The Pyrates. George Fraser MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ Avery, look’ee, here’s j’y, or rattle me else! The young man nodded amiably, but looked down his classic nose when the beaming skipper presented him to his fellow-passenger.

      “Blood?” he said, bowing perfunctorily. “I seem to have heard the name,” and his tone didn’t imply that it had been in connection with the last Honours List; plainly he was not enchanted with the Colonel (trust Avery to spot a wrong ’un every time). “You are a soldier, sir?”

      “Oh, here and there,” said Blood easily. “You’re a sailor?”

      “I am a naval officer,” said Avery coldly.

      “Ah,” said Blood wisely, and wondered: “Don’t they sail?”, at which Avery’s cuffs stiffened sharply as he favoured the Colonel with that steely glance employed by Heroes on mutinous troops, rioting peasants, and impudent rakehelly villains, who respectively quail, cower, or gnash their teeth when exposed to it. Colonel Blood met it with an amiable smile, and the two of them detested each other from that instant.

      A coach came rumbling along the cobbles, and Captain Yardley swore picturesquely, excused himself to Avery, and stumped off bawling: “Admiral’s a-comin’, damme! Ho, bosun, blister me bum, lay up here, d’ye see? Hands on deck!” And as the coach stopped by the gangplank, a massive-limbed figure with an order on his silk coat and a ruffled castor on his head, stepped ponderously down from it – Admiral Lord Rooke, with a face like a ham, brilliant grey eyes, grizzled head, weatherbeaten feet, tarred elbows, and all that befits a sea-dog of seniority and sound bottom. He was just what an admiral ought to be: tough, kindly, experienced, and worshipped by the salts of the Navy, who referred to him endearingly as Old Pissquick, in memory of the time he extinguished a lighted fuse accidentally at the intaking of Portobello, or the outflanking of Mariegalante, no matter which. He bellowed a command in a voice which had blown look-outs from their crows’-nests e’er now, and a lackey leaped from the box and quivered in his livery.

      “You’re not English, are ye, fellow?” growled the Admiral.

      “No, sair, pliz, je suis un Frog,” smarmed the lackey.

      “Just the thing!” cried the Admiral. “On thy knees, rat!” And as the lackey knelt on all fours in the mud, providing a step, a dainty foot emerged from the coach, shod with a trim spiked heel, and cased in white silk, and planted itself in the small of his back. A second dainty foot followed it, with a flurry of lace petticoat which revealed a modish velvet garter buckled with brilliants below a shapely knee, and there stood the Admiral’s daughter, Lady Vanity, her tiny gloved hand holding a parasol, waiting to be helped down.

      “Lower away!” bawled the Admiral, kicking the lackey’s behind, and the lackey subsided obsequiously into the mud, allowing Lady Vanity to step down to the cobbles, over which forehead-knuckling salts had laid a red carpet. Examine Lady Vanity for a moment.

      She was, of course, a blonde whose hair shone in sunkissed golden ringlets on either side of a roses-and-cream complexion which she knew to be dazzling. Her eyes were sparkling blue, her nose haughtily tip-tilted, her little chin imperious, her lips a cupid’s bow whose perfection was no way impaired by its provoking pout; practically everything about Lady Vanity pouted, including her shapely figure, which would have done credit to the Queen of the Runway. She was not tall, but her carriage was that of a fashion model who has been to a Swiss finishing school and knows she has the equipment to stop a battalion of Rugby League players in their tracks with the flick of a false eyelash. She was dressed by Yves St Laurent, in pleated white silk, and her jewellery alone had cost her doting father all his last cruise’s prize money. Lady Vanity was a living doll; even the plump little negress who was her maid was pretty enough to be Miss Leeward Islands.

      Captain Avery and Colonel Blood stood together by the rail, drinking her in – one in respectful worship, the other with thoughts of black silk bedclothes and overhead mirrors.

      “Will ye look at that, now?” invited the Colonel in an enchanted whisper. “Maybe there’s compensations to a life at sea, after all. I hope to God the old feller isn’t her husband … not that it matters.”

      Avery’s eyes blazed frostily at this lewd effrontery. This fellow’s foul tongue, he decided, must be curbed, and speedily.

      Lady Vanity was surveying the ship. “Are we expected to sail to India in that?” she cried petulantly.

      “Seen worse,” growled the Admiral, and kicked the lackey again for luck.

      “No doubt you have, father,” said Lady Vanity chillingly. “But I did not run away to sea as a cabin-boy at the age of twelve.”

      “Ye’re still that cabin-boy’s daughter, m’dear,” chuckled the Admiral, bluff as anything, “even if they call me ‘me lord’ nowadays.”

      He handed her aboard, and there were big introductions at the gangway, with Captain Yardley blistering and damning and apologising with great geniality, milording and miladying and bowing as far as his guts would let him as he indicated Avery, whom the Admiral hailed with delight.

      “Why, young Ben! Good to see ye, lad!” He waved a great paw. “M’dear, this is Captain Avery, that fought wi’ me against the dam’ Dutchmen – m’daughter, Lady Vanity …”

      Their eyes met, the brilliant maidenly blue and the clear heroic grey, and although the lady’s glance remained serene, and the young captain’s steady, atomic explosions took place in the interior of each. Captain Avery felt a qualm for the first time in his life; his knees may not have trembled, but they thought about it, and a great gust of holy passion surged up from his pelvis and thundered against his clavicle. Lady Vanity, normally careless of masculine adoration which she took for granted, suddenly felt as though her silken stays were contracting and forcing a flight of doves up through her breast to her perfect throat, where they elbowed each other in fluttering confusion. As he took her hand and bent over it, murmuring “Servant, ma’am,” his mind was saying, “Nay, not servant, worshipping slave – and master and protector, all these and more!’ And Vanity, whispering “Sir,” was thinking “Oh, dreamboat!” and feeling thoroughly ashamed of all the fan letters she had written in the fifth form to Prince Rupert (who had just sent a cyclostyled autographed picture, anyway). So they met, and as he raised his eyes to hers, and she for once shielded those haughty orbs ’neath fluttering lashes, their unspoken love was sealed like Bostik; beside them, Dante and Beatrice were nothing but a ted and a scrubber at a palais hop.

      She never even noticed Blood, who was giving her his pursed, wistful leer. Her attention was all for Avery as she murmured softly: “We shall be companions on the voyage, sir. You shall tell me all about the ropes and anchors and keel-haulings and things,” and he replied “I shall be even more enchanted than I am now,” with such a look of fervent adoration that she dropped her reticule. Blood picked it up, and she never even looked at him as she said, “Thank you my man,” and passed on while Rooke drew Avery aside.

      “Ye have it safe?” he asked, rolling an eye at the box containing the Madagascar crown, and Avery assured him that he had, and would bestow it secretly in his cabin. “Aye!” rasped the Admiral, in what he imagined was a conspiratorial whisper. “In y’r cabin! Secretly, that’s the word! But mum!” Possibly they heard him as far away as Chelsea, for he had a carrying voice; at any rate, Blood did, and made a note that the box which Captain Avery carried so carefully might be fraught with interest.

      But his speculations were now rudely interrupted, by Captain Yardley thundering: “Make haste, then, bring her aboard, d’ye see, wi’ a curse!” and the passengers of the Twelve Apostles turned to see who this might be. A barred cart had drawn up on the quay, and СКАЧАТЬ