Cinnamon and Gunpowder (2 page)

He surveyed the room and, seeing no immediate resistance, stood aside to allow the others in. He was followed by not one but two short Chinamen in black silk, twins in face and dress; they entered with their hands clasped behind their backs, swords swinging from their hips. One of them wore his queue wrapped around his neck like a scarf. They took their positions flanking the hall.

The three made a curious group, the hulk of Mr. Apples and these two child-sized Orientals. If not for the mutilation of the door, I would have thought we were about to enjoy a mummer’s theater.

Then entered a pillar of menace, a woman in an olive long-coat. Her red hair hung loose over her shoulders. She sauntered to the middle of the room, her coat opening to reveal jade-handled pistols. Using a chair as a stepping stool, she walked upon the dining table to Lord Ramsey’s plate and stood there looking down, as if she had just conquered Kilimanjaro. Her boots added inches to her already long frame. No one dared tell her, apparently, that tall women confuse the eye.

Even I, who know only what I read in the dailies, recognized her at once. There, not twenty feet from me, was the Shark of the Indian Ocean, Mad Hannah Mabbot, Back-from-the-Dead Red, who had been seen by a dozen credible witnesses to perish by gunshot and drowning, and yet had continued to haunt the Pendleton Trading Company routes, leaving the waters bloody in her wake.

Lord Ramsey leaped from his chair and fled toward the back steps (never had I seen him move with such urgency), but he was intercepted by one of the twins, who must have given him a blow, for he crumpled to the floor gasping. Mr. Percy, finally realizing his obligation to protect his guests, made a valiant attempt to retrieve an heirloom sword from the mantel, but the massive Mr. Apples brought down his fist and ruined Mr. Percy’s face as a child ruins a pie.

A terrible silence filled the house, interrupted only by the wet whimpering of Mr. Percy and the equine clopping of Mad Mabbot’s boots as she descended and approached Lord Ramsey’s supine figure. There, with pleasure plain on her face, Mabbot drew her pistols and leveled both barrels.

Posterity will reprimand me for not making an attempt to protect him, and well it should. Despite my girth, I am a sorry pugilist. As a child, I was bullied by children much smaller than myself. Mr. Percy, whose fate I had just witnessed, had fought against Napoleon’s cavalry. I had no hope of faring any better. I should like to have a better excuse, but I was simply frozen under my white toque.

Mabbot was only paces from me, and I could hear as she spoke to Lord Ramsey in the cheery tone a milkmaid may use to soothe a cow.

“No, don’t get up—we can’t stay long. Once I learned you were in the neighborhood, I simply couldn’t miss the opportunity to drop in and see you in person. Did you know your clever corsair is using red-hot cannonballs now? Those were a treat! You can imagine the excitement.”

Ramsey cleared his throat twice before speaking, and still his voice quavered as he said, “Mabbot … Hannah, let me propose that we—”

“But the world is glutted with your proposals,” Mabbot interrupted. “Mr. Apples, would you like to hear a proposal from Ramsey?”

“Rather eat my trousers,” the giant said from across the room.

“You haven’t aged well,” Mabbot said, lifting Ramsey’s chin with the tip of her boot. “Are you really so surprised? Did you think I’d be content to be hunted the rest of my days and not find a way to return the favor?” Leaning close, she murmured, “But between you and me, it’s going after the Brass Fox that really irks me. I can’t let you win that race, can I?”

At this point Lord Ramsey said something more. I didn’t hear it. Most likely he was taking the opportunity to mumble a prayer.

Mabbot bit her lip, frowned, and said, “Tell the devil to keep my tea hot. I’m running late.” Then she fired point-blank, without mercy or provocation, into his defenseless body.

One of her guns did not go off, apparently, for as Ramsey writhed, she examined the trigger with irritation. She knocked the faulty flintlock with the butt of the other gun, aimed it again, and discharged it directly into his poor heart. He lay still at last.

Even as I write this, my body starts at the memory of that merciless retort, the smoke and spatter.

