As I thought over the motions, the postures of long familiarity between the two, an odd notion took root in my mind: Perhaps Adam and Jack were familiar in more than the abstract? If one looked closely and discounted the difference in years, one might say there was a degree of resemblance between them.
Almost the resemblance of brothers.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
GIRLS: Piracy their dreadful trade is-
Nice companions for young ladies!
AS GEOFFREY HALE’S assistant, one of my tasks was to ensure that the crew remained more or less content, letting the film go ahead without disruption. As Harlequin worked her way southwards, with fifty-two individuals spanning the variations of age, background, interest, and gender, keeping everyone placid proved an increasing problem. My only reassurance was that, given the tight quarters, all these burgeoning relationships – both affectionate and war-like – would find consummation difficult until we had made landfall.
The changing tide from the quarterdeck was most worrying of all.
Before leaving Lisbon, La Rocha’s attitude towards Fflytte and Hale had been condescending but amiable: Apart from the one uncomfortable outburst in the first hour, La Rocha had listened politely to the requests and demands of his English employer, albeit with the amused eyebrow of an expert faced with the enthusiasms of an amateur.
The farther south we went, however, the further Fflytte and Hale were demoted towards the ranks of the actors. Fflytte seemed to have forgot that La Rocha had come inches from killing him with the belaying pin. Instead, when not actively engaged in filming, our director either ignored the quarterdeck entirely, as if having that portion of the ship-his ship – forbidden to him was no more unusual or irritating than being barred from the parrot’s perch atop the mainmast, or else he approached that sanctum sanctorum with bows and scrapes, to ask our Captain’s thoughts on some twist of the picture’s plot, to enquire of Samuel what the function of that line there might be.
Holmes and I were not the only wooing being done on Harlequin, not by a long shot.
Hale approached the demotion of Englishmen by going quiet. He watched the Captain and his lieutenant as they came and went, studied their interactions with the crew, and rarely spoke directly to them. He stopped what he was doing whenever Fflytte approached the ship’s masters (which was rarely when they were on the quarterdeck), and frowned at his cousin’s subservient posturings.
He did not have to say aloud what he was thinking: Why is the ship’s owner given no say in the running of his vessel? One might imagine that La Rocha not only ran, but owned Harlequin.
The thought went far to explain Hale’s outburst during the night.
As we neared the coast of Africa, the attitude of the two pirates shifted from patronising to near-scornful. And not just La Rocha and Samuel – I noticed Adam turning away from Fflytte with a faint sneer; later that day, young Jack did the same.
It was worrying.
It would have been positively alarming had the pirates demonstrated the same low-grade aggression towards the girls. But towards all of us women, they held an air of distracted kindliness, as if we were pretty toys who were not to be played with too energetically. An attitude I found personally infuriating, but it was preferable to most of the alternatives.
* * *
That last afternoon at sea, Holmes and I managed another brief conversation without having to perch fifty feet in the air. The coast of Morocco was approaching, and all those not actively engaged in running the ship were gathered along the port-bow to watch. So long as we kept our voices low and our expressions those of two people murmuring sweet nothings at one another, we should be all right: there were no port-holes underneath us, and not even Samuel or Annie, between them omnipresent on board, could come upon us from seaward.
We sat shoulder to shoulder on the starboard rail; there was no need to feign my welcome of his physical proximity.
“They’re up to something,” I said, fluttering my eyelashes.
“La Rocha and Samuel, with Adam, Benjamin, and Earnest,” he replied with a smile.
“And Jack.”
“Adam’s younger brother.” He said it as if it were obvious, although he couldn’t have figured it out much before I had.
“Samuel’s sons, you think, rather than La Rocha’s?”
“Adam looks more like Samuel than Jack does, but they all have much the same accent. However, I agree, they’re probably both Samuel’s.”
“Gröhe must know as well. If it was so urgent they had to sneak him in under our noses, he has to have some purpose. But what?”
“Were I to venture a prediction,” he said calmly (heaven forbid he should be caught out in a guess), “I’d say we’re about to be kidnapped.”
A cold finger ran down my spine: Robinson Crusoe had it easy, when it came to piratic captivity. “There are some real horror stories about Moroccan prisons.”
“This is 1924, not 1624,” he said, without a trace of doubt in his voice. Which made me lean into him a touch more, in gratitude. “And although La Rocha is unstable and capricious, I’d say he lacks the mental pathology needed to put a collection of blonde girls into chains.”
“I’m not sure I’d say the same about Samuel.” I gave a shy duck of the head, for the sake of our onlookers – which, considering our topic of conversation, felt even more lunatic than usual.
“Were Samuel in charge, Russell, I should be worried indeed. But La Rocha will take care to leave us in cotton wool, for the time being. Don’t worry, holding captives for ransom is a common enough occupation here.”
“Is it?”
“Oh yes. Sir Harry Maclean, who later became the Sultan’s commander in chief, was held ransom for a time. Twenty thousand, I believe they got for him.”
“Francs?”
“Pounds.”
“Ouch. I can’t see anyone parting with that much for this lot in a hurry.” I thought of having to spend months locked up in the company of Bibi and Annie and Edith … “What do you think about taking the ship?”
He smiled – his own smile, not the smarm of the Major-General. “Have I mentioned recently, Russell, that I find your confidence anodyne to an old man’s doubts?”
I snorted. “The day you doubt yourself is the day I sprout wings and fly with Rosie. You and I could take the ship if we wanted.”
“Not by direct action.”
“We can’t put the others at risk, I agree, even though low cunning outdoes open warfare any day. Still, two against sixteen …”
“Three if-”
He bit off what he had been about to say, and I turned to him a face that, had anyone been nearby, would have cast our affectionate act into serious doubt. “Let me guess: You were going to tell me that Mycroft has a man on board.”
“I think he may.”
“So why didn’t he tell you?” I demanded.
“Kindly don’t look so murderous, Russell, we’re supposed to be love-making here. That’s better, if a trifle sickly. He didn’t tell me because I haven’t talked with him.”
“You haven’t-” I closed my mouth, pushed away from the railing, and stalked across to the other side, staring unseeing towards the brown line across the horizon. When I went back to him, land was a mile closer and things were somewhat clearer. “You didn’t actually say that you came to escape Mycroft. He never got to Sussex, did he? There were no builders in. Yet he made arrangements for you to come here?”