Minerva's Voyage (10 page)

“Uh.” I thought fast. “My kerchief, Master Scratcher. That is, Master Matchett's kerchief, but when I get a ghost of a chance I mean to.…” I came to a full stop. I'd returned it weeks before, and Matchett had offered to shake hands with me.

“You're a filthy worsted-stocking knave, you know tha'?”

“No, sir.”

“God's Blood! Lucky I can't see you or I'd knock you into Sunday.”

“But it's only Tuesday now, sir.”

“Shut your bloody trap and go back to slee'.”

“I shall, sir, never fear.” I cradled my head in my hands lest he take it into his drunken brain to come after me in the dark and wallop me there and then, not wait for Sun
day at all.

In the morning I recalled waking in the night, but my brain had totally misplaced the cipher solution. Mayhap it had only been the product of a dream. When I told Fence he said that doubtless my conversation with Scratcher had been part of the dream too, or nightmare, more like, induced by too much eating of the roast pig and the fishes that accompanied it. He reminded me of several other good or bad dreams I'd had. He could have been right. Though if this one
had
been a nightmare, it had certainly sounded and smelled like the real sheep-shit Scratcher.

C
HAPTER 17
D
ECIPHERING!

All day I'd been trying to think up solutions. But “that won't work; that won't work either,” I kept muttering to myself. I felt that if I didn't get the answer soon, I'd go completely mad. On pretense of fetching wood for a cooking fire, I'd come back to the spinney to look at the hand from the clouds emblem and see if it would remind me of what I'd forgotten, but I'd only got the chest half dug out when I heard a noise. That devil Proule and some of the other men, including Stephen Beerson, clerk to the minister of a Sunday, were speaking to one another in hushed tones a few yards away, hidden, no doubt purposely, in the undergrowth. Trusty and Ruffles were there too. I could tell by their voices. And there were glimpses of Mary's tattered red skirt through the bushes and trees. I was surprised she was there. She must have healed her rift with Proule.

“That could get us all killed,” I heard someone say. “I'm leaving now.” It was one of the crew. He broke into a run as he left, a fearful look on his face. He passed so close that I couldn't believe he didn't notice me, but mayhap he was too upset.

What could they be discussing? I covered the chest with earth and scaled a cedar as silently as I could, its feathery needles crushing under my hands. I'd always been a good tree climber. It was almost a necessity for a felon such as myself. It put me, in a manner of speaking, above the law. From way up on a bough I could look down on Proule and his remaining cohorts without being observed, and that suited me, you might say, down to the ground.

“It can't get us killed. We have authority backing us,” said Mary, which made me even more curious.

“So we're agreed then,” Proule said to Mary and the fellows.

“We're agreed. Roberts there-gone is a fool and a cow
ard,” said Trusty.

“Right,” agreed Ruffles. They always agreed with each other.

“Aye, we're agreed, Praise the Lord, every man of us,” said Beerson.

“And woman too.” This, of course, was Mary.

“Swear most solemnly, that we'll do what he wants, on God's name.”

They laid their hands atop one another's, palm down. “We swear.”

“On God's name,” added Beerson, who didn't take his duties lightly.

“On God's name,” the others dutifully repeated. Then they were gone, slipping like wraiths through the woods and to our settlement, so as not to draw attention to themselves. I slid down the tree slowly. The crew man had shown by leaving that they were likely up to something, probably no good. And that
someone
— I didn't know who — wanted them to do
something
— I didn't know what. That scared but excited me. Yet another mystery for Fence and me to unravel!

Fence was coming towards me now, his hose hitched above his knees, pale face sprinkled with freckles birthed in the hot sun of the Bermudas. “You smell of cedars.”

“The smell must have rubbed off on me. I was up a tree.”

“Let's take another look at those emblems,” he said.

“Right-o, but I have to piss first.” I would keep the news of what I'd seen till later.

We relieved ourselves, sniggering with embarrassment as we did so. It was so different from the boat. The spinney being large and uncrowded, save for the trees, made it all more personal somehow, than if everyone in the hold was pissing in a pail together. Afterwards we pulled up our hose, or rather what was left of it, holes held together by threads, and returned to the more serious business of looking again at the emblem: a hand holding a crown as it emerged from the clouds. It was Fence who came upon the first real bit of evidence for the cipher, because, as luck would have it, he was such a poor reader. He could put words together slowly and painfully, but he said himself that it took him most of daylight to read a sentence.

“Let me read it, let me read it, Robin,” he begged. I agreed reluctantly, as I was impatient, but this would be, after all, an aid to the boy's education. He took the paper from me so he could pore over it more closely, but he soon came unstuck.

“I can't read the whole line,” he said.

“Of course you can,” I encouraged, like a good teacher.

“Spell it out.”

“A” he started. “That's the whole of the word because then there's a gap. Just A.”

“Yes, good.”

“S-E-C-R-E-T … se … cret.”

“Right.” I was becoming impatient. Impatience made me itchy. I began to rub my bites.

“A again — can't read the next letter.”

I was getting really annoyed. At this rate we'd never solve anything. I looked over his shoulder at the emblem.

“Surely you can. You just saw it in ‘secret.'”

“No I didn't.”

“Yes you did. It's an R.”

