Bleak Expectations (25 page)

‘Mr Benevolent!’

‘Yup, me again. Thank you so much for helping me with my little problem, Admiral.’

‘My pleasure.’

‘What are you planning to do with me?’ I asked fearfully.

Mr Benevolent grinned down at me, his teeth tiny white shards of malice. ‘To use the vernacular your Bin invention has given us, the admiral is taking out the trash. Now, forgive me, but I must hurry back to London to woo your sister. For I am going to make her my bride, just to upset you. Even if you are dead when it happens. To upset your ghost, perhaps. Not that I believe in that sort of supernatural nonsense. But the principle stands.’ He came to a slightly awkward halt. ‘
Aaaa
nyway, that’s what I’m off to do. Goodbye, Pip Bin. Goodbye for ever.’

He waved at me, blew a kiss and then the hatch slammed shut. I could hear footsteps and evil laughter as he walked away, his horrid cackle dwindling to nothing.

‘Ha, ha,
ha
,
ha
,
ha
,
ha
!’

All was briefly silence, but then I heard the sounds of the ship preparing to depart.

‘Haul anchor and hoist the mainsail!’

‘Middentrops to puncty and splice the shimmie-shangles!’
³

With creaks and groans the mighty vessel set off, its destination unknown to me, my fate unknown to me, the square root of eight hundred and twenty-one unknown to me, though after a few seconds’ rough calculation I reckoned it was just under twenty-nine, possibly about twenty-eight and three-quarters.

Fear gripped me as I stared at the confining walls of my shippy prison; terror wrapped its sinuous fingers around my throat, and panic began to tickle me under the arms, making me jitter and shake nervously.

What hope of escape was there for me now?

Or indeed for Pippa, whose future would involve a lot more Mr Benevolent than anyone might wish. True, she had Mr Parsimonious and Harry to protect her but . . . well, you know, they were both a bit rubbish.

Only I could protect her; and it seemed as if I could not protect even myself. For even if I could escape from this confinement – and it seemed as if I really could not – then I would have to fight my way off the ship, which again seemed incredibly unlikely, and even if I managed that I would be adrift alone in the ocean with all the dangers that entailed.

Despair set in; and though I was now eighteen I felt nothing other than a boyish misery and the strong desire to shed bitter, illegal tears of woe.

So I did.

¹
Swabbing technically refers to the vertical strokes of a mop, swibbing to the horizontal; they are equivalent to the warp and weft in weaving.

²
He means the prow. With tight deadlines and the absence of Wikipedia, nineteenth-century authors often just ploughed on if they couldn’t think of the right word.

³
Sir Philip may have made up these supposedly nautical terms. I have never come across them in any other literature, and I’ve read at least two Patrick O’Brian novels.

I slumped tearfully against the rough wood of the ship, as miserable as that most woeful of fish, the saddock.
¹
All my money, success and fame as the inventor of the Bin meant nothing, for I was trapped and doomed to die, leaving behind a mad mother, a still missing possibly dead father, a daft best friend and an imminently Mr Benevolent-seduced sister. But as I rested my forehead despairingly against the coarse planks that encased me, I realized that the wood was not just rough from nature but from design – someone had scratched writing on it.

The near darkness of my captive space prevented reading, so I traced the letters with my fingers and read: ‘Tnqneg 8lm’.

Alas, it was just nonsense. Or I’d got it wrong, accustomed as I was to reading with eyes not fingers.

Squinting in the dim, lazy light, I tried to make out the letters by more conventional ocular means and, over a period of some hours, my eyes gradually adjusted until I could read two sensible, non-nonsense words, which together formed a name, and not just any name, but a morale-boosting name of great import.

That name was Thomas Bin.

My father.

He had been on board this vessel! Admittedly in the hellish prison I now found myself in, but it proved that he was alive, or at least had been back then and might indeed be so still if in the meantime no deathy circumstance had waylaid him; though given that I had not heard from him in ages I was less than optimistic on that front, being perhaps only nano-hopeful or pico-positive.

Nevertheless, his name and that eency-weency teeny-tiny bit of hope was enough to fill me with both resolve and a resolution: I was going to get off this ship if it was the last thing I ever did.

