Without a word, he pointed to a triangular scrap of canvas overhead.
“That’s the main topmast stays’l,” I told him. “That’s the mains’l throat halyard. Fore t’gallant brace. Port deadeyes. Catharpins. Snatch block.” This went on for two or three minutes, attracting rather more attention than I had intended. I was considering allowing a few mistakes to creep in, just to take the eyes off us, when Samuel made a noise I would not have thought possible from him. He laughed. Then his hand slammed down on my back, nearly shooting me off the deck and causing my spine to tingle from toes to jawline.
He turned to the quarterdeck, where Rosie had resumed his perch and La Rocha, unable to hear our voices, was watching intently.
“I have parrot, too!” Samuel shouted at La Rocha, then asked me, “You maybe want to learn how they work?” A jab of the thumb upwards indicated that the lessons would not be given on deck. My heart instantly climbed up my throat.
“Er, perhaps tomorrow?” I said. There was no way in which my brain would accept further information, especially over the internal screams of terror.
His hard palm came down on the top of my head and rumpled my hair as if I were a small child. “My parrot,” Samuel repeated, and strode back to the quarterdeck, humour restored.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
[Girls and MAJOR-GENERAL go up rocks, while PIRATES indulge in a wild dance of delight on stage.]
ONE OF THE bits of actual information Samuel had let drop was that a brigantine this size would originally have held up to a hundred crew members – numbers necessary less for running the ship, I thought, than for manning the cannon and adding heft to boarding parties. Currently, we had something over half that original number, but even that was proving a trial. When it had rained our first afternoon out and the girls retreated below, the ship rang with spats and squabbles. With the main portion of deck off-limits under canvas, our choices were below decks, or on each other’s toes.
Finally, at mid-day, the sail-makers reached the end of their labours, and began to arrange huge armfuls of canvas at the foot of the aft mast. One of them reached into the apparently featureless expanse of cotton and pulled out a tie, dragging it to the upper spar (which, I knew now, was called the “gaff”) and attaching it, followed by a string of like attachments, to the length of the gaff. Once the sail’s upper-most side was firmly linked, the gaff was raised a bit, and the forward edge of the sail was tied to a series of wooden hoops that circled the mast like a giant’s game of ring-toss. The gaff was occasionally raised a little more, freeing the next hoops. Eventually, the lower edge of the sail was uncovered enough to fasten to the big lower spar, the boom (named, perhaps, for the final sensation of the incautious sailor whose skull it hits). When it was tightly fitted, and the upper corner of the gaff portion had been made taut, the crew went below. They came up with hands clean, hair combed, and dressed for the first time in piratical attire – Will’s pleas to film the event having nicely coincided with La Rocha’s own sense of the dramatic.
We mere passengers stood back, out of the way of sailors and cameras. Samuel’s voice rang out, and the crew jumped to seize the big halyards on both sides of the ship. They hauled, and hauled, and Harlequin’s mainsail began to rise, transmuting from a puddle of canvas to a living thing. Up it went, deck to masthead, lashings tight, lines passing through blocks in a bewildering zigzag of rigging. When it was stretched to its fullest height, the crew gave a few almighty heaves to tighten the gaff, and made haste to tie off the halyards and loop the ends across their pins.
The sail above us luffed lazily in the slight breeze, then found its angle and began to fill.
Cheers rang out. The parrot took to the air, circling the masts before coming back to its perch near the wheel, to flap its wings energetically and declare, “ ‘Wandered lonely as a cloud!’ ” Samuel scowled at it; Will filmed it; La Rocha fed it a piece of biscuit. The ship gave a small shiver, and bent more fully into the wind. I do not know if Harlequin felt happier, but I know the rest of us did.
Particularly the two sail-makers, whose hands were worn raw with their efforts.
The crew tied off the lines in neat array, looking a touch self-conscious in their raggedy costumes. Will folded away his camera. La Rocha stroked his reddened beard and ordered a tot of rum all around. I smeared salve on the sail-makers’ hands and told them thank you in Portuguese and English. Maurice appeared with a cake. And when Frederic then conjured up a gramophone, a dance commenced.
Since I had returned the Major-General to safety, some eighteen hours earlier, Holmes and I had taken pains to avoid each other, limiting our communication to the occasional courteous remark. Now, with music going and thirty people bouncing about, he contrived to be standing beside me.
He tipped his hat with his free hand and feigned a sip of the poisonous rum that he had been nursing for the past ten minutes. He wasted no time getting to the point.
“Who do you make for the villain of the piece?” he said, to all appearances making a comment on the weather.
With the same polite expression on my own features, I replied, “Is there a villain in the piece?”
“Sure to be, with those two in charge.”
“Which two – La Rocha and Samuel, or Fflytte and Hale?”
“The Englishmen are paying the bills, but do you honestly imagine they’re in charge?”
My response was delayed by our police sergeant, Vincent Paul (an Englishman with a French name and an Irish accent) who stood before me and asked if I would care to dance. A response was obviated by Holmes setting down his glass and saying, “A Major-General outranks a sergeant, my good sir,” as he seized me in his arms.
Fortunately, the tune to which the others were gyrating and leaping, although it seemed to have no tempo at all, could be interpreted as 3/4 time, making a waltz possible: A waltz permits conversation; Charleston and fox-trot do not. And due to the layout of the deck, with raised housing that forced a rotation of couples along the rails (other than those dancing atop the sky-light, who risked being swept off by the boom if we had to tack), few of the couples were in a position to overhear more than a few words at any given time.
“Tell me about this Pessoa chap,” Holmes demanded.
Distilling the character of Fernando Pessoa into the duration of one recording disk was no simple matter, but I fed him a brief synopsis, from Pessoa’s translation skills to the poetry journal; his appealing humour and dubious grasp on reality; his erotic fascination for pirates and the multiple personas he had crafted; how he had led us to La Rocha and to Harlequin. “And as you heard, he knew where La Rocha could buy a parrot, one that had been owned by an Anarchist.”
“You suggest Pessoa is himself an Anarchist?”
“He’s definitely anarchic, but his politics could be anything, depending on which ‘heteronym’ is in supremacy at the moment. I’d say his ‘Ricardo Reis’ persona lacks the drive and dissatisfaction for Anarchy, although ‘Álvaro de Campos’ might perform an anarchic act if he felt it emotionally justified. I don’t know about-”
But the music ended, and before the next recording could be wound up, the police sergeant was there, awaiting his turn. And I had little choice but to permit him the closeness of the waltz, since to all intents he was less of a stranger than the Major-General was. However, I took care to tread on his toes several times, which left him more than willing to relinquish me to Holmes.