"Stop her," snapped Hurwood impatiently.
Davies nodded, and several grinning pirates stepped in front of her.
Hurwood permitted himself another laugh, but it turned into a retching cough. "Let's go," he croaked. Chandagnac happened to glance at Leo Friend, and he was almost glad that he'd been forced to stay aboard, for the physician was blinking rapidly, and his prominent lips were wet, and his eyes were on Beth Hurwood.
"Right," said Davies. "Here, you clods, get these corpses over the side—mind you don't pitch 'em into the boat—and then let's be off." He looked upward. "How is it, Rich?"
"Can't jibe," came a shout from aloft, "with the spanker carried away. But this wind and sea are good enough to tack her in, I think, if we get all the lads up on the footropes."
"Good. Elliot, you take a couple of men and pilot the sloop back home."
"Right, Phil."
Beth Hurwood turned her gaze from her father to Leo Friend, who smiled and stepped forward — Chandagnac noticed for the first time that the fat physician's finery included a ludicrous pair of redheeled shoes with "windmill wing" ties—and proffered an arm like an ornate, overstuffed bolster, but Beth crossed to Chandagnac and stood beside him, not speaking. Her lips were pressed together as firmly as before, but Chandagnac glimpsed the shine of tears in her eyes a moment before she impatiently blotted them on her cuff.
"Shall I take you below?" Chandagnac asked quietly.
She shook her head. "I couldn't bear it."
Davies glanced at the two of them. "You've got no duties yet," he I s".:.told Chandagnac. "Take her up forward somewhere out of the way. You might get her some rum while you're at it."
"I hardly think—," Chandagnac began stiffly, but Elizabeth interrupted.
"For God's sake, yes," she said.
Davies grinned at Chandagnac and waved them forward.
A few minutes later they were on the forecastle deck by the starboard anchor, shielded from the wind by the taut mainsail behind them. Chandagnac had gone to the galley and filled two ceramic cups with rum, and he handed one to her.
Line began buzzing through the blocks again and the spars creaked as the sails, trimmed and full once more, were turned to best catch the steady east wind; the ship came around in a slow arc to the north, and then to the northeast, and Chandagnac watched the crowded lifeboat recede and finally disappear behind the high stern. The sloop, still on the port side, was pacing the Vociferous Carmichael. From where he now leaned against the rail sipping warm rum, Chandagnac could see the mast and sails of the smaller vessel, and as their speed picked up and the sloop edged away from the ship to give it room he was able to see its long, low hull too. He shook his head slightly, still incredulous.
"Well, we could both be worse off," he remarked quietly to Beth, trying to convince himself as much as her. "I'm apparently forgiven for my attack on their chief, and you're protected from these creatures by … your father's position among them." Below him to his left, one of the pirates was walking up and down the waist, whistling and sprinkling sand from a bucket onto the many splashes and puddles of blood on the deck. Chandagnac looked away and went on. "And when we do manage to get out of this situation, all the sailors in the boat can testify that you and I stayed unwillingly." He was proud of the steadiness of his voice, and he gulped some more rum to still the post-crisis trembling he could feel beginning in his hands and legs.
"My God," Beth said dazedly, "all I can hope for is that he dies out here. He can't ever go back. They wouldn't even put him in a madhouse—they'd hang him."
Chandagnac nodded, reflecting that even hanging was less than what her father deserved.
"I should have seen his madness coming on," she said. "I did know he'd become … eccentric, taking up researches that … seemed a little crazy … but I never dreamt he'd go wild, like a rabid dog, and start killing people."
Chandagnac thought of a sailor he'd seen killed at the swivel gun, and the one Hurwood had shot in the face a moment later. "It wasn't done in any kind of … frenzy, Miss Hurwood," he said shortly. "It was cold—methodical—like a cook squashing ants on a kitchen counter, one by one, and then wiping his hands and turning to the next job. And the fat boy was at the other end of the ship, matching him shot for shot."
"Friend, yes," she said. "There's always been something hateful about him. No doubt he led my poor father into this scheme, whatever it is. But my father is insane. Listen, just before we left England last month, he stayed out all night, and came back all muddy and hatless in the morning, clutching a smelly little wooden box. He wouldn't say what it was—when I asked him, he just stared at me as if he'd never seen me before—but he hasn't been without it since. It's in his cabin now, and I swear he whispers to it late at night. And my God, you read his book! He used to be brilliant! What explanation besides lunacy could explain the author of The Vindication of Free Will babbling all that nonsense about oxtails and two-headed dogs?"
Chandagnac heard the note of strain and doubt under her carefully controlled diction. "I can't argue with that," he conceded gently.
She finished her rum. "Maybe I will go below. Oh, uh, John, could you help me get food?" Chandagnac stared at her. "Right now? Sure, I guess so. What did you—"
"No, I mean at mealtimes. It might be even harder now to avoid the diet Friend has prescribed for me, and now more than ever I want to stay alert."
Chandagnac smiled, but he was thinking again about the consequences of throwing scraps to stray dogs. "I'll do what I can. But God knows what these devils eat. Friend's herbs might be preferable."
"You haven't tried them." She started toward the ladder, but paused and looked back. "That was very brave, John, challenging that pirate the way you did."
"It wasn't a challenge, it was just … some kind of reflex." He found that he was getting irritable. "I'd got to like old Chaworth. He reminded me of … another old man. Neither one of them had any goddamn sense. And I guess I don't either, or I'd be in the boat right now." He bolted the remainder of his rum. "Well, see you later."
He looked ahead, past the bowsprit at the blue horizon, and when he looked back she had left. He relaxed a little and watched the new crew at work. They were scrambling around up in the rigging, agile as spiders, and casually cursing each other in English, French, Italian and a couple of languages Chandagnac had never heard, and though their grammar was atrocious he had to concede that, in terms of obscenity, blasphemy and elaborate insult, the pirates got the most out of every language he was able to understand.
He was smiling, and he had time to wonder why before he realized that this multilingual, goodnaturedly fearsome badinage was just like what he used to hear in the taverns of Amsterdam and Marseille and Brighton and Venice; in his memory they all blended into one archetypal seaport tavern in which his father and he were eternally sitting at a table by the fire, drinking the local specialty and exchanging news with other travelers. It had sometimes seemed to the young Chandagnac that the marionettes were a party of wooden aristocracy traveling with two flesh-and-blood servants; and now, seven years after quitting that life, he reflected that the puppets hadn't been bad masters. The pay had been irregular, for the great days of European puppet theaters had ended in 1690, the year of Chandagnac's birth, when Germany lifted the clergy's ten-year ban on plays using living actors, but the money had still occasionally been lavish, and then the hot dinners and warm beds were made all the pleasanter by memories of the previous months of frosty rooms and missed meals. The pirate with the bucket of sand had apparently finished his job, but as he was stumping aft past the mainmast his heel skidded. He glared around as though daring anyone to laugh, and then he dumped all the rest of his sand on the slippery patch and strode away.