on a man with that expression on his face (Selim the Grim) but La Rocha was made of sterner stuff than I. Either that or he knew just how far he could push his second in command.

Samuel’s gaze left the Captain’s hat, played across the passengers standing motionless about the deck, rested on the two grease-spattered lads (who hastily bent to their work), and then flicked briefly towards the presence that perched above us in the rigging.

He gave a brief nod, as if confirming some private idea, and descended from the quarterdeck, saying “Come” as he walked past Fflytte and Hale, leading the way to the bow. They followed Samuel; after a moment, I followed them; Annie and Edith came, too; soon half the ship’s population was gathered to hear Samuel’s voice.

Samuel waited for us to go still – or as still as one can go on a moving deck. Then, with a final dark glance at the quarterdeck, he faced the open sea and pointed. “Bowsprit,” he said. His forefinger went up. “Outer jib.” The finger dropped a few degrees. “Inner jib. Fore stays’l.”

And so he went. We learned what the lashings around the anchors were called (in English, to my surprise and relief) and which neat coil of rope was connected to which sail, and whether it was a halyard or a sheet; where the upper topsail ended and the topgallant began; the various staysails as opposed to the jibs. Or rather, we heard the labels recited. It was as if Samuel had been assigned the job of naming every minute portion of the ship – but naming alone. He would occasionally answer a direct question, if it reached him in a pause between recitations, but for the most part, he was a dictionary rather than an encyclopaedia. When Bibi asked why the sail was called “square” when it was a rectangle (in fact, they were trapezoidal), he simply looked through her and went on.

Most of the others went back to their sunbathing and cigarettes before we progressed twenty feet down the port side. Fflytte and Hale were looking stunned, Will ignored the lecture entirely, Edith developed a dangerous fascination for the knots holding the various lines in place, and Annie most helpfully kept pulling the child’s exploring fingers away from the belaying pins. Daniel Marks and Bibi seemed transfixed by the reflections in Samuel’s black boots.

Halfway down the side, only two of the audience were paying attention. Jack was one, the young pirate focussed on every label, every brief explanation, his lips in constant motion as he either tried to guess the name before Samuel could say it, or repeated the name under his breath once it was given.

The other attentive one was me.

I can’t say that it mattered in the least whether the bundle of rope before me was a sheet or a clewline, or if pulling on it raised the third sail of the fore mast (the fore-upper-topsail-halyard) or adjusted the angle of its yard (the fore-upper-topsail-brace) since I had no intention of running the ship myself. However, it was a mental challenge, along the lines of mastering basic Arabic in a month or committing to memory the by-ways of London. And Samuel’s whole attitude was that of a gauntlet thrown: None of you landsmen will be able to follow this, but I’ve been ordered to give it to you, and by God I will.

So I paid attention.

I admit that at first I cheated, writing down key words to reinforce their place in my mind. But once I had the patterns (clewlines and buntlines, halyards and braces, each going higher up the mast as we went aft) it became easier. Of course, my brain felt as if it were about to explode long before we went down the steps (companionway) and past the kitchen (galley) to the orlop deck, but it was all there, neatly catalogued and waiting for the next time I found myself on a brigantine.

Finally, at the nethermost reaches of the ship, Samuel came to a halt. Some ninety minutes had gone by. Jack was not far from tears, Fflytte looked bored out of his skull, Hale and Will had slipped away somewhere around the middle of the second level below decks, and Annie acted as if she had weights attached to both ankles. God only knew where Edith had got to.

Our sadistic guide held up the oil lamp with which he had ill-lit our way, and announced, “Is all.”

Fflytte seized his hand, thanked him vigorously, and fled. Jack thumbed his forelock and trudged back to his grease pot. The big man looked at the two young women he’d been left with, and for the first time, permitted a grimace to cross his face.

“I waste my time,” he said.

Annie protested, so weakly she might have been agreeing, but I decided there was no harm in letting him know that his efforts had not been entirely in vain.

“Not at all,” I assured him. “It’s extremely helpful to have a clearer idea of how all those bits tie together.”

“Yes?” he said, disbelief clear in his voice and stance. “Then what you call this?”

He kicked his boot (for the first time, not so shiny) against a piece of wood that I probably could have guessed had I never set foot on a sailing ship.

“That’s the mast – the mainmast,” I told him.

“That?” he said, indicating a lump of wood and metal.

“A knee.”

After the third such easily named object, it occurred to him that these would be fresh in my mind. Without a word, he pushed past and clumped up the ladder, restoring the lamp to its hook.

Without a word, he pointed to a triangular scrap of canvas overhead.

“That’s the main topmast stays’l,” I told him. “That’s the mains’l throat halyard. Fore t’gallant brace. Port deadeyes. Catharpins. Snatch block.” This went on for two or three minutes, attracting rather more attention than I had intended. I was considering allowing a few mistakes to creep in, just to take the eyes off us, when Samuel made a noise I would not have thought possible from him. He laughed. Then his hand slammed down on my back, nearly shooting me off the deck and causing my spine to tingle from toes to jawline.

He turned to the quarterdeck, where Rosie had resumed his perch and La Rocha, unable to hear our voices, was watching intently.

“I have parrot, too!” Samuel shouted at La Rocha, then asked me, “You maybe want to learn how they work?” A jab of the thumb upwards indicated that the lessons would not be given on deck. My heart instantly climbed up my throat.

“Er, perhaps tomorrow?” I said. There was no way in which my brain would accept further information, especially over the internal screams of terror.

His hard palm came down on the top of my head and rumpled my hair as if I were a small child. “My parrot,” Samuel repeated, and strode back to the quarterdeck, humour restored.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

[Girls and MAJOR-GENERAL go up rocks, while PIRATES indulge in a wild dance of delight on stage.]

ONE OF THE bits of actual information Samuel had let drop was that a brigantine this size would originally have held up to a hundred crew members – numbers necessary less for running the ship, I thought, than for manning the cannon and adding heft to boarding parties. Currently, we had something over half that original number, but even that was proving a trial. When it had rained our first afternoon out and the girls retreated below, the ship rang with spats and squabbles. With the main portion of deck off-limits under canvas, our choices were below decks, or on each other’s toes.

Finally, at mid-day, the sail-makers reached the end of their labours, and began to arrange huge armfuls of canvas at the foot of the aft mast. One of them reached into the apparently featureless expanse of cotton and pulled out a tie, dragging it to the upper spar (which, I knew now, was called the “gaff”) and attaching it, followed by a string of like attachments, to the length of the gaff. Once the sail’s upper-most side was firmly linked, the gaff was raised a bit, and the forward edge of the sail was tied to a series of wooden hoops that circled the mast like a giant’s game of ring-toss. The gaff was occasionally raised a little more, freeing the next hoops. Eventually, the lower edge of the sail was uncovered enough to fasten to the big lower spar, the boom (named, perhaps, for the final sensation of the incautious sailor whose skull it hits). When it was tightly fitted, and the upper corner of the gaff portion had been made taut, the crew went below. They came up with hands clean, hair combed, and dressed for the first time in piratical attire – Will’s pleas to film the event having nicely coincided with La Rocha’s own sense of the dramatic.

We mere passengers stood back, out of the way of sailors and cameras. Samuel’s voice rang out, and the crew jumped to seize the big halyards on both sides of the ship. They hauled, and hauled, and Harlequin’s mainsail began to rise, transmuting from a puddle of canvas to a living thing. Up it went, deck to masthead, lashings tight, lines passing through blocks in a bewildering zigzag of rigging. When it was stretched to its fullest height, the crew gave a few almighty heaves to tighten the gaff, and made haste to tie off the halyards and loop the ends across their pins.

