Pirate King (24 page)

“I came up for the curiosity,” I told Holmes. “You followed to flirt with me. However, from this height, I think I should not risk another hard slap.”

“I would appreciate that,” he answered.

CHAPTER THIRTY

KATE
: Let us compromise (Our hearts are not of leather):
Let us shut our eyes, And talk about the weather.

A
FTER THE MORNING’S
larking about, the afternoon was all work. Lunch was a brisk affair, although tasty. Once the plates were cleared, the pirates were all carried off by Fflytte and set before the critical eye and deft brush of Maude, the make-up woman.

One might have imagined she wanted to dress them in lace and silk stockings.

They would not have it—or rather, those who initially had no objection to paint were brought to task by those who ridiculed and refused. Had Maude, a no-nonsense Yorkshirewoman, been a man, our pirates might well have broken her fingers.

She protested. Fflytte protested. Will pointed at the sun and protested. Samuel and La Rocha had a long and inaudible argument on the quarterdeck, at the end of which Samuel descended to deck level and planted his reshined boots in front of Maude. She had to clamber on top of the sky-light to reach, but—brave woman—she applied her brushes to his stormy face without hesitation. The pirate crew looked on in appalled silence.

Kohl and rouge installed on that fierce countenance, Samuel stood back, and raised one eyebrow at his men, daring them to smirk.

They dared not.

After that, one by one, the pirates submitted to Maude’s attentions, gathering self-consciously to chuckle at each other’s outlined eyes and rouged lips. When she was finished, Maude looked up at La Rocha—and packed away her paints.

The Pirates of Penzance
takes place entirely on land. Initially, Fflytte’s
Pirate King
had been designed with minor variations on that theme, with a few ship-board scenes to link together those in Portugal (which appeared to be standing in for the original’s Penzance) and in Morocco (which had no place whatsoever in the minds of Gilbert or Sullivan).

However, that plan went out the port-hole the instant Randolph Fflytte fell under
Harlequin
’s spell. Instead, Lisbon and Rabat would act as book-ends for the substance of the tale in the middle—which would draw heavily on Fflytte Films’ reputation (“Fflyttes of the Faraway!”) for sea-going authenticity. Will had already shot two reels of shipboard life, from the meaty hands of the sail-makers to Rosie on the yard-arm. Now we had three hours of strong daylight left in which to record some of the actual story.

Hale had put me in charge of ensuring that the clothing and appearance of the girls and Daniel Marks matched how they had looked at the Moorish Castle’s “pond,” since this ship-board portion would follow immediately on the heels of that bucolic and flower-bedecked scene, and the Major-General’s thirteen daughters would have had no chance to return home and pack their bags before being gently abducted by the appreciative bachelor (and, being orphans, lonely) pirates.

I went through the girls with my notes, confiscating various brooches and hair-pins, exchanging two pairs of shoes to their correct feet, plucking one feather out of Ruth’s hat (which only had five in Cintra) and collecting seven bracelets, three necklaces, five colourful sashes, and one pair of spectacles. Ten of the girls I had scrub kohl from their eyes; six of them I ordered to spit wads of chewing gum over the side.

When the pirates were painted and the girls restored, Fflytte clambered onto the sky-light with his megaphone.

And the first hitch came up.

La Rocha was an essential part of the story, and hence of the filming process. But he stuck fast to his position: Unless we were to furl all the sails and reduce the rigging to bare yards and empty lines (which would leave us insufficiently photogenic) we required a person of authority on the quarterdeck.

Samuel went to talk to him, and another ten minutes went by. The previous bonhomie between captain and lieutenant seemed to be wearing thin, although Samuel made no overt sign of rebellion or even disrespect. I caught Holmes’ eye, and knew that he, too, was wishing their conversation could be overheard by someone more sensible than the parrot. Eventually, it was decided that our spare pirate (no sign of Gröhe) with Maurice and the two sail-makers to back him up (heaven forbid we should make use of the seven surplus women on board) might be installed at the wheel, the four men between them being judged capable of keeping us from sinking or sailing off the edge of the world. Fflytte put the megaphone to his lips. Will bent to the camera. Rosie dove out of the rigging to attack the plumage on Ruth’s hat.

