Sense And Sensibility And Sea Monsters (40 page)

Elinor stopped him with a reproof. “Octopi seem to play an important role in your adventures, Mr. Willoughby.”

With a sheepish expression, Mr. Willoughby produced a long, slim
cylinder from his pocket, marked along one side with a light sketch of an eight-armed figure.

“What—”

“’Tis an octopus whistle,” Willoughby slyly explained; “specially designed to emit a sound pitched to draw their attentions, no matter the weather or water. I have found that being rescued from the clasping, eight-tentacled embrace of a giant octopus tends to create—in a lady—a certain affection—”

Elinor shook her head, unsure of the words to express disapprobation at such a device, and slipped the cylinder into her pocket.

“Well,” he replied, “once more good-bye. I shall now go away and live in dread of one event.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your sister’s marriage.”

“You are very wrong. She can never be more lost to you than she is now.”

“But she will be gained by someone else. And if that someone should be the very he whom, of all others, I could least bear—but I will not stay to rob myself of all your compassionate goodwill, by showing that where I have most injured I can least forgive. Good-bye. God bless you—and—oh—one more thing—”

Without a further word, he removed from the sheath of his boot a razor-sharp dirk, and pressed its handle into Elinor’s hand. And then he stumbled down the gangplank, his orangutan companion trailing behind, leapt into his kayak, and sailed away.

Elinor’s stood swaying with the boat’s rocking motion, her thoughts silently fixed on the irreparable injury which too early an independence and its consequent habits of idleness, dissipation, and luxury, had made in the mind and character and happiness of Willoughby. The world had made him extravagant and vain—extravagance and vanity had made him cold-hearted and selfish. From a reverie of this kind she was recalled by a most terrible sound—a long, harsh shriek, that she could not recognize until
she looked through the spyglass—and would forever remember thereafter as the sound emitted by an orangutan when it is run through with a cutlass.

For here at last, fulfilling her every terrified expectation, was
The Jolly Murderess
, six black flags fluttering darkly in the moonlight, sailing unerringly forward for
The Cleveland
, rapidly narrowing the hundred or so yards between the crafts. And here was a jolly-boat, its oars manned by two cruel-eyed brigands sent as an advance party, yet closer; it was this small vessel that had intercepted Willoughby’s kayak. Elinor saw the limp body of Monsieur Pierre tossed like a ragdoll into the water; she saw the escaped Willoughby swimming furiously to shore. And she saw, as she again raised the spyglass from the jolly-boat to the ship itself, standing at the prow of
The Murderess
, the author of this latest and direst calamity— Dreadbeard himself.

The terrible pirate chieftain was massively tall, in a long and jet-black captain’s coat, a cap of scarlet and gold tilted at a rakish angle backwards on his big, bearded head, and a long mane of tar-black hair spilling from his hat and down his back. He stood beside the wheel, which was manned by a ragged, dirty-faced and hunched coxswain, who snarled and spat on the deck as he directed the ship on its course for
The Cleveland
. As for the hated captain, he stood stock still, his chest thrust forward, clutching in the fist of his left hand a gleaming double-edged cutlass, glinting like new-forged steel in the moonlight.

Elinor felt at once the ludicrousness of all Willoughby’s trapdoors and netting, of any such trifling defenses; the tiny dirk he had handed her felt like a toy in her hand. Elinor trembled;
The Jolly Murderess
plowed the black water. The massive figure at the prow threw back his head and laughed—a loud, cackling, hideous bellow that rolled across the water towards her in terrible waves.

Dreadbeard had arrived.

W
HEN ELINOR RUSHED BACK
inside the cabin and up the stairs to the bedroom of the unconscious Marianne, she found her just awaking, refreshed by so long and sweet a sleep. Elinor’s heart, meanwhile, beat a rapid tattoo of terrified panic.

Peeking out the black-curtained window, she saw that the advance boat was nearly in boarding range of
The Cleveland
. She heard Dreadbeard’s terrible laughter through the windows of the cabin, and then again, ever louder, nearer and nearer with every moment. The hideous sound threw her into an agitation of spirits which kept off every indication of fatigue, and made her only fearful of betraying her terror to her sister. “Go back to sleep, dear Marianne,” she murmured in her ear. “Only sleep a while longer.”

She raced back out onto the verandah, just in time to see the pair of foul mercenaries in their dinghy bump up against the hull and begin their ascent of the Jacob’s ladder and onto
The Cleveland
.

“Avast, ye hearties!” they hollered as they climbed, “We be requestin’ the pleasure of your company this fine evening!”

