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