The sail above us luffed lazily in the slight breeze, then found its angle and began to fill.

Cheers rang out. The parrot took to the air, circling the masts before coming back to its perch near the wheel, to flap its wings energetically and declare, “ ‘Wandered lonely as a cloud!’ ” Samuel scowled at it; Will filmed it; La Rocha fed it a piece of biscuit. The ship gave a small shiver, and bent more fully into the wind. I do not know if Harlequin felt happier, but I know the rest of us did.

Particularly the two sail-makers, whose hands were worn raw with their efforts.

The crew tied off the lines in neat array, looking a touch self-conscious in their raggedy costumes. Will folded away his camera. La Rocha stroked his reddened beard and ordered a tot of rum all around. I smeared salve on the sail-makers’ hands and told them thank you in Portuguese and English. Maurice appeared with a cake. And when Frederic then conjured up a gramophone, a dance commenced.

Since I had returned the Major-General to safety, some eighteen hours earlier, Holmes and I had taken pains to avoid each other, limiting our communication to the occasional courteous remark. Now, with music going and thirty people bouncing about, he contrived to be standing beside me.

He tipped his hat with his free hand and feigned a sip of the poisonous rum that he had been nursing for the past ten minutes. He wasted no time getting to the point.

“Who do you make for the villain of the piece?” he said, to all appearances making a comment on the weather.

With the same polite expression on my own features, I replied, “Is there a villain in the piece?”

“Sure to be, with those two in charge.”

“Which two – La Rocha and Samuel, or Fflytte and Hale?”

“The Englishmen are paying the bills, but do you honestly imagine they’re in charge?”

My response was delayed by our police sergeant, Vincent Paul (an Englishman with a French name and an Irish accent) who stood before me and asked if I would care to dance. A response was obviated by Holmes setting down his glass and saying, “A Major-General outranks a sergeant, my good sir,” as he seized me in his arms.

Fortunately, the tune to which the others were gyrating and leaping, although it seemed to have no tempo at all, could be interpreted as 3/4 time, making a waltz possible: A waltz permits conversation; Charleston and fox-trot do not. And due to the layout of the deck, with raised housing that forced a rotation of couples along the rails (other than those dancing atop the sky-light, who risked being swept off by the boom if we had to tack), few of the couples were in a position to overhear more than a few words at any given time.

“Tell me about this Pessoa chap,” Holmes demanded.

Distilling the character of Fernando Pessoa into the duration of one recording disk was no simple matter, but I fed him a brief synopsis, from Pessoa’s translation skills to the poetry journal; his appealing humour and dubious grasp on reality; his erotic fascination for pirates and the multiple personas he had crafted; how he had led us to La Rocha and to Harlequin. “And as you heard, he knew where La Rocha could buy a parrot, one that had been owned by an Anarchist.”

“You suggest Pessoa is himself an Anarchist?”

“He’s definitely anarchic, but his politics could be anything, depending on which ‘heteronym’ is in supremacy at the moment. I’d say his ‘Ricardo Reis’ persona lacks the drive and dissatisfaction for Anarchy, although ‘Álvaro de Campos’ might perform an anarchic act if he felt it emotionally justified. I don’t know about-”

But the music ended, and before the next recording could be wound up, the police sergeant was there, awaiting his turn. And I had little choice but to permit him the closeness of the waltz, since to all intents he was less of a stranger than the Major-General was. However, I took care to tread on his toes several times, which left him more than willing to relinquish me to Holmes.

When the music started up, my husband-cum-suitor swung me onto the impromptu dance floor and continued where we had left off. “Do you know how long Pessoa has used the name ‘Ricardo Reis’?”

“Some years, I should say. Why?”

“There’s a Lisboan embezzler named Artur Reis who’s clever enough to be planning a crime that’s visible only in bits, such as transferring guns from prop cabinets into private hands, or finding a use for a bit of extra cocaine. I wondered perhaps if the name might be a poet’s homage to a criminal.”

“Reis is a common enough name in Portugal.”

“True.”

“It means ‘captain’ in Arabic.”

“And several of the Barbary pirates are called that – Murad Reis, one of the most vicious of the Salé Rovers. He started out as a Dutch merchant marine, named … Jan Jansen, that’s it. He was the one who sailed into St Michael’s Mount and seized a ship-load of captives, then later did the same on the west of Ireland. And Dragul Reis, who served with the Barbarossa brothers towards the end of the Barbary kingdoms – he died in fifteen fifty-something.” Holmes, clearly, had taken the opportunity to raid a book-store before boarding his own steamer. But the mention of Barbarossa reminded me-

“Do you think La Rocha’s new red beard is a bow to the Barbarossa brothers?”

“More likely that than an homage to the Holy Roman Emperor,” he replied. “But to suggest that Pessoa is to Reis as La Rocha is to Barbarossa seems to invite unnecessary convolutions into the matter.”

Since my mind was still struggling to untangle itself from the morning’s terminological convolutions, and since the record would only last another minute or so, I hastened to get him up to date on what I knew about the others as well.

It’s remarkable how much a person can say in two minutes, particularly when speaking to an ear as familiar with nuance as the one that lay inches from my lips. I took care to maintain an expression of courteous disinterest on my face, but by the song’s end, I had managed to convey to Holmes the central points of my past two weeks.

When the music ceased its bawling from the metal trumpet, my husband stood away and, as the Major-General, gave me a slight bow. One of the police constables came to me next, but I claimed fatigue and stood to one side for the next few numbers, looking with care at my companions.

Bibi made a brazen approach to the quarterdeck to venture a flirtatious overture to, of all people, Samuel. The big man cast a sideways and clearly amused glance at La Rocha, then looked back at her and slowly gave a single shake of his head. The young woman voiced an unconcerned laugh, as if to say she had only been playing with him (How long was it since Bibi had been turned down, I wondered?) and flounced down the steps, chewing her gum all the while, to seize Adam away from Annie. Annie glowered as she watched them start the next dance.

Hmm: Annie and Adam.

Mrs Hatley, Edith’s mother and our Ruth-the-incompetent-piratical-nursemaid, was dancing with the police sergeant, although neither seemed particularly taken with the procedure, spending most of their time watching those around them. Daniel Marks was ignoring the glances of the girls currently unclaimed, preferring to stand beside the pirates Benjamin and Jack. Marks and Benjamin were opposite sides of the coin of masculine beauty, one fair and tall, the other dark and lithe. Marks laughed at something Jack said – here was one pirate with enough English to communicate a joke.

Edith had shaken off her mother’s urging towards the younger pirates to form a trio of the younger girls, elbows and heels flapping the air in time to the music. Will Currie had stashed his equipment and film below, since the lack of cohesive costuming here made film pointless. Now he tapped the second-smallest girl, Kate, on the shoulder, and when she turned to see, he bowed and held out a hand. She glanced uncertainly at her chaperone sister (on the sidelines talking to June’s mother) for permission. When it was given, Kate turned her back on Edith and June and began to dance with Will, tentatively at first, then with more confidence as he encouraged her with avuncular dignity.

Then the music changed, to a true waltz. Some of the couples drifted apart, but Bibi dug her fingers into Adam, Will adopted a formal posture with Kate (who came up to his shoulder), and Edith, after a glance towards the waiting pirates, stepped forward and set her hands on June’s waist and shoulder. Why not?

Holmes had been trapped by Isabel’s mother. She was a woman of forty whose stays were well exercised by a figure best described as “lush.” From her coy attitude towards my husband, I saw that she had caught word of the Major-General’s purported lechery and intended to make the most of it.

