Greenbeard (9781935259220) (24 page)

 

Blue Peter watched her take shape, frequently pausing on his rounds just to observe her being clothed, put in harness for war. Her shape to a yokel landsman's
eyes merely meant that she was a ship, yet to a sailor's eyes she was a predator, a predator as lairy as a wolf, but to a pirate's eyes she was lovely. Her hull was long and lean and low, the foredeck and the quarterdeck barely shoulder-height above the waist-deck – much, much, lower than a frigate of the Royal Navy - the easier to board another boat from, the true mark of a pirate-ship. Yet after the rebuild the low deck was no longer an obvious modification, the decks hacked level more-or-less in haste. Now she looked as though she had been built that way from the keel up, and, more than that, she was a pirate-ship made for piracy with no constraint of expense, and she looked it. Blue Peter was minded of a leopardess. She had always had a wiggle of her stern when tacking, just like the twitch of that animal's hindquarters when she jinked to cut off her prey, and now that little quirk seemed so fitting that it was eerie. The
Ark de Triomphe
was a dangerous lady, a
femme fatale
.

Blue Peter, as Master Gunner, had overseen the mounting of her new guns, whose black snouts now protruded from her gun-ports. The latest cast-steel eighteen-pounders from the Carron Company, none finer, equipped her single lower gun-deck, with twenty-four-pounder iron carronades on her upper decks. He would miss the short bronze Portugese thirty-two-pounders from the foredeck, though; he had been fond of those old smashers. As each new gun-barrel was dragged to the frigate on a sledge the crews had stopped to introduce it to its predecessor, laid on timbers in a shed, to splash them both with rum and ‘marry' them so that the new gun would carry the same name as the old one. Sailors are superstitious, and pirates perhaps even more so.

The only thing that looked odd about the
Ark de Triomphe
was the small platform mounted between the foremast and the mainmast on a diagonal spar, at about one-half of the mainmast's height. Blue Peter had no idea what it was for, but his fingers still ached from the fitting of the five thin copper rods that ran to it, the last of the copper rods to be installed, he hoped. The
Ark de Triomphe
is not just a leopardess, he thought, there is more; she has bones of iron now, and yet more, her claws are guns of steel, and, yet more again, her nerves are copper rods made to carry lightning. What is he making here? What kind of beast has he built as his steed for his monster-hunt? And Blue Peter Ceteshwayoo was suddenly cold, and very afraid.

Although it was still freezing cold, there were faint signs, if not of Spring then of the imminent arrival of Spring, and the low sun was occasionally shining
apologetically through the scudding clouds. As Blue Peter stood on the bank looking at the frigate's mysterious platform a Liver bird settled on it, flapping its wings whop-whop before folding-up like an old umbrella. In the brief calm between gusts of breeze Blue Peter heard its call, “awk! awk-la! AWK!”

T
he Broadmeadow estuary lay calm and dark under a moonless night sky, and the small Irish village of Malahide showed no lights. The pirate frigate
Ark de Triomphe
lay at anchor, low and black. The ship and the longboat that was shuttling to-and-fro from the shore should have been invisible in the gloom, but the wide estuary was full of small skiffs with bright lanterns on poles.

“I have heard of the cunning Orientals using birds to catch fish, but I never thought to see such a thing ten miles from Dublin,” said Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges.

“They are cormorants, it seems. Avian creatures that are accustomed to dive beneath the waters in search of their piscine prey,” said Blue Peter Ceteshwayoo. “The fisherman ties a leather thong around the bird's neck, the poor creature cannot swallow the fish and so must bring it back to its master. The lantern's light attracts the fish.”

Captain Greybagges looked at him quizzically.

“I asked the fellows down there on the beach,” said Blue Peter, pointing.

“There seemed to be little point in being stand-offish when we are already exposed in plain sight by their lights. Fishing with birds is a source of extra money for the farming people around here, they said. Fishing with birds, and collecting seaweed.”

“Seaweed?”

“A particular kind of seaweed. They told me it is dried, shredded and sold to be used for padding coffins, as it absorbs the stink of a corpse. The departed relative is displayed in the family parlour for the wake, which is an overnight vigil of drunken remembrance. The sad occasion is thus rendered less dolorous by the exsiccative properties of the bier of kelp, so the grieving kin may then enjoy the roborative properties of the beer of barley….”

Captain Greybagges eyed him in silence. Blue Peter looked abashed, and then continued.

“The fishermen may have been making sport of me, of course, as I am but a poor heathen blackamoor, but I doubt it, as they were otherwise quite amiable and polite. Well, they were after I gave them a sip of rum.”

“Seaweed to line coffins? I suppose I have heard of stranger things.” Captain
Greybagges strode back to the road above the beach. The boat had returned and pirates were carrying small wooden boxes to it from a coach and a cart. The horses snorted and stamped their hooves, their breath swirling in ghostly clouds in the glow from the coach-lamps.

“How many more, you swabs?” growled the Captain.

“One more trip, Cap'n,” said Torvald Coalbiter, carrying a wooden box on his shoulder.

“Don't say it!” said the Captain, turning to Blue Peter. “Not until we are safely back at sea. Don't tempt the fates.” Blue Peter looked abashed again.

There was a confused outbreak of shouting from the sea. Ghastly piratical oaths answered by curses in Gaelic and the squawking of cormorants; the longboat had nearly rammed a fisherman's skiff.

 

 

“I shall say it, now that we are safely back at sea. Everything went well!” Blue Peter grinned and poured rum for himself and the Captain.

“I am not usually a superstitious man,” said the Captain, “but these mechanisms are vital to my plans. I feared that such delicate engines might be easily broken, or that an attempt might be made to steal them away to ransom them. Now they are stowed aboard the barky I can feel easier.”

