Cinnamon and Gunpowder Read online

  Mr. Apples was sitting on a stool among them. At first, I thought he might be rending meat, but on closer inspection, I saw the man was knitting, knitting ferociously; his enormous hands danced, yet his face was as still as marzipan. A skein tumbled out of his bulging pockets, his needles clicked, and he hummed along to the music.

  The wool was the same color as his hat and the same gauge as the cables of his scarf. Indeed, I noted that many of the crew wore some item that Mr. Apples must have knitted.

  I made my way again down the companionway and abaft to the narrow pantry hold. With a lantern before me, I took stock of that chamber and felt desperate. Meager materials and these were they:

  In sacks:

  heavy cornmeal, with scattered weevils

  wheat flour, coarse

  rice, polished

  garlic, cured

  raisins

  dried figs

  some type of white bean

  walnuts

  dried anchovies

  coconuts

  black pepper

  In barrels:

  hardtack

  molasses

  lard

  vinegar

  limes

  potatoes, buried in sand

  rum

  Madeira wine

  panch

  ale, bitter

  honey, gritty with wax and what may be wood chips

  herrings, whole, pickled in vinegar and garlic

  In boxes:

  gunpowder-cured meat, which the men call “Mary Sweet,” tough as tarpaulin

  onions, under hay

  what must be cheese, waxed in balls

  coarse grey salt

  tea, pressed into cakes and smelling of the earth

  These are the desolate contents of the hold; by far the most arresting are the rats, so bold and so many. I understand now the captain’s predilection for tiger pelts, whose lingering musk must offer some deterrent.

  Certainly there are staples here to feed the horde, but proper ingredients for cuisine? Butter, cream, mushrooms, fruit, ice, spices, fresh meats, eggs, preserves, crisp vegetables, sugar, bacon, sausage, sherry, etcetera—neither a scrap nor a drop of these. No herbs. Not even a carrot. Lord help me.

  Concerning the cured meat, I’ve tasted it and I’m confident it is not pork. Though the tang of the gunpowder makes it hard to be certain, I think it is horse. I made the mistake of asking why the men call it Mary Sweet and was treated to several choruses of this song:

  Mary Sweet was potting meat

  when she fell into the grinder.

  She poured right in and filled the tin

  and that is where you’ll find her.

  Mary Sweet is given out once a day, and though the men complain about it, they look forward to it almost as much as to their wine rations.

  Not far from the provisions, in a narrow hold, among unused torches and short lengths of rope awaiting splicing, Mr. Apples keeps a wicker basket full of scorpions. I had opened the basket and nearly stuck my head into it to discover the source of the faint odor of rotten oranges and dust when Mr. Apples grabbed the back of my neck.

  “Don’t want to do that,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “Ain’t food. Stick to the pantry.”

  I will obey. His rationale for such an unusual husbandry remains a mystery to me. There are, no doubt, many things twitching in the shadows of this ship that are best left alone.

  Although I’ve wandered the ship considerably, I have not found my fellow prisoner. There are only half a dozen locked holds on the lower deck that might contain him, but I cannot go about knocking on doors and shouting without drawing undue attention. Despite my eagerness, I must pace myself. In my agitation, I’ve taken to running circles in my little cell. I wish I could say it calmed my nerves, but at least it distracts me for a few moments.

  A few minutes ago, Joshua peered in, perhaps to see if I was recovered from my beating. I asked if he might bring me a crust of hardtack; having vomited my oats, my stomach was grumbling. He shook his head and tapped his ear. I assured him that no one would notice nor care if I had a bit of hardtack to dip in my panch. But Joshua shook his head again and cupped his hands over his ears.

  With a sigh, I accepted that Joshua is deaf and mute. I mimed eating a small thing, and he disappeared and returned with a few dried figs. Bowing my head to thank him, I contented myself with them. It was just the sort of luck I was getting used to: here was the only person on the boat whom I thought I might trust not to slit my throat, and there was no easy way of communicating with him. I might as well engage my boot in conversation.