Holmes’ face was priceless, keen with interest on the surface, alive with apprehension underneath. The crowded shipboard conditions proved a distinct advantage for those desirous of chaperones, but the crowding brought disadvantages as well, making it impossible to get away from a determined female. As they circled about, I took pity on Holmes and made a quick jerk of the chin. His eyes registered a flash of relief, but he continued the dance without interruption.

Moving around the edges of the merry-makers, I glanced upward, and with a cold sensation realised that Samuel was watching me. Had he seen my gesture to Holmes? Would it have betrayed us as being too familiar for the communication between strangers?

I could not risk giving myself away: This was one tight place Holmes would have to get out of on his own.

Before the Major-General could shed his admirer and work himself around to me, I shifted past some bouncing couples to boost myself onto the railings beside the one pirate who seemed perennially shy and retiring, the one who rarely took off his hat even below decks, the one who looked out of place in that crew.

The one who resembled a Swedish accountant.

I swung my legs and nodded to the music and said without looking at him, “Don’t pretend that you don’t speak English.”

It took him a while to decide what to do. Then he said, “Very well.”

“What is your name?”

“Gröhe.”

“Why did you come back, after Mr Fflytte had said he didn’t want you?”

“I … Mr … Captain La Rocha needed me to come to Morocco with them. This was the most easy way.” His English was adequate, the accent beneath it Turkish with a hint of his German heritage below that.

“Why does La Rocha need you?”

“Odd to say, I am his book-keeper.”

I looked at him, eyebrows raised. “So Mr Fflytte wasn’t far off, at that.”

Gröhe smiled wanly. “No.”

“I don’t understand why Mr La Rocha needs a book-keeper in Morocco,” I said, taking care not to come across as an interrogator, merely a curious if sharp-eyed assistant.

But it was a question he clearly did not care to answer, saying weakly, “He often requires a book-keeper.”

“But I thought he was a semi-retired fisherman?”

The pasty face turned even paler; the narrow throat swallowed; the eyes darted around in search of rescue. “I’m … it’s a family matter. I, that is, I couldn’t afford to get to Morocco on my own, but I have family there, and Captain La Rocha said, he thought if I took this job …”

I’d known we would soon be interrupted, but Gröhe didn’t feel Samuel’s approach until a big hand clapped onto his shoulder, at which time he gave a shrill cry remarkably like mine the night before.

Samuel left his hand where it was and leant past the small man, baring his teeth in a grin that contained none of his earlier affection towards his human parrot. “What you asking my friend, here, Miss Russell?”

I raised a face of good-natured innocence. “I recognised this gentleman from the day Mr Fflytte asked him to leave. I wondered why he hadn’t gone.”

I kept the expression raised like a mask, kept my feet casually swinging, although I could feel the rapid beat of my heart and wanted nothing more than to flee from those black eyes. They bore into me, and after a minute, I permitted myself – permitted my character, Miss Russell the assistant – to frown a little. “Is there something wrong?”

“You can tell me that, I think.”

“Well, if you mean am I going to report it to Mr Hale, no, I hadn’t intended to. I mean, what could he do, throw the poor fellow overboard? As far as I can see, there’s little harm done. However, perhaps he shouldn’t collect any more pay packets from Fflytte Films.” I pronounced the last sentence like a chiding schoolteacher. Then I waited, hoping his ears wouldn’t pick up the pounding of my heart over the music.

Samuel’s eyes slid shut in a slow blink, then he was looking at the book-keeper and I was breathing again. He spoke, and Mr Gröhe tugged at his hat and scurried away, below decks. Then Samuel turned back to me.

“You will not tell Mr Fflytte and Mr Hale about this.”

I decided that Miss Russell had taken enough. I tipped my head to the side, frowning. “You know, that sounded suspiciously like a command. I’m going to assume it is a problem with your English and not that you imagine me to be one of your employees. I told you I did not intend to expose your Mr Gröhe. But I’ll admit that if you try to bully me about it, I’ll be tempted.”

His eyes went even darker; the fingers of my left hand crept towards the blade in my boot-top.

And then he smiled. In amusement and appreciation, as if I’d done something just adorable. He stretched out the hand that had dug into Gröhe’s shoulder and patted my cheek, then turned on his heel and passed through the revolving couples to the quarterdeck.

Furious and perplexed, I realised that we’d had an audience for the tail end of our meeting. Annie stood nearby, watching Samuel’s retreat. Behind her I spotted Holmes, alert to the tension and oblivious of the demands of the dance.

“Did you want something?” I snapped at the girl. (Silly, really, to call Annie a girl – she was older than I was, no matter what she claimed.)

“Oh! Sorry. It’s just, well, some of us were just wondering how long we’re going to be at sea, but there’s something rather intimidating about the quarterdeck, isn’t there, even though it’s only a couple of steps above the rest. And when I saw Mr Samuel come down I thought I might ask, only he seemed somewhat … preoccupied.”

I pulled myself together and shot Holmes a glance while summoning a rueful laugh for Annie’s benefit. “He’s a strange one, isn’t he? Touchy.”

“Oh, isn’t he just? At first one thinks Mr La Rocha the more terrifying of the two, but then Samuel will snap at one of the men over something and one feels oneself sneaking off like a scolded kitten.”

Annie had more intelligence in her than those wide blue eyes and ripe-cherry mouth suggested. I turned the talk to the approximate length of journey ahead of us, and from there to supplies, and then to Maurice’s cooking.

But my mind was holding up Samuel’s words to Gröhe, examining them, considering.

Samuel had spoken in Arabic, a language I understood well enough: If you don’t want me to feed you to the fish, he had said, you will disappear until we hit land.

* * *

The party showed all signs of continuing until luncheon, and no doubt after that, Fflytte would claim the deck and all actors for his purposes. If Holmes and I were to finish our conversation, we had to be out of earshot for longer than three minutes at a time.

The only way I could think of required steeling my nerves and donning an additional layer of clothing. And if I found the below-decks deserted, as I expected I would, I could take the opportunity for a bit of snooping.

But as I made my way to the common cabin, I was surprised to hear voices from below – surely everyone was on deck except Mr Gröhe? And Maurice, of course, at work transforming inadequacy into magnificence. But this was a woman’s voice, answered by a child: Aha, Edith and her mother, Mrs Nunnally.

I pressed my ear against the cabin door. What was the woman doing? Edith’s whines of complaint were punctuated by sharp exclamations of discomfort: “Ow! I wasn’t doing anything, I was just dancing like Mrs Grimley taught- Ouch!”

“I told you to take care, that we didn’t have a chance to do this yesterday and that if anyone came too close – stand still!”

Edith’s voice kept whining, until I could not stand it. Yes, the child had made my life a trial, but there was no cause to mistreat her. I lifted the iron latch and stepped inside. I am not sure what I expected to see, but it was not what lay before me.

Mrs Nunnally was bent over Edith’s face, the customary below decks gloom brightened by the light from a small lamp. She whirled, and I looked in confusion at the object in her hands. A pair of tweezers. What …?

She dropped the implement into a pocket and presented me with a wide and utterly artificial smile. “We were just finishing up here, I noticed that my Edith had neglected to keep her eyebrows neat, and there’s nothing Mr Fflytte dislikes more than-”

I looked around her at the child, whose cheeks gave clear evidence that the tweezers-work had not been above the eyes. Many things about my tom-boyish admirer fell into place.

“Perhaps I should call you Eddie?” I asked.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

SERGEANT: With stealthy step the pirates are approaching.

“Oh please, Miss, have mercy on us!”

