Twelve
‘Is he asleep?’ asked Mary.
The Pirate Captain leaned over and poked Babbage. Then he flicked his ear. Then he tugged one of his bushy sideburns. The mathematician let out a little snore.
‘Thank Neptune,’ said the Captain. ‘He wasn’t joking when he said he gets travel sick, was he? Doesn’t look big enough to hold that much stuff inside him.’25
Mary gave Jennifer a gentle nudge. She seemed to be asleep as well. The coach bumped over some rocks, but neither of them stirred. ‘I’m glad they’ve nodded off, Pirate Captain,’ said Mary. ‘Because I’ve been looking for a chance to talk to you about my novel. The fact is, I’ve run into a few . . . difficulties.’
‘Is it description? I always find that tough.’ The Captain chewed his lip thoughtfully. ‘The trick is to use all the senses. So, let’s say your character was to look out the window of this coach. First off, he’d see miles and miles of gloomy forest, plenty of creeping mist, and an occasional glimpse of the moon. He’d hear the odd wolf howling and the sound of the other coaches rumbling along the unmade track. He’d smell the cedar top notes of his classy aftershave. He’d feel a bit uneasy because he’s more than a day’s travel from the sea and someone once told him that he gets all his powers from seawater. And what’s the other sense?’
‘Taste.’
‘He’d have great taste in clothes, decor and beard styling. Does that help?’
‘In a way,’ said Mary. ‘It’s more a problem with the direction that the book’s taking. Quite unexpected really. You remember the half-man, half-seaweed mutant? He was supposed to be really vile, cruel, vicious, murderous and so on. All the other characters feared and hated him in equal measure. Well . . .’
Mary gazed out of the window at miles and miles of gloomy forest.
‘Phoebe, the heroine, she’s started to see a different side to him. She’s developing feelings.’
Mary gave the Pirate Captain a look that he might have interpreted as significant if he hadn’t been admiring her delicate wrists and missed it altogether.
‘She’s not sure whether it’s anything serious. They have nothing in common! Phoebe’s a progressive woman toiling with the modern world and he . . . he sleeps in a rock pool and survives partly by photosynthesis. But there’s something about him. I don’t know! A quiet nobility almost. An attractive air of danger. He appears so effortless, whereas Sir Henderson . . .’
‘Her betrothed?’ said the Pirate Captain.
‘Yes. He . . . Well, he seems rather pedestrian in comparison. This wasn’t how I planned the book at all, Pirate Captain. I don’t know what to do.’
‘Have you tried having her swoon whenever anybody turns up? That way she doesn’t need to do much of anything. I’ll let you in on a secret – generally I avoid female characters in my novels because they do different things to men. You can’t make a female character set her jaw because the reader just wouldn’t believe it. But if I find I’ve made the mistake of writing a woman into the book, I make her swoon as soon and as often as possible.’
‘I don’t think you’re quite following me, Pirate Captain,’ said Mary, slowly, emphasising the words. ‘This is the key to her future happiness. Should she stick with Sir Henderson, who, though dependable, doesn’t share her interest in experimental vivisection at all, or should she defy society’s conventions and hit on the seaweed-man mutant?’
The Captain thought for a moment.
‘If she does that, she needs to look out for his beak.’
‘Your beak?’
‘Have you never met a half-man, half-seaweed? They generally have a beak next to their mouth. Could be a nasty surprise for this Phoebe if she’s trying to kiss him and there’s a little beak there crying out for fish in a weird raspy voice. “Fiiisshhh! Fiiissshhh!” it’ll go. “Giiivvveee meeee fiiiisshhh.” That’d put me off kissing for sure.’
‘You’ve lost me, Pirate Captain. Does this represent something profound or do you really have a beak?’
‘Me? Not that I know about. But he would, wouldn’t he? If you want this book to be realistic that is. “Fiiiisssshhh! Fiiiisshhhh!” ’
While the Pirate Captain continued to illustrate how the half-man, half-seaweed’s beak would talk, Mary sat back and rubbed her temples as if she were very tired. Then, steeling herself, she leaned toward the Pirate Captain once more.
‘Captain . . .’
‘Last stop!’ shouted the coach driver. ‘Everybody out!’
‘Cogs!’ said Babbage, sitting up with a start. ‘Oh. Are we here already?’
The pirates, the Romantics and Babbage hefted their luggage off the coaches.26 Not for the first time the pirate with a scarf wished the Pirate Captain was better at travelling light. He had once asked if maybe the Captain didn’t need to pack quite so many fancy hats whenever they were away from the boat for longer than an afternoon, but the Captain just responded with a vague excuse about how his physical baggage represented, in some hard to define sort of way, his emotional baggage, which was something he didn’t want to talk about, and which the pirate with a scarf should be ashamed to have brought up in the first place.
The unlikely group struggled from the mud track towards a village nestling at the foot of the pass. More of the mist hung about doing its thing, and a bleak and relentless rain made everything as shiny and slippery as a seal, though not so adorable. Eventually they reached the village’s single little tavern, from which spilled the sound of meaningless foreign chatter, and the sort of music that strikes you as interesting when you’re on holiday to far-flung climes, but which turns out to be unlistenable in any other context.
‘Gracious me!’ said Shelley, once they’d got inside and taken off their wet overcoats. He looked about, delighted. ‘It’s so authentic!’
The people crowding the tavern all had the type of face that has its own special section in Spotlight. Everybody had the right number of eyes and noses and chins and mouths, but they seemed to have been stuck onto their heads by a particularly cack-handed child.
‘We mustn’t mention this place to a soul, lest the rest of London society should start to include it on their Grand Tour. It would be overrun by tourists.’
