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
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
“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
“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
