The Barbary Pirates

existed, or had ever existed—and I doubted both—I had a feeling the agreement I made would not be as simple as Dragut had promised. She had yet to add her own amendments. The more I tried to escape these Egyptian Rite rascals, the more deeply entwined with them I seemed to get. The more I dreaded Aurora Somerset, the more determined she seemed to make me her partner. We had become—as I’d concluded in America, after I wounded her brother—married in hate.

As baffled as I was at the prospect of taking care of a child, I found that Harry had practicality I admired. He was, in predictable order, hungry, sleepy, or bored. Addressing these issues came to be my primary responsibility. He was in the habit of one nap per day, but also subject to awakening in the night and crawling into my hammock for comfort. At first I found this startling and then, after a while, oddly natural and even reassuring. Certainly he slept better than I did, accepting his immediate environment with a child’s equanimity, even though he did keep asking about his mother. On food, he stated his likes and dislikes plainly. The bread, dates, and fruit I fetched him were fine, but he had no use for olives, chickpeas, or pickled fish. Fortunately he was both weaned and trained to the toilet, though it took some persuasion to accustom him to the ship’s bucket we used as his boy-sized head. With cheerful curiosity, he’d follow pirates to the vessel’s real head under the bowsprit, watching them do their business above the pitching waves with a scientist’s concentration. Bodily functions had unending fascination for him, and I gave long and learned lectures about the relative merits of privies, latrines, necessary houses, heads, buckets, bushes, and the tavern wall. He took enormous pride in mastering his own bucket, and I daresay it’s a more useful skill than most of what we give medals for.

Keeping him entertained and out of mischief was my biggest challenge, since I had to warn him off the gunwales, ratlines, and guns, and away from swinging booms and finger-pinching halyards.

The dog he avoided on his own.

Fortunately, some of the pirates, after their initial apprehension, adopted him as a kind of pet. They amused themselves by teaching him quick games. I found he could be kept occupied for an hour or two with a few musket balls and a belaying pin to knock them about. I created a simple dice game he took a liking to—the point was to jump the joints in the ship’s decking to the count of the dice, and I always let him win. I was oddly proud, and worried, that he’d inherited my gaming instincts.

“Where you live?” he asked.

“A lot of places, actually.”

“Where Mama?” It was his favorite subject.

“I met your mother in Egypt,” I told him. “She was helping a man take a shot at me, but then I claimed her as a slave of sorts and it all worked out in the end. She’s very clever.”

“Mama say you brave.”

“Did she now?” I couldn’t have been more flattered if I’d been inducted in Napoleon’s new Legion of Honor, even if Harry wasn’t entirely certain what “brave” even meant. “I think I’d say resourceful, and occasionally determined. The real grit is in being a mama, Harry. It’s a real commitment, being a mama.”

“And papa!”

“Well, yes. I suppose I should have been here, or there, had I known about you. But my original home is across the ocean in America, so I visited there. I was looking for woolly elephants, I was. Have you ever seen an elephant?” I mimicked the beast, using my arm for a trunk.

“From castle! It hurt a man.”

“My goodness! Was it an accident?”

“Mama wouldn’t let me see.”

“Well, that shows we have to be careful, don’t we? If we get in a scrape I’ll take you down to the hold and tuck you among the spare sails. You absolutely must stay there, you hear? When it’s safe again, I’ll come get you.”

“What’s a scrape?”

“Oh, just some unpleasantness. I don’t think we’ll have any.”

“Am I pirate?”

“I think you are, Harry. A boy pirate, anyway, if you’re on a pirate ship.”

“Who pretty lady?” He pointed to Aurora.

“Why she’s a pirate, too, and not one you want to get close to. She’s not a nice lady like your mama.”

“She gave me sugar.”

“Did she now?” That little bit of favoritism annoyed me. I didn’t want Aurora making friends with my son. “If you get hungry, you come to your papa.”

“Dog bad. And bad man walks funny.”

“Remember—find a hiding place in the sails.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I’d half hoped we might run into an American frigate on our way to Syracuse, given that Malta was on the way, but I didn’t see our flag anywhere. If Morris was fighting a war he had an odd way of doing it. We breezed past the British outpost as if in a regatta and pointed for Syracuse, that ancient city on Sicily’s eastern shore that had been fought over by the Athenians, Romans, Vandals, Goths, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Germans, Spanish, and just about anyone else who happened by. It was founded more than seven centuries before Christ, about the same time as Rome, and was presently ruled from Naples by the Bourbon king Ferdinand under the protection of the British navy. Syracuse, in short, was a place so thoroughly besieged, shelled, occupied, surrendered, and liberated that I had a hard time believing there was anything left to find there but recycled rubble. With luck we’d poke about, realize the whole thing was a myth, and Aurora would good-naturedly grant us all our freedom.

I knew better, of course.

The old city of Syracuse is on an oblong island that is connected by bridges to the mainland. There’s a fort called Castello Maniace at the city’s outer tip, its guns commanding any ship trying to enter or leave the harbors. This island, called Ortygia, is what we’d initially mistaken for a narrow bay on the palimpsest map. There’s a large harbor on the southern side and a smaller one to the north, and then the new town and villas run uphill on the mainland, occupying a pie-shaped wedge of land that culminates at the Epipoli plateau. It’s a perfect, centrally located place for a city, and the ancient Greeks had built eighteen miles of walls (long since dismantled and stolen by farmers and contractors) to enclose all its suburbs and estates.

Now, in 1802, the buildings of Ortygia are three-and four-story houses of honey-colored limestone with red tile roofs, the old town dominated by the spires and domes of its primary cathedral, the duomo. There is more gay color in Syracuse than in Muslim Tripoli, more whimsy and more charm. Bright blue fishing boats bob at its quays, painted stucco has hues of yellow and pink, and the homes have wooden shutters of ivory, green, blue, and lavender. Wrought-iron balconies allow the city’s damsels to step out to water fringes of flowers and pose above the chaos of cart, donkey, prancing cavalier, farm wagon, and fancy coach.

I saw all this playing the English tourist, Sir Ethan Gage, in the company of my cousin, the Lady Aurora Somerset, both of us kept in European costume from clothes the pirates had pillaged and stored in Barbary. That this brought back memories of Aurora’s incestuous relationship with Cecil Somerset is an understatement, and the charade made me queasy. Aurora treated it as a grand joke. We pretended this pairing because our pirate corsair couldn’t very well tie to the town quay, so instead we were rowed ashore at a bay down the coast. Dragut took pirates to do some preliminary scouting at an old Greek fort called Euryalus, and came back reporting he found no mirror but that it was a ruin perfect for “the necessary rendezvous.”

“What rendezvous?” I asked.

“If we find the mirror we need help getting it and reassembling it,” the captain said. “But first we have to find it, somewhere in or around this city. Correct?”

“As best as I could tell.”

“For your son’s sake, I hope you’re right.”

“Assuming we find it, how are we going to take it without having half of Sicily at our heels? Castello Maniace