The Pirates! in an Adventure with the Romantics (9 page)

And so the pirate boat sailed up the Thames towards Oxford. Because they were bang in the middle of an electrifying quest for a mysterious book, they didn’t stop to admire the cultural highlights of either Slough or Didcot. But to pass the time between feasts – which now featured the sort of food the pirates supposed a mathematician might like, such as pies that tessellated and toast cut up into the shape of graphs – Byron gave the crew tips on how best to walk with a continental swagger, Percy and Babbage engaged in heated arguments about whether a really long word was better than a really big number, and Mary sat quietly in a deckchair, apparently scribbling away in a journal. Everybody seemed to be enjoying themselves, except for the Pirate Captain, who had shut himself away in his cabin and hadn’t been seen for most of the day.

Jennifer – who, being a former Victorian lady was a bit sharper than the others at picking up on emotional goings-on aboard the boat – gingerly knocked at the Captain’s door and poked her head inside, worried that something might be amiss. She was surprised to find him stretched out in his hammock, poring over a big leather-bound book of poetry.

‘Are you feeling okay, Captain?’ asked Jennifer. She had never seen the Pirate Captain reading a book without prominent anthropomorphic animals on the cover before. ‘Byron’s about to run through his best brooding faces, if you’d like to come and watch?’

The Captain peered up at her. ‘Oh, that’s nice. But I think I’ll give it a miss. I’m feeling a touch off colour.’ He gave his belly a rueful pat. ‘Seems that last feast disagreed with me.’

Jennifer gasped. ‘You never disagree with feasts, Pirate Captain! You always get on with feasts incredibly well.’

‘Well, my stomach is feeling very odd indeed.’

‘Odd? What sort of “odd”?’

The Captain flared a nostril miserably. ‘You remember our adventure in that meadow? When I was skipping along with my mouth open and accidentally swallowed all those butterflies? It feels a lot like that.’

Jennifer’s frown grew deeper, though she still looked pretty. She put a hand on his forehead to see if he was running a temperature. ‘What’s that you’re reading, Captain?’

‘It’s a book of sonnets. Heavy going, if you must know. Thirty sonnets in and not a single character has pulled out a pistol or got bitten by a poisonous spider. In fact there
aren’t
even any characters to speak of. And half the descriptions of things are actually descriptions of
other things
entirely. It’s baffling.’

‘So why are you reading it?’

The Captain sighed, slammed the book shut and pouted wistfully out of the porthole. ‘I thought it might help me come across as a literary type. Oh! I suppose there’s no use trying to hide it any longer. It’s Mary! The fact is . . . I think I’m in love.’

Jennifer breathed a sigh of relief, because she’d seen this sort of stuff before, back in her old, much more boring life of dinner parties and lace doilies and emotional misunderstandings. ‘Oh, is
that
all? I was scared it might be cholera or something.’ Love was certainly better than cholera, though maybe a little worse than whooping cough. ‘I wouldn’t worry, Captain. You know how you tend to get over these things surprisingly quickly. You fell in love three times last month, and one of those was just Black Bellamy in a wig.’

‘To be fair to me, he really suited being a redhead. And yes, it’s true that in the past I’ve proved reassuringly resilient when it comes to matters of the heart,’ agreed the Captain. ‘But this feels . . . different.’

‘Different?’

‘Well, you know how it usually goes. Meet a girl. Rattle my buckles. Up a staircase backwards, spot of the dashing cutlass business, bosoms heave, I swear eternal commitment and then a week later I get bored and maroon them on a desert island.
²¹
But
,
I
don
’
t
really
feel
like
doing
any
of
that
with
Mary
.’

‘What
do
you feel like doing?’

‘Sighing, mostly. Taking long sorrowful walks. Writing her name on my desk. That sort of thing.’

The Captain pointed to his desk, where he’d scratched the words ‘Mrs Mary Captain’ a couple of dozen times into the weathered oak.

‘I think the problem,’ said Jennifer, knowledgeably, ‘is that you’ve got the
unrequited
type of love, which is easily the most annoying kind. But it’s probably just all this talk about romance that’s to blame. You’ve got swept away by the atmosphere.’

‘Do you think so?’ The Captain perked up a bit. ‘Yes, maybe that’s it. I hope you’re right, for all our sakes. You know what happens when I get tangled up in a maelstrom of emotions. It plays havoc with the beard.’

‘Anyway, Captain, I don’t think you should try to change who you are,’ said Jennifer, indicating the book of sonnets. ‘You should be true to yourself. Us girls like it when boys are genuine.’

‘Ah, now, that might be true enough. But I think you’ll find that the
genuine
me is the me who would pretend to be really into all this sort of nonsense in order to convince a girl that we had something in common. QED.’

Jennifer looked stumped, because this certainly did sound like the kind of thing the genuine Pirate Captain would do. Before she had a chance to come up with a counter argument, Byron crashed through the door like a big flouncy labrador.

‘My hair is looking astounding today!’ he bellowed. ‘Also, we’ve arrived!’

They parked the pirate boat next to some punts, and everybody gathered on deck. Tourists and students ambled about in a work-shy sort of way as the afternoon sun glinted off Oxford’s ivory towers. More recently established universities built their towers of brick, but Oxford used ivory, because back in those days people didn’t realise that slaughtering thousands upon thousands of whales and elephants to build student accommodation wasn’t very ethical.

‘Oxford!’ said Shelley, looking with disdain at the pointy skyline. ‘My bête noire! My old stony-faced enemy!’

‘Do you not like Oxford, Mister Shelley?’ asked the pirate in green. ‘I think it seems very pretty.’