Satisfied, the red-haired rogue sat in Ramsey’s seat at the table and forked a glistening cherry into her mouth while her thugs threw the other guests to the floor.

The desire to live moved me, and, remembering the small door beside the pantry I had seen the servants use, I made for my escape. I tumbled down dark steps into a subterranean brick tunnel, through which I groped as quickly as I could, sure it would lead to the staffs’ quarters behind the house. When the tunnel branched, I veered left and came upon another set of steps and a door. I burst through, prepared to run, but I had misjudged the direction, for I found myself in the library with Mr. Apples’s hand on my shoulder. He tossed me like a sack of laundry back into the dining room, where I was obliged to sit on the floor with the others. I took my position next to his lordship’s body and held his still-warm hand while the fiends ransacked the house.

I confess that my mind was not prepared for these events. It failed under the pressure and became that of an idiot, lingering on the lace of the tablecloth and bringing to light the oldest and most obscure memories quite randomly: being taught to swim in the freezing lake behind the orphanage with the other boys by Father Keenly, who bade us fetch coins he threw into the water; kneading my first loaf of bread and wondering at the magic of its rising. Father Sonora’s voice, so long ago I was sure I had lost it, now came back, as vividly as if he were just behind me, saying, “Hush, child, God despises whimpering.”

Fear, for the moment, left me and was replaced with a readiness to meet my wife, Elizabeth, in heaven. I saw her then as I had last seen her, holding the newborn child curled upon her breast, both of them serene in the coffin. Then my sight fixed on Lord Ramsey’s torn chest, where grew, slowly, a scarlet bubble. I cannot say whether it was two minutes or two hours I stared at that gory dome before I came to my senses.

The staff had gathered before the mantel, and the rest of the party remained on the floor near the table in various states of distress. One maid wept where she sat and inched her way across the floor to avoid the puddle of blood spreading toward her. This was the young woman I had just yelled at an hour earlier for washing a copper-bottomed pot with strong vinegar. She had held her composure then, but now—who could blame her—the tears darkened her smock. When she discovered blood upon her apron and began to scream, I crawled to her, worried she might bring the pirates’ wrath upon us. I blotted the stain with my towel, saying, “There, see? It is only a splash of wine. They’ll be gone soon. Just hold on.” I put my arm around her and hushed her, but I was too late; Mr. Apples was headed our way.

As he reached down, I beat at him with the towel. “Don’t touch her,” I wheezed. “She’s done nothing to you!”

But the giant was after me, not the maid. He yanked me rudely to my feet and held me by the arms while Hannah Mabbot examined me.

“Is this spirited man the cook?” she shouted. “Are you responsible for this delightful feast? What a piece of luck!… What is it you say, Mr. Apples?”

“Like shittin’ with the pope.”

“No, the other thing, less vulgar.”

“Whistlin’ donkey.”

“Quite! A surprise and a delight like a whistling … How is it that these phrases make sense when you say them? Anyway, bring him along.”

2

THE
FLYING ROSE

In which I am bent to new employment

Thus was I bound with hemp and shoved along to a boat hidden under the willows in the cove. As Mr. Apples rowed, I sat pressed against the lacquered side by one of the twins. Mabbot, at the prow, rested her feet on a large sack full of house silver and jewelry taken from the guests. She carried a leg of the duck wrapped in a damask napkin and gnawed at it with pleasure. She lounged against the stern, savoring her coup.

Below us, the water was crystalline, and the fish darted among the tangles of seaweed. Sped along by Mr. Apples’s powerful arms, the boat charged out of the cove, and I thought,
These fish neither know nor care that I am being so savagely ripped from my life.
The idea of sardines coming to my aid brought from me a burst of crazed giggles that, just as involuntarily, devolved into whimpers. Mr. Apples raised an eyebrow at me as he rowed. I considered toppling over into the brine to make my escape but, bound as I was, hand and foot, I would surely have drowned. There was nothing for me to do but be pulled in lurches across the surf, toward my fate.