  When he saw my pen and log, though, he showed great interest. After I had him wash the lampblack from his hands, we established that the boy can scrawl most of the alphabet, but few written words are known to him. He can read lips with some accuracy, but only granted ample light and patience. Two hours passed almost pleasantly as we ruined several pages of paper with jottings and sketches. During this time we arrived at a simple method of instruction: I write a word, he shakes his head if he does not know it, and then I proceed, by drawing and aping, to teach it to him.

  If I am to be interned, I suppose it is good that someone should benefit—someone besides that hurricane they call captain.

  Like all men of good breeding, Ramsey practiced verbal continence. When entertaining, he was a fine and theatrical orator. But during the mundane moments he spoke only when necessary, and, as his silences proved, little is truly necessary. Those who served him learned to take direction from the slope of his shoulders and the tone of his sighs.

  Therefore, the rare moments when I saw Ramsey lose his composure stand out in my mind—as when he threw the doll into the fire.

  I was haunted at the time by the vacancy in the house. Ramsey was a notorious bachelor, and, when we were not hosting, the silence itself marched the halls like a grim mistress. I was young, my Elizabeth and our unbaptized son were but a year in the grave, and my mind was wont to linger on morbid things. I concocted a story: I convinced myself that Ramsey had, himself, lost a child.

  It’s not uncommon for a young man to feel familial with an employer, and a charismatic man like Ramsey, a man of such poise, well, it’s clear to me now that I came to think of him as an uncle of sorts. At least, I was trying to learn from him how to be a solitary man—to appreciate the nobility of a quiet room.

  It was early fall when I found the doll in the woodshed. A nasty influenza had indisposed most of the servants, and Ramsey had sent them to their quarters rather than listen to their sniffling. This left me to fetch my own wood. I wasn’t used to the chore and, while selecting logs, I stood too quickly and cracked my head on the sloping roof. Amid my raining curses there fell, from behind one of the beams, a toy soldier—a fine one with genuine silver buttons and a canvas uniform besmirched with mildew. The owner had fashioned a sword out of snipped tin and bound it tightly to the wooden hand. The doll seemed so out of place that I was afraid for a moment to touch it. If an actual child had plopped to the floor among the logs, I would not have been more stunned.

  I immediately recalled a conversation I’d had with a woman at the market a few weeks earlier. She was a nursemaid, with a rheumy-eyed tyke on her hip. She spotted me picking through the parsnips and approached as if she knew me. “You’re Ramsey’s man, aren’t cha?”

  I said I was.

  “Aren’t you the lucky one? Fine house, isn’t it? Oh, I know; I lived for five years there, tending to the boy.”

  Putting her finger to her nose, she winked at me with such import that I thought for a moment that I was talking to a prostitute. “But that’s between us and the turnips, eh?” She laughed, then, and sauntered down the lane, the infant on her hip watching me unkindly over her shoulder as she went.

  I had dismissed the incident, but as I stood staring at that doll, it came back to me, every word.

  That night I placed the doll on a windowsill so I might consider it as
I worked. It was my intention to return it to Ramsey in a manner that would express to him my deep empathy for his evident loss. I was puzzling over how exactly to do this even as Ramsey ate in the dining room.

  I was preparing a caramel sauce for his pudding when Ramsey, as he sometimes did, came into the kitchen to compliment me on the goose-liver and leek pie. The soldier in the window caught his eye immediately.

  “I found this curious object—” I began, but Ramsey snatched the doll and pushed past me, gnashing his teeth.

  He burned his hand opening the oven and pitched the toy into the coals. Flames licked it up at once. He looked not at me, nor spoke, as he stormed from the kitchen. I took my reprimand from this display and never mentioned it again to anyone.

  That’s not to say I forgot it. In fact I was deeply moved by the situation as I now understood it. Ramsey had had a son, by whom I couldn’t begin to guess. It was clear to me only that the son had died. Before sleeping at night, I recalled the tiny silver buttons dripping so eagerly in the heat, the round head smoldering, the tin sword gripped tightly till the last.

  It made me admire him all the more for his stoicism. In loss, Ramsey and I were family. Mabbot’s merciless pistols have orphaned me again.

  Mr. Apples, knowing that many things creep in the pantry, has given me a jar to hold any weevils or earwigs I sift out of foodstuffs. These the strange man will feed to his scorpions.