In Elinor’s left hand she still clutched the little knife that Willoughby had pressed upon her—with her right she now snatched up Palmer’s hunting rifle and aimed it at the gangplank; as soon as the kerchiefed head of the first invader appeared over the side, she squeezed the trigger. The force of the gun pushed Elinor backwards with tremendous force into the cabin-rail; and, furthering her distress, the shot missed entirely. The intended target, a lanky, filthy tar in a ragged, patched coat, laughed wickedly as the ball sailed harmlessly over his head. He hopped insouciantly over
the side and advanced across the deck. Elinor backed up against the cabin-rail, squeezed off a second ball, and this time with greater success: the second pirate took the shot directly in his face as he appeared over the side rail; his head exploded in a burst of gore, and his body flew backwards into the sea.

But before she could rise to her feet, Elinor felt the calloused hands of the filthy first pirate at her neck, squeezing with brutal force; all the pain of the throat wound she had received from the sea scorpion recurred, only to be supplanted by the terrifying sensation of the air being choked from her body. She stared up into the dirty face of the pirate, and conceived with a desperate melancholy that this would be the last sight ever to greet her eyes. Oh, she wished she had granted her full attention, when gentlemen of fortune were the fashion in-Station, to the mock fights she had seen. Oh, how she wished she had some knowledge of how to repulse the cruel attentions of a pirate!

As if in answer to her desperate thoughts, she heard the bellowing voice of Mrs. Jennings: “Whittle! Whittle him!”

Indeed, such was a form of knowledge she knew well—and, moreover, she had the proper tool to hand: Willoughby’s dirk, a hilted blade, five inches long, could most assuredly approximate a driftwood sculpting knife! She raised the dagger and began to cut away at the brigand’s dirty grimace—one cut, then another, then another, a series of fierce slashes, imagining his hideous nut-brown face was nothing but a chunk of old driftwood she was shaping into a figurine.

As she slashed away, blood rained down out of the pirate’s face directly onto hers; she spat his black blood from her mouth. Shortly, his grip relaxed, for she had stabbed the man to death. Mrs. Jennings, in her nightclothes and cap, rushed to her side and helped Elinor to her feet. “We must hurry,” she sputtered. “We face—”

“Dreadbeard, dear. I know.” She pointed to where
The Jolly Murderess
still sailed forward, now not more than thirty feet away; Dreadbeard still at the prow, cutlass in hand, seemingly unperturbed by the dispatch of his
advance party. But then, as they watched,
The Murderess
stopped in its forward motion, and for a long moment simply sat in the water. Elinor thought for one joyful, fleeting second, that her adversaries were, for some blessed reason, preparing to turn and sail back out to sea. She raised the spyglass again, just in time to see Dreadbeard raise his huge cutlass overhead as a signal and let out an unholy shout; at which signal his crew— from their various positions, arrayed along the bow, huddled in the poop-deck, even hanging from the riggings—raised bows and let loose a bombardment of arrows.

Elinor and Mrs. Jennings ducked behind the captain’s wheel as the deadly projectiles whizzed in a thick deadly blur around them.

“Surrender!” cried Dreadbeard’s guttural voice from the prow of the
Murderess
. “Surrender—and mayhaps I’ll spare ya keelhaulin’, and only slit your throats and feed your guts to the sharks. You bein’ ladies and all. Or then again, mayhaps I
won’t.
”

At this bit of piratical levity, his fellow mercenaries laughed in a ragged chorus.

Elinor summoned the courage to poke her head up from behind the wheel and shout, “We shall never—” only to have her sentence caught short by blinding pain as an arrow, one of a second round let loose by her adversaries, struck her in the arm. Mrs. Jennings then demonstrated that her apprehension of pirates was as keen as Elinor’s, and her ability to fight them if anything more assured.

With a mighty wail she leapt to the guns and fired
The Cleveland
’s carronade with deadly accuracy; soon several of the enemy had fallen under a hail of round shot, collapsing mortally wounded to the deck. But the ship, even at that moment, resumed its forward progress as Dread-beard’s men threw the pieces of their former shipmates overboard.

“Closer, my dearies,” shouted Dreadbeard from his place at the prow. “Who shall be my first dance partner, I wonder? I do so love the comp’ny of a lady.”

It was then that Elinor remembered the whistle. Just as
The Jolly
Murderess
rowed near enough that she no longer required the spyglass to see the leering faces of her foes, she produced from her pocket the long, cylindrical penny-whistle that Willoughby had so shamefacedly handed her only an hour before—though it seemed now like years gone by.