THE WOMAN BURST into tears and threw herself on my mercy and at my feet, but as she pleaded and tried to explain, all I could think was, why had it taken me so long to recognise a child of changed gender? Heaven knows I’d dressed in boys’ clothing often enough myself.

I pushed the dreary female to one side and dropped to my heels before Edith. “Do you want to continue on this picture?” I asked her – or, him.

He nodded. I could see a couple of dark hairs Mrs Nunnally had missed, where this adolescent chick was beginning to fledge. It explained the sudden height gain as well.

“If I let you stay on, you have to promise me: no more pranks. No more cutting June’s hair or gluing together the pages of Celeste’s romantic novels or putting push-pins through the soles of Linda’s shoes. No more torturing the others, or me. Absolutely none. Or I tell Mr Hale, who will send you home instantly. Agreed?”

The pretty blonde head jerked vigorously up and down. I held the child’s eyes long enough to be sure he meant it – and long enough for him to know that I did, too.

God knew where Fflytte Films would find another blonde child at this late date. And Edith was going to have a tough enough time concealing all that sprouting pubescence by the time filming ended next month.

It was not really my problem.

I fetched my jumper and went back up on deck.

Holmes was dancing – still, or again – with his buxom admirer, and I thought it would not be long before his desperation began to show to the others. I pulled on the woollen garment and set my fingers into the rope ladder – no, call it by name: the ratlines of the fore shrouds.

I had seen the men climbing often enough to know it was not only possible, but possible to do it with equanimity. The first few hemp rungs were easy; then the ship rolled to the side I was occupying, and I knew instantly, without a doubt, that the entire vessel – deck, rigging, French cook, and parrot – was about to tip over and come down on top of me, smashing me into the surface of the sea.

I clung, whimpered, and waited to die.

And after a minor eternity, the ship’s roll slowed, and paused, then returned the way it had come. The angle of the shrouds returned to the oblique, the mast ceased to loom above me, the rope ladder I clung to stopped sagging and went firm again. I could not move, but I could breathe. When the ship rolled back again, I was ready for it; I ignored the looming mast, the sag of the shrouds, waiting for Harlequin’s pause. When her mast swung back away from me, I managed to climb three whole hempen rungs before feeling her collapse again onto me.

It was inelegant, and a sailor would have been laughed off the ship, but I climbed.

At the lower yard – the top of the lowest sail – I made the mistake of looking down. I probably whimpered again, although I could not hear myself over the wind. My insouciant air became a great deal more difficult to maintain after that, even though I had seen Holmes’ head near the base of the mast and knew it would not be long before he found excuse to join me in the heights. I resolutely turned my gaze upwards, to where the mast tapered into nothingness. And, more encouragingly, to where a simulacrum of solidity awaited me.

Just above my head was the tops, what I would previously have called a crow’s nest – or parrot’s nest – with a bit of a hole in the bottom next to the mast that had lines passing through it. I wriggled in beside the lines, knowing full well that using this “lubber’s hole” was scorned as cowardly. Inside the tops, I let go a deep breath, profoundly grateful for the faint sense of protection imparted by the shrouds around me and the wood beneath me. This was quite far enough, to escape inquisitive ears. The protection was spurious, the deck’s mild sway giving way to a sense that I was about to be violently flung through the air. I wrapped both hands around nearby ropes, hoping with some small part of my mind that from below, my appearance would preserve some vague attitude of nonchalance rather than appear what it was: a landlubber clinging for dear life.

Rosie came to see what I was up to. I was grateful that she – he – took up a position ten feet down the yard, rather than directly overhead.

A cough came from below. Without loosing my fists, I leant a fraction forward, far enough to see the crown of Holmes’ head. I tried to move clear of the hole, but my hands would not obey.

However, to my surprise, he appeared, not from the hole at my feet, but among the lines at the outer edges of the platform, clambering the shrouds with the ease of a monkey.

“Show-off,” I muttered.

“If you shift a bit to the right, I can get past you,” he suggested.

“I don’t think I can move,” I informed him. The wind, nonexistent fifty feet below, snatched the words from my mouth and threw them towards the African coastline.

“Try.” He waited, to all appearances oblivious to the wind’s attempts to slap him from his perch, for the several minutes it took me to commit my weight a few inches to the right. Then he swung a long leg around the shrouds and dropped in beside me with nothing but the fingers of his right hand to hold him in place.

There were times when I came near to hating the man I had married. “Don’t tell me: You spent two years before the mast when you were a lad.”

“Only eight months. When I was twenty.”

“I think I’d prefer sea-sickness.”

“Yes, I’d noticed you seem remarkably free of the affliction here.”

I groaned.

“What did our Mr Samuel have to say?”

With an effort, I recalled that earlier sense of threat, and told Holmes about the conversation.

“Interesting,” he remarked. At some point while I’d been talking, he had looped his arm through a rope and was picking at a frayed place on his shoe. I shuddered, and squinted at the distant horizon. “You’ve told me about your Mr Pessoa, and I have a basic picture of Fflytte and Hale. Perhaps you’d give me your opinion of any others who have made an impression upon your mind.”

“You probably did not receive my third letter?” I said. “Then I shall start with William Currie, the cameraman. He’s been with Fflytte since the very beginning, including the War years. An intelligent man and a likeable rogue. Although I’d say that, despite his popularity, he keeps himself to himself. Unlike his bosses.” I reviewed for him my points of interest from the missing letter: June’s mother working for Fflytte Films in 1909; June’s birth in 1910; June’s sharing of Hale’s colouration; Hale and Mrs Hatley’s ship-board conversation that ended with a slap.

“Unlikely to be blackmail,” he said.

“I agree, plus they act like old … well, perhaps not friends. Acquaintances. Although I can’t decide if Hale doesn’t realise June may be his, or if he knows and they’re all just very casual about it.”

“With stage people – or in this case, cinema folk – it could easily be the latter. Have you uncovered the process by which this production came into being?”

“What do you mean?” A question I always disliked having to ask Holmes.

“Oh, surely-”

“Let’s leave out the rebukes, Holmes. Just tell me what you’re getting at.”

“If we are to solve the disappearance of Lonnie Johns, and prevent some hypothetical further crime, it might help to know what the end point of this elaborate project is to be. Other than a cinema adventure.”

I clung and I pondered, then shook my head. “I still would not wager that there is any further crime in the offing here, Holmes.”

“With La Rocha and Selim involved?” he scoffed.

“Oh, I agree those two have something in the works, I meant on the part of Fflytte Films – which is where I was brought in, if you remember. The criminality of our pirate crew could be nothing more than two men following the scent of money: Randolph Fflytte walks into Lisbon and starts littering the streets with pounds sterling; he’s practically begging to be taken advantage of.” What was the Portuguese for to fleece? Or the Arabic?

“So the ship, the men, the smooth arrangement under the nose of the Englishmen,” he said. “You suggest that all that is mere opportunism?”

“Look at the sequence: Geoffrey Hale hires Pessoa; Pessoa introduces Fflytte to La Rocha; La Rocha sees a man with far more money than sense; he uses his authority on the Lisbon waterfront to bully the Harlequin’s owner to sell it cheap to Fflytte, arranging that all the paperwork is ready to go when Fflytte walks up. No doubt La Rocha also received a slice of the takings from the ship chandlers, the sail-makers, and everyone else along the line. Just as he’ll have claimed a percentage from the pay packets of the crew we hired – and got free passage for any of his men headed for Morocco.

“In fact, even if the men have different accents, it wouldn’t surprise me if all of them were headed home. What would you wager that if we told them in Arabic to see the bird, every pirate on the ship would look up?

