Pirate King (15 page)

I will admit, my dreams that night were a touch … confused.

CHAPTER TWENTY

SCENE
: A ruined chapel by moonlight.

T
HEN CAME
M
ONDAY
morning, and everything changed.

The cast—most of it—was at breakfast when Fflytte swept in, dressed in the most remarkable suit I’d yet seen, a canary yellow twill with a bright orange cravat spotted with green fleurs-de-lis. He stood in the doorway and clapped his hands to gain our attention, gaining that of all the civilians and waiters as well.

“Good morning, everyone!” He paused, as if expecting a classroom of dutiful replies. Hale loomed behind him in the doorway, looking as if he had not slept well. He might have simply remained where he was, but behind him came Will Currie, who shouldered the yellow twill aside and gestured to a waiter carrying a jug of coffee. Hale took advantage of the opening, as did a couple whose departure had been blocked by the director. Fflytte disregarded them all.

“Fresh day, fresh week, fresh ideas!” he boomed. “Now, as some of you may have heard, I found a ship yesterday that’s going to transform what we do with this picture. It will take a bit of attention to get it in condition for the cameras, so, rather than delay the rest of the production while we’re doing that, I’m going to divide us up. Now, we’ve done this before,” he cajoled, although I had heard no protests, “and we’re all professionals here. Well, most of us. And the newcomers to the trade are fast learners. Here’s what we’ll do. Team One is composed of me and Mr La Rocha: He and I will get the ship ready to film.”
And to limp into the harbour and back without going down
, I added by way of silent prayer. “The second team, with Mr Hale, will rehearse the pirates and their fight scenes with the constables. Mr Hale will be in charge of that, assisted by Mr La Rocha’s, er … well, we know him in the part of Samuel. And our translator, Mr Pessoa, will remain with them.” I drew a relieved breath: I could not let the man who’d composed what I overheard the previous evening remain near young girls, but I was not looking forward to telling Hale why. “Team Three will be the girls, with Mr Currie and Miss Russell. Oh, and you, Daniel. Girls, I’m sending you on a little working holiday just near the coast, to film the scenes where Frederic first sees Mabel. I’m told it’s a lovely place, we’ve made arrangements for you to spend the night, the charabanc will be here in an hour. And—”

Whatever he’d planned on saying next was drowned in a gale of shrieks and exclamations, as a score of females threw down their table napkins and stormed for the door. Amused—he’d done it deliberately, I could tell—Fflytte stood aside to let them race past, then turned to the depleted audience, consisting of the crew, Daniel Marks, and the police constables. Harold Scott—our Major-General—was not there. One rarely saw him before noon.

“Maude,” Fflytte said to the woman in charge of make-up, “you’ll go with the girls, of course. And, Miss Russell? Will’s assistant, Artie, is a touch, er, under the weather. You don’t mind helping Will with the equipment, do you?”

I looked at Will, who was grimly stirring sugar into his coffee. He’d known about the plan beforehand—going by his lack of bounce, he’d spent a large part of the night protesting. “Happy to,” I replied.

Then Fflytte turned to the woman in charge of costuming. “Sally, you’ll stay with me and Mr La Rocha. He tells me there’s going to be a lot of repairs needed to the sails, and—”

“No!” she and I objected, at the same instant. She didn’t wait for me to cede the floor. “I’ll not ruin my hands on canvas.”

“You’ve sewn canvas before.”

“Yes, when you needed a shroud for a burial at sea,” she retorted. “But there’s a world of difference between wrapping a mannequin and producing an acre of canvas sail.”

“Oh, hardly an acre,” Fflytte cajoled.

“I’m not doing it!”

“Mr Fflytte,” I interrupted, “I have to agree. Because if Sally’s not there, any decisions and repairs to the girls’ costumes will be up to me and the girls.”

He opened his mouth to ask what was wrong with that, then looked at what I was wearing; considered, too, what his actresses would wear if given free choice; and closed his mouth—rather more rapidly than manners would require, I thought: My dirt-coloured woollen trousers and tweed hacking jacket were a lot more practical than his garments. Certainly warmer.

“Very well, I’m sure La Rocha will know a sail-maker down near the harbour.”

No doubt La Rocha was well acquainted with all sorts of men willing to garnish their bills and pass him the difference. But I did have one question.

“Have you consulted La Rocha and Samuel about this division of labour?” Samuel was La Rocha’s shadow; I had never seen the two men apart.

“They’re fine with the idea,” the director said.

But when I looked at Hale, I could see that
he
was not. I had to agree: Fflytte and La Rocha out in the world, unchaperoned, would be a terrifying picture for the man in charge of the cheque book.

The charabanc might be arriving at the hotel in an hour, but I did not expect that it would leave soon after that. And indeed, two hours later, Will Currie was still in argument with Sally the seamstress as to which set of equipment was the more vulnerable to weather. In the end, I bodily hoisted her sewing trunk to the man whose feet were dangling from the roof of the ’bus, told Will he could prop his camera in the seat beside me, and we were away.