Perhaps I was doing wrong in trying to teach him. Likely he was as unteachable with letters as I was with numbers, though he was a quick thinker in other ways. I read the line aloud, tired of waiting: “
A secret arm stretched out from the
sky
….” This hinted at a mystery all by itself. I felt, as my blood rushed to my throat, that we were on the right track.

“No it's not an R. Not like any R I've ever seen. And there are other funny letters too.”

“Don't be daft. Give it here.” I read the entire verse quickly:

A secret arm stretched out from the sky,
In double chain a diadem doth hold,
Whose circlet bounds the greater Britanny,
From conquered France, to England sung
   of old…

“It's about kings,” said Fence wonderingly.

“Yes. Kings of England.”

I looked at the emblem again. And then I realized. The verse was laid out in two kinds of letters. One kind that Fence could read, and one that he couldn't. The second R of the line didn't look like the first, it was much more elaborate. That was a problem for Fence, but as an experienced reader, I could decipher each. Those he couldn't read, though, the ones in what that old crone Oldham would call “secretary script,” were harder for me too.

“Fence,” I said importantly, picking a couple of lice off my head and sticking them in my mouth, an old habit, “you're going to have to help me count letters. I believe I have the answer. It's simple.”

“It is?”

“Yes. You gave it to me by accident. There are two kinds of writing in this emblem, though I don't think there were in the ship emblem. Letters in one kind are x's. Letters in the other are y's. We have to count off the letters in the verse in fives. That will be your job. And then we'll see how many x's and y's are in each counted off section, and match each section to a letter of the alphabet in the cipher key.”

Fence looked completely lost. There was a small stick next to me, and I picked it up, scratching letters out in the dirt. “Every five letters in the emblem verse equals one letter of the secret message. D'you see? So if we have five letters in a row in the ‘x' writing, that would be an A, because the cipher says that A equals xxxxx. And if we have four letters in a row in the ‘x' writing, followed by a letter in the ‘y' writ
ing, we have a B, because the cipher says that B equals xxxxy. Get it now?”

“I'm just beginning to.” Fence scratched his head as if he wasn't. “Show me more.”

“Here.” I wrote the beginning of the emblem verse, counting very carefully.

A secr/et a
m/e

A        C

“You could read the first five letters of the verse. Therefore they're all x's. Five x's in a row are an A, according to the cipher key. You could read the next three letters too, e-t-a, but couldn't read the r. So that's xxxy. Can you read the next letter?”

“Aye, it's an m.” He still looked perplexed.

“So that's an x too. Do you see? In other words the next five letters read xxxyx. That's a C according to the cipher. So we have the first two letters of the solution: A C.

Fence pored over the emblem for at least two minutes. “I understand, Robin, I understand,” he exclaimed at last, clapping his hands.

“Good. You're the better counter. You'll do the counting.”

“Aye. Let's do the rest now.”

True it is, there was nothing I wanted to do more. But the sun was already tipping down from the zenith and turning the colour of an orange. I'd been away for hours. “We'll work on it tomorrow.”

“Please, can't we just do another letter or two?”

But I'd already stood up, and was dusting down my sleeves and hose. “Can't. Even though I want to. Have to pick up some wood for a fire and get back or Scratcher will knock me into Sunday, so he says.” I was already packing up emblems and lugging the chest back to the hole we'd taken it from.

Fence stood by sadly, chewing his nails, which were as filthy as my own.

“Help me cover this,” I said. We pushed dirt into the hole, ran back to the settlement and separated. After look
ing around to make sure no one was watching, I nicked an armful of wood that was piled outside someone else's hut and hurried with it to Scratcher's.

It was only then that I remembered Proule and his cohorts. I'd been so elated at solving the cipher, I'd forgotten completely to tell Fence about the secret meeting.

Inside, Scratcher and Proule were drinking and arguing about something that had to do with Boors' idiot madness and his inability to govern the settlement or even himself.

“Where you been all this time?” Scratcher demanded, his face surly as he turned from Proule.

“Out collecting sticks for the fire, master, as I told you. They're piled outside. It was work and a half, I can tell you.”

“Hmph. You better be telling the truth.”

“I am, sir.”

“More wine,” said Proule loudly, holding up his bottle. Scratcher held up his own. “Serve us, you lousy whelp of a mongrel.” Picking up both bottles, exhausted as I was, I hastened along the beach to fetch more drink from Scratch
er's stash in the rocks. At this rate it would run out much faster than I'd calculated.

“I know a secret,” slurred Proule after another swig or two. Scratcher, who had been scratching his unmentionables, as usual, stopped for a minute.

“A secret?” he asked.

“Aye, but I'm not telling yer, Bill Scratcher.”

“The name is William Thatcher, you gas-ridden ape.

God's Blood! Tell me the goddamn secret.”

“Not ruddy likely. And I ain't no ape. Watch yer mouth, Scratcher, or I'll watch it for yer.”

They were going at it again. I slunk into the corner shadows, realizing unhappily that there would be no supper this day. It was too late to fish for it myself and Scratcher had been too lazy to cook or fetch even a tortoise egg. But there was still the possibility of a secret passed from one to the other. I tried not to sleep. I tried to listen hard to them as they shouted, sang, and fought through the night. I was hoping that the secret might slip out. But unless I did fall to dreaming and miss something important, Proule was true to his word. He didn't so much as whisper of secret doings. And in the end they were so roaring drunk that they threw punches at each other and swore the other had stolen their goods, emblems, boxes, and wine, till the air turned blue.