“And,” I added as I mentally sorted through our large collection of troubling details, “Hale told me about something odd that happened the other day. After the first filming, one of the pirate crew – Jack, the second youngest – started to say something about practice not mattering because they weren’t going to – but before he could complete the sentence, Samuel smacked him down. Although that might only mean that the crew don’t intend to bother finishing the picture because they’re just here for a ride to Morocco.”

Holmes was shaking his head before I finished. He protested, “Never have I known those begging a free ride to be so industrious.”

I added, “When they are accumulating generous pay packets in the meantime?”

It was Holmes’ turn to ponder, a juncture at which, had we not been in a young gale and surrounded by tar-soaked rope and dry canvas, he might have brought out his pipe. I shifted, to keep my backside from going numb against the wood, and allowed my gaze to go down. The sails beneath me were pregnant with wind, a vista of living cloth. It would have been quite beautiful, had I been able to see past the terror. Holmes finally said, “It is a poor fit. Sixteen pay packets is petty crime, for those two.”

“Portugal doesn’t have a lot of ready cash lying around, just at the moment. And – wait.” A thought was tapping at the back of my mind, a faint thought, pressing to get through. What …

He was still talking. “However, if this is but the tip of an iceberg, if what we are seeing is the Moroccan equivalent of the Italian criminal syndicate currently taking such a firm hold in America, thanks to their Prohibition – the Brotherhood of the Jolie Rouge, shall we say, along the lines of the Red Circle-”

And then I had it. I broke into his monologue, smiling for the first time since laying my hand on the ratline. “The paint! Holmes, when I first saw her, I noticed that Harlequin’s name was the only relatively intact paint in sight. One could even see the ghost of a former name. Which I think was ‘Henry Morgan.’ ”

“The privateer.”

“What if this ship actually belonged to La Rocha all along? What if it’s a nice simple swindle: La Rocha finds a rich victim, sells him a ship under another name so it doesn’t look suspicious when La Rocha takes charge of fixing the old tub up, tricking his mark into spending money right and left to refit her? I was impressed by how fast they laid their hands on sails that fit, used riggings that were precisely what was needed. Even the oars.”

“Sweeps,” he corrected me absently, chewing on his lip.

I leant forward, an angle that would have been impossible five minutes earlier. “I know you’d prefer to find that La Rocha has woven an elaborate tapestry of crime, but isn’t it more likely he’s just grabbing at passing opportunities? Nine years ago, with the Turkish gold: Did he actually plan the theft? Or did he simply catch its scent and reach for it?”

“Your theory being that there is nothing to the sale of guns and drugs? That Lestrade has a bee in his bonnet? That the death of Lonnie Johns – the apparent death – was the suicide it appears?”

“Not necessarily. I’m merely suggesting that the one has nothing to do with the other.”

“Coincidence?” He pronounced the word with distaste.

“Co-existence, say. A man with a history of felonies would readily seize the chance to commit another.”

“Which brings us back around to the question: Which man?”

“I do not know. But I believe we will have at least a couple of weeks to figure it out: Hale doesn’t distribute the final paycheques until the picture is in the can.”

He said nothing, thoughtfully, just looked downwards. “Perhaps we ought to descend, and continue our investigations.”

“I’m not sure I can.”

He ignored me, and instead wondered aloud, “How are we to explain our prolonged conversation up here, before they come to see?”

I put my head beside his, looking down the long stretch of mast to the deck below. Annie and Edith were peering up the mast in curiosity; any moment now, one or both would scramble up like a monkey. I peeled a hand recklessly from its iron grip and waved to the pair of faces, letting them know I was coming down. Then I forced my feet to inch towards the access hole.

“I came up for the curiosity,” I told Holmes. “You followed to flirt with me. However, from this height, I think I should not risk another hard slap.”

“I would appreciate that,” he answered.

CHAPTER THIRTY

KATE: Let us compromise (Our hearts are not of leather):

Let us shut our eyes, And talk about the weather.

AFTER THE MORNING’S larking about, the afternoon was all work. Lunch was a brisk affair, although tasty. Once the plates were cleared, the pirates were all carried off by Fflytte and set before the critical eye and deft brush of Maude, the make-up woman.

One might have imagined she wanted to dress them in lace and silk stockings.

They would not have it – or rather, those who initially had no objection to paint were brought to task by those who ridiculed and refused. Had Maude, a no-nonsense Yorkshirewoman, been a man, our pirates might well have broken her fingers.

She protested. Fflytte protested. Will pointed at the sun and protested. Samuel and La Rocha had a long and inaudible argument on the quarterdeck, at the end of which Samuel descended to deck level and planted his reshined boots in front of Maude. She had to clamber on top of the sky-light to reach, but – brave woman – she applied her brushes to his stormy face without hesitation. The pirate crew looked on in appalled silence.

Kohl and rouge installed on that fierce countenance, Samuel stood back, and raised one eyebrow at his men, daring them to smirk.

They dared not.

After that, one by one, the pirates submitted to Maude’s attentions, gathering self-consciously to chuckle at each other’s outlined eyes and rouged lips. When she was finished, Maude looked up at La Rocha – and packed away her paints.

The Pirates of Penzance takes place entirely on land. Initially, Fflytte’s Pirate King had been designed with minor variations on that theme, with a few shipboard scenes to link together those in Portugal (which appeared to be standing in for the original’s Penzance) and in Morocco (which had no place whatsoever in the minds of Gilbert or Sullivan).

However, that plan went out the port-hole the instant Randolph Fflytte fell under Harlequin’s spell. Instead, Lisbon and Rabat would act as book-ends for the substance of the tale in the middle – which would draw heavily on Fflytte Films’ reputation (“Fflyttes of the Faraway!”) for sea-going authenticity. Will had already shot two reels of shipboard life, from the meaty hands of the sail-makers to Rosie on the yard-arm. Now we had three hours of strong daylight left in which to record some of the actual story.

Hale had put me in charge of ensuring that the clothing and appearance of the girls and Daniel Marks matched how they had looked at the Moorish Castle’s “pond,” since this shipboard portion would follow immediately on the heels of that bucolic and flower-bedecked scene, and the Major-General’s thirteen daughters would have had no chance to return home and pack their bags before being gently abducted by the appreciative bachelor (and, being orphans, lonely) pirates.

I went through the girls with my notes, confiscating various brooches and hair-pins, exchanging two pairs of shoes to their correct feet, plucking one feather out of Ruth’s hat (which only had five in Cintra) and collecting seven bracelets, three necklaces, five colourful sashes, and one pair of spectacles. Ten of the girls I had scrub kohl from their eyes; six of them I ordered to spit wads of chewing gum over the side.

When the pirates were painted and the girls restored, Fflytte clambered onto the sky-light with his megaphone.

And the first hitch came up.

La Rocha was an essential part of the story, and hence of the filming process. But he stuck fast to his position: Unless we were to furl all the sails and reduce the rigging to bare yards and empty lines (which would leave us insufficiently photogenic) we required a person of authority on the quarterdeck.

Samuel went to talk to him, and another ten minutes went by. The previous bonhomie between captain and lieutenant seemed to be wearing thin, although Samuel made no overt sign of rebellion or even disrespect. I caught Holmes’ eye, and knew that he, too, was wishing their conversation could be overheard by someone more sensible than the parrot. Eventually, it was decided that our spare pirate (no sign of Gröhe) with Maurice and the two sail-makers to back him up (heaven forbid we should make use of the seven surplus women on board) might be installed at the wheel, the four men between them being judged capable of keeping us from sinking or sailing off the edge of the world. Fflytte put the megaphone to his lips. Will bent to the camera. Rosie dove out of the rigging to attack the plumage on Ruth’s hat.

