The Pyrates. George Fraser MacDonald

that on your clavichord, duchess!” she hissed spitefully. “Golden Vanity – pah! We’ll see how you enjoy your slavery!”

      If aught had been required to cement Avery’s adoration for the Admiral’s beauteous daughter (and frankly, not much was), it would have been her response to Sheba’s gloating taunt. Her face pale but proud, her bosom heaving with hauteur in a manner which caused some of the pirates to wonder whether selling her was such a bright idea after all, Lady Vanity countered with a swift one-two. “Among slaves I shall still be a lady,” she cried proudly. “Among ladies you will always be a slave!” Even the callous ruffians could not forbear to chant their approval of her dauntless spirit. “One in a row, boo-boom!” they cried, while Sheba sprang clawing to avenge the insult. But Akbar, with a hellish laugh, had already swung Vanity’s struggling form up on his shoulder, and bore her swiftly to his galley while Avery went ape, alternately cursing his captors and demanding that they sell him in Vanity’s place. They pointed out, reasonably enough, that he was down-market stuff by comparison.

      “An’ anyways, we got a better use for you, cully, an’ ye may lay to that!” bawled Firebeard. “What say we keelhaul him, mates? It’s ages since we had a good keelhaulin’ –”

      But again Sheba barred the way. “Avast there, blubber-guts!” She paced slowly to Avery, thoughtfully plucking her nether lip ’twixt shapely fingers. “This King’s captain is too good a man to lose – ’tis lad o’ rare mettle has earned the right to join us as a free companion, if he so chooses. That – or slow death,” she added, with a look of smouldering ardour at Avery that would have melted treacle. At which the pirates nudged each other and stifled discreet coughs, glancing innocently at the mast-heads and whistling airily. Happy Dan Pew sniggered and grimaced froggishly.

      “Great round basins behind the house of Monsieur and Madame Desgranges!” exclaimed he, all roguish-like. “One addresses to oneself the question: what companionship does La Belle Noire have in mind for our prisoner so stalwart and gallant, hein? Is it to make the promenade au bicyclette in search of cabbages, jewels, small pebbles, and stained-glass windows? Not on votre vie, if you ask me!” And he minced and chuckled lewdly, while Rackham frowned ’neath knitted brows and glanced from Sheba to Avery.

      “Well, bully, what say ye? Wilt join us on th’account, ha?”

      Avery was on the point of replying coldly that he would rather be shot from a cannon, but it occurred to him that there was no point in putting ideas into people’s heads, so he maintained a contemptuous silence. Not so Blood, who clamoured to join, inquiring eagerly about pension rights, sickness benefits, and overtime. They shushed him impatiently, crowding round Avery with menace in their looks, while Sheba gnawed her lip in anxiety and tensed herself to spit the first man who laid a finger on him. It was one of those explosive moments when eyeball rolls at eyeball and wills clash in ponderous confrontation and no one has much idea what the hell is going to happen next because they’ve forgotten what the question was in the first place. Rackham, that canny leader of men, read the situation in one shrewd glance, and moved to defuse it.

      “Right,” quo’ he, “break it up. We’ll give him a few hours to think it over. Not fair to rush the chap. Put ’em both in irons – and then let’s get sail on this rust-bucket afore she grows barnacles! About it, ye dogs! Firebeard, man the larboard scuppers! Bilbo, have thy villains lay aft the focsle! Sheba, your mascara’s running! Happy Dan, write out the verb être six times before lunch, and the rest of you for heaven’s sake join in the chorus!”

      These sailorly words acted on the fractious pirates like magic. In a trice they had hustled Avery and Blood below decks, swept up the broken glass, clewed up everything in sight, and repaired to the Merino Lounge for before-lunch cocktails while they discussed the exciting events of the day so far. Only Black Sheba brooded sombrely on her high stool at the bar, and many there were who remarked how she was moodily squeezing that pink pimento stuff out of her martini olives, and wondered what this might portend.

       Well, it’s all happening, and no mistake. Our principals are right in it. Will Avery join the pirates? (Don’t be daft, of course he won’t.) But what then? Will Sheba’s unholy passion for him provide the twenty-four hour all-round body protection that every young executive needs? Will the insurance company pay up on the Madagascar crown? Will Lady Vanity’s purchaser be able to get her a work permit? It’s all very worrying.

       CHAPTER

       THE SIXTH

      It was really rotten down i’ the foetid, stinking, dim-lit orlop, where timbers creaked and rats scuttled, etc. Blood and Avery had been fettered wrist and ankle to facing bulkheads, which was uncomfortable enough, but to make matters worse the cleaners hadn’t been in, the straw hadn’t been made up, or the scuppers hoovered, or the bilges refilled, and there wasn’t any Kleenex left. To cap it all, the pirates had taken over the ship’s intercom, and instead of the normal hymns and rousing sea shanties, the muzak now consisted entirely of dirty drinking songs illegally taped from Radio Tortuga. Avery bore it all in stoic silence, the chaotic mess of his tortured thoughts concealed ’neath a cold, imperturbable mask, but Blood griped incessantly; it was just like these swindling foreign tour operators, he said, to grab your money and then forget you existed; he should have read the small print when he came aboard, and so on, and so on, until even Avery’s icy control snapped in one bitter denunciation of his fellow-captive.

      “Hear ye, fellow,” said he, and each acidic word was like a blade rasping from its sheath, “wouldst be better employed making peace with thy beastly soul, for mark me, when this hand o’ mine is free again, its first task will be to wring the putrid life out of thy mangy carcase –”

      “What the hell are you going on about?” demanded Blood. “Is it my fault we’re stuck down here?”

      Avery’s eyes flamed like 1000-watt icebergs. “Base renegade, fink, and traitor –”

      “Traitor?” exclaimed Blood. “Me? Oh, for God’s sake, ye haven’t got your galligaskins in a twist over the measly crown, have ye? As if that mattered – they’d ha’ found it sooner or later, and if you’d had your way we’d have been nothing but a couple of shark’s belches by now. Which,” he added unhappily, “is what we’re liable to be anyway, unless you can sweetheart that big spade wench into a happier frame of mind.”

      “D’you think I care a jot for that – or even for the crown?” Avery’s voiced quivered like a trampoline with noble indignation. “Aye, though shame, ruin, and disgrace may be my merited portion, forasmuch as I have goofed up my mission and let the side down – what can I think on but my dear Lady Vanity?”

      “Well, if it’s any consolation, go ahead,” said Blood. “Although what I always say is, there’s a time to fantasize about blondes and a time to think about getting the hell out of the mess we’re in, and I’d advise the latter –”

      “I didn’t mean think on her in that way, ye carnal muckrake,” snapped Avery, his teeth clenched. “Have you no conception of what her fate will be, in the clutches of yon Moorish hellspite? Of what –” and his voice grew all roopy with apprehension “– it may already have been? You know what such heathen do with Christian women captives. You’ve read the colour supplements?”

      “Oh, aye,” said Blood carelessly, “‘Au pair milkmaids trapped in harem hell’, and ‘I was a sex-crazed sultan’s plaything’.” He shrugged callously. “When all’s said, it’s just what happens to any married woman on her honeymoon. I daresay she’ll be well looked after … three square meals a day, and that …”

      At this point they were interrupted by the little Welsh pirate who, in his capacity as shop steward of the local branch of the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Piratical Operatives and Filibusters and Allied Trades, was eager to see Avery enrolled in that powerful offshoot of the Coast Brethen.