Mrs Hatley screamed, Will cursed, Fflytte shouted, and eventually La Rocha ordered his bird away. To everyone’s astonishment, the creature obeyed. Rosie took up a position on the port-side ratlines, there to mutter a Greek chorus of imprecations and Anarchist phrases.

Megaphone up; slate poised; Will’s eye to the camera; Harriet shrieked and leapt atop the sky-light, sending the megaphone flying and nearly the man holding it. Harriet’s twin admirers, Irving and Kermit, leapt to her rescue, although it took a good minute for her words to become comprehensible: She had seen a rat.

I shouted her down, before panic could seize our little project and all the girls leap for the life-boats. “It was a mouse, only a mouse! Haven’t you seen Lawrence’s pet mouse? It was only Lawrence’s pet.”

It had, in fact, been a rat. The accused pirate reached into his pocket to prove the innocence of his small passenger, but Samuel proved himself as quick mentally as he was physically. He growled to the lad, in Portuguese.

Lawrence stared up at the big first-mate, yanked his hand out free (fortunately,
sans
mouse), and nodded his head vigorously. “Yes yes, Miss Mouse gone for a walk, so sorry, she very nice, no scare.”

Samuel bent to retrieve the megaphone, handed it to Fflytte, and fixed Harriet with a gaze of utter authority. “Mouse small, very clean. You play with her later, yes?”

Harriet swallowed, herself as mesmerised as a mouse facing a snake. She nodded, and Samuel held up a hand to assist her descent to the deck.

The other girls patted her. With a shiver, she returned to her assigned place, keeping one keen eye on the aft hatch where she’d seen the dread creature. The megaphone went up again.

And this time: “Camera!”

The scene played out nicely, the girls and the pirates acting together on film for the first time. I held my breath at the moment where Frederic had to lunge out from the centre of the pirate mob, since, according to Hale, most of the rehearsals here had ended either in a fall or a fistfight. But it went beautifully, with Adam and Francis shifting at precisely the right moment, and Fflytte’s amplified prompts more by way of encouragement than command.

Will’s arm turned the crank with its mechanical precision; Rosie kept to the heights; the pirates even remembered not to stare at the camera and nudge each other with their elbows; and after the requisite performances, Fflytte called, “And, cut! That was mostly fine, but let’s see if we can get a little more swagger into your walk, men.”

Protest, at which Hale reminded them that sometimes (usually) a scene had to be repeated (several times) and that a ninety-minute-picture took rather more than ninety minutes to make. Then he had to explain what
swagger
meant. After which the next take was cut thirty seconds into it when the men’s exaggerated sway of the hip and shoulders made them look like male courtesans, or perhaps victims of St Vitus’ Dance. Four tries later, Fflytte called “Cut” and decided that he would go on to the next scene, which had been transplanted from the original’s sea-side setting, with the girls plus Frederic, to the ship’s deck and the entire cast.

Now, girls and pirates alike were required to make innocent and blatantly oblivious conversation about the weather while permitting Frederic and Mabel to bill and coo. The difficulty of ship-board privacy having been forcefully brought home to me, I watched this scene with fascination.

Various gazes wandered in the direction of the young lovers, but then, they did in the opera as well. Bibi as a shy and virginal Mabel was only slightly more believable than Daniel Marks’ manly wooing, but they were actors, and got the job done.

Fflytte decided he wanted a second version with more specific interaction in the background: Ginger and Gerald admiring a particularly fine knot; Adam and Annie together at the rail (Bert didn’t even scowl—he was a more experienced actor than I’d realised); Henry and Harriet (“I go with her,” Irving declared;
“Me,”
claimed Kermit; “Henry!” bellowed Fflytte through his megaphone, setting every ear to ringing) would stand and point back at the stern.