‘I was a student here,’ the poet explained, with a sniff. ‘Until they expelled me, unable to cope with my radical ideas.’

‘What sort of radical ideas did you have?’

‘Oh, all sorts,’ said Shelley, sounding vague. ‘I published numerous shocking pamphlets that threatened to knock the world off its axis.’

‘I’ve had radical ideas too,’ nodded the Captain. ‘I once made up an entirely new word for “pancakes”. Can’t remember what it was now, but it didn’t catch on. Still, you’ve got to try these things, haven’t you?’

‘My ideas were rather more radical, Captain,’ said Shelley. His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Amongst other things I proposed the use of some quite unexpectedly bohemian fonts in the university newspaper. Though I fear I have already said too much.’

The Captain suddenly did the face that indicated either a thought or a cannonball had struck him. ‘Expelled, eh? Well now,’ he said, with a sly arch of his beetling brow, ‘I imagine a dangerous individual such as yourself would probably be a wanted man round these parts. Public Enemy Number One? Hounded by the authorities, that kind of thing?’

‘Yes,’ said Shelley, looking quite pleased. ‘I suppose I would.’

‘And we can’t risk you getting clapped in irons, can we? Or whatever the academic equivalent of getting clapped in irons is. You’re much too valuable to this entire enterprise. So I think it best if you stay onboard the boat for this bit of the adventure.’

Percy shrugged. ‘Oh, well. I suppose that
does
make sense.’

‘Also, I think it’s important for our expedition to maintain a low profile, lest any shadowy figures should also be after this book.’

‘Shadowy figures?’ said Mary, her ears pricking up.

‘Oh yes. In my experience there are always shadowy figures involved when you’re on a mission searching for a mysterious thing. So, with that in mind, I think Byron shouldn’t come with us either.’

‘Me?’ cried Byron, on the verge of tears. ‘But why?’

The Captain did an apologetic mouth-shape. ‘It’s just that a fellow of your celebrity is pretty much bound to attract unwanted attention.’

‘Confound it!’ Byron thumped the boat’s railing. ‘But you’re right. Why, just last week I was almost smothered to death under a mountain of discarded undergarments, my only crime being to walk a little too close to the open window of a nunnery. Damn my dangerously potent pheromones.’
²²

‘I can’t really think of a reason that Babbage shouldn’t come,’ the Captain continued, ‘except I believe I heard that there’s an exhibition of calculating devices at the University Museum. From what I’ve been told, if you turn some of them upside down you can write the words “BOOBLESS” and “SHOE BILE”. ’

‘Ooh,’ said Babbage. ‘I wouldn’t want to miss that.’

‘So, I guess it’s down to me and you, Mary,’ said the Captain, pulling on his fireman’s coat and marching down the gangplank. ‘Just the two of us. Same as those sleuthing duos you read about in magazines. I’m like the hard-bitten senior detective, with just his final case to solve, and you’re like my feisty new canine partner, with your shining nose and eager manner. Or possibly I’m like a disorganised slob who never made lieutenant and you’re like the buttoned-down humourless Russian who doesn’t approve of my louche attitude but has been assigned to work with me for diplomatic reasons. One of those.’

Eight

Phantoms? Phantoms. PHANTOMS!

‘Of course, the really dangerous thing about university libraries is the simmering sexual tension,’ whispered the Pirate Captain, as he and Mary joined the queue for the Bodleian’s information desk.

‘Are you sure?’ asked Mary. She looked around the place. In front of them two prematurely balding students quietly discussed what the best type of hole-punch might be. Over in the corner a postgraduate worried about his career prospects. Somewhere, a don snored.

‘Yes, it’s the atmosphere of forced restraint combined with young people at their most frisky age. Creates a crackling aura of pent-up hormones.’

‘If you say so, Pirate Captain,’ said Mary, doing her pretty eye-rolling trick again.

‘Anyhow,’ continued the Captain. ‘This is exciting, isn’t it? Here we are, edging closer to solving my enigmatic belly riddle.’

‘Of course, we might have edged a bit faster if you hadn’t insisted on that bucolic punt ride to get here. Or the champagne picnic in Port Meadow. Or the gentle stroll through the Botanic Gardens. Which was all lovely, of course, but did seem like a long detour.’

‘Can’t be too careful. I thought it best to blend in with the tourists. Lest those shadowy figures I made up earlier should be spying on us.’ The Captain held up a punnet of strawberries left over from the picnic. ‘Would you like me to feed you some more strawberries?’

Mary patted her stomach and pulled a face. ‘Actually, I’m quite full of strawberries now. But thanks anyway.’

‘I happen to know a sonnet about strawberries. Would you like to hear it?’ The Captain cleared his throat.

‘Gosh. Another sonnet already? Maybe you should save it for later,’ Mary said, smiling through slightly gritted teeth. Then, not wanting to be rude, she quickly added, ‘Don’t get me wrong, though. It’s certainly impressive how many sonnets you’ve got more-or-less memorised.’ She stifled a yawn. ‘It’s like a whole other side to you I would never have guessed at.’

The Captain brightened at this, and decided now might be a good time to use the latest metaphor he had been working on. Obviously this wasn’t the first time the Captain had attempted a metaphor – there was that one about ravening wolves which hadn’t really panned out a few adventures back – but this one was about a jewel, and he knew a lot about jewels, so was more confident that he’d nailed it.

‘Another side to me? Yes, I suppose in many ways, you could say I’m like a
jewel
with myriad
facets
, each one more unexpected than the next.’