Which was a bit of a silly resolution, actually, for if getting off the ship
was
actually the last thing I ever did then I might as well not bother, as other than some sense of satisfaction at having achieved that nautical escape, I would have gone no further to saving my family and would still be dead.

I re-resolutioned thusly: I was going to get off the ship and make sure it definitely was not the last thing I did, instead making sure that I went on to do more things, such as de-maddening my mother, finding my father and saving Pippa from Mr Benevolent’s saucy clutches.

With that purpose in mind, I began to formulate a plan. Within an hour, I had got one. It was bold and ambitious, and required a tin of gunpowder, a small trampoline, seven yards of silk ribbon, a pineapple, a large trampoline and five highly trained parakeets, none of which I had to hand, so I abandoned it and started planning again.

But I had got no further than reformulating my original plan so that it needed only four parakeets, no ribbon and just the small trampoline, when the hatch above me opened to reveal the sadistically grinning face of Admiral Horatio Hardthrasher.

‘Out you come, young swabbo!’

Two sailors reached down and hauled me out of my tiny, solitary compartment. They smelt of rum, seawater and gunpowder.
²
It was quite pleasant, actually, manly and mildly intoxicating. They threw me on to the deck in front of the admiral, and left, holding hands. Not each other’s, just some hands they happened to have with them.

‘So, just you and me, Bin. Before I send you down to Davy Jones’s locker to fetch Ryan Jones’s kitbag,
³
I thought I’d make you pay for killing the brother I loved.’ The admiral was holding something out of sight behind his back, and I trembled at what horrific punishment it might be. ‘Say hello to the rabbit o’ twelve punches!’

I flinched in painful anticipation of this no doubt monstrous device, but instead the admiral merely produced a glove-puppet of a fluffy, sweet-looking rabbit, an object that seemed designed to make me say ‘aw’ rather than ‘ow’.

‘Why is it called— Ow!’

The admiral rapidly punched me twelve times, thus physically explaining the device’s name, and I realized I had been wrong. For while the rabbity exterior might elicit coos of sweetness, the massive fist within was definitely meant to hurt, and it really, really did.

But it also unleashed a ferocity within me I had not known existed. Before the admiral could reload his punching bunny – by which I mean hit me again – I charged him and tackled him to the ground as if I was playing Bastardball, the hideously violent game taught me by one of his own brothers, though the irony of that fact was lost on me as only aggressive thoughts filled my mind.

As the admiral tried to get up, I hurled myself atop him and, seizing his wooden left arm, I pushed it hard against his wooden right leg and desperately began to rub the two together. My frantic efforts soon bore fruit as tendrils of smoke issued forth and then – glory be! – a spark followed by a small flame. I blew gently and encouragingly on the tiny fire, and it grew, spreading rapidly until every wooden part of him was aflame.

‘No!’ he shouted, staggering flamily around the deck. Where he touched, the ship too blossomed into fire, which raced pyromaniacally across the walls, ceiling and floor until I was surrounded by flickering menace.

It seemed as if I had leaped straight from an admiral-shaped frying pan into a fire-shaped fire, for I could see no way out. Then I espied a potentially life-saving axe on the wall, grabbed it, started hacking desperately at the walls of the ship and, after several splintering blows, a great rent appeared and seawater flooded in – surely this would now extinguish the fire.

It did.

It also sank the ship.

And so, mere minutes later, I found myself adrift in the English Channel. Alone. Wet. Cold. Frightened. But free.

¹
Basically a haddock with a frown. Probably sad because its name is a pun.

²
This was the original scent of popular gentlemen’s aftershave Old Spice, which was first sold in the nineteenth century as New Spice.

³
Nineteenth-century nautical slang terms for the sea-bed and therefore drowning. Oddly, in recent years the phrase ‘Ryan Jones’s kitbag’ has become a Welsh rugby slang term to denote general excellence.