‘Aren’t we tourists?’ asked the albino pirate, confused.
‘No, we are travellers,’ Shelley explained. ‘There’s a world of difference that I’m not going to go into right now. Mostly it’s to do with wearing flip-flops.’
‘Hello, characterful local barkeep,’ said Byron, waving. ‘A flagon of whatever disgusting indigenous drink you probably brew out of wolf skeletons and bits of mud, please.’
‘Just look at the man’s hands!’ Shelley marvelled. The barkeep obligingly held up his hands for closer inspection. ‘The stubby fingers of a real culture, untainted by Western values!’ He turned to address the entire tavern. ‘You know, in many ways all of you strange, hunched-over peasant folk are far richer than us, because you’re so much more spiritual.’
The locals murmured a slightly half-hearted ‘thank you’. As the Romantics attempted to strike up a conversation about tribal tattoos, Jennifer picked her way across the tavern to where the Pirate Captain had parked himself on a stool. He was pulling wistful faces into his pint glass.
‘Hello, Pirate Captain. Mind if I join you?’ she said, sitting down next to him. The Captain glanced across the room at Mary and pulled another even more wistful face. Jennifer patted his shoulder. ‘You know, Captain, before I joined the crew, all my adventures happened in drawing rooms and on lawns. We didn’t have sea monsters or tidal waves so we tried to get our excitement from listening to what people said.’
‘Sounds awful,’ said the Pirate Captain with a shiver.
‘It was,’ agreed Jennifer, ‘but it taught me something really useful. It’s called reading between the lines. When people say one thing they often mean something else entirely. The trick is to think about what that could be. So, for example, when Lady Something-or-other talks about an urn in her ornamental garden she’s actually intimating that the Earl of Wherever is interested in marrying Madame Thingy’s niece who was recently in Bath. That’s called subtext.’
‘Subtext?’ said the Pirate Captain, blankly. ‘Is that like one of Babbage’s codes?’
Jennifer nodded. ‘That’s right. It’s like a really annoying code. Here’s another example. Imagine a young Englishwoman writing about a nautical mutant. Now imagine she tells a nautical person about a plot where a young Englishwoman has feelings for the mutant.’
‘That sounds a lot like Mary’s book,’ the Captain said with a nod. He paused. ‘Hang on a tick. I thought you were asleep?’
‘I was trying to sleep, but you’ve got quite a loud voice. It penetrates.’
The Pirate Captain took this as a compliment and gave a little bow.
‘So I pretended to be asleep rather than get in the way.’
‘Do you do that often? Pretend to be asleep, I mean?’
‘Don’t worry, Captain, I’ve never noticed you creep into my cabin and try on my clothes at night, and if I had noticed I would be sure to assume it was just the kind of healthy experimentation anybody might do. But you’re missing my point about Mary’s subtext.’
It took quite a long time for the Captain to really grasp it, even after she’d drawn a few diagrams to help him along.
‘So,’ said Jennifer, ‘to sum up: I think Mary likes you too. But she’s conflicted. The same way you sometimes get conflicted about whether a chop is better than a steak.’
The Captain contemplated. The face the Captain did for contemplating was a lot like the face he did for nodding off, so Jennifer gave him a prod.
‘All depends on the context. Is it to go with potatoes?’
‘Try to stay on topic, Captain.’
‘Sorry. Well then. Mary and me. I think I’ve got an idea!’
‘I suppose it’s too much to hope that your idea involves “talking about your feelings like two sensible adults”?’
‘It is, sorry. See, if Mary likes this subtext palaver as much as it seems, then it only makes sense for me to use even more of my own subtext. It will show we’re on the same wavelength. I don’t really know what being on the same wavelength means, but I do know that it’s one of the most important things to you women.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Jennifer, who knew when to cut her losses in a conversation with the Captain. ‘So how are you planning to do your subtext?’
Before the Captain could reply, Byron’s big ringing voice cut right across the noise of the tavern.
‘. . . and so that’s why we’re here to visit Castle Ruthven!’ he boomed.
Everything stopped. The barmaids stopped serving drinks. The band stopped playing gypsy versions of popular hits. Even the raven on the roof stopped his atmospheric cawing. A few of the younger pirates thought it was a game of musical statues and so they stopped too, and did their best to freeze in position.
‘Did I say something bad?’ asked Byron, in as much of a whisper as he could manage.
The barkeep grunted, and reached behind the bar. Then he slapped a piece of paper down on the table in front of the poet. It was a short leaflet printed in English, German, French, Spanish and Japanese.
It was the most bone-chilling tourist information leaflet the pirates had ever read. A few of the crew suddenly remembered they might have left a stove on aboard the boat, and suggested it could be a good idea to go back and check.
Byron, though, just laughed.
‘I think you’ll find,’ he said to the barkeep, ‘that we are made of sterner stuff than you suppose. For you see, we travel with the indomitable Pirate Captain! A man who bested the kraken itself! A man who single-handedly wrestled a dinosaur to a standstill in the Bodleian Library! Not the sort of chap to turn tail and run from a horrifying curse. Why, I doubt you’d even find the word “fear” in his dictionary.’
The barkeep shrugged a suit-yourself sort of shrug, and went back to polishing an ashtray.
‘He’s right, of course,’ said the Pirate Captain, nodding to Jennifer. ‘If you look in my dictionary you’ll find that it goes straight from “fealty” to “feasible”. My advice: should Black Bellamy ever turn up on your doorstep offering to sell you a set of reference books, send him packing. His encyclopedias are even worse. It’s just the definition of “sucker” repeated on every page for nineteen volumes.”