She blew it, and blew it again, and then again, knowing not whether the device would prove effective; certain only that it was their only chance at survival. And then, in a flash, from some inscrutable depth of the ocean, a long, rubbery tentacle, bedecked with suction cups, snaked its way over the side of the pirate ship and onto its fo’c’sle. In the next moment, another tentacle appeared, and then another, and then a fourth. Soon
The Murderess
was surrounded by a writhing school of eight-tentacled monsters, churning the black water, banging their great oblong heads against the hull, and reaching their multitudinous tentacles into the galleys. The pirates called out to each other in their mercenary cant, confused and fearful, as one by one they were grabbed bodily by long, powerful tentacles and pulled into the water. Elinor stood frozen, awestruck, the whistle still at her lips, as the cephalopods did their grim work.

In several minutes time, the pirates had been vanquished—all, it seemed, but for Dreadbeard himself, who still stood unbowed at the prow of the schooner, his black eyes aglow. At his feet was a pile of chopped-up tentacles, dispatched with a few swift blows of his gleaming cutlass; under his foot was an octopus’s shattered skull, which he had staved in with the heel of his massive boot. He stared unerringly at Elinor, his cutlass high above his head, a virulent gleam in his eye, as the boat continued to draw forward.

“What fascinatin’ friends you’ve got, for a lass your age,” smirked Dreadbeard, kicking an octopus head overboard. “I am so
keen
to make your acquain—aaaaah!”

Dreadbeard let out a horrid scream of pain and surprise as some-one—or
something
—smashed him brutally with a length of plank on the back of his massive shaggy head. The pirate captain reeled, giving the stranger time to grasp the cutlass from his outstretched hand and, with a
single swift and powerful blow, chop off his head.

The hero was Colonel Brandon. Elinor hailed him heartily from the deck of
The Cleveland
, and he hailed her back, holding aloft the severed head of the fearsome Dreadbeard.

“Brandon? But that means—”

Elinor spun around on the deck of the houseboat, and beheld: “Mother!”

Mrs. Dashwood, whose terror, riding Colonel Brandon as he swam nearer and nearer the houseboat had produced almost the conviction of Marianne’s being no more, had no voice to inquire after her, no voice even for Elinor; but
she
, waiting neither for salutation nor inquiry, instantly gave the joyful relief; “Marianne lives, mother! She lives!
And
we have vanquished the pirates! Happy day!”

Her mother, catching it with all her usual warmth, was in a moment as much overcome by her happiness, as she had been before by her fears. She collapsed into Elinor’s arms, right there on the foredeck, and from that position the two watched as Colonel Brandon hacked the corpse of Dreadbeard to bits with an axe seized from the deck of the ship, and threw bits of his body, one by one, overboard to the octopi who had been of such able assistance. Colonel Brandon then leapt off the deck; in an instant, had swum the scarlet-flooded water and appeared beside them on the verandah of
The Cleveland
.

As
The Jolly Murderess
drifted slowly back out to sea, its peril decisively neutralized, Mrs. Dashwood was supported into the drawing-room between her daughter and her friend—and there, shedding tears of joy, though still unable to speak, embraced Elinor again and again, turning from her at intervals to press Colonel Brandon’s hand, with a look which spoke at once her gratitude, and her conviction of his sharing with herself in the bliss of the moment. He shared it, however, in a silence even greater than her own.

As soon as Mrs. Dashwood had recovered herself, to see Marianne was her first desire; and in two minutes she was with her beloved child, rendered dearer to her than ever by absence, unhappiness, and danger. Elinor’s delight, as she saw what each felt in the meeting, was only checked by an apprehension of its robbing Marianne of further sleep— but Mrs. Dashwood could be calm, could be even prudent, when the life of a child was at stake, and Marianne, satisfied in knowing her mother was near her, and conscious of being too weak for conversation, submitted readily to the necessity of silence and quiet. Mrs. Dashwood
would
sit up with her all night; and Elinor, in compliance with her mother’s entreaty, went to bed. But the rest, which one night entirely sleepless, and many hours of the most wearing anxiety, and pirate battle, seemed to make requisite, was kept off by irritation of spirits. Willoughby, “poor Willoughby,” as she now allowed herself to call him, was constantly in her thoughts; she would not but have heard his vindication for the world, and now blamed, now acquitted herself for having judged him so harshly before. But her promise of relating it to her sister was invariably painful. She dreaded the performance of it, dreaded what its effect on Marianne might be; doubted whether after such an explanation she could ever be happy with another; and for a moment wished Willoughby a widower, and visualized Mrs. Willoughby being consumed by a great octopus, as the pirates had been so recently. Then, remembering Colonel Brandon, reproved herself, felt that to
his
sufferings and his constancy far more than to his rival’s, the reward of her sister was due, and wished anything rather than Mrs. Willoughby’s death.