I quickly realized that my freedom from the ship might very soon be converted into a different kind of freedom, that is to say freedom from life, for the salty chill of the Channel rapidly began to suck the warmth from my body, like an aquatic vampire. There seemed no chance of survival as I was far from land and entirely at the mercy of the capricious tides; for this was still some years before Professor Wilkie Swim invented his famed method for propelling oneself through the water without the aid of a sail or a well-trained fish.
¹

And as I bobbed helplessly, feeling the cold sap my life-force, I saw a terrible sight in the form of a large, floating sign: ‘Warning: you are about to leave the Channel and enter La Manche.’

I was drifting towards France.

‘Help!’ I began to cry, as the watery border approached. ‘Help!’ Yet no help came, and I knew that within minutes I would have to shout, ‘
Au secours!
’ to attract aid, a thought that made me sick to my incredibly British stomach.

Though it also occurred to me that if the cold waters continued their effective work at driving me towards death I might not actually live to face that French fate, in some ways a positive, but on balance a distinctly mixed blessing.

‘Help!’ I cried again, though more weakly than before. ‘Help,’ I now merely said, weaker still. ‘Help . . .’ I whimpered, my strength nearly gone.

I closed my eyes, and prepared to yield to the briny embrace of the sea. The river had claimed my aunt Lily; now its salty cousin was going to claim me. In fact, here from her watery afterlife, as if to guide me Charon-like
²
into the next world, was my late aunt, for I now heard her voice.

‘Pip! Open your eyes, Pip!’

I did, and there she was before me, my brave, noble aunt Lily appearing to stand on the waves like a sea-nymph or Channel-elf.

‘Are you come to carry me over to the other side, dear aunt?’

‘What, France? No, I’m here to take you home.’

Home? I suppose in some ways the afterlife is a final home to all of us.

‘Now grab this rope and let’s get going!’ She sounded cheery at the prospect of my death, and I have to admit this made me a little cross. Then a wet rope hit me in the face and I was a lot cross. What place in spiritual death journeys did a wet rope in the face have?

Unless I wasn’t dying and she was real.

I looked a little closer, and indeed she was real, tangible and alive, not standing on the water but on a small raft, and a distinctly corporeal, non-spiritual raft at that.

‘Come on, grab the rope.’

I did as she said and she hauled me aboard her vessel.

‘But I thought you were dead!’ I exclaimed, hugging her equally from affection and for her bodily warmth. All right, maybe eighty-twenty in favour of the warmth. But I was much fondly glad to see her.

‘The river swept me out to sea where I was trapped on a sandbank for weeks,’ she explained, ‘though I used the time constructively to capture and train this fish we are on.’

‘Then this is not a raft?’

‘No, it is a tuna.’ Indeed it was, a mighty fish spread out beneath our feet.
³
‘I was just heading back to land when I saw you departing on HMS
Grrr
. Well, I thought I’d tag along, see what transpired, and isn’t it lucky I did?’

‘It is indeed. Thank you, Aunt Lily.’

‘Now, let’s get you home. Yah, go on, yah!’ She snapped the fish reins she held in her hand and we were away, the tuna emitting a surprisingly horse-like whinny as it leaped forward through the waves.

As the noble piscine bore us back to Britain, I told her everything that had happened since I had last seen her, especially of Mr Benevolent’s naughty machinations and his avowed intention to marry Pippa.

‘I fear that awful man will not rest until he has married a daughter of our family.’ Aunt Lily sighed, and I remembered that she had once been engaged to my evil ex-guardian herself.

‘Why were you going to marry him, Aunt Lily?’ I was eager to hear how such a state had come about; it seemed as if the tuna was, too, as he now turned his head to look at her.

‘I was once young and naïve. And Benevolent was handsome and charming. Alas, that charm was an illusion and the good looks concealed bad thoughts.’

‘What happened?’

‘He wooed me. He used all the seductive tricks a girl might fall for – flowers, pleasant letters, tips of the hat, a funny nickname, pretending to care about my womanly opinion, being nice – and I did indeed fall for them. We eloped to marry without the knowledge of our families, but it turned out he was merely after the money my father had left me; he took it and then abandoned me at the altar. I was too ashamed to admit what had happened so I ran off and started my life of adventure.’