Mrs Hatley screamed, Will cursed, Fflytte shouted, and eventually La Rocha ordered his bird away. To everyone’s astonishment, the creature obeyed. Rosie took up a position on the port-side ratlines, there to mutter a Greek chorus of imprecations and Anarchist phrases.

Megaphone up; slate poised; Will’s eye to the camera; Harriet shrieked and leapt atop the sky-light, sending the megaphone flying and nearly the man holding it. Harriet’s twin admirers, Irving and Kermit, leapt to her rescue, although it took a good minute for her words to become comprehensible: She had seen a rat.

I shouted her down, before panic could seize our little project and all the girls leap for the life-boats. “It was a mouse, only a mouse! Haven’t you seen Lawrence’s pet mouse? It was only Lawrence’s pet.”

It had, in fact, been a rat. The accused pirate reached into his pocket to prove the innocence of his small passenger, but Samuel proved himself as quick mentally as he was physically. He growled to the lad, in Portuguese.

Lawrence stared up at the big first-mate, yanked his hand out free (fortunately, sans mouse), and nodded his head vigorously. “Yes yes, Miss Mouse gone for a walk, so sorry, she very nice, no scare.”

Samuel bent to retrieve the megaphone, handed it to Fflytte, and fixed Harriet with a gaze of utter authority. “Mouse small, very clean. You play with her later, yes?”

Harriet swallowed, herself as mesmerised as a mouse facing a snake. She nodded, and Samuel held up a hand to assist her descent to the deck.

The other girls patted her. With a shiver, she returned to her assigned place, keeping one keen eye on the aft hatch where she’d seen the dread creature. The megaphone went up again.

And this time: “Camera!”

The scene played out nicely, the girls and the pirates acting together on film for the first time. I held my breath at the moment where Frederic had to lunge out from the centre of the pirate mob, since, according to Hale, most of the rehearsals here had ended either in a fall or a fistfight. But it went beautifully, with Adam and Francis shifting at precisely the right moment, and Fflytte’s amplified prompts more by way of encouragement than command.

Will’s arm turned the crank with its mechanical precision; Rosie kept to the heights; the pirates even remembered not to stare at the camera and nudge each other with their elbows; and after the requisite performances, Fflytte called, “And, cut! That was mostly fine, but let’s see if we can get a little more swagger into your walk, men.”

Protest, at which Hale reminded them that sometimes (usually) a scene had to be repeated (several times) and that a ninety-minute-picture took rather more than ninety minutes to make. Then he had to explain what swagger meant. After which the next take was cut thirty seconds into it when the men’s exaggerated sway of the hip and shoulders made them look like male courtesans, or perhaps victims of St Vitus’ Dance. Four tries later, Fflytte called “Cut” and decided that he would go on to the next scene, which had been transplanted from the original’s sea-side setting, with the girls plus Frederic, to the ship’s deck and the entire cast.

Now, girls and pirates alike were required to make innocent and blatantly oblivious conversation about the weather while permitting Frederic and Mabel to bill and coo. The difficulty of shipboard privacy having been forcefully brought home to me, I watched this scene with fascination.

Various gazes wandered in the direction of the young lovers, but then, they did in the opera as well. Bibi as a shy and virginal Mabel was only slightly more believable than Daniel Marks’ manly wooing, but they were actors, and got the job done.

Fflytte decided he wanted a second version with more specific interaction in the background: Ginger and Gerald admiring a particularly fine knot; Adam and Annie together at the rail (Bert didn’t even scowl – he was a more experienced actor than I’d realised); Henry and Harriet (“I go with her,” Irving declared; “Me,” claimed Kermit; “Henry!” bellowed Fflytte through his megaphone, setting every ear to ringing) would stand and point back at the stern.

I hoped no skilled lip-readers would be seeing this picture in the theatres, because some of the conversation was wildly inappropriate to the setting, but it looked good, and the assigned couples balanced nicely – until suddenly La Rocha stood away from the shrouds where he’d been told to lean (“Like a proud parent,” Fflytte had instructed, with the retort, “Proud, of these?”) and barked out a phrase.

Instantly, the scene flew to pieces. Girls dropped from supporting arms, girls fluttered their eyelashes at nothing, and in two cases, girls were knocked to the boards by sailors leaping to obey their captain.

The entire enterprise nearly came to an abrupt end then and there, saved by Samuel – who noticed that, although Will had hastened to grab his camera to safety, Randolph Fflytte was still standing on the sky-light, thus for once of a height to be endangered by the swinging mainsail boom. Samuel’s solution was once again startlingly direct and effective: He knocked Fflytte’s feet out from under him. The megaphone flew overboard. When Fflytte had his breath back, he began to shout at La Rocha, who – fortunately – did not have a belaying pin or marlinspike to hand.

I had not noticed the shift of wind that required a tack, but La Rocha had. When the manoeuvre was finished and the lines stowed again, when the pirates were back and the loops of rope restored to their exact positions, when Jack’s lost hat was replaced by a reasonable facsimile, we set up camera and director, fashioned a substitute megaphone out of one of Maurice’s baking tins, and continued.

Finally, Will called matters to a halt, saying that the light was going. Fflytte protested, but Will was firm that any more film through the camera would be film wasted.

The entire ship gave a great stretch of the limbs and drew a breath of relief.

And then looked around for entertainment.

In a flash, Bibi, Bonnie, and Ginger vanished and reappeared in swimming costumes, dancing about on the foredeck for a moment to tuck their hair into caps, then over the side they went. The wind had already died down considerably, but Samuel ordered the sails furled, sent David into the shrouds as watchman, and had one of the skiffs put out, just in case. There were volunteers aplenty for manning the oars: Adam won the honour. He was soon surrounded by half a dozen water nymphs cavorting in the calm ocean. The other pirates found tasks that kept them in the front half of the ship, and cast envious glances at Rosie, who sidled out on the bowsprit to crane his head at the girls.

Maurice appeared with a pair of fishing rods, thrusting one of them at Hale and attempting to give the other to Bert-the-Constable. However, Bert had other ideas, and passed it to Vincent-Paul-the-Sergeant before stripping down to his trousers and diving over the side, surfacing midway between Annie and Jack. Annie was treading water to talk to Adam-at-the-oars, while Jack was attempting to talk Edith into fetching “her” swimming costume and coming in. Edith looked enviously at Lawrence – dangling upside-down from the martingale stays, his head plunging in and out of the water with each swell – but had enough sense not to risk the inevitable exposure of a skimpy and waterlogged costume. Jack splashed Bert, in an effort to tempt Edith in; Bert swam circles around Jack; Daniel Marks dove expertly in and came up to swim circles around Jack in the opposite direction; Mrs Hatley appeared in a startlingly revealing costume and stuck close to Daniel Marks; handsome dark Benjamin arranged to fall in from his task at the bow and, when there was no furious protest from the quarterdeck (where Samuel watched closely, but did not move to intervene), he urged shy Celeste to venture down the ladder, daringly leaving her spectacles above.

Randolph Fflytte and Will Currie stood with their heads together, debating whether or not to film the activity.

Geoffrey Hale, meanwhile, settled atop the bulwarks with his pole. Collar open, face going pink with the day’s sun, mind far away, the man looked at ease for the first time since I’d met him. I simply could not envision him as a seller of illicit firearms and cocaine. Nor could I see him carrying out the cold-blooded murder of a young female assistant. Still, he had seen long years of active and bloody duty on the Front. And I have been wrong before.