“The ride from Dublin certainly will have attracted attention,” said Blue Peter. “A cart, a coach and an armed escort of pirates mounted on old nags and mules. I'm surprised the children of Dublin didn't follow us, thinking that the circus had come to town.”

“I wish I could have arranged things more efficiently, Peter, but with time pressing I could not. A more clandestine meeting with the clockmakers and a diversion when the boxes were moved would have been better, but instead I just had to load the boxes, go as fast as we could and trust that any wicked rapparees or mosstroopers would be without the time to prepare an ambush. I wasn't going to meet all the clockmakers at the same time and place, either, but I again had no choice. The clockmakers, thus introduced, would discuss the engines and so, in turn, so the gossips of Dublin would certainly have had word of a valuable cargo in transit.”

“The clockmakers were a congenial parcel of rogues, though,” said Blue Peter, sipping rum from his crystal goblet.

“Indeed, and that is a problem, for they will continue to talk among themselves now, being intrigued by the mechanical devices that I ordered from them, and I do not wish my business to be discussed or bruited abroad by wagging tongues.”

“I am intrigued, too,” said Blue Peter, “but I am not a clockmaker, so I will remain mystified, I suppose.”

There was a knock at the door of the Great Cabin and Jack Nastyface entered, followed by Mr Benjamin carefully carrying a square box. The box was rectangular, as long as a forearm, half that in width and height and made of unvarnished pinewood, with a rope handle at each end, and a number scorched onto its top and sides with a hot iron

“I thought you might like to see an example what you have purchased at such expense, Captain,” said Mr Benjamin, placing the box on the table. There was another knock and Bulbous Bill Bucephalus and Israel Feet entered. Mr Benjamin took a small jemmy-bar from a pocket and levered off the top of the box, nails screeching in the wood, while Blue Peter poured shots of rum for everybody.

“No touching! No poking with fingers! Don't spill any damned rum on it, either!” spoke Mr Benjamin sternly, then reached into the box and lifted out a complex mechanism of brass and steel, of cogs and gearwheels. It sat on the table, the machined metal coruscating in the lamplight. The Captain and his officers looked at it in silent wonderment for a while. Jack Nastyface kept quiet and hoped nobody would notice him.

“Why, they are fine craftsmen, these Dublin clockmakers!” said Mr Benjamin at last. “These are not your mere cork-and-nail men!”

“Cork-and-nail men?” asked the Captain with a raised eyebrow.

“Irish travelling tinkers who will attempt to mend clocks. They will hold a piece of drilled sheet-brass with a nail stuck into a bottle-cork, the better to file it into a cog-wheel. Some of them have surprising skill for unlettered oafs, it is true, but the workmanship shown here is of a different order entirely.” Mr Benjamin smiled down at the brass clockwork machine.

“What does it do?” asked Bill, frowning.

“It multiplies numbers, or rather
quantities
,” said Mr Benjamin. “See, the shaft
here
is rotated to represent one value, this shaft
here
the other value and the resulting
multiplicand is the rotation of this shaft
here
. The powerful spring
here
provides the energizing power to drive the mechanism, which is re-wound by this little shaft
here
.”

“What be these?” said Israel Feet, reaching out with a finger.

“Don't touch!” snarled Mr Benjamin. “Sorry, Izzy, but these mechanisms are quite gracile, and frangible if mishandled. Those ivory discs are for fine adjustments.”

“It is quite beautiful, I have never seen its like!” said Jack Nastyface.

“What be you a-doing in here, Jack?” growled the Captain. Jack Nastyface blushed to the roots of his hair.

“I … I helped Mr Benjamin to carry it in,” he gulped.

The Captain regarded him with a baleful eye.

“Curiosity killed the cat, Jack. Go and tell the cook to bring us some snacks, and as a punishment for your nosiness you must pass it around the crew that I nearly ran Izzy through with a cutlass for merely breathing on this engine, and that I will surely keel-haul any fool who touches any one of these mechanisms with even the nail of a little finger. Only Mr Benjamin is allowed to fiddle with them.”

Jack departed, closing the door behind him. Mr Benjamin carefully replaced the gleaming brass engine back into its box.

“They are all there, Captain. Nine multipliers, nine adders of the Gaussian pattern, nine differential integrators, plus the regulators, the connecting shafts and all the other bits and pieces. Each component in triplicate to give two spares against breakages. One hundred and forty-seven boxes.”

“Once we are returned to Liver Pool and moored, how long to install them in the barky, Frank? The deciheptaxial mechanism we discussed?”

Mr Benjamin scowled. “Two weeks, maybe three if there's a problem.”

“Make it two, if you can, Frank!” said Captain Greybagges, before sipping rum from his chased-silver goblet.

The
Ark de Triomphe
ploughed eastwards under full sail through the dark Irish Sea, under a sky bright with stars.

 

 

The
Ark de Triomphe
lay moored once again to the Liver Pool boatyard jetty, her masts and decks busy as pirates attended to any small problems that the short trip
to Ireland had shaken out. Mr Benjamin and his team – mostly young pirates, but with a cabinet-maker and a whitesmith from the ranks of the old pirates – were installing the Captain's mechanisms in a large locker below the quarterdeck, next to the steering-tackle under the ship's wheel. They all seemed strangely cheerful, thought Blue Peter, and he wondered if it was the simple joy of such precise and exacting work. Whatever the cause, their chatter and the noise of the necessary carpentry had driven Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges out from the refuge of his Great Cabin ashore to the front parlour of the boatyard house, where Blue Peter found him writing letters –
scritch, scratch
– and drinking coffee.

“I believe I have solved the problem of the Dublin clockmakers!” said the Captain, as Blue Peter sat down. “Will you have some coffee? A biscuit?”