I break now to rest, for the rocking has gotten worse.

Wednesday, Later

As sleep eludes me, I have retrieved this log from under my sack of sawdust and continue by the light of the rancid tallow taper.

Our boat rounded a craggy outcropping, and we were suddenly in the shadow of the
Flying Rose
, the four-masted barque whose voluptuous ornamentation has been related in
The Times
by those rare souls who had seen her firsthand and lived.

She was lurid and terrible to see, the fallen Lucifer on the water, blind to the pelicans moving like gnats across her bow. I was still in shock—my mind had none of its native tone—and I quailed, as we approached, at the crimson curve of her hull, the countless bundles of rigging, and the sails clustered like clouds above me. Since my journey to France as a young man, I had not returned to sea, and boats had been, to me, merely quaint objects moving sleepily against the horizon. Even in my fear, I marveled at the ingenuity of man, at the countless arrangements of ropes threading into the sky. The men moving about the deck could play this massive instrument; they knew which lines to pluck to achieve a subtle shift of course and power.

I had once seen a fox trot up to a picnic on the grounds of Asford Manor and, despite the crowd of revelers, make off, more or less unnoticed, with a string of sausage. Such are the rewards of brazenness. With the sentinels of the Royal Navy searching for the
Flying Rose
in the Indian Ocean, here she was, quietly anchored not a mile from English grass.

Befuddled, I found myself climbing obediently up a rope ladder, crossing, as I went, the strata of barnacle, stout wales, moldings shimmering with gold leaf, and rubicund bulkheads. I had no idea what was in store for me save for the certainty that I would be shortly murdered. At this unhappy thought, I began to tremble. Cracked by the strain, I heard myself mumble as they led me to my cell, “There, there, Wedgwood. You’ll wake up soon enough … Wake! Wake, man!”

During the two days I spent locked in this narrow cell, my fear and horror bloomed fully in the dark, and I became again the child stifling the sounds of his weeping through the night. Periodically, to soothe myself, I opened the locket around my neck and sniffed its contents.

When they let me out to wander the deck, whose rails and fixtures had been carved into gargoyles by a deft and perverse hand, the land was already gone. Around us was a glittering wonder of water. The air and light helped quell my vomiting. I return to the cell at night and, locked in, sleep here on a sack of sawdust. By day this ship is my prison; I stumble about the rolling deck, not speaking, not spoken to, and avoiding as best I can the sweaty men who go to and fro with hammers or marlinspikes, bellowing songs and obscenities.

Never have I seen such a motley assemblage of characters. Except that we are at sea, I would believe that I had been abducted by a traveling circus. There are men here of every hue and size, also men whose race cannot be determined due to the indigo tattoos that cover their faces and arms. There are men with bullrings through their noses, with turbans large enough to hide a samovar, with gold thread braided into their hair, with scimitars lashed to their hips; some with teeth sharpened to points, some with no teeth at all. Many of the men have lost fingers, one has no ears, and not a few of them sport blistered patches upon their faces, necks, and forearms. These scars look very much like the effects I have seen after inept assistants burned themselves with hot oil. Mr. Apples, Joshua the cabin boy, the cooper, and Conrad the cook all bear these marks. I do not know whether it was plague or punishment, and I pray not to be present for a recurrence of either.

I’ll say here that I do hate ships. What I know about sails, I learned as a young man, when it was necessary for me to hide under a heap of them in the hold of an olive barge for three days. I have never wanted to learn more. When conversations occasionally turn nautical, I have found that there are always herbs that need drying or cheeses to press.

Three days aboard and I have not seen the captain again save for her silhouette one sunset on the deck above her cabin.

I eat gruel—swill, really—oats or some other bloated grain seasoned with lard and flaccid onions. There is a king’s ransom of black pepper aboard, which, even with profligate use, helps not at all. I eat little. I have learned to relieve myself, in view of God and all, through a hole in a plank suspended out over the water. I have learned to walk a straight line on the bucking wood. I have learned by exposure the names of the myriad corners of the ship.