The water around our bow boiled with activity, as if a school of small fish were being driven to the surface by deep and unseen hungers below.

Jack was the first to emerge, clambering up the rope ladder, blind to the disappointment he brought to an apprentice pirate and a constable. Edith was pleased to see him, however, and the two were soon immersed in the intricacies of knot-tying, as the young pirate showed the Major-General’s daughter how to construct a perfect monkey’s paw.

Dusk drew near, giving Adam an excuse to row after Annie and Bert, who had contrived to fall behind the slowly moving Harlequin. Annie’s shrieks of laughter at being hauled aboard the little boat rang across the intervening water, and although she was shivering when she came on deck, her eyes shone with the pleasure of having admirers.

Appetites were hearty for Maurice’s dinner. Afterwards, the gramophone was brought out again, and lamps were lit, and we danced beneath the stars.

* * *

It is, as one can see, impossible to keep much hidden in a universe 150 feet long and 23 feet wide. One need only keep one’s ears and eyes open, to overt behaviour and to nuance, for much to be revealed.

The problem being, it works both ways, making it necessary to construct a believable reason for such questions as, Why did Miss Russell climb a mast for a lengthy conversation with a gent she barely knew – and whom she had nearly drowned at first meeting?

Yet another story-within-a-story, with the only possible script being: A haughty young woman encounters, rejects, and ultimately is won over by a most unlikely man. The Taming of the Shrew, with pirates. And considering that with my trousers, hair-cut, and spectacles I might at first glance be taken for a man, and that Holmes was nearly thrice my age and already established on board as a lecher, the only way to construct the play was as a comedy.

Which placed us in the awkward position of being two married people engaged in a prolonged and very public flirtation, while three score of onlookers sniggered behind their hands at the unlikely pairing. At least our audience cooperated – egged us on, as they thought – by granting us a few square feet of privacy during our tête-à-têtes.

I had to be grateful this voyage was only 350 miles; had we been crossing the Atlantic, we’d have either had to stand before La Rocha while he performed an on-board marriage, or beside him while he performed at-sea burial services for a series of shroud-wrapped fellow passengers. Probably both.

Setting aside the burden of this exquisitely uncomfortable wooing performance, and its unfortunate effect on Holmes’ blood-pressure, the round-the-clock shipboard intimacy provided wide opportunity for a reverse espionage: While Holmes and I enacted a stage comedy at our end, we could also watch a series of other performances unfold among those who considered themselves our audience.

For example, I should never have come to realise Geoffrey Hale’s simmering resentments and irritations with Fflytte were it not for this continuous close surveillance. As it was, the entire ship heard him shout, “Oh for God’s sake, can you talk of nothing but this damnable film!” one night from the tiny cabin the partners shared. And I feel certain that the reaction of my fellow passengers was the same as mine: Of course he cannot; why would you even ask?

The next day, Hale’s usual long-suffering amiability was back in place, but once the slip had been given voice, it was difficult for him to disguise further small ventings of frustration as the good-humoured grumbles they had seemed before.

Further reasons to appreciate the brevity of our voyage cropped up almost hourly. I noticed that wherever Annie was, Adam-the-Pirate and Bert-the-Constable would often drift over to stand, listening casually. Although I’d caught the occasional flash of wit sullying Annie’s big blue eyes, and although she seemed to treat Bert with a sister’s dismissal, Adam’s attentions made her go all fluttery and girlish. Even though she had to be five years older than he.

Taking this to an extreme, Mrs Hatley seemed to be rehearsing her part of Ruth-the-Nursemaid even during her hours of rest, making much of Daniel Marks, our Frederic, patting his hair, adjusting his coat, laughing at his jokes.

Frederic seemed oblivious, because his eyes were usually on the beautiful young pirate Benjamin.

Benjamin’s beautiful eyes, however, followed Celeste.

And Celeste often looked back at him.

The older girls alternated their flirtations between the pirates and the constables, stirring the antagonism between the picture’s enemies. Two of the pirates were old enough to interest the mothers, who took to powder and paint (often lopsided, thanks to poor lighting and the ship’s motions).

One of those was Mrs Nunnally, whose preoccupation with the middle-aged pirate David freed young Edith to cultivate a friendship with Jack. Edith was happy to find someone with whom “she” could hunker on the decks with dice or a pen-knife.

Among the pirates I slowly became aware of some facts. I knew that La Rocha, Samuel – Selim – and Gröhe all spoke Arabic, although with a different accent from what I had learnt in Palestine. Over the next days, despite Samuel’s constant presence that had the sailors guarding their tongues and their actions, several of the men let slip a word here, a phrase there, betraying their knowledge of the language. Adam and Jack were the first two I overheard, followed by Benjamin, then Earnest.

And not only linguistic clues emerged: On our third morning, Adam spotted Annie in conversation with one of the constables (not, as symmetry might suggest, “Alan,” but her other attendant, Bert) and he took objection. Shouting soon escalated to jostling, but to my surprise, Annie did not perform the requisite girlish mock-protest that serves to feed tensions to the point of open violence. Rather, she shoved herself in between the two young cockerels. With her there, no punches could be thrown, and in a flash others had intervened to separate the would-be combatants.

I watched closely as Adam slid his knife back into its hiding place – then Samuel had the young pirate’s collar in his fist, to drag the lad off to the side and give him hell and a couple of hard shakes. When he let go, Adam staggered against the railings. Samuel snapped out a harsh order and pointed at a bucket with a frayed rope tied to its mended bail.

He was setting Adam to scrubbing the deck, on his knees, with a brush. The young man, face red and stormy, snatched up the bucket, upturned it so that a brush fell out, then dropped the pail over the side to fill it with sea water. As he stomped past Jack, the pail sloshing furiously, Jack reached out a comforting hand; Adam threw it off with a snarl. The younger lad shot a covert look at the quarterdeck, saw with relief that Samuel’s back was to him, then walked away towards the bowsprit, looking bereft at the rejection of his friend.

As I thought over the motions, the postures of long familiarity between the two, an odd notion took root in my mind: Perhaps Adam and Jack were familiar in more than the abstract? If one looked closely and discounted the difference in years, one might say there was a degree of resemblance between them.

Almost the resemblance of brothers.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

GIRLS: Piracy their dreadful trade is-

Nice companions for young ladies!

AS GEOFFREY HALE’S assistant, one of my tasks was to ensure that the crew remained more or less content, letting the film go ahead without disruption. As Harlequin worked her way southwards, with fifty-two individuals spanning the variations of age, background, interest, and gender, keeping everyone placid proved an increasing problem. My only reassurance was that, given the tight quarters, all these burgeoning relationships – both affectionate and war-like – would find consummation difficult until we had made landfall.

The changing tide from the quarterdeck was most worrying of all.

Before leaving Lisbon, La Rocha’s attitude towards Fflytte and Hale had been condescending but amiable: Apart from the one uncomfortable outburst in the first hour, La Rocha had listened politely to the requests and demands of his English employer, albeit with the amused eyebrow of an expert faced with the enthusiasms of an amateur.

The farther south we went, however, the further Fflytte and Hale were demoted towards the ranks of the actors. Fflytte seemed to have forgot that La Rocha had come inches from killing him with the belaying pin. Instead, when not actively engaged in filming, our director either ignored the quarterdeck entirely, as if having that portion of the ship-his ship – forbidden to him was no more unusual or irritating than being barred from the parrot’s perch atop the mainmast, or else he approached that sanctum sanctorum with bows and scrapes, to ask our Captain’s thoughts on some twist of the picture’s plot, to enquire of Samuel what the function of that line there might be.