I hoped no skilled lip-readers would be seeing this picture in the theatres, because some of the conversation was wildly inappropriate to the setting, but it looked good, and the assigned couples balanced nicely—until suddenly La Rocha stood away from the shrouds where he’d been told to lean (“Like a proud parent,” Fflytte had instructed, with the retort, “Proud, of these?”) and barked out a phrase.

Instantly, the scene flew to pieces. Girls dropped from supporting arms, girls fluttered their eyelashes at nothing, and in two cases, girls were knocked to the boards by sailors leaping to obey their captain.

The entire enterprise nearly came to an abrupt end then and there, saved by Samuel—who noticed that, although Will had hastened to grab his camera to safety, Randolph Fflytte was still standing on the sky-light, thus for once of a height to be endangered by the swinging mainsail boom. Samuel’s solution was once again startlingly direct and effective: He knocked Fflytte’s feet out from under him. The megaphone flew overboard. When Fflytte had his breath back, he began to shout at La Rocha, who—fortunately—did not have a belaying pin or marlinspike to hand.

I had not noticed the shift of wind that required a tack, but La Rocha had. When the manoeuvre was finished and the lines stowed again, when the pirates were back and the loops of rope restored to their exact positions, when Jack’s lost hat was replaced by a reasonable facsimile, we set up camera and director, fashioned a substitute megaphone out of one of Maurice’s baking tins, and continued.

Finally, Will called matters to a halt, saying that the light was going. Fflytte protested, but Will was firm that any more film through the camera would be film wasted.

The entire ship gave a great stretch of the limbs and drew a breath of relief.

And then looked around for entertainment.

In a flash, Bibi, Bonnie, and Ginger vanished and reappeared in swimming costumes, dancing about on the foredeck for a moment to tuck their hair into caps, then over the side they went. The wind had already died down considerably, but Samuel ordered the sails furled, sent David into the shrouds as watchman, and had one of the skiffs put out, just in case. There were volunteers aplenty for manning the oars: Adam won the honour. He was soon surrounded by half a dozen water nymphs cavorting in the calm ocean. The other pirates found tasks that kept them in the front half of the ship, and cast envious glances at Rosie, who sidled out on the bowsprit to crane his head at the girls.

Maurice appeared with a pair of fishing rods, thrusting one of them at Hale and attempting to give the other to Bert-the-Constable. However, Bert had other ideas, and passed it to Vincent-Paul-the-Sergeant before stripping down to his trousers and diving over the side, surfacing midway between Annie and Jack. Annie was treading water to talk to Adam-at-the-oars, while Jack was attempting to talk Edith into fetching “her” swimming costume and coming in. Edith looked enviously at Lawrence—dangling upside-down from the martingale stays, his head plunging in and out of the water with each swell—but had enough sense not to risk the inevitable exposure of a skimpy and waterlogged costume. Jack splashed Bert, in an effort to tempt Edith in; Bert swam circles around Jack; Daniel Marks dove expertly in and came up to swim circles around Jack in the opposite direction; Mrs Hatley appeared in a startlingly revealing costume and stuck close to Daniel Marks; handsome dark Benjamin arranged to fall in from his task at the bow and, when there was no furious protest from the quarterdeck (where Samuel watched closely, but did not move to intervene), he urged shy Celeste to venture down the ladder, daringly leaving her spectacles above.

Randolph Fflytte and Will Currie stood with their heads together, debating whether or not to film the activity.

Geoffrey Hale, meanwhile, settled atop the bulwarks with his pole. Collar open, face going pink with the day’s sun, mind far away, the man looked at ease for the first time since I’d met him. I simply could not envision him as a seller of illicit firearms and cocaine. Nor could I see him carrying out the cold-blooded murder of a young female assistant. Still, he had seen long years of active and bloody duty on the Front. And I have been wrong before.

The water around our bow boiled with activity, as if a school of small fish were being driven to the surface by deep and unseen hungers below.

Jack was the first to emerge, clambering up the rope ladder, blind to the disappointment he brought to an apprentice pirate and a constable. Edith was pleased to see him, however, and the two were soon immersed in the intricacies of knot-tying, as the young pirate showed the Major-General’s daughter how to construct a perfect monkey’s paw.