  It strikes me with a shiver, as I write this now, that the pantry rats might be, themselves, a provision of a kind. I would not be surprised if these barbarians kept them as miniature livestock to satisfy the occasional craving for fresh meat. The thought dries my tongue and I begin to think, as I often do when faced with unpleasantness, of ways to gently and swiftly dispatch myself. But I am determined, if for no other reason than to spite the witch, to survive, indeed to stand victorious at the end of this ordeal.

  How, though, to make a genuine meal from such a heap? Saint Paschal, attend to me and give me help.

  Monday, August 23

  Early this morning, I heard someone stumble right outside my locked door, then Mr. Apples yelling, “Damn your bones! You’re as graceful as a potato.”

  To this a gentleman replied, “Give me a moment. It’s the gout. Makes my legs stiff.” This was no pirate. He had a proper accent, sounds that evoked the first curls of cream in strong tea, with the distinctly woolen-at-the-edges quality of a veteran pipe smoker.

  Was this not my comrade? I rose and saw that the crafty fellow had secreted another message underneath my door. Gout indeed! The message proves that he is a valuable ally. It reads:

  FLATTEN SPOON TO BEST LOCK.

  I must try this at the first opportunity. You’ve a friend, Wedgwood!

  This afternoon, Mr. Apples was taking his gunners through their paces again, as he did every day, firing imaginary balls at invisible foes. The men went so far as to cover their ears, though the guns were dumb.

  The bosun meanwhile had a crew caulking the seams of the deck near the forecastle. These men hammered wads of oakum and animal hair into the grooves, then poured boiling pitch over them. The smell would have driven me back below deck if a stark demonstration of Mr. Apples’s power hadn’t stopped me where I stood: One of the bosun’s boys went to fetch a fresh bag of oakum and, no doubt in a hurry to be done, took a shortcut right behind the cannon crew in the midst of their fantasy battle. As he passed, Mr. Apples turned and drove his open hand under the man’s chin with such force that the runner was lifted off the deck. His feet followed their momentum, and he twisted in the air to land facedown, sprawled like a scarecrow.

  Pitching his voice so all hands could hear, Mr. Apples said, “That’s just a kiss. If a gun kicks you, we’ll scrape you into a snuffbox to bury you.”

  With that he freed his crew to line up for their grog. I was relieved to see the scarecrow pull himself up and weave his way back to his fellows, who seemed to forgive him for forgetting the oakum.

  I found myself gazing at the cannon and considering the many shapes of violence. The hollowed sockets of those guns brought to mind the Cyclops staring blind with rage at the horizon after Odysseus had gone.

  Mr. Apples broke my reverie. “You could cook meat with that scowl alone,” he said, pulling yarn from his ditty bag. “What’s the matter, Spoons? I didn’t hit you.”

  “It seems to me,” I said, “strength like that is a gift that could go to a better use.”

  “That swat’ll save his life.” He held up the gourds of his fists. “I was a pugilist. Is that the better use you’re thinking of? I stood in a ring and crushed heads for the pleasure of a crowd. A bear can do that. That’s what I was when Mabbot found me. These sailors could sign with any other crew, get monthly pay and chocolate to drink for the holidays, but here they eat mush and go months with no prizes. They hunt the Brass Fox, which is like trying to catch smoke in your hat. Why do they put up with it?”

  “Why indeed?”

  “Once you meet Mabbot, you can hardly go back to being a bear. You have two choices: fight her or fight for her.”

  A full week aboard and I’ve made no progress toward the meal that will save my life. I have a better chance of building a cathedral out of vermicelli. In my despair, I can hardly lift myself from the sack of sawdust I sleep on and which I have grown alarmingly fond of. I try to imagine recipes, but my mind has the tinny echo of an empty flour bin.