Holmes and I were not the only wooing being done on Harlequin, not by a long shot.

Hale approached the demotion of Englishmen by going quiet. He watched the Captain and his lieutenant as they came and went, studied their interactions with the crew, and rarely spoke directly to them. He stopped what he was doing whenever Fflytte approached the ship’s masters (which was rarely when they were on the quarterdeck), and frowned at his cousin’s subservient posturings.

He did not have to say aloud what he was thinking: Why is the ship’s owner given no say in the running of his vessel? One might imagine that La Rocha not only ran, but owned Harlequin.

The thought went far to explain Hale’s outburst during the night.

As we neared the coast of Africa, the attitude of the two pirates shifted from patronising to near-scornful. And not just La Rocha and Samuel – I noticed Adam turning away from Fflytte with a faint sneer; later that day, young Jack did the same.

It was worrying.

It would have been positively alarming had the pirates demonstrated the same low-grade aggression towards the girls. But towards all of us women, they held an air of distracted kindliness, as if we were pretty toys who were not to be played with too energetically. An attitude I found personally infuriating, but it was preferable to most of the alternatives.

* * *

That last afternoon at sea, Holmes and I managed another brief conversation without having to perch fifty feet in the air. The coast of Morocco was approaching, and all those not actively engaged in running the ship were gathered along the port-bow to watch. So long as we kept our voices low and our expressions those of two people murmuring sweet nothings at one another, we should be all right: there were no port-holes underneath us, and not even Samuel or Annie, between them omnipresent on board, could come upon us from seaward.

We sat shoulder to shoulder on the starboard rail; there was no need to feign my welcome of his physical proximity.

“They’re up to something,” I said, fluttering my eyelashes.

“La Rocha and Samuel, with Adam, Benjamin, and Earnest,” he replied with a smile.

“And Jack.”

“Adam’s younger brother.” He said it as if it were obvious, although he couldn’t have figured it out much before I had.

“Samuel’s sons, you think, rather than La Rocha’s?”

“Adam looks more like Samuel than Jack does, but they all have much the same accent. However, I agree, they’re probably both Samuel’s.”

“Gröhe must know as well. If it was so urgent they had to sneak him in under our noses, he has to have some purpose. But what?”

“Were I to venture a prediction,” he said calmly (heaven forbid he should be caught out in a guess), “I’d say we’re about to be kidnapped.”

A cold finger ran down my spine: Robinson Crusoe had it easy, when it came to piratic captivity. “There are some real horror stories about Moroccan prisons.”

“This is 1924, not 1624,” he said, without a trace of doubt in his voice. Which made me lean into him a touch more, in gratitude. “And although La Rocha is unstable and capricious, I’d say he lacks the mental pathology needed to put a collection of blonde girls into chains.”

“I’m not sure I’d say the same about Samuel.” I gave a shy duck of the head, for the sake of our onlookers – which, considering our topic of conversation, felt even more lunatic than usual.

“Were Samuel in charge, Russell, I should be worried indeed. But La Rocha will take care to leave us in cotton wool, for the time being. Don’t worry, holding captives for ransom is a common enough occupation here.”

“Is it?”

“Oh yes. Sir Harry Maclean, who later became the Sultan’s commander in chief, was held ransom for a time. Twenty thousand, I believe they got for him.”

“Francs?”

“Pounds.”

“Ouch. I can’t see anyone parting with that much for this lot in a hurry.” I thought of having to spend months locked up in the company of Bibi and Annie and Edith … “What do you think about taking the ship?”

He smiled – his own smile, not the smarm of the Major-General. “Have I mentioned recently, Russell, that I find your confidence anodyne to an old man’s doubts?”

I snorted. “The day you doubt yourself is the day I sprout wings and fly with Rosie. You and I could take the ship if we wanted.”

“Not by direct action.”

“We can’t put the others at risk, I agree, even though low cunning outdoes open warfare any day. Still, two against sixteen …”

“Three if-”

He bit off what he had been about to say, and I turned to him a face that, had anyone been nearby, would have cast our affectionate act into serious doubt. “Let me guess: You were going to tell me that Mycroft has a man on board.”

“I think he may.”

“So why didn’t he tell you?” I demanded.

“Kindly don’t look so murderous, Russell, we’re supposed to be love-making here. That’s better, if a trifle sickly. He didn’t tell me because I haven’t talked with him.”

“You haven’t-” I closed my mouth, pushed away from the railing, and stalked across to the other side, staring unseeing towards the brown line across the horizon. When I went back to him, land was a mile closer and things were somewhat clearer. “You didn’t actually say that you came to escape Mycroft. He never got to Sussex, did he? There were no builders in. Yet he made arrangements for you to come here?”

“My brother may not be aware that he made the arrangements. He kept sending messages to say he’d been delayed, that he would arrive the next day. I thought nothing of it – I’ve had sufficient experience with British builders to expect that any dealings with them will go awry – but when I received your letter on Wednesday and telephoned to his flat, there was no answer. The building’s concierge said he’d been gone for days. I don’t know where he is or what he’s up to, but I didn’t want to wait for him. I forged a document and commandeered his resources.”

How jolly: another warrant for our arrest.

“But you agree that he has a man here?” I asked.

“I’d say the machinations for your getting on board were too complex for Scotland Yard. They carry the aroma of Mycroft.”

“Well, his agent is unlikely to be one of the pirates, since La Rocha brought them. And the film crew have mostly been with Fflytte for a while. That leaves the constables, of whom Clarence and Donald are regulars. What about Alan? He has the watchful air of one of Mycroft’s men.”

“Even if all four of the remaining constables are with us, there are too many innocents standing in the way of harm.”

Plus, La Rocha and Samuel had no small degree of low cunning themselves. And more ruthlessness than either Holmes or I could summon.

“Are you suggesting that we let them continue with their kidnapping?”

“I think it would be more dangerous to move against them now, when they are clearly braced for challenge, than later when they feel secure at their success.”

“Holmes, I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“If nothing else,” he mused, “it will be a novel experience. I have been abducted before, but never within the setting of a Gilbert and Sullivan play.”

I considered our situation, and was hit by a thought that made me chuckle.

Holmes looked at me sideways. “I should be glad to hear any aspect of the situation that is merely humorous.”

“A moving picture based on a story of fictional pirates taken over by real ones, and the picture itself hires false pirates to play pirates, who turn out to be real? Fernando Pessoa would die with happiness.”

* * *

We, however, in the absence of our walking conundrum and translator, could only wait with interest for the announcement of our abduction to be made. The handful of pirates that we had decided were in on the plot became ever more tense as the coastline grew before us. The girls began to bubble with the thrill of the adventure. The rest of the pirates happily demonstrated their skills in the rigging to the girls below and to the other ships in the vicinity. The tan horizon line became a shaped coast with long white breakers and a tight collection of stone walls and flat rooftops.

No announcement was made.

We came within shelling range of the city, then rifle shot, then bow-shot, without being informed that we were prisoners.

Finally, the water curling back from our hull took on a tinge of brown, from the waters of the Bou Regreg river that divided bustling modern Rabat on the south from the enclosed and xenophobic Moslem Salé to the north. In its heyday, the river had provided a neat refuge for shallow pirate hulls, while keeping at a distance the deeper draughts of the royal navy. Over the generations, the river had silted up, permitting the passage of small fishing boats and ferries – until the French occupation began, and improvements were made.

The French and English governments would no doubt be thrilled to learn that their European modernisation schemes had enabled the latest generation of Salé pirates to bring thirty-four European prisoners up to the city gates in modesty and ease.