Cintra was, or so I had been told, a picturesque little hilltop town nearer the Atlantic coast, fifteen miles or so from Lisbon. Normally, one would take the train that left from beside the hotel, but Fflytte and Hale had decided that a charabanc would put the equipment at less risk, and (I realised this only later) would make it more difficult for one of the actresses to slip away.

As soon as we had left the centre of town, I regretted the decision. The road was in the same condition as the charabanc—bad—which would mean that a forty-minute train ride was going to take us two or three hours. We jostled and rattled, raising a cloud of dust through which could be glimpsed olive trees and windmills, cork oaks and a very Roman-looking aqueduct, boulders and an occasional figure—young boy, old man, or mummified scarecrow?—seated on a boulder, watching over a flock of dirty sheep or goats.

An hour out, the murmur of complaint and discomfort had swollen to a tide. I told the driver to halt at the next likely place. He answered in Portuguese. I tried Spanish, then French, and in that tongue he told me that the next likely place would be Cintra. I replied that he could in that case stop anywhere the girls might stretch their legs without falling off a cliff or being attacked by a pack of dogs.

Twenty minutes later, I tapped the driver on the shoulder and told him that here would be fine.

When the worst of our accompanying dust cloud had drifted past, a bevy of females staggered from the charabanc, coughing in chorus, groaning at their bruises (the older ones) and exclaiming at the dust in their clothing (mostly the younger). They dispersed along the roadside. Will Currie clambered to the roof to check the tight shrouds on his equipment. Daniel Marks stepped down, grimacing at the surface underfoot. We stood listening to the engine tick and the dust settle, alone on a rural road a short mule-ride from the capital city, when like magic, local residents drew into existence, to all appearances materialising from out of the dust, bearing cups of water and baskets of oranges, bowls of raisins and tubs of oil-washed olives. Trades were made, combs and hair ribbons, cheap bracelets and money offered, first through facial expressions, then gestures and, when those proved popular, full-blown charades. The natives sat in awe-struck appreciation when Annie, June, and little Linda dragged Daniel Marks into their wordless play, enacting something that was either the 1910 Portuguese revolt or
Love’s Labours Lost
—my attention was occupied with counting our heads, lest we lose one of our alphabet of girls. When I herded my charges back onto the charabanc, leaving behind a carpet of orange peel and olive seeds, I discovered that the locals had been selling other things as well.

“Wait! What’s that noise?”

In the back, six scrubbed and innocent faces turned to me. If one of them had possessed the wits to claim that she was merely whining at the thought of getting back onto the ’bus, they might have got away with it, but instead they blinked their lashes and asked, “What noise?”

I heard it again, and traced its source: of course.

“Turn out your pockets, Edith. The other pockets. No, Mrs Nunnally, I’ll handle this. Edith, give the boy back his puppy. In any event, it’s far too young to be away from its mother—its eyes aren’t even open. How much did you pay him? Really, for that scrawny—never mind, give it back. No, let him keep your money, it can be a lesson to you.”

I tried to get the driver to chide the enterprising local that a puppy that small would only sicken and die if taken from its mother; judging from the amused reaction of the people lined up at the charabanc door, either the Portuguese were disturbingly heartless, or the exhortation changed somewhat in translation.

I climbed on, counted heads for the twentieth time, and off we drove.

Someone from the Avenida-Palace, it seemed, had made the arrangements not only for our transportation, but for our welcome at the other end. We were greeted, gathered up, refreshed with luncheon at a nearby café, then loaded upon a fleet of decorative if rickety wooden carts and aimed at the hill under whose side Cintra sheltered.

Most of us took pity on the animals after half a mile or so and climbed down to walk. (Daniel Marks, after due consideration, decided that
noblesse
—or perhaps
virtus—oblige
, and joined us; Bibi did not.) The exertion helped to dispel the effects of the faint drizzle that had begun to fall, or at least take our minds off it. A few of the girls tried to rouse community feeling with song, but that soon petered out when the pedestrians lacked sufficient breath to participate other than in brief gasps, while those huddled beneath their travelling rugs felt an uneasy suspicion that singing might be taken for lightness of heart.

It was a long hill.

I wondered if I was drifting towards the hallucinations of hypoxia when, on raising my head to appraise the next unforgiving rise, a garden party appeared. There was a taut canvas marquee. A queue of what could only be servants stood just beneath the cloth roofline; three uniformed grooms trotted out to take our horses’ reins.

A small fortune in hothouse flowers stood, incongruously, in three enormous tin buckets. I could even smell them. But then, I thought I smelt bacon as well, which was every bit as unlikely as the flowers.

Our party, stunned respectively either by breathlessness or by cold, stumbled towards the oasis. To my astonishment, it did not shiver and fade away as we drew near. Cups of piping tea were thrust into our hands, platters of fresh, buttered rolls laid with crisp bacon were set before us, scones with—well, no, not clotted cream, but with butter and jam were shovelled onto the plates of famished adolescents.