  I will spare myself the needles of remembrance. My survival depends on being present, focusing all of my energies on dodging the captain’s threat. I must not linger on the sweet memories of my beloved Elizabeth, rest her, laughing with a jasmine candy in her cheek, nor of good men sharing a glass of port; nor will I linger on the softness of my down pillow back in London, nor on clean undergarments, nor on the view of the orchard from my kitchen window, nor on eggs—oh, eggs! Nor on the reassuring firmness and eager weight of my knife whistling so cleanly through a head of cabbage. I will not let myself catalogue the other friends I took for granted: my slim whisk, copper-bottomed pots, marble pastry table, and rows of yeast batters in various states of arousal. I shall not think once of my Rumford stove, my cast-iron castle, my coal-fed kingdom. For now I shall attempt to pretend that the things on hand here are the only tools that have ever existed. I must become like Adam, taking what is offered and inventing the rest.

  The Flying Rose is modified, I’ve learned, in a few mischievous ways. For one, her stern is reinforced to support the two sleek black cannon, which the gunners have affectionately named the Twa Corbies. These long-range stern chasers are poised to destroy anyone in pursuit. Further, a good portion of the lower deck has been divided into small chambers, the better to hold stolen goods or prisoners like myself.

  The vessel is always abustle. A seaman stands near the mizzenmast, ready to strike a large gong emblazoned with white enamel cranes. It is his job to generate the various rhythms by which the crew know their time and duty. While the sailors do indeed work hard and the ship is polished to a sheen, they also spend a stunning amount of time playing music, wrestling, whittling, or simply lolling about the deck, laughing and joking in a pidgin language that sounds like the bark of a sea lion. The ship’s surgeon is a shameless drunk who refuses to rise from his hammock until he has had two liters of straight wine in his gut. God forbid I should ever need his attentions. Further, as far as I can see, Mabbot does not use compass or astrolabe but relies instead on Pete, a shriveled old savage of mysterious origin, calloused as bark, who sits upon a specially rigged chair out over the bowsprit and stares at the sea sunrise to sunset. While it is clear to me that poor toothless Pete has entered his second infancy, Mabbot says he is “counting the waves” and trusts his direction as God’s word.

  Mabbot takes a twice-daily walk, touring the ship as she goes, sometimes giving a two-word order. I have seen, as she passes, something moving in the deep pockets of her long coat. It is unsettling. The men in the berths whisper absurdities: that she keeps the plague
in her pocket like a pet, that she has a wolf’s maw where her generative organs should be. Such is the grip she has on their minds.

  Her rounds bring her always to Pete, the little man at the forepeak. They speak, he points, sometimes they consult a map, then she returns to her cabin. It is a wonder the ship is not rotting in the deepest crevice of the seafloor, and yet she has made herself a menace to the Pendleton Trading Company for nearly fifteen years; indeed, her ambushes are the stuff of legend. The rumors of her resurrection after execution by firing squad and drowning are ridiculous, but I could be convinced that the woman has a pact with the devil. It would explain much.

  Too, this ship is so full of Mohammedans I find myself wondering why God does not simply push it under with His finger as He did Gomorrah.

  The men eat in the forecastle mostly, sitting on their lockers and holding their bowls on their laps. As a prank they invited me to sit at a small table, only to guffaw when my porridge slid across on a swell and dropped with a splat on the floor. In the future I must remember to think twice before accepting courtesy from a pirate and to keep one hand on the bowl at all times. Still, bit by bit, I allow myself to make simple conversation with the sailors here. Though I stammer sometimes at the sight of their pierced faces and lewd tattoos, I tell myself: They’re just men. Held together with wire and spit, but only men, after all.

  With one exception, I have not regretted these conversations. I have been obliged to linger in the galley, assessing my tools and resources, scant and rusty as they are. This has meant tolerating Conrad’s long tongue.

  A word on Conrad: I cannot call him a cook. Nor, having eaten so much of his fare, am I comfortable calling him a Christian, though he claims to be. He is a man, I grant. Many of the foulest things of the earth come from men.

  His sores are in need of calendula. Happily we need not look at him while eating, for he wisely avoids the men at mealtimes. But having heard his wet cough, having smelled in the narrow passages the cheesy ropes of his braids, having witnessed, even once, his hobby of staring out at the horizon while his hand scuttles about his neck like a crab looking for some promising lesion to pick, one finds it